Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema [1st ed.] 9783030400637, 9783030400644

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Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema Edited by  Joel Gwynne Niall Richardson

Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema

Joel Gwynne  •  Niall Richardson Editors

Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema

Editors Joel Gwynne National Institute of Education Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Singapore

Niall Richardson Film & Music, Silverstone Building University of Sussex, School of Media Brighton, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-40063-7    ISBN 978-3-030-40064-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Ocskay Mark / Alamy Stock Photo Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgement

Chapter 5 ‘Ageing Predators and Asexual Old Queens: Challenging Stereotypes of Cross Generational Gay Relationships in Beginners and Gerontophilia’ develops arguments first addressed in Niall Richardson’s Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema (London: I B Tauris, 2018).

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Contents

Introduction  1 Joel Gwynne and Niall Richardson Female Desire in Cross Generational Relationships  13  Mother and Lover: Dissident Desire and the Older Woman in The Mother and Adore 15 Joel Gwynne  Things to Come: Fertility, Futurity and the Family in L’Avenir, Un Chateau en Italie and Post-Coitum Animal Triste 33 Fiona Handyside Heterosexual Romantic Cross Generational Relationships  53  Age Disproportion in the Post-Epitaph Chick Flick: Reading The Proposal 55 Diane Negra

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 The Generation Game: Lovers and Friends; Mothers and Daughters; Filmmakers, History and Home Again 79 Deborah Jermyn Same Sex Romantic Cross Generational Relationships 103  Ageing Predators and Asexual Old Queens: Challenging Stereotypes of Cross-­Generational Gay Relationships in Beginners and Gerontophilia105 Niall Richardson  Queer and Upright: Sex, Age, and Disorientation in Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical123 Nick Rees-Roberts  ‘Draw Me like a Statue’: Youth, Nostalgia and the Queer Past in Gods and Monsters141 Michael Williams Dysfunctional Cross Generational Relationships 167  ‘Shameless and Repulsive’: Beryl Reid and Transgressive Middle-Aged Desires in Film Comedy of the Late 1960s169 Claire Mortimer  “I’m Seeing Something That Was Always Hidden”: Innocence and Coming into Knowledge Through the Gaze in Blue Velvet and Malèna187 Kwasu D. Tembo

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Non Romantic Cross Generational Relationships 213  Impossible Spaces? Liminal Space and Cross-Generational Love in Ann Hui’s A Simple Life215 Sue Thornham  Intergenerational Archipelagoes: Trans-Motherhood and Transing the Indonesian Family in Realita, Cinta, dan Rock n Roll and Lovely Man235 Alicia Izharuddin Index257

Notes on Contributors

Joel  Gwynne  is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Education/Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research has appeared in international journals such as the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of Literary Studies, Film International, Film, Fashion and Consumption, the Journal of Contemporary Asia, the Journal of Gender Studies, Women’s Studies International Forum, Feminist Theory and Feminist Media Studies. Fiona Handyside  is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the co-editor of International Cinema and The Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts (Palgrave, 2016) and the author of Cinema at the Shore: The Beach in French Film (2014) and Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (2017). Alicia  Izharuddin is Research Associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School where she pursues her research interests in gender and emotions in Muslim Southeast Asia. Her first book is Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Deborah  Jermyn is Reader in Film & TV at the University of Roehampton, where she is also Research Degrees Convenor in the Department of Media, Culture & Language. She is the author and co-­ editor of 11 books, most recently including Love Across the Atlantic: US-UK Romance in Popular Culture (2020) (with Barbara Jane Brickman and Theodore Trost) and Nancy Meyers (2017). She has published xi

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e­ xtensively on the romantic comedy genre, and issues pertaining to ageing, gender and contemporary culture, including essays in Feminist Media Studies, The European Journal of Cultural Studies and Celebrity Studies, and continues to work also on questions of women’s authorship and Hollywood. Claire Mortimer  is an independent scholar; she completed her PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2017, “Battleaxes, Spinsters and Chars: The Ageing Woman in Post-War British Film Comedy”. She is developing this into a monograph to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021, as well as working on other publications around the area of age and stardom, including work on Joan Hickson and Margaret Rutherford. She has published widely, including Romantic Comedy (2010), Doing Film Studies (2012) and contributing to A Companion to Film Comedy (2013). She teaches film and media studies in FE. Diane Negra  is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she is the author, editor or co-editor of ten books including What a Girl Wants?: The Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (2008), Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (2014) and The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (2016). Together with Mary Harrod and Suzanne Leonard she is assembling an anthology entitled Imagining “We” in the Age of “I:” Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture. She serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Television and New Media and Chair of the Irish Fulbright Commission. Nick  Rees-Roberts is Professor of Media Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University-Paris 3. He is the author of French Queer Cinema (2008/2014) and Fashion Film: Art, Advertising, Documentary (2018), co-author of Homo exoticus: race, classe et critique queer (Armand Colin, 2010), and co-editor of Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity (2015). He is co-editing a volume on French film star Isabelle Huppert and writing a new book, Fashion, Fame & Failure. Niall  Richardson  lectures in film at the University of Sussex where he convenes MA Gender and Media. He is the author of the monographs The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman: Critical and Cultural Readings (2009), Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (2010) and Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema (2018).

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Kwasu  D.  Tembo is an independent researcher based in Harare, Zimbabwe, and a PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include—but are not limited to—comics studies, literary theory and criticism, philosophy, particularly the so-called prophets of extremity—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. His current research activities centre around film criticism and theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy and sexuality. His international output is featured in peer-­ reviewed periodicals and anthologies including those by Lexington and Palgrave. Sue  Thornham is Professor of Media and Film at the University of Sussex. She has published widely on feminism, film, and cultural studies, and is author of six books: Passionate Detachments (1997); Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies (2001); Television Drama: Theories and Identities (with Tony Purvis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Women, Feminism and Media (2007); What if I Had Been the Hero? Investigating Women’s Cinema (2012); and Spaces of Women’s Cinema (2019). She is also the editor of two key collections, Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (1999) and, with Paul Marris and Caroline Bassett, Media Studies: A Reader (third edition 2009). Michael Williams  is Professor of Film at the University of Southampton. He is author of Film Stardom and the Ancient Past: Idols, Artefacts and Epics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Film Stardom, Myth and Classicism: The Rise of the Hollywood Gods (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He has widely published on stardom and with a particular focus on Queer imagery and reception and is also author of Ivor Novello: Screen Idol (2003) and co-editor of British Silent Cinema and the Great War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

List of Figures

 ge Disproportion in the Post-Epitaph Chick Flick: Reading A The Proposal Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6

Margaret Tate’s driven career woman, a postfeminist popular culture cliche, is set up for a familiar ideological rehabilitation as The Proposal opens Destination Wedding (2018) detaches its protagonist couple from the social realm Andrew and Margaret’s engagement accrues meaning in relation to Gammy’s hopes for generational continuity Sandra Bullock’s “mastery” of the aging process saw her lauded by People magazine in 2015 Among his numerous roles in Sitka Ramone serves as the proprietor of the Paxton General Store Bob’s abusive tirade against Margaret early in the film articulates his views of female professional power and to some extent the film’s

57 61 67 68 71 72

 he Generation Game: Lovers and Friends; Mothers T and Daughters; Filmmakers, History and Home Again Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Following their drunken fling, Harry (Pico Alexander) is perturbed to discover on waking that not only did he fail to have sex with Alice (Reese Witherspoon), she has done his laundry for him 88 Home Again ends audaciously not with an image of a nascent or reformed couple, but with a 40+ woman pictured assuredly and contentedly single91

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List of Figures

‘Draw Me like a Statue’: Youth, Nostalgia and the Queer Past in Gods and Monsters Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8 Fig. 9

The first Parthenon frieze replica panel comes into view as Hanna and David walk through Whale’s home 144 Hanna arrives before the second Parthenon replica panel 146 A complex circle of gazes and framings 151 Boone researches Whale, framed by homoerotic New Deal art 152 Whale conceals his copy of Physique Pictorial152 Boone’s sculptural pose 158 Boone awakes 161 Boone sits up, the camera tracking to include the frieze panel in the background 161 Figure of ‘Dionysus’, from the East Pediment of the Parthenon (Reversed)162

I ntergenerational Archipelagoes: Trans-Motherhood and Transing the Indonesian Family in Realita, Cinta, dan Rock n Roll and Lovely Man Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Nugi and Ipang gaze upon an impressive image of Mariana before realising that she was previously Nugi’s father. Realita, Cinta dan Rock n Roll (Reality, Love, and Rock n Roll 2006) 243 Cahaya embraces Ipuy, relieved that her estranged parent has accepted her return. But Ipuy is more reluctant and is visibly uncomfortable with her daughter’s demand for connection and intimacy245 Cahaya meets Ipuy for the first time in Lovely Man (2011). She is very clearly a visual and moral counterpoint to Ipuy, a sex worker, seen here out of focus smoking a cigarette 248

Introduction Joel Gwynne and Niall Richardson

Across both historical and contemporary popular cultures, the depiction of much older men having romantic and sexual relationships with women who are significantly younger remains hegemonic and normalized. As Linda Alcoff has written, “cross-generational relations between old men and young women are the subject of so many approving cultural representations that they may seem to typify one of the normative scenarios of ‘romance’”.1 Similarly, Vicki Bell has asserted that to “desire someone younger than oneself, with less access to power than oneself, is certainly not an abnormal desire. It is the predominant construction of masculine desire in the contemporary form of heterosexuality”.2 This trend perpetuates not only in the European North but also the majority of cultures across the globe. Its prolificacy as a cultural and social trend remains evident in the sheer number of fictional texts which not only feature such relationship configurations but also treat such age disparities as incidental

J. Gwynne (*) National Institute of Education, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] N. Richardson University of Sussex, Sussex, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_1

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and unremarkable even when they may deserve more attention. In Anglophone popular cinema, for example, it has always been accepted that leading men will be paired with much younger romantic interests. Fred Astaire was close to 60 when he was paired with a 26-year-old Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face (1957); Cary Grant was aged 55 when matched with the 26-year-old Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief (1955) while Sean Connery was 52 and seducing the 30-year-old Kim Basinger in Never Say Never Again (1983). This trope has continued into contemporary popular cinema with A-List stars usually being paired romantically with considerably younger women. Richard Gere’s onscreen love interests tend to be 20–30 years his junior—a pattern which has been maintained from Pretty Woman (Gere was 40 while Roberts was 22) through to Arbitrage where Gere was 63 and Laetitia Castia 34. Harrison Ford is usually matched with women who are 15–20 years younger than he is and, remarkable as it may seem, the media was more concerned about Anne Heche’s sexual identification, when she was cast as Ford’s love interest in Six Days, Seven Nights (1998), rather than the 20-year age difference.3 Denzel Washington is 65 (at the time of writing) but his onscreen romantic partners tend to stay 20 years his junior (in Déjà Vue Washington was 52 and paired with the 31-year-old Paula Patton) while Johnny Depp is nearly always paired with women under the age of 25. Beyond the cinema screen, the actual lives of Hollywood icons further exemplify the cross generational trend and reveal significant gender differences in terms of the manner in which such relationships are received by the media and consumed by the public. When the press report on 44-year-­ old Leonardo DiCaprio’s new relationship with yet another much younger lover—currently, at the time of writing this introduction, 21-year-old Camila Morrone—it is difficult to detect either surprise or rebuke. Such patterns of dating are represented as to be expected of Hollywood’s most “eligible bachelor”, commensurate with the expectation of a lifestyle which accords the wealthy, heterosexual male the means with which to fulfil the wildest dreams of heteronormative hedonism. Indeed, for the heterosexual man, consecutive intergenerational relationships between himself and a younger female firmly align with generational and gendered hierarchies already embedded in society. However, when the age difference is reversed, and the relationship is between an older woman and younger man, then the media response is much less favourable—if not even condemnatory. A key example is the media coverage of Sam Taylor-Wood and Aaron Johnson’s relationship

 INTRODUCTION 

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prior to their marriage. Indeed, the couple have spent much of their relationship defending their 23-year age gap through multiple interviews with magazines (e.g. Elle and Grazia) and via strategic publicity moves which can be interpreted as reputational management in the face of intense public scrutiny. The examples of DiCaprio compared with Sam Taylor-Wood reveal that not even celebrity status can equalize gender disparities in terms of how culture responds to cross generational relationships. When popular cinema does represent a romantic relationship between an older woman and a younger man, this has usually been contained within three narrative devices. First, the older woman / younger man relationship can be coded as a caregiving, maternal-style relationship. Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), for example, was only granted script approval if the conclusion coded the relationship between Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson as one in which she cared for him after an accident. (Of course, with characteristic Sirkian irony, the final film image was able to suggest that desire still fuelled the relationship with its representation of the stag at the window.) Other examples have included Tea and Sympathy (1956) and Tim (1979). More recent variations on this narrative trope—in which female sexual desire is implied but, for various reasons, has been contained—have included the thriller Cellular (2004) (the older woman falls in love with the young man via telephone conversations), Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) (Florence cannot show physical affection due to her illness) and The Children Act (2017). Alternatively, the relationship of the older woman and younger man is depicted as financially (and often emotionally) exploitative by identifying the young man as a gigolo. These relationships are often coded as humorously or frighteningly grotesque as the younger man manipulates or, at the very least, benefits from the doting affections of a naïve (and sometimes emotionally vulnerable) older woman. This has been a staple Hollywood narrative and examples include Just a Gigolo (1931) (although Irene Purcell was only 4 years older than William Haines), Sunset Boulevard (1950), American Gigolo (1980) and, most recently, How to be a Latin Lover (2017). More recently, the sexually active older woman is constructed as the comic stereotype of “cougar”. Arguably, the first example of a cinematic cougar was Mrs Robinson in The Graduate (1967)—a character whose name has almost become synonymous with the concept of the older woman actively seducing a younger man. (Of course, given the gendered ageism of Hollywood, “younger” was more of narrative conceit than

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biological reality in The Graduate given that Dustin Hoffman was only 6 years younger than Anne Bancroft when the film was produced.) Other cinematic examples include Susan Sarandon’s performance as Nora in White Palace (1990) and, most recently, the character of Jeanine Stifler (Jeanine Coolidge) (often merely known as Stifler’s Mom) in the American Pie Series (arguably the film franchise which coined the offensive term MILF). Given the contemporary media sensibility of postfeminism, the figure of the cougar has attained even greater representation as her sexual activity is invariably linked to her “girling”—namely the processes by which an older woman is represented as continually striving to be a younger version of herself. Postfeminist culture has, after all, reconstructed our entire understanding of the relationship between age and womanhood, as Sarah Projansky contends: If the postfeminist woman is always in process, always using the freedom and equality handed to her by feminism in pursuit of having it all (including discovering her sexuality) but never quite managing to reach full adulthood, to fully have it all, one could say that the postfeminist woman is quintessentially adolescent no matter what her age.4

Indeed, it is in this context in which the older woman is able to legitimize her sexual activity and cross generational relationships; both are rendered culturally acceptable since her literal age belies both her physical appearance and her embracement of the hedonistic pleasures of youth. It is in this way that the figure of cross generational relationships between older men and younger women rose to discursive prominence in 1998 with the appearance of Kim Cattrall’s hypersexual Samantha Jones in Sex and the City (1998–2004), a representation elevated within popular television from a mere supporting character to an actual protagonist in the form of Courtney Cox’s performance as Jules Cobb in Cougar Town (2009–2015). These cougar identified representations of the older woman who engages in relationships with younger men are, of course, problematic in many ways. The representation of such desires in popular culture is often salacious and sensationalist, implying that the older woman who desires younger men is a dysfunctional nymphomaniac, while other representations may imply a consumerist desire for elevated social status through the ownership of a “toy boy” who serves a purely sexual function for the affluent wife (and nowhere is this more apparent than in the long-running

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television series Desperate Housewives [2004–2012]). It is notable that the “cougar” figure is, then, symptomatic of trends in postfeminist media culture which equate sexual agency with empowerment and consumerism. None of the female characters in Desperate Housewives, for example, situate their relationships with younger men in feminist terms as a subversion of the typical gendered order of cross generational relationships (namely the heteronormative and patriarchal configuration of older man/younger woman). The characters invariably invoke older women’s sexuality as predatory, and perhaps even more problematically, the expression of the older woman’s sexuality appears contingent on her youthful appearance regardless of her actual age. While it could be argued that the reason this cultural representation has gained traction and popular appeal is because it is almost a direct inversion of the sexological and social discourses surrounding the figure of the spinster as sexually repressed, one has to question whether the best way to challenge a stereotype is by simply inverting it? Is a hypersexual older woman necessarily a positive challenge to the depiction of the older women as sexually repressed? It is important to stress that a simple inversion of the patriarchal pattern of older man with younger woman may be equally problematic. Simply put, if an older male dating a younger female can be understood as an abuse of patriarchal and structural power, does this mean that an older woman dating a younger man cannot be rebuked too on moral or ideological grounds? Or, in the case of same-sex relationships, if an older male is sexually involved with a younger male, does this relationship somehow escape censure since the younger participant is not a young female and, therefore, arguably not as structurally disadvantaged? If an older female is sexually involved with a younger female, does this relationship also escape censure since the older woman is not accorded with the authority of patriarchal privilege? What about non-romantic relationships? How are power dynamics structured and negotiated between older and younger people whose bonds are not sexual? These are just some of the questions addressed in Cross Generational Relationships in Cinema. This book contributes to the recent body of gerontology research within film/media studies. Much of the current scholarship on visual culture has focused on four key debates. First, there have been analyses of how ageism is gendered within both popular media texts and entertainment industries themselves. Male actors (both on the screen and within their working lives) encounter considerably less ageism than women and, as identified already, a male Hollywood star can anticipate a much longer

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career as a leading man than his female counterpart.5 Second, critics have focused on how the figure of the ageing woman has been represented on the screen, debating how the coding of older female characters as grotesque “hags”, dottie dears or bedridden, dying grandmotherly types are mobilized within popular narratives.6 Third, there has been research which has considered contemporary representations which have been identified as more “age affirmative”, attempting to challenge many of the earlier stereotypes, and negotiate paradigms of “successful ageing” on the screen. Are these recent films really challenging previous gerontophobic stereotypes or are they merely reinforcing sexist ideologies in that female ageing is only “acceptable” if idealized hetero-feminine iconography is maintained?.7 Finally, there has been some recent scholarship which has considered the problems faced by ageing masculinity (particularly within the genre of action cinema) and how ageing intersects with gay, lesbian and trans identifications.8 However, the gerontological research in media studies identified above has focused on the representation of the older person. If there is a consideration of how an older character interacts it is only within the framework of genre or narrative analysis. There has yet to be a sustained study which addresses how the dynamics of cross generational relationships are represented and negotiated in contemporary cinema and whether these texts are managing to revise or challenge earlier narratives and stereotypes. This book begins by broaching the topic of cross generational relationships through three chapters which explore the strong sexual desire of older women who are romantically involved with younger men. Joel Gwynne’s chapter focuses on Roger Michell’s The Mother (2003) and Anne Fontaine’s Adore (2013), two films which share commonalities in their stark and honest presentation of the sexual subjectivities of older women in relationships with younger men. Both films also interrogate not only the anxieties which pervade advancing age, but also the lived experience of invisibility and diminishing desirability. In his exploration of these chapters, Gwynne poses the question: To what extent does the “coming out” of the desirous and desirable older woman signal a victory for feminism by rendering visible ageing female desire, and by destigmatizing cross generational relationships? Surveying similar territory, Fiona Handyside’s chapter turns our attention to French cinema through three films: Mia Hansen-Løve’s L’Avenir/ Things to Come (2016), Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s Un Chateau en Italie/A Castle in Italy and Brigitte Roüan’s Post-coïtum animal triste/ After Sex

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(1997). As in Gwynne’s chapter, these films all engage with the invisibility of women beyond midlife, and even though they explore the possibility of sexual attraction between a younger man and an older woman, they bring to the fore a sense of loss, grief, and fear, rather than any kind of celebratory or emancipatory rhetoric. Handyside poses the following questions: Do the women in these films need long-term connections to men, or is an investment in futurity one that seeks fulfilment in the birth of a child? Is this truly the connection with the next generation these women seek, and does this offer us a progressive or a reactionary view of sexual politics? The chapters by Gwynne and Handyside both focus on films which can be largely categorized as independent films which were not box office successes. While it is purely speculative and reductionist to state that the lack of commercial success of these films can be attributed to their stark exploration of the sexual subjectivities of older women, what remains clear is that films which feature cross generational heterosexual relationships but do not deeply examine sexuality are often more successful. The next section of this book, then, focuses on films in this vein, namely mainstream Hollywood cinema and its treatment of heterosexual relations between older women and younger men. Opening this section, Diane Negra tackles Anne Fletcher’s The Proposal (2009), which she argues is part of a cluster of recessionary romances that appeared after the global financial crash in which certitudes about gender and class are subject to revision, situating the film in relation to its “chick flick” predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Negra asserts that The Proposal’s age-­disproportionate romance is deceptive, an effort to particularize a star-driven romance narrative at a time when “chick flicks” had fallen into commercial disrepute. As such, Negra’s chapter compliments Deborah Jermyn’s analysis of the romantic comedy Home Again (2017), the directorial debut of Hallie Meyers-Shyer, herself the daughter of rom-com queen Nancy Meyers. This chapter examines how Home Again self-consciously alludes to this distinctive filmic pedigree of a mother-daughter cross generational relationship and how the mother-daughter, creative, cross generational relationship informed the marketing, reception and, indeed, narrative substance of the film. Jermyn’s chapter asks the following questions: How does Home Again seem to reflect an awareness of Meyers-Shyer’s place as “her mother’s daughter”? And most importantly, in its analysis of the film’s relationship between Alice (Reese Witherspoon) and Harry (Pico Alexander), how does it demonstrate, as Meyers first did in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, that the romantic comedy provides a thoughtful,

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rich and unusually accommodating home to the figure of the older woman desired by a younger man? Moving away from heterosexual relationships, it is crucial to consider how queer cinema has explored the relationship between cross generational relationships and heteronormative imperatives. Indeed, if, for many feminists, the normalization of sexual relationships between men and younger women/girls needs to be questioned as deeply suspect, then for queer theorists, the specific forms of condemnation directed towards consensual same-sex intergenerational sexuality is also demanding of interrogation. Opening this section of the book, Niall Richardson interrogates two films—Mike Mills’ Beginners (2010) and Bruce LaBruce’s Gerontophilia (2013)—which challenge dominant media stereotypes of ageing gay men. In the former, Mills tackles the stereotype of the older, predatory gay who seeks to “corrupt” innocent, younger men, while LaBruce confronts the stereotype of the desexualised figure of the “old queen”—a body whose ageing and effeminacy dislocates him from hegemonic conceptions of desirability. The chapter argues that both of these stereotypes can be seen to hold similarities with the prejudices surrounding ageing femininity and serve to revise the accepted narrative of the older gay man who is desperately lonely and incapable of maintaining a relationship. In doing so, Richardson argues, Beginners challenges the spectator’s expectations by reworking narratives of gay male ageing, romantic relationships and how these stories are interpreted, while Gerontophilia makes the spectator question their own erotic response to the “abject” “old queen”. Similar to Richardson’s chapter, Nick Rees-Roberts also explores the nexus between gerontophilia, queer relationality, sexuality and ageing in Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical (2016). Asserting that Staying Vertical is Guiraudie’s “queerest” work to date, the chapter argues that while the film is ostensibly concerned with a creatively blocked filmmaker who lusts after boys while fathering a child with a woman whom he randomly meets, the real subject of interrogation within the film is the social conventions of “age-appropriate” physicality and sexual desirability. The film rejects more mainstream LGBT identity politics of sameness via Guiraudie’s utopian vision of unfettered eroticism for men of all ages, this suggesting that smashing taboos of age and ageing and norms of physical attractiveness and desirability provide the key to unlocking the more experimental forms of queer relationality.

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The final chapter in this section moves away from more explicit depictions of sexuality, and instead focuses on the more esoteric territory of queer nostalgia. Analyzing Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters (1998), Michael Williams makes a compelling analysis of the ways in which the cross generational relationship between James Whale (Ian McKellen) and Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser) is juxtaposed with nostalgic desire to reclaim and revisit the past. Williams argues that the film is underscored by nostalgia for cinema’s own past and, from its 1950s setting, for a perceived utopian age in the gay imaginary, while acknowledging how patriarchal power can exploit the young, whether in wars, ancient or modern, or beside an idyllic Californian pool. Up until this point in the book, the chapters have all explored romantic and sexual relationships which, while unconventional, all involve consent and reciprocity (although this varies across a spectrum within all of the films discussed). The next section of the book, then, focuses on cross generational relationships where love remains unrequited or rejected and often borders on dysfunctional and toxic. Claire Mortimer opens this section with an analysis Beryl Reid’s roles in The Killing of Sister George (Aldrich 1968) and Entertaining Mr Sloane (Hickox 1970), specifically the manner in which Reid, as she entered middle-age, cultivated the persona of the grande dame guignol within the context of relationships with younger partners. By highlighting how these roles departed from the dominant representations of ageing femininity in film comedy which elided any suggestion of sexuality, and through drawing on Mary Russo’s work on the ‘female grotesque’, Mortimer demonstrates how Reid’s performance as the older woman in dysfunctional relationships articulated a profound cultural distaste for ageing sexuality. Moving to more recent cinema, Kwasu D.  Tembo locates two films, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malèna (2000), within the context of dysfunctional, cross generational desire in the absence of what would normally be regarded as a reciprocal relationship. While both films operate within distinctly separate cultural and cinematic traditions, with Lynch’s film framed within the experimental aesthetics and narratology of a psychological thriller set in 1960s–1970s suburbia and Tornatore’s against the backdrop of sociopolitical and cultural upheaval during World War II, both films present starkly dark and unconventional coming-of-age narratives. By centering the perspective from the male figures in both films, Tembo asserts that the experiences of Malèna (in Malèna) and Dorothy (in Blue Velvet) are circumscribed by a

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naive gaze, and as such the complexity of their experiences and subjectivity remain unexplored and remote while they exist as objectified figures of intrigue, pleasure, sadness, anger, and desire. The final section of the book serves to recognize that not all cross generational relationships are romantic or sexual. Sue Thornham’s analysis of Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011) considers the intersections of time and space, narrative and image, history and memory. The film tells the story of the developing relationship between middle-­ aged and unmarried Hong Kong film producer Roger Leung (Andy Lau) and Ah Tao (Deanie Ip), the maid who has served his family for sixty years but who, following a stroke, insists on retiring to a care home. Through this cross generational relationship, Thornham argues, Hui draws out not only a history of love and mutual dependence which Roger has repressed but also the spaces, lives and relationships that Hong Kong’s relentless push to modernity renders invisible. In the final chapter of the book, Alicia Izharuddin juxtaposes two films about transgender motherhood: Upi Avianto’s popular 2006 film Realita, Cinta, dan Rock n Roll (Reality, Love, and Rock n Roll) and Teddy Soeriaatmadj’s 2011 film Lovely Man. While both films demonstrate the stereotypical conventions of transgender identities onscreen—the “reveal”, hyperfeminine drag and the embodiment of transfemininity by muscular leading men—Izharuddin argues that the films remain subversive through a depiction of trans-motherhood which reconfigures the Indonesian nuclear family into a more unsettling/unsettled unit that resists fixity of boundaries. The chapter argues that “archipelagic intergenerational relations” bring into focus the ways in which the Indonesian family is “transed” when the cross generational unit of transgender mother and biological child reunite after estrangement.

Notes 1. Linda Martin Alcoff, ‘Dangerous Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Pedophilia’ in Feminist Interpretations of Foucault, ed. Susan J.  Hekman (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), p. 115. 2. Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 158. 3. Harry M.  Benshoff and Sean Griffin Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), p. 253.

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4. Sarah Projansky, ‘Mass Magazine Cover Girls: Some Reflections on Postfeminist Mothers and Postfeminist Daughters’, in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, eds. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 45. 5. Sally Chivers The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Amir Cohen-Shalev (ed.) Visions of Aging: Images of the Elderly in Film (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009); Pamela H. Gravagne The Becoming of Age: Cinematic Visions of Mind, Body and Identity in Later Life (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013); Joel Gwynne and Imelda Whelehan (eds) Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Deborah Jermyn and Sue Holmes (eds), Women, Celebrity and Cultures of Ageing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Timothy Shary and Nancy McVittie Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016); Aagje Swinnen and John Stotesbury (eds) Aging, Performance, and Stardom: Doing Age on the Stage of Consumerist Culture (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012). 6. Jodi Brooks ‘Fascination and the grotesque: what ever happened to Baby Jane?’, Continuum, 5:2 (1992), pp.  225–235; Sally Chivers ‘Baby Jane grew up: the dramatic intersection of age with disability’, Canadian Review of American Studies, 36:2, (2006), pp.  211–227; Mark Gallagher ‘Be patient, dear mother … wait for me’: the neo infirmity film, female illness and contemporary cinema’, Feminist Media Studies, 9:2, (2009), pp. 209–225; Elizabeth W Markson ‘The female aging body through film’, in C.  A. Faircloth (ed.), Aging Bodies: Images and Everyday Experience (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003) pp. 77–102; Anne Morey, Anne ‘Grotesquerie as a marker of success in aging female stars’, in Sue Holmes and Dinae Negra (eds), In the Limelight and under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp.  103–124; Martin Shingler, Martin ‘Masquerade or drag? Bette Davis and the ambiguities of gender’, Screen, 36:3, (1995), pp. 179–192; Karen Stoddard Saints and Shrews: Woman and Aging in American Popular Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983). 7. Sally Chivers ‘The show must go on: aging, care and musical performance in Quartet’, Modern Drama, 59:2, (2016), pp. 213–230; Josephine Dolan ‘Old age films: golden retirement, dispossession and disturbance’, Journal of Popular British Cinema and Television, 13:4, (2016), pp.  571–589; Josephine Dolan Contemporary Cinema and ‘Old Age’: Gender and the Silvering of Stardom (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell (eds), Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations, (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012); Deborah Jermyn ‘“Get a life, ladies. Your old one is not coming back”: ageing, ageism and the lifes-

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pan of the female celebrity’, Celebrity Studies, 3:1, (2012a), pp.  1–12; Deborah Jermyn ‘“Glorious, glamorous and that old standby, amorous”: the late blossoming of Diane Keaton’s romantic comedy career’, Celebrity Studies, 3:1, (2012b), pp. 37–51; Deborah Jermyn ‘Past their prime-time: women, ageing and absence on British factual television’, Critical Studies in Television, 8:1, (2013), pp.  73–90; Deborah Jermyn ‘Pretty past it? Interrogating the post-feminist makeover of ageing, style, and fashion’, Feminist Media Studies, 16:4, (2016), pp.  573–589; Niall Richardson Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema (London: I B Tauris, 2018); Frances Smith ‘Femininity, ageing and performativity in the work of Amy Heckerling’, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 10:3, (2016). http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue10/ HTML/ArticleSmith.html (accessed 28 October 2017); Margaret Tally ‘Something’s Gotta Give: Hollywood, female sexuality, and the “older bird” chick flick’, in Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young (eds), Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies. London: Taylor & Francis, 2008), pp. 119–131; Tina Vares ‘Reading the “sexy oldie”: gender, age(ing) and embodiment’, Sexualities, 12:4, (2009), pp. 503–524. 8. Ellexis Boyle and Sean Brayton ‘Ageing masculinities and “muscle work” in Hollywood action film an analysis of The Expendables’, Men and Masculinities, 15:5, (2012), pp. 468–485; Sally Chivers ‘“Blind people don’t run”: escaping the “nursing home spectre” in Children of Nature and Cloudburst’, Journal of Aging Studies, 34, (2015), pp. 134–141; Linda M. Hess ‘“My whole life I’ve been dressing up like a man”: negotiations of queer aging and queer temporality in the TV series Transparent’, European Journal of American Studies, 11:3, (2017), pp. 1–19; Linda M. Hess Queer Aging in North American Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Chris Holmlund ‘Celebrity, ageing and Jackie Chan: middle-aged Asian in transnational cinema’, Celebrity Studies, 1:1, (2013), pp. 96–112; Norma Jones and Bob Batchelor (eds) Aging Heroes: Growing Old in Popular Culture (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Eva Krainitski ‘Ghosted images: old lesbians on screen’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19:1, (2015), pp. 13–26; Eva Krainitski ‘“Older-wiser-lesbians” and “baby-dykes”: mediating age and generation in New Queer Cinema’, Feminist Media Studies, 16:4, (2016a), pp. 631–647; Eva Krainitski ‘Unsettling heteronormativity: abject age and transgressive desire in Notes on a Scandal’, in Joel Gwynne (ed.), Transgression in Anglo-American Cinema: Gender, Sex and the Deviant Body, (London and New  York: Wallflower Press, 2016b), pp.  161–175; Niall Richardson Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema (London: I B Tauris, 2018); John R. Yoakam ‘Gods or monsters: a critique of representations in film and literature of relationships between older gay men and younger men’, Journal of Lesbian and Gay Social Services, 13:4. (2001), pp. 65–98.

Female Desire in Cross Generational Relationships

Mother and Lover: Dissident Desire and the Older Woman in The Mother and Adore Joel Gwynne

Released in 2003, Roger Michell’s The Mother is a sombre portrayal of May’s (Ann Reid) struggle with loneliness in the aftermath of the death of Toots (Peter Vaughan), her husband of more than thirty years. Unable to receive comfort and meaningful connection from both of her estranged, grown-up children—with whom she maintains a difficult relationship marked by unresolved tension—May commences an affair with her daughter’s lover, Darren (Daniel Craig), who is more than twenty years younger and married with children of his own. Released in 2013, Anne Fontaine’s Adore adapts Doris Lessing’s novella “The Grandmothers” (2003) and narrates the turbulent romantic lives of lifelong friends Lil (Naomi Watts) and Roz (Robin Wright) who, as they pass into middle-age, begin romantic and sexual relationships with each other’s sons. Both films share a number of commonalities and function as useful points of contrast and

J. Gwynne (*) National Institute of Education, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_2

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comparison. The Mother depicts a relationship between a middle-aged man and a woman beyond sixty years of age, while Adore depicts a similar age difference of approximately twenty years, but instead focuses on middle-­ aged women and their sons/lovers who are both under the age of twenty-­ five. While these films address different stages in a woman’s life which involve vastly different personal and cultural considerations, what both films share is an age disparity of a generation between the female leads and their lovers. Indeed, in both films, the biological age difference between the lovers is akin to that of a parent-child relationship. The Mother and Adore are notable in their interesting, though not entirely unproblematic depiction of relationships which challenge social norms. While relationships between older men and younger women are, of course, ubiquitous in society and popular cultural representation, what makes both films unique is their exploration of alternative relationship configurations in terms of significant age difference, and their stark and honest presentation of the sexual subjectivities of older women. Commensurate with the cultural invisibility of both older women’s sexual desire and the dominant cultural pattern of women dating and marrying men of a similar age or older, serious relationships between older women and younger men are rarely represented in fiction and cinema. Both films are thus worthy of scholarly attention, for while distinct in their own ways they share overlapping thematic concerns, particularly in their interrogation of not only the anxieties which pervade advancing age, but also the lived experience of invisibility and diminishing desirability. By focusing on The Mother (2003) and Adore (2013), this chapter seeks to answer the following questions: If women have historically been encouraged to eroticize the more distant, more powerful and patriarchal father-figure, then what are the feminist implications of seeking a lover who is significantly younger? And to what extent does the “coming out” of the desirous and desirable older woman signal a victory for feminism by rendering visible ageing female desire, and by destigmatizing cross-generational relationships?

In Celebration of Youth In “Women and the Double Standard of Ageing” (1997), Susan Sontag considers the importance of youth to culture, making the observation that fertility is tied to youth in differential ways for men and women. Given that the majority of women lose their ability to produce children much earlier than men, and considering the cultural value of fertility in a more

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discursive sense, Sontag asserts that older men are valued in a patriarchal society while older women are not. Indeed, as she succinctly points out: “What makes men desirable to women is by no means connected to youth”.1 Anxieties concerning ageing and the loss of fertility are thus the product of the social stigma attached to both, and a refusal to value older women if they lack fertility, positions women’s value as contingent on their value to men. Sarah Falcus has observed how the “cult of youthfulness is one that weighs more heavily on women than on men”,2 and notes how the topic of female ageing has historically been neglected by second-­ wave feminists in both academia and civil society, with key concerns, such as reproductive rights and equality in the workplace lobbied for in the context of younger women. In the 1990s, feminist scholarship appeared to be intensely interested in redressing such cultural double standards, and a wave of key texts were published by women who were active within second-wave feminism, including Germaine Greer’s The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991), Betty Friedan’s The Fountain of Age (1993), and Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Declining to Decline (1997). More recently, feminist scholars and key contributors in the field have published several texts such as Josephine Dolan and Estelle Tincknell’s Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations (2012), Lynne Segal’s Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (2014), Joel Gwynne and Imelda Whelehan’s Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones (2014), Deborah Jermyn and Susan Holmes’ Women, Celebrity and Cultures of Ageing: Freeze Frame (2015), Norma Jones and Bob Batchelor’s Aging Heroes: Growing Old in Popular Culture (2015), and Niall Richardson’s Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema (2018). It is within the context of these publications that it is fruitful to survey the impact that shifting perceptions of ageing within certain areas of culture may have on popular cultural representations of cross-generational relationships. This chapter is concerned with drawing out some of the positive shifts in terms of the way in which older women’s desire is expressed and represented in the context of cross-generational relationships. Yet, it is important to first begin by stating that both The Mother and Adore largely fail in presenting the ageing process as a positive experience—as it has indeed been represented by feminist gerontologists—partly because both films refuse to resist the cultural valorization of youth. If “youth is bonded with patriarchy in the enslavement of the older woman”,3 then nowhere is this more apparent than in Adore’s celebration of

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youthfulness and its association with beauty, happiness and fulfillment. Indeed, the film begins with a celebration of idyllic youth, as the camera tracks Roz and Lil as teenagers running down a rural road, heading towards a beach, where they discard their clothes and dive into the sea with joyful abandon. Their laughter is accompanied by a sweeping musical score that clearly indicates not only the bond that Ros and Lil share as children but also positions childhood and young girlhood as a period of celebration and exuberance. Such scenes call to mind the importance of girlhood to the culture at large, and affirm Alison Winch’s reflection that in contemporary visual culture, “the feminine ideal is the girl, and the girled body is an asset”.4 The opening scene closes with Roz and Lil gazing at each other as young girls, and cuts to a scene of both characters gazing at each other as older women at the funeral of Lil’s husband, Theo. Such an opening forces the audience to consider why the film begins in this way, and there are perhaps a number of reasons. The opening scenes demonstrate that Roz and Lil have known each other for many decades, but perhaps more importantly, I would suggest that the juxtaposition of several scenes which are very different in tone and circumstance make explicit the stark disparity between their utopian girlhood as young teenagers, and the difficult realities of their adult lives. Significantly, the funeral scene closes with a panoramic shot of the beach and sea—the same sea the audience witness Roz and Lil diving into as children more than thirty years ago. Shortly after this, the film cuts to Roz’s son Tom and Lil’s son Ian surfing together in the sea—both boys of a similar age to Roz and Lil’s adolescent selves in the opening scene of the film—and the soundtrack is a reprisal of the same music we hear in the opening scene, too. The adolescent bodies of Ian and Tom morph and transform into strong and muscular adult versions of themselves, swimming in the same sea, much in the same way that we witness the transformation of Ros and Lil from girlhood to womanhood. The opening scenes of Adore are thus highly significant in the manner in which the time-space continuum of childhood and adulthood converge, with the central characters of Roz, Lil, Ian and Tom occupying a space in which childhood and adulthood are presented in a cyclical manner that intimately connects the lives of the characters. In these first few scenes which depict the movement and transitions of time, the audience witnesses all four characters age from childhood to adulthood, and yet this ageing processes is crucially depicted as occurring in the same geographical, emotionally affective locations: the idyllic youth that Roz and Lil

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experience on the sea and beach of Perth is paralleled by experiences of their sons. Taken accumulatively, these scenes make it difficult for the audience to separate the intense emotions that Roz and Lil possess towards their youth from their contemporary adoration of their sons, who appear as symbolical iterations of their mothers’ vibrant, former selves as children. The interactions between Roz and Lil in the early part of the film make it abundantly clear that they are mourning the loss of youth, the possibilities of which are written on the bodies of their sons. Both women take voyeuristic pleasure in their sons’ surfing abilities—describing them as “young Gods”—and ponder whether they were both as athletic when they were young women, forcing the audience to consider whether the sexual desire they develop for each other’s sons can indeed be separated from a nostalgic desire for youth in more general terms. Certainly, in a subsequent scene, the two mothers look at photographs of their younger selves—“admiring their own beauty”, in the words of Tom—and come to the conclusion that they were prettier in the past, but have more “character” in the present. The audience is presented with a dinner-table scene in which both women discuss their romantic conquests as young women; reflecting on the past takes up a large amount of their contemporary existence. Prior to beginning their sexual relationships with Tom and Ian, the two mothers can, then, be understood as women attempting to come to terms with the ageing process, and nostalgically looking to the past as a way of understanding themselves as adults in the present. It is difficult to deny the nostalgic hold that youth has on Roz and Lil, and the film suggests that this nostalgia towards their youth may affect their perception of their contemporary lives and the decisions they make as middle-aged adults in the contemporaneous narrative. Simply put, could it be that Roz and Lil are unable to transition from their idyllic childhood to the often-limiting realities of being middle-aged women with adult responsibilities? Do they yearn for their younger selves running along the beach with abandon, and to what extent can their romantic and sexual relationships with each other’s children in the present be understood as signifiers of that youthful yearning? The film does not offer clear answers to these questions, but nostalgia for youth is understandable, given that culture both validates youth and presents grim possibilities for the ageing woman. Betty Friedan has observed that while it may be tempting for women to try to “pass” as younger—and in the context of Adore youth-by-proxy may be enacted by a cross-generational relationship—she suggests that women who distance

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themselves from the reality of ageing may result in a further reinforcement of the fear of old age and marginalization.5 Like Germaine Greer, Friedan’s belief in the empowering possibilities of ageing is predicated on a resistance to youth culture, since the more women “deny our own age in order to pass as young, the more we give credence to the that dread aura of age”.6 Rather than resist youth culture, Adore appears to do the opposite and embrace the “ageing as decline” narrative. Indeed, as their respective relationships progress, both Roz and Lil are sure that both men will “get bored of us eventually”—suggesting that an attraction to an older woman should be intelligible only as a temporary and superficial distraction, and that both younger men will soon be swept away by younger women in a culturally appropriate manner.

Ageing as Decline Adore follows a cultural trend in which ageing is configured as dysfunctional and abject, and thus the only appropriate response is to view it with disdain and to try to hold onto youth for as long as possible. Despite occasional interventions in popular culture where the ageing process is represented as a more positive experience—in films such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Madden, 2011), for example—the ageing as decline narrative remains dominant in Anglo-American popular culture, and has been since the publication of Elaine Cumming and William Henry’s Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement (1961), which Betty Friedan summarizes as proposing the hypothesis that it is functional for “both society and the individual for older people to voluntarily retire, retreat, ‘disengage’ from active involvement in society”.7 In Adore, even though both Roz and Lil are successful women in terms of their careers, the narrative focuses on nothing more than their relationships with their young lovers, and appears to suggest that it is only through the youth of their lovers that the two older women can find fulfillment. It would not be hyperbolic to assert that with the exception of their sons/lovers, both women are represented as having nothing of value in their lives. When considering the perspective of ageing as a period of decline, it is important to note that while both The Mother and Adore present similarly negative depictions of ageing, they are nevertheless occupied with different concerns regarding ageing and its discontents, not only in their focus on a different phase in the life course (i.e. retirement and middle-age) but also due to the different socio-economic demographic of the characters.

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Susan Sontag has noted that anxiety about ageing is “certainly more common, and more acute, among middle-class and rich women than among working-class women”,8 since economically disadvantaged women are more fatalistic about ageing. Comparing and contrasting The Mother and Adore resolutely confirms this statement, since while the upper middle-­ class women of Adore are confronted with romantic entanglements and the loss of vitality, The Mother focuses more on the social impact of ageing on familial relationships. Even though The Mother does not resist the dominant perception of ageing as a period of decline, it succeeds in conveying the distressing social realities of ageing in a way that is affective and convincing. Zoe Brennan has illustrated how representations of ageing often possess dehumanizing tendencies, creating two-dimensional images that perpetuate the ghettoization of the aged and eradicate the complexity of their lives,9 and to the credit of Roger Michell’s direction, Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay, and assured performances from Anne Reid and Peter Vaughan, The Mother presents a sensitive depiction of the indignities of ageing. Certainly, The Mother begins with sombre scenes of May lying in bed awake, listening to the sounds of Toots sleeping, followed by a scene in which she dresses her husband, followed by a scene of the couple sitting in silence at the dinner table. Taken accumulatively, these scenes function to construct a grim perception of life as a retired couple, and suggest that being old is simply an awful experience, beset by both physical impairment and a lack of emotional intimacy. This absence of intimacy between husband and wife extends to May and Toot’s relationship with significant others, for when they visit their children and grandchildren in London, granddaughter Rosie (Rosie Michell) greets May by informing her that she “has a broken face”. Such statements implicitly connect May’s rejection as a grandmother with her appearance as an older woman, and in doing so support the ageing as decline discourse in its implication that human value is directly tied to age. This is underscored at other affective points in the film, particularly when Toot’s passes away and May is suddenly alone in the world. The indifference of her children is made clear when May returns to her now empty home, accompanied by her son Bobby (Stephen Mackintosh). As May sits on the bed and looks at her husband’s old photographs, Bobby becomes impatient since he has more pressing, work-related matters to attend to. When May states that she does not want to live on her own, her son agrees that she can stay with him for some time, and yet both he and his wife Helen (Anna Wilson-Jones) are clearly unhappy with the arrangement. The trials and tribulations of

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ageing, even the death of one’s own father, are presented as nothing more than an inconvenience to the lives of the younger people, and May only becomes a valuable part of her children’s lives when she demonstrates that she is useful. Her daughter Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw), for example, only has time for her mother when she fulfills a purpose in her own life, such as taking on the role of an ad-hoc childminder to her son. It is within this context of the older woman as marginalized and devalued that the film begins to enter more radical territory. May declares that she is “not ready for old age”—a statement that feels like a clarion call— and the film is positive in that it does recognize and assert that ageing should not be a period of withdrawal from society and social relationships, even ones which are not socially sanctioned. The lack of care and value accorded to May on account of her age sets the context for her attachment to a man who does demonstrate some level of interest in her, and recognizes her as a human being with legitimate feelings, thoughts and desires. Indeed, the textual crux of narrative appears to be the moment in which Darren witnesses her children’s disregard of May’s feelings, and remarks: “We’ll be like that one day. Nobody wanting us”. From this point onwards, what makes The Mother so radical is its depiction of the ways in which older women desire to be desired, and not merely tolerated by family members for their utilitarian functionality. Before exploring the film’s representation of sexuality, it is first crucial locate positions towards old age and sex within feminist gerontology.

Positive Ageing and Dissident Desire Positive representations of female ageing in literature and visual culture can be understood as what Margaret Morganroth Gullette has termed as “midlife progress narratives”,10 and these can be defined as texts which challenge the assumption that the first period of adulthood—where youth and sexuality are celebrated the most—irrevocably determines the future. For example, Jeannette King identifies Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark (1973) as a progressive novel in its treatment Kate Brown’s abandoning of a sexual self and her consequential return to a metaphorical childhood where she can explore her passion and idealism (King 2013: 152). Likewise, Germaine Greer champions an abandonment of women’s sexual selves as they age so the “passionate, idealistic, energetic young individual who existed before menstruation can come on earth again”.11 For Greer, if women’s adult lives are often defined by their erotic capital,

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then old age should be a period of liberation where the older woman can reject the youthful norms of beauty culture and the demand for maintaining a desirable body. Studies within the social sciences have also emphasized “the sense of empowerment and confidence felt by women who no longer feel they have to please anyone but themselves”12 by adopting the positions espoused by de Beauvoir and Greer. There thus appears to be a wealth of arguments which posit that the key to fulfilment in old age is to resist the practices and pleasures of youth, and to find new ways of living.13 Yet, while recognizing that ageing can potentially be positive as women are no longer bound by the cultural pressures associated with youth, it is also important to acknowledge that perceiving old age as a period of disembodiment and asexuality may be equally problematic. Jacquelyn N. Zita has pointed out that the ideology of ageism presents “the old female as asexual if not antisexual”,14 and this has developed into a widely accepted stereotype that has been resisted by the lived experience of women. Friedan observes that elderly people “who find they have strong sex desires are overwhelmed with guilt and shame and feel they are oversexed”.15 Friedan herself speaks candidly about these desires: Would I never know true intimacy again, would I ever take off all my clothes, be completely there with another being again? And sometimes I felt such a yearning, such a sense of loss, that I desperately tried playing the old game again. But it no longer worked. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk the shame. Better to face the fact that this part of my life was over and take what pleasure I could in children and friends, women and men, without wanting or expecting it to end in bed, much less romance or marriage.16

Written when Friedan was 72, such a statement is highly significant in not only addressing the taboo, seldom expressed and socially sanctioned sexual desire of the older woman, but also in addressing the difficulty of living a life without tactile intimacy and sexual opportunity. The Fountain of Age represents important work in its attempt to break the silence surrounding sexual desire and celibacy, and this silence is a cultural double standard that has not affected men to the same extent (similar to how men have not been expected to attain desirability as a cultural requirement). In 1998, the launch of Viagra onto the market place made it clear that ageing male sexuality should not be considered taboo, and the marketing of the product encouraged a normative view of masculinity which aligned manhood with sexual potency and virility.17 Such scientific measures to uphold

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phallic potency—and the positive cultural reception of these interventions—signifies a culture unable to conceptualize sexual solutions for ageing women. Susan Sontag has even gone as far as to argue that double standards towards ageing “shows up most brutally in the conventions of sexual feeling”18 which assume a gender difference that functions “permanently to women’s disadvantage”. A refusal to perceive older women as desiring subjects reflects what Kathleen Woodward has referred to as the “binary of visibility and invisibility” in which the older woman is visible only as an ill, abject body, while remaining invisible as a desirable body.19 This binary is perhaps representative of the way in which marginalized groups are configured in many sections of society, “either rarely (literal invisibility) or inaccurately through caricature or other distortion”,20 and so older women’s corporeality is understood as hyperbolically excessive (in terms of illness) or invisible (in terms of sexuality). It is therefore important that films such as Adore and The Mother reclaim ageing sexuality, and this reclamation of desire could in itself be identified as another characteristic of a “progress narrative”. One of the key ways in which both films are progressive is the manner in which both resist the construction of older, actively sexual women as predators, a common trope in Anglo-American culture concerning women who express sexual desire for younger men. The culture of continental Europe offers a variation on this theme, with influential texts such as Colette’s Cheri (1920) offering a more sympathetic account of cross generation desire which emphasize the role of the older woman in initiating young men into sexual and emotional maturation. What is perhaps unique about Adore and The Mother is their resistance to both cultural tropes of older women as predatory sexual aggressors and nurturing sexual educators. In Adore, both Roz and Lil are not remotely predatory nor maternally nurturing in their interactions towards their lovers. In fact, it is Ian and Tom who initiate sexual advances towards Roz and Lil. Ian clearly has strong sexual desire for Ros, and later informs Lil that he loves her too. Despite the age disparity, this is a relationship that is depicted as following normal social conventions and motivated for socially sanctioned reasons of love and desire. It is therefore difficult to interpret Roz and Lil’s actions as predatory given not only the agency accorded to their male lovers, but also due to the genuine and mutual desire that all parties express. For both older women, the relationships lead to hitherto unknown levels of emotional and sexual contentment in their lives. Rather than predatory, there are even junctures in the film which illustrate the ways in which the younger lovers emotionally

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complete the older women. When Tom is away in Sydney for to take part in a play, Lil is unable to handle the jealousy she feels and turns to drinking; she is depicted as someone who is dependent on Tom, rather than as a femme fatale who is taking advantage of his youth. Similarly, Ian is dependent on Roz. Rather than perpetuate the model of the older woman as predatory or maternal, Adore presents its relationships at normative. In a similar manner, The Mother resists the older woman as predator trope by carefully and incrementally conveying the loneliness of May and her sexual and emotional needs. These are displayed frankly and without any sense of strategy or contrivance, for when May finally asks Darren to sleep with her, it is direct and solemn: “Would you mind coming to the spare room with me? Would you”. The line is delivered as an anguished plea, one which bears acute affective resonance especially since this request is preceded by an extended scene in which May shares her reflections on a life less than fully lived, a life in which she “just wasn’t’ there […] always too worried about everything to live in it properly”. May is thus not constructed as a predator, but rather a lonely woman who meets a man who sympathizes with her condition. In both The Mother and Adore, the central female characters are not older women who are sexual predators with dubious motives, but are artfully conceived as real, flawed human beings with complex motivations and desires. Both films, then, present older, passionate, sexually eligible women who expose the fragility of the cultural boundaries that distinguish the young and sexual from the old and celibate, and this is perhaps seen most dramatically in the presentation of ageing bodies on screen. While the naked bodies of young women are dominant across cinema, similar levels of nudity from women of middle-years and older are comparatively rare. Remarking on the cultural disgust towards older female bodies, Zoe Brennan states that society “fosters this attitude by encouraging the equation of beauty with youth, and beauty as a prerequisite for sex”.21 Considered within the context of this statement, Adore and The Mother can be understood in counterpoint. In one noteworthy scene in Adore, Roz lies naked on a bed while the camera tracks her body from her calves to her head. The audience bears witness to her body while it is caressed by Ian, and this depiction of a younger man in adoration of the physique of a much older women is a striking visual image. And yet, while this ostensibly represents a promising shift away from the decline narrative, Brennan’s statement holds, since even though Roz is an older woman, her body shows little sign of ageing; instead of sagging

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skin, the camera tracks her taut and lithe limbs and curves. The film’s celebration of the ageing body is thus more complicated and less affirmatory than it may appear, since it implies that ageing bodies can only be celebrated if they adhere to the cultural and aesthetic expectations of youthful bodies. In the scene, Roz conveys fear that her body will become invisible once she begins to show the common signs of ageing, declaring “soon enough I won’t let you see me like this”. This could have been a moment in which the film could offer a culturally divergent viewpoint by asserting that even ageing bodies can be desirable, and yet it is a lost opportunity since the response of her lover is simply a fantastical rejection of the ageing process. In his ironic reply of “I won’t let it happen”, Ian confirms his own fear of Roz’s inevitable ageing and asserts his will to resist the ageing process. Like Adore, The Mother showcases a similar, complex depiction of ageing desire and the ageing body, the acceptability and visibility of which is ultimately predicated on youth. The presentation of May’s naked body is certainly more radical compared to Roz’s, since May is more than twenty years older than Roz and there is thus no attempt to celebrate the youthful female body. Upon presenting her naked self to Darren for the first time, May frankly asks: “What do you see? A shapeless old lump?”, a question to which Darren shakes his head. In presenting the scene in this manner, it could be reasonably asserted that The Mother succeeds where Adore fails in its presentation of the ageing body. Ageing corporeality is not denied, but rather affirmed, since even though May’s body is not youthful and does not appear to be youthful, she is nevertheless desired by her younger lover. And yet, the film’s sex scenes ultimately valorize youth in a different way in their staging of May’s passive sexuality, despite her seniority. Certainly, while the sex scenes in the film construct May as a woman who enjoys intercourse and refuses to feel any sense of shame that may be associated with sexual activity in women above sixty years of age, there is a distinct absence of feminist egalitarianism in terms of sexual politics. May is constructed as either a meek sexual servant (when performing oral sex on Darren) or as a woman who appears eternally grateful for Darren’s sexual attention. In the film’s first sex scene, Darren invites May to touch his body—almost as if his body is a divine relic to be worshipped—and May responds by requesting to be touched by Darren. When her lover does so, May exclaims “I thought nobody would ever touch me again, apart from the undertaker!” This moment of black humour conveys May’s strong sense of both desperation and gratitude, placing her within a

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position of passivity in her sexual relationship with Darren; he is the giver of pleasure, and May is the enthusiastic receiver. Darren is depicted as a younger, experienced and skilled lover, and May is firmly in his sexual thrall. In presenting May as a lonely, desperate and sexually grateful older woman, it is the younger lover who enables her sexual pleasure. The film implies that older women’s sexuality can only be depicted positively when sexual desire is shared with a younger lover; it is the youth of her lover that allows older women’s desire to be rendered visible and her sexual vitality is affirmed by proxy. This troubling trope is confirmed in a late scene in which May has sex with retiree Bruce, and the intercourse is depicted as a horrendous experience—shot more as a horror film than a drama—punctuated with close ups of wincing, grimacing faces and bulging eyes. The scene makes it resolutely clear that sexual intercourse between two old people is disgusting and abject, while intercourse between an older lover and a younger is more acceptable. The muscular, lithe physique of Daniel Craig allows sex to be presented as visible, acceptable and healthy, whereas sex between two ageing bodies is presented as irredeemably distressing.

Conclusion: Lovers or Mothers? Adore and The Mother represent women across two key life stages—middle age and retirement—and their struggle with their sexuality in a manner that remains rare in contemporary cinema. If both films carve a space for the sexuality of the older woman to be made visible, then to what extent are they successful in destigmatizing cross-generational relationships? The answer rests in the final frames of the films, which in both cases need to be considered in the context of Jeannette King’s incisive observation that since “relationships between older women and younger men subvert patriarchal power relations between the sexes” the older woman “must be ridiculed, or demonised, and the relationship must prove a failure” in order to neutralize such threats.22 As a faithful adaption of Lessing’s novella, Adore punishes both Roz and Lil with the ultimate admonishment of losing their sons/lovers to younger women with whom they marry and have children. Moreover, when Tom and Ian’s new wives learn of their transgressive relationships, Roz and Lil are denied access to their granddaughters. In The Mother, May is similarly punished when her children discover her affair with Darren; her son Bobby deems her an “old slapper” while referring to Darren as a “fuck up”; the cross-generational relationship is positioned as dysfunctional and the lovers are positioned as

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abject. The film closes with May’s rejection by her children and the severing of her relationship with Darren, leaving London to return to her lonely house. Adore and The Mother represent complex and sometimes contradictory images of cross-generational relationships and the sexual older woman which are both agentic and disempowering to varying degrees. Both films are positive in their depiction of older women who embrace their sexuality despite advancing age and the commensurate social expectations of celibacy, and in the case of Adore, the film attests that cross-generational relationships are able to follow the same normative dynamics and conventions of those between similarly aged lovers; namely, an egalitarian relationship based on love and desire. And yet, both Adore and The Mother implicitly suggest that it is only in the context of a cross-generational relationship with a younger lover that the older women’s sexual legitimacy can be confirmed. It is the youth of the lovers in both films that render the visibility of older women’s desire as palatable; in The Mother, the screening of desirable young(er) flesh negates the abject status of the naked, wrinkled corporeality of the older woman, while in Adore the existence of the signs of ageing are entirely elided in the bodies of Roz and Lil. Given the valorization of youth in culture at large, it is perhaps hardly surprising that both films suggest that youth is needed, on some level, to “activate” and energize the libido of the older woman. The films appear to suggest that if a woman is no longer young, then she can thus reclaim her youth through intercourse with a younger man. Sexual empowerment for the older woman is thus predicated on the possibilities of embracing youth by proxy. How, then, are we to account for this dynamic in both films? In order to fully evaluate the implications of the films’ complicated position on ageing and sexual empowerment, it is perhaps useful to consider the centrality, or lack thereof, of the role of motherhood in both. Lynn Segal has observed that psychoanalysis “remains complicit in fixing the essence of female adulthood as, and only as, Mother”, thus “securing women’s abject status as unconditional thankless givers, never the secure takers, of carefree joys and bodily delights”.23 Indeed, there is no cultural discourse aside from the discourse of maternal love which accounts for intense feelings an older woman may have for a younger man. The corollary is the assumption that young men who experience sexual and emotional intimacy with an older woman are the victims of an Oedipal obsession, and are thus as equally dysfunctional as the woman who desires the younger man. To what extent do The Mother and Adore challenge the oedipal stigma

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attached to cross-generational relationships by demonstrating that older women are able to distinguish themselves from their former roles as mothers? In Adore, what marks the cross-generational relationships as problematic—aside from the age disparity—is that both Roz and Lil have known Ian and Tom since they were children and have raised them together as a close unit in the capacity of biological mothers and in  loco parentis. Having operated as nurturers their entire lives within the context of a close family unit—and faced with the impending “empty nest” upon both sons’ maturation—the cross-generational relationship could be read as one of the ways in which both women establish new identities and new experiences in a new phase in the life course. This symbolic rejection of their roles as “mothers” in Adore is paralleled in the more direct admonition of the constraints of motherhood we see in The Mother. As Imelda Whelehan astutely notes, what “makes the film so refreshing is that May does not return to domestic quietude, and the question of whether she was actually a ‘bad’ mother (as per her own testimony) is left open”.24 From early in the narrative, the audience is astutely aware that the film’s title is highly ironic as in some of the film’s most affective scenes, May openly confesses to having being a reluctant mother all of her life, rebuking many of the idealized qualities associated with motherhood. Not only is she sexually active at an age when mothers are culturally expected to be celibate, but she also openly admits to having spent most of her years frustrated and disappointed with her children. In one particularly frank confession that occurs during a lifelong learning writing class facilitated by her own daughter, May reads aloud a narrative account of how she would leave the house while her children screamed in their cots, and did not return for several hours. Considering the different ways in which motherhood is rejected in Adore and The Mother, it could be argued, then, that while both films ostensibly appear to embrace the “ageing as decline” narrative by equating empowerment with youthful sexuality, the cross-generational relationships depicted may function more politically as a powerful assertion that women, especially as they advance beyond child-rearing years, should be perceived as more than merely “mothers”. The cross-­ generational relationship can be usefully understood as a romantic arrangement that is not merely socially subversive, but even an act of feminist resistance to the perception that women of a certain age should be defined by their role as asexual, ideal mothers or grandmothers.

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Notes 1. Susan Sontag. ‘The Double Standard of Ageing.’ In V.  Carver and P. Liddiard (eds.), Ageing Population (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987), p. 74. 2. Sarah Falcus. ‘Addressing Age’ in Michèle Roberts’s Reader, I Married Him’ Contemporary Women’s Writing 7:1 (2013), p. 19. 3. Barbara Macdonald and Cynthia Rich. Look Me in the Eye (London: Women’s Press, 1985), p. 39. 4. Alison Winch. Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhoods (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 28. 5. Betty Friedan. The Fountain of Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006). 6. Ibid., p. 64. 7. Ibid., p. 186. 8. Sontag, p. 76. 9. Zoe Brennan. The Older Woman in Recent Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), p. 18. 10. Margaret Morganroth Gullette. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997). 11. Germaine Greer. The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), p. 61. 12. Jeannette King. Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 136. 13. Catherine, B. Silver. ‘Gendered Identities in Old Age: Toward (de)gendering?’ Journal of Aging Studies, 17 (2003), pp. 379–397. 14. Jacquelyn N.  Zita. ‘Heresy in the Female Body: The Rhetorics of Menopause’. In Marilyn Pearsall (ed.), The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 107. 15. Friedan, p. 259. 16. Ibid., p. 258. 17. Donna Peberdy. Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 18. Sontag, p. 77. 19. Kathleen Woodward. ‘Inventing Generational Models: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Literature’. In Kathleen Woodward (ed.), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 154. 20. Carol Vance. ‘Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality’. In Carol Vance (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (London: Pandora Press, 1989), p. 14.

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21. Brennan, p. 76. 22. King, p. 147. 23. Lynne Segal. ‘Forever Young: Medusa’s Curse and the Discourses of Ageing’. Women: A Cultural Review 18 (2007), p. 49. 24. Imelda Whelehan. ‘Not To Be Looked At: Older Women in Recent British Cinema’. In Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams (eds.), British Women’s Cinema (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 181.

Things to Come: Fertility, Futurity and the Family in L’Avenir, Un Chateau en Italie and Post-Coitum Animal Triste Fiona Handyside

France is undergoing a rapidly evolving situation with regard to coupling and marriage culture. Marriage rates are declining; 228,000 marriages were celebrated in 2017, compared to 235,000 in 2016. This is the lowest marriage rate since World War II; 1946 saw a high-point of 516, 882 marriages taking place that year. This falling marriage rate is part of a global trend, with almost everywhere experiencing this phenomenon, including Asia. In the French context, this fall in the number of marriages is against a backdrop of a changing political and legal structure for how people may choose to commit to each other. In October 1999, the French parliament legalised a civil solidarity pact, the so called PACS, largely to offer some kind of legal status to same-sex couples. However, the majority of couples that choose to PACS are opposite-sex, and 192,000 PACS were celebrated in 2016. In 2013, parliament passed legislation that gave same-sex couples

F. Handyside (*) University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_3

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equal marriage and adoption rights, but also retained PACS.  In 2017, there were 7000 same-sex marriages.1 These changes in the legal and social landscape for couples reflect the waning influence of the Catholic Church, the growth of civil rights movements and identity politics, such as feminism and gay and lesbian rights, and resulting shifts in socially sanctioned ways to fall in love and commit to relationships. They signal an unsettling of how couples are expected to, and may expect to, relate to each other, and an understanding of marriage and partnership informed by liberal ideas about sex and gender. As sociologist Eric Fassin explains, awareness of gender as a category nevertheless remains controversial within French political and cultural life. In 2005, the state committee charged with policing the French language published an official recommendation warning against the ‘abusive use of the word “genre [gender]”’, arguing that it was only applicable as a grammatical term, and that in other contexts, it was preferable to use terms derived from ‘sex’ such as ‘sexiste’ and ‘sexuel’ to describe differences between men and women, including in the cultural domain.2 This builds on the idea that the very notion of gender is an American import which threatens to undermine ‘natural’ differences between men and women, and especially the French pleasures of seduction and romance. This virulent strain of Anti-Americanism erupted in the 1990s during the Clarence Thomas hearings and looked at fascinated horror at what was labelled American prudishness. This was particularly crystallised in Mona Ozouf’s 1995 book Les mots des femmes which explicitly pitted a French feminism which delights in difference while still working for equality to a bellicose American feminism which aimed at warring against men. The tenacity of such discourses, and their currency in the French film industry, are illustrated by the open letter published on 9 January 2018 in Le Monde signed by 100 women involved with the French film industry. This letter protests against what it describes as the excesses of the #metoo campaign following the revelations about widespread harassment and misconduct by film producer Harvey Weinstein. While not disputing the seriousness of the allegations against Weinstein, the letter nevertheless criticises a version of (implicitly American) feminism which it sees as nothing more than hatred of men. The letter uses the term ‘puritanisme’ in the second paragraph, and ‘purificatoire’ in the third to recentre the #metoo movement on old Anglo-French disputes, reinstating international feminist hierarchies as it discusses the legitimacy of who gets to speak for which women.

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The legitimacy of the writers is sealed in French and international media by the signature of Catherine Deneuve as the icon of French sexual open-­ mindedness; The Guardian, for example, references her role as a bored housewife and part-time prostitute in Belle de Jour (Buñuel, 1967).3 Deneuve adds a sheen of sexy glamour and respectability to the construction of a national French feminism that preaches equality within a framework of heterosexual difference understood as play and seduction. Eugénie Bastié notes that the youngest signatory is 35, suggesting that the pitching of French (sexual) liberty against American puritanism is an outdated binary for younger French women, and #metoo took on its own social media life as #balancetonporc in the Francophone sphere under the impulsion of the journalist Sandra Muller.4 Nevertheless, the blurb on the back of Bastié’s book calling for a more nuanced approach towards sexual politics describes her as ‘resisting Anglo-saxon puritanism that wants to sanitise love’, showing the appeal and endurance of this shaping of gender relations, sex, and desire in French life. At the same time, Fassin reminds us, the French State does not shrink from instrumentalising feminist discourses and notions of women’s rights when it comes to justifying discrimination against its Muslim population, notably by banning the headscarf in schools. It is in this context that French right-wing politicians such as Nicolas Sarkozy proclaim women’s freedom to decide who they want to marry, and whether they wish to divorce, as a fundamental right granted by the French Republic, so that gender equality becomes mainstream ‘common sense.’5 The 2000s then saw rapid legal shifts in terms of how marriage is defined, who can get married, and how significant marriage may be within both society and for individuals, while at the same time feminism itself is debated, instrumentalised, and mainstreamed. Women are offered more romantic options than before and an opportunity to reframe marriage, but in a society in which heterosexuality, seduction, and romance are not only normative but constructed as desirable, even in some feminist discourses. In this context, the recent efflorescence of romantic comedy makes sense, as it provides a popular and accessible form to work through these ambivalences. It is the contention of this chapter that a small sub-genre, the older woman/younger man cross-generational romance, is particularly useful in articulating the anxiety about how heterosexual women reconcile sexual desire and social acceptability. Given how useful this genre is for exploring the contours of sexual and social relations, it is thus not surprising that we find cross-generational

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older woman/younger man romances across popular and auteur films in French cinema. Besides the three films discussed in this chapter, we could also add Les Beaux Jours/Fine Days Ahead (Vernoux, 2013), which stars Fanny Ardant as a 60-something retired dentist who starts an affair with her much younger computer studies teacher at the local community centre; Adore (Fontaine, 2013), a French directed and produced, English language film in which two mothers fall in love with each other’s sons; Les Egarés/Strayed (Téchiné, 2003), which features Emmanuelle Béart as a widowed school teacher living as a refugee during World War II, who falls in love with a 17-year-old boy who helps her and her children; La Pianiste (Haneke, 2001), in which Isabelle Huppert plays a masochistic piano teacher ardently pursued by her pupil; Brève Traversée (Breillat, 2001), in which a 16-year-old boy loses his virginity to a 40-something woman on a cross-Channel ferry. Most pertinently, there is the mind-bogglingly titled MILF (Laffont, 2018)6; an Axelle Laffont vehicle that shows three 40-something women on holiday on the Riviera enjoying energetic sexual romps and drinking games with three 20-something boys who work at the local kids’ holiday camp. The film divided critics, who saw it as either a message of feminist liberation, or as a collection of vulgar and clichéd ideas about women and sex.7 For all that this was unabashedly a popular sex comedy, indulging in lingering shots of the women playing beach volleyball wearing bikinis, or showing men naked with only a sock covering their penis, nevertheless it touches on some of the flash points that animate the more prestigious festival-destined films this chapter concentrates on, showing their persistence across the different brow-elevation levels for this narrative. First, we have an explicit discourse on age difference and sexual double standards. During a trip to the beach, Cécile (Virginie Ledoyen) asks them to move further along the sand; Elise (Axelle Laffont) insists they stay near the sailing club, saying ‘for thousands of years, no-one has said anything about older men and younger women. But older women and younger men? I’m not hiding.’ Second, the film considers these women primarily as mothers. When Markus (Victor Meutelet) chats up Cécile, she explains that her unease is because she is old enough to be his mother—his retort is that she isn’t actually his mother, so the film acknowledges and denies the incest taboo that hovers near these relations. For Sophie (Marie-Josée Croze), the very phrase ‘MILF’ only highlights her own failure to become a mother (so the phrase actually assumes all women in their forties are mothers, even if they aren’t). The film suggests that the appeal of these

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women for the boys is that they have already had a family, so won’t bother them for commitment, unlike the younger women the film casts as scheming, angry, and neurotic. Nevertheless, motherhood is also the defining issue for these relationships. Paul (Waël Sersoub) comments to his friends the reasons he’s delighted about sex with Elise is that he was expecting ‘old lady pussy, especially as she’s had a kid, but it was wild.’ Later, however, when Elise’s daughter Nina/Mitty Hazanavicius turns up to stay, he curtly reminds Elise she might want to spend time with Nina rather than him, and this signals his desire to cast their liaison as a holiday romance just as Elise tries to interest him in visiting her in Paris. Lastly, the film’s press releases draw attention to how Axelle Laffont, the director and star, had a relationship with a man 16 years her junior, implying an autobiographical basis to the performance which recurs across female-directed vehicles about older women and younger men, as if ‘real-life’ experience is necessary for any credibility to attach to the story.8 In the three films I discuss in detail in this chapter, Post-coitum animal triste (Rouän, 1997), Un Chateau en Italie (Bruni-Tedeschi, 2013) and L’Avenir (Hansen-Løve, 2014), we find these motifs of the sexual double standard, motherhood, and autobiography. My focus is how the films also bring to the surface questions of temporality, situating all three of their female characters in a crisis as their lives fail to match the expected life trajectory of a successful postfeminist woman, combining family, career, and autonomy. These hybridised rom-com-melodramas veer in tone between farce and melancholy, and all three feature a central female protagonist who finds herself experiencing maternal and sexual desires that exceed age-appropriate norms. These films draw on a rich tradition of cinematic treatment of heterosexual older women and their romantic and sexual liaisons with younger lovers, analysed in classic discussions of the romantic comedy/melodrama and their relation to the problem of female desire in patriarchy. The titles of all three draw attention to the question of future—what happens after sex; the imagined future of daydreams; and what is to come—replacing the assumed futurity of ‘successful ageing’ with a more capacious and ambiguous sense of what is possible or desirable for middle-aged women. The films thus use the catalyst of the younger man to (try to) imagine a future for women outside a maternal and wifely role. The question becomes whether this future vision can find a suitable narrative and generic home, as these films struggle to find a suitable vehicle for their stories and flail between genres.

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From Comedy to Melodrama: Questions of Genre in the Cross-Generational Romance In his analysis of Douglas Sirk’s classic women’s film, the melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955)—a film that would become a template for his own Angst Essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul (1974)—Rainer Werner Fassbinder gets swiftly to the heart of the matter when it comes to the chances of an older woman and a younger man forming a lasting sexual and romantic union: Jane Wyman is a rich widow, and Rock Hudson is pruning her trees … Jane and Rock’s encounter becomes a great love. But Rock is 15 years younger than Jane, and Jane is completely integrated into the social life of an American small town […] That’s a pretty shitty starting point for great love. Her, him, and the world around them.9

As Fassbinder’s critique demonstrates, the cross-generational relationship between an older woman and a younger man sets up conflict. This is because in this scenario, the couple are not imagined as independent people able to choose love freely. Rather, the older woman is integrated into a series of responsibilities to her family and friends, taken for granted as the price she pays for recognition as a subject. Rather than a straightforward romance, as would happen between a pairing of the same generation or between an older man and a younger woman, here the cross-­generational pairing sets up a collision course between individual sexual desire and social roles. Even though Jane Wyman is a widow rather than contemplating adultery, her 40-something character is committed to a social role (as mother, as friend) that precludes the chance of ‘great love’ with a younger man. As Fassbinder reminds us, such a conflict takes a physical toll on Wyman’s character, as she ends up with terrible headaches ‘which happens to all of us if we don’t fuck enough.’10 As Laura Mulvey concludes, Sirk’s melodrama shows us conflict ‘not between enemies, but between people tied by blood or love’ and probes the ‘pent-up emotion, disillusion and bitterness well-known to women.’11 Fassbinder’s analysis of All That Heaven Allows shows how the cross generational heterosexual romance where a woman is the older partner sets up a melodramatic, rather than a comedic, template for the narrative which results from this pairing. This melodrama results from the fact that the younger man-older woman dynamic places female sexual desire into a

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collision course with women’s social role as wife, mother, and all-round good citizen. The majority of romantic comedies operate according to the Cinderella plot, in which a woman’s true worth as a kind and gentle person is revealed through a combination of a makeover and an approving male gaze (a dynamic we can identify from 1950s Audrey Hepburn vehicles to postfeminist teen movies such as She’s All That (Iscove, 1999)). In this model, heterosexual romance confirms the suitability of female desire and moulds it into a model of social aspiration. In the cross-generational romantic melodrama, in contrast, desire and duty are at odds. Stanley Cavell’s classic analysis of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood’s women’s films reaches similar conclusions to Fassbinder about the difficulty of sustaining romance for the older woman. In his account of a subgenre of the romantic comedy, the comedy of remarriage, Cavell detects melodramatic undertones that come about from the conflict between women’s ability to know her desire, and the social containment of it. The heroine of the comedy of remarriage is notably older than the Cinderella-­ type ingénue, a middle-aged women who is ‘neither young nor old, experienced yet still hopeful’;12 approaching an age ‘at which the choice of motherhood will be forced upon her, or away from her.’13 Cavell’s insight here that one of the melodramatic conflicts for the woman approaching middle-age and the question of desire pertains to motherhood as much as romance is accentuated in the cross-generational romance films this chapter explores, as I will expand on further. Cavell explains that an essential goal of the romance is the education of the woman. One of the primary functions of the comedy of remarriage is to represent the education of the woman from girlhood to mature sagacity, which involves recognising the violence of men, of the human condition, of accepting the world as it is. If the romantic comedy tout court keeps a girlish view of femininity, the comedy of remarriage asks how the woman is to be educated out of this girlishness. Such a question remains pertinent to more recent manifestations of comedy of remarriage type films, including the cross-generational romance, for postfeminism is a cultural sensibility in which femininity is overwhelmingly associated with girlishness and youth. As Kathleen Rowe Karlyn has demonstrated, postfeminist films frequently display matrophobic instincts, favouring the feisty young girl over the nagging or difficult mother.14 Female subjects are allowed to follow their desires so long as they remain girl-focused and oriented, to the extent that adult females are often ‘girlified’; what

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postfeminist culture finds more difficult to imagine is a successful, desiring adult woman who has left behind the pleasures of girlhood. The critical question for the comedy of remarriage is what it is about the man in the picture that fits him to be chosen by the woman to provide her education into the brutality of the world. For Cavell, ‘this suggests a privileging of the male still within this atmosphere of equality’ and so the male ‘retain[s] a hint of villainy’, preparing the genre ‘for its inner relation to melodrama.’15 Marriage, explains Cavell, is the central social image of human change; raising the possibility of divorce hints at trouble in the social as well as the sexual realm. The comedy of remarriage resolves the problem of women’s adult desire, by offering her a worthy outlet; its negative pendant is the unknown woman melodrama, where the woman abandons hope of her desire being recognised and authenticated. In the films I study in this chapter, we have the cross-generational relationship that Fassbinder diagnoses as a ‘pretty shitting starting point for love’ alongside some of the features of the comedy of remarriage and the melodrama of the unknown woman as they all consider the problem and possibility of adult, educated female desire rubbing up against social conventions. While Cavell and Fassbinder discuss how mid-century Hollywood worked through the issue of the older heterosexual woman’s desire, and how this desire leads romantic comedy to turn to melodrama, this is also a pattern that is particularly useful for us to consider in recent and contemporary French cinema’s treatment of heterosexual romance. Initially, the romantic comedy seems an entirely foreign model from French cinema’s investigation of heterosexual couple culture, with its most famous movement, the New Wave, privileging male subjectivity and male concerns. For Geneviève Sellier, only Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais, 1959) and Cléo de 5 à 7 (Varda, 1962) ‘attempt to position the female character as a focal consciousness with whom the subject might identify.’16 The contrast with the strong older female leads of Hollywood’s screwball comedies and melodramas could not be clearer, and Raphaelle Moine attributes this contrasting filmic architecture to the lack of US remakes of French films into romantic comedies in this period (she counts only 3 out of more than 70 remakes ever). Yet, as Mary Harrod has shown, the romantic comedy has been a flourishing genre since the 1990s in France. Harrod attributes this efflorescence partially to industrial factors, such as the growth in the number of female directors in France; the renaissance of the woman-­ focused romantic comedy in Hollywood and its success in France (Pretty

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Woman, Marshall, 1990, sold four million tickets at the French box office); and the relatively low budgets required for this genre making it attractive to producers. While such industrial factors are important, as Harrod explains, genres also perform a broader cultural role. It may be difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint the exact relationship between any one individual film and socio-cultural shifts; nevertheless, the romantic comedy responds to and informs socially sanctioned ways of falling in love. She suggests that another reason for the romantic comedy’s belated rise within French cinema is as a response to the impact of feminism on French attitudes towards gender difference. Rather as Cavell claims the comedy of remarriage can be understood as the working through of ‘the inner agenda of a culture’, so Harrod senses in the rising popularity of romantic comedy in France an attempt to comes to terms with changing ideas about marriage, as signalled by the falling marriage rates that I discussed in the introduction.17 In this emotional pull between comedy and melodrama in narratives of romance, we see a struggle to find an appropriate tone to tell a still taboo story of cross generational desires. The films I study in this chapter sometimes have rapid tonal shifts from tragedy to farce, for some critics jarringly so: this jarring echoes the conflicted generic and gendered stakes of the cross-generational romance. Heterosexual desire and pleasure remains a site of conflict and contradiction for women rather than being a place of reconciliation, and the ‘happy end’ remains elusive. Lauren Berlant argues that society provides us with persuasive narratives for us to attach our desires to; in their search for a generic home, these films show the failure of society to offer a fulfilling romance narrative for the mid-life woman.

Mid-Life Femininities: Maternity and Menopause These three films were made from 1997–2014 in France and all feature a cross generational romance between a middle-aged woman and a younger man. All three are scripted and directed by women, locating female subjectivity as key to this sympathetic exploration of the mid-life woman and her sexual/romantic encounters outside marriage. French female directors have historically been reluctant to identify as women filmmakers. For example, Diane Kurys, who has made a series of films focusing on the experiences of girls and women, nevertheless rejects the label woman filmmaker for fear that it would limit the appeal of her films. As Carrie Tarr explains, ‘the concept of the auteur, if ostensibly ungendered, remains

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resolutely masculine […] it is difficult to explore female subjectivity without subscribing to traditional patriarchal notions of French femininity.’18 Similarly, when questioned about the lack of female directors in the main competition at the Cannes film festival in a special issue of Cahiers du cinéma dedicated to the question of ‘where are the women?’ [où sont les femmes?], Mia Hansen-Løve objected to Melissa Silverstein’s phrase on her Women and Hollywood blog ‘who will represent us women?’ For Hansen-Løve, glosses Stéphane Delorme in his editorial, such a phrase leads to fears of ghettoization, folklore, and essentialism.19 While interest in, and sympathy toward, the experiences of female middle-age are not confined to female directors (as filmmakers from Douglas Sirk to Todd Haynes and Eric Rohmer testify), the flourishing of the romantic comedy and the space to offer exploration of female mid-life romance does coincide with the growing number of female directors working in France. Although there is no necessary link between films directed by women and films which address women’s concerns, a more gender-balanced industrial context makes such attention more likely. Clearly, however, female directors in France are concerned that their films don’t get pigeon-holed as being purely or essentially about and for women. Such male-oriented genres as the buddy movie and the action film are alive and well in France as box-office mega hits Intouchables (Nakache and Toledano, 2012), with 19 million tickets sold, and Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Boon, 2008), with 20 million tickets sold, amply testify, but don’t suffer from the same commercial and critical prejudice that they are self-indulgent narcissistic exercises from their directors, or can only appeal to a limited audience divided along gender lines. The directors of these films emerge from three distinct generations of French female filmmakers. Brigitte Rouän made her first film in 1990, having been an actress in the 1970s and 1980s, part of a generation of female filmmakers, including Catherine Corsini, Nicole Garcia, and Tonie Marshall, who aimed at a more mainstream market than earlier female filmmakers and often explored older women’s desire and identities. Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi first rose to prominence as an actress in the 1990s, working with filmmakers associated with the jeune cinéma français, such as Noémie Lvovsky and François Ozon. She made her first film in 2007; she and Lvovsky have worked together as co-scriptwriters with Agnès de Sacy on all her features to date. Mia Hansen-Løve, substantially younger than the other two directors (she is not yet 40 and made her first film at the age of 26), is part of a wave of young female directors such as Céline Sciamma

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and Katell Quillivéré. Despite their use of nudity, of which more anon, the films avoid the sex and violence identified with ‘the new French extremism’, keeping their stories firmly within an aesthetic more generally associated with ‘cinéma du milieu’—mid-budget films with artistic ambition suited to the festival circuit. Post-coïtum animal triste was produced by renowned indie producer Humbert Balsan, renowned for championing female filmmakers, and premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. Un Chateau en Italie was the only female-directed film to be in the main competition at the Cannes film festival in 2013; the previous year not a single woman had been represented, provoking protests and calls for boycotts by feminist groups. L’Avenir, Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth film, which marks her as the most prolific of the directors examined here, was produced by Charles Gillibert and nominated for the Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlin film festival, where it received its world premiere. The differences between the films’ industrial contexts speak partially to their generational positions, but their narrative and stylistic similarities demonstrate too the significance of the low to mid-budget female-story focused auteur film for women director’s careers. Perhaps Un Chateau en Italie and L’Avenir’s position within the main competition at Cannes and Berlin respectively, rather than being pushed to a sidebar, speaks to a changing dynamic and new sympathy towards telling these women’s stories in the most culturally prestigious and commercially promising sections of festivals? What links these films across their exploration of the sexual/romantic dynamic between an older (but not elderly) woman and a younger man (but not a teenager) is how the relationship with a younger man allows the woman to cast a critical perspective over cultural norms concerning mid-­ life femininity. These are relationships between adults, in which all parties are capable of fully informed consent, distinguishing them somewhat from some of the other films I mention above where the age gap is greater and the men involved are adolescent. The fact they still enact subversive and transgressive accounts of female desire shows just how narrowly conceived sexual norms are for heterosexual women, despite the liberalising impetus present in French legislation concerning couple culture. These norms above all pertain to the chronological mapping of women’s lives, for, as Diane Negra has shown, postfeminist culture allows for the expression of female desire, as long as it is contained within certain parameters, and one of the strictest of these is what she names the postfeminist life cycle.20 This lifecycle operates to govern women’s lives through the concepts of

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temporal propriety and conformity, and celebrates various life milestones through lavish ritualised ceremonies (birthday parties, bridal showers or hen parties, weddings, and baby showers). These ceremonies are becoming more widespread and mediatised in France, with the ‘enterrement de vie de jeune fille’ (EVJF) or hen party featured in films such as Jour J (Keerchi, 2017) and Budapest (Gens, 2018), and French television offering wedding-spectacle-focused reality shows such as 4 Mariages pour une lune de miel (TF1, 2011–present) and Mariés au premier regard (M6, 2016–present). In the films I consider here, we have women who find themselves out-of-sync with the idealised feminist lifecycle, as their desire erupts in an unruly fashion and in an age-inappropriate way. Such unruliness turns them into figures who operate outside of heteronormative ideals of family life. All three films feature a key moment of dialogue in which the female protagonist expresses the idea that mid-life is a time of decline and loss of sexual desirability. In Post-coïtum animal triste, having experienced her intense sexual relationship with Emilio (Boris Terral) as rejuvenating, the loss of the relationship plunges Diane (Brigitte Roüan) into despair, for, as Joan M. West argues, the loss of her lover is also the loss of her own youthful self.21 Diane stands in front of the mirror and removes her pyjama top. She pulls back the skin from her face, flicks despairingly at her breasts, dismissing them as ‘old-timers’, and then flips the loose skin at the top of her arm and watches it swing. She asks her own reflection ‘am I still fuckable?’ The scene is remarkable for its straightforward presentation of a naked female body, and Roüan acknowledges how challenging it was to perform. Diane goes out drinking with her friend, and through a drunken haze, sums up her feeling that being in her forties excludes her from sexual passion: ‘at 20, when you cry over a lover, it’s because you think you’ll never love again. At 40, it’s because you know you’ll never love again.’ For Louise Rossi-Levi (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) in Un Chateau en Italie, her fear of decline is above all focused on the question of fertility, given that she has not had children. When Nathan (Louis Garrel) invites her back to her house ‘to sleep’, she replies, ‘yes, of course. You’re too young for me’; he replies ‘but you’re not too old’, which draws her laughter. She replies ‘you haven’t seen me in the morning’, and then more seriously ‘I’m looking for love; I want children. We’re not suited’ before he turns and kisses her. Despite this physical demonstration of his desire, the protests Louise made present obstacles throughout the film to the functioning of their relationship. Finally, in L’Avenir, Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) tells Fabien

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(Roman Kalinka), her former student, about her divorce from her husband. As they stroll through Parc des Buttes-Chaumont together, she says, ‘after 40, women are only fit for the dustbin.’ He replies, ‘how can you say that? Especially you!’ She responds, ‘do you know many women of my age who leave their husbands?’; when he replies, ‘yes, loads’, she dismisses the claims. ‘Only in the movies; I find you very naive.’ So important to the film’s interest in Nathalie is the question of her age and related sexual desirability that her line about women only being fit for the dustbin is included in the two-minute trailer for the film. The films thus have their own female characters articulate a prevalent cultural discourse that associates mid-life with loss. This time of life is associated with a decline in fertility and the arrival of the menopause, taken as the main biological marker for women of mid-life. Referred to elliptically as ‘the change’, menopause signals a shift in women’s identities. As Joel Gwynne and Imelda Whelehan explain if menarche and the capacity to reproduce in many ways define femininity and sexuality, what do women become after this phase of their lives […]? Postmenopause, a woman is practically a social pariah: with the loss of reproductive function her sexual attraction is also in question.22

More positively, however, ‘the change’ can also propel women to a time when her identity can be formed outside of family-focused narratives. These films explore the conflicts occasioned for women at a time of their lives where sexual desire, sexual attraction, and maternity, are placed into conflict rather than being brought together. Furthermore, mid-life is time associated with other changes to family structures. Julie Dare’s sociological work on mid-life as experienced by Australian women identifies four key mid-life changes (what she refers to as ‘stressors’). These four stressors are the menopause, the ‘empty nest’ syndrome, divorce, and the care of ageing or dying parents. She states that the first two aspects are most commonly associated with the cultural master narrative of female mid-life. However, through the use of qualitative interviews with mid-life women, Dare claims that the latter two, divorce and care of ageing parents, are the real issues affecting women’s lives.23 These films balance the sexual passion and intellectual stimulation associated with the younger lover with other shifts in their heroines’ lives that reflect more closely the concerns Dare has identified, most especially in L’Avenir, where Nathalie’s children leave home, her mother dies, and her husband leaves her for another woman.

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While the film acknowledges the loss and pain this involves, it also offers a sense of the exhilarating freedom outside of received social roles this offers Nathalie. As she exclaims to Fabien, somewhere between delight and shock, ‘when I think about it, my kids are grown, my husband’s left, my mum is dead, I’ve found my freedom. Total freedom. I’ve never experienced it. It’s extraordinary.’ Issues of maternity shape the narratives of all three films, showing how even in this moment of liberty realised through an association with a younger man, mid-life women cannot escape the imperatives of this role. Diane already has children. It is when Emilio’s grandfather suggests to him he might like a family Emilio begins to reconsider his relationship with Diane. Furthermore, it’s his desire to return to the Third World and continue his work as a hydraulic engineer that seals his decision to leave Diane; this work is linked to children’s demands on Emilio through the Unicef posters featuring smiling children that decorate his workplace. In her frustration at his loss of interest in her and devotion to these children, Diane visits him at work, accosts him, and headbutts him, sending him flying to the floor. This is a satisfying retort to his sudden coldness and typical of the slightly zany and excessive energy that characterises her performance and keeps the film’s useful tonal slippage. Louise embodies a different figure in the postfeminist lifecycle; the woman who has left it ‘too late’ to conceive and suffers baby hunger. Her desperate desire to have a child has a manic, desperate quality, which echoes the violence and breaking of rigid class norms that Diane’s headbutt also suggests. Louise undergoes in vitro fertilisation (IVF), rubs holy water on her belly, and visits a miraculous, successful pregnancy-guaranteeing chair in Naples, to no avail. Rather as with Diane’s encounter with Emilio, this moment is charged with mad intensity. The nuns protest that as an unmarried woman, Louise is not entitled to sit on the chair; the camera chases rapidly after Louise as she dashes through narrow corridors, and then clings desperately to the chair as a nun tries to peel her off it. Her encounter with Nathan’s own mother is awkward. Initially, Nathan’s mother tells her not to call her ‘Madame’, as they are too close in age; she then ends up telling an anecdote about how she had an orgasm during childbirth. Louise’s encounters with the possibility of motherhood are thus coloured by embarrassment, difficulty, and frenzy, as her attempts to become a mother are at odds with her age and relationship status. Un Chateau en Italie thus shows how motherhood, while promoted as an idealised state for women, is nevertheless marked as taboo within the cross-generational relationship

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with a younger man, possibly because the relation hints at something incestuous that doesn’t impact in the same way when younger women are involved with older men as this is closer to a cultural norm. L’Avenir comes the closest to suggesting something akin to a mother-son relation between its two protagonists, and perhaps this is also why it shies away from a sexual relation between them, as they tiptoe around whether their attraction is sexual or scholarly. Fabien is introduced to us when he interrupts a family lunch. ‘Who is it?’ asks her husband. ‘Oh, her pet’ replies her daughter; ‘the son she would have liked to have had’ explains her son. However, L’Avenir is able to resolve the issue of mid-life female desire and motherhood through making its female protagonist a grandmother. This is clearly a more conciliatory ending, but we may suspect hints of rebellion in Nathalie’s stubborn insistence her grandchild looks nothing like her exhusband, rejecting his role in the creation of this new family and extended kinship circle.

Performance, Exhibitionism and Autofiction These films offer explicit, often graphic representations of the female body, particularly when it is the director herself placing herself in front of the camera, which is the case with Post-coïtum animal triste and Un Chateau en Italie. Rouän and Bruni-Tedeschi offer us explicit images of their naked bodies, placing specifically female body parts on screen. Rouän, performing as Diane Clovier, stands naked in front of a mirror and tugs dismissively at her right breast, bemoaning its lack of youthful bounce; as Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet explain, this extraordinary performance by Rouän led to horrified accusations of exhibitionism.24 Bruni-Tedeschi, performing as Louise Rossi-Levi, shows us her legs being gently opened by a gloved hand, and then a close-up on her vulva as she is injected with ‘two high quality’ embryos during IVF treatment. The explicit treatment of the IVF process is part of the film’s more general lack of embarrassment when it comes to Louise’s desire for a child which lurches between registers of documentary authenticity (the aforementioned vulva shot), high farce (being chased by angry nuns away from a miraculous fertility chair), and naturalistic empathy (when Louise loses the baby and curls up in the foetal position in the street, after tugging at a cardigan to try and hide the blood stains on her skirt). Such a brazen display of naked female body parts, more usually associated with pornography, adds to a more general critical uneasiness about how crude these films are in their exploration of female

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desire. In the case of Post coïtum, animal triste, a cat’s caterwauling can be heard over the credit sequence and the film opens with an image of a black cat in heat writhing with lust before cutting to Diane writhing against a pillow as she masturbates, crying with pleasure. In an interview included on the French DVD, Rouän explains: A cat in heat is the most indecent animal there is, she opens everything, she shows everything, she sticks out her tongue, she does very pretty things, slightly less pretty things, it’s very charming because it’s unwitting […] so we filmed this cat, with a lot of difficulty […] waiting for her to perform. After, during editing, the editor, a man, was shocked. He said if a boy had made this film, who showed a cat in heat and then straight afterwards a woman twisting about in bed because she needs her lover, we would think it was awful misogyny. Now, I don’t think it’s misogyny, I think we’re all animals.

By concentrating on sex as an animalistic, physical yearning rather than an emotional or spiritual connection, the film emphasises Diane’s physical lust for Emilio, who is introduced through a shot that shows his body from thigh to chest. Dark, sensuous, physically confident Emilio brings Diane a drink of water, setting him up as a perfect lover for the postfeminist age, with his classic masculine good looks and sensitive sensibility. This places him as the new masculine ideal as ‘a hallmark of postfeminism is its dualistic approach to configuring ideal masculinities that conflate [otherwise] competing modes of masculinity.’25 Emilio combines a built, muscular body that is objectified by Diane’s gaze, with an emotional literacy that far exceeds that of her husband. The film finally suggests that such postfeminist masculinity belongs to a younger generation than is age-­ appropriate for Diane, and it is precisely this problem that finishes the relationship and shatters her happiness. She only finds the necessary impetus to overcome her despair when the novelist to whom she has been confiding her despair turns her emotions into a hit novel. As West explains, this turns Diane into the ‘fecundating father’, turning ageing and sexist notions of creativity on their head.26 While West thus interprets the film as curing mid-life trauma, the uneasiness of the film’s mix of genres, from vaudeville to tragedy, and the focus on how autobiographical it may be in the press, undermine such a positive reading, for it shows how awkward a fit the older woman/younger man relation is for a conventional generic

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containment. As Berlant explains, such failure can be described as ‘genre-­ flailing’, and it speaks particular to the issues women have in trying to find happiness in a culture obsessed with narrow rules for intimacy and romance. In a crisis we engage in genre flailing so that we don’t fall through the cracks of knowledge and noise into suicide or psychosis. In a crisis we improvise like crazy, where “like crazy” is a little too non-metaphorical.27

Perhaps it’s the genre flailing, and its connections to those feminine madnesses of narcissism and hysteria, that help explain the especially harsh critical reception Un Chateau en Italie received from (male) critics in France and the UK. Jean-Philippe Tissé in Cahiers du cinéma awarded the film one star (out of five) and dismissed it as ‘sickening’; Julien Barcilon in Télé 7 Jours was ‘embarrassed by the immodest scenes’; Vincent Ostria in L’Humanité remarked ‘it’s difficult to feel sorry for these spoiled creatures’; Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian said it was the worst film at Cannes, describing it as ‘a smug, twee confection.’28 Bruni-Tedeschi’s decision to base elements of the film on well-known events from her own life, and to cast family members—so that her mother, Marisa Borini, plays her mother in the film, and her former lover, Louis Garrel, plays her lover—means any creative effort or energy is dismissed. Bruni-Tedeschi herself dismissed the description of her film as ‘auto-fiction’, arguing that it was a creative, collaborative piece of work between her and her cast and crew. Bruni-Tedeschi draws attention to the still gendered dynamics, where a female director’s films are interpreted through a voyeuristic, celebrity-oriented lens, and she’s simply asked what’s fictional and what’s real, whereas Fellini, Allen, or Truffaut never have their works, also based on their own creative and personal experiences, dissected in the same way.29 What makes Bruni-Tedeschi a particular target for this kind of reading is her engagement with a world of privilege, in which servants hover at the edges and the family resists the local mayor’s attempts to open up the chateau. It is striking, again, how privilege functions to make a woman’s experiences somehow less human and authentic, and her art is felt more able to sustain vicious attack, a dynamic we see played out in criticism of Sofia Coppola’s films too. L’Avenir clearly has more distance between its subject matter and its director, given that Mia Hansen-Løve did not act on screen, and is

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considerably younger than Isabelle Huppert. Nevertheless, interviews and pre-­release publicity discussed the fact the story was based on HansenLøve’s mother, a philosophy teacher, and described the film as part of a ‘family portrait’ (2014’s Eden being inspired by her brother). HansenLøve’s comment that she renamed her mother’s cat, to preserve its privacy (at the request of her mother) neatly parodies these concerns with the lines between autobiography and fiction, narcissism and creativity, self-­ absorption and self-reflexivity.30 These films challenge chrononormative framings of women’s lives, and push towards a more uncertain and capacious sense of what women’s lives might become, and thus fall between genre cracks. These films necessarily become about the (im)possibilities of female desire, and the desperate extemporising that characterises their slippage between melodrama, autobiography, tragedy, comedy, and naturalism demonstrate the difficulty of finding a generic or narrative home for the older woman/younger man relationship.

Notes 1. These statistics are all taken from the voluminous INSEE (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques) website—https://www.insee. fr/en/recherche?q=marriage&debut=0. 2. Eric Fassin, ‘A Double-Edged Sword: Sexual Democracy, Gender Norms, and Racialized Rhetoric’, in Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed, eds., The Question of Gender: Joan W Scott’s Critical Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 143–160 (p. 150). 3. Anon, ‘Catherine Deneuve says men should be “free to hit on” women, The Guardian 9 January 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2018/jan/09/catherine-deneuve-men-should-be-free-hit-onwomen-harvey-weinstein-scandal. 4. Eugénie Bastié, Le Porc-Emissaire: Terreur ou contre-révolution (Paris: Cerf, 2018), p. 53. 5. Eric Fassin, ‘A Double-Edged Sword’, p. 157. 6. The film itself argues that ‘MILF’ is a compliment. During a trip to the local ice-cream parlour, Cécile comments that the other patrons think that they are cougars. Julien smilingly replies, ‘No, you’re not cougars. You’re MILFs’ and Paul further explains ‘MILF is a compliment. A cougar hunts. A MILF doesn’t go looking for it.’ 7. Robin Cannone, ‘MILF, comédie feministe ou film sexiste de cougars?’, Le Figaro, 2 May 2018. http://www.lefigaro.fr/cinema/2018/05/0 2/03002-20180502ARTFIG00221%2D%2Dmilf-comedie-feministe-oufilm-sexiste-de-cougars.php.

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8. Anon, ‘Axelle Laffont, MILF, a “vécu 3 ans et demi avec quelqu’un de 16 ans de moins”’, PurePeople, 2 May 2018. www.purepeople.com/article/ axelle-laffont-milf-a-vecu-3-ans-et-demi-avec-quelqu-un-de-16-ans-demoins_a284374/1. 9. R.W.  Fassbinder, ‘Six Films by Douglas Sirk’, translated by Thomas Elsaesser, in Laura Mulvey and Jon Holliday, eds., Douglas Sirk (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1972), p. 107. 10. R.W. Fassbinder, ‘Six Films by Douglas Sirk’, p. 107. 11. Laura Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and melodrama’, Movie 25, Winter 1977–1978, p. 55. 12. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 18. 13. Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 4. 14. Katherine Rowe Karlyn, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011). 15. Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears, p. 5. 16. Geneviève Sellier, ‘Gender, Modernism, and Mass Culture in the New Wave’, in Alex Hughes and James S.  Williams, eds., Gender and French Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2001), p. 136. 17. Mary Harrod, From France with Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015). 18. Carrie Tarr, Diane Kurys (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 3. 19. Stéphane Delorme, ‘Réalisatrices’, Cahiers du cinéma 68 1 September 2012. 20. Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants: Fantasizing the Postfeminist Reclamation of Self (London: Routledge, 2009), esp. pp. 47–85. 21. Joan M. West, ‘Cures for Mid-life trauma? Post-coïtum animal triste and Vénus beauté (institut)’, L’Esprit créateur 42:3 (Fall 2002), pp. 17–27. 22. Joel Gwynne and Imelda Whelehan, ‘Introduction: Popular Culture’s Silver Tsunami’, in Gwynne and Whelehan, eds., Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones, p. 13. 23. Julie S.  Dare, ‘Transitions in Midlife Women’s Lives: Contemporary Experiences’, Health Care Women Int., Vol. 32, 2011, pp. 111–131. 24. Carrie Tarrie with Brigitte Rollet, Cinema and the Second Sex: Women’s Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 121. 25. Hannah Hamad, Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), p. 40. 26. Joan M. West, ‘Curing mid-life trauma.’ 27. Lauren Berlant, ‘Big Man.’ Social Text Online, 19 January 2017. https:// socialtextjournal.org/big-man/.

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28. For a summary of French criticism, see the allocine website. http://www. allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=203925.html. See also Peter Bradshaw, ‘Cannes 2013: A Castle in Italy—first look review’, The Guardian 21 May 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/ may/21/cannes-2013-castle-in-italy-review. 29. Caroline Broué, ‘La Grande Table’, France Culture 29 October 2013. https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-grande-table-1ere-partie/ valeria-bruni-tedeschi. 30. Xan Brooks, ‘Interview—oh no please don’t touch the cat!’, The Guardian 30 August 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/30/ mia-hansen-love-things-to-come-autumn-arts-preview-2016.

Heterosexual Romantic Cross Generational Relationships

Age Disproportion in the Post-Epitaph Chick Flick: Reading The Proposal Diane Negra

In a spot running before cinema features in summer 2019 entitled “Surprise” an attractive young woman named Sally is glimpsed on a jetbridge earnestly trying to flag down an airplane as it taxis for departure. A moment later having boarded the plane she declares her love to Peter, one of its passengers, before an appreciative audience of his fellow passengers and the plane’s crew. As they embrace after she tells him “I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you,” the cabin breaks into applause while we glimpse a chairback screen depicting two affectionate giraffes. The couple run happily to a parking lot and are next seen driving through a beautiful wooded landscape toward a presumptive happy ending until Peter begins to question Sally about how she got through security and made her way onto the runway. As she fumbles to reply the pleasant piano chords backing up the scene start to sour and Peter pulls the car over having noticed Sally’s transformation into a ravening zombie with decomposing skin and a bloody gash of a mouth. He flees in terror seeking a hiding place in the woods and the spot ends with Sally looming over him and

D. Negra (*) University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_4

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Peter’s presumed imminent demise. On screen wording then appears reading “From Romcom to Horror” promoting AT & T’s unlimited plans.1 The spot is saturated with more rom com tropes than I have space to mention here and its staging and dialogue invoke numerous prior films including When Harry Met Sally (1989), Only You (1994), French Kiss (1995) and 27 Dresses (2008) among others. (I should point out here that the film which will be my chief concern in this chapter, The Proposal, had an alternate ending that staged a last-minute airport reunion for its focal couple.) The spot’s comedic operations rest on the recognizability of these tropes but more critically on its belief that the social optimism that typically undergirds the reunited runaway couple framed in a romantic tableau no longer sustains. In fact, through its conversion of a love story to zombie horror, the piece recognizes that the chick flick currently operates as an “undead” media genre; its moribund status is paradoxically matched with the continued (if reduced) production of cinematic romances. I begin then, by situating myself at the time of writing in 2019 with the chick flick positioned as an exhausted, imploded “undead” category, subject to a variety of innovations that seek to ideologically refurbish it but have mostly rendered it ineffective and sometimes unintelligible. (Indeed, most post-epitaph chick flicks unwittingly highlight the bad faith under which they transact with audiences as I shall discuss below). With this context in place I now want to turn back a decade to a film that enables us to access a key phase of transition in the generic vigor, commercial security, and cultural status of the contemporary Hollywood romance. An unusual commercial success released in a period in which death notices for the Hollywood “chick flick” were starting to be posted with regularity, The Proposal (2009) incorporates an intriguing mix of stock elements of the postfeminist cinematic romance and innovative narrative components.2 One of the most conspicuous of these is the film’s pairing of an “older” professional woman (Margaret Tate, played by the 45-year-old Sandra Bullock) and her (somewhat) younger assistant (Andrew Paxton, 33-year-old Ryan Reynolds). Margaret, a Canadian book editor working in New York, faces the threat of deportation and prevails upon Andrew to pretend that they are engaged, a ruse they keep up with both comedic and dramatic difficulty on a visit to his family in Sitka, Alaska.3 As the film opens, the age gap between the couple is figured as a gap in professional authority and financial capital. Notably it is presented as analogous to other unorthodox or illicit “office romances”; upon Margaret’s

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announcement of her engagement to Andrew, Edwin, a senior executive at the Ruick & Hart publishing house, which employs the couple queries “Isn’t he your secretary?” and Margaret points out Edwin’s own involvement with employee “Laquisha,” who we take to be African-­American. In this way, The Proposal both underscores and minimizes the transgressive frisson of the age discrepant romance (this is also the film’s first veiled reference to the destabilizing effects it associates with trafficking beyond whiteness) (Fig. 1). The Proposal’s pressing business would seem to be staging a romantic couplehood that entails the checking of Margaret’s authority; early in the film Bob, an editor at the publishing house scornfully greets Margaret and Andrew as “our fearless leader and her liege.” At the conclusion in the same office space Andrew shouts at Margaret to “stop talking” so that he can express his feelings and persuade her that they should be together. The couple kiss against a backdrop of cheering office workers, one of whom calls out “Yeah, show her who’s boss, Andrew,” to close the film. While Andrew gains rhetorical and social authority as the film proceeds references to Margaret’s age diminish and the egalitarianism that the film attributes to its focal couple entails repairing the initial knowledge and power discrepancy between them. Maneuvers of this kind do little to disguise the fact that acquiring the social passport of a partner, long the animating concern of the chick flick, is also the critical imperative here.

Fig. 1  Margaret Tate’s driven career woman, a postfeminist popular culture cliche, is set up for a familiar ideological rehabilitation as The Proposal opens

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I suggest that The Proposal’s age-disproportionate romance is largely a ruse, an effort to particularize a star-driven romance narrative at a time when chick flicks had begun to fall into commercial disrepute. Transparently designating its beautiful female star “mature” while relying heavily on her youthful appearance, The Proposal generated a contradiction that audiences were expected to see through. Letting go of the pretence of Margaret being “old,” the film then fills this gap with an emphasis on Andrew’s grandmother, “Gammy” Annie’s (Betty White) octogenarian antics. In a similar fashion, as I shall examine, The Proposal effects a substitution of an “angry” man of color (the insubordinate Bob) for a sanguine one (Sitka’s genial Ramone) in a way that reveals its commitment to upholding whiteness. An apposite romance for the post-global financial crash era, The Proposal symbolically resolves two pressing social concerns in its formation of a protagonist couple: the first of these is the increasingly evident lack of upward mobility in a tight economy and the second is the perceived rising professional power of women (in certain spheres). Thus, bearing in mind the social and economic circumstances that condition the emergence of popular narratives we should note how The Proposal’s representational strategies betray its understanding that as Richard Reeves puts it “the American class system is hardening, especially at the top.”4 The film is clearly part of a cluster of recessionary romances that appeared after the global financial crash in which certitudes about gender and class are subject to revision and the manifold challenges to the couple as an exemplary social unit require careful management. Margaret’s maturity signifies only to the extent that it serves the film’s latent concerns about job security and professional advancement in a contracting economy. The recessionary period’s focus on the economic vulnerability of millennials is channelled through Andrew, whose physical appearance reads as younger than the actor playing him and whose job status seems closer to that of a recent graduate than a 33-year-old. The character’s placement as a talented and devoted employee with seemingly no prospect of advancement (through regular channels) raises questions about capitalist meritocracy that were particularly pressing in the years following the global financial crash and which might be seen to have imperilled many of the chick flick’s standard operating protocols. Before turning to these issues in more depth, I begin here by positioning the film in relation to its genre landscape.

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The Proposal and Its Chick Flick Predecessors, Contemporaries, and Successors The Proposal stages intimacy scenarios indebted to classical texts such as It Happened One Night (1934) and The 39 Steps (1935) in which the traveling couple/the couple in nature come to rely on one another. Like numerous other contemporary romances, the film invokes nature as a facilitator to the authenticity of romance—at the end of the film, Andrew refers to the time the couple has spent in Alaska (in which they are set to be married in a barn) saying “we had our little adventure out in the woods.” Margaret’s experience of nature is initially virtual as we see her in a high-rise New York City apartment running on a treadmill whose screen features a woodland scene. Later she will dance in the woods with Gammy in a Native American ritual scene that mingles absurdity with authenticity. The film adheres to a conventional “chick flick” belief in truthful nature/the truthful body in which a kiss reveals meaningful intimacy staging a critical scene early on in which Andrew’s family and friends urge the couple to kiss and they are mutually surprised by the electricity between them. The Proposal is noteworthy for the way it situates Margaret in a middle ground between the young aspirational heroine and the midlife female executive so often placed in chick flicks as a warning of what the younger woman should not become. The bad female boss as cautionary figure appeared with tedious regularity in the postfeminist chick flick; Working Girl (1989) might be seen to open the door to a succession of these, the most florid of which perhaps appears in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). The striving female graduate centered a large number of such films including a cluster in the early millennium that showcased employee abuse endured by the female precariat (alongside Devil films like The Nanny Diaries [2007]). Given the key plot point in which Margaret secures Andrew’s agreement to a sham engagement to forestall her deportation, The Proposal is also somewhat reminiscent of Green Card (1990) in its depiction of an artificial romance designed to secure US citizenship for one member of the couple that becomes authentic as the pair get to know each other. A key scene in which Margaret’s confession of honesty and speech about the value of family interrupts her wedding ceremony is reminiscent of Bullock’s own While You Were Sleeping (1995) where she calls off her wedding to the “wrong brother” in the family which she has come to know in the role of “fake fiancée.” In both instances, we are given to understand that the

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decency of the family into which the orphaned Bullock protagonist is to be married makes it morally wrong to deceive them. Released in the same year as Nancy Meyer’s It’s Complicated, which explores a younger man/older woman pairing but ultimately reverts to a more conservative formulation, The Proposal generates an age disproportionate romance that sustains the film through to its conclusion in which Margaret receives a marriage proposal from Andrew. Both films were produced in a market highly uncertain about the commercial prospects of the “chick flick,” and which had seen a gradual but distinct diminishment in their production over the previous decade. After having been a steady commercial returner for about fifteen years the cinematic romance started to run out of steam around the millennium. Arguably, this freed the genre to embark on some forms of moderate experimentation around age and affect. In 2009 melancholic romances like 500  Days of Summer and Adventureland appeared alongside films that sought unsuccessfully to up the ante on pre-existing themes of female competitiveness and competition in the category (such as Bride Wars) or to centralize the commitment-­ phobic male misogynist (in films like The Ugly Truth) who had entered the genre through films like Wedding Crashers (2005) and Failure to Launch (2006) and whose commercial value was ratified that year in the breakout success of the first film in The Hangover franchise. Other signs of staleness in the genre that year included the release of pallid relocation romance Did You Hear About the Morgans?, time-traveling narratives 17 Again and The Time Traveler’s Wife and the My Big Fat Greek Wedding sequel My Life in Ruins (following eight years on from its predecessor). Long-time Hollywood producer Lynda Obst seems to have categorized 2009 (roughly defined) as a renaissance for the chick flick. Writing in April 2010 and without specifying the year she was referring to she asserted (hyperbolically) that “this year” “the chick flick returned to the marketplace with thunderous approval from all female quadrants.”5 She bases this claim on the commercial returns of films about equally apportioned from 2009 and 2010. Obst, of course, is not an impartial commentator having made her name largely as a producer of chick flick fare including Sleepless in Seattle (1993), One Fine Day (1996), Hope Floats (1998), Someone Like You (2001) and How to Lose a Guy in 10  Days (2003). Her assessment seems overly optimistic and yet in some ways it may be the case that 2009 reads as a sort of last hurrah for the chick flick in a certain kind of recognizable form.6

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One manifestation of this can be seen in the way that, despite its anxieties about meritocratic reward, The Proposal retains a degree of optimism that has proved elusive in most of the chick flicks that follow it. The film constitutes one of the last examples of a rom com universe where characters self-correct and become better people to qualify for the reward of couplehood as opposed to the more recent trend in which protagonists learn almost nothing.7 The film resolutely connects the couple to the social, a longstanding tactic that is increasingly abandoned in US chick flicks and is in fact dispensed with altogether in Winona Ryder/Keanu Reeves’ emphatically post-epitaph film Destination Wedding (2018). In the low-profile release of August 2018, the protagonist pair are remarkable socially isolated; throughout the film they speak only to each other.8 (When Ryder’s Lindsay briefly greets the bride and groom at the wedding they are attending the encounter is filmed at a distance and with no audible dialogue.) The film’s romance rests on a foundation of bleak misanthropy that is signaled in the hyper-isolation of its central couple and embedded within a trajectory of ideological disenchantment that has marked the post-millennial chick flick overall though seldom so conspicuously (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2  Destination Wedding (2018) detaches its protagonist couple from the social realm

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Following the oversaturation of behemoth franchises Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray (2015, 2017, 2018) it’s not clear that the chick flick still exists.9 One of the signs of the genre’s quiescence is that “classic” chick flicks are being given limited theatrical re-releases. When Harry Met Sally and Dirty Dancing (1987) were among the films being released in 2019 by Regal Cinemas in the US in this way. Another notable recycling mode entails re-focalizing successful and well-remembered films around a black protagonist—What Men Want (2019) spins What Women Want (2000) in this manner conferring telepathy upon Taraji P. Henson rather than Mel Gibson. In another such altered remake, Little (2019), 13 Going on 30 (2004) is reversed so that a successful female black executive is hexed back to childhood, an inverted version of the original film’s plot. A notable subset of recent romances features protagonists or protagonist couples who are physically or mentally ill (Silver Linings Playbook [2012], The Fault in our Stars [2014], The Big Sick [2017], Five Feet Apart [2019], Then Came You [2019]). Indicative of a broad shift to a disability culture, these films often wield the threat of terminal illness as a ticking clock or as leverage for a protagonist or protagonist pair to savor life for as long as it may be lived. The Valentine’s Day 2019 season was notable for the nearly simultaneous release of two female brain injury comedies (Isn’t It Romantic and What Men Want), which rely on the device of cognitive impairment/ alteration to stage toothless critiques of romantic comedy conventions. They followed closely upon the heels of another similarly plotted film, Amy Schumer’s I Feel Pretty in 2018 in which a fall off a bike at Soul Cycle leads Schumer’s Renee Bennett to see herself as conventionally beautiful. Sentimentalized self-acceptance acts as a veneer for the requirement operating in these films that non-normative female subjects be held blameworthy and demonstrate commitment to modifying their perspective. Of these films Christopher Orr has amusingly written that: Yes, it appears we now have an official subgenre of pseudo-feminist movies in which a woman is initially presented as completely unattractive; is concussed into a fantasy in which she becomes impossibly desirable; and from the experience gleans important, affirmative lessons about believing in herself.10

The conspicuous emergence of the body-conscious revisionist chick flick that critiques the form’s operating conventions (Isn’t It Romantic, I Feel

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Pretty) certainly feels disingenuous, symptomatic of what Amanda Hess has called “beauty-standard denialism.”11 It emerges from a cultural moment wherein “the injury of narrow, idealized feminine body image is circulated but then countered with the apparent capacity of all women to ‘love their bodies’ and be self-confident.”12 And the positioning of Amy Schumer and Rebel Wilson as plus-sized leads and body acceptance icons in these sorts of films should perhaps be taken advisedly; Schumer reports herself to wear a size 6–8 while 68% of American women wear a dress size of 14 or higher. But it is evident that these films coalesce around a prevalent idea in current postfeminist culture, one which has been aptly summarized by Jia Tolentino as follows: The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-­ escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.13

A simultaneous development and one related to the age segmentation of the genre has been the emergence of the “older woman” romance as exemplified by films as early as Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and as recent as Book Club (2018). To gloss all these developments in a general way, we may say that Hollywood’s efforts to craft strategies of differentiation around the chick flick in the first decade of the twenty-first century often failed but also sometimes generated spectacular success as with the films of the Twilight franchise (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012). Certainly, the occasional raunch-com hit has emerged (Trainwreck [2015], Bridesmaids [2011]), often with the authorial involvement of Judd Apatow, but the commercial and narrative consistency that defined the genre for well over a decade is gone. It’s also apparent that the cinematic romance is increasingly directed to “youth” markets and “senior” markets with not much in between.

Anxieties of Age in The Proposal One of the signs of Twilight’s conventionality is its pairing of a (much) older man and a young woman. Romances of this kind have been rare enough throughout Hollywood history. In contemporary films they have tended to be featured in marginal and low-budget offerings such as Prime,

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(2005) I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) and Birth (2004). In other age discrepant romances, such as Moonstruck (1987) a makeover is required to de-age the female protagonist. White Palace (1990) manages class differences through the age discrepancy plot in stark contrast to The Proposal, which works hard to equalize the protagonist couple’s initially unequal class positioning and does so by revealing it to be a mirage. While Margaret scornfully tells Andrew early in the film, “I live on Central Park West and you probably live in some squalid little studio apartment with stacks of yellowed Penguin Classics,” it is shortly revealed that Andrew is the scion of a wealthy family who reside in a town where seemingly most of the businesses are run under their name.14 Celebrating Andrew’s decision to take the difficult path of moving to New York to try to make a place for himself in the publishing industry, The Proposal re-formulates the likely reasons why a young, ambitious person might have to leave their hometown in search of work in the post-recession economy; Andrew’s choice is purely elective and cushioned by his family’s wealth. Moreover, it is presented as a sign of his independence and integrity that he pursues a career in publishing rather than taking over his father’s business. This dimension of the narrative illustrates how The Proposal builds verisimilitude while minimizing ideological threats to normative class and wealth hierarchies. Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell write that “Many mainstream representations of aging femininity, with the honourable exception of the television soap opera, posit the older woman as a transgressive figure who operates outside or beyond the familial.”15 In The Proposal as I have indicated, the depiction of Margaret as an older woman is patently insincere but she still incarnates a transgressive figure given her status as a powerful female professional. Nevertheless, it should be clear that The Proposal does not constitute a meaningful challenge to durable cinematic conventions anathematizing single professional women. With comedic intent the film invokes Margaret’s age obliquely through a set of references to her as a witch. Andrew refers at one point to her “snacking on children while they dream.” When he seeks to alert his coworkers that Margaret will be circulating through the office he sends an email: “The witch is on her broomstick.” Marriage rescues Margaret from the fate of the spinster; the “poisonous bitch” she is referred to early on by her competitive colleague Bob is seen to be transformed through marriage and family membership. It is evident from the film’s set-up that Margaret’s power needs to be

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checked and that this entails a relocation to a remote site where her authority holds no sway. Andrew’s deep familial and communal ties in Sitka contrast markedly with Margaret’s isolation and caricatural “workaholic” status. Like innumerable postfeminist protagonists before her, she is an orphan, having lost her parents in childhood. Margaret is foiled by the older women of Andrew’s family particularly his grandmother Annie who fakes a heart attack near the end of the film to draw the couple together. The resolution for the “problem of aging” with which the film associates Margaret is in part tied to her positioning within an intergenerational female line of succession in the Paxton family. This line includes both Andrew’s mother Grace and Annie, but it also rhetorically invokes earlier female familial histories and potentially a child Margaret might have with Andrew. Grace alludes to the grandchildren she may get upon her son’s marriage while Annie invokes the weight of family tradition and history when she is fitting Margaret into a wedding gown she once wore herself and presents her with a brooch that belonged to her great grandmother who she tells Margaret was an indigenous Tlingit and “a lot like you.”16 Andrew’s parents and grandparents coerce Margaret and Andrew to get married right away with Annie invoking her elderly status and suggesting they need to marry before she dies. Broadly speaking, The Proposal instrumentalizes its concerns about aging femininity in support of the family—Gammy adds idiosyncrasy to a staid wealthy family and legitimizes it through her ancestral connections to Native ethnicity. The Proposal trades heavily on Betty White’s comic persona which Kirsten Anderson Wagner has characterized as that of “a lovable old lady who is at heart a foul-mouthed and man-hungry diva,”17 softening it somewhat in line with the film’s conservative ideological commitments but relying on it to generate moments of unruly transgression. By the time of the film’s release, the combination of wholesome and ribald comedic elements was well-rehearsed in the White persona, which relied on older women’s customary freedom to partake in sexual humor in a non-­ threatening way. This comes to the fore in Annie’s enjoyment of Ramone’s exotic dance routine for instance but overall The Proposal is invested in White’s positioning as “America’s beloved grandmother,” and her use value in a transferral process from a problematically aging midlife woman to a safely aging elderly one.18 The Proposal “forgets” Margaret’s putatively advanced age in some ways by re-classifying her as potentially procreative through comic incidents,

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such as the placement in Margaret and Andrew’s room of a blanket Gammy refers to as “the babymaker.” Margaret attracts the support of Andrew’s mother and grandmother in part, it would seem, because she represents the hope that the Paxton line will continue.19 This is of course consistent with Hollywood “family values” solutions for myriad female concerns in the romance. When aging women accrue value it tends to be through their imbrication with heteronormative life stages and institutions. In line with the film’s professional woman rehabilitation plot as Russell Meeuf observes “Women like Gammy and her great-grandmother help teach Margaret models of strength that do not involve abandoning family and romance—essentially she can look to a prefeminist past to find her postfeminist future.”20 The Proposal’s investment in matriarchal configurations and oblique delineation of a fading patriarchy arguably intensifies at the close when Grace and Annie immediately perceive that Margaret is in love with Andrew when she calls off the sham wedding. Bewildered, Andrew’s father Joe struggles to figure out the significance of this and is briskly admonished “Keep up, Joe,” by his wife (Fig. 3).

Age Defiance and the Sandra Bullock Star Persona Upon Margaret and Andrew’s arrival in Sitka, Gammy asks, “Where’s your girl?” then seeing Margaret adds “I guess the word girl is inappropriate.” Later Andrew will say to Margaret “Let’s go—my grandma’s moving faster than you.” Such comic references are transparently toothless given Bullock’s evident youthfulness and the actress’ celebrated “age defiance.” The film’s depiction of Margaret is of course heavily intertextually informed by the age discourses of the Bullock star persona which is founded in crucial ways on her spectacular transgression of the cliché that women become invisible over age 50 while numerous other chick flick stars have become tabloid targets and commercial has-beens. Nearly a decade after The Proposal’s release Bullock is regularly extolled in press discourse for looking far younger than her actual age of 55. In 2015 she was named as People’s World’s Most Beautiful Woman and quoted in a cover story that heavily emphasizes her motherhood of adopted son Louis. The piece closes with Bullock referring to a future time when she will be “old and gray and more wrinkly than I am now,” a characterization belied by her radiant appearance in a series of accompanying photos (Fig. 4).21 Among The Proposal’s promotional strategies was the lure that audiences would see Bullock naked on screen for the first time.22 (In fact, the

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Fig. 3  Andrew and Margaret’s engagement accrues meaning in relation to Gammy’s hopes for generational continuity

scene in which Bullock and Reynold’s nude bodies slam together by mistake as she is attempting to reach for a towel and he is listening to music is exceptionally carefully handled and no nudity is shown). Nevertheless, the “revelation” of Bullock’s slim and muscular body still carries a certain charge in the context of a star persona marked by the chaste protocols of the 1990s chick flick and a career with virtually no explicit love scenes. And perhaps most critically it operates as reassurance that Bullock’s body is not “tainted” by age, another strategy for downplaying the age difference of the film’s protagonist couple. Bullock’s costuming across The Proposal works (although less explicitly) toward the same end as she appears in the New York scenes in pencil skirts, form-fitting dresses, and towering heels. The dexterousness she displays in making her way down to the sidewalk to propose to Andrew while wearing such footwear is another of the film’s carefully crafted items of business. By contrast, Margaret appears in Sitka in a dowdy, old-fashioned wedding dress, a borrowed sweater and casualwear, the only exception to this plain wardrobe a piece of high-end lingerie that Andrew comments is

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Fig. 4  Sandra Bullock’s “mastery” of the aging process saw her lauded by People magazine in 2015

inappropriate for Alaska. The film thus clearly employs a sartorial register for the expression of the female executive power it conceptualizes so ambivalently. But the close visual attention The Proposal pays to Bullock’s body in the office scenes seems to betray the understanding that the fit body is an important source of symbolic capital in the neoliberal workplace. Its importance is fortified by the declining value of institutional,

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industrial, and system memory in an era of constant innovation and re-­ structuring. The female executive body is presented as a by-product of fitness labor and on this basis can serve to display power in the workplace. By contrast, Margaret’s body in the Sitka scenes is comfortably attired, subject to comedic scenarios of play and teasing; though briefly jeopardized when she falls into a lake, this incident leads to the forging of physical and emotional intimacy between the protagonist couple and Margaret dons a tacky animal sweater to keep warm in another sartorial cue to her transformation. Margaret’s “rehabilitation” is expressed not only bodily and sartorially but morally. A fast-talking executive with little care for those around her at the start of the film, her exposure to “small town values” is conceived of in terms of a beneficial proximity to the authenticity the film associates with the removal to Sitka and move away from the “disordered” female authority of the corporate workplace. Loyalty is depicted as a cementing value that Margaret comes to appreciate. Initially presented as someone who will do or say anything to close a deal in her business in the closing stages of the film she attests to the value of the work ethic Andrew inherited from his father and she reviews a manuscript Andrew has promoted and agrees that he has good literary taste and that the book will be published. Her emotional and physical vulnerability are emphasized by the film as she candidly reveals to Andrew that she wept in the ladies’ room after being excoriated by a colleague and is rescued by him when she is flung into a lake and doesn’t know how to swim. Andrew’s decency and constancy are showcased when he refuses to acknowledge even in the face of legal jeopardy that his engagement to Margaret is a strategic one. In a critical line of dialogue spoken shortly after this scene Andrew tells Margaret “you would do the same for me,” and her abashed reaction suggests she is morally chastened by this. Andrew’s highly sympathetic status (he enjoys a fond intimacy with his mother and grandmother) is central to the film’s operations as is the suggestion that he is in some ways an old-­ fashioned man guided by ethical and idealistic principles. When Margaret dictates that they will marry to prevent her deportation she sardonically queries, “Like you were saving yourself for someone special?” Andrew’s response “I like to think so. Besides, it’s illegal,” is telling. Margaret’s further threat is that if he doesn’t marry her, Andrew’s “dreams of touching the lives of millions with the written word” will die. At another point in the film after Andrew and Margaret have been visited in their bedroom by his parents and grandmother bearing cinnamon

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rolls and coffee, which Margaret serves to Andrew in a simulation of the role of dutiful wife, she jokes that she’d better learn how to cook to “Keep my man happy. I don’t want him leaving me for another woman.” Andrew’s response “Haven’t left you yet, Margaret,” paralyzes her to the extent she can’t release the plate she is handing him and he has to pry it from her grasp. As Suzanne Leonard makes clear in Wife Inc., American popular culture in the period of this film’s release was saturated with scandalous revelations about unfaithful husbands that concentrated heavily on the figure of the betrayed midlife woman—indeed Bullock herself would become just such a figure in 2010 when husband Jesse James was revealed to have been serially unfaithful during their marriage. In this context, the significance of Andrew’s profession of constancy resonates.

Racial Anxieties and White Privilege Billy Stevenson has astutely suggested that the chick flick’s decline runs parallel to the “waning of whiteness.” In an elaboration of this insight he notes that: Specifically, the two spectacles of whiteness most integral to the romantic comedy—property and upward mobility—have become problematic even for white audiences in the wake of ongoing recession, turning the romantic comedy into a period piece, a reminder of a different era where feeling good was more available, and in which the very idea of a feel-good film could be embraced or enjoyed without some of the reservations that might attend to it today.23

In The Proposal the constitution of the protagonist couple symbolically entails the re-alignment of cultural hierarchies and the reassurance of hegemonic whiteness. In this respect, we may note the film’s comedic usage of Ramone (Cuban-born Oscar Nunez) who functions as Sitka’s jack-of-all-trades, appearing at various times as a waiter, an exotic dancer, a shopkeeper, and a wedding officiant in Sitka. Ramone’s comedic role is founded on a certain from-the-margins unruliness; during a cocktail party he insists Margaret try a bit of sushi though she dislikes it and dramatically spits it out, he appears as the officiant at her wedding to Andrew speaking too loudly and overdramatically and helping to communicate a sense that the ceremony is “off.” Under pressure to display his Americanness to the immigration agent who zealously pursues Margaret’s deportation,

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Ramone’s last scene under the film’s end credits shows him singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” and professing his love for America (Fig. 5). Ramone’s all-purpose functionality and genial regard for Margaret symbolically expunge the traces of the vitriolic Bob (South Asian born Aasif Mandvi) who issues a belittling tirade against Margaret in front of the staff when she sacks him for cause early in the film. (One of the imperatives associated with Margaret keeping her job at Ruick & Hart is that Bob will be given it if she is unable to continue working.) The substitution of Ramone for Bob as the token character of color symbolically quells a race threat, which the film can’t openly acknowledge. Where Bob had referred to Andrew as Margaret’s “liege” suggesting a disruption of gender normativity Ramone refers to Margaret in speaking to Andrew as “your lady,” a sign of its restoration (Fig. 6). The film’s tokenistic racial economy also makes room for Gammy Annie’s ties to Native Alaskan culture, which are briefly referenced in the aforementioned wedding dress scene where she alludes to her Tlingit heritage but chiefly depicted in a scene in which Margaret discovers her

Fig. 5  Among his numerous roles in Sitka Ramone serves as the proprietor of the Paxton General Store

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Fig. 6  Bob’s abusive tirade against Margaret early in the film articulates his views of female professional power and to some extent the film’s

dancing around a fire in the woods “giving thanks to Mother Earth.”24 When Margaret is exhorted to join in and to chant “from her heart,” she can only produce the lyrics to misogynist rap song “Get Low” by Lil’ Jon.25 Unanchored by family, female role models or meaningful forms of community, Margaret is presented as encompassed by and to some extent affiliating with a dysfunctional patriarchy. Romance with Andrew and inclusion in the matrilineal Paxton family represent the prospect that Margaret will repair these deficiencies, acquiring a heritage mindset and imbrication into family and community.26 The film’s sense of heritage is purged of a problematic white privilege through Gammy’s indigenous Alaskan heritage, which mitigates the potentially imperialist appearance of the Paxton franchise in Sitka.

Conclusion One of the reasons sometimes cited for the decline of the contemporary chick flick is the diminishing of genuine couple charisma in Hollywood product. The Proposal distinguishes itself in part through the sense of connection that seems to flow between its protagonist pair and their adeptness at verbal intimacy which serves the film’s deft recycling of the convention

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in which comic bickering is the cover for attraction. Yet as with all cinematic romances the unification of the central couple is endowed with a larger significance tied to their ability to symbolically solve social problems. The Proposal manages creeping fears of an employment market that was deemed particularly unfriendly to men in the years after the global financial collapse and more broadly the perception that home and family might be abandoned in a period marked by the heightened demands/ expectations of professional careers. I have argued that Andrew’s plot positioning and youthful appearance amplify the film’s recessionary signification. The Proposal’s reliance on “small town moralities,” dynastic wealth, and a private economy is telling. Its restoration of national, racial, class and gender homogeneities and hierarchies implied that emergent revelations about the inadequacy of conservative class, gender, and race economies could be safely quashed. As I have suggested here, the film seeks to discipline and chastise the single, white female professional and couple creation entails the marginalization or comic subordination of racial others. In this way, The Proposal reflects the always-ongoing interrelation between film and social discursive processes. As Sandra Bullock’s last romantic comedy, The Proposal, I have suggested, is useful for what it may tell us about the decline of a formerly robust female-centered narrative paradigm. A film in a waning genre whose commercial clout had greatly receded by the time of its release, the film uses the notion of the age discrepant romance as a feint. In looking for new ways to justify the management of the single woman that has long been practiced by the chick flick, the film instrumentalizes Margaret’s age and authority for the role she will play in a matrilineal Paxton family line and her “softening” through romance with Andrew. Her conversion away from solipsism and self-interest is emphatically linked to her absorption into a wealthy family which is represented as essentially operating a private economy in Sitka. Berated by Bob in front of her staff in an open plan office at the beginning of the film, Margaret is shouted at by Andrew in the close in the exact same space in a display of his romantic authority that effects narrative closure but subtextually reveals that the management of the professional woman is the film’s consistent priority. Like numerous other chick flicks The Proposal sees little benefit for its female protagonist in the corporate sphere and posits it as antithetical to more meaningful life values.27 For this reason, the gradual stripping away of Margaret’s professional capital over the course of the film is presented

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as a pre-condition for her happiness. Notably, the alternately gendered “marrying the boss” plot remains too ideologically volatile for the film to dwell on or openly depict so it takes evasive action in a closing comedic montage in which all the principals are seen giving testimony about Margaret’s case to the zealous immigration official. In this way, the idea that Margaret is still “under suspicion” never quite leaves the film. The Proposal’s conservatism is also visible is its attentiveness to themes of inheritance and procreation. I have suggested that the larger social totality out of which The Proposal emerged was shaped by a post-­ recessionary context that engendered fears about the stability of work and merit and that was in the habit of blaming women for the deficiencies of post-financial crash neoliberal capitalism. In its effort to refresh stale chick flick formulae by crafting a dubious cross-generational romance plot, the film illustrates the attempts being made at the time of its release to update romance conventions without relinquishing the ideological status quo. Acknowledgments  I thank Suzanne Leonard and the participants of the interdisciplinary research seminar (particularly Lee Flamand and Ali Tuzcu) at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin for their feedback on an early draft of this article. At a later stage, I was grateful to have the opportunity to present this work at the University of Zaragoza where colleagues including Celestino Deleyto and Beatriz Oria provided useful reactions and thoughts.

Notes 1. AT&T had entered into a media partnership with cinema media vendor NCM (National CineMedia) which enabled AT&T to run 90-second films, such as this one during the previews of general release films. See “Top Spot of the Week: BBDO, Director Daniel Wolfe Team on ‘Surprise’ for AT &T.” 2. IMDB lists the film as the 16th highest grossing domestic release of the year. It outperformed emergent franchise films like Fast & Furious, auteur fare including Inglourious Basterds and critically praised dramas such as Up in the Air. See https://www.imdb.com/search/title?year=2009,2009&so rt=boxoffice_gross_us,desc. The year’s 8th highest grossing film was The Blind Side for which Bullock would win the Oscar. For my purposes here the “chick flick’s” most recognizable and predominant form is that of a studio released star vehicle with female focalization and dilemmas of work and romantic partnership narratively foregrounded.

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3. The character’s Canadianness is a bit of an in-joke given Bullock’s long-­ established “America’s Sweetheart” status and the fact that her co-star, Ryan Reynolds, actually is Canadian. The film’s national/racial economy is hinted at in Margaret’s response when informed she will be deported: “It’s not like I’m an immigrant or something, I’m from Canada.” 4. From the back cover of Richard V.  Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in The Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to do About It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution P, 2017). 5. Obst, Lynda. “In Defense of the Chick Flick.” The Atlantic, April 1, 2010. 6. In a taste of things to come 2009 was also the release year of Chinese romantic comedy Sophie’s Revenge a significant hit that established the viability of Chinese chick flicks. 7. This idea was explored in an early draft of Suzanne Leonard’s “Weddings, Anti-Heroines, and Postfeminist Cynicism”. In The Wedding Spectacle Across Contemporary Media and Cultures (Eds.), Helen Wood, Jilly Boyce Kay & Melanie Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 53–65. 8. The film further illustrates that having conspicuously failed to generate new stars, the genre is now recycling them. 9. Indeed, there are occasional calls for its revival. For instance, in August 2018, Kyle Buchanan wrote in The New  York Times that “audiences are starved for a good romantic comedy” and that “The genre that minted stars like Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock has fallen into disrepair. As studios began squeezing midbudget movies out of summer slates stocked with expensive superhero movies and dirt-cheap horror entries, the rom-com was first to go.” See “Summer Movie Scorecard: Some Crazy Rich Hits and Shocking Misses.” 10. Orr, Christopher. “Isn’t It Romantic Fails as Both Rom-Com and Satire.” The Atlantic Feb. 2, 2019. 11. Amanda Hess. “‘I Feel Pretty’ and the Rise of Beauty-Standard Denialism.” The New York Times. April 23, 2018. A related film is 2019’s weight loss comedy Brittany Runs a Marathon whose thematics of female self-care operate similarly but lacking a significant star whose bodily recognizability is key to her appeal, the film is free to stage a physical metamorphosis. 12. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, p. 72. 13. Jia Tolentino, Jia. “Always Be Optimizing.” In Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion (New York: Random House, 2019), p. 80. 14. Noting that nearly all of the town’s businesses feature the name “Paxton,” Margaret asks “Who are you people?” and later demands of Andrew “Why didn’t you tell me you’re some kind of an Alaskan Kennedy?”

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15. Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell. “Introduction.” In Aging Femininities, Troubling Representation, Josephine Dolan & Estella Tincknell (eds.). (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars P, 2012), pp. x–xi. 16. It is clear that The Proposal wants to position Gammy as a figure of racial authenticity and it is careful about doing so, designating her Native ancestry as Tlingit (a tribe associated with the Pacific Northwest) rather than the more localized Sitka. Any reference to the local indigenous people would trouble the film’s confident association between Sitka and the Paxton family, raising even if only implicitly uncomfortable questions of historical dispossession and diminishing the town’s status as a hometown for Andrew. 17. Kristen Anderson Wagner. “‘With Age Comes Wisdom:’ Joan Rivers, Betty White and the Aging Comedienne.” Feminist Media Histories 3:2 (2017), p. 150. 18. Ibid., p. 142. 19. In this way the film strikingly resembles Moonstruck (1987) which rejects an older man in favour of his younger brother as the right romantic partner for Cher’s Loretta Castorini. Loretta’s mother hopes her 37-year-old daughter will have a baby and the film celebrates the passion and vitality of Loretta’s romance with Ronnie, seeing his brother Johnny as an insufficiently modern figure to update the family. 20. Russell Meeuf. “Betty White: Bawdy Grandmas, Aging in America and ‘Prefeminist’ Fantasies.” In Rebellious Bodies: Stardom, Citizenship and the New Body Politics (Austin: U of Texas P, 2017), p. 163. 21. Julie Jones, “Sandra Bullock is People’s 2015 World’s Most Beautiful Woman!” People.com April 22, 2015. https://people.com/celebrity/ worlds-most-beautiful-2015-sandra-bullock-is-peoples-pick/. 22. This became a structuring element in an interview related to the film that Bullock gave to The Today Show’s Matt Lauer in which the journalist gloated at the outset “I’ve seen you naked,” and told her “You’re naked for most of this movie.” Lauer’s lascivious approach to the interview led to its digital recirculation years later after revelations of his sexual misconduct surfaced and he was fired from his long-time position on the morning show. 23. Billy Stevenson. “Divorce.” Nov. 14, 2018. https://cinematelevisionmusic.wordpress.com/2018/11/14/divorce-hbo-2016-2018/. 24. Further bolstering the sense that The Proposal takes matters of family continuity and procreation rather seriously, Gammy’s performance here is also a kind of fertility ritual on Margaret’s behalf. The older woman exhorts Margaret “We must give thanks and ask that your loins be abundantly fertile.” 25. The song stands in implicit contrast to a much older and lighter-spirited rap/hip hop song “It Takes Two” by Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock which is invoked in a scene the previous evening in which Margaret reveals personal

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details to Andrew as they share a bedroom in his parents’ house. Margaret mentions that the first concert she ever attended was a Base and Rock show and then she and Andrew sing a bit of “It Takes Two” exhibiting a warm, playful rapport while the song’s lyrical emphasis on coupledom thematizes the changing stakes of Margaret and Andrew’s relationship. 26. The power of “the hometown” in the postfeminist romance is a subject I have written about in What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of the Self in Postfeminism. Where the hometown is conventionally the purview of a female character The Proposal introduces an innovative maneuver in linking it to a male protagonist. 27. The film makes a number of references to the punishing pace of corporate life at Ruick & Hart. In an early scene Margaret cavalierly tells Andrew that she will need him to work over the weekend, initially making it impossible for him to visit his family as planned. When she later asks him why he hasn’t visited them more regularly his reply “I haven’t had a lot of vacation time the last three years” draws the brusque response “Oh stop complaining.”

The Generation Game: Lovers and Friends; Mothers and Daughters; Filmmakers, History and Home Again Deborah Jermyn

In 2017, when Hallie Meyers-Shyer made her directorial debut with the romantic-comedy (romcom) Home Again, a noteworthy Hollywood milestone was reached in women’s film history. The novice filmmaker symbolically took the baton from her mother Nancy Meyers, whose résumé marks her as one of the foremost women filmmakers of all time, and in the process established a matrilineal directorial lineage arguably unparalleled within the industry. As the offspring of Meyers and fellow filmmaker Charles Shyer,1 Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s backstory is a glittering one indeed, in which she grew up steeped in Hollywood sets, stories and lifestyles; her parents first collaborated as a writing-producing team on Private Benjamin in 1980, for which they were Oscar nominated, before Shyer went on to direct a number of their jointly written scripts through

D. Jermyn (*) University of Roehampton, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_5

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the 1980s and 1990s in such hits as Baby Boom (1987) and Father of the Bride (1991). After the couple split, Meyers’s career flourished in spectacular style. Following her directing debut in 1998 with The Parent Trap, a string of ‘chick-flick’ successes such as Something’s Gotta Give (2003) ensued as she went on to become the most commercially successful woman ‘triple-threat’ (writer-producer-director) in the industry’s history. Going back further still, Meyers-Shyer’s grandfather on her father’s side was Melville Shyer, one of the founders of the Directors Guild of America. As Tim Robey’s Telegraph review of Home Again noted, then, Meyers-Shyer is indeed a ‘scion of Hollywood royalty’2 and for this reason her Los Angeles-set film debut was widely received as occasioning more than a few seemingly autobiographical embellishments and maternal influences. This chapter in part examines how Meyers-Shyer’s film can be meaningfully situated within these terms. In doing so, crucially it uncovers how the reception of the younger filmmaker entailed a recycling of the same kinds of gendered disdain that have characterised her mother’s career, illuminating the manifold ways in which women romcom directors and women’s stories of ageing romantic heroines are systematically denigrated by popular criticism. Home Again recounts the story of Alice (Reese Witherspoon), a separated mother of two recently returned from New York to the fabulously appointed Californian childhood home she inherited from her now deceased, celebrated film director father. On the night of her 40th birthday, seemingly seized by a ‘mid-life crisis’, she has a drunken fling and finds herself embroiled with baby-faced Harry (Pico Alexander), a charming but broke 27-year-old upcoming movie producer, who soon moves into her guest house along with two movie-making pals so they can pursue funding for their first feature film. In no time critics were united on one point; that ‘the apple didn’t fall far from the tree’.3 This was not only in regard to the fact that Meyers-Shyer’s lushly aspirational domestic mise-­ en-­scène was greeted as duplicating the recurring visual landscape Meyers has become synonymous with. Furthermore, it centred on what Melissa Silverstein has called Meyers’s authorial ‘calling card’ (2015)4; namely the figure of the ‘older woman’—an individual widely erased in Hollywood and beyond,5 but here placed centre-stage as romantic protagonist. Home Again is precisely the kind of film that gets left behind and deemed grating and unimportant by the very large majority of film studies scholarship and popular critical discourse; a light-hearted romance with good-looking stars, a milieu populated by privileged (and all too familiarly

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white) people whose ‘problems’ seem enviable pondered as they are amongst breathtakingly upscale homes, all of this delivered in a format that offers no arresting flourishes but only the reassuring visual and technical landscapes of a familiar old Hollywood style. The general consensus is that a package like this—‘pretty much a standard wish fulfilment chick flick’6 as The Washington Post put it—merits little close consideration and cannot furnish material of importance or cultural significance. Indeed, as I have previously argued elsewhere in a feminist analysis of the gendered ostracising of Nancy Meyers from critical and scholarly recognition,7 it is precisely these aesthetic and narrative features that have meant Meyers’s work too has struggled to reach the critical acknowledgement due it. What might feminist film studies do, then, with the unprecedented moment offered by Home Again, and the series of paratexts thrown up by it, from reviews to marketing materials to interviews, and more? What happens when ‘the romcom queen’s daughter’8 enters the family business, and does so not only by becoming a director but by becoming, specifically, a fellow director of that least esteemed, most feminised, most despised entity of the romantic comedy? And when she, significantly and again like her mother, uses the genre to take up the case of the mature romantic heroine, and the still culturally discomforting possibility of an older-­ woman/younger-man romance? In what follows, at one level as noted I want to interrogate how the daughter inherits the same kinds of critical discourses that have been emblematic of the mother’s career, and crucially what this tells us about the conditions women filmmakers creating populist ‘women’s cinema’ in Hollywood work with/in. But for the purposes of the collection assembled here, Home Again also offers a particularly fertile entry also into understanding cross-generational relationships and cinema. This is especially with regard to the film being critically positioned as the offspring of a cross-generational creative relationship between mother-daughter, while simultaneously being in some respects about a cross-generational romantic relationship. Meyers’s role as a producer on the film who was actively involved in advising her daughter in artistic rather than only business matters (e.g. working with her actors on set) went far beyond the labour typically presumed of a role understood to be primarily concerned with organisational matters like financing. This is a film, then, that entailed a multiply inflected, instructive collision of numerous intergenerational themes at the level of production, content and reception.

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In this chapter, incorporating textual analysis and examining a range of reviews and promotional interviews, taken largely from UK and North American writers judged ‘top critics’ by rottentomatoes.com as a means to underline the popular pervasiveness of the positions taken, I locate recurrent (dismissive, gendered) critical tropes in the reception of Home Again that I argue parallel and illuminate those seen through Meyers’s career. In the context of the current media and cultural landscape, which is seemingly more attuned than ever to highlighting the injustice and ubiquity of the industry’s exclusion of women practitioners, locating and analysing how these parallels are constituted forms a timely, necessitous and instructive intercession. Further, in analysing the film itself while scrutinising its extra-textual media life and the continual return to Meyers-Shyer’s matrilineal pedigree within this, one is able to reach a more multi-perspectival, nuanced understanding of just how such ‘chick-flicks’ and the love stories they tell end up ‘left behind’, despite frequent evidence of their popularity with audiences. Importantly, however, despite the exceptionality of this moment at one level, this is not an analysis which produces findings pertinent only to the particularities of a curiously anomalous case-study. More than this, what follows constitutes a feminist intervention elucidating instances of how women’s popular/populist filmmaking gets systematically sidelined and denigrated across culture; just as, indeed, romantic narratives that privilege women’s perspectives and experiences, and older women’s reflections on the gendered inequities of ageing, do also. All comprise discursive constructions and perspectives pervasively undermined by film criticism (as they frequently are too by conservative and masculinist traditions in academia) in distinct ways that belittle such subject matter and assign it to our cultural margins as self-indulgent and trifling. Rather than being merely another trivial example of the disposability of romcom, the matrilineal heredity across two generations of Hollywood directors precipitated by Home Again makes the film, as indicated, something quite unrivalled in the industry’s history, even while it constitutes a quite familiarly constructed instance of the genre.9 It points to how, for all the dismissiveness with which the genre is treated, the romcom has provided a crucial space for numerous women creatives in Hollywood to find work (and indeed the dismissiveness with which it is widely met cannot be disentangled from this). Elsewhere, one can locate other instances of cross-generational parent-child filmmaker heritages in Hollywood, but these have been almost entirely tales of men’s relationships, men’s stories

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of passing the role of director from father to son, or unusually in Sofia Coppola’s case from father (namely Frances Ford Coppola) to daughter. Beyond Meyers-Shyer’s own grandfather and father, these high-profile paternal lineages have included, for example, Carl Reiner and Rob Reiner; Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman; Lawrence Kasdan and Jake Kasdan; and Melvin Van Peebles and Mario Van Peebles. And while both John Cassavetes and John Huston each had both a son and a daughter who would go on to direct, it is their sons who have been more prolific and are better known for their directorial endeavours than their daughters (being Nick and Zoe Cassavetes, and Danny and Angelica Huston, respectively). Notwithstanding the stories of women practitioners in film history that are still coming (back) to light today and being belatedly more fully archived (see, for example, The Women Film Pioneers Project),10 and more recent labours and initiatives in the industry to boost current woman-to-woman mentorships, these prominent directly patrilineal relationships are only one way in which Hollywood has frequently operated more broadly as a male-­apprenticeship system. Analysis of the reviews examined reveals that Meyers-Shyer’s relationship to her mother was unfailingly signalled by writers as a crucial contextualising note with which to better understand the film, while also being a fact brightly heralded in the film’s marketing. Furthermore, this information was recurrently proffered by critics by way of observing that Home Again carried all the hallmarks of the mother’s work while being sadly deficient in her mother’s flair, offering only ‘a knock-off’ version of Meyers’s ‘hallowed materialism’ for Vanity Fair,11 and being ‘sorely lacking [in] the old-fashioned panache or fizz of Meyers’ most entertaining movies’.12 This name-checking of Meyers across reviews was to be entirely expected, given not just her relationship to the director but that, as noted, Meyers herself worked on the film as Producer. Her influence was exacted, then, not merely as a creative guiding light or mentor for Meyers-Shyer. More than this, she was a key physical presence with a very real financial and professional investment in the film throughout the process, from development, through production and post-production, right onto the promotional copy, and a visibly active participant in the publicity junkets attached to the film to a degree not usually seen among producers. As noted, however, the critical reception of Meyers’s work has been a chequered one, and she has not courted the kind of widespread recognition one might have expected her commercial success alone to have warranted. In particular, she has been widely criticised for unimaginatively reciting

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the same formulaic stories of white privilege. Hers are films in which—as with Home Again—wealthy, creatively/entrepreneurially inclined women protagonists, and particularly ‘older’ women, regularly find romantic as well as real-estate satisfaction amidst painstakingly curated aspirational homes. Yet the continual foregrounding of Nancy Meyers’s name across the promotion and advertising for Home Again unambiguously underscores that her involvement as Producer, and Meyers-Shyer’s status as her daughter, were seen as key selling-points rather than markers of a problematic association—as highly marketable features of the production that were strategically prioritised as a means to target the potential (existing romcom) audience. Before going on to interrogate the seeming incongruities threaded through this, and disentangling the ways in which the reception of both filmmakers entails the propagation of some tellingly cognate gendered critiques, I want to first turn in more detail to the film itself. How is it so evidently the case that, as Kate Erbland’s Indiewire review put it, one leaves Home Again with ‘no doubt that the newly minted filmmaker is Nancy Meyers’ daughter’,13 and how does this production knowledge inform how one might more fully contextualise and comprehend the film, its cross-generational romance, and subsequent reception?

From Her Mother’s Daughter: Home Again and the Meyers Touch From its commencement, the ‘influence’ of Meyers, which I argue can just as readily be understood as evidence of conscious homage to her, is manifest in Home Again when Meyers-Shyer elects to open the film with a voiceover narration. Against a series of vintage stills documenting her father’s life and celebrated filmmaking career, Alice describes her childhood and stellar Hollywood parentage (we soon learn that her former starlet actor mother introduced here, and more than two decades her father’s junior, was ‘discovered’ by him in a restaurant). From this we cut to the present and see Alice embark on her 40th birthday crying in front of the bathroom mirror, following which the voiceover ceases for the duration of the film. As I have previously observed, the motif of the transitory opening narration constitutes an introductory flourish continually favoured by Meyers, one she explains she admired and borrowed from Billy Wilder’s work in The Apartment (1960),14 and one now adopted by her daughter too. Also echoing her mother’s oeuvre, through its focus on

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Alice as moviemaking progeny, and on the budding auteurs she befriends who are determined not to capitulate to crass studio pressures, the film can be framed as a meta-text that self-consciously reflects on the creative worlds of writing and movie-making,15 with Entertainment Weekly rightly describing it as ‘in part an ode to the filmmaking industry’.16 Further, as per her mother’s work again, it centres on a self-starting, ‘mature’ woman with a stalled love-life who is building/has built her own business and/or an esteemed reputation in her profession (see in addition, for example, The Parent Trap (1998), What Women Want (2000), It’s Complicated (2009) and The Intern (2015)), this constituting a character type who more widely forms a staple of ‘chick-flick’ territory. Significantly, the creative industry Alice is attempting to break into is that of interior design, a professional field which fits neatly into neoliberal and postfeminist discourses found commonly in contemporary chick-­ flicks,17 and in much of Meyers’s oeuvre, where women’s work is often configured as not really ‘work’ at all but rather an extension of one’s wider passions and talents.18 It is through this backdrop of Alice’s nascent interior design business that Home Again gives some of its most self-conscious nods to the Meyers inheritance and to what I have elsewhere called ‘the Meyers touch’.19 Reviewers repeatedly noted that the plush interiors of Alice’s home tied her work inextricably to Meyers’s luxe vision and milieu, a world in which comforting cushions furnish plush sofas and verdantly overflowing bowls of citrus fruit adorn table tops. For reviewer Mark Jenkins, then, ‘The homes and gardens that star in the two women’s movies are essentially interchangeable’.20 Or as The Hollywood Reporter rather more crudely and dismissively put it, ‘Like her mom, Meyers-Shyer is a lifestyle pornographer of the first order’,21 the Meyers’s ‘house style’22 being framed as a superficial preoccupation for both women, one deflecting from their unsophisticated characterisation and narrative. Indeed, following in her mother’s footsteps again, Meyers-Shyer’s interiors warranted a dedicated spread in Architectural Digest,23 one of numerous magazine design features dedicated to the film. But beyond media interest in the set design of the film, Alice’s designer aspirations provide a platform for knowingly acknowledging the import of the world of design to the Meyers’s ‘house style’ within the film. Her (staggeringly narcissistic) inaugural client Zoey (Lake Bell)24 initially compliments the mood boards Alice has produced, for example, remarking ‘That’s a lot of blue’, leading Alice to explain, ‘Well […] I thought, the Hamptons thing…’. For knowing audiences, this can be read as a playful

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reference to the most celebrated and widely deliberated of Meyers’s sets, that of Erica’s (Diane Keaton) revered Hamptons writing retreat in Something’s Gotta Give. If Meyers’s thematic ‘calling card’, namely ‘talking about older women’25 is here in Home Again, then, so too are her aesthetic ones. Carrie Rickey has suggested that ‘Ms. Meyers has her own signature: the side-by-side shot of a man and woman on a bed, seen from the ceiling’,26 while for Manohla Dargis, ‘Her most notable visual signature is [her] immaculate, luxuriously appointed interiors’.27 To this, I have argued, one must add the recurrence of ‘sequences in which characters stop to regard, survey and appreciate the impressiveness—the wonder—of the spaces and scenery that surround them’.28 Notably, in Home Again, Meyers-Shyer collapses all these elements together, when Teddy and George discover their new home in Alice’s lush guest-house; Teddy excitedly jumps on the bed proclaiming, ‘Oh my God, I’m not kidding, you’ve got to feel these sheets!’, before we cut to an overhead shot of the pair lying blissfully together on it, as George concurs, ‘These sheets are insane’. In these and numerous moments, rather than only imitation self-­conscious echoes of the Meyers touch can be felt, as Meyers-Shyer makes a kind of cross-generational intertextual nod to the work of her mother, whose own work has itself consistently been informed by knowing reference to the filmmakers before her that she most admires.

40/Love: Ageing Female Desire and the Younger Man The extent to which the film really is, also in keeping with Meyers’s familiar terrain, about an ‘older woman’ may at one level appear more contestable since the film rather underlines how fundamentally nebulous the term ‘older woman’ is. While she is indeed older than Harry, Alice is still ‘only’ 40, and a 13-year-relationship age-difference where the woman is the senior partner arguably isn’t as entirely noteworthy as it once was. Nevertheless, it is still not culturally framed as ‘the norm’ (as, for example, the incessant speculation in recent times about the relationship between French President Emanuelle Macron and his wife Brigitte, 17 years his senior, has underlined; indeed, just 16 per cent of contemporary relationships comprise an older woman and younger man according to the statistics bureau Insee).29 Furthermore, whether one considers 40 to constitute ‘older’ for a woman today or not, contemplating the possibility of an

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atypical age gap, and imagining what dating might look like the second time round for a 40+ woman after marriage and children, is very much part of the reflective learning curve Alice traverses in the film. In keeping with a cultural mindset that still finds the prospect of an older-woman/ younger-man union innately cockeyed, the ‘cougar’-type30 dimensions of the relationship between the more experienced and urbane Alice and the still somewhat immature Harry are initially played for laughs, although it would be something of a stretch of the imagination to situate Alice/ Witherspoon as a full-blown cougar at the age of 40, and having only just returned to dating. This is all the more true given that visually and physically (if not socially) at least, there is no striking disjuncture evident between the couple, Alice’s life of privilege having ensured she is ‘ageing well’ as that judgemental and subjective turn of phrase would have it (e.g. her wealth enabling her to take yoga classes at home and shop at Whole Foods). Nevertheless, when a hungover Harry awakens in Alice’s bedroom the morning after they meet he is discomfited firstly, to recall not only that they failed to consummate the relationship due to him having a vomiting episode, but secondly, to discover she has freshly laundered all his clothes for him while he slept. Alice is thus here prised into a tiresome ‘surrogate mother’ role, while he takes up that of recalcitrant teen, as if these are the established types they must seemingly default to by virtue of their age gap, diffusing the sexual charge of the ‘cougar’ formation momentarily at least to revert to another tired archetype within olderwoman/younger-man relationship discourses (Fig. 1). From herein, however, importantly this is a film which resists mining any potential ‘MILF’31 set-up to snigger at the older woman’s expense. Neither is it reproachful of Alice—who importantly in this respect is also a ‘single mother’, a figure relentlessly judged and scrutinised throughout culture—for entertaining such a relationship. If anything, there is more inherent disapproval inferred towards her father, John Kinney; his relationship with her much younger mother constitutes a far more socially commonplace dynamic, but it is framed here as part of a general seeming glibness and capriciousness evident throughout his chequered relationship history, which included his being unfaithful to Lillian. Rather, Home Again is crucially a film that explores ‘cross generational relationships’ not just in regard to the novelty of an older-woman/younger-man dyad, but interestingly and uncommonly in terms of the many and diverse relationships and bonds that exist in it between mothers, fathers, children, carers, grandparents, friends and ex-lovers across ages; amiable demi-flirtations

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Fig. 1  Following their drunken fling, Harry (Pico Alexander) is perturbed to discover on waking that not only did he fail to have sex with Alice (Reese Witherspoon), she has done his laundry for him

occur between Lillian and Harry’s friends as well as Lillian and Alice’s ex-­ husband Austen (Michael Sheen), friendships are built between Gen Xers and ‘Millennials’ (cf Alice and Teddy), and between Millennials and ‘tweens’ (cf George and Isabel). Indeed, James Mottram was one of few reviewers willing or able to entertain a conceptualisation of the film as in some way culturally curious on this front, eschewing the terms ‘chick-flick’ and romcom to describe it as ‘a diverting social comedy with a hint of depth’ (my emphasis).32 Cross-generational relationships are here imagined in multiple ways, then, in a manner which is both undeniably idealised in its picture-perfect delivery but in other respects also quietly progressive in the unconventional imagining of the contemporary intergenerational community it entails,33 for example, foregoing customary gendered and nuclear family principles of care provision. Upending expectations about the predictable generic terrain of romcom, it is these varied relationships, rather than Alice’s new romance, that provide most of the ‘big emotional beats’ in the film, as Indiewire perceptively observed.34 As with Something’s Gotta Give, then, in which Meyers toys with the prospect of a socially provocative relationship between accomplished 50-something playwright Erica and dashing 30-something doctor Julian (Keanu Reeves), the possibility of an unorthodox older-woman/

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younger-­man union is only momentarily dangled before audiences watching Home Again. Erica and Julian’s age-gap is much more incendiary than that of Alice and Harry, of course, even if she too is ‘ageing well’; so too does the audience undergo a more arresting cultural and cinematic encounter when Meyers boldly allies Julian’s/Reeves’s desiring gaze with Keaton’s lovingly lit but nevertheless evidently lined and middle-aged face. Erica eventually leaves the adoring Julian for a more socially acceptable relationship with 64-year-old reformed player Harry (Jack Nicholson), a plot-point which prompted disappointment and disbelief from some reviewers. For Betty Kaklamanidou, the refusal of Meyers’s film and other of the most widely distributed and financially successful ‘cougar’ romcoms in Hollywood to ‘give their respective reverse May-December romances a chance’ is evidence of their ultimate ‘retreat to a social conservatism’, pointing to ‘both the public’s and Hollywood’s enduring traditionalism’.35 At the same time, this is not to understate the magnitude of Meyers casting the 57-year-­old Diane Keaton as a romantic heroine in a studio production at this time, and the consequence of Something’s Gotta Give for reconfiguring the genre into a hopeful, reflective, benevolent space for older women and their desires, in an industry and culture which largely erases them. Significantly in Home Again, however, Alice ends her relationship with Harry not for a more appropriate romantic prospect, but to be single. In this sense, the final scenes of Home Again must be recognised as gently but still uncommonly progressive. Alice sits in her garden surrounded by an extended family of people dear to her, drawn from three generations and amassing blood-ties, ex-partners and friends, all of whom have settled their differences as they celebrate her daughter’s success in her school production. She looks around her, smiling, satisfied, in a fashion than might be construed as sentimental; but importantly there is no exchange of longing looks between her and Austen or Harry that signal new suggestive understanding, no trading of wry smiles that hint at unfinished romantic business. For an evidently wearied Dargis, this is ‘a movie that formulaic step by step needs to confirm that a single woman can be happy. You go, girl’,36 a summary that sees only tired clichés in this aspect of the film. But this response belies how in fact it is rare for a romcom (and cinema generally) to end with a comfortably and unambiguously romantically un-­ entangled central woman protagonist in view. Alice is single, but neither alone nor lonely, and contented to be so. This is an ending that might seem small in its significance, written on the page in this way. But in fact it

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might be deemed quietly radical, even aberrant, when considered in context as emanating from an industry which overwhelmingly, like the wider culture it springs from, steadfastly perpetuates the belief that single women, and older single women in particular, are by definition somehow incomplete, damaged or otherwise unhappy. As Kinneret Lahad has observed, an upsurge of critical work since 2000 examining single women has confirmed that ‘single women in different parts of the world are regularly typecast as desperate, hysterical, childish, irresponsible or lazy’.37 These are representations in which ‘late singlehood’ especially ‘is still commonly perceived in terms of negations: a lack, an absence, a deficient identity’.38 By picturing the 40+ single woman in a way that steadfastly resists such saturnine characterisations at the end of Home Again, the daughter’s work here is more audacious even than the mother’s, whose (widely underestimated, even if problematic) oeuvre has dared to imagine women over 50 as still desirable in Hollywood, and whose romantic endings can often be seen as consciously ambivalent. Still, like very many in the genre, Meyers’s films have nevertheless always left the door open to imagining the ageing or previously romantically ‘burned’ heroine entering shortly into coupledom again, and finding new satisfaction in (later) life because of this, rather than ending with her resolutely and unperturbedly single as Meyers-Shyer does here. Indeed crucially, for Meyers-Shyer, this is ‘what makes it a modern romantic comedy… It’s not about a woman finding love’ (my emphasis).39 This point is also underlined by the fact that the film ends on a lingering close-up of Alice framed alone—not with an image of a couple—a shot that echoes traditions long associated with European and art cinema and their willingness to contemplate the interiority of their protagonists, thereby suggesting a gravitas rarely allied to the chick-flick heroine (Fig. 2).

The Matter of Reception: At Home with the Critics for Home Again Of course, to suggest that in any of the scenes outlined above Meyers-­ Shyer is deliberately paying tribute to her mother’s work, rather than slavishly or unimaginatively trying to copy it (and doing so poorly) would be to elevate and recognise Meyers as a filmmaker whose work warrants the deference of an ‘homage’, as well as to credit Meyers-Shyer with conscious agency. Given the willingness reviewers have long shown to denigrate

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Fig. 2  Home Again ends audaciously not with an image of a nascent or reformed couple, but with a 40+ woman pictured assuredly and contentedly single

romcom as a genre, predictably enough critics were mostly keen to read Meyers-Shyer’s film as further unimaginative evidence of its general prescriptiveness. For The New York Times, it was ‘a shabby copy of a Nancy Meyers romantic comedy’,40 while Erbland at IndieWire exhorted, ‘Next time, she should build her own house’.41 However, in belittling Meyers-­ Shyer for not delivering ‘the Meyers touch’ as deftly as her mother, by a kind of default action Meyers’s work is (unwittingly) elevated by this discourse. The recognisability and box-office success of her previous film titles evidently trumped these same films’ often rather less than enthusiastic critical reception, since reviews of Home Again recurrently critiqued Meyers-Shyer for failing to be as good at making a Nancy Meyers film as Nancy Meyers is. This was something of a critical volte face for a field which has historically regularly derided Meyers, in which many writers seemed to acknowledge (even if inadvertently) that there is a functioning skill set— indeed a rather accomplished and exacting skillset—at the heart of what Meyers does, that can’t merely be effortlessly counterfeited. A proliferation of intriguing, and gendered, critical tropes emerge across the reception of the film, though space prohibits me from examining them in their entirety. For example, there was regular chatter about the film as one which somehow stood to either re-ignite or extinguish the romcom—‘Can the rom-com be saved?’, asked the title of Abigail Jones’s

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Newsweek piece42—a discourse paralleling how Meyers has previously been scapegoated as responsible for the genre’s diminishing reputation.43 Such framing puts the weight of the performance of a whole genre, of transforming it into something ‘modern’44 or subjecting it to a ‘make-­over’,45 on the individual woman filmmaker’s shoulders. As such, this discourse rather corresponds with the frequently made observation that women directors are disallowed a single failure in Hollywood, where a ‘one-strikeand-you’re-out’ policy applies only to women behind the camera. This generates a heightened scrutiny and pressure to perform in an outstanding fashion right from their debut, in a manner male directors are not exhorted to evince.46 In addition, many reviews questioned whether audiences would be able to ‘relate to’ this rich, white, beautiful woman’s ‘crisis’, in a premise ‘built on presumptions of [staggering] privilege and naiveté’ and ‘credulity-­ stretching [conceit]’.47 Here, they suggest, audiences won’t have patience or sympathy with a protagonist whose biggest problem is whether to stay with her still adoring high-flying music-exec husband, or her 27-year-old ‘toy-boy’, whose abs-of-steel Austen also seems distracted by and who, as one of her pals observes, along with his roommates provides her with childcare, tech support and sex-on-demand. The overwhelming whiteness of ‘mainstream’ romcom propagated here and throughout Hollywood unquestionably warrants scrutiny, criticism and revision,48 its striking pervasiveness forming a marker of which romantic narratives are formulated as holding value in dominant culture. Alongside advocating a call to redress the genre’s common absence of racial inclusivity, it is also germane to interrogate how the questioning of the film’s ‘relatability’ here can be understood as inherently gendered. This critical perspective demonstrates an unwillingness to understand romcom within the terms of its own verisimilitude, in a genre which has long made upmarket homes, and enviable careers, and high-class social milieu, part of the fabric of the pleasure it offers audiences. Instead, by sidestepping how such generic verisimilitude actually functions, and by questioning the ‘relatability’ of it, the lightweight ‘feminine’ world of relationships, romance and family at stake in the genre is also undermined and rendered a hollow distraction for a filmmaker to occupy themselves with. In this vein, it would be fascinating indeed to make a comparative analysis with the reception of Hollywood’s more ‘masculine’ multi-millionaire-superhero franchises, films which also operate within the realms of a generic verisimilitude pivoting in high-class milieu, to ascertain the extent to which they are, or are not, accepted on

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their own generic terms. Do critics recurrently ask too whether audiences will find their stories and emotional landscapes, focussed on unimaginably privileged men in ‘credulity-stretching’ circumstances, to be similarly ‘unrelatable’; or do their heroes’ challenges, victories, self-doubts and so on somehow transcend their settings? But if the most commonly and prominently shared feature of reviews was to stress the cross-generational familial relationship between Meyers-­ Shyer and her mother,49 then closely allied to this, as invoked above, was the prevalence of critics’ autobiographical interpretations of Home Again.50 Here, Alice becomes Meyers-Shyer’s stand-in as the privileged daughter of a broken Hollywood home, similarly born into filmmaking aristocracy. Such readings also form an extremely common approach to Meyers’s films; indeed, she has actively fostered such an understanding of her work since she repeatedly speaks of how she ‘writes what she knows’51 and draws directly on personal experience in her work. It is notable, though, that it is only Alice’s father who is a director in Home Again, her mother here rendered the actress muse he discovered, so that Meyers-Shyer’s vision of contemporary Hollywood and its power structures is, frustratingly, entirely male. All the ‘wannabe’ filmmakers and established agents and producers we encounter in Home Again are men. This begs the question as to whether the film disappointingly missed an opportunity to progress a different vision of Hollywood, since if anyone has the insight to make a movie which shows women at work and advancing in this industry it is surely the Meyers-Shyer/Meyers dyad. Alternatively, this depiction might be regarded as Meyers-Shyer simply showing, if not actively critiquing, the dominant reality (in a film regularly chided for a lack of ‘realism’) of how Hollywood really is principally populated. Indeed, such a reading seems buoyed by one of the minor recurrent jokes in the film, whereby two of the executives at the creative agency Harry and his collaborators are working with are called Jason; the intimation, it might be said, is that there are likely to be more men in the room called ‘Jason’ than there is to be a woman, when one is trying to get a film made. At any rate, the notion of women making ‘autobiographically’ inflected films needs crucially to be situated within a gendered framework, since it is typically deployed quite differently to the ideal of ‘personal’ filmmaking valued by masculinist auteurist critiques. Rather, there is a sense in which critics of women’s autobiographically informed cinema often suggest it speaks to a certain lack of imaginative skill on the part of the filmmaker; Meyers-Shyer is ‘simply drawing on elements of her own biography’, as

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Geoffrey Macnab put it (2017),52 here presuming that drawing on one’s personal history can ever indeed be straightforwardly ‘simple’. Such commentary frames the director as falling back on the more prosaic territory of her own actual experience as opposed to being capable of newly envisioning creatively conjured landscapes, becoming a means by which to belittle the vision and value of the work (and the experiences being represented) as somehow insular and self-indulgent. In respect of this theme also, it is striking that Alice’s dead father, John Kinney, is a very particular kind of director, and one quite different to Meyers—a lauded auteur, whose Best Director Oscar and hand-marked scripts and moody monochrome film posters for his masterpiece, Lola In Between, still fill a room in Alice’s home and reduce Teddy to a star-struck fanboy. Indeed, more than one reviewer invoked revered 1970s auteur John Cassavetes as the seeming template here; Julia Cooper, for example, understands Bergen’s role as ‘an endearing Gena Rowlands-like stand-in’.53 Thus, Home Again seems both to very much invoke the autobiographical cross-generational territory of Meyers-Shyer’s Hollywood upbringing in a filmmaking ‘dynasty’, and to significantly rewrite that autobiography, by removing her mother from the auteur-director role and instead seeming to revere an entirely standardised vision of the ‘edgy’, masculine creative as distinguished artist. However, by way of conclusion, I want to focus on another of the vital and striking motifs that emerges in the accounts and reception of this film’s making; namely both women’s/both filmmakers’ absolute resistance to falling into the familiar narrative trope of the mother-daughter cross-generational relationship as one which is almost inevitably fraught, testing, even rivalrous. Throughout interviews, the women regularly receive leading questions about how they interacted on set, and the nature of their relationship, which neither Meyers-Shyer nor Meyers bite. Instead, mother and daughter stand unified, Meyers-Shyer unequivocally declaring her admiration for her mother’s work as constituting ‘feminist films, and important movies’.54 Here the two proffer an affirmative insistence on their mutual pleasure in, and indebtedness to one another, having collaborated on the film, in a manner that attests to a kind of feminist retrieval of the mother-daughter relationship from patriarchally percolated conflict. Their doggedness on this point poses a challenge to the notion that third-­ wave feminist daughters are almost inevitably desirous to distance themselves from their second-wave mothers. Interviewed in a short filmed Q&A for mydomaine.com, for example, the two respond to the one-word question ‘Challenges?’ as follows:

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NM:

People think it’s going to be hard because mothers and daughters don’t supposedly get along. I don’t think that’s so true. I think mothers adore their daughters and daughters adore their moms. HMS: Yeah, and it’s kind of an age-old tradition, ‘So and So & sons’ are a family, you carry on family businesses and this was ours. It was both of my parents’ job, it was my grandfather’s job on my dad’s side […] I just think it was a natural thing for me NM: It’s really rewarding to share what you know with your child. It’s incredible. I’ll never have this experience again.55 Here Meyers opens by rebuffing the idea that mother-daughter collaboration must be doomed because (patriarchal) convention has had it for so long that this is an inescapably fractious relationship.56 Meyers-Shyer in turn notes that in contrast, the paternal legacy of the ‘& sons’ suffix has long been an accepted commonplace of commerce, and that she inherited her place in the ‘family business’ from both parents; before Meyers returns to an entirely positive summary of the experience of Home Again—the joy of passing on knowledge to her daughter—thereby evoking a matrilineal female-apprenticeship system in Hollywood, at last. Having said all this, it is imperative not to overstate the exceptionalism of the moment occasioned by Home Again, be that for the representation of women, of older-women/younger-men romance, or for women’s film history. After all, this is also the story of a privileged, normative, white woman nurturing access for another privileged, normative white woman, to make more films about privileged, normative white women. Indeed, Meyers-­ Shyer’s circumventing of Home Again’s lack of inclusivity or diversity in interview is derisory. Asked alongside her mother by The Sunday Times, ‘Do you think film-makers should be tackling diversity?’ she answered, with seeming obliviousness to intersectionality, ‘Yes… For this one, I felt I was catering to an underserved audience, which is female’57—as if making a female-protagonist led film negates any requirement to think about any other aspects of ‘diversity’. Similarly, tackled by Variety for having a cast which ‘is basically all white’, she again dodges accountability by responding similarly, ‘I was serving an underserved audience here with women…. I hope to have more diversity as I go on. It was a small cast’.58 Furthermore, it is important to note that woman-to-woman apprenticeships in the industry should not be sought or located only in the kind of directly (natal) matrilineal relationship found here. Still, it is

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striking that in the process of what was achieved in making Home Again, the cross-­ generational alliance mapped here provides not only a rare instance of women disordering Hollywood’s male-apprenticeship system; crucially too, it forms a challenge to pervasive ideas of the inherently conflictual nature of mother-daughter attachments. Here, ‘turning into your mother’ is no longer the daughter’s greatest fear as culture so often has it, but the realisation of just what she desired. As has been demonstrated, through interrogating the numerous ways in which the reception of Home Again invokes Meyers and parallels motifs common to the reception of Meyers’s work, one is able to unstitch some of the ubiquitous strategies commonly used to belittle the generic terrain of romcom and the work of popular/populist women filmmakers. Thus it is imperative that scholarship turns assiduous attention, as undertaken here, to the ‘left behind’ texts of chick-flick cinema in order to more fully understand the multitude of ways in which such women’s filmmaking is received in an inherently gendered fashion, that work from a baseline presumption that it cannot be anything other than trite. Despite the culture outlined, and just as Meyers first did a decade and a half before with Something’s Gotta Give, in Home Again Meyers-Shyer contests some of the limits and conservative reputation of the chick-flick, even while, somewhat paradoxically, like Meyers she does so within an entirely rarefied milieu. As charted here, in Shyer-Meyers’s case, this has entailed imagining a rich breadth of intergenerational relationships and possibilities, and memorably envisioning a contented and appealing single woman framed without romantic prospects at the film’s end, while at the same time too easily sidestepping attention to inclusivity. And it is in respect of this simultaneous challenge to/adherence to the genre’s familiar lines, and not merely the film’s abundance of cashmere throws and Pottery Barn lanterns, that Meyers-Shyer’s film seems most indebted to her mother’s work; and that we cannot separate an analysis of Home Again’s cross-­generational relationships from awareness of her mother’s work, since as Newsweek unambiguously pronounced, ‘Nancy Meyers singlehandedly turned the middle-aged romantic comedy into a viable genre’.59 Once more, romcom is the generic space that proves most willing to put the subjectivity of an older woman desired by a younger man centre-stage in popular culture, attesting that in an industrial and cultural landscape where she barely exists, romantic comedy continues to provide her with an unusually welcoming home, again.

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Acknowledgements  Many thanks to delegates at the 2018 ‘Doing Women’s Film & Television History’ conference, Barbara Brickman and her ‘Girls Make Movies’ students at the University of Alabama; the Melbourne Women’s Film Festival; Su Holmes; Peggy Tally; and the editors of this collection, for sharing thoughtful discussion and feedback during the completion of this essay.

Notes 1. Shyer acted as 2nd Unit Director on the film, as reviews sometimes noted (e.g. Dargis, 2017; Rife, 2017). Though some writers did indeed invoke Meyers-Shyer as the daughter of both Meyers and Shyer, still her directorial lineage was overwhelmingly situated as being passed most notably through her mother. 2. Tim Robey. ‘Home Again review: Reese Witherspoon boo-hoos her way through a Good Housekeeping nightmare, The Telegraph, September 28, 2017, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/home-reviewreese-witherspoonboo-hoos-way-good-housekeeping/ [accessed March 14, 2018]. 3. Ibid. 4. Melissa Silverstein. ‘The Contradictory Feminism of Nancy Meyers’ The Intern’, September 28, 2015, indiewire.com, available at: http://www. indiewire.com/2015/09/the-contradictoryfeminism-of-nancy-meyersthe-intern-213252/ [accessed March 15, 2016]. This ‘calling card’ points to the success in particular of Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated (2009), films in which ageing divorcees Erica (Diane Keaton) and Jane (Meryl Streep), respectively, both unexpectedly find later life love again (though some years down the line from Alice). Hence Meyers has carved a reputation for being a filmmaker who is particularly perceptive regarding the desires of older women, both in terms of the characters she writes and the audiences she serves. 5. Dafna Lemish and Varda Muhlbauer. ‘“Can’t Have It All”: Representations of Older Women in Popular Culture’, Women & Therapy, 35:3–4 (2012), pp. 165–180. 6. Mark Jenkins. “Home Again’ is a single-mom romcom with a twist: The kids are courted too’, The Washington Post, September 7, 2017. 7. Deborah Jermyn. Nancy Meyers (London and New  York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 8. Francesca Babb. ‘Nancy Meyers: The rom-com queen’, The Independent, January 9, 2010, available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/nancy-meyers-the-romcom-queen-1862430. html [accessed April 14, 2014]. Julia Cooper. ‘Director Hallie Meyers-

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Shyer debuts with charming romcom Home Again’, The Globe and Mail, September 7, 2017, available at: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ arts/film/film-reviews/review-director-hallie-meyers-shyer-debuts-withcharming-rom-com-home-again/article36201527/ [accessed March 14, 2018]. 9. Perhaps the closest similar instance of such matrilineal directorial lineage is that of Australian director Gillian Armstrong and her emergent filmmaker daughter Billie Pleffer. Equally, the distinctions between them should not be glossed over in an effort only to point to their shared gender/familial links, given that Armstrong has built her career across both the Australian and US film industries and both documentary and fiction filmmaking, while Pleffer’s entry into the industry has been by way of film shorts and, more recently at the time of writing, television. Doubtless early cinema histories might uncover ‘lost’ precedents, but none remain as readily documented today as that of Meyers and Meyers-Shyer in this instance. 10. Details of the Women Film Pioneers Project, which seeks to ‘jumpstart historical research on the work of women filmmakers from the early years of cinema […]’ and ‘to reconfigure world film knowledge by foregrounding an undocumented phenomenon’, can be found at https://wfpp.cdrs. columbia.edu/. 11. Richard Lawson. ‘Reese Witherspoon heads into an Uncanny Valley’, Vanity Fair, September 7, 2017, available at: https://www.vanityfair. com/hollywood/2017/09/home-again-movie-review-reese-witherspoon-nancy-meyers [accessed March 14, 2018]. 12. Jon Frosch. Review of Home Again, The Hollywood Reporter, September 5, 2017, available at: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/homeagain-1033104 [accessed March 14, 2018]. 13. Kate Erbland. ‘Hallie Meyers-Shyer Debuts With a Rom-Com That Heavily Draws From Her Own Mother’s Career’, IndieWire.com, September 5, 2017, available at: https://www.indiewire.com/2017/09/ home-again-review-hallie-meyers-shyer-debut-1201872097/ [accessed March 14, 2018]. 14. Jermyn 2017, pp. 90 and 178. 15. For Meyers’s most overtly reflexive films as director in this vein, see Something’s Gotta Give and The Holiday (2003). 16. Ruth Kinane, Ruth. ‘Home Again: Reese Witherspoon explains the state of the modern rom-com’, Entertainment Weekly online, August 15, 2017, available at: https://ew.com/movies/2017/08/15/home-again-reesewitherspoon-state-of-modern-rom-com/ [accessed March 14, 2018]. 17. Diane Negra. What a Girl Wants: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009).

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18. Indeed, in keeping with this we learn Alice has previously been a clothes designer and photographer. 19. Jermyn 2017, p. 146. 20. Jenkins 2017. 21. Frosch 2017. 22. Lawson 2017. 23. Carson Griffith. ‘Nancy Meyers and Hallie Meyers-Shyer Tell AD the Secrets Behind the Set of Home Again’, Architectural Digest, September 15, 2017, available at: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/ nancy-meyers-and-hallie-meyers-shyer-tell-ad-the-secrets-behind-the-setof-home-again [accessed March 14, 2018]. 24. Lake Bell’s performance as the self-centred Zoey here will also prompt deja-vu for fans of Meyers, given her earlier and not dissimilar supporting role in It’s Complicated. 25. Silverstein 2015. 26. Carrie Rickey. ‘With “The Intern” Nancy Meyers Keeps Exploring Women’s Relationships’, The New York Times, September 18, 2015, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/movies/with-theintern-nancy-meyers-keeps-exploring-relationships.html?_r=0 [accessed November 12, 2015]. 27. Manhola Dargis. ‘Review: In ‘The Intern,’ She’s the Boss, but He’s the Star’, The New York Times, September 24, 2015, available at https://www. nytimes.com/2015/09/25/movies/review-the-intern-proves-experience-doesnt-have-to-start-at-the-top.html [accessed November 12, 2015]. 28. Jermyn 2017, p. 155. 29. Alix O’Neill. ‘Why does dating a younger man still raise eyebrows? Meet the couples making it work’, March 31, 2017, The Telegraph, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/relationships/does-datingyounger-man-still-raise-eyebrows-meet-couples-making/ [accessed July 25, 2018]. 30. A ‘cougar’ is defined by Montemurro and Siefkin as ‘a popular descriptor of older, unmarried women who express their sexuality by publicly pursuing younger men for casual relationships or sexual encounters…. Although cougar is often used as a pejorative or caricature of a desperate divorcee, it recognises the fact that women can continue to have sex lives beyond the age of forty’ (Beth Montemurro and Jenna Marie Siefkin. ‘Cougars on the prowl? New perceptions of older women’s sexuality’, Journal of Aging Studies, 28 (2014) p. 35. Meyers-Shyer has commented that ‘I really don’t like the word cougar’ (Kelley, 2017), underlining the sense in which it generally carries unpleasantly predatory connotations. 31. MILF is another popular expression for a sexually desirable older woman, being an acronym for Mother I’d Like to Fuck.

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32. James Mottram. Review of Home Again, Total Film, September 25, available at: https://www.gamesradar.com/movies-to-watch-29-september-2017/ [accessed March 14, 2018] To be clear, this is not to say that chick-flicks can’t ordinarily be ‘social comedies’, but rather to note that they are rarely situated as such. 33. Deborah Jermyn. ‘Grey is the new green’?: Gauging age(ing) in Hollywood’s upper quadrant female audience, The Intern (2015), and the discursive construction of ‘Nancy Meyers”, Celebrity Studies, 9:2 (2018), pp. 166–185. 34. Erbland 2017. 35. Betty Kaklamanidou. ‘Pride and Prejudice: Celebrity Versus Fictional Cougars’, Celebrity Studies, 3:1 (2012), p. 85. 36. Manhola Dargis. ‘In ‘Home Again,’ an Imitation of Life (and Mom)’, The New  York Times, September 6, available at: https://www.nytimes. com/2017/09/06/movies/home-again-review-hallie-meyers-shyer.html [accessed March 14, 2018]. 37. Kinneret Lahad. A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 4. This is a modern movement one might in part trace back to the huge cultural preoccupation that met the fictional adventures of 30-something ‘singleton’ Bridget Jones in the years preceding this, with Helen Fielding’s newspaper column (which was subsequently adapted into a highly successful book and film franchise), launching in UK newspaper The Independent in 1995. And while Lahad is interested in child-free single women, her account is still apposite here. 38. Ibid., p. 6. 39. Kinane 2017. 40. Dargis 2017. 41. Erbland 2017. 42. Abigail Jones. ‘Can the rom-com be saved? ‘Home Again’ Director Hallie Meyers-Shyer Delves Into the Genre Her Mother Mastered’, Newsweek, September 7, 2017, available at: https://www.newsweek.com/rom-comhallie-meyers-shyer-nancy-meyers-home-again-661049 [accessed March 14, 2018]. 43. Jermyn 2017. 44. Kinane 2017. 45. Melena Ryzik. ‘Reese Witherspoon Knows Rom-Coms Need an Image Makeover’, The New York Times, September 3, 2017, available at: https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/movies/reese-witherspoon-homeagain-younger-men.html [accessed March 14, 2018]. 46. Francesca Angelini. ‘Nancy Meyers and Hallie Meyers-Shyer: What women film-makers want’, The Sunday Times, October 1, 2017, available at:

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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/home-again-reese-witherspoonnancy-meyers-hallie-meyers-shyer-what-women-film-makers-want-gvlcz8lst [accessed March 14, 2018]. 47. Katie Rife. ‘You can’t go Home Again (and should probably stay away the first time)’, The A.V.  Club (online), September 7, 2017, available at: https://www.avclub.com/you-can-t-go-home-again-and-should-probably-stay-away-1801916376 [accessed March 14, 2018]. Richard Roeper. ‘Reese Witherspoon, ‘Home Again’ People are Likable If Not Relatable’, Chicago Sun Times, September 7, 2017, available at: https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/reese-witherspoon-homeagain-people-are-likable-if-not-relatable/ [accessed March 14, 2018]. 48. Karen Bowdre. ‘Romantic Comedies and the Raced Body’, in Abbott, Stacey and Jermyn, Deborah (eds), Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2009), pp. 105–116. 49. Bobby Finger. ‘Home Again Is the Bizarro Nancy Meyers Movie You Didn’t Know You Needed’, The A.V.  Club online, September 8, 2017, available at: https://themuse.jezebel.com/home-again-is-the-bizarronancy-meyers-movie-you-didnt-1802729256 [accessed March 14, 2018]. See Cooper 2017. 50. Roeper 2017; Jones 2017; Erbland 2017. 51. Jermyn 2017. 52. Geoffrey Macnab. Review of Home Again, The Independent, September 27, 2017, available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/film-reviews-roundup-goodbye-christopher-robinhome-again-daphne-pecking-order-zoology-a7970056.html [accessed March 14, 2018]. 53. Cooper 2017. Actor Gena Rowlands was also Cassavetes’s wife, and ‘muse’, working with him in numerous collaborations. See also Finger 2017. 54. Seth Kelley. ‘Hallie Meyers-Shyer on Creating ‘Home Again,’ Growing Up in Hollywood and Her Mom’s Kitchens’, Variety, September 7, 2017, available at: https://variety.com/2017/film/news/home-again-halliemeyers-shyer-reese-witherspoon-nancy-1202550148/ [accessed March 14, 2018]. 55. Hadley Mendelsohn. ‘How Nancy Meyers and Her Daughter Are Paving the Way for Women in Hollywood’, mydomaine.com, September 8, 2017, available at: https://www.mydomaine.co.uk/nancy-meyers-interview [accessed March 14, 2018]. 56. As Adrienne Rich wrote so compellingly, ‘The cathexis between mother and daughter—essential, distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story… this relationship has been minimized and trivialized in the annals of patriarchy. Whether in theological doctrine or art or sociology or psycho-

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analytic theory, it is the mother and son who appear as the eternal, determinative dyad… the relationship between mother and daughter has been profoundly threatening to men’ (Adrienne Rich Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, London: Virago, 1977, pp. 225–226). More than 40 years on, it remains in the interests of the patriarchy that mothers and daughters ‘don’t get on’, and thus to fan the flames of divisiveness between them; in this vein some feminist commentators have critiqued the very premise of conceptualising feminism/s via the pervasive notion of ‘waves’, an approach which they show at its heart envisions the discourse of feminism as one of generational competition, while subscribing to a reductive, linear approach to history that simplifies histories of feminisms (e.g. see Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, London: SAGE 2009). 57. Angelini 2017. 58. Kelley 2017. 59. Jones 2017.

Same Sex Romantic Cross Generational Relationships

Ageing Predators and Asexual Old Queens: Challenging Stereotypes of Cross-­ Generational Gay Relationships in Beginners and Gerontophilia Niall Richardson

As many of the chapters in this collection have argued, ageism is gendered. While female ageing is a source of anxiety and shame, older men do not face the same level of socio-cultural prejudice.1 However, the case is somewhat different for ageing gay men who, in many ways, face similar problems as those experienced by ageing women.2 Arguably, this has been encouraged by the media which have employed many of the same coding strategies in its representation of older gay men as it has done for older women. There are two dominant media stereotypes of ageing gay men. The first is the older, predatory gay who seeks to ‘corrupt’ innocent, younger men. This is not only the trope of ageing homosexuality as a direct threat to

N. Richardson (*) University of Sussex, Sussex, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_6

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society but also something coded implicitly as a type of contagion; a ‘sickness’ which younger, heterosexual men could catch if they are not careful (see next section). The second stereotype is the desexualised figure of the ‘old queen’—a body whose ageing and effeminacy removes him from the scheme of sexuality because he occupies a liminal space between gendered identifications. In contrast to the older gay predator, this type is coded either as an object of pity and/or humour (see next section). Most importantly, neither of these types are ever shown to be able to maintain a meaningful, romantic relationship. This chapter will discuss how both these stereotypes can be seen to hold similarities with the prejudices surrounding ageing femininity and will then analyse two contemporary film texts— Beginners and Gerontophilia—which have tried to challenge these tropes and revise the accepted narrative of the older gay man who is desperately lonely and incapable of maintaining a relationship.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane and Her Gay Coded Pianist? Female and Gay Male Ageing Many of the chapters in this collection have argued that gerontophobia is gendered. Ageing women do face more socio-cultural pressures than ageing men. However, it is worth acknowledging that there are certain similarities between representations of ageing heterosexual women and ageing gay men. As remarkable as it may seem to us now, when Anglophone popular culture first started addressing social ‘problems’ (e.g. race/racism, age and (homo)sexuality) in the 1950s/60s it coded both female ageing and homosexuality as a type of contagion which could infect innocent, young people. Hollywood’s monster movies—often allegories for the socio-­ political anxieties of the time—coded feminine ageing as a highly dangerous disease which, if it was not quarantined, could infect or even kill innocent people.3 For example, The Leech Woman (dir: Dein, 1960) and The Wasp Woman (dirs: Corman and Hill, 1959) both represented ageing women who had discovered a means of vampire-like rejuvenation. Yet this process of revival required that they drain the life force from innocent, youthful victims. As can only be expected, both monsters are killed at the end of the film and the world is now safe from the threat of ageing femininity.

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This suggestion of contagion was also one of the key coding strategies used to depict gay men on the 1950s and 1960s cinema screen. While Hollywood narratives represented gay-coded characters attempting to seduce the unsuspecting victim, and thus lure their prey into the twilight world of queerness,4 other representations explicitly coded homosexuality as a contagious disease. The 1961 US ‘social guidance’ film, Boys Beware: Homosexuals are on the Prowl (dir: Sid Davis) warned young men about the ‘dangerous’ and ‘predatory’ homosexuals who were lurking in everyday places. It narrates how the teenager Jimmy meets the much, much older, sunglass-wearing Ralph (sunglasses were, apparently, de rigeur fashion for ‘predatory homosexuals’) and they become friends. The climax of the film occurs when the narrator reveals that: What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious—a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual: a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex.

There are several terrifying misconceptions articulated here. First, Boys Beware asserts that homosexuality (like ageing femininity in The Leech Woman) is a disease that is highly contagious. The implication is that Jimmy may now have caught this sickness from prolonged exposure to Ralph. The use of smallpox as a simile must be read as deliberately provocative given that, in the 1960s, smallpox (once a great terror of society) had been eradicated through medical developments. Arguably, Boys Beware is implying that medical science would, given time, also succeed in eliminating the ‘disease’ of homosexuality or, at the very least, invent a vaccine against it. Second, the narrative confuses (or deliberately conflates?) homosexuality with paedophilia by representing the teenage Jimmy being lured into danger by the middle-aged Ralph. Unfortunately, as Nancy Knauer has argued, this stereotype of ‘the aging queen qua paedophile’5 is still one that lingers in contemporary, popular cultural representation. Consequently, the Boys Beware stereotype of the older gay men as lonely, embittered and, most importantly, predatory is one of the most enduring images of ageing homosexuality.6 Indeed, in his landmark study of how the older gay man was discursively constructed, Raymond Berger summarised this commonplace assumption of how the ageing gay man was thought to live:

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The older homosexual…is alienated from friends and family alike, and he lives alone, not by choice but by necessity. At thirty, he is old. Since he is no longer sexually attractive to other homosexuals, he is forced to prey on children and to pursue anonymous sexual contacts in public places such as restrooms and parks. He is desperately unhappy.7

This stereotype has been furthered by mainstream cinema. Not only have films from the 1960/70s, such as Death in Venice (dir: Vischonti, 1971), represented the older, gay man as a lonely, sexual predator, desperate to win the affections of a much younger man, but more recent cinematic texts, such as Gods and Monsters (dir: Condon, 1998), Love and Death on Long Island (dir: Kwietniewski, 1997), City of Your Final Destination (dir: Ivory, 2009) have—arguably—continued this trope. In these more recent films, there is the same motif of the isolated, ageing gay men who is desperate to seduce a much younger man.8 Although these films are more nuanced than earlier representations (I have praised Love and Death on Long Island’s subtle critique of heritage conventions (Richardson 2019) and Michael Williams offers a stirring defence of Gods and Monsters in this collection), these films do continue the tradition of representing ageing homosexuality as an existence of loneliness and sexual frustration in which the older gay man preys upon younger men. The second similarity in media discourses between ageing women and gay men is that both are subject to the tyranny of The Beauty Myth.9 Although it is true that heterosexual men are now experiencing greater pressures to conform to hegemonic standards of masculine beauty,10 it is still predominantly straight women and gay men who are required to objectify their bodies, internalising the gaze which regiments and demands standards of physical excellence.11 Like heterosexual women, gay men know what it feels like to be appraised simply in terms of physical beauty and to experience the demands to conform to culturally recognised standards of youthful attractiveness. A cursory glance at gay popular culture (magazines, online social networks, bars and clubs) will reveal an unashamed celebration of youthful beauty which parallels, if not even mirrors, the adoration of girlish femininity within heterosexual society and so older gay men may well find themselves excluded from youth oriented gay culture.12 In gay culture the body is very often a type of cultural capital— the symbol of belonging to specific groups. When the body ages, and is unable to conform to the requisite standards of gym-toned beauty,13 then the older gay man can experience rejection and alienation from gay culture.

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There are several theories as to why the youthful, fit body is so revered within hegemonic gay culture. First, as Hajek and Giles argue,14 many younger gay men are highly distrustful of all older people (not just older gay men) because of the bad experiences they have had in experiencing rejection during their coming out.15 Second, hegemonic gay male culture’s fetishization of the fit ‘looking’ body type may, on one level be a response to the AIDS pandemic. A muscular body is read as an uninfected body. Third, this focus on care-of-self may also be viewed as a ‘coping mechanism’ for dealing with exclusion from heteronormative society.16 If people feel unloved and rejected from mainstream culture then they can often make their own bodies their love interest and focus on perfecting this. However, like ageing women who try unsuccessfully to mask the ageing process, if the older gay man tries to disguise his ageing then he is ridiculed. While the label ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ (with its class-based connotations of sexual laxity17 are not levelled at the age-ashamed gay man, the pejorative term of ‘old queen’ certainly is. Like the ageing woman, trying to fool people with excessive make-up and hair dye, the ‘old queen’ is considered equally grotesque. It is perhaps for this reason that popular Western media has often paired the ageing female grotesque with her gay-coded male sidekick—both outcasts from the requirements of their cultures. Baby Jane and her effeminate pianist (played by Victor Buono—an actor whose homosexuality was an open-secret in 1950s Hollywood) are the most famous example but more recent partnerships, referencing this motif, have included Bobbi Adler (Debbie Reynolds) and her pianist in Will & Grace and Violet (Frances de la Tour) paired with the old ‘queens’ in the British sitcom Vicious. Arguably, one of the most famous media representations of this type was the late, great Quentin Crisp: the self-identified ‘last stately homo of Britain’ and also a writer, raconteur, occasional actor and more often someone who was merely famous for being famous. Most importantly, Crisp was one of the first publicly identified homosexuals (he predated the popularization of the label gay) and in this respect Crisp helped to codify the iconography of (ageing) homosexuality in the minds of much of the heteronormative majority.18 Once considered a pioneer for early gay rights (if only because he attained visibility for the identification) Crisp was later vilified by Gay Liberation. Peter Tatchell, for example, labelled Crisp as ‘self-hating’ and ‘homophobic’19—given that Crisp, throughout his career, had demonstrated little support for the idea of equal rights.

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One of the main problems that gay activism had with Crisp, especially from the 1970s onwards, was the way Crisp argued for an essentialised view of homosexuality as effeminacy. In an often-quoted passage from his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, Crisp asserted that homosexuals ‘must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine’.20 Given that a key agenda in 1970s gay liberation politics was the de-sissification of homosexuality, in which gay men appropriated the signifiers of heterosexual masculinity,21 Crisp’s identification of homosexuality within the matrix of gender transitivity was problematic for many gay activists of the time. Even more distressing was the way Crisp asserted that the innately effeminate homosexual could never attain any true erotic and romantic satisfaction: The parallel problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a ‘real’ man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who ‘goes with’ other men is not what they would call a real man. This conundrum is incapable of resolution…’22

In Crisp’s essentialist view of gender and sexuality roles, not only are gay men innately effeminate but they desire an ‘authentic’ masculinity which they can never attract. Of course, it should be remembered that Crisp, writing in an era predating academic Gender Studies, was obviously struggling to comprehend and reconcile several critical paradigms—not least the formulation of the sexual matrix premised upon performative gender. Yet, irrespective of how Crisp was essentialising gender and sexual identifications, his comments undoubtedly made many gay men read Crisp as defeatist and self-loathing. Most importantly, Crisp’s view that homosexuality could never attain any erotic or sexual union, so that ‘the homosexual world is a world of spinsters’,23 furthered the belief that gay men inevitably became embittered and lonely, old ‘queens’. It is fair to speculate that, until relatively recently, the only publicly recognisable representation of the older gay man was Quentin Crisp and so even his name is now used as a shorthand to denote a type of effeminate, ageing gay man. The two contemporary films discussed in this chapter are attempting to negotiate the legacy of these two dominant tropes: the predatory older gay man and the desexualised, spinster-like Crispan ‘queen’. Beginners (dir: Mills, 2010) challenges the received narrative of the older gay man who preys upon a younger man and forges a cross-generational relationship through emotional or financial exploitation (Robinson 2008;

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Steinman 1990). Gerontophilia (dir: LaBruce, 2013) moves one stage further and asks the spectator to reconsider the image of the abject, desexualised old ‘queen’ (can this older body be an object of desire?) through a very unsettling challenge to dynamics of gendered and eroticised spectatorship.

Beginners Inspired by the late coming-out of his own father, Beginners is Mike Mills’ semi-autobiographical film. It tells the story of Oliver (Ewan McGregor), a heterosexual man in his thirties, who is reflecting on his father Hal’s coming-out at age 75 followed by his death from cancer a short time after his announcement. Hal is played by Christopher Plummer who received critical acclaim for his performance—including the 2011 Best Supporting Actor Oscar, making Plummer the oldest actor to have received an Oscar. Beginners has been the subject of academic critical attention,24 particularly how the figure of the older gay man has been coded in the narrative. Beginners is certainly trying to challenge many preconceptions around gay male ageing, coming-out narratives and cross-generational same-sex relationships. Most obviously, the film is determined to overthrow the ‘persistent stereotype of the predatory, miserable, and lonely ageing gay man’.25 In part, this is achieved through the film’s reworking of narrative conventions. First, Beginners reverses the coming-out narrative in which children usually come-out to their parents. In Beginners it is a 75-year-old father who comes out to his son. Second, the film is also challenging the coming-out moment as signifying the end of the story for the gay character.26 Dennis Allen has argued that much American popular culture tends to link ‘homosexuality to a narrative of disclosure’27 in which the coming-­ out moment signifies the finale of the character’s storyline. Popular television dramas often feature the coming-out narrative as the only story for the gay character so that, after coming-out, the gay character is usually left with ‘narrative redundancy’28 and then written out of the drama altogether. Beginners challenges this paradigm by featuring an older (indeed a terminally ill) gay man who only starts to ‘live’ after his coming out. Hal and his son Oliver become closer than they have ever been before and Hal finds more romantic and emotional fulfilment in the short time he has with his lover Andy than he did over the rest of his earlier life. Third, as Hess argues, Beginners not only revises narrative conventions but questions the very reliability of all narration. Key to this is the character of

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Oliver who, as a homodiegetic character narrator, both narrates the film but is also an active participant in the story. As Hess points out, Oliver continually questions his own ability to narrate with accuracy and therefore interrogates the very ‘construction of identity through narrative’.29 Beginners prepares the spectator for this challenge to narrative in an early scene when Oliver’s voiceover tells the spectator that ‘this is what life was like in 1950s America’, accompanied by a montage of media images from 1950s popular culture. Oliver then follows this with a similar narration of contemporary North American life—again accompanied by popular media images. The sequence demonstrates that what we think we know about life is simply a system of cultural representations and narrative histories which are highly subjective and open to personal interpretation. This scene, drawing attention to the unreliability of narrative conventions, prepares the spectator for the way in which Beginners then proceeds to challenge the assumed narratives of older gay men and their romantic relationships. Therefore, in the next sequence, Oliver narrates that he remembers his father wearing a purple sweater when telling him that he was gay but that, in fact, Hal was wearing a dressing gown. The film represents Hal in this purple jumper saying, direct to camera, that he is gay and then there is a cut to another shot of Hal saying, once again, ‘I’m gay’ but this time wearing his robe. This montage then continues by introducing a third shot of Hal—this time dressed in an olive-brown sweater—and continues to cut between Hal saying the same sentence while dressed in robe, purple sweater and olive sweater. The sequence not only stresses the unreliability of Oliver’s narration (Oliver is not actively trying to deceive the spectator but merely pointing out that the art of narrating is difficult) but is also questioning the reliability of all narratives. Most significantly, this sequence draws attention to the assumed iconography of ageing gay men through the key semiotic of the purple (or lavender) sweater. Although Plummer is the same in all the shots, the change in fashion inflects the image with a different nuance so that Hal looks more like the stereotypical older ‘queen’ in the lavender sweater than when he is in the robe or olive sweater. This visual trip-wire is intended to make the spectators question why they, like Oliver, would assume that the older gay man would be dressed in lavender-purple and therefore reflect on the legacy of the Crispan model that had enshrined this iconography in cultural perception. Most importantly, Beginners is attempting to make the spectator consider how certain narratives are accepted as unquestioned truth in specific cultures. The film makes this very explicit in a later scene in which Hal

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rewrites the death of Jesus in his diary. Instead of the savage death by crucifixion, Hal narrates how Jesus died peacefully, as an old man, surrounded by his friends. When Oliver reads this story he is amazed that his father has rewritten Jesus’ death. As Hess argues, ‘Oliver’s surprise shows that some narratives are so fundamentally embedded in a culture that they become the invisible and unquestioned norm’.30 However, what is particularly charming about Beginners is not simply that it rewrites narratives throughout but demonstrates how the ideology of a narrative is dependent upon personal interpretation. This is made clear to the spectator in an early sequence in the film when Hal telephones his son to chat about the evening he has spent in a gay club. (There is even a visual in-joke in this scene—referencing Plummer’s most famous film role—as Hal is shown to experience a type of epiphany because of The Sound of Music [but in this case it is house music rather than ‘doh ray me’] in the gay club.) The scene in which Hal dances by himself to house music could, in another narrative, be coded as a moment of intense sadness in which the lonely, older man is forced to dance by himself in the club— ignored by all the younger men on the dancefloor. Yet Beginners represents Hal as accepting that he will be invisible on the dancefloor but, nevertheless, gaining a great deal of joy from the physical pleasure of dancing to the pulsing house music. After his evening in the gay club, Hal telephones Oliver in the middle of the night to enquire about the name of this addictive, thumping music. The sequence edits to a shot of Oliver telling Hal that it was probably house music and then enquiring if Hal had met anyone. Hal replies that he hadn’t become acquainted with anyone because younger gay men are not interested in older gay men. This line is then followed by a shot of Hal, sitting alone at the bar and sipping his cocktail—a much more stereotypical image of the lonely, older, gay man. However, the point is that this image of Hal as lonely at the bar has not been anchored by a specific point of view. The spectator is unsure if this is still Hal’s memory of the evening or if this is now Oliver’s interpretation of how he believes the event may have looked. Therefore, the sequence is drawing attention to how events may be read in different ways by different people. Hal’s evening in the club may well have been a very pleasant experience in which he, although being older and unfamiliar with the music, had a very enjoyable time dancing to pulsating house rhythms. On the other hand, the evening could be interpreted as a depressing experience emphasising the isolation of the older gay man. The fact that someone is on their own in the gay club does not necessarily mean that the person is

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lonely and unhappy. Beginners’ deliberate confusion of focalisation, emphasising that narratives are personally subjective, is probably one of the reasons why many reviewers identified the film as having a dream-like feel (Schwarzbaum 2011) as shots are often divorced from a specific character’s point of view in order to create a haemorrhaging of focalisation and, in this respect, a ‘dreamy’ quality to the film text. Beginners’ deliberate play with narration not only questions how we should read the image of the older gay man but then interrogates the narrative trope of the older gay man who lusts after younger men—often having to pay or coerce intimate exchanges. In contrast to earlier representations, Hal is shown to enjoy a ‘fulfilled relationship’31 with his younger boyfriend Andy and the film even depicts Andy visiting Hal in the hospital, insisting upon his right to see Hal and kissing him ‘triumphantly’32 to proclaim that he is Hal’s partner. Again, as with the house club sequence, Beginners disturbs the spectator’s expectations of focalisation and narrative. Many earlier HIV/AIDS awareness films emphasised a narrative in which the gay lover was denied hospital visitation rights to his dying partner—often barred from the ward by the terminally ill man’s parents or siblings. The point of focalisation in these narratives was usually the gay lover—barred from seeing his dying partner—and thus coded as a helpless, powerless victim. Beginners, however, reverses the point of focalisation by offering Oliver’s point of view as he is forced to tolerate Andy who is barging into the hospital room, interrupting the time that Oliver and Hal are having together, while insisting that he has the right to be there. While Andy forces many kisses on Hal, there is a shot of Oliver looking rather upset that Andy has disturbed the time he was having with his father but aware that he is unable to say anything because of the received narrative of families barring gay lovers from hospitals. This deliberate inversion of the anticipated power dynamics also suggests that the younger gay men may not be the helpless victim of the cross-generational relationship either but may indeed have been the active suitor. The insistent way that Andy kisses Hal on the lips—even though Hal himself doesn’t seem to want such emphatic affection—suggests that if there is a dominant and controlling partner in the relationship then it certainly is not the older gay man. Beginners, therefore, is reversing the paradigm of the older, predatory gay man, who hunts after the unsuspecting and naïve younger man (often with offers of money), by representing the younger suitor as actively demanding the attention of the older man and declaring their relationship in a public space. Arguably, Beginners is asking the spectator to question

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the traditional ascription of power dynamics to the young-old partnership and perhaps reconsider previous interpretations of similar representations on the screen. Beginners is challenging not only the accepted coming-out narrative but also the discursively constructed identification for the older gay man. Hal is neither the lonely, old gay man nor the effeminate queen. Similarly, Hal may be at the end of his life but he is beginning a new era of emotional fulfilment and, most importantly, liberated fun. However, while Beginners challenges the narration of the dynamics of attraction in gay cross-generational relationships, Gerontophilia moves one stage further in its attempt to make the spectator question the assumed un-attractiveness of the ageing gay man who self identifies as an ‘old queen’.

Gerontophilia As I’ve argued already, the idea of the ‘old queen’, whose ageing effeminacy makes him fall between the gender binary and therefore be identified as un-sexual, was enshrined in the public imagination through the figure of Quentin Crisp. Gerontophilia (dir: La Bruce, 2013) is a remarkable film not only for the way it reclaims the stereotype of the ‘old queen’ but forces the spectator to consider the erotic potential of this type of body; a body type usually coded as abject in representations. What makes Gerontophilia a challenging film to watch is not only that the ageing, gay male body is coded as an object of desire but that the spectator is often situated within the erotic perspective of the young gerontophile who is lusting after the ageing ‘old queen’. The film tells the story of 19-year-old Lake (played by Canadian model Pier-Gabriel Lajoie) who has an erotic attraction to much, much older bodies. Lake secures a job in a nursing home where he meets the 80-year-old Melvyn Peabody (Walter Borden)—a self-identified ‘old queen’—and falls in love with him. The second half of the film develops into a road movie as Lake breaks Melvyn out of the care home and they embark on a trip across Canada together. Identified by commentators as a gay version of Harold and Maude (dir: Ashby, 1971), Gerontophilia is unusual in the Bruce LaBruce canon for having a more conventional approach to narration and for being much less sexually explicit than his earlier films. Gerontophilia does, however, continue the LaBrucian theme of queering sexual identifications, sexual desire and the very concept of ‘sexy’. For example, LaBruce’s previous film, L.A Zombie (2010), interrogated the ascription of sexiness within the cinematic canon through a queering of the figure of the zombie. While the

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vampire (every bit as undead as the zombie) has often been coded as hyper-sexual and sexy, the zombie has not. L.A Zombie represented the porn star Francois Sagat (arguably one of the most desirable bodies in gay popular culture) as the zombie protagonist and so the film asks the spectator to question not only cinematic traditions of sexiness but to challenge the politics of the erotic gaze itself. Is porn star Sagat still sexy when coded as the abject zombie? Gerontophilia develops this theme of queering the continuum of sexuality, sexual attraction and sexiness by representing the type of body that is usually celebrated for its beauty (19-year-old Lake—acted by a classically handsome male model) desiring the older body whose iconography usually inspires erotic numbness if not even revulsion. Although medical science continues to classify gerontophilia as a paraphilia (in the same league as paedophilia and necrophilia), and most medico-psychiatric analyses identify case studies in which abuse of older people has been the sole objective of the gerontophile,33 LaBruce’s film is asking the spectator to consider that gerontophilia should perhaps just be identified as unusual sexual desire. The opening sequence of Gerontophilia emphasises that the queering of sexual desire will be a key motif in the film by representing Lake and his girlfriend Desiree (Katie Boland) engaged in passionate kissing. While there is nothing unusual about two teenagers making-out, the film codes Desiree’s sexual excitement as being inspired just as much by the names of the feminist activists and writers that she is listing as by her smooches with Lake. This opening sequence asserts that even the most conventional, heterosexual lovemaking has the potential for queerness. Is Desiree turned on by kissing Lake or do his smooches simply provide a mechanical stimulation to accompany her true erotic pleasure of thinking about the famous feminists? The film then shows Lake walking home in a sequence which deliberately references the cinematic clichés that have been used to signify ‘perversity’ in previous representations. First, Lake stops to gaze upon a dead bird and, for a few moments, this scene suggests that he may be a necrophiliac. Not only is this a reference to the film Kissed (dir: Stopkewitch, 1996), in which the protagonist’s necrophilia is revealed through her gazing upon a dead animal, but is also the first time in the narrative that Lake has shown some genuine interest in anything. Lake’s gaze is then drawn to the image of the school pedestrian crossing and the patrol man ushering the little kids across the road. The camera offers the soft focus, slow

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motion perspective of Lake gazing upon the schoolkids and the patrol man and thus suggests the cinematic coding usually employed to denote paedophilia. However, it soon becomes apparent that Lake’s desire is not directed towards the little kids crossing the road but the very elderly patrol man. Arguably, the point of this sequence is to distinguish gerontophilia from both necrophilia and paedophilia. If the spectator was feeling anxious that the film’s protagonist would desire dead bodies or children, there is a surely a sense of relief at this moment to learn that Lake’s fetish is simply that he fancies older people. Throughout Gerontophilia, various sequences draw attention to the hypocrisy of much of contemporary neoliberal society which dictates that younger people are supposed to respect and admire the elderly but not find them sexually attractive. In one scene, Lake is doing some charcoal sketches while sitting on his bed where is a large picture of Gandhi behind his headboard. This image exemplifies the restricted continuum of idolization versus eroticization that is maintained in contemporary culture. It is acceptable for Lake to have a poster of Gandhi above his bed given contemporary society’s respect for Gandhi as one of the greatest human rights activists in history. However, if this poster above the bed were to be identified as an erotic pin-up (as posters in teenagers’ bedrooms often are), would contemporary society view the image in the same way? Similar to the scene in where Desiree’s pants the names of her feminist idols while she kisses Lake, the film is asking if hero-worship is distinct from desire or is there always some overlap. However, where Gerontophilia is truly challenging for the spectator is the way it manipulates empathy as the film progresses. Initially, Lake is represented as the film’s hero. He is appalled by the treatment of the older people in the care home (especially at the hands of dragon-esque matron Nurse Baptiste) and, in the early scenes of the film, the spectator should read Lake’s desires for the older characters as something laudable. As the film progresses though, the coding of Lake starts to change. In one scene, Lake is sketching Melvyn while he is sleeping on the bed. Lake has pulled the bed cloths back to reveal Melvyn’s naked body and is making a pencil sketch of the man’s nude form. After he has finished the sketch, Lake then starts to masturbate while gazing at the sleeping body of Melvyn. On one level, this scene continues the film’s critique of what is considered an ‘acceptable’ level of emotional investment in an older body. Is sketching a body always underpinned by eroticism and, if so, is it an appropriate level of erotic investment? When the artist’s gaze becomes salacious, inspiring

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masturbatory lust, does this pencil sketch become pornography rather than art? Most importantly, this scene is a pivotal moment in the narrative in which Lake transforms from a sympathetic character to someone who is coded as much less likable. Arguably, Lake’s erotic concern for Melvyn has now mutated into a form of abuse. As the film progresses, Lake becomes fiercely possessive of Melvyn and is even irritated when Melvyn speaks to a man in a café for no other reason than to ask for directions on the map. In one of the final sequences, Lake and Melvyn are in a gay bar and, when a young man shows an interest in Melvyn, Lake starts a bar-room brawl with the guy. What is remarkable about this narrative progression is that Melvyn, the body identified as physically undesirable, starts to become the more attractive character in the film while Lake, the body which accords to contemporary standards of youthful beauty, appears as a selfish, insecure and even sadistic bully. This reading is encouraged by the fact that Lake says very little in the film (his dialogue tends to be short, mumbled sentences delivered in a monotone voice) but Melvyn demonstrates wit and camp humour once he is free from the care home enforced diet of tranquilisers. One of Melvyn’s best one-liners was his response to Nurse Baptiste who told him that medication would be more effective if he took it on schedule. Melvyn replied: ‘Like the trains in Germany’. It soon becomes apparent that an evening in the company of Melvyn Peabody would be very entertaining while spending time with Lake would be exceedingly dull. Gerontophilia’s final image of Melvyn and Lake in the gay bar draws attention to this problem in their relationship by offering a shot of two same-sex couples (one lesbian, one gay) chatting at bar tables. The camera then pans to the left to show Melvyn and Lake slow-dancing together on the floor but not saying a single word to one another. The use of camera movement, rather than an edit, situates Lake and Melvyn in the same context as the other two couples to juxtapose the difference in the relationships. While the other couples are capable of conversation, demonstrating their emotional and intellectual connection, Lake and Melvyn are only united by physical desire. Gerontophilia is, of course, a film inspired by a highly unusual sexual relationship. Documented cases of such extreme cross-generational relationships (same sex or heterosexual) are very rare and so Gerontophilia, like Beginners, can be read as merely a meta-critical reflection on the dynamics of ageing gay male sexuality, desirability and cross-generational romance. Arguably, the heterosexually identified spectator is aware that

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such relationships are exceptional and so is not really being asked to question his/her perception of older gay male sexuality and cross-generational relationships in contemporary culture.

Conclusion Beginners and Gerontophilia have tried to revise both the Crispan stereotype of the desexualised ‘old queen’ and the trope of the older predator who exploits younger men in a manipulative cross-generational relationship. Beginners challenges the spectator’s expectations by reworking narratives of gay male ageing, romantic relationships and how these stories are interpreted while Gerontophilia makes the spectator question their own erotic response to the ‘abject’ ‘old queen’. However, while both films are addressing the situation of the older gay men and their cross-­ generational relationships, it could also be argued that these films were not really about these men and their relationships but instead focused on how contemporary society struggles to accept the sexual, older gay male body in a cross-generational relationship. Indeed, a comparison could be drawn with the types of Gay Affirmation and AIDS Awareness films of the early 1990s. Philadelphia (dir: Demme, 1993) (one of the most famous of these genres) is arguably not the story of a gay man who is dying of HIV/AIDS-­ related infections but is instead the narrative of how a homophobic lawyer can come to ‘tolerate’ homosexuality.34 Arguably, the same ideology is present in the two films discussed in this chapter in that their focus is on how the heteronormative majority contend with the ‘threat’ of the ageing, gay male body and the idea that this person may still be sexually desiring and desirable—even to younger, conventionally handsome men. Most importantly, while all three films may indeed represent ageing gay men in cross-generational romances, the narratives all end in death. In this respect, the challenge to the heteronormative family is ‘safely dead’35 by the films’ conclusions. At the end of both films, the final images are of conventionally attractive, young people.

Notes 1. See Carroll L.  Estes. ‘Women, Ageing and Inequality: A Feminist Perspective.’ In M.  L. Johnson (ed.) Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp.  552–559. Linda R.  Gannon. Women and Aging: Transcending the Myth (London:

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Routledge, 1999); Greer, Germaine, The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991). Joel Gwynne and Imelda Whelehan (eds.) Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Niall Richardson. Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema (London: I. B Tauris, 2018). Lynne Segal. Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (London: Verso, 2014). Susan Sontag. ‘The Double Standard of Aging.’ In V.  Carver and P.  Liddiard (eds.) An Aging Population: A Reader and Sourcebook (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 72–80. ulia Twigg. Fashion and Age: Dress, the Body and Later Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 2. See Jones and Pugh, 2005; Christopher Hajek and Howard Giles. ‘The Old Man Out: An Intergroup Analysis of Intergenerational Communication Among Gay Men.’ Journal of Communication, 52:4 (2002): pp. 698–714; Paul Simpson. ‘Alienation, Ambivalence, Agency: Middle-Aged Gay Men and Ageism in Manchester’s Gay Village.’ Sexualities, 16:3/4 (2013): pp. 283–299; Paul Simpson. Middle-Aged Gay Men, Ageing and Ageism: Over the Rainbow? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 3. Kathleen Slevin and Thomas Linneman. ‘Old Gay Men’s Bodies and Masculinities.’ Men and Masculinities, 12:4 (2010). 4. Richard Dyer. The Matter of Images (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 19–49. 5. Nancy Knaue. Gay and Lesbian Elders: History, Law and Identity Politics in the United States (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), p. 58. 6. Brian De Vries and John Blando. ‘The Study of Lesbian and Gay Aging: Lessons for Social Gerontology.’ In G. Herdt and B. de Vries (eds.) Gay and Lesbian Aging: Research and Future Directions (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2004), p. 7. Hajek and Giles 2002. 7. Berger, quoted in Rawls, Todd W. ‘Disclosure and Depression Among Older Gay and Homosexual Men: Findings from the Urban Men’s Health Study.’ In G. Herdt and B. de Vries (eds.) Gay and Lesbian Aging: Research and Future Directions (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2004), pp. 117–141. 8. John. R.  Yoakam. ‘Gods or Monsters: A Critique of Representations in Film and Literature of Relationships between Older Gay Men and Younger Men.’ Journal of Lesbian and Gay Social Services, 13:4 (2001), pp. 65–98. 9. DeVries and Blando 2004; Hajek and Giles 2002; Jones and Pugh 2005. 10. Rohlinger, Deana, A. ‘Eroticizing Men: Cultural Influences on Advertising and Male Objectification.’ Sex Roles, 46:3–4 (2002), pp. 61–74. 11. Jones and Pugh, p. 251. 12. Simpson 2013; Hajek and Giles 2002; Slevin and Linneman 2010.

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13. Erick Alvarez. Muscle Boys: Gay Gym Culture (London: Routledge, 2007). Tim Benzie. ‘Judy Garland at the Gym: Gay Magazines and Gay Bodybuilding’. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 14:2 (2000), pp. 159–170. 14. Hajek and Giles, p. 700. 15. A. R. D’Augelli. ‘Developmental Implications of Victimization of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Youths.’ In G. M. Herek (ed.), Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Issues, Vol. 4. Stigma and Sexual Orientation: Understanding Prejudice Against Lesbians, Gay Men, and Bisexuals (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), p. 194. 16. Hajek and Giles 2002, p. 705. 17. Helle Rexbeye and Jǿrgen Povlsen. ‘Visual Signs of Ageing: What are We Looking at?’ International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 2:1 (2007), pp. 61–83. 18. See Richard Dyer, p. 32. Mark Armstrong. ‘A Room in Chelsea: Quentin Crisp at Home.’ Visual Culture in Britain, 12:2 (2011), pp. 155–169. 19. Peter Tatchell. ‘Quentin Crisp was No Gay Hero’, The Independent, Tuesday 29 December, 2009. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ commentators/peter-tatchellquentin-crisp-was-no-gay-hero-1852122. html (accessed 11 August 2016). 20. Quentin Crisp. The Naked Civil Servant (London: Harper Perennial, 2007), p. 26. 21. Jeffrey Weeks. Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 198. 22. Crisp, p. 64. 23. Ibid., p. 159. 24. Margaret Gatling, Jane Mills and David Lindsay. ‘Sex after 60? You’ve Got to be Joking! Senior Sexuality in Comedy Film.’ Journal of Aging Studies, 40 (2017), pp. 23–28. Dustin Bradley Goltz. ‘Overcoming the Villainous Monster: The Beginnings of Heroic Gay Male Aging’. In Norma Jones and Bob Batchelor (eds.), Aging Heroes: Growing Old in Popular Culture (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), pp. 77–88. Pamela H. Gravagne. The Becoming of Age: Cinematic Visions of Mind, Body and Identity in Later Life (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013). Linda M.  Hess. ‘Portrait of the Father as Gay Man: A New Story About Gay Aging in Mike Mills’s Beginners.’ Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 47:2 (2014), pp. 163–183. Timothy Shary and Nancy McVittie. Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). 25. Hess, p. 166. 26. Ibid., p. 178. 27. Dennis Allen, ‘Homosexuality and Narrative.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 41:3–4 (1995), pp. 609–634.

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28. Glyn Davis and Gary Needham. ‘Introduction: The Pleasures of the Tube.’ In Glyn Davis and Gary Needham (eds.), Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 1–12. Didi Herman. ‘“I’m Gay”: Declarations, Desire, and Coming Out on Prime-Time TV.’ Sexualities 8:1 (2005), pp. 7–29. 29. Hess, p. 166. 30. Ibid., p. 176. 31. Ibid., p. 172. 32. Ibid. 33. Adersh Kaul and Stephen Duffy. ‘Gerontophilia: A Case Report’. Medicine, Science and The Law, 31:2 (1991), pp. 110–114. 34. See Allen 1995. 35. Hess, p. 173.

Queer and Upright: Sex, Age, and Disorientation in Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical Nick Rees-Roberts

Léo, the thirty-something protagonist of Alain Guiraudie’s film Staying Vertical (Rester Vertical, 2016), seems lost. But what is he looking for? A blocked auteur, he makes repeated, conciliatory calls to his impatient producer to request further delays and advance remuneration for the script he is working on. He spends the film obsessively drifting from one location to another, going round in circles, searching for something—sex, love, intimacy, connection, fatherhood, happiness—some way to engage collectively and interpersonally with an individualistic world. Tracing Léo’s trajectory, Guiraudie’s film maps out alternative relational models of queer love and desire across generational divides. ‘The real question,’ the feminist critic Lynne Segal asks in Out of Time—her analysis of the pleasures and perils of ageing—is ‘how are we to live our lives?’1 For progressive change to happen in LGBTQ+ contexts, she observes, ‘it requires the

N. Rees-Roberts (*) Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_7

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queer imagination to try to surmount its own obsession with youth and its deep fear of ageing—usually far greater, it seems to me, than even the fear of death, which it has been far easier to romanticize.’2 Rejecting the false homogenisation of generations, Segal calls for the bridging of divides; ‘cross-generational ties,’ she writes, ‘can appear or disappear, sometimes fleetingly, in other situations, leaving their mark across a lifetime.’3 Guiraudie’s cinema, I argue here, interrogates a materialist dimension to the temporal and existential question of cross-generational bonds by situating them precisely in various queer rural settings and by mapping out their shapes, spaces, and orientations. Like feminists, queer theorists and cultural critics have approached age difference in queer sexualities in various ways. In his materialist model of power within same-sex forms of intimacy, Alan Sinfield recognised an embarrassment among queer theorists and thinkers about age hierarchy, loaded with ‘implications of immaturity, narcissism, effeminacy, pedophilia, exploitation, and humiliation.’4 These factors draw on more widespread cultural assumptions of sexual attractiveness in younger people and material stability in older people. ‘Age hierarchy therefore invites stigmatization as merely instrumental on both sides, in contrast to the reciprocity attributed to age-matched relations.’5 Leo Bersani, for his part, has posited a non-identitarian critical project as a way of thinking through and beyond psychoanalytical impasses on sexuality and subjectivity, to invent what the philosopher Michel Foucault termed ‘new relational modes’— understood as exploratory reconfigurations of identity, sociality, and aesthetics.6 Foucault formulated what queer theorist Heather Love has described as a ‘utopian promise of queer,’ an ethical vision of same-sex relations as suggestive of ‘new social “virtualities”—as yet unimagined forms of individual and collective existence.’7 ‘Queer intellectuals,’ Bersani states provocatively, ‘are curiously reticent about the sexuality they claim to celebrate.’8 Indeed, queer theory’s embrace of Foucault’s vision of gay friendship as a way of life has, as Kadji Amin argues in his book Disturbing Attachments, neglected the troubling issues of power inequalities or inegalitarianism within forms of modern pederasty at the heart of Foucault’s thesis of experimental friendship. Amin’s broader engagement with queer history aims to problematise a liberal sexual agenda fashioned around egalitarianism by rethinking embarrassing attachments particularly in relation to questions of age, desire, and power. Taking Jean Genet, the French queer mid-century poète maudit, as an exemplar of this queer historical genealogy, Amin remarks on how

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‘modern pederasty’—by which he means ‘an age-structured coupling between either adult men, boys of different ages, or an adult man and a youth’9—has been largely overlooked by subsequent queer writing and representation including the many interpretations of Foucault’s hypothesis on new sexual alliances and interpersonal configurations, which might include commonplace forms of age-different coupling and erotic fantasy play such as daddy/boy role-play.10 Discourses of gay liberalism and sexual egalitarianism have, Amin asserts, prevented the emergence of other critical frameworks for thinking through or about forms of age disparity within queer culture beyond the conventional hierarchies transposed from the straight mind. Like Amin, I find Sinfield’s book On Sexuality and Power particularly important for combining psychoanalytic and materialist theory to open up new—imaginative, looser—ways of thinking about the relationship between social power and same-sex desire.11 In this chapter, I explore a nexus of queer relations—the various affective, sexual, and erotic attractions, connections, and fantasies of age difference (which, following Amin, we might view as possibly disturbing attachments) within the off-centre fictional worlds imagined by Guiraudie, whose distinctively oblique perspective on queer sex is, in my view, an important and singular contribution to the broader landscape of contemporary French cinema. In an earlier account of his cinema to date,12 I drew on Foucault’s original definition of same-sex relational models as bound up in pleasure through the example of cross-generational intimacy to interpret the films Real Cool Time (Ce vieux rêve qui bouge, 2000), The King of Escape (Le Roi de l’évasion, 2009), and Stranger By The Lake (L’Inconnu du lac, 2013). Here, I argue that Guiraudie’s subsequent work, Staying Vertical (2016), described by the director as his ‘most queer film’13 to date, echoes an earlier literary exploration of cross-generational intimacy—his début novel Now The Night Begins (Ici commence la nuit),14 a tale of desire for a nonagenarian man. Staying Vertical, in part, transposes this narrative focus on ‘gerontophilia’ to the screen. Unlike Stranger By The Lake, a more formally classical thriller about gay male cruising, Staying Vertical obliquely troubles categories of both erotic identification and lived sexual identity. Léo, for example, is presented straightforwardly early on in the story as bisexual, shown trying to pick up a stray boy by the roadside and then later fathering a child with a woman whom he has met quite randomly. As is the case with the director’s earlier work, the broader radical challenge posed by the film is precisely in relation to the social conventions of ‘age-appropriate’ physicality and desirability. The most

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provocative sequence involves an act of euthanasia through anal sex between Léo (Damien Bonnard) and a much older man, Marcel (Christian Bouillette). For Guiraudie, rethinking questions of sexuality, identity, and kinship across generational differences involves the rejection of the more mainstream egalitarian LGBTQ+ identity politics of sameness in place of which he posits a hallucinatory utopian vision of unfettered eroticism for men of all ages. Staying Vertical playfully suggests that dismantling taboos of age and ageing and norms of physical attractiveness, suitability, and desirability provides the key to unlocking more experimental forms of queer relationality, experience, and worldliness. Stranger By the Lake is a more sober take on gay male desire and sexuality than the filmmaker’s early work. In my chapter on questions of affect and space within contemporary French queer cinema,15 I discussed the topography of Guiraudie’s film and its controlled mapping of sexual congress—what Bersani describes as the ‘sexual sociability’16 of gay male practices such as cruising—embedded in the generic format of a thriller in which the sexy object of desire, Michel (Christophe Paou), the stranger of the title, is also a serial killer. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), the aimless and lonesome pleasure-seeker, who returns to the lake to cruise every day without fail, falls for him only to witness him strangle and drown a jealous lover one evening in the lake. Beyond the generic conventions of the thriller, the film also more realistically conveys the contradictory nature of cruising with its mix of lust and anticipation at times tempered by feelings of boredom and disappointment. The suspense—for the spectator, as much as for the characters—comes from waiting for the action proper to kick off. I argued previously that Guiraudie treads a familiar cultural path of death and desire, represented by the theoretical writings of Georges Bataille on the subject of sexual transgression.17 However, in its toxic brew of obsessive lust and infatuation, the story also quite simply recounts Franck’s scripted desire to connect emotionally, to be in love with both the murderous stranger and the unknown (the ambivalent inconnu of the original French title carries both meanings). The director has talked of wanting to explore ‘what it means to have someone under your skin.’18 In her subsequent analysis of the film’s complex rhythmic patterning and of how ‘queer cruising personalises geography,’ Saige Walton notes the relationship between being ‘open to the unknown’ and the random variability of the activity that might include unavailability as much as actual sex.19 As the initially hedonistic utopia of the lake becomes a disturbing territory of unconscious drives, edging covertly through the undergrowth

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Franck finally surrenders by submitting to his passion as the killer proceeds to hunt him down. In this moment of potential self-annihilation, described in his analysis of non-human life forms and queer ecology by Benjamin Dalton as the character’s ‘self-sacrifice to the non-human,’20 the story is left unresolved, suspended in time; as Dalton goes on to argue, ‘the film denies closure: we never know if Franck finds Michel, if he lives or dies. Unlike the conspicuously staged ejaculation, the film itself does not come but remains forever still to come.’21 Since my initial survey of Guiraudie there has been a flourish of academic articles on adjacent aspects of his fictions, often-intricate close readings of Stranger By The Lake, his most celebrated film to date. Enda McCaffrey, for example, also draws on Bersani’s theory of impersonal relationality to analyse the filmmaker’s debut novel Here Begins The Night and on affect theory to consider its formal continuation in Staying Vertical.22 Nathan Friedman ingeniously draws a cartography of the male bodies in Stranger By The Lake as ‘in flux, as matter en route to the next possible configuration or relationship,’23 while Eugenie Brinkema visualises the film’s geometric—as opposed to scenographic—structuring24; all sophisticated readings of Guiraudie, but which in their elevated theoretical formulations miss something of the director’s authorial signature, his voice and tone (to employ old-fashioned terminology)—his idiosyncratic brand of grounded progressive politics and witty no-nonsense provocation. In Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies, Damon R. Young explains how the structural triangulation of the film’s three leading characters (the two lovers Franck and Michel, and another older stranger, Henri, whose attraction towards Franck remains unrequited) is mapped onto the more formal equation between sex, love, and friendship—the public sex enacted in the film serving to focalise the multiple forms and configurations of gay male intimacy in the transformative space of the lake.25 Gary Needham has also written about the performance of cruising, and it is precisely this dramatic dimension that interests me about Stranger by the Lake.26 Theorising the patterns and structures of looking and waiting inherent in both cinema and cruising, Needham describes the film straightforwardly as about cruising, one that ‘uses both a repetitive and durational structure in its narrative in order to capture the sense of waiting inherent in cruising. Specific shots are repeated to underscore the sameness of days and encounters, but for gay men this is not boring—it is utopian since homosexuality’s relationship to temporality and desire is not that of straight linear time. (…) In Stranger by the Lake spectators are made to

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wait and repeat scenes and scenarios, having their desires delayed.’27 This theatrical dimension reminds me of Andrew Holleran’s description in his seminal 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance, which recounts sexual mores of New York nightlife of the post-gay liberation period, of the staging of desire in the round of the dance-floor: He wanted to keep this life in the realm of the perfect, the ideal. He wanted to be desired, not possessed, for in remaining desired he remained, like the figure on the Grecian urn, forever pursued. He knew quite well that once possessed he would no longer be enchanted—so sex itself became secondary to the spectacle: that single moment of walking in that door. And even as he danced now he was aware of whose heart he was breaking; everyone there was utterly aware of one another.28

In Guiraudie’s film, the character of the older loner Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), who is always removed from the action behind the beach until he fatally intervenes to save Franck from the killer, is used to make a critical comment on the compulsive nature of the men’s interactions and to set up Franck’s final submission to a disorientating desire that he cannot control. However, for all the insistence on self-loss and non-identity in canonical queer theory (from, say, Bersani to Edelman), it might also involve—at times simultaneously in perverse counterpoint—a sense of emotional connection and longing beyond physical release and pure pleasure. The conversations between Franck and Henri articulate their shared sense of dislocation and loneliness. As the film would seem to suggest, the utopian space of cruising potentially contains a contradictory nexus of obsession, loss, pleasure, and love—not just the inbuilt performance (as in the idea of playing a role or playing around) but also the longing for excitement to relieve the tedium of life’s routines and domestic realities. Indeed, the fantasies staged through the film’s theatrical artifice are collectively shared more than intimately private. As psychoanalytic queer theorist Tim Dean writes, ‘Fantasy enables a collective to be virtually present even if the sex occurs between just two people. Far from individualizing or private (as we tend to think when we reduce it to a psychology of illusion), fantasy works to de-individualize subjectivity by linking it to the public world of others.’29 Staying Vertical riffs on these relational themes of love, sex, and desire but in a looser way, and its structure imitates free-form improvisation. There is a distinct shift from the more ostensibly radical content of Stranger by the Lake—this despite the film’s classical form through the

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dramatic unity of action in time and place—to the meandering drift and promiscuous topography of Staying Vertical. By the time the film was shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, Guiraudie’s reputation was seemingly associated with explicit gay sexuality, a public image that he slyly acknowledges in the film’s opening scene. Shot subjectively from the driver’s perspective, a car edges along a country lane before slowing down to look at an errant young man standing by the roadside opposite a farm. As the driver (Léo) turns the vehicle round he glimpses an elderly man warily guarding the property. He gets out and approaches the youth to ask him if he’s ever acted before—‘You don’t see faces like yours that often’ Léo offers by way of a compliment—or ever considered trying out for a film, a vaguely predatory proposal that is rejected outright. Swallowing his pride, Léo gets back in his car and drives off. We are left wondering what exactly he is looking for, more than casting his future film or hooking up with the boy. The drift of the opening sequence establishes this quest as the narrative’s leading thread, which raises the question of perspective and subjectivity right at the start—the spectator might be positioned to spend the rest of the film in Léo’s head following his story, his drives, and his viewpoint. When the youthful dreamer Yoan apparently disappears to Australia midway through, we suspect, as does Léo, that this is a fictitious reprieve from the old Marcel, who in conversation hurls comically hyperbolic homophobic abuse at him. The contours between reality and fantasy—in the dual sense of staging conscious daydreaming and unconscious desire—are frequently blurred in Guiraudie’s films, and this is accentuated by Jean-Christophe Hym’s elliptical editing of narrative into fragments that slip into the space of the unmarked dream often towards the narrative conclusion, a routine feature of Guiraudie’s work.30 As a writer of fiction, Léo, who could simply be taken as the director’s younger alter-ego, shapes the rambling story making it up freestyle as he goes along, telling us a version of events that combines a mundane realism with erotic fantasy. Straight after his failed pick-up by the roadside, Léo engages with a random young shepherdess out on a deserted plateau in the Massif Central, with whom he talks of the material difficulties of her work. Their exchange abruptly cuts to a close-up shot of her stroking his crotch. Like Guiraudie’s earlier film Real Cool Time, which staged cross-generational desire within the confines of a closing factory, the material and erotic dynamics of work and play here intermingle. Léo’s bisexuality is in essence presented as a matter of fact and used to circumvent the audience expectations of a conventional gay film right from the start.

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Rather than focus on sexual identity, it is precisely the issue of age— articulated both through difference and hierarchy—that disturbs the standard structure of queer cinema by positioning desire for older and elderly men as the truly radical manoeuvre, thereby taking up the narrative strand developed more experimentally in the earlier novel Here Begins the Night. The age gaps between characters on screen (in The King of Escape, Stranger by the Lake, and Staying Vertical) are less extreme than in the novel, visibly reduced due to the material exigencies of casting and the commercial constraints of production. All the characters in Stranger by the Lake were originally written as forty plus, and Curly, the errant girl who unexpectedly seduces the gay cruiser Armand in The King of Escape, was older than intended due to the casting of a well-known actor, Hafsia Herzi, in the role. Nevertheless, the rural couple in Staying Vertical are intentionally presented as queer in the sense of oddball and difficult to fathom from the outside—to both LGBTQ+ and mainstream audiences—due to their manifest age gap and the pervasive power of dominant ideology, which flattens out cross-generational couples into straight models of filiation and normative perceptions of age-appropriate behaviour and fantasy. Previously I turned to Bersani’s inflection of Foucault’s original hypothesis of queer relationality to focus on the question of age. Bersani’s non-­ identitarian project is, in essence, an attempt to think through and beyond psychoanalytical impasses on sexuality and subjectivity to invent what Foucault termed ‘new relational modes,’ understood as exploratory reconfigurations of identity, sociality, and aesthetics. Foucault’s much-quoted interview with the French magazine Gai Pied in 1981 entitled ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ has been interpreted by Bersani as a statement of intent to outline new relational modes of being in the world.31 Foucault’s interview outlined many of the insights on sexual subjectivity and the distribution of power that underpin the two later volumes of The History of Sexuality, which trace classical Greek and Roman models of same-sex pleasure and practices of the self structured in part around age and power disparity between partners. The interview started with a question about the then fifty-year-old philosopher’s relation to a magazine written by and for younger men. Foucault took the opportunity to question the near-­ automatic identification of homosexuality with attraction between young men. The multiplicity of affective relations that Foucault was elaborating at the time involved same-sex intimacies across age boundaries. Two men of noticeably different generations, he argued, would

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face each other without terms of convenient words, with nothing to assure them about the meaning of the movement that carries them toward each other. They have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure.32

Earlier in the mid-1970s, Foucault had explored this question both theoretically and experientially. In a series of recorded exchanges between Thierry Voeltzel and the philosopher, Vingt ans et après (Twenty years and after), republished in 2014, Foucault orientated their discussions towards the relationship between politics and sexuality.33 (Incidentally, the pair met when the by then famous philosopher stopped to pick up the twenty-year old Voeltzel, who was hitchhiking by the roadside.) Describing his travelling companion as the twenty-year-old boy par excellence, Foucault specifically asks him about cross-generational sex and hierarchy commenting that the discovery of one’s homosexuality at the age of twenty at that time often involved sexual relations with older men as part of initiation into a gay sexual subculture. Both settle on an understanding of queerness as the rejection of the perceived hierarchical structure of conjugal heterosexuality symbolised by the myth of the couple, an ideal that has since been reactivated by the contemporary liberal assimilationist politics of gay marriage. Prefacing his book The Logic of the Lure, queer art theorist John Paul Ricco quotes a line from Foucault (‘There is no pathology of pleasure, no “abnormal” pleasure’) before asking provocatively ‘What if we neither began nor ended with identity?’34 With that in mind, let’s now consider Staying Vertical in relation to Foucault’s emphasis on pleasure over desire and queer theory’s subsequent non-identitarian project. The film’s two most provocative—for some audiences, potentially shocking—scenes show the natural beginning and ending of life, two arresting—and not unrelated—explicit images of the body: the first is an extreme close-up of a dilated vagina as the symbolically named Marie (India Hair) gives birth to Léo’s son, whom she abandons soon after leaving Léo to care for him alone. Elliptical jumps in times are indicated through the parallel images of Marie’s anatomy, from the shot of her genitals during sex as Léo goes down on her to the graphic close-up of her vagina as she gives birth. Much more subversive to the hegemonic regime of sexual representation is the scene in which Léo penetrates old Marcel before he dies, an act of pleasure provocatively suggested as a form of palliative care, a possible technology

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of the self that consciously blurs the lines between filiation and desire. Subsequently, Léo’s act of care is histrionically misinterpreted as predatory abuse by the tabloid press following his arrest, coverage of which includes the outlandish headline ‘He sodomized then euthanized the old man in front of his own baby!’ The version of Léo’s life conjured up by these lurid headlines suggests a scenario that is far more transgressive than the one he struggles to write when he is holed up in a room in the centre of Brest staring at a blank computer screen. Creatively blocked, Léo (whom one might read psychoanalytically as a metonymic substitute for—or a version of—Guiraudie’s past self) types a series of scene directions for the first sequence of his next film: a long straight line, daytime, Lény is driving. Léo will do anything to avoid the normative forward-momentum of that fictional straight line, so he deletes these first attempts at a story and promptly lies to his producer to negotiate an advance of three thousand euros to tide him over in the meantime. Through a series of dynamic pan shots of the landscape marking the transition from the coast to the countryside, Léo returns to the farmhouse of the opening scene in front of which sits old Marcel listening to blaring rock music. Léo asks after the boy, Yoan, inferring that he wishes to take him off the hands of the older man who bargains for the youth— whom he calls a faggot—as an object of exchange. He then lies about Yoan’s whereabouts complaining that he has stolen money from him and absconded. However, Léo clocks the boy’s shadow in an upstairs window, and in his obsessive pursuit of him returns later to spy on the couple from behind a bush. Given the outfacing presentation of the pair as mutually abusive, Léo’s predatory gaze and curious behaviour err towards a normative interpretation of their situation, one that is challenged by the ensuing dialogue in which Yoan bluntly rejects his advances and refutes being trafficked as an object of exchange between the two older men. Léo’s meddling attempts to interfere with their lives are initially resisted by Yoan, who escapes by hitching a ride with another driver; and his prying is also rebuffed by Marcel who takes umbrage at the suggestion that he has trapped the boy like a submissive pawn. In spite of his comically hyperbolic abuse, it is old Marcel who becomes the real object of desire, a visual transposition of the narrative premise of Guiraudie’s earlier novel in which everyone lusts after grandpa. The enigmatic feelings of attraction and antagonism between Léo, Yoan, and old Marcel in Staying Vertical are placed at the centre of the film’s field of gravity, and what is interesting about Guiraudie’s

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cross-­generational relations is how the conventional expectation of coupling as ostensibly egalitarian—as rooted in sameness—is upturned and displaced while other routine manifestations of exploitative behaviour in gay culture are challenged by the boy’s confrontational gaze. Interestingly, Léo’s unwanted advances are also paralleled by a more ambivalent exchange of looks earlier in the urban setting of Brest in which he interacts with a homeless guy who is sleeping rough and who accepts Léo’s money but not his compassion, refusing his clumsy attempt to connect as patronising. The film therefore invites us to question Léo’s subjective framing of events as a potentially normalising worldview: to push this argument further, he might even be viewed as a sort of unreliable narrator whose coercive reading of the age-different couple as inevitably unbalanced and seemingly abusive—according to which the older man appears outwardly wealthier and tyrannical while the errant boy is coded as financially dependent and submissive—is shown to be a falsely one-sided interpretation of reality. Their own version of their life is hardly one that fits normative categories of cross-generational desirability. The couple’s rendition of modern pederasty, then, queers social norms while simultaneously invoking them—‘he is a bit like my son,’ Marcel says of Yoan, thereby blurring the lines between love, desire, and filial substitution. This queer coupling is further mapped onto the film’s larger considerations of kinship configurations. Soon after giving birth, Marie unexpectedly abandons her baby— without any of the expected narrative explanation or judgemental reaction—leaving Léo to raise the child alone. Having been tracked down by his desperate producer to an alternative healer’s therapeutic retreat hidden in the canals of the Poitou marshlands, where he is sequestered and forced to finish his script, Léo escapes penniless, and in a (most likely) fantasy scenario shot in the same liminal underpass in Brest where Léo has previously exchanged pleasantries with the homeless man, Léo and the baby are engulfed and attacked by a vagrant mob, an ironic take on the liberal’s nightmare scenario of a revolting underclass. Saved by Marie’s father, who also fancies him it transpires, Léo leaves to tend to the dying Marcel in a palliative sex act in which he administers a poison to help Marcel slip away, all the while stroking his chest and genitals before penetrating him until a fatal climax, an erotic act of euthanasia that literalises la petite mort. Unable to justify the act of care or explain its relational context to the police, Léo is arrested and his son is temporarily taken into care as patriarchal law and order steps in to straighten out the situation by returning the baby to Marie, who is morally

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shamed into accepting her maternal duties. The natural order of things is temporarily—and ironically—reinstated through narrative closure before a jump in time to a coda in which Léo, now a bearded shepherd, his son, and Marie’s father, who is now in a relationship with Yoan, are out on a desolate hillside, where they are protecting the flock against a pack of wolves. The film’s final shot shows them surrounded, standing tall and upright—in a brave attempt to ward off the predators. How, then, to interpret the meaning of this act of defiance or resistance in relation to the film’s wider interlocking vision of sexuality, sociality, and politics? The fragmented nature of both the setting (the elliptical jumps across different landscapes) and the storytelling (the loops and repetitions and back and forth motion of Léo’s journeying across France) and Guiraudie’s trademark slipping between fantasy and reality—or rather his mise-en-abîme of reality through unmarked transitions into fantasy spaces—make it hard to pin down the film’s exact ideological framework or discursive mode, let alone its cultural politics. To be sure, Guiraudie’s use of fantasy removes him from the more didactic strand of social realism (indeed, despite obvious political affinities, the quirkiness of his work would suggest a more fruitful comparison with the cinema of Bruno Dumont, say, than with other non-Parisian filmmakers such as Robert Guédiguian, for example) but Staying Vertical does nonetheless contain a muted call for resistance within its title, a plea to stay woke. The rural settings—the lost countries of his films—point to a conscious attempt to envision queer cinema outside of a metropolitan context and ideological worldview, to challenge the norms of gay narratives, which often tend to chart the journey of the provincial boy to Paris—Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel (Plaire, aimer et courir vite, 2018) and Anne Fontaine’s Reinventing Marvin (Marvin ou la belle education, 2017), loosely adapted from Edouard Louis’s novel The End of Eddy (Pour en finir avec Eddy Bellegueule), both draw on this familiar framework of the bildungsroman.35 Guiraudie, however, is clearly not interested in telling Parisian tales of love and success. His representations of provincial lives place queer sexualities within specific formations and locations of class outside the metropolitan norms of youth, beauty, and sexual commodification. Queer desire, then, seems even queerer because Guiraudie films places so far from the norms and clichés of metropolitan representation. The director claims simply to have chosen the places he prefers the most in France: the Méjean plateau, the Poitou marshlands, and the Breton port of Brest—places that

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all feel elsewhere and utopian.36 The hegemonic spaces of gay nightlife (spaces of consumption such as clubs and bars) are replaced by non-­ institutional and non-commercial rural spaces creating a purposefully ex-­ centric cinema, a cinema of ‘other’ spaces such as barren rural landscapes such as the plateau or liminal spaces such as the underpass in the centre of Brest, ‘heterotopic’ spaces in the Foucauldian sense,37 according to which more radically decentred perspectives emerge to refocus in aesthetic terms familiar questions of queer identities and relations in the framework of the contemporary neoliberal political economy—the proverbial wolf of the film’s enigmatic coda. Unlike the formally controlled classicism of Stranger by the Lake, there is a subdued punk sensibility to Staying Vertical, a meandering film written out of sync and shot on the go, which slips back and forth between the real and the oneiric. The film also gestures to the contemporaneous social movements of economic alienation and insurrection that began in the French provinces and spread to Paris with the Nuit debout protests (roughly translated as Up all night or Rise up at night) in 2016 against the socialist labour reforms, which paved the way for the more radical grassroots Gilets jaunes (The Yellow Vests) movement for economic justice that began in 2018. Guiraudie’s insistence on Léo’s relative insecurity and precariousness—despite being socially integrated, he’s homeless and uprooted for most of the film—suggests that his verbal exchange with the homeless guy mixes compassionate identification with a fear of submersion. Reading Guiraudie’s materialist politics is made difficult by his ironic mode of address and execution. ‘My cinema begins at the point where the social and the political only present me with dead ends,’38 he comments. Resorting to the alternative space of fantasy is a way to reshape the social according to his imagination, which blends a left political affiliation with his own personal obsessions to create a queer rural proletarian pride in the tradition of the FHAR, the French radical gay liberation movement of the early 1970s.39 Moreover, following the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s model of aesthetic critique that took cinema as a means to comment on the social through a sexual lens, Guiraudie also injects the title (Staying Vertical) with his trademark insolent humour, signalling a call for a form of erotic as much as social resistance—in essence, the title is also a call to keep it up. In that regard, the larger socio-political context of homophobia also comes into play, in particular the same-sex marriage legislation passed in 2013, which showed the extent to which homophobia is still a

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powerful—if residual—political formation in France.40 Rather than literally transposing these contests around sexual citizenship through a more realist mode of representation, Staying Vertical responds to them at a tangent, drawing on both fantasy and fable. The film certainly questions the normative injunctions of gay marriage and kinship structures founded on liberal claims for state recognition, but no one is likely to be ‘just married’ in a Guiraudie film. I have argued that age, class, and location are all central to the vein of off-kilter politicised critique running through Guiraudie’s cinema. I began by quoting the feminist writer Lynne Segal on the interlocking questions of ageing, identity, and desire; I end by citing her account of radical political formations and interpersonal and collective belongings, Radical Happiness, in which she traces the contours of collective joy from interpersonal love to inventing utopias.41 I realise that in reading Segal alongside Guiraudie, I found myself making parallels between her cultural criticism and his queer cinema. Segal writes about the narcissistic nature of romantic love and about projecting idealising fantasies of those we fall for; she quotes the poet Adrienne Rich who describes the ‘necessary fiction’ of desire: ‘We fall in love not just with a person wholly external to us but with a fantasy of how that person can fill what is missing from our interior lives.’42 I would infer that this is exactly what Guiraudie means when he claims his ambition for Stranger by the Lake was to convey the disorientating feeling of having someone under your skin, a state of mind that Jonathan Dollimore describes so vividly in Desire: A Memoir—‘To be alive is to desire and to desire is, sooner rather than later to be deeply, subjectively confused,’43 he writes. My appreciation of both films is motivated at some basic level by an empathetic engagement or identification with Guiraudie’s protagonists, Franck (the serial pleasure-­seeker) and Léo (the disorientated writer). To be clear, my interest in Guiraudie is motivated by a fundamentally personal quest to understand myself as a queer viewer in relation to Guiraudie’s fictional world-making or worldliness, a term described by Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt to convey ‘what it means to be queer in this world.’44 Films like Stranger by the Lake and Staying Vertical form part of a cinema that produces new articulations of queerness and belonging, films ‘that invent new registers that both reflect experience and have the capacity to imagine radical forms of social being.’45 What erotic drives pull Franck to Michel beyond physical attraction and lust? And why does he appear to surrender to his murderous lover in the closing moments of Stranger? Why does Léo spend Staying Vertical

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procrastinating, drifting, and going round in circles rather than following the straight line he began to draw and then erased in his screenplay? And how does Guiraudie’s broader queering of normative space and time relate to the film’s final image of cross-generational resistance? Perhaps we should read this ambivalent parting shot as a utopian one that captures ‘the tension between [the] desire for personal freedom and the need for security,’46 which is how Segal describes the political task of inventing alternative spaces to engineer a better collective future. Utopias, she avers following Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson, say much about the failures and constraints of our present society.47 Guiraudie’s queer cinema is important not only for its cross-generational representations of the types of bodies, identities, and milieus that tend to be overlooked by more mainstream film production, but also for its intersectional engagement with a broader materialist agenda of social change and economic justice. Ultimately, we might see this queer image of kinship—the deviant single father, the baby boy, and his pederastic grandfather, erect before their predators—as Guiraudie’s singular vision of an everyday utopia.

Notes 1. Lynne Segal, Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (London: Verso, 2013), p. 225. 2. Ibid., p. 250. 3. Ibid., p. 71. 4. Alan Sinfield, On Sexuality and Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 116. 5. Ibid. 6. Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), p. x. 7. Heather Love, ‘Queers_This,’ in After Sex: On Writing since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 180–191, p. 182. 8. Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 31. 9. Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 15. 10. Ibid., pp. 25–28. 11. Ibid., p. 36. 12. Nick Rees-Roberts, ‘Hors Milieu: Queer and Beyond,’ in A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, ed. Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle

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Moine and Hilary Radner, (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 439–460. 13. Adrien Naselli, ‘Alain Guiraudie: “Rester vertical est mon film le plus queer”,’ Têtu, August 26, 2016, https://tetu.com/2016/08/26/alainguiraudie-rester-vertical-interview, accessed December 12, 2019. 14. Alain Guiraudie, Ici commence la nuit (Paris: P.O.L., 2014). 15. Rees-Roberts, ‘Hors Milieu: Queer and Beyond’. 16. Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays, p. 57. 17. See Rees-Roberts ‘Hors Milieu: Queer and Beyond’, pp.  256–257 and Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 249–257. 18. Guiraudie quoted in Saige Walton, ‘Cruising the Unknown: Film as Rhythm and Embodied Apprehension in L’Inconnu du lac/Stranger by the Lake (2013),’ New Review of Film and Television Studies 16:3 (2018), pp. 238–263, p. 259. 19. Ibid., p. 253. 20. Benjamin Dalton, ‘Cruising the Queer Forest with Alain Guiraudie: Woods, Plastics, Plasticities,’ in Beasts of the Forest: Denizens of the Dark Woods, ed. Jon Hackett and Seán Harrington (Barnet: John Libbey Publishing, 2019), pp. 64–91, p. 80. 21. Ibid. 22. Enda McCaffrey, ‘(Im)personal Relationality in Alain Guiraudie’s Ici commence la nuit,’ Fixxion: Revue critique de fixxion franҫaise contemporaine, 12 (2016), pp. 60–71 and ‘Lupine and zig-zag lines: queer affects in Alain Guiraudie’s L’inconnu du lac and Rester vertical,’ Contemporary French Civilization, 44:4 (2019), pp. 387–415. 23. Nathan Friedman, ‘Diagram of the Amorous Search: Generating Desire with Guiraudie’s L’Inconnu du lac,’ Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy 9 (2016), pp. 183–188, p. 183. 24. Eugenie Brinkema, ‘Strangers by Lakes: 1 or 2 or 4 or 5 or 10,’ Discourse 40:3 (2018), pp. 370–381. 25. Damon R.  Young, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 228–229. 26. Gary Needham, ‘Cruising as Another Way of Looking?’ Wuxia 1–2 (2015), pp. 44–67 27. Ibid., pp. 49–50. 28. Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (London: Vintage, 2019), p. 37. 29. Tim Dean, ‘Mediated Intimacies: Raw Sex, Truvada, and the Biopolitics of Chemoprophylaxis,’ Sexualities 18:1–2 (2015), pp. 224–246, p. 235. 30. I draw this insight from discussions about Guiraudie’s cinema with my friend Professor Dimitris Papanikolaou.

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31. Michel Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’ trans. John Johnston, in The Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 135–140. 32. Ibid., p. 136. 33. Thierry Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après (Paris: Gallimard, 2014). 34. Jean-Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), p. xvii and p. xix. 35. Edouard Louis, The End of Eddy, trans. Michael Lucey (London: Vintage, 2017). Louis’s rejection of his rural homophobic proletarian origins is theoretically indebted to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s deterministic understanding of class identities formed through a habitus, an idea that the philosopher Didier Eribon has also transposed to gay culture by blending it with Foucault’s theories of social and sexual subjectivation. See Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims, trans. Michael Lucey (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2013). 36. Joachim Lepastier and Vincent Malausa, ‘Chercher le loup : Entretien avec Alain Guiraudie,’ Cahiers du cinéma 725 (September 2016), pp. 22–25, p. 22. 37. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ Diacritics 16 (1986) [1967], pp. 22–27. 38. Guiraudie quoted in ‘Pour un communisme de l’individu’ in L’Atelier des cinéastes : de la Nouvelle Vague à nos jours, ed. José Moure, Gaël Pasquier and Claude Schopp (Paris: Klincksieck, 2012), pp. 235–242, p. 237. 39. Ibid., p. 240. 40. See Bruno Perreau, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016) and Nick Rees-Roberts, ‘Sexuality and Shade: Who’s Afraid of Queer Theory?’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25:2 (2019), pp. 372–374. 41. Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London: Verso, 2017). 42. Adrienne Rich quoted in Segal, Radical Happiness, p. 133. 43. Jonathan Dollimore, Desire: A Memoir (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. 55. 44. Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt, Queer Cinema in the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 214. 45. Ibid., p. 215. 46. Segal, Radical Happiness, p. 139. 47. Ibid., pp. 157–158.

‘Draw Me like a Statue’: Youth, Nostalgia and the Queer Past in Gods and Monsters Michael Williams

Gods and Monsters (Bill Condon, 1998) presents a fictionalised account of director James Whale’s final days at his Los Angeles home. Struggling to cope with the debilitating effects of a stroke, the 68-year-old Whale (Ian McKellen) suffers from flashbacks to his early years in Britain and particularly his experience of trauma, and same-sex desire, in the trenches of the Great War. We also share Whale’s memories from his Hollywood career, with his best-remembered works from the 1930s, Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), providing visual and narrative resonances for his developing cross-generational relationship with a hunky young gardener, Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser). It is Boone’s musculature that first catches the director’s eye; the performance of out gay actor, McKellen, ensuring the visibility of Whale’s queerness. However, when

I would like to thank Joel Gwynne and Niall Richardson for their support and patience as editors, as well as Daniel O’Brien and David Cobbett for feedback on early drafts. M. Williams (*) University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_8

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this leads to the young man being invited to model for Whale’s sketches, we learn that there are other motives afoot, with Whale hoping that Boone’s strength can be marshalled to take his life and thus end his suffering. In the climactic scene, as Boone fully comprehends the traumatic yearning that calls Whale’s mind to the past, Boone finally assents to pose fully naked for the artist ‘like a statue’, as he puts it. This is a crucial moment in both the film and its source novel, Christopher Bram’s 1995 Father of Frankenstein, which acknowledges a familiar trope in the self-expression and often-implicit cultural articulation of gay desire.1 Indeed, the film constantly shifts between personal and historical perspectives and desires: the cross-generational desire of the ageing gay director for the young man, the idealised nudes of antiquity and queer culture of the twentieth century, Whale’s flashbacks to his working-­ class youth and the battlefield, and the 1990s’ cinephile audience’s cultural memory of cinema history as channelled through Whale. Noah Tsika has indicated the importance of cinematic intertextuality to audience responses to the film in the form of ‘media images and cultural memories’,2 but I extend this to embrace the wider use of classical art history to frame the relationship between Whale and Boone in particular. I examine how the cross-generational, and pan-historical, past is framed by the film’s set design, subtly framing ancient alongside twentieth-century bodies, most prominently in the scenes in which Whale attempts to sketch Boone in his studio. This complex cross-generational, and cinephiliac, nostalgia comes increasingly to the fore in often challenging ways, acknowledging how patriarchal power can exploit the young, whether in wars, ancient or modern, or beside an idyllic Californian pool.

‘Gay High Style’ and Architectural Framings The film’s strategy of framing past within present and of juxtaposing generations—young, old and ancient—is apparent from the outset. Following the titles, and a brief recreated shot of Frankenstein’s monster lumbering in slow motion across the screen, we cut to Boone’s home as he awakens to start the day. Boone is then seen driving his truck across a series of shots that follow him from the ocean-side trailer-park to Whale’s Pacific Palisades home. As Condon states in his DVD commentary, this has been read in terms of Boone figuratively ascending to the gods.3 Like Joe Gillis’ fateful turn into Norma Desmond’s driveway in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), a key intertext and another film with a fading Hollywood figure

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and a man floating in the swimming pool, the columns of Whale’s home are suggestive of a Californian Mount Olympus. Desmond was evoked as a forgotten Hollywood goddess haunting a decaying Italian Renaissance style mansion. But while she was portrayed as a virtual ruin herself, striving to make her ‘return’,4 Whale has no wish for a comeback. Yet he has a wish to see his past works artistically valued, which connects to the way his health—discussed, as we shall shortly see, with the images of a more ancient past hanging above him like a thought bubble—is forcing him to face traumatic memories and divine meaning from them. It is worth noting the film’s most lavish depiction of Hollywood, the garden party hosted by director George Cukor (Martin Ferrero) that Whale and Boone attend is a firmly neo-classical space. ‘Palladianism Persists in Pasadena’, wrote a property blog when the location, the 1932-­ built Arden Villa, came up for sale in 2017, an even more striking version of the party house with ‘a few Roman statues’ on its patio described in Bram’s novel.5 ‘Enduring design, charming upgrades, and permanent pedigree make this private Palladian Masterpiece the perfect backdrop for a Royal Lifestyle with Olympian Calm in Pasadena’, its potential buyers were told. It’s also the perfect setting in the film for the queenly Cukor to show off his guest of honour, Princess Margaret, much to the chagrin of Whale, who relishes subverting his counterpart’s class pretence by revealing that Boone is his gardener. Like Joe Gillis, Boone is watched by the property’s owner as he arrives, as we see him exit his vehicle through the panes of glass of a drawing room window, cutting to Whale himself, revealing him to be the source of this objectifying point-of-view. We see a closer shot of Boone, showing off his muscular physique in a white vest as he heaves his lawn mower from the back of the truck, before a tracking shot leads Whale’s housekeeper, Hanna (Lynn Redgrave), and ex-partner, David Lewis (David Dukes), along the hallway into the room. This shot offers the first view of what Condon describes as the ‘gay high style’ designed for the home by art director Richard Sherman, creating for Whale a deliberately dated colour palette influenced by famed 1930s interior decorator, Elsie de Wolfe.6 But it is not just the past of two decades that permeates this shot, but two millennia; Whale has only to turn his head from Boone framed outside the window to view an ancient scene of homoeroticism. Having established the exterior of the manicured Arcadian realm in which he lives, the tracking shot that captures Hanna’s tea tray steering through the labyrinthine turns of the hallway presents a clearer sense of

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Whale’s milieu. Through hushed mutterings, the housekeeper is trying to persuade David to move back in, but as they walk a series of artworks zig-­ zag into view. In the dark outer room, the white gleam of a classical bust is glimpsed on a console table beneath an amber-coloured painting illuminated above, the brightest object in the room aside from the white orchids on the opposite side. In the next room, past an ornate marble planter, the film’s first clear view of an artwork swings into view: an apparently 1:1 scale reproduction panel from the Parthenon frieze (Fig. 1). The replica seen here is of panel XII from the West Frieze, which features three figures. On the left is a young man, fully naked aside from the cloak that hangs behind him and which frames his body. His head is turned down and to the right demurely as he appears to be taking notes from an apparently older tunic-clad man, standing in the middle of the panel before a horse, who gestures in declamatory and somewhat theatrical fashion towards the youth. On the right a cloaked boy attends the horse. Classical scholar Martin Robertson notes the ambiguity of the panel, where it is unclear which man is the horse’s master, and whether the man in the tunic is protesting at being reprimanded or giving instruction.7 John G. Younger, discussing gender and sexuality in the frieze, observes that while all three figures stand in contrapposto, the nude ‘ephebe’ (one in early manhood of c.18–20 years) on the left does so ‘exaggeratedly’.8 The striking nature of his pose draws attention to his genitals and his idealised muscularity, and consequently attracts the eye when added to the film’s mise-en-scène.

Fig. 1  The first Parthenon frieze replica panel comes into view as Hanna and David walk through Whale’s home

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Younger argues that the composition suggests the sexual desire of the central figure towards the ephebe and reads this as a reference to Greek vases ‘of an earlier generation’, imagery that would be interpreted as homoerotic.9 It is significant that this ancient cross-generational intermediality is brought into visual play in the immediate wake of Whale’s desiring gaze at the man framed outside his window. Later we will see that there is also a replica Greek painted vase in the director’s studio, where he attempts to persuade Boone to follow a dress code as minimal as that of the ephebe. The style of the bas-relief is instantly recognisable to anyone who has seen images of the Parthenon panels or the originals or copies in the museums of Athens, London and elsewhere. For those who have not, it will likely have other connotations: that the man who gazes at Boone is an admirer of Greek art; his home evokes acculturated notions of taste, that he appreciates the male form, and given the way such imagery function in cinematic codes, he is most likely gay. A classical object d’art on a film set or publicity still can say a lot about a character or star, carefully encoding aspects of their identity for those with the right inclination, or knowledge, to see it. There’s nothing masked about Whale’s homosexuality in Gods and Monsters, nor McKellen’s outside it, but as with the layers of the past that get ruffled by Whale’s stroke, the set design evokes how gay identity has historically often found an articulate but ‘tasteful’ voice when enunciated through a classical mask of one form or other. Richard Dyer has noted how classical imagery was deployed in some of the earliest gay rights publications in the nineteenth century as well as in erotic photography as ‘a way of representing desire, both in the sense of imaging it to themselves and in the sense of arguing for it to the world’.10 Images of the classical nude can thus be both erotic and auratic; the Parthenon marbles themselves described by John Boardman as coming to ‘exemplify the high point in the development of the most influential sculptural tradition of the western world’.11 Today, as Mary Beard has written, one cannot state that the subject of the frieze is explicitly gay (or straight, for that matter), for this is in the ‘eye of the beholder’, but certainly for some ‘the youthful naked riders key into the well-known homoeroticism of classical Athenian culture’.12 This aesthetic tradition of juxtaposing stars with classical sculpture, often in their homes, became a code that was exploited in film fan-­ magazines and star publicity, as in the replica bronze nude runners from Herculaneum that watched over the closeted Dirk Bogarde in his country home in a 1955 press photograph, which also framed the star within a

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history of queer desire.13 K.J.  Dover, in his landmark study of Greek homosexuality, noted how small figures of Eros were painted into the background of same-sex couplings on Greek vase painting as a coded marker to the viewer as to whether the scenario depicted is erotic.14 Likewise, I would argue, the classical nudes inserted into Whale’s decor give a hint to the film’s viewer as to the homoerotic frame into which Boone has entered. The ‘gay high style’ of Whale’s home is thus founded on a classical ‘high point’ and innumerable generations of queer reception across the centuries. From the outer room, Hanna leads David into the living room, past a painting of a nude male in the background (likely to be one of the original paintings by Whale included in the film) where Whale is gazing at Boone. The walls of the room are a dark plum in colour, which throws into visual contrast a second Parthenon replica panel, also large scale, which hangs on the wall above the piano (Fig. 2). This is the most prominent artwork in the film and seems there to pronounce a gay sensibility, if there ever was such a thing, with its striking image of two nude, and semi-nude, youths riding bareback on horses that are rearing up as if halting after a charge. This is frieze panel West X, and while the honey-coloured plaster it seems to be made of connotes the patina of age, the detail of this copy appears slightly crisper than the original. Like the other Parthenon imagery included in the film, this is one of the panels that has remained in Athens and not been taken into collections at other museums.

Fig. 2  Hanna arrives before the second Parthenon replica panel

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However, in less than 10 seconds of screen time from the first reproduction from the Parthenon frieze, we have a third. As Hanna places the tray on top of the grand piano, and with the large bas-relief framed centrally above, the camera subtly adjusts the shot to include a glimpse of the electric table lamp base to the right, whose design presents a third Parthenon frieze panel upon its dark embossed surface. This machine-age amalgam of ancient and modern reproduces another panel from the west frieze—panel III, also in Athens—in which another contrapposto nude male stands to the left, a horse to his right, whose reins he, and a bare-­ chested male behind, grasp hold of. We view this lamp more fully later in the film, as we shall see, when the idealised nude youth who stands to the right of this frieze block replica is revealed. It is not coincidental that this is one of the blocks highlighted as an example of ‘thigh-centered allure’ by Kim Marra in her work on age, bareback horse-riding and the queerness of the Parthenon frieze. This is evidence, she argues, of the allure of the ‘frontal intercrural method’ of sex (where the penis is rubbed between the thighs of the lover) discussed by Dover.15 Dover argues that age difference was all-important to Greek understandings of sexuality, with the desired body of the youthful eromenoi—a figure in vase painting he refers to as the ‘male pin-up’16—generally presented from the perspective of the older erastai, with only the latter intended to take pleasure from their encounters. To Marra, the panels of the frieze offer a proto-cinematic display of Athenian homoeroticism, and channel the gaze of men like Phidias himself, who ‘habitually watched naked youths exercising in the gymnasia’.17 It is not much of a stretch to see how Whale and Boone’s cross-­generational, and cross-class, relationship is framed by this, with the senior and higher ‘status’ director performing a pederastic, story-telling, role to an eager, but initially naïve, student. This is a point Tsika briefly touches on with reference to Thomas Waugh’s writing on the ‘ideal of pedagogic Eros’ that was central to pre-cinematic gay literary traditions and which is sometimes manifested in Queer films such as Visconti’s 1971 Death in Venice as a ‘Socratic intergenerational initiation’ of mentor and model.18 The film draws on these ancient archetypes while also alluding to the homophobia prevalent in mainstream 1950s culture beyond the Arcadian idyll that is Whale’s garden, even as that culture, paradoxically, was abundant in homoerotic imagery. The scene where a young male student, Edmund Kay (Jack Plotnick), attempts to interview Whale about his career, only to find himself induced to trade items of clothing for anecdotes, is played for humour with a twinkle in McKellen’s eye, and a gentle

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sexual frisson. However, we are made to notice the power that Whale ostensibly holds in this scenario. It is only when Whale experiences a flashback and collapses that the game halts, and Kay is prevented from needing to be protected from things going ‘flooey’ as Hanna later describes it. There is a gesture here towards the stereotype of the predatory queen who preys on young men, a paranoid conflation of the paedophile and homosexual promulgated by the Federal Government during the ‘lavender scare’ of the late 1940s and through the 1960s.19 But while holding white male privilege, Whale is also an outsider in sexuality and national identity, with the stroke-induced flashbacks serving to interrupt the present to announce the trauma he has experienced as well as the wartime lover it denied him. In Whale’s visions later in the film, we learn that Boone and others that visit his home, and indeed the sculptural youths on his walls, are proxies for the idealised young man lost in the war. In terms of power relations, Dover argues that in ancient Greece ‘it was taken for granted in the Classical period that a man was sexually attracted by a good-looking younger male’.20 However, if the older man was to be successful in seducing the younger one, it was only by a process of ‘earning hero-worship’, as in the way that Whale gradually tutors Boone as to his Hollywood celebrity.21 Hence the older male gained admiration from his peers for loving, and seducing, a younger one, while the youth was praised if he ‘retained his chastity’, and he certainly shouldn’t be seen as the instigator.22 This scenario is an unequal one, and as Dover notes, the process of ‘courting’ boys, as depicted in vase painting, was a mild term for ‘an approach that includes putting a hand on the boy’s genitals’.23 As we shall see, in the climactic scene in which Whale’s wartime traumas full rupture into the present, the director does indeed attempt to grab Boone’s genitals in such a deliberately provocative act, and a nightmarish glimpse of those classical rituals and 1950s stereotypes, but with quite different motive. The second bas-relief remains a focal point in the mise-en-scène throughout the introductory scene of David’s visit, and Whale walks over to stand in front of it, the camera moving towards him before he sits down by the piano, his upper body framed within the frieze itself (the lamp base still visible to the right), the horses seemingly rearing up at his presence. The yellow of Whale’s tie and the chrysanthemums on the piano match the honey-coloured frieze panel, while the rich red of Whale’s dressing gown makes him a more vibrant figure of the present, although at this

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moment the conversation is about his health as he drops into the chair, the past preserved in the framed photographs that clutter the piano; the director seems to insert himself into this historical scene. While in the novel Boone strips off his t-shirt following this scene, his body is revealed only vicariously through the classical art in the film,24 its exposure held back for the studio scenes. Indeed, the classical touches to Whale’s home are an addition brought by the film, standing in, perhaps, for the classicism associated with Whale’s youth in the novel (as we shall see). As Finnerty notes, in Bram’s novel, Whale is discovered leafing through Physique Pictorial magazine for ‘a figure who will move him to art’, and then spies Boone through his window.25 The film transposes this scene into the studio, where the older man is revealed not only to be a collector of art, but something of a master copier who bridges the generations, and millennia, in his work. It is to the studio, and the pool outside, that I now turn.

Embodying the Past The film’s opening scene established that the classical male nude frames Whale’s desire; he seemingly inhabits the cultural position mapped out by the Grand Tourists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bathing in the reflected glory of the perceived beauty, grandeur and cultural prestige of the ancient past while writing diaries or being painted in its ruins. As Páraic Finnerty has noted in an essay on Bram’s novel and Gilbert Adair’s Love and Death on Long Island, both adapted as films in the late 1990s, what is ‘provocative’ about these texts is their ‘foregrounding of American masculinity as the object of queer desire’.26 Both films feature senior English protagonists—John Hurt in the other film, alongside Jason Priestley—who pursue young American males. Rather than the trajectory of the Grand Tourist, who travels towards Italy and the ancient European past, here Englishmen travel west, and to Hollywood in Whale’s case. Moreover, while a classical parenthesis frames the mise-en-scène of the director’s home, Whale idealises contemporary American masculinity, rather than ancient Greek. Boone’s first visit to Whale’s studio occurs shortly after we learn of the severity of the director’s illness, following his collapse during an interview with a college student who wants to write about him. There, Whale’s trading of information for items of the young man’s clothing is superficially playful and consensual, but the other man’s awkwardness draws attention, once more, to its exploitative power relations. In contemporary

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interviews, Fraser noted the ambivalently ‘seductive’ nature of Boone and Whale’s relationship, though avoided commenting on any homoerotic motive on Whale’s part: ‘Sometimes it’s like mentor and student, sometimes executioner and victim, sometimes father and son’.27 Once recovered, Whale’s pursuit of Boone in this scene reads as part two of his attempt to view the nude male body. We first find Whale struggling to sketch a male foot from a plaster cast sitting on the table in front of him; the whiteness of the plaster recalling a classical object d’art. Whale’s attention is drawn to the sound of Boone outside, and Boone cautiously assents to abandon his mower in favour of iced tea. As Boone enters the studio, Whale has arranged himself on a chaise longue, and watches the young man survey his paintings. A large nude portrait of a blonde young man, standing in contrapposto pose, stands prominently on the floor next to Whale, forcing Boone to face it while talking to him. This is an original Whale painting,28 adding a note of authenticity to the scene with a Queer classical body mediating between the real and cinematic studio space and literally framing the kind of view that Whale hopes to gain of Boone. A Grecian-style vase also stands on the table next to him, featuring nude classical youths in a touch that recalls the frieze reliefs inside the main house. A bowl of lemons is on the table, brightly connecting the Californian sunshine with the Mediterranean. The colours of the scene are warm and inviting, including the heavy throw against which Whale leans and the purple hued walls. Whale admits that the vague familiarity of the paintings to Boone is due to their nature as ‘copies’, revealing the director to be a master imitator. As Boone drinks, Whale exclaims: ‘you must excuse my staring, but you have the most marvellous head’. At this moment, Boone’s head is in profile, Fraser’s large eyes widening in incredulity at the compliment. There is something of a goofy Michelangelo’s ‘David’ to Fraser’s face—merged with the stylised expressiveness of Disney’s Hercules (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1997), released the previous year—perhaps even recalling the distinctive turn of the head associated with portrait busts of Alexander the Great. Boone replies to Whale that he has never modelled, ‘what’s to sketch?’ he asks. ‘You have the most architectural skull’, Whale insists, also describing his ‘expressive’ nose. ‘Broke, more like it’, Boone responds. The film cuts to a shot looking back at Whale over Boone’s shoulder, the nude painting and the vase sitting in pools of light on the left as Whale raises his hand to measure up his subject (Fig. 3). The gardener appears to stare at the neo-classical nude as he takes a long draw from his tea; he

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Fig. 3  A complex circle of gazes and framings

presumably sees in the nude the vicarious image of his own body exposed to Whale, just as the sitter of this painting did. Again, ancient and modern bodies are brought into dialogue in a circle of gazes between the men, the painting and the vase and, indeed, the commodification of Fraser’s star body, as I will discuss later. However, the irony in the film, as Mark Bronski has noted, is that Whale’s desire for Boone is ultimately ‘more about Thanatos than Eros’, the film exploiting ‘culturally preconceived ideas about aging and sex’, and the stereotype of the ‘predatory queen’ alluded to here, in order to subvert them.29 We come to understand Whale’s trauma and desire for a death that would bring escape from his illness, and see Boone’s increasing respect for the director as a father figure. Boone is wary that Whale wants to draw him in his ‘birthday suit’, gesturing towards the painting in front of him and indicating his awareness of the nude male models in Whale’s past. Whale denies interest in the gardener’s body, which McKellen archly enunciates with mock sincerity. After agreeing to a future, clothed, pose, Boone leaves, but not before checking out his reflection in his truck’s wing mirror, evidently flattered by the interest and trying out a new view of himself. We then cut to the Santa Monica Library where he looks up clippings of Whale’s films. The most notable aspect about this scene is the striking homoerotic murals that are seen framing Boone, once more, on either side, depicting shirtless male workers (Fig.  4). This was filmed at a high school in San Pedro,30 this 1937 New Deal-era mural by Thomas Tyrone Comfort entitled ‘Industrial Life in San Pedro’.31

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Fig. 4  Boone researches Whale, framed by homoerotic New Deal art

Fig. 5  Whale conceals his copy of Physique Pictorial

When Boone returns to the studio to pose for Whale, the nude portrait has been moved behind a more innocuous painting next to the door, presumably to avoid unsettling the model. Boone has evidently groomed himself for the occasion, donning a crisp white shirt. Whale is frustrated by the garment and Boone’s reluctance to remove it, and searches for something to preserve his modesty. The camera tracks back as Whale investigates the objects on his table top, and a pile of physical culture magazines is incriminatingly revealed to the viewer as he lifts a woollen pullover. The cover of the magazine that Whale holds briefly before the camera, concealed from Boone’s eyes as the director glances guiltily towards him, is

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the July 1951 issue of Physique Pictorial, with British future Hercules peplum star, Reg Park, flexing shirtlessly on the cover (Fig. 5). Such magazines frequently included models posing as if Greek gods—classical Americans, if you will—often with props such as columns and discuses to evoke a classical milieu that contrived to lift them above mere soft-core pornography into something with a veil of respectability, and even art, about it. This moment is lifted from an early scene in Bram’s novel. Abandoning a sketch he is attempting, Whale picks up a book on Rembrandt but finds that an issue of Physique Pictorial falls out onto the floor, images of ‘muscle, bodies, skin’ with near-naked models that are ‘Beefy from the neck down, their faces are blandly American as highway billboards’.32 The images do not arouse him, nor provide ‘a figure who will move him to art’ but bring ‘memories of being touched’. At this moment a sound turns his attention to Boone skimming the pool outside. Here, the ideals of fine/classical art and those of contemporary America are juxtaposed as in the film, but the latter is more overt in alluding to the sexual subtext that at least seems to underscore the scene in the studio. Whale’s hasty covering of the magazines alludes to their likely masturbatory function for him, like many gay men in the 1950s where such publications served as a source of erotic stimulation and, as we have seen, historical validation. Boone’s appearance, posing contrapposto with the lawnmower when Whale first approached him, is a vision of this kind of neo-classical Americana brought to life. Indeed, the equivalent moment in the novel sees Boone stripping off his t-shirt to reveal a ‘beefy pink torso and shoulders’, echoing the language that earlier described the physique magazine as ‘Ah, shirtless youth, Whale thinks with a smile’.33 The film withholds a view of Boone’s chest until the studio scene, with only the Parthenon marbles to foreshadow it, the film’s equivalent of the novel’s idealised ‘shirtless youth’ reference to Boone, perhaps, also an allusion to fantasies of the Greek ideal. Whale soon locates a desultory dust cover: ‘we could drape this across your shoulders like a toga’, he offers, mocking the young man’s coyness (as well as fig-leaf imposing prudishness regarding nude statues) while alluding to the classical body he is projecting onto Boone. The theatrical cut of the film omits a moment in the shooting script that has Whale attempt to persuade Boone to go barefoot while posing,34 a link back to the director’s early scrutiny of the student interviewer’s feet, as well as to the plaster foot he attempted to sketch before seeking a live model. Later on, Boone sits once more for the artist in an uncomfortable confrontation as pretence is dropped and Whale’s sexuality is

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discussed all-too-frankly for him. Following their argument, Whale experiences a flashback to one of his naked pool parties, its visual crescendo a nude youth emerging from a pool, again as if a figure of the classical past Whale seems so attached to. Animated into slow-motion life, emphasising the somewhat surreal, dream-like memory that springs upon Whale, it seems like the gods of the past are rising, archaeologically, before him. These are Whale’s visions of male beauty, arising from what Tsika describes as the ‘Greek-derived, Western ideal of white beauty’.35 In this they are also figures familiar in the cinematic imaginary, whose ideals do not always reveal their classical roots so clearly. The film’s allusions to the classical past draw on much more overt references in the novel. There, a flashback depicts the young James Whale rejecting the factory life awaiting him in his Edwardian West Midlands home town. It also shows him escaping to the nearby countryside with his chum, Tozer, having been frustrated that the Dudley School of Arts and Crafts only supplied plaster casts of classical nudes, in another instance of sculpture providing surrogate life models. The setting, a ‘ruined granary’ whose ‘ruins are hardly ancient’ but instead attended by canal water blackened by ‘runoff slag from the steel mills upstream’,36 incongruously juxtaposes the reality of Whale’s life with the forms, and desires, that he longs for. The bodies of the young men literally expose this framing of past and present, as Tozer sketches: In front of him, against the yellow ferns and soot-streaked tree trunks, young James Whale, twenty-one years old, reclines on his elbows in the classical pose of “The Dying Gaul.” He is uncomfortably, nervously, naked. There’s nothing classical about his nudity. He looks like a skinned rabbit. His long torso is not much thicker than his limbs, and his flesh is the color of rice pudding.37

Tozer jokes that they are a ‘pair of Greek gods by the Old Birmingham Canal’ as they strip off, with Whale quipping ‘Whoever saw a Greek statue with a drawing pad?’.38 The future director is aware of the shabbiness of the setting, a ‘caricature’ of fine art, but perceives a ‘neoclassical squint in Tozer’s belly button’ and both men become aroused and wrestle, to the inevitable conclusion.39 Whale is stunned by feeling the other man’s skin ‘not flat like a picture but as round as a sculpture’.40 The scene is packed with references to ancient bodies that have long been framed by queer desire, granting a museal aura to the viewing of queer bodies in a time and

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place where such things must be unspoken. Such vicarious desire, projected onto sculpture, thus becomes shocking when the marble of fantasy becomes warm to the touch, as Galatea responding to Pygmalion’s touch. Or Boone being exchanged for plaster replicas of Greek marbles, or the men posing in a beefcake magazine.

Cross-Generational Nostalgia In the ‘strip’ scene with the film student, Whale’s desire to view the young man’s body paralleled his desire to be seen as a versatile and serious director. When we come to the studio scene, Whale is clearly gratified by the interest aroused in Boone when the young man learns that he was a director, recognising his two Frankenstein films. Whale here acknowledges at least some pride in the films, given his swift dismissal of the further sequels as works by ‘hacks’. As we have seen, this scene is all about the director constructing an aura around himself of artistic sophistication and prestige; the art he self-consciously curates in his home a theatrical display in which he hopes to cast Boone as the leading, classical, figure. The studio scene thus develops a theme of cross-generational nostalgia (or lack of) for Whale’s films within the classical/modern, old/young framings we have considered so far. Pam Cook has described screen nostalgia as being predicated on an acknowledgement that the thing that is longed for has been lost, and ‘can only be accessed through images’.41 Whale’s unsuccessful attempts to sketch Boone and recover his lost health and artistic ability are equally articulated by his reaching for the idealised youths of his Edwardian memories and are vicariously embodied in the sculptures and paintings that now surround him. As Whale confides to the shirtless Boone: ‘I’ve spent much of my life outrunning the past, and now it floods all over me’. However, the film also maps Whale’s nostalgia—channelled by Boone’s curiosity—onto that of the viewer and a sense of longing not only for the ostensibly warm Hollywood milieu of the 1950s and 1930s for the viewer (the classicised spectacle of the male body eliding the real-world homophobia of those decades), but also for Whale’s films themselves. Boone becomes a student of Whale’s work, also educating the viewer, just as Whale finds that Boone symbolises something for him. As one review of Bram’s novel puts it, ‘Whale and Boone are each other’s icons’.42 It is television that provides access to Whale’s past via images for Boone, representing future generations that would discover the films in this way.

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Boone brings a TV guide to tell Whale that one of his films is showing that night, and while Whale indicates disappointment that the screening is of The Bride of Frankenstein and not The Invisible Man or Show Boat, changing the subject to mask his pique, he nonetheless stays up late with Hanna to watch it, while Boone watches the film with his sceptical bar friends. It is at this point in the film where we see the film’s title quote from The Bride of Frankenstein, as Dr Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) toasts, ‘to a new world of gods and monsters’, a line that carries a number of meanings in this context. Pretorius evokes a secular world where science becomes the progenitor, framing Frankenstein and himself as gay parents—indeed, the film has Whale whisper that Pretorius is ‘a little bit in love’ with Frankenstein. The ‘gods’ here could also refer to the classical figures that either form or shape the art in Whale’s home and frame Whale’s attraction to and manipulation of Boone—and we later see the Monster take the form of Boone to carry the frail director, further complicating the blurred lines of death-wish and desire. As we have seen, the panels of the Parthenon, both as originals and copies, have been globally dispersed into museums, galleries and domestic spaces that form the ‘diaspora of the marbles’, as Classical historian, Mary Beard, terms it, with barely a city in Europe and America without a copy.43 While the appropriate geographical location of the marbles remains hotly contested, in terms of the aura they have accumulated, it is difficult to argue with Beard’s conclusion that uncomfortable as it may be: ‘if it had not been dismembered, the Parthenon would never have been half so famous’.44 This fame has been achieved not only as a spectacular remnant of the past, but through re-location and copying and the conscious construction of aura through art history criticism and careful display. As David Lowenthal observes: ‘Fragmented works seemed more intensely alive than intact antiquities’.45 In Gods and Monsters, Whale has collected reproductions of the Parthenon marbles presumably for their aura of art and high culture, aiding his image as an English ex-pat in Hollywood, and masking his working-class roots, which break through as he speaks to Boone, but also signalling his sexual proclivities. While he brushes away his paintings as being largely copies, undercutting Boone’s willingness to be impressed by them, where does this place his own artworks, his films? Juxtaposed with the high aura of Greek art—never higher than in works associated with Phidias—are Whale’s Frankenstein films to be seen as ‘low’ art? Boone represents a post-war generation encountering Whale’s films as late-night curiosities of uncertain provenance. His tutoring in Whale’s

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character allows him to appreciate the director’s trademark disdain for generic and tonal boundaries, and frequent embrace of a gallows (or trench-) humour that causes the patrons at Boone’s bar to question directorial intent—are these films meant to be funny? The film brings us an authoritative yes; these films can be both scary and funny, and like the vicissitudes in physical ideals the film makes us aware of across the centuries, here too are the artistic cycles of film taste.

‘What Did You Expect? Bronze?’ Following the Hollywood party where Whale and Boone are drenched by a sudden rainstorm, the film moves towards its climax as the two men return to the director’s home. Whale searches for dry clothes that will fit Boone, the younger man retaining a towel around his waist due to the lack of suitable trousers. From the visual (if perhaps not social) warmth of the party sequence, the film now adopts an ‘Expressionistic’ aesthetic of stormy greys and blues and canted angles,46 as past and present clash disturbingly in Whale’s final night. Whale proceeds to share his darkest recollections of the Great War, and how returned memories of the death of his (symbolically handsome) lover, Barnett, and that ‘whole generation’ have left him with ‘nothing’ of the desires and creative talent that could draw him away from the horrors of the past. Tsika likens the ‘tasteful décor and high ceilings’ of the drawing room in which Whale’s subsequent assault on Boone takes place to the Oval Office, connecting it to the 1990s’ sexual misconduct of another ‘old white man’, as he puts it—perhaps stretching the point as Clinton was about 15 years younger than Whale—President Clinton (Tsika rightly notes the general ethnic whiteness of the film’s world). As Tsika notes, Mike Nichols’ 1998 Primary Colors, which addressed the exploitation of gay men as well as women on Capitol Hill, shared marquees with Gods and Monsters.47 However, I would also note that the mix of Federal/Greek Revival styles of these Washington buildings take their cues from neo-classicism, adding another, architectural, frame around the display of Boone’s (and arguably, Fraser’s) built, admired and exploited body. Boone seems to come to a decision in this momentous sequence and takes a long swig of his drink as Whale stares out of the window. We cut closer to Whale facing the window with its triptych of panes; Whale is framed within a pane on the right, his reflection is in the middle, and on the left we see an almost oneiric reflection of Boone lifting off his sweater.

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This is a frieze-framed echo of his first, Parthenon-framed, introduction; the statue metamorphosing into living glory. We cut to a mid-shot of Boone, his flesh contrastingly warm in tone against his surroundings with a musculature carefully sculpted in the low-key lighting, while the gentle contrapposto of his torso, arms hanging loosely at his side, is not dissimilar to the classical sculpture of Doryphoros, the spear-bearer (Fig. 6). ‘You said you wanted to draw me like a statue’, Boone explains. We cut back to the reflection as he drops the towel, a dark pair of shorts about his waist. Condon reveals that Boone was originally planned to be nude in this scene,48 stating that Fraser felt that this would take audiences ‘out of the movie’—that is, that it would not only be Boone’s body that would be exposed, but that of Fraser the star, too. The film grants Boone a little more agency than the novel in this sequence, but Bram’s dialogue is influential. In the novel, it is Whale’s idea to sketch his groundsman once more, claiming that his artistic urge has returned. He alludes to the incongruity of Boone’s improvised apparel, opining that: ‘It reduces you, Clayton. A man of your youth and physique? You should be free of encumbrance. All of the piece. Like a Greek statue’.49 Boone resists becoming naked but is then shamed by Whale’s frank recollection of his wartime experience, deciding then (like the film) to drop the towel, but is (unlike the film) fully naked. Whale surveys the body displayed before him: ‘a body thicker and more uneven than any Greek statue, in patches of tan and white, a stocky piebald statue’.50 The film’s shooting script maintained a specific reference to being sketched like ‘a Greek statue’ (presumably in

Fig. 6  Boone’s sculptural pose

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response to Whale’s original ‘unencumbered’ line) and not simply ‘a statue’ as in the theatrical release. Either way, it is a fragment of a missing exchange, but the omission of ‘Greek’ allows it to be more generalised. This foregrounds the overdetermined nature of Boone’s body in the film and its shifting meaning within a series of overlapping framings; from the classical bodies connoting art and homoeroticism in Whale’s home and the body of Barnett on the wire in the Great War, to Physical Culture and Hollywood pool parties in his more recent past. Boone comes to symbolise the sexual and emotional connections spanning several generations that Whale strives to recover and at the same time presents the muscular power (Thanatos) that might allow him to escape a past that has become unbearable in its incontinent ruptures into the present. In the film, Whale reaches to Boone’s reflection in the window, foregrounding the elusive nature of the nostalgic image for him—both desirable and, he hopes, death-bringing. Whale turns. We see another shot of Boone, this time his hands are placed on his hips in a much more twentieth-­ century pose—not unlike the neo-classical sculptures that decorate Rome’s 1930s’ Stadio dei Marmi (formerly Foro Mussolini), or the pictures in Whale’s physical culture magazine for that matter—suggesting pride, strength but also uneasy self-awareness in the body. It is the most sculptural image in the film, and at once a star image too. But Boone’s body is challenging to Whale, who protests ‘You’re much too human’, to which the perplexed young man responds: ‘what did you expect, bronze?’ Boone interprets Whale’s words to express disappointment that he does not match up to a presumably classical sculptural ideal. The exchange is lifted directly from the novel, where we have also shared Boone’s thoughts as he sees his naked body through Whale’s eyes, foregrounding perceived imperfections such as his appendectomy scar (also present on Fraser’s body).51 Brendan Fraser’s body, moulded by Hollywood, is evenly tanned and more akin to Western ideals of male beauty than the Boone of the novel, and never more so than in this scene. Fraser was known for his built physique; his musculature and willingness to reveal it to the camera bringing him into the public eye in films such as California Man (Les Mayfield, 1992). This was particularly the case for George of the Jungle (Sam Weisman, 1997), the loincloth-clad role which immediately preceded Gods and Monsters, and in the publicity for which he recounted his training regime and the need to pump iron before every take.52 Shaped by 1990s aesthetics, Fraser/Boone’s build and features (including his broken nose) are certainly less streamlined, more ‘built’, and individuated, than most Greek

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gods of sculpture, particularly around the chest and shoulders. Like the dust-cloth toga from the earlier scene, the large shorts he wears seem incongruous, as if putting underwear on the Apollo Belvedere to make him ‘decent’. Standing in Whale’s room, Boone is also most vividly alive and human; once finally ‘brought to life’, Pygmalion’s object of desire (like Frankenstein’s cadaverous living statue) is a challenge to its creator. Whale fetches his gas mask and, in a disturbing scene, tries and fails to provoke a distraught Boone into becoming an involuntary assistant to suicide. The book has Whale attempt to persuade Boone that their age difference, and the homophobia this might fuel, will exonerate Boone: ‘You’d be the innocent youth. Protecting his virtue from the dirty old pansy’.53 In the aftermath, the book uses another classical allusion—to the handsome youth beloved (and abducted by) Zeus, and the boatman to the underworld—to express the clash of Eros and Thanatos in the scene: ‘“If I’d seen you like this a few months ago, Clayton?” Whale whispers. “I’d be in heaven. Alas. You’re not Ganymede tonight. And you’re certainly not Charon.”’54 However forced, Boone just does not fit the classical models, he is emphatically of the present. Following the emotional crescendo of this scene, Boone helps Whale get into bed, and we share Whale’s delirious dream of walking hand-in-­ hand with Boone as his Monster, the role he has just refused to play, before returning to the battlefield of the Great War. There, he finds the body of Barnett and lays down beside him; the camera craning down to survey this funereal geometry of bodies as if viewing a Michelangelo fresco. A ringing phone brings us to a close-up of Boone waking on the couch in the same room from which Whale first spied Boone in the garden. Boone props himself up on his left elbow (as he did when posing for Whale) before we cut to a wide shot, the camera tracking around to bring in a full view of the Parthenon frieze panel, then the one in the hallway beside which Hanna is speaking on the phone, until the frame encompasses the final Parthenon panel as depicted on the lamp base. Hanna enters the room with a tray as she did in the opening scene. The camera comes close to Boone, holding the frieze in view (Figs.7, 8 and 9). Boone wears a white vest with a cream-coloured blanket draped over him like a toga, his bare foot protruding into the centre of the frame. Draped in this pose, and juxtaposed with the marble imagery above—the bodies connected in their whiteness—Boone occupies the space of the East Pediment Parthenon sculpture usually identified as Dionysus as displayed in the British Museum, albeit reversed.55 He is an ungainly Dionysus in the

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Fig. 7  Boone awakes

Fig. 8  Boone sits up, the camera tracking to include the frieze panel in the background

manner of previous misfit framings with classical art, but this is particularly appropriate here, given the excesses of the previous night, for the god symbolises wine and indulgence, and the dissonant note of sexuality that reverberates through Whale’s home and his memories.

Conclusion Gods and Monsters’ portrayal of cross-generational relationships of various kinds is complex and poignant and seems increasingly so looking back now over two decades since its release. In the wake of the #MeToo

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Fig. 9  Figure of ‘Dionysus’, from the East Pediment of the Parthenon (Reversed)

movement, added resonance is brought to the scene of the student induced to strip for the director’s amusement, as well as between Boone’s early objectification by Whale, even as it is used to explore same-sex sexual dynamics, ancient and modern, and the way homosexuality needed to be carefully coded amid a hostile external environment. While the film used Fraser’s semi-nude body within the film and in publicity, the star has himself commented on how he was later mistreated by Hollywood. In 2018, he told GQ magazine about the negative effect on his career of allegedly being groped by the ex-president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 2003, as well as the extensive medical treatment he has undergone to repair physical damage caused by performing his own stunts in action films.56 Fraser describes a star who came to be valued for his looks and labour but treated as an object by those in power, offering something of a dark flipside to the themes of youth, beauty and queer desire, depicted in the 1998 film.

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Gods and Monsters ends on a cross-generational note. Carter Burwell’s score strikes a particularly melancholy theme, highlighting the main theme on solo violin, as Boone and Hanna watch Whale’s drowned body float in his swimming pool, his arms spread out. This is the same pose in which, as Condon notes, Whale imagined himself lying down with the body of Barnett, his dead lover from the Great War, who had died suspended from barbed wire.57 The body is mythologised in Whale’s recollection, an awful human sculpture of a once-idealised body now subject to ruin and decay, ignominiously displayed before his comrades each and every day. Lost to the past, Barnett’s body registers as a sculptural absence into which modern, and ancient, bodies are projected. In this, Whale’s memory resonates with similar idealised, Apolline, men mourned in the writings of gay Great War poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.58 Boone awakens in the pseudo-Phidian pose above to a new life without Whale, although he doesn’t know it yet, just as Whale has just laid himself to rest in the ground with the lost generation, a true nostalgie de la boue. A final coda adds another generation as Boone’s young son is seen watching The Bride of Frankenstein on television, shifting the focus from the pederastic and homoerotic to paternal and cultural. Boone clearly takes pride in his son’s appreciation of the film and produces Whale’s original sketch of the Monster, on which Whale has inscribed ‘Friend?’, to answer the boy’s scepticism regarding his claim to have known the film’s director. Art authenticates Boone’s relationship to Whale, just as the sketch had served as Whale’s authoring signature when first shown to Boone. The film’s melancholy final shot sees Boone striding down a rain-­ swept alleyway aping the gait of Karloff’s Monster, an ungainly human statue, and a palimpsest of icons, gods and monsters, both cinematic and cultural that span generations.

Notes 1. Christopher Bram, Father of Frankenstein (London: Phoenix, 1999 [1995]). 2. Noah Tsika, Gods and Monsters: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009), p. 47. 3. Bill Condon, Director’s Commentary, Gods and Monsters, DVD. Condon credits this observation to an audience member at a screening of the film. 4. Michael Williams, Film Stardom and the Ancient Past: Idols, Artefacts and Epics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 131–141.

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5. ‘Palladianism Persists in Pasadena’, 19 May 2017: http://blog.bhhscalifornia.com/palladianism-persists-in-pasadena-at-arden-villa/ [Accessed 9 November 2018]; Bram, p. 200. 6. Condon, DVD Commentary. 7. Martin Robertson, The Parthenon Frieze (London: Phaidon, 1975), p. 56. 8. John G. Younger, ‘Gender and Sexuality in the Parthenon Frieze’, in Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Claire L. Lyons (eds.), Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1997), pp.  120–153, p.  125. The ephebe is Fig.  22 on the frieze. 9. Younger, pp. 27, 29. 10. Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London, Routledge, 1993), p. 25. 11. John Boardman’s Foreword to Frank Brommer, The Sculptures of the Parthenon: Metopes, Frieze, Pediments, Cult-Statue (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1979), p. 7. 12. Mary Beard, The Parthenon (London: Profile, 2010), p. 132. 13. See Williams 2018, pp. 141–148; other examples in Film Stardom, Myth and Classicism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 76–81. 14. K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 6. 15. Kim Marra, ‘Queer Aging Bareback: A Ride with the Parthenon Sculptures’, TDR: The Drama Review, 58:4 (Winter 2014), pp. 147–157 (152). Marra refers to Dover (1989). 16. Dover (1989), p. 6. 17. Marra, 149. 18. Tsika, p. 119, citing Waugh, ‘The Third Body: Patterns in the Construction of the Subject in Gay Male Narrative Film’, Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson (eds.), Queer Looks (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 141–161 (p. 149). 19. See David K.  Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2004). Paranoia that homosexuals were a danger to unsuspecting young men is vividly apparent in public service films such as Boys Beware: Homosexuals Are on the Prowl (Sid Davis, 1961). 20. Dover, ‘Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behaviour’, in Laura K. McClure, Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002), pp. 19–33 (p. 25). 21. Dover (2002) [original emphasis], p. 26. 22. Dover (2002), p. 27. 23. Dover (2002), p. 27. 24. Bram, p. 8.

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25. See Páraic Finnerty, ‘The Englishman in America: Masculinity in Love and Death on Long Island and Father of Frankenstein’, Genders, 51, 2010, paragraph 6. Online: https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-2013/ 2010/04/01/englishman-america-masculinity-love-and-death-long-islandand-father-frankenstein. 26. Finnerty, paragraph 19. 27. Carol Allen, ‘Brendan Fraser: Interview’, Independent, 12 December 1997: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/its-hard-work-all-thatswinging-from-vines-1288245.html [Accessed 30/12/18]. 28. Bill Condon, Director’s Commentary, Gods and Monsters, DVD. 29. Mark Bronski, ‘Gods and Monsters: The Search for the Right Whale’, Cineaste, 24:4 (September 1999), pp. 13–14. 30. Bill Condon, Director’s Commentary, Gods and Monsters, DVD. 31. See ‘The New Deal in Los Angeles, 1933–1943’, http://wpainla. blogspot.com/2010/05/san-pedro-high-school.html [Accessed 6 December 2018]. 32. Bram, p. 13. 33. Bram, p. 8. 34. Bill Condon, Gods and Monsters: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2005), p. 31. 35. Tsika, p.  56. Drawing from Richard Dyer’s White (London: Routledge, 1997). 36. Bram, p. 17. 37. Bram, p. 18. 38. Bram, pp. 19, 20. 39. Bram, p. 20. 40. Bram, p. 22. 41. Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London, Routledge, 2005), p. 4. 42. ‘Monster Mash’, The Advocate, 2 May 1995, 62–63 [63]. [Review of Bram’s novel]. 43. Beard, pp. 16, 18. 44. Beard, p. 22. 45. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country: Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 244. 46. Bill Condon, Director’s Commentary, Gods and Monsters, DVD. 47. Tsika, pp. 50–51. 48. Bill Condon, Director’s Commentary, Gods and Monsters, DVD. 49. Bram, p. 236. 50. Bram, p. 241. 51. Bram, p. 241.

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52. Carol Allen, ‘Brendan Fraser: Interview’, Independent, 12 December 1997: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/its-hard-work-all-thatswinging-from-vines-1288245.html [Accessed 30 December 2018]. 53. Bram, p. 246. 54. Bram, p. 250. 55. See https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=461662&partId=1&searchText=181 6,0610.93&page=1 [Accessed 31 January 2018]. 56. Zach Baron, ‘What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser’, GQ, 22 February 2018: https://www.gq.com/story/what-ever-happened-to-brendan-fraser [Accessed 20 December 2018]. 57. Bill Condon, Director’s Commentary, Gods and Monsters, DVD. 58. See Paul Fussell, ‘Soldier Boys’, The Great War and Modern Memory (Illustrated Edition) (New York and London: Sterling, 2009), pp. 339–388.

Dysfunctional Cross Generational Relationships

‘Shameless and Repulsive’: Beryl Reid and Transgressive Middle-Aged Desires in Film Comedy of the Late 1960s Claire Mortimer

Comedienne and variety star Beryl Reid redefined her screen persona in the late sixties, embracing risk in taking roles which would alienate some of a fan following built up over several decades, but which led to international recognition for her skills as an actress. This chapter explores Reid’s performances in The Killing of Sister George (Robert Aldrich, 1968) and Entertaining Mr Sloane (Douglas Hickox, 1970), as an older woman defying moral codes by pursuing relationships with much younger partners. The two films deliberately courted controversy in their representation of sexuality, both being adaptations of plays which were landmarks in the emergence of the ‘permissive’ society of the 1960s. Reid plays characters that threaten the traditional family structure, being spinsters who transgress, refusing to accept their place in the margins by seeking to enjoy unconventional sexual relationships. Susan Sontag wrote of the double marginality accorded to the ageing woman, on account of her age and

C. Mortimer (*) Independent Researcher © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_9

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gender, yet the unmarried status of the spinster amounts to a triple marginality, making the danger even greater in departures from socially inscribed age-appropriate behaviours.1 The shock of the sexually active middle-aged spinster is accentuated by the choice of much younger partners, whose gamine good looks incarnated the spirit of the sixties, in contrast with Reid’s rather more matronly form. This chapter will focus on Reid’s role as Kath in the film adaptation of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane as a lascivious middle-aged spinster who pursues and seduces a murderous young lothario, Sloane. The film ends with the pregnant Kath and her brother happily contracting to share the favours of the reluctant Sloane, in the wake of his murder of their father, pioneering a family structure which is a farcical inversion of the social ideal. The film’s exploitation of the grotesque took Orton’s farce into the realm of Gothic horror, articulating an ambivalence regarding ageing sexuality which would be perpetuated in British comedy, in film and television, over the following decades. Sloane is marked by the wider social and cultural context, looking back to the variety tradition within the template of the era of sexual liberation. It celebrates the radical sexual politics of the sixties as figured large in Orton’s play, but its overt efforts to cultivate controversy and emphasise the lurid potential of its sexual content signal a desperation in the face of declining cinema audiences, at a desperate time for the British film industry. Reid took the role in Entertaining Mr Sloane, having risen to stardom, and notoriety, on both sides of the Atlantic in the lead role in the stage play and subsequently the film adaptation of The Killing of Sister George. After decades as a variety performer, Reid took the role of an ageing lesbian actress whose relationship with her younger girlfriend collapses alongside her career in a television soap opera. Both roles departed from the dominant representations of ageing femininity in film comedy which typically elided any suggestion of sexuality, betraying a profound cultural distaste for ageing sexuality. Reid’s roles in both films involve her in relationships with younger partners which challenge the notion of the nuclear family, with ageing female sexuality being portrayed as predatory and pathetic in equal measure. This chapter will consider Reid’s performances with regards to the wider sociological and cultural framework, specifically the prevailing discourses concerning ageing femininity and sexuality.

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Sex and the Ageing Woman Both Sister George and Kath transgress taboos not only regarding femininity, ageing and sexuality, in their desire for a younger partner. That a woman should experience sexual desire having lost her capacity to bear children is the source of social unease, as noted by commentators on female ageing. Lynne Segal observed that ‘[f]ew adjectives combine faster than ugly-old-woman’, remarking on the ‘prevalent shame around ageing female flesh’.2 The sight of a desiring menopausal woman was inherently troubling at a time when to even mention the word ‘menopause’ was taboo, as was made plain by David Frost’s nonplussed silence when anthropologist Margaret Mead did just that in a television interview in 1970.3 In the midst of an era of sexual liberation, the menopause remained an embarrassing secret, with the sexual revolution being the territory of the young rather than the old(er). Anxieties regarding the predatory ambitions of the middle-aged woman were endemic in post-war culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Vivian Sobchack’s research into low-budget science fiction/horror films of the late 1950s and early 1960s identified narratives that centred on middle-­ aged women transformed into monsters, noting that ‘what they figure as most grotesque and disgusting is not the monstrousness of the transformation, but the “unnatural” conjunction of middle-aged female flesh and still youthful desire’.4 In British film of the same period the older woman/ younger man relationship was a trope of kitchen sink dramas, with the older woman being a tragic figure, punished by a lonely death in Room At The Top (Jack Clayton, 1958) and This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963), or emerging as a selfish harpy in A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961), wherein Jo’s middle-aged mother (Dora Bryan) prioritises her love life with an unsuitable younger man over her daughter’s needs. Hollywood films of the era were slow to incorporate unconventional romantic roles for older characters, with the most notable example being Harold and Maud (Hal Ashby, 1971) concerning the love affair between a nihilistic twenty-year-old man and a seventy-nine-year-old Holocaust survivor, who meet at a funeral. The permissive society of the 1960s extended the bounds of filmic representations of sex and relationships, with the decade being marked by various landmarks in British cinema such as Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961) pushing the boundaries regarding representation of homosexuality, The L-Shaped Room (Bryan Forbes, 1962) dealing with single parenthood, and

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male nudity in Women in Love (Ken Russell, 1969). The decade certainly witnessed notable landmarks which marked the emergence of a more liberated society, including in Britain the failed prosecution of Penguin books in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial in 1960, the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 and the loosening of the shackles of marriage marked by the Divorce Law Reform Act in 1969. Nevertheless, the sexual revolution was not wholly welcomed, with fears about hedonism and moral decline being prevalent, with Mary Whitehouse founding her Clean Up TV Campaign in 1963. Decriminalisation of homosexuality was granted on the understanding that ‘they should be grateful, silent, and invisible’.5 Liberalisation led to a loosening of the boundaries regarding what was culturally acceptable, with top-shelf magazines being launched including Penthouse (1965) and Mayfair (1966), and Kenneth Tynan’s erotic revue Oh Calcutta!, leading to widespread outrage in 1970. Both The Killing of Sister George and Entertaining Mr Sloane were surrounded with controversy, deliberately cultivated by producers in order to compete for a youth audience at a time of declining audiences and rapidly changing social mores.

From Variety Act to Film Star: The Killing of Sister George Approaching her fifties, Reid’s age was central to her casting in both The Killing of Sister George and Entertaining Mr Sloane. Reid’s career was as eccentric as her persona, finding international film stardom as a middle-­ aged British actress in the late 1960s, within a cultural climate driven by the fetishisation of youth. Richard Dyer noted that star images can sometimes result in ‘problematic fits’ when cast in particular roles, resulting in a disjuncture which can have a ‘particular ideological significance’.6 The casting of variety star Reid was calculated to create such a disjuncture, subverting her persona as the face of British light entertainment, but consistent with her background and the traditions of the unruliness of female variety performance, most notably the spinster grotesque. Reid welcomed the chance to disrupt her persona, embracing risk, being desperate to be taken seriously as an actress, and move away from variety and revue work.7 Reid’s career had flourished through her creation of, and performance as characters who subverted expectations regarding idealised feminine traits. Her roles as Sister George and Kath were informed by a persona which Rosie White describes as being typical of the character actress

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performing comedy in ‘challenging “proper” heterosexuality through a deployment of grotesque, camp and eccentric performance styles’.8 Born in 1920, Reid’s career trajectory followed that of many other British character actresses of the twentieth century, starting in variety and revues, informed by the music hall tradition of female performance, moving to radio, film and television as the century progressed, building a substantial fan base which ensured a lasting career. Reid exerted control over her career, having become a household name in the guise of schoolgirl terror Monica, a character developed by Reid from her live act to become a permanent feature on the hit BBC radio show Educating Archie (1952–56). Reid’s first film role was maths teacher Miss Wilson, in The Belles of St. Trinian’s (Frank Launder, 1954), a character which prefigured Sister George, being coded as queer through masculine attributes, specifically sporting a monocle, wearing tweed and obsessed with golf. Subsequent film roles were intermittent, and tended to emphasise her age and lack of glamour, cast as an elderly spinster at the age of forty in Two Way Stretch (Robert Day, 1960), and as a wife who is so irritating that her husband is driven to murder her in The Dock Brief (James Hill, 1962). British film comedy continued to maintain a tradition of the mature woman being allowed a latitude and agency in the narrative denied to them in other genres, with actresses such as Hattie Jacques, Margaret Rutherford and Irene Handl enjoying enduring careers. Nevertheless their roles were defined by their asexuality, often in contrast with the hypersexuality which defined the leading, younger starlet, with the prospect of the sexually active older woman being too troubling to contain within the narrative. Both of Reid’s major film roles were iterations of the spinster, one of the perennial roles available to ageing actresses. As a variety performer Reid belonged to the tradition of the music-hall grotesque, whose absence of glamour, youth and femininity is cultivated for comic effect. She followed in the tradition of Nellie Wallace, one of the foremost grotesques of the twentieth century, described as the ‘Essence of Eccentricity’, her stage persona was that of ‘a clownishly unglamorous older spinster with delusions of attractiveness’.9 Wallace’s stage act was centred on her spinster status, conflating her lack of idealised femininity with sexual frustration, as celebrated in one of her most iconic songs, ‘Under the Bed’, in which she sings of her mother’s warning to always look under the bed before going to sleep, regretting that ‘it’s never been my luck to find a man there yet’, and betraying the frustration of the ageing spinster.

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Much like Sloane, The Killing of Sister George centres on a complex and unconventional three-way relationship, with Reid playing the role of the desiring yet monstrous middle-aged woman in a relationship with a younger partner. The play follows the collapse of actress June Buckridge’s career and relationship, when her character, Sister George, is killed off in a long-running BBC soap opera. Her long-term relationship with Alice (Susannah York) falls apart at the same time, when she leaves her for another older woman, BBC executive Mrs Croft (Coral Browne). The character of George was informed by Reid, with theatre impresario Michael Codron commissioning Frank Marcus to write the original play Sister George with her in mind, inspired by her work in variety and revue. The cast encountered horror and disgust throughout the provinces when touring the production in 1965, with Reid describing them as ‘pathfinders’.10 The play shocked Reid’s fan base, finding herself confronted by former fans who professed themselves ‘disgusted’ by the play.11 Nevertheless, the play found its audience in London, selling out before transferring to New  York, with Reid becoming an international star, receiving a Tony Award for her performance. Director Robert Aldrich sought to shock the audience with his film adaptation, rendering the older woman monstrous in the tradition of the ‘Grande Dame Guignol’ films of the era. The success of Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) had led to a proliferation of horror films featuring ageing stars in the role of unstable older women. The ageing lesbian Sister George shares many of the characteristics of the heroines of these films as defined by Tomasz Fisiak as ‘outside society, marginalized and, in effect, deprived of their rights. They form a collective vision of Otherness […] Society banishes them, for they no longer fit the societal norm, due to their age and poor mental health’.12 For Aldrich, the play offered the material to take the genre to more shocking extremes, with the ‘otherness’ of the ageing George being accentuated by her lesbianism, with her much younger and beautiful girlfriend being represented as a victim of the older woman’s jealousy and drunken rages, in a tempestuous and often abusive relationship. In tune with the times and the need to push boundaries Aldrich decided that he wanted the film adaptation to be more explicit than the play, yet Reid was categorical in telling him that she did not want to be in a ‘sex film’.13 His efforts to sensationalise the relationship led to his decision to emphasise the age gap between George and Alice, with Reid being made up to appear somewhat older than her age to

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play George, wearing a grey wig, and ‘tough old suits’,14 to create the image of an ageing butch lesbian, or in Reid’s words ‘a collar-and-tie job’.15 Susannah York was cast as Alice, creating a dramatic juxtaposition between her gamine girlishness in contrast to the stolid tweedy butchness of Reid’s George. York’s persona was that of the English Rose, ‘the blue-­ eyed, golden-haired ingenue’, in her own words, the perfect English starlet for the sixties, whereas Reid was an ageing performer whose career was entering its fourth decade.16 The contrast between the personae of the two informed the narrative tension between the collapse of George’s livelihood and Alice’s vulnerability. Aldrich went further to accentuate the abusive aspect to their relationship, adding scenes in which Alice is bullied and abused by George, being forced to eat George’s cigar butt and having a scone thrown at her. Such scenes established their relationship as being deeply dysfunctional, with Alice’s vulnerability being accentuated by her flimsy babydoll nightie, and her attachment to her ‘family’ of dolls. Aldrich’s direction constructs Alice as a casualty of the permissive society, a damaged waif, who is preyed upon by older women to satisfy their selfish desires. It is only at the end of the film that George reveals the truth about Alice, who turns out to be somewhat older than she seemed, having had a child when she was fifteen, who had been put up for adoption. Precocious sexuality is punished, with Alice having lost her autonomy with her child, and being positioned as a victim to the predatory instincts of older women, masquerading as protective, parental figures. For the majority of the film George’s role in the relationship is that of a punishing parent figure, prone to irrational and unjust bullying of the vulnerable Alice, calling her ‘Childie’ reinforcing her seeming youth and innocence. Nevertheless, there is an essential ambivalence in the film’s representation of a lesbian relationship, with George being represented as being maternal in her concern and love for Childie at times. Within their domestic space, Alice plays the part of a child, wearing girlish nighties, cosseting her dolls, being given to wilful behaviour and submitting to rituals of penitence when guilty of behaviour deemed to be unacceptable to George. Reid’s insistence on no explicit sexual scenes renders their scenes together largely chaste with the exception of a kiss in one scene in contrast to the seduction of Childie at the end of the film by her new lover. Alice’s childlike traits are accentuated in the seduction scene, wearing a long wig and hair band which render her the image of Alice in Wonderland, whilst wearing a tiny dress. Mrs Croft takes on a predatory persona as she manoeuvres to take Alice from George, positioning herself as being the

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saviour of a vulnerable young girl, referring to her as ‘your little girl’ and ‘my child’. Alice demonstrates little agency in moving on from George to Mrs Croft, being appropriated by the latter, who seduces her by seemingly befriending her favourite doll, promising to ‘to look after you, better dress you up, keep your hair nice and soft…’ The sex scene has the impact of rendering Mercy Croft as vampiric and exploitative with  Alice supine, upset and seemingly helpless as the older woman proceeds to seduce her. Mrs Croft looms over the bed holding one doll, whilst the vulnerable Alice clasps another. Melissa Anderson points out the impact the film has had with ‘its sly way of celebrating dykes’, George being an ‘unrepentant butch […] redeemed by her unwavering commitment to her sexuality’.17 George is an ambivalent character, her sexuality being represented as concomitant with abusive tendencies in her treatment of Childie and in assaulting the two young nuns in a taxi early on in the film. Nevertheless the narrative renders her a tragic victim of her age and sexuality, punished for both in losing her lover and her career, giving vent to her angst by destroying her character’s coffin on the deserted set of the soap opera. For Jodi Brooks the film can be placed alongside a clutch of films from the era which feature the figure of the ageing actress confronting the demise of her stardom, including Sunset Boulevard (1950) and, of course, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?  Brooks sees these characters as discarded on account of their age, in their personal and professional lives ‘marked by time twice over: as aging women they are marked as outside desire, and as aging stars, as image, they are both frozen and transitory’.18 Yet ironically whereas Sister George faced the scrap heap, and roles as the ‘grande dame guignol’ signalled the decline of the careers of formerly glamorous stars of Hollywood, Reid was launched into stardom by the play and the film. The film earned the dubious honour of being one of the first to be awarded an X certificate in the new US regulatory system, chiefly on account of the explicit sex scene added by Aldrich to the original play. Reid became a cult figure on account of the pioneering nature of the film in being the first Hollywood film to feature explicitly lesbian characters.

Entertaining Mr Sloane Reid followed her ground-breaking role as George with a role which appeared to be equally subversive in terms of relationships and sexuality in Entertaining Mr Sloane. As with Sister George, the original play was

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already notorious, with playwright Joe Orton professing his intent being to ‘break down all the sexual compartments that people have’ in writing Sloane.19 The play had premiered in 1964, catapulting Orton to fame as it pushed boundaries with its innuendo, violence and sexual content. By the end of the 1960s, producer Douglas Kentish felt that the time was right for the first film adaptation of Orton’s work, choosing it as his first foray into filmmaking in conjunction with director Douglas Hickox. The play’s relevance had been enhanced by the brutal murder of Orton by his lover Kenneth Halliwell in 1967, in the same year the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality and abortion was legalised, whilst the death penalty had been abolished in 1965. Britain in the late sixties was ostensibly a more tolerant and liberal place, yet at the same time a nihilistic mood was increasingly prevalent with the election of Nixon in the States, the horror of the Vietnam war and an increasingly vociferous counterculture. Violence, sex and destabilisation of social norms still had the capacity to shock, with Kentish hoping to attract an audience with Entertaining Mr Sloane, as is evident from the press book which emphasises its ‘controversial’ content, boasting that the film ‘keeps closely to the original and is certain to provoke angry mumblings from some cinemagoers’.20 With cinema attendance collapsing year on year in Britain, the casting of Reid in the wake of her role in Sister George would help to command an audience and generate the publicity to ensure the film made an impact. Reid had turned down the role of Kath in Orton’s original production, having been advised by her agent that it was too risky for her career.21 Entertaining Mr Sloane features Reid in the role of Kath, a lonely middle-­ aged spinster who lives with her elderly father, Dadda (Alan Webb), who has been estranged from her brother, Ed (Harry Andrews), for twenty years after finding him with another man. Kath finds Sloane (Peter McEnery), in the graveyard, and persuades him to take up lodgings in their house, unable to resist his youth and good looks. Sister and brother become smitten with the amoral Sloane, who ultimately murders their father who had identified him as the murderer of his former boss. The siblings solve this awkward family crisis by blackmailing Sloane into a ménage à trois, with Kath expecting his baby. The film finishes with an improvised marriage ceremony in which Kath and her brother marry the trapped Sloane, a scene not in the original play. Douglas Hickox’s direction accentuated the Gothic horror implicit in a relationship represented as being deeply transgressive, betraying anxieties around sexuality, ageing femininity and the family. The monstrosity of ageing female desire takes

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comedy to the brink of the horror genre. Hickox’s approach accentuated the grotesque elements of the narrative and characters, prefiguring the style of his camp horror Theatre of Blood (1973). A Gothic mood is established by relocating Kath and Dadda’s house from the rubbish dump of the play to a cemetery. The presence of death permeates the mise en scene and narrative, made vivid in the murderous inclinations of Sloane, culminating in the final scenes with the corpse of Dadda sharing the room with his children enacting a marriage ceremony with his murderer. This dysfunctional and incestuous household was inspired by the story of Oedipus according to Orton. He attacks what he saw as the complacency and hypocrisy of society through the subversion of the family unit, to suit the needs and desires of the sibling rivals. John Lahr described the play as ‘the most blatantly autobiographical of Orton’s major plays. It is the unhappy son’s daydream of the perfect family in which he is never excluded and always needed’.22 The character of Kath was apparently based on many of the characteristics of Orton’s mother, with Leonie Orton exclaiming ‘That’s my mum’ when seeing Beryl Reid’s performance on stage in 1975.23 The characterisation of the older woman was not flattering, with Reid wondering in hindsight why ‘Joe Orton so obviously hated women, because there are some very cruel lines about women in the play’.24 Emma Parker identifies in Orton’s work a ‘misogynistic tendency to use female figures to personify the values he deplores’.25 The film, as with the play, worked to perpetuate an unease about the desiring older woman, and what Germaine Greer referred to as the persistent belief that the menopause turned women into sex maniacs.26 The relationship between Kath and Sloane is rendered sordid and profane, with Kath’s characterisation being true to the variety tradition of the grotesque and the ageing spinster as nymphomaniac, whose desperation and lust prompt her to seduce Sloane, being wilfully oblivious to his abusive treatment of her father, and his relationship with Ed. Whereas Reid had flatly declared herself unable to do any sex scenes as an ageing lesbian, she enthused over the role of Kath, and dispensed with any reservations she had had regarding nudity and sex: ‘I was an ageing nymphomaniac, and I wore wonderful transparent dresses, stiletto heels, and very lush wavy red hair’.27 In this respect, the production, and Reid’s performance, perpetuated the stereotyping which Orton had criticised in the performances in the stage production. He had intended that the characters would be unconventional, and not reinforcing ‘sexual compartments’ such as the ‘nympho’, ‘queer’ and ‘psycho’.28 Interviewed in 2017, Leonie

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Orton felt that the film was not true to the her brother’s intentions, in particular feeling that Reid’s interpretation of Kath was excessive, for although Joe Orton had ‘wanted her to be predatory’, but ‘he didn’t want her to be this floozy that Beryl Reid portrays on screen’.29 Nevertheless Reid’s interpretation of the character extended beyond her performance, been given the responsibility for significant aspects of Kath’s appearance, visiting the ‘“tart shops” in Soho to find just the right sort of stockings and thigh-length boots’.30 Her insistence on heavy make-up helped in her creation of Kath as a grotesque, highlighting the anachronistic behaviour of a middle-aged woman masquerading as young.31 Kath’s libidinous desperation is consistent with the iterations of the spinster in popular comedy such as the Carry On series, with Marion Jordan commenting that ‘the most objectionably cruel of the stereotypes of the unattractive woman is that of the aging (or in some other way non-pin-up) spinster, aping a coy girlishness in the hope of catching a man’.32 Orton had fully intended to shock the audience with the youth of Sloane, describing him as ‘a very young boy’, and a ‘combination of innocence and amorality’.33 The casting of McEnery set up a similar dynamic to Sister George by juxtaposing the short, middle-aged and matronly variety star with a tall, slender incarnation of sixties’ youthful blonde good looks. McEnery’s persona balanced the wholesome family-friendly traits of a Disney romantic lead with rather more edgy roles which pushed boundaries regarding sexual relations, having played the young gay man pushed to suicide in Victim and a son seduced by his father’s second wife in La Curée (Roger Vadim, 1966).34 Hickox highlights the dysfunctional pairing of the ageing nymphomaniac with the amoral youth by setting the opening scene of Kath and Sloane’s first meeting in the graveyard, against the backdrop of a funeral service. The scene establishes the monstrous nature of the desiring middle-aged woman who transgresses expected modes of behaviour, with Kath wearing a transparent mini-dress whilst eating a lolly in a suggestive manner in stark contrast to the serious nature of the internment in the background. She is gradually revealed to the spectator, with the camera slowly moving along her arm to her mouth, building expectation of a much younger woman by revealing the exotic colours of her manicure and the psychedelic fabric of her sleeve, before revealing the bright pink mouth of an older woman. This unsettling contradiction is further developed as an extreme close up lingers on her provocatively sucking on a brightly coloured ice lolly, conflating the iconography of childhood with sexuality, ageing with desire.

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Hickox’s treatment of the scene cultivates the profane nature of the burgeoning relationship, juxtaposing religious iconography and images of decay with Kath and Sloane’s lewd conduct in a sacred site. A montage of shots of the graveyard establishes a nihilistic mood, featuring broken gravestones, rotting flowers and an effigy of Madonna and child, accompanied by a funereal chanting, suggesting the corruption of society’s moral framework. Hickox’s direction gives the scene a hallucinatory feel, featuring unsettling juxtapositions of sound, imagery, setting and unconventional behaviours, comparable to the acid trip in the graveyard scene in the recently released Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969). This is true to the play’s imagery which John Lahr evokes as refracting ‘the sense of threat and cultural death of the revolts of the late sixties’.35 The coupling of the lascivious older woman and the amoral younger man takes the comedy of the grotesque to an extreme which borders on horror. Kath finds Sloane in the midst of death, a vision of lithe youthful masculinity, sunbathing on a grave, his torso bare, hair dyed blonde. The camera renders Kath’s desire a spectacle when she stands over Sloane, we are positioned to look directly up at her from Sloane’s point of view, her plump body on display through the transparency of her dress. Sloane repeatedly plays with the signifiers of desire, challenging the viewer with the representation of the sexually active older woman as a grotesque, unconfined by conventional boundaries regarding age and gender. Reid’s Kath belongs to a tradition of female monsters, which includes Sobchack’s vengeful menopausal women who prey on the young to regain their youth, and prefigures the ‘monstrous-feminine’, or ‘femme casatrice’ of horror films of the late twentieth century, as identified in the work of Barbara Creed. Creed’s intervention is informed by Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, noting the relevance of ‘ancient religious and historical notions of abjection’ for the monstrous-feminine, including ‘sexual immorality and perversion […] decay and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body and incest’.36 All of these elements are made vivid in the opening graveyard sequence of Entertaining Mr Sloane, converging in the body of Kath, the film lending itself to be read as a horror film, particularly given the Gothic setting and prevalence of death as the backdrop to her attempts to seduce Sloane. The tropes of the horror genre inform the film’s characterisation of Kath as a female vampire, who preys on youthful masculinity to satisfy her sexual and maternal desires. She repeatedly compliments Sloane on his smooth skin, and admires his ‘lovely neck’ before giving him a ‘motherly

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kiss’. When Dadda sticks a gardening fork into Sloane, Kath is excited by the blood, taking her prey into the house and going further in her seduction of him by taking his trousers off, exclaiming ‘You’ve got a skin on you like a princess […] I like a lad with a smooth body’. She fetishises the texture of his youthful skin, with a lust which parades itself as maternal, but is patently carnal as she seeks to seduce. Creed notes the link between sex, the maternal and the abject in the relationship between the female vampire and her male victim, specifically ‘the mixing of blood and milk; the threat of castration; the feminization of the male victim’.37 The film subverts these tropes within the framework of farce, and Sloane is a consensual ‘victim’, driven by a desire for self-gratification which outstrips that of Kath, who is unwittingly ensnaring a murderer. He returns Kath’s desire, grabbing at her breast and responding to her advances. The ageing woman is both desiring and the recipient of a measure of desire within the world of Sloane, where normal meanings and boundaries are dissolved. Sloane pursues a similar narrative project to the horror film, which Creed theorises as being hinged on the concept of the border, keeping apart the monstrous, or the abject, from civilisation.38 The abject in Sloane are those who fail to take up normative gender roles, and manifest abnormal sexual desires, and in the case of Kath fail to behave in an age-­ appropriate way. The film departs from horror tropes and maintains the spirit of farce in exploring the consequences of the borders between abject and normality not being enforced, with the abject creating their own moral codes, whilst purporting to respectability. Kath insists on her respectability and domestic standards, whilst simultaneously abandoning inhibition in her seduction of Sloane, apologising for being scantily dressed by explaining that it was washing day, whilst posing suggestively, pointing out that ‘I haven’t a stitch on…except my shoes…I’m in the nude under this dress’. The comic horror of anachronistic behaviours in the character of Kath is made vivid in her desire to be both mother and lover to Sloane, seeing him as the same age as her lost child, whilst making him the father of her unborn child. This fluid intermixing of roles invokes the story of Oedipus, as is compounded by Sloane’s murder of Dadda. Reid’s performance as Kath fully embraces the spirit of the grotesque, her pregnant ageing body at the end of the film evoking Bakhtin’s definition of the grotesque in the Kerch terracottas, depicting ‘senile pregnant hags’.39 This image which conflates death with birth rejects and mocks classic aesthetics, evoking the human in physical, animalistic terms. These ageing grotesques are defiant, and animated by a comic spirit, Bakhtin elaborating that ‘[m]oreover, the

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old hags are laughing’. Orton envisaged Kath at the end of the play as ‘the pregnant Mother-Goddess in her lair’.40 She attains the impossible; she triumphs despite her age, possessing the younger man, and expecting the child she lost in her youth. Lahr observes that she ‘has symbolically defeated death and grown “bigger” as the curtain comes down’.41 Youth is trapped by the machinations of the desiring older generation; Kath and Ed show themselves as more than equal to exploit Sloane’s amorality. The film received mixed reviews, with critics struggling with Hickox’s treatment of the original play, often betraying a visceral distaste for the relationship between Kath and Sloane. Alexander Walker felt that it was a ‘commercial for kinkiness’, making extensive use of ‘an overworked new category, the crotch shot’.42 Penelope Houston condemned the film as ‘kitsch’ and suggested the opening scene could be a death knell for British film: ‘when and if the British cinema celebrates its own ritual death-­ sentence, these kitschy lolly crunchings will go ringing around its cemetery’.43 Felix Barker proclaimed the film to be ‘squalid and sick’ and ‘pretty repellent’.44 Reviews tended to regard Kath  as a grotesque, repeatedly making reference to her body and age, with the Daily Sketch describing her as ‘a matronly lady with so much cleavage and so thin garments that she resembles a blancmange […] a bulging lady dressed like a tumbling nymphet’.45 Dick Richards described Reid as ‘funny and often shudderingly unpleasant as a flabby, middle-aged Lolita’.46 The Daily Express stood out in welcoming such a reversal of the dynamics of relationships in films, applauding the sight of ‘a middle-aged woman […] seducing a handsome youth’, adding that ‘there are enough films about pretty people and their beautiful relationships on the circuits’.47 The publicity campaign foregrounded the erotic content of the film in its marketing suggestions, but with an emphasis on youth rather than Sloane’s mature suitors. The posters centred on an image of Sloane posing in his leather outfit, and campaign materials featured extensive coverage of nubile models in their swimming costumes, even though they only featured as part of the setting in one scene. The late 1960s audience were clearly deemed to be more attracted to the concept of a conventional sex comedy, with the cross-­ generational relationship at the heart of the narrative being elided in the marketing, ignoring the narrative impetus and themes of Orton’s original play.

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Questionable Parts The trope of the desiring older woman became central to Reid’s persona in the late 1960s, with the Daily Mirror asking ‘why do they pick on Monica-Marlene-Beryl when they want a pathetic middle-aged sexual or emotional misfit?’48 George and Kath were informed by Reid’s persona, transposing the frustrated spinster grotesque to the 1960s for a youth audience, thereby alienating her fan base. Such demonstrations of cross-­ generational desire were evident in Reid’s  television work, Rosie White citing the example of a sketch in which Reid plays an elderly woman who eagerly welcomes a young bailiff made to stay with her until she pays her outstanding taxes, adding that ‘her desire may be the punchline of the joke but it is desire nonetheless’.49 White argues that Reid’s work undermined ‘normative models of gender and sexual behaviours’, but did not ‘challenge or shock’. Nevertheless, it is evident that her film work did challenge and shock, with the actress taking a notable risk in taking on roles which were guaranteed to dismay many of her fans. Accordingly, Lizzie Thynne argues that Reid cultivated a disruptive persona which ‘harnesses the female disorderliness for which she was already celebrated in her stand­up career, to making the kind of sexual innuendo normally reserved for male artists’.50 This persona was central to her role as the older woman who was indulging in illicit and transgressive relationships with younger partners, subverting the norms concerning age and gender. Ultimately the characters of both George and Kath are lonely and desperate outcasts, in contrast to their younger lovers who are physical incarnations of idealised youthful beauty of the era. Mary Russo argues that society perpetuates a ‘rhetoric of the old as the culturally residual, the decrepit, the distorted’, reinforcing social barriers which keep ‘us in place and apart from the unsafe populations that are polluted by extremes and excesses’.51 Both films explore the consequences of the ageing woman refusing to accept her pariah status, and disregarding social barriers. Kath refuses the bounds which limit ageing desire, such anachronistic behaviour being part of the film’s broader canvas of the breakdown of moral codes. Sloane is trapped by a pioneering family structure, which pretends propriety, forging a new amorality which indentures the wantonness of youth to the selfish needs of the older generation, married to both sister and brother. This chapter has outlined how Reid was prepared to take risks to be taken seriously as an actress, taking roles as a middle-aged woman in unorthodox relationships with younger partners. Whereas The Killing of

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Sister George has come to be celebrated for being the first film featuring an overtly lesbian relationship in Hollywood film, Entertaining Mr Sloane rendered the desiring older woman a grotesque, perpetuating a perennial type to be found in popular culture. Both films foreground the middle-­ aged grotesque, placing her at the centre of the narrative, and rendering her alternately pathetic and predatory in her pursuit of relationships with younger partners. Despite the social reforms of the decade, Kath and George, are deployed as warnings of the dangers of family and social dysfunction, and the consequences of unbridled sexuality and the breakdown in traditional gender roles. Alexander Walker observed that British cinema of the late 1960s was increasingly trapped into pursuing ‘trends’ in filmmaking to the point of exhaustion as it sought an audience, in particular the elusive youth market.52 Hickox and Kentish clearly hoped that a combination of both Reid’s and Orton’s notoriety, embellished with a Gothic aesthetic and a Georgie Fame soundtrack, would appeal at a time of the rise of the counterculture. Entertaining Mr Sloane was pioneering in subverting the normative dynamics of romantic relationships, but its cultivation of the grotesque has meant that it has languished in the shade of the critical success of Harold and Maud the following year in charting a cross-­ generational relationship of even greater age disparity.

Notes 1. Susan Sontag, ‘The double standard of aging’ in The Saturday Review (23rd September 1972). 2. Lynne Segal, Out of Time, London: Verso, 2013, p. 96. 3. Ibid., pp. 26–27. 4. Vivian Sobchack, ‘Scary women: cinema, surgery and special effects’ in Kathleen Woodward, ed., Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 203. 5. Lesley Hall, Sex, Gender, and Social Change in Britain since 1880, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, p. 179. 6. Richard Dyer, Stars, London: BFI, 1979, p. 148. 7. Beryl Reid in interview with Roy Plomley, Desert Island Discs, BBC, 11 February 1983. 8. Rosie White, ‘Beryl Reid Says… Good Evening: Performing queer identity on British television’, in Northumbria Research Link. Available at http:// nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/21184/2/JEPC_6_1_art_White_%281%29.pdf [Accessed 9 December 2018].

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9. Michael Kilgarriff, Grace, Beauty and Banjos (London: Oberon Books, 1998), p. 272. 10. Beryl Reid, So Much Love (London: Arrow, 1985), p. 129. 11. Kaye Crawford, Roll Out the Beryl, n.p.: Fantom, 2016, p. 80. 12. Fisiak, Tomasz, ‘Hag horror heroines: kitsch/camp goddesses, tyrannical females, queer icons’ in Justyna Stępień, ed., Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014, p. 44. 13. Crawford, p. 152. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 155. 16. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/filmobituaries/8262228/Susannah-York.html. 17. Melissa Anderson, ‘Curious George’ in Film Comment, January/February 2009. Available at: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/encore-thekilling-of-sister-george/ [Accessed 25 September, 2018]. 18. Jodi Brooks, ‘Performing aging/performance crisis’ in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, Kathleen Woodward, ed., (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 233. 19. John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), p. 187. 20. Entertaining Mr Sloane press book, BFI library. 21. Reid, p. 78. 22. Lahr, p. 189. 23. Ibid., p. 190. 24. Reid, p. 184. 25. Emma Parker, ‘Introduction’ in Entertaining Mr Sloane, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 14. 26. Germaine Greer, The Change (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 282. 27. Reid, p. 155. 28. Lahr, p. 187. 29. Leonie Orton, interviewed in Joe Orton Laid Bare, BBC Television, 25 November 2017. 30. Crawford, p. 102. 31. Real life and fiction blurred into each other when filming the graveyard scene with Reid being confronted by an angry woman who had come to lay flowers on a grave, shouting ‘You dirty bitch’ at the actress. Reid, p. 157. 32. Marion Jordan, ‘Carry On…follow that stereotype’ in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds.), British Cinema History, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983, p. 322. 33. Lahr, p. 177. 34. McEnery had been cast in leading roles in two Disney films, including The Moon Spinners (James Neilson, 1964), for which he made his mark for giving Hayley Mills her first screen kiss, in a hearse.

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35. Ibid., p. 179. 36. Ibid., p. 9. 37. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 70. 38. Ibid., p. 11. 39. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1968] 1984), p. 25. 40. Lahr, p. 187. 41. Ibid., p. 209. 42. Alexander Walker, ‘The au pair boy’, Evening Standard, 2 April 1970. Press cuttings file on Beryl Reid, BFI library. 43. Penelope Houston, The Spectator, 11 April 1970. Press cuttings file on Beryl Reid, BFI library. 44. Felix Barker, Evening News, 2,4,70. 45. Daily Sketch, 1 April 1970. Press cuttings file on Beryl Reid, BFI library. 46. Dick Richards, Daily Mirror, 3 April 1970. Press cuttings file on Beryl Reid, BFI library. 47. Ian Christie, ‘Tone up with this outrage!’, Daily Express, 1 April 1970. Press cuttings file on Beryl Reid, BFI library. 48. Daily Mirror, 11/7/70. Press cuttings file on Beryl Reid, BFI library. 49. White, pp. 18–19. 50. Lizzie Thynne, ‘A comic monster of revue: Beryl Reid, Sister George and the performance of dykery’ in Robin Griffiths (ed.) British Queer Cinema (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 102. 51. Mary Russo, ‘Aging and the scandal of anachronism’ in Kathleen Woodward (ed.), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 27. 52. Alexander Walker, Hollywood England (London: Orion, 1974), p. 398.

“I’m Seeing Something That Was Always Hidden”: Innocence and Coming into Knowledge Through the Gaze in Blue Velvet and Malèna Kwasu D. Tembo

Aside from Mike Nicholls’ The Graduate (1967), Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), and Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (2008), David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena (2000) make for possibly the most robust twentieth and twenty first century examples of intergenerational love between a boy/young man and a woman in recent Western cinema. An essential element of both film’s exploration of intergenerational love is the relationship between age, sex, power, and knowledge. Equally, and perhaps most controversially for both films, is the centrality of the theme of child or young sexuality (the protagonist in Malena being a teenager and a young university student in Blue Velvet). It is a theme in which despite the ethical miasma of the current post-truth epoch, the issues and debates surrounding both underage

K. D. Tembo (*) Independent Researcher, Harare, Zimbabwe © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_10

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sexuality and intergenerational intimacy remain a loadstar of Western moral rectitude. While the main trends in discourse surrounding intergenerational love approach the subject in terms of homosexual male relationships between young and older men, or those involving older men and young women, this chapter seeks to reframe the subject within a discussion of power, knowledge, and voyeurism in intergenerational relationships involving boys (pre-pubescent and pubescent). Examples of scholarship in this regard include, but are not limited to Wyrod et  al. (2011), Anema et  al. (2013), Bessell (2017), and Faraji et  al. (2018).1 This chapter opens with an analysis of current trends in intergenerational love scholarship. This initial excursus will contextualize the latent inextricability between the themes of sex, age, power, and voyeurism. It then examines the objectification of the figure of the mature women through both the male gaze and the fetishized status of the MILF (a slang term whose constituent letters form an acronym of the phrase Mother I’d Like to Fuck). It concludes with a close reading of the role of sex, power, and knowledge in Blue Velvet and Malena, focusing on the inextricability between the acquisition of intimate sexual knowledge and the disruption of the seeing/being-seen voyeuristic dyad each protagonist initially employs. Lynch’s Blue Velvet follows college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), recently returned to his hometown Lumberton, a metonomy for the idyllic image of 1950s–60s white American suburbia. Returning with the intention of managing his father’s hardware store after he is hospitalized following a stroke, Jeffrey discovers a severed human ear in a meadow abutting his family home. Cautioned to relinquish any further pursuit of the case by the town’s lead detective John Williams (George Dickerson), Jeffrey approaches his daughter Sandy (Laura Dern). Being enamoured, intrigued, and somewhat frightened by Jeffrey, she divulges what she knows about the case having overheard certain details of it from her father’s private conversations. The catalytic detail pertains to one Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a mysterious nightclub singer who lives in an apartment building near Jeffrey’s home. With Sandy’s help, Jeffrey satisfies his curiosity about Dorothy by breaking into her apartment. Hiding in her closet and witnessing a disturbing, titillating, and surreal encounter, Jeffrey is initiated into a world of voyeurism, sex, and power. Despite the threat of being caught up in a murder, as well as personal danger to himself, Jeffrey is drawn further into the velvetine darkness lurking behind any portrait of suburban normalcy. Despite the two films’ contrapuntal settings and epochs, central narrative aspects of each text are precipitated by on a young boy (Renato) and

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a young man (Jeffrey) spying on an older woman, partly for sexual gratification and partly for knowledge. In each case, both protagonists discover the complex of sex, power, and knowledge at the heart of adulthood. Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena is set in a Sicilian town during 1940. The narrative follows the voyeuristic perceptions and experiences of Renato Amoroso (Giuseppe Sulfaro), a 12-year-old boy. The narrative is further framed by three formative events occurring in Renato’s life: Italy’s entrance into World War II, receiving a new bicycle, and seeing a beautiful mature woman named Malena Scordia (Monica Bellucci). Living alone on account of her husband fighting in Africa, her solitude and beauty make Malena equally an object of lust for the men in the village, and one of scornful contempt for its women. Through Renato’s gaze, the audience initially witnesses Malena enduring a series of devastating hardships. These involve rumours of her indecency leading to her being disowned by her infirm father, the death of her husband, and continued rumours about her sexual licentiousness. Initially, Renato is not characterized as a young pervert to whom Malena represents a sacralized albeit sexualized feminine ideal. Instead, and indeed perhaps, one of the most unsettling aspects of Renato’s characterization throughout the film is the fact that he is portrayed as “pure” or “innocent” in his “devotion” towards the grief-stricken and tragic figure of Malena. However, latent within this “pure adoration”, which impels him to become increasingly more “love sticken” and “risk everything to save her”, is a desire to satisfy his decidedly more carnal urges indirectly either through his voyeuristic spying on Malena, or through such acts as stealing her underwear and wearing them on his face. This characterization shifts after Renato witnesses Malena being raped by her lawyer after he successfully defends her in a defamation case against her. He moves from being coded as a young pervert with purely sexual motivations to being a young pervert with naively “noble”, protective motivations. This manifests both indirectly through prayer, but also directly through petty, surreptitious, and humorous acts of vengeance against her accusers. Regardless of his age, Tornatore shows that Renato never considers Malena’s own feelings about her experiences and perceptions, which are both limited and revealed by Renato’s voyeuristic access thereof. Following the death of her father during an Allied air raid, Malena becomes destitute and resorts to prostitution to survive. Seemingly confirming the town’s opinion of her, Renato discovers Malena with two German officers of the force occupying the town and faints. Taking his

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bizarre symptoms for demonic possession, his mother insists he be exorcized while his father instead takes him to the local brothel where Renato fantasizes that the woman taking his virginity is Malena. Following the Allied liberation of the town, Malena is dragged into the streets, beaten, and publically humiliated by having her hair cut off. After the ordeal, she flees. It is revealed that her husband survived the war having suffered the loss of an arm. He returns seeking Malena but is unable to find her until Renato leaves him an anonymous note telling him of her location, and the fact that she still cares for him. After a year, the townsfolk’s ire dissipates and Malena and her husband fully reintegrate into society. The film concludes with the only instance in which Malena and Renato interact when an orange falls from her market bag. Renato assists her by picking it up and returning it to her, wishing her good luck as she smiles at him. Both texts explore the psycho-sexual and emotional transition from pubescence and pre-pubescence to young manhood. Being that the individuals who catalyse and facilitate this transition are mature women in each case, both texts inherently explore the themes of sex, power, and knowledge within a frame of intergenerational relationships. Judith Wittenberg (1990) and Robert Gooding-Williams describe the film as a “classic narrative of initiation”, a theme that manifests sometimes subtly, such as in “the snake plants in Dorothy Vallens’ apartment seen in the background when she and Jeffrey are together, suggesting that he is indeed an American Adam about to bite the apple of sexuality and thus to lose forever the innocence of youth”.2 In their assessment of the parallelism Lynch employs in depicting a dialectic of socio-economic, cultural, and sexual worlds, suburbia and its seedy, and ever present underbelly, the authors acknowledge Lynch’s exploration of the agency of the youth involved, his motivation, his sexuality (regardless of how disconcertingly puerile), his intent, and his desire. In this way, Lynch “heavily stresses the concept that any close examination of seemingly innocent terrain will reveal a dark underside where violence is the norm”.3 Here, innocence and its typically ameliorative and protective jurisdiction over youth, particularly in the ostensibly chaste sterility of Lynch’s pastiche of 1950s suburbia, cannot foreclose the desire for knowledge and sex from rupturing the prohibitive and structuralist barriers of so-called family values. Here contemporary scholars such as Hubbard tends to agree that the issues and debates surrounding child and youth sexuality up to and including young adults, specifically when the participants in said sexualities are themselves adults, are primarily a question of agency. As Hubbard notes, among many

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feminists, therapists, and social liberals who are sensitive to relationship structures of social inequality and power imbalance is the concern over “ the very real harm that coercive or manipulative relationships can inflict upon young children” as well as young adults.4 This feeling is substantiated and subtends the sociopolitical, cultural, and biological dialectic between all the phenomena associated with the category “child” equally and against those that constitute the category “sex”. Thomas Hubbard (2013) claims that “the most damaging abuse of power comes from well-intentioned adult efforts to control children’s sexual knowledge rather than exploitation of their bodies for ends of adult pleasure”, and introduces two important areas of analysis in this study of its chosen cases studies: “children or underage sexual knowledge (as well as pleasure) and adult pleasure”.5 Similarly, Rachel Carroll (2012) states that “the question of agency is imperative in the context of intergenerational sexual relationships. Dynamics of power, intent, flights of feeling, emotion, coupled with networks of knowledge and learning complicate the arrangement”.6 Moving away from pathological determinations, numerous films deal with the issues and debates associated with child and youth/young adult sexuality in ways that highlight the individual experiences of protagonists in relation to their environments instead of a binding macroscopically abstract moral approach. Example here includes Mel Gibson’s Man Without a Face (1993) which explores intergenerational mentorship in the face of paedophilia. Michael Cuesta’s L.I.E (2001) similarly, albeit more directly, explores the taboo and culturally abject figure of the suburban paedophile as sympathetic. There are other explorations of the importance of intergenerational sexual relationships as formative experiences in early life, such as Roeland Kerbosch’s For a Lost Soldier (1994). The reverse scenario has also received high-profile attention. Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal (2006) explores the manner in which sexualized youth, in the form of a 15-year-old male student seducer, disrupts the cultural sanctity and structural integrity of both adulthood and marriage. More controversially, perhaps, are Hollywood investigations into the sexual developments of teenagers in and among themselves. Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) offers an incisive, candid, and ultimately tragic exploration of the burgeoning sexuality, pleasure, and ignorance of youth. Similarly, Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2002) does the work of dispelling essentializing myths regarding the often culturally longed for inextricability between youth and innocence. Moreover, films such as Peter Kern’s Street Kid (1991) and Carsten Sonder’s Pretty Boy (1993) present narratives that

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trouble the notion that youths are de facto victims in any and all instances involving intergenerational sexual relationships and/or child/youth/ young adult sexuality itself. Each text’s child sex worker protagonist is, while underage, portrayed as a willing agent of their trade.7 While current research remains burgeoning, Carroll notes how “intergenerational sexuality […] practices have been historically and culturally constructed” against a Greek precedent based on both pedagogy and pederasty, where “sexual relations [of an intergenerational nature] are not just permitted but idealised as fulfilling an educative purpose”.8 She also notes how this model is highly gendered and typically “does not apply to female-­ male or female-female adult-minor relationships; adult women are not in the same relation to patriarchal power as men and hence girls cannot be apprenticed in its inheritance in the same way”.9 What makes the relationship intergenerational proper is the age difference between the lovers in each text. While Carroll notes that in A.M. Home’s The End of Alice,which “enters more ambiguous territory in its depiction of a sexual relationship between a nineteen-year-old female college student and a twelve-year-old boy in which the categorical distinction between intergenerational sexuality and abuse is disturbingly blurred.”10 In contrast, however, the age and generational gap in the chosen texts is clear in that it spans decades. This means that none of the lovers that form the focus of Blue Velvet and Malena are positioned in the same spectrum, be it adulthood in full, or adolescence, even at the antipodal extremes of one: “intergenerational is a term which can be used to describe sexual relationships between individuals of different ages, including those below the age of consent; it implies that such relationships can be consensual and non-harmful”.11 In terms of heterosexual intergenerational relationships, perhaps the best known example thereof in the Western canon is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). Like Nabokov’s titular character, Jeffrey and Renato have to navigate the socio-cultural issues and debates concerning knowledge, pleasure, power, and other agential questions in having intergenerational sexual relationships. In these terms however, Lynch and Tornatore present and engage with their principals in radically oppositional ways to Nabokov. In Lolita, the first-person narrative of Humbert leaves little to no narrative, psychological, or emotional space to offer a detailed or quasi-detailed characterization of Lolita’s innenwelt meaning “inner world” in German, here used in the Lacanian sense to refer to an individual’s psychological and emotional experience. Her desires, fears, imagination, and other personality attributes remain opaque, disabled, and prohibited by the primacy

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of innenwelt of the first person, Humbert, a cis adult white male. The effect here is that stripped of the agency of being fully described, physically as well as psycho-emotionally, Lolita is reduced to an object in Humbert’s personal experiences, one onto which he superimposes his desires and fantasies of beauty, mystery, danger, and youth. Nomi Tamir-Ghez notes the silencing effect this peripherization of the text’s titular character obfuscates, almost totally, Lolita’s “point of view, the way she sees the situation and feels about it”.12 In Blue Velvet and Malena, the reverse forms each text’s central premise; namely, the centrality of the perspective of a cis white male youths’ desire. In each case, the object of said desire and, indeed, its centre is occupied by the sexual knowledge, desire, and power of a mature woman. The issues and debates surrounding the sexualization of the mature woman in Western societies often circulate and are represented by the term “MILF”. Vannier, Currie, and O’Sullivan (2014) draw attention to interesting empirical research that combines sex and age. Their analysis of recent investigations reveals that one in six searches for sexual material in online searches included age-related terminology. Additionally, the authors note that: in these age-specific searches, there were two clusters of popular ages. The most popular search was for teenagers (e.g., “teen”). The third most popular was for women in their 40s or 50s (e.g., “MILF”), as indicated by the use of search terms such as “sexy 40-year-olds”[and further, that] the single most popular search term entered into the most visited free pornography site (PornHub.com) was “mom.” This finding indicates a significant interest in older women in pornography, specifically those who fall into the MILF category”.13

There are several latent implications to these findings. The first, that the appeal of MILF pornography lays in part to the fantasy embodied by mature performers as being representative of sexual confidence, agency, and knowledge. Their prowess, experience, aggressivity, clarity of desire, and seductiveness in the frame of this fantasy include said confidence, agency, and knowledge being used to overcome a younger male performer with whom the male viewer identifies. Second, that the antipodal relation of ages engenders and sustains this fantasy.14 Similarly, Montemurro and Siefken (2012) note that from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (1786) to Desperate Housewives (2004), the figure and appeal of MILFs is a staple of

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Western popular culture. Since its modern use in noted intergenerational text American Pie (1999), the term appeared in some of the most influential contemporary texts on film and television. Typically in the West, the term MILF demarcates certain physical and existential attributes. For example, MILFs are typically seen as physically attractive middle-aged (late 30s to early 40s) mothers who are sought after by younger men in general, teenaged boys in particular. In terms of typical activities, MILFs are seen as frequenters of specific spaces related to their status as mothers. These include schools, daycares, and shopping malls.15 May Friedman draws attention to the contradictory significations the term gives rise to. MILF has evolved into a term that is “perceived simultaneously as porn genre and source of empowerment” that “exposes some of the tensions surrounding sexuality and motherhood and the ways that considering mothers as sexual beings can be both a provocative and risky enterprise”.16 Here, the specific sexual archetype signified by the term not only has agential and age-related connotations, but also connotations of privilege and race. As Friedman notes, “MILFs are almost always white and usually middle to upper class and are universally presented in heterosexual contexts” and, further, that “the term is deeply raced and classed: the synthesis of motherhood and sexuality is not equally offered to all mothers—with this blending often having dire consequences for mothers from non-normative social locations—such as young mothers, racialized mothers, and poor mothers”.17 Moreover, another aspect of the contemporary incarnation of the MILF not only links sexuality and maturity, but also the maternal. “By coupling the archetype of the predatory older female with maternity”, argues Friedman: the contemporary MILF may be seen as a new mode of engagement with female maternal sexuality. This is an important representation given the historical and contemporary disconnect between motherhood and sexuality in both popular and scholarly realms, but it also suggests a problematic popular engagement with the intersections of motherhood, femininity, and sexuality.18

The suggestion here is that MILF performs an important demystifying function in terms of the interaction between sexuality and maternity in that it problematizes any obfuscatory erasure of maternal desire. Friedman suggests that “mothers who are presented as femmes fatales are at least

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immune from the sanitized and insipid assumptions about mothers as exclusively caregivers with no erotic engagement”.19 While suggesting, by definition, that older women and mothers do not have their sexual desires or praxes curtailed as such, as an emancipatory or empowering term, MILF is not without problems. It can be argued that the term concatenates sex and maternity in such a way that denies the mother sexual agency and objectifies her sexuality through her status as a mother and vice versa. The result of this construes the mother as an inert recipient of sexual desire, as a figure of care and nurturing which extends to sexual needs, whose labour as a mother, combined with sexualized notions of loneliness, repression, and the desire to unburden, forms the foundation of the fantasy. However, while Bellucci and Rossellini portray characters who could easily be described as both MILFs and femme fatales by the above rubric, Lynch and Tornatore characterize their sexualities, knowledge, and agency as distinct from those of other mothers who, by contrast, are presented as asexual. This is slightly more problematic in the case of Malena as Belluci’s eponymous character is said to have had a child but lost it soon after its birth. As such, while a mother by definition, she is less so in terms of lived experience. That aside, Friedman summarizes the latent contradiction at the heart of the term MILF, namely, in the opposition between sexuality and maternity: MILF may be seen as a signifier of a broader objectification of women in general, and mothers in particular, in that it presents female sexuality via a male gaze and does not engage with feminine or maternal desire. Ultimately, dominant discourses of both motherhood and MILF hold mothers to strong expectations. Mothers are held to many deeply contradictory standards, and the ‘tyranny of sexiness’ […] is a reminder that mothers must selflessly live for their children, while remaining well presented, busty, and red-hot after the babies go to sleep.20

Though research on the sociopolitical, cultural, and legal issues and debates surrounding trends in intergenerational sexual relationships between mature women and young or underage boys is scant, the practice seems to be entering mainstream news media far more frequently in recent years. Notable cases of women who have sex with adolescent boys include the following: Angelene McAnulty, 25, charged for having sex with a 15-year-old boy; Lee Annette Williams, 50, charged with the statutory rape of a former student when he was 14. Pop news media such as

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Boredazzle even feature articles such as “10 Hottest Teachers Caught Sleeping with Their Students”21 (n.d) highlighting the intergenerational sexual exploits of New Jersey’s Lindsay Massaro, arrested for second-­ degree sexual assault against a 15-year-old boy; Stephanie Peterson Ferri, 26, arrested for sexual relationship with 14-year-old student; Sarah Jones, cheerleader for the Cincinnati Bengals, carried on a sexual relationship with then 17-year-old Cody York, a former student whom she ended up marrying when he reached the age of 19; Hope Jacoby from California who was charged with multiple cases of oral copulation of a minor and unlawful sex with a minor, which in her case were boys between 14 and 17 when she was 23; and lastly Heather Daughdrill who had sex with a 13-year-old boy (Boredazzle n.d). It is important here to consider the socio-cultural status, portrayal, and valuation of the hebephilic and/or ephebophilic incidents such as those cited above. This chapter contends that a key attribute of the obfuscation, mystery, taboo, and the various revulsions and enticements that accompany them surrounding such instances is sustained by image of the sexually active mature woman as a fantasy of pleasure, power, and knowledge. As Carroll notes: where intergenerational sexuality between a mature woman and male minor is concerned […] patriarchal discourses either normalize the relationship as heterosexual initiation in line with male fantasy or pathologise the woman as deviant in gendered terms; in neither scenario is the boy constructed principally as a victim and in both his presumed sexual agency implicitly protects him from that status.22

The terminology used suggests that when the youth in intergenerational sexual relationships is male and the adult female, there is a certain degree of prestige and achievement associated with it. The experience is circumscribed by the reified ideology of toxic masculinity that places a premium on enviable sexual conquests above all else, such as learning, emotional vulnerability, and indeed love between the actors. The entire scenario is so often hypersexualized, be it through the stereotype of the lonely and/or promiscuous/deviant and sexually experienced “MILF”, or the notable increase in Internet pornography’s interest in scenarios involving “sexy step-mothers/mother-in-laws”, to the cliché of the “sexy teacher/instructor”. Such scenarios are not only seen as quintessential in the context of

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pornographic genres involving ostensibly intergenerational actors, but also are circumscribed by popular sexual fantasy more broadly. The relation between knowledge, sex, and power is predicated or at least exacerbated by the mysteries of their praxes, the mysterious of their source, and the truth which resides within them. Frida Beckman (2012) notes that Dorothy, as a femme fatale: represents an enigmatic relation between visibility and truth. She is highly visible and yet never quite what she seems to be. She is blatantly sexual at the same time that she is not fully legible; she is attractive and threatening at the same time. Representing woman as an alluring secret that has to be revealed, the femme fatale, […] is fully compatible with the epistemological drive of the narrative, the hermeneutic structuration of the classical text. The unmasking of the ‘truth’ of the narrative is also the unmasking, and disarming, of the (sexual) power of the woman.23

Both Malena and Dorothy are subject to, however jejune, male gazes. Both Jeffrey and Renato have access to Malena and Dorothy’ public and private lives, to both their exterior beauty and interior realities of privation and perversion. While both films explore the implications of spectatorship, participatory voyeurism, it is true of both films that “the gaze is overtly male and its recipient female, and its outcome is violent”.24 As noted by Claire Johnston (1977), the male gaze, however “progressive” its presentation, typically redounds to a situation wherein which “woman is presented as what she represents for man” as a fetishized signifier.25 Similarly, Laura Mulvey describes this same situation as one wherein which the male gaze “projects its fantasy onto the female figure”.26 In this way, both the diegetic and extradiegetic male gaze turns the woman into an erotic object in each text. In Blue Velvet and Malena, both Dorothy and Malena are both indeed the sexual objects of the male gaze of each text’s young protagonist in such a way that their youth cannot erase the objectifying and specifically voyeuristic impulses that propel it towards adulthood through sexual knowledge. The manner in which Malena and Dorothy view their own sexualities is secondary. In the case of the latter, the viewer is left to piece together the fragmentary and indirect expressions of Dorothy’s self-­ understanding about both her own situation and her own sexuality as a collection of vengeance, a desire for power, instruction, and loneliness. In the case of the former, a large part of Malena’s sexuality is so obviously,

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even obtusely, tied to her desire for basic survival. In initially encountering both women at a remove, that is at a distance, Jeffrey and Renato, and by extension of a diegetic degree the viewer through their gaze, voyeuristically maintain the MILF illusion. At this distance, both Dorothy and Malena remain remote, unobtainable, mysterious, and alluring loadstars in the trajectories of their sexualities. In this arrangement or framing, the primary expression of agency for Malena and Dorothy is paradoxically inert and most potent as an object as opposed to agent. Here, sex is not motherhood’s abject, but rather sexual agency is motherhood’s abject. It could also be argued that Lynch’s centralization of female desire and sexual power through the counterintuitive power dynamics predicating various forms of dominant/submissive sexual relationships centralizes Dorothy, and in so doing, the film “ultimately privileges the maternal over the paternal”.27 However, Bundtzen forecloses any exploration between sexuality, maternity, and intergenerational sexual relations by firmly and swiftly circumscribing all Dorothy’s complex representations of amalgams of these areas in and by maternity. For the preponderance of the film, Dorothy’s status as a mother is not enacted by her agentially. It is an aspect of her being used as leverage to illicit control over her embodied experience. In this sense, she is marked by motherhood, but is prohibited, primarily by the text’s antagonist Frank (Dennis Hopper), from embodying it. Furthermore, Jeffrey acts as an alluring lethean, excrescent object her desire for which presents a latent threat of forgetting her maternity in favour of the present exigency of her sexual desire for him. In this sense, for both Malena and Dorothy, being an MILF is being in a trap wherein which neither motherhood nor mature sexuality can be fully enjoyed or fully enacted both within and without the sexually objectifying and socio-­ culturally admonitory combination of being a mother and an attractive older woman. In describing this remove, John Alexander notes that: we never find out who Dorothy is; we only know her through her performances—either on the stage of the nightclub, or various stages to specifically male audiences, all of which she provides with a different scenario—the victim to Frank, the dominatrix to Jeffrey, and later, the self-ingratiating lover, and to her son, she performs ‘mother’, but even that performance is as much for the benefit of Frank, Ben and the curious assembly at Ben’s place. The nearest Dorothy comes to a natural representation of herself, is in the final sequence—the slow-motion image when she embraces her little boy. Yet, even in this sequence, the camera is performing on her behalf.28

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Similarly, Malena is primarily an object of intrigue, pleasure, sadness, anger, and desire for Renato. The perception and understanding of experiences she undergoes are circumscribed by a naive gaze. As such, the complexity thereof is reduced to a child’s view of them, leaving the feelings and emotions of that object, Malena herself, as fascinating, appealing, disturbing, and remote as exquisitely carved marble.

Sex, Power, Knowledge: Intergenerational Love as Tutelage for Jeffrey and Renato While Renato’s voyeuristic activities are hidden by the sociopolitical and cultural tensions pervading in World War II Italy, Jeffrey’s voyeurism is more taut and perilous precisely because it has no greater superstructural calamity whose interstices it can exploit. The irony here inheres in the fact that as a voyeur, he is more exposed than Renato. This tension between seeing/being-seen, the hidden and the observed, and the mysterious and the truth is most clear when Jeffrey breaks into Dorothy’ apartment, hides in her closet, and watches as she is sexually and physically humiliated and abused by Frank. Frank’s departure does not nullify the tension but centralizes it on the distraught and overdrawn Dorothy. In maintaining the take, Lynch exacerbates these tensions through close-ups of Jeffrey watching Dorothy weeping, undressing, and exposedly living her difficult and sad life—one that the boy voyeuristically accesses and discovers to be a complex combination of sadomasochism, extortion, and interrupted motherhood. John Alexander suggests that Jeffrey’s voyeurism is not entirely predicated on sexual titillation, since an early version of Lynch’s film script established Jeffrey as a voyeur at the beginning of the story, when he is in the school furnace room “fascinated by a sight, beyond in the darkness”, a girl student fighting off the sexual advances of a male colleague. Although this sequence was subsequently dropped, there is little mistaking Jeffrey’s pleasure in the situation; this is his sought-after “opportunity” for learning knowledge.29 In this sense, Dorothy is objectified in numerous ways and on numerous levels. First, as an attractive older woman, second, as a mother, and third, as a psycho-sexual psychopomp, a term from Greek mythology referring to a spiritual guide here used in the sense of a more knowledgeable and experienced guide figure. In this capacity, Dorothy offers Jeffrey opportunity to explore the complex—and

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when compared against his beatific suburban life—dark nexus of power, sex, and knowledge.30 The appeal of this nexus is intimated well before Jeffrey breaks into Dorothy’s apartment. As Sander H. Lee (2011) notes, Sandy is seduced into showing Jeffrey Dorothy’s apartment building after using the increasingly disquieting and mysterious circumstances surrounding the case she is involved in to flirt, “the whiff of danger and violence being as seductive as the suggestion of sex”.31 In this scene, Jeffrey says to Sandy: “there are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience. Sometimes it is necessary to take a risk. I got to thinking that I guess someone could learn a lot by getting into that woman’s apartment”. Here again Lynch centralizes the connection between sex and knowledge, suggesting that Jeffrey’s voyeuristic intensity is a byproduct of his experiential epistemology of on-sight learning. However, this ostensibly benign, even scientific, explanation cannot obfuscate the paradox of Jeffrey’s voyeurism. This paradox is summed up by Sandy who says “I don’t know if you are a detective or a pervert” to which Jeffrey responds by teasing “that’s for me to know and you to find out”. In this sense, it seems more accurate to conclude that Jeffrey’s voyeurism is, in fact, predicated on an ambiguity that exists between these two antipodes: knowledge contra sexual gratification.32 As I will argue later, I suggest that Lynch sets up this dialectic only to undermine it with the revelation that these two dialectical oppositions are inextricable from one another through unveiled experience. In Blue Velvet, it is not so much a question of whether a sexual means of acquiring knowledge is the most morally sound or didactically efficient method. Instead, Lynch presses the notion firmly that on the part of a youth or boy, sexual gratification and knowledge are the same thing. Jeffrey gains knowledge about pleasure, power, pain, sadism, and masochism in a specifically sexualized frame of reference and tutelage. It is precisely Dorothy’s own variegated psycho-sexual experiences, most of which are shown to be extreme as psychologically abusive as they are physical in the film, that facilitate Jeffrey’s initiation into a deeper understanding of the link between sexuality and power. The effect of initiating Jeffrey in this way would perhaps be less effective were Jeffrey cast as older and more experienced. Dorothy’s power over Jeffrey resides in the dual-fold space of his suburban worldview and youthful inexperience. This power, it is also important to note, is predicated, in no small part, on Dorothy’s physical beauty and allure, itself a dual-fold construction of the threat of violence and the need for protection. It is this paradox that qualifies Dorothy as an

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MILF against the above rubric. Similarly, and as I will argue later in terms of exposure, the epistemic aspects of the narrative as one in which Jeffrey learns would not work were his tutelage about these mysteries left to the equally naive and inexperienced Sandy, or indeed the comparative chaste sterility of her or Jeffrey’s parents. Here, the difference in age and experience is essential in not only constructing the relationship between Dorothy and Jeffrey as intergenerational, but more importantly, the content of what that term demarcates, namely, knowledge of the paradoxes between sex, power, and violence. This exchange or accrual of knowledge, power, and agency through sex requires Jeffrey to necessarily disrupt the seeing/being-seen dyad of voyeurism and become an active participant. The cost of knowledge is the phallogocentric violence of the male gaze. In this sense, he cannot sequester his desires, for sexual gratification and knowledge alike, to the shadows of a closet. He has to expose himself to the woman that was exposed to him. He has to let her see him, touch him, hurt him, pleasure him, and teach him in the same way he saw her experience the same. Jeffrey’s entry into Dorothy’s apartment marks this transition from observer to participant. When he is discovered in the closet by Dorothy, this “price” of knowledge becomes readily apparent. She orders him to undress at knifepoint. Reversing the power dyads that she not only experienced disadvantageously during Frank’s visit but also through Jeffrey’s observation thereof, Dorothy orders him not to look at her or move, allowing her to view his body, but also to sadistically enjoy his vulnerability. She teases him in her dominance, taking to her knees in front of him in a position of submission that is complicated by the fact that she is armed with a knife, a weapon and tool of castration. Even in this single gesture, Jeffrey comes to learn that the world of dialectical opposites promulgated by the inner-contra-outer worldview of gated suburbia cannot account for radical play and antipodal mixing that seems to be the foundation of the world beyond the idyllic American Dream. He also learns that disobedience is met not with a stern talking to, but with violence in the underbelly world Dorothy seems to represent. When Jeffrey shows a measure of disobedience, Dorothy cuts his face with the knife. Lee suggests that “this red cut on the cheek initiates Jeffrey into Dorothy’s world of violence”.33 A valid question here is “ well, why doesn’t Jeffrey simply try to overpower her and escape?” The answer is twofold. On the one hand, Jeffrey has multiple opportunities, and indeed reasons, to leave Dorothy. He ignores Sandy’s warning against his continued interest in Dorothy because he is impelled to know more

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both about her, as well as what it is she knows. Here, I contend that the ostensible pretext of the case of the severed ear is secondary to what it represents: physicality and violence. Here, the ear is as symbolic as the eye in terms of clandestine knowledge acquisition: while the eye oversees as it spies, the ear overhears as it eavesdrops. Moreover, Jeffrey’s attraction to Dorothy is intensified by the inextricable link between pleasure and pain, sexual joy and sexual shame, intimacy and violence, all, relative to his limited experience of them, paradoxes she embodies. On the other hand, Jeffrey’s age, despite his courage and tenacity, comes through in his fundamentally suburban image. He is portrayed overall as a good young man who acknowledges the authority of adults, including that of his parents as well as the town sheriff. Simultaneously, however, Lynch shows the viewer that Jeffrey understands that submitting to an older authority can offer knowledge and experiences that would otherwise be unavailable were he to adopt a rebellious or obstinate attitude. Therefore, while Jeffrey’s age seemingly permits this power dynamic, this secret exchange of secrets, between he and Dorothy, it is also precisely his understanding of the relationship between youth, adulthood, and authority that allows him to manipulate said dynamic in order to discover and experience. Jeffrey’s initiation into this world increases in its surreal complexity as Jeffrey comes to learn that Dorothy was not entirely an unwilling victim of Frank’s excessively brutal tirade of verbal and physical abuse he witnessed in the closet. While it appeared that Dorothy was a submissive victim of Frank’s violence as a necessity of protecting her husband and child, the combination of power, pain, and sexual gratification is not dependent of Frank’s presence. After his departure, Dorothy instructs, teaches, and also invites Jeffrey to physically comfort her. Speaking softly and seductively, she asks: “See my breast? … You can feel it. Do you like the way I feel? Feel me! Hit me! Hit me! Hit me! Hit me!”. With this violent invocation and Lynch’s close-up of Rossellini’s red lips, Jeffrey is swallowed not only by Dorothy’s depravity, but his newfound understanding that depravity is complex, an existential state that combines the abject, that is, shame, pain, violence and humiliation with the clarity and gravitas of sexual gratification. His figurative and literal coming into knowledge is summed up by Dorothy’s poetic and powerful statement that punctuates the conclusion of their tryst: “Now I have your disease in me”. Here, an exchange has occurred. She has taken the death of his innocence and the first instantiation of his desire, one that she has taught him cannot be circumscribed by the ameliorative forces of good morality, truth, or justice. In this way,

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perhaps critical attitudes towards Lynch’s characterization of Dorothy have failed the character most problematically in terms of obfuscating the complex fact that, as Irena Makarushka acknowledges, Dorothy seems to possess masochistic tendencies in principium (1991).34 Moreover, most criticisms of the film do not even acknowledge the fact that Rossellini’s performance contains a very powerful suggestion that Dorothy wants to initiate Jeffrey into her mysteries. Lynch portrays this initiation slowly, sensually, centralizing the closing of space between the former observer and observed. In this portrayal, Lynch unambiguously shows that Dorothy takes a not small amount of pleasure in his burgeoning sexuality, in having or claiming that moment, in introducing him to the psycho-sexual border where abject and pleasure meet in extra-moral intensities. This notion of exposure and exchange is further taken up in another and perhaps one of the most important scenes in the film. The scene in which Dorothy enters, unannounced, into Jeffrey’s private life and reflects the excrescent nature of sexuality and knowledge. In a parody of a first date where Sandy and Jeffrey prepare for an evening together in the Williams’ household, a bruised and naked Dorothy enters the house looking for Jeffrey. Seemingly delirious, potentially dehydrated, and enduring shock from exposure, Dorothy screams to Sandy and her mother “he put his disease in me!”. Immediately, the contrast between Dorothy and Sandy is rendered at its most stark in the film. The latter views the former as a confluence of things: repulsive, shameful, shocking, mysterious, sensual, honest, and tragic. Ironically, these attributes are specifically those Jeffrey finds magnetic about Dorothy as well. The difference is that Jeffrey is not repulsed but further seduced by certain complex and difficult truths Dorothy embodies, truths so utterly contrary to the type of suburban submissiveness, simplicity, and positivity Sandy embodies. Here, the term exposure’s importance becomes clear. Dorothy’s bruised, delirious, desirous, and painful nudity exposes Sandy, the Williams’, and the sterile stability of suburbia they represent to the truth of what it attempts (and fails) to exclude: a childless mother, a strange surrogate-submissive to a sociopath, and a sordid Othered mature lover of a respectable local young man. Moreover, Jeffrey is exposed as having broken faith with the authority of the expectations of a young man his age, which ultimately refers to the authority of suburban American ethics of which his hometown is subject. Instead, he is exposed as having sought in its trash heaps, morgues, nightclubs, and closets a range of abject experiences and deeper truths about lust, passion, crime, domination, submission, and himself, in the last

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instance. Sandy, her parents, and the world they represent are, in turn, exposed as wanting in this knowledge. I contend that ultimately, they are shocked and horrified not by the fact of Dorothy’s nudity, but rather by all that it exposes about what it is they lack: the courage, tenacity, and honesty to pursue knowledge of themselves, wherever and however dangerous the path may be. This scene and its lesson can be summarized by a slightly altered rendition of Nietzsche’s famous adage: if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you, no matter where you are, who you are with, or who you think you are. While the narrative is disseminated predominantly from Jeffrey’s perspective in Blue Velvet, the centrality of the juvenile gaze in Malena is near total. As William Hope (2003) notes in “the voyeuristic activities of Renato constitute the film’s single telos, or goal orientation, and this encourages a form of spectatorial engagement based on the objectification of Malena Scordia, the insidiousness of which becomes apparent in the film’s brutal denouement”.35 The totalization of Renato’s gaze permeates the bourn between fantasy and reality as Tornatore shows his objectification of Malena through perceptions and impressions intermingles with imaginary sequences which feature Malena as a central feature. These fantasies are presented as either re-imagined scenarios from Renato’s quotidian life, such as Malena becoming his Greek teacher at school, or more elaborate constructions that refer to classic movies. The narrative and fantastical objectification of Malena by Renato is further “supplemented by countless point-of-view shots through keyholes, window frames and telescopes, perspectives which accustom the film’s spectators to view Malena from Renato’s preferred vantage points”.36 While Hope suggests that these objective vantages are preferred, I argue that Renato, much like Jeffrey, simply avails himself of the only vantages available to him. Moreover, much like Jeffrey, these vantages, ones which the audience shares, reveal a complex individual whose sexuality, objective beauty, and obfuscated personality are part of broader networks of trauma. Malena’s worsening circumstances are revealed scopophilically, which, albeit essentially one-sided, complicates sexual gratification as the sole determinant for the deployment of Renato’s gaze in the first place. The implication here is that “in the midst of a morass of temporal remoteness, emotional pathos, and impotence through close alignment with an adolescent”, neither Renato nor the audience can sequester the onto-existential experience of the object of his gaze to being an MILF and nothing else.37 For both Jeffrey and Renato, voyeurism indeed proffers wisdom about the

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socio-cultural complexity of being that is often paradoxically obfuscated in both the acts of being seen and seeing. It is only precisely through Renato’s gaze that the misfortunes experienced by Malena can be revealed to the audiences who identify with the burgeoning complexes of the boy rather than the jaded judgementalism of the townsfolk. In selecting an adolescent for the role of the film’s voyeuristic protagonist, Tornatore circumscribed the audience’s gaze in that of a male, true, but also within the perceptions and experiences of “an individual whose emotional perspectives occupy a liminal status between childhood and adulthood—an ambivalent position equidistant between legitimate infant curiosity and transgressive adult perversion” (Hope 261). The question here is precisely what is the nature of Renato’s objectification of Malena? Is there any suggestion that Renato sees the older woman as more than just a figure of sexuality, but as a mother figure? The answer is, in a very real sense, both. On the one hand, the various scenes that depict Renato’s fantasies of Malena that could ostensibly be described as innocent seemingly offset the character’s burgeoning sexuality and Malena as a loadstar therein. On the other hand, Malena is constantly exoticized, externalized, gazed upon, and therefore objectified in the last instance. In these fantasy scenes, Malena seemingly signifies less as an object of lust, but as the fantastical embodiment of Renato’s latent desire for companionship. Here, the older woman is brought into his psychical world on the grounds of comfort, play, joy, and, indeed rather maternally, emotional nurturing. However, in this capacity, Malena does not replace Renato’s mother in these fantasies. Renato’s mother’s household is shown to be microscopically tumultuous due to the larger-than-life personalities that form it. His sense of security and his subsequent access to nurturing and attention is threatened in this and other ways. This disadvantage is symbolized, for example, by the fact that he is the youngest in his family and the smallest of his friends. This disquieting uncertainty, which plays out in Sulfaro’s furrowed brow and anxious large eyes, is further exacerbated by macroscopic pressures exerted upon him, his family, his town, and “his” Malena by the war. In this way, precisely what Malena fulfils in these fantasies is a sense of attention that Renato feels his age and the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural primacy of the war takes from him. Moreover, in casting himself as Malena’s fantastical sidekick and/or rescuer, he reclaims a certain agency and purpose that the fear of invasion and death engendered by the war constantly erases.

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There are two other notable scenes in which the relationship between Renato, Malena, agency, and proximity is brought to the fore. Perhaps the film’s most iconic sequence is preceded by a short scene in which Renato observes, from one of his usual peepholes, as Malena cuts and colours her hair red. While the viewer can only see his eye, there is a sense that he is aghast at this transgressive transformation. The sense of increasing distance between he and Malena is exacerbated in the scene that follows where Malena enters the town square, red-lipped, red-headed, set off by a form-accentuating dress and brazen confidence. The sensation she causes—in which both admiration, desire, and contempt are voiced— leaves Renato helpless to watch as the entire community focuses itself in toto on her approach. The local men, as well as some Nazi officers in the square, scramble to light her cigarette for her. Here, Renato’s agency and proximity to Malena are eroded by the fact that his age, youthful voice, and burgeoning sexuality are drowned out in a chorus of adult opinion, judgement, and fantasy. The latent suggestion here is that the passions of his age are less apparent. Sequestered by moral prohibitions and reductivist thinking about youth and sexuality, Renato’s desires, wishes, and observations have no right to exist before maturity occurs after puberty, and will therefore not be recognized. As such, according to traditional Italian Catholic wartime mores, he is too young to feel and do what he does in terms of carnality and voyeuristic companionship. More sinister, perhaps, is the latent suggestion that Renato’s feelings of abandonment are a direct result of Malena simply attempting to adapt and survive in an extremely difficult sociopolitical, economic, and cultural climate for a mature, beautiful, unwed woman. From the vantage of his youthful mind, adaptation means change, change means difference, and difference means distance. There is an irony at play here. While Renato’s development into young manhood is an imminent becoming that requires physical and psychoemotional change, his sense of his own identity, pleasure, and companionship simultaneously requires the staticity of the woman that embodies these forces, desires, and fantasies in him, namely Malena herself. While he can and must grow, she must remain unchanging in order for him to do so: as stolid, ever-present, reliably unattainable, or off-limits for all as a mother, yet sexually appealing, desperate, and lusty as a MILF.  This is ultimately the truth of Renato’s double-bind of Malena. This effect is compounded when Malena and another local woman named Gina are shown to be fraternizing with German officers occupying the town. Renato listens and watches the now blonde Malena in the

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company of the Germans from a barbershop window as the men therein slander and malign her. The symbolic purity, comfort, pleasure, and most importantly attention towards Renato Malena represents are shown to not only be co-opted and threatened by his own townsfolk, but further wrested from him by the warlike hands of foreign invaders. More symbolically, the more colours her hair appear to take, the greater the distance between what Renato needs Malena to be contra who she really is: a survivor. A recognition of this fact, spurred on by Renato’s lurid kaleidoscopic nightmare-­fantasies of Malena’s imagined sexual turpitude and treason, causes the boy to have a psychic break. He faints and his mother is told by a local priest that he is possessed by the devil. He is subsequently taken to an exorcist who attempts to dispel the cause of his ague with syncretic stregherian techniques (Italian witchcraft). Lastly, his father diagnoses his suffering as caused by excessive libido and seeks out the local brothel for his son as a remedy. The church, the cult, and his parents fail to recognize the fact that his development, growth, and coming-into-knowledge are paradoxically both impelled and impeded by their own catalyst, namely, Renato’s obsession with Malena. With Jeffrey, the predicating impetus for his scopophilia is by and large an epistemic one. Jeffrey seeks to observe and later participate, understand, learn, and discover the truth of things behind the mystery of life symbolized by the sad, powerful, lonely, and magnetic Dorothy. Tornatore’s protagonist is quite younger than Jeffrey and, as a boy discovering his own sexuality as a new and essential dimension of his curiosity, a telos of the sort referred to by Jeffrey is simply unavailing with Renato. Here, immaturity, alongside sexual gratification and curiosity, is connoted with impuissance, flux, and play. Hope argues that: the youth’s tentative pursuit of the enigmatic Malena is bereft of the assured and often sadistic dominance of adult protagonists and their scopophilic drives, and is outwardly innocuous. Although he projects his fantasies on to Malena, visualizing her in scenarios drawn from films as diverse as Stagecoach, La cena delle beffe, and Wuthering Heights, it is his own boyish presence in these fantasies, coupled with their overdetermined styalization by Tornatore, which establishes a comic ambience that renders anodyne his objectification of Malena. The film appears to offer an additional safeguard against any moral discomfort that may be experienced by spectators, in the way it equates Renato’s distance from Malena with powerlessness. In Renato’s case, it is a distance that foregrounds the extent to which the youth is

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restricted by the social mores of 1940s Sicily, by conventions which do not facilitate social interaction between a male teenager and a married woman.38

Here, Tornatore seemingly establishes an implicit “code of conduct” with regard to the presentation and engagement with Malena from Renato’s standpoint. Renato’s experience of Malena, save for the final scene of the film, is delimited to a purely scopophilic purview. Implicit in Tornatore’s ethics is the contradistinction between the purely visual and its transgression through touch. This can be noted in the fact that individuals who touch Malena, save her husband—whose lost arm can be read as a symbolic cost of having consensual physical access to Malena—are portrayed as insensitive, vile, opportunistic, and sadistic. These include the dentist Cusimano’s gratuitous hand-kissing as a spectacle in front of a crowd of onlookers in the village. Here, physical contact between himself and Malena represents objectification in a direct sense: he uses his proximity to her to engender prestige and envy while simultaneously precipitating further disgust and contempt to and for Malena herself. This prohibition against physical contact of the idealized object also manifests in a scene in which a black marketeer gropes Malena’s hair when she is unable to pay for basic necessities. Tornatore elects extended close-ups to depict these moments which are supplemented by cuts to Renato’s disturbed and disgusted face as he comes to learn that his idealization of Malena, one based on her radiant beauty, is precisely the same reason that she is desecrated, abused, and objectified. The question here is whether or not a difference exists between a sanctificatory or predatory gaze. This question becomes exigent when considering the gaze beyond its fantastical embellishments and naive charm which still both invite and give way to inducing adult scopophilic pleasure in Malena’s objectification as an MILF from Renato’s perspective. As Hope rightly notes, this is an insidious effect that is achieved with the consequence of conditioning viewers to accept from the film’s outset the unlimited objectification of Malena/Belluci. Viewers are offered the palliative of viewing her from an adolescent’s naive and innocuous perspective as a means of engaging with the film with a clear conscience, and are then duly positioned at the discreet distance both temporally and diegetically from the unfolding events. Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that the film is composed of a concatenation of seductive and illicit spectatorship structures that actuate an objectification of and visual mastery over Malena/Belluci, a pattern which

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culminates in her savage public immolation in the wake of the Allied liberation.39 Like it is with Jeffrey, Renato’s coming into knowledge requires physical participation, fear, danger, and a fundamental role reversal. However, unlike Jeffrey who has a physical sexual experience with the direct object of his scopophilic and epistemophilic desire, Renato undergoes a similar experience albeit indirectly. In a scene where Renato’s father takes him to Castelcuto’s bordello as a means to alleviate his highly active libido which is taken to be a sign of demonic possession, Tornatore presents the scene as frightening from Renato’s perspective. The saturnine space and blood-red walls of the establishment portray the brothel as latently vaginal or womblike. Moreover, its shadowy mise-en-scene intimates that all forms of contact, transgression, experience, and knowledge that occur are a result of occurrences within it are or may be infernal in nature. As Renato and his father enter, the sex workers announce his status as a picciriddu or boy, immediately establishing an essential power disequilibrium between his naive fantasies of idealized sex with an equally sanctified woman and the realities of the relationship between sex and power. As Lynch does with Jeffrey in his initiation scene with Dorothy and her knife, Tornatore’s portrayal of Renato’s panoptic power of disrupting the seen/being-seen dyad collapses the controlled, distanced titillation of the film’s antecedent voyeurism into direct exposure to an invasive and aggressive sexuality. In this way: Renato, once the subject, is not the bewildered object. Bathed in nauseous red light, visualized by a series of dizzying, circular pans to represent Renato’s confused point of view, and of a duration seemingly calculated to generate discomfort through its length, the representation of the prostitutes’ predatorial procession around the youth denotes a radical shift of power away from Renato as an actant. The scene not only exposes his immature vulnerability, but also openly confronts the spectator with a consciously active manifestation of female sexuality to function as a counterpoint to Malena’s unconsciously compliant passiveness. The air of provocation in the mise-en-scene, as if challenging the spectator to derive gratification from such as crude representation of contrived prurience, is unmistakable.40

In the last instance, in each text, the transition from youth to adulthood occurs through intergenerational love. Initially, each film presents its respective protagonists as boys and young men who will grow to inherit the ideology of toxic masculinity that circumscribes sexually attractive

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mature women and mothers to the category of MILF with little to no regard as to their own psychological, emotional, and sexual well-being. However, as the films progress, Lynch and Tornatore suggest that MILFs are not, in their narratives at least, placeholders for mature sexual knowledge and learning alone. In Blue Velvet and Malena equally, the category of MILF is problematized by the fact that in their respective voyeuristic observations and indeed physical learning, both boys come to knowledge beyond sex as a distilled, pure, or unambiguous experience. Through the complicated mixture of both their sexuality and their sadness, loneliness, pain, and strength, both Dorothy and Malena instruct and bring each boy into knowledge of various life, but specifically the secret and difficult lives of mature mothers, in a way that combines knowledge, sex, and power.

Notes 1. Aranka Anema, Brandon Marshall, Benjamin Stevenson, Jasmine Gurm, Gabriela Montaner, Will Small, Eric Roth, Viviane Lima, David Moore and Robert Hogg. “Intergenerational Sex as a Risk Factor for HIV Among Young Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Scoping Review”. Current HIV/ AIDS Reports, 10 (2013), pp. 398–407. S.  Bessell. “The Role of Intergenerational Relationships in Children’s Experiences of Community”. Children and Society, 31 (2017), pp. 263–275. Wyrod, Robert et al. “Beyond Sugar Daddies: Intergenerational Sex and AIDS in Urban Zimbabwe”. AIDS and Behaviour. 15:6 (2011), pp.1275–82. 2. Judith Byrant Wittenberg and Robert Gooding-Williams. “The ‘Strange World’ of Blue Velvet: Conventions, Subversion and the Representation of Women”. In Sexual Politics and Popular Culture Diane Raymond, Bowling (ed.) (Green State University: Ohio, 1990), pp. 150–152. 3. Ibid., p. 152. 4. Thomas K.  Hubbard. “Introduction” In Censoring Sex Research: The Debate Over Male Intergenerational Relations Thomas K.  Hubbard and Beert Verstraete (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. xvii. 5. Ibid., p. xx. 6. Rachel Carroll. Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). p. 52). 7. Hubbard, p. xxii. 8. Carrol, pp. 60–61. 9. Ibid., p. 61. 10. Ibid.

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11. Ibid., p. 68. 12. Nomi Tamir-Ghez. “The Art of Persuasion in Nabokov’s Lolita”. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook Ellen Pifer (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 24. 13. Sarah A. Vannier, Anna B. Currie and Lucia F. O’Sullivan. “Schoolgirls and Soccer Moms: A Content Analysis of Free “Teen” and “MILF” Online Pornography”. Journal of Sex Research 51:3 (2014) p. 254. 14. Ibid., p. 261. 15. Beth Montemurro and Jenna Marie Siefken. “MILFS and Matrons: Images and Realities of Mothers’ Sexuality”. Sexuality and Culture, 16 (2012), p. 376. 16. May Friedman. “Beyond MILF: Exploring Sexuality and Feminism in Public Motherhood”. Atlantis 36:2 (2014), p. 50. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 51. 20. Ibid., p. 52. 21. “10 Hottest Teachers Caught Sleeping with Their Students”. http:// www.boredazzle.com/teachers-students/. 22. Carroll, pp. 78–80. 23. Frida Beckman. “Irony to Narrative Crisis: Reconsidering the Femme Fatale in the Films of David Lynch”. Cinema Journal 52(1) (2012), p. 25. 24. Wittenberg and Gooding-Williams, p. 152. 25. Claire Johnston. “Myths of Women in the Cinema”. In Women and the Cinema. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary (eds.) (New York: Dutton, 1977), pp. 410–411. 26. Laura Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 418. 27. Lynda K. Bundtzen. “‘Don’t look at me!’: Woman’s Body, Woman’s Voice in Blue Velvet”. Western Humanities Review 42:3 (1988) p. 21. 28. John Alexander. The Films of David Lynch (London: Letts, 1993), p. 93. 29. Ibid. 30. Wittenberg and Gooding-Williams, p. 156. 31. Sander H. Lee. “The Horrors of Life’s Hidden Mysteries: Blue Velvet”. The Philosophy of David Lynch. William J.  Devlin and Shai Biderman (eds.) (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011) p. 48. 32. Ibid., p. 49. 33. Ibid., pp. 50–51. 34. Irena Makarushka. “Subverting Eden: Ambiguity of Evil and the American Dream in Blue Velvet”. Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. 1:1 (1991), pp. 31–46.

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35. William Hope. “Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena: An Object Lesson for a Voyeuristic Generation”. The Italianist, 23:2 (2003), p. 259. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., p. 260. 38. Ibid., p. 262. 39. Ibid., p. 264. 40. Ibid., p. 265.

Non Romantic Cross Generational Relationships

Impossible Spaces? Liminal Space and Cross-Generational Love in Ann Hui’s A Simple Life Sue Thornham

In this chapter, I examine Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui’s depiction of cross-generational love in A Simple Life (2011) in terms of its play with time and space, narrative and image, history and memory. In its foregrounding of place, the body and intimacy, and its disruption of linear history in favour of the fragmented, rhythmic, and everyday, I argue, the film operates at once as a ‘memory text’, in Annette Kuhn’s terms,1 and as a profoundly political critique of the public history of a now globalized Hong Kong. I begin with questions of time and space. In Space, Place and Gender (1994), Doreen Massey examines the binary opposition between space and time central to the work of contemporary cultural theorists.2 Whilst writers differ in the characteristics they attribute to space—for Ernesto Laclau, for example, space is stasis, whereas for Fredric Jameson, it is

S. Thornham (*) University of Sussex, Sussex, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_11

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chaos—they are consistent, and consistent with a long philosophical tradition, in coding it as female. Whilst time, writes Massey: is defined by such things as change, movement, history, dynamism … space … is simply the absence of these things. … With time are aligned History, Progress, Civilization, Science, Politics and Reason …. With space on the other hand are aligned the other poles of these concepts: stasis, (‘simple’) reproduction, nostalgia, emotion, aesthetics, the body.3

From this follow two further arguments. The first, and more familiar, is that space/the feminine becomes the realm of immanence, the body, exteriority, whereas time/the masculine is that of transcendence, interiority, subjectivity. The second is that, as Massey argues, space becomes ‘the sphere of the lack of politics’.4 In this formulation, space does have its own kind of temporality: that of cyclical time. This is the ‘woman’s time’5 of Julia Kristeva’s description, a temporality characterized by repetition and a lack of change. Here, in this time outside history, which is really space, ‘things may change yet without really changing’.6 Shifting our focus slightly, we can see this also as the temporality of memory as Kuhn describes it,7 in which place is foregrounded, events are repetitive or cyclical, and linear time is disrupted. Here, the past inserts itself into the present as a kind of ‘haunting’,8 and you have a sense ‘that something has been irretrievably lost’.9 But for the cultural theorists whose work Massey examines, what all of these lack, indeed are opposed to, is genuine dynamic change; this belongs to time, the sphere of history, politics, and action— and to masculinity. The opposition that Massey charts is one familiar not only from the Western philosophical tradition critiqued by feminist philosophers and cultural theorists.10 It also underpins much of literary and film theory. In Gérard Genette’s equally binary, equally gendered account of storytelling, ‘narration’, which concerns the ‘temporal, dramatic aspect of the narrative’, is a matter of ‘pure processes’. Its opposite, ‘description’,11 serves to ‘suspend the course of time and to contribute to spreading the narrative in space’.12 It is therefore, ‘quite naturally’ in Genette’s view, the ‘ever-­ necessary, ever-submissive, never-emancipated slave’ of narration.13 In Stephen Heath’s theorization of cinematic narrative, this becomes the opposition between movement and its regulation through cinematic framing. In this view, disruption of cinema’s ideologically conservative ‘fictions of wholeness’14 can come only from an intensity of movement—the

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eruption of time or history into the ‘smooth stability’ of cinema’s constructed world.15 Massey is concerned to rethink this gendered opposition. What she offers in its place, however, is not a straightforward revalorizing of space. Instead, she proposes a more radical rethinking of space itself. In place of the gendered opposition of movement/stasis, time/space, and journey (or story)/landscape, culture/nature, she proposes a redefinition of space that sees it not as static but as itself a ‘dynamic simultaneity’, a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-­far’.16 Space, then, ceases to be ‘something we travel across’17 in our journey towards becoming (human, or subject, or hero), but becomes itself the intersection of different stories, different temporalities. The journey of man, or history, with its ‘overarching narrative’, is ‘actually the fact of intersecting with a multiplicity of other stories’.18 Space, insists Massey, is ‘political’. In contrast to Heath, she argues that ‘the very possibility of any serious recognition of multiplicity and heterogeneity’ depends not on time or history, but on ‘a recognition of spatiality’.19 I have suggested that the opposition that Massey critiques underpins not only gendered concepts of history and subjectivity but also theories of narrative and cinema. Massey herself, however, does not draw such connections. The stories with which she is concerned are the metanarratives of modernity—the ‘story of globalization’,20 ‘the “story” of capitalist modernity’,21 ‘the story of “the West”’22—or the smaller narratives of historical change. Yet this struggle to articulate ‘a different temporality’,23 which is also a groundedness in space, place and the body, and to insist on a ‘multiplicity’ of stories rather than a singular narrative, is one that has not only characterized feminist cultural and textual theory, despite its occasional forays into dreams of nomadism or cyborg identities. It is also, I think, a useful way of thinking about the kinds of cinema women might produce.24 If space, as Massey suggests, is conceptualized as stasis/surface/that which is to be travelled over, and gendered female, then, as Teresa de Lauretis and others25 have argued, to cross over space—and thus become the subject of narrative—is to be gendered—or to masquerade as—male. But to seek to imagine that journey otherwise, to engage with space, in all its complex, embodied temporality, will be to effect a very different relationship, one which must also change narrative: no longer ‘overarching’ and single, but ‘simultaneous’, plural, a ‘meeting up of histories’.26

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Ann Hui is a director whose films are preoccupied by questions of space, and by the hauntings of memory. In A Simple Life she presents a story that is concerned with—to use the terms of Massey’s gendered opposition—‘“simple” reproduction, nostalgia, emotion, … the body’. The transient and liminal spaces of its story of inter-generational love are not, however, the ‘ever-necessary, ever-submissive’ backdrops to the histories it recounts. They constitute its focus, and in presenting us, in Massey’s words again, with ‘the intersection of different stories, different temporalities’, they are, above all, political.

Ann Hui’s Cinema: Modernity and Displacement Hui is a filmmaker whose work is identified with a specifically Hong Kong cultural and cinematic history. Born in Manchuria, the daughter of a Chinese father and Japanese mother, and moving to Hong Kong at the age of five, she studied English and comparative literature in Hong Kong, and filmmaking at the London Film School, before beginning her career as a television documentary maker in Hong Kong in the late 1970s. For Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Hui’s life and work are paradigmatic: they ‘inscribe the transitional history of Hong Kong cinema’,27 a history that both depicts and embodies a rapid transition to modernity characterized by accelerated urbanization, a sense of hybridity and dislocation, and a Westernized and increasingly technologized corporate culture. If she is viewed as paradigmatic chronicler of Hong Kong’s modernity, however—many of her films focus on periods of its twentieth century history—she is also seen as its critic: her films, writes Ho, attempt to ‘distance, dislocate, and disrupt the corporate push toward economic success, Western lifestyles, and the technology that characterizes Hong Kong’s modernity’.28 Hong Kong itself has been viewed as a place whose rapid process of urbanization has meant that its history ‘is inscribed in spatial relations’—in the ‘jostling anachronisms and spatial juxtapositions that are seen on every street’.29 Ann Hui’s cinematic rendering of its history provides a specifically gendered interrogation of that space. Her protagonists, like those of other Hong Kong filmmakers, are displaced, dislocated, marginal, but as women, their marginality is also to a sense of history written as overarching narrative of colonial conflict, nationalist uprising, or modernist progress. Their stories are at odds with the historical narratives on whose margins they exist, often glimpsed in fragments through the male narrators through whom they are told. The films’ focus on the temporality of the everyday takes us

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into cramped and makeshift spaces of the private and domestic that resist the kind of allegorical reading—in which character and narrative are seen to stand in for Hong Kong and its history—that is so common in writing on Hong Kong cinema.

Political and Personal Hui’s films have been seen as falling into two groups30: political works and personal stories.31 A Simple Life (2011), her twenty-sixth film, would seem to fall firmly into the second group. Western reviewers saw it as one of Hui’s ‘low-key dramas about women’s lives’,32 a story drawn from real events, with ‘a tonic flavor of the everyday’,33 a portrait ‘of two good people’ painted ‘in gentle humanist terms’,34 ‘suffused with [a] gentle, unforced humanity’.35 Yet the distinction between these groups of films, as Patricia Brett Erens has suggested, is not quite as straightforward as it seems.36 In Boat People (1981), set in post-revolutionary Vietnam, and one of Hui’s most ‘political’ films, the film’s human centre is Cam Nuong (Season Ma), a fourteen-year-old girl whose marginal existence reveals the realities of life in Danang, and whose gaze both challenges and evades the camera of photographer Akutagawa (George Lam), through whose search for a visual ‘truth’ the film is narrated. Conversely, The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (2006), like A Simple Life one of Hui’s ‘low-key dramas about women’s lives’, has also been seen as an investigation of the ‘divided, incoherent and fragmented’ nature of post-socialist China.37 Here, too, the film’s protagonist is a woman whose story seems always slightly off-centre, a marginal figure within both familial and national structures who is often viewed, as the title suggests, through the perspective of others. What connects the two, and other films such as The Golden Era (2014) and Our Time will Come (2017), is a focus on a woman whose story is framed by male characters: an elusive figure who struggles to emerge from their constructions and whose life is lived in the interstices of the more dominant historical narratives that they embody. Only in the autobiographical Song of the Exile (1990) is the story voiced through a female character. This doubleness of Hui’s films has been identified with an increasingly feminist consciousness by a number of critics. For Ho, for example, Hui’s female characters, ‘in their subjective and social estrangement’, both mark and are displaced within Hong Kong’s rapid historical shifts: their stories, ‘marginalized, repressed and rendered invisible by the city’s modernity’,38 serve to interrogate and critique its progressivist myths. In the case of A

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Simple Life, then, it is perhaps not surprising that whilst reviewers focused on the film’s central relationship, with its ‘rhythms of shared routine and intimacy’,39 one critic could also suggest a comparison with that most feminist of interrogations of the domestic everyday, Chantal Akerman’s (1975) Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.40

A Simple Life A Simple Life tells the story of the developing relationship between middle-­ aged and unmarried Hong Kong film producer Roger Leung (Andy Lau) and Ah Tao (Deanie Ip), the maid who has served his family for sixty years but who, following a stroke, insists on retiring to a care home. We follow their increasing closeness until her death after a second stroke, two years later. The film was based, as the film’s publicity material emphasized, on producer Roger Lee’s own experiences, and Lee co-wrote the script as well as producing. Publicity material also focused on the existing relationship between Hui and her two central actors, and between Ip and Lau, who is Ip’s godson. When, in the ‘behind the Scenes’ DVD ‘Extra’, Ip talks of this relationship (‘He’s forever a kid in my eyes’, but ‘he’s now a successful businessman and actor’), it is unclear whether she is referring to that depicted in the film or to her own with Lau. The film, then, charts an inter-generational love story, but one that is uncomfortable and never fully acknowledged. It is a relationship that for some reviewers had ‘troubling undercurrents’.41 Its protagonists, they pointed out, ‘aren’t married or lovers, but servant and master’42; theirs is not a relationship of ‘romantic love’.43 Like many of the relationships in Hui’s films, it is outside the bounds of ‘proper’ familial or romantic relations, anachronistic and uneasy in its combination of distance and intensity. When, in order to render it comprehensible, Roger at various points in the film claims to be Ah Tao’s godson or nephew, the pretence only serves to point up the relationship’s inadmissibility. It is a relationship whose marginality is further emphasized by its unfolding not in places that are private and intimate but in transitory public spaces: cafés, parks, and the liminal public areas of the care home and hospital to which we see Ah Tao admitted. It is also one in which intimate touch is almost absent: ‘I found myself waiting for a hug that never came’,44 commented one reviewer. Instead, food replaces touch as the agent and language of (given, refused, or withdrawn) sensual contact. At the beginning of the film, a series of scenes define the relationship before

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Ah Tao’s stroke through the rituals of choosing, cooking, and consuming food. We see the time and care with which Ah Tao buys, prepares, and presents to Roger’s critical gaze the dishes that comprise his meal, and the automatic way in which, hearing her steps behind him at the table, he simply extends a hand to receive the bowl of rice that he knows she will hand to him. At the film’s close, it is the absence of such exchange that we see marked. Roger’s meal is now a take-away bowl of noodles, eaten alone in a hospital corridor. A Simple Life gives us the story of Ah Tao’s decline and death that lies between these scenes, told, as in many of Hui’s films with a female protagonist, through the recollections of a central male character, here Roger. It is his memories that constitute the extended flashback that is the film; his voice-over, beginning the story with his own birth (‘Ah Tao was already with my family when I was born’), that we hear at its start. It is a story, however, that is also a recapitulation of the history of Hong Kong. Ah Tao’s life has encompassed its feudal background, the Japanese invasion, a rapid modernization which replaced Chinese maids with overseas workers, and a newly wealthy diasporic middle-class who move freely between Hong Kong, China, and the USA. Yet the public history that has been so central a preoccupation of Hong Kong cinema is glimpsed only on the film’s periphery, and it is on the repeated interruption of Roger’s linear narrative and its apparent transparency that it focuses. Its scenes are fragmented, circular, and often filmed with an intimacy and closeness that can seem to approximate touch. What we see are the marginal and fleeting spaces of the everyday, and the detail and sensual specificity of those spaces. Roger is shown to be an authoritative and financially powerful player in the transnational film world that he inhabits, a figure at ease in Hong Kong’s global capitalist present. But if he is frequently in motion, traversing the spaces of that transnational world, the camera does not invite us to look with him to a destination and purpose beyond; instead we must pause and look at. As the film develops, it is Ah Tao that increasingly provides its sense of movement, but it is always a movement in place. The film opens with a wide shot of one of its many transitional spaces, a deserted railway platform. The image that follows, of Roger sitting in the station’s waiting-room, hunched and alone, hugging his rucksack to his chest like a child, is filmed through the glass of one of the room’s windows. The effect is to render him insubstantial, lost within the blank space of the institutional room, with its banks of empty chairs, and the reflections of spectral passers-by and the black bars of metal railings into which

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it seems to dissolve. As the camera cuts inside, he is positioned at the extreme edge of the frame, seated in front and to the left of a vast reproduction of a Chinese water painting that dominates the shot. This, the nostalgic fantasy of a past China, is an institutional image that we will see again towards the end of the film, where it provides the backcloth to the orchestrated photograph of the reunion of Roger’s family. Now, we follow Roger, a solitary figure throughout, as he boards his train and gazes, apparently unseeing, at the bleak coastal landscape that it crosses. As we hear his voice-over, it has a curiously formal quality, precise and distanced. It is, we later realize, not an internal monologue but an extract from his funeral oration for Ah Tao. In the flashback scenes that follow, we see the domestic routines of Ah Tao and Roger before her stroke, as she shops in the market, object of both affection and practical jokes for its stallholders, and cooks for Roger. For him, the domestic space of his flat is clearly a temporary retreat. As so often in the film, he is preparing to leave, and we watch his meticulous and self-absorbed preparations. But he dominates its space. As he silently eats the meal she has prepared, we view him centre-frame, filling the shot. He does not speak to or look at her as she hands him the food whose preparation is her life. When the focus shifts to Ah Tao, she is filmed through the doorway of the tiny kitchen, squeezed into the background of a frame whose foreground Roger occupies. On his return from a business trip to Beijing, we view her again through the kitchen doorway: what fills the frame are walls and door; as she caresses the cat, her body half-obscured by the kitchen door, she occupies the same amount of frame space as the washing machine. A little later, after her stroke, we see them in the hospital. He is once again self-absorbed, turned away from her and preoccupied with his mobile phone, too far away from her bed for the camera to capture them in a single shot. This, then, is a relationship of master and servant, oddly formal and distanced despite the confined domestic space in which it is enacted. That it is also a relationship of love on Ah Tao’s part is evident from the sensuous detail of the food that we see her preparing, the camera capturing the colour, texture, and sounds of the contents of the sizzling wok. This intimacy of detail and use of blocked, cramped shots are contrasted, in the remainder of the film’s opening scenes, with the world of transnational film production that Roger occupies with such ease. The scenes of his financial meeting in Beijing, with the representative of a proposed film’s Chinese backers and its directors—played, as ‘Director Tsui’ and ‘Director

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Hung’, by Tsui Hark and Sammo Hung—take place in expansive, ultra-­ modern malls and offices. It is a world that is capitalist and patriarchal— Roger’s young, female assistant hovers in the corridor outside the production company’s vast offices during the meeting—and focused on size and money. Tsui demands a larger set, doubled lights and crew, and a bigger budget. Its victors are those who can win and control the money. Its creativity is self-proclaimed—‘Shooting a film is like giving birth’, asserts Tsui—but hollow. Beneath the larger sets and increased budget, the films produced, admits Roger later, aren’t good. Above all, however, it is a world of performance: the performance of a romanticized and heroic Chinese history in the films produced (Roger’s film will be yet another version of the epic war drama, The Three Kingdoms45), and the blustering, noisy performance of Roger and the directors to secure the money. Two further points about this world are worth noting. One is that if Roger’s feudal relationship with Ah Tao has in one sense infantilized him—he is incapable of the simplest of domestic tasks—it also renders him perfectly able to succeed in this world of global capitalism. There is continuity, not contradiction, between these two realms of male privilege. The second is that the attributes of Roger’s world of film production run right through the layers of Hong Kong society, and Roger is known, and comfortable, at all these levels. The care home in which he will place Ah Tao is owned, he finds, by an old friend, Grasshopper. Here, too, the shiny foyer masks the reality: in this case of stinking toilets and the temporary cubicles that are the residents’ ‘rooms’. Here, too, the primary concern is money: ‘Before you know it, we’ll outnumber convenience stores’, boasts Grasshopper of his expanding empire of care homes. Here, too, China’s history is a matter of hollow performance, in this case by the group who arrive at the care home, complete with singer and camera crew, to celebrate the mid-Autumn or Moon Festival. They distribute traditional moon cakes to the residents but then, filming over, take them back ready for the next performance. The cakes are, says, one of the group, not gifts but ‘just props’. Roger, we find, is an old friend of the manager of this group, too. But Grasshopper’s empire also extends in other directions. It is on him that Roger calls when he later needs a group of thugs to evict a tenant in one of the poorest areas of Hong Kong, so that the flat can be prepared, without her knowledge, for Ah Tao’s final years. ‘No need for death defying stunts’, comments a satisfied Grasshopper to Roger as his men complete their task through the threat of violence alone. Grasshopper’s comment reminds us not only of the film that Roger is making, linking his

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two worlds, but also of Lau’s own status as action star of such blockbusters.46 Roger, with no sign of compassion for the evicted man, smiles and pays Grasshopper’s men.

Space and Time If, then, other films of Ann Hui set the everyday lives of their female protagonists against the vast sweep of official histories, reversing our customary focus, in A Simple Life this history is doubly absent: not only peripheral to the film’s narrative but a matter of performance and myth—the fantasized construction of a self-aggrandizing transnational cinema whose central concern is power and money. Like Sally Potter in The Tango Lesson (1997), Hui lets us glimpse at the film’s margins the film she is not making, whilst the film she does make centres on the spaces that it would render invisible. In the first instance these are the spaces of the care home. Liminal spaces, they are neither public nor private—the residents, indeed, have no privacy. Many of the scenes take place in the home’s foyer, the threshold space just inside its glass doors. Neither wholly inside nor outside, this is a place for eating and mah-jong playing, a space of waiting and watching as fellow residents are moved in or out and visitors arrive or, more often, fail to arrive. It is the loss of human dignity of the home’s residents that strikes us first: they are fed in line, with a grey and unsavoury slop; they grumble about misplaced teeth and stolen possessions; their rooms have no doors. Outside, a low-angle exterior shot, apparently filmed from the doors of the building, shows us a bleak line of decaying concrete apartment blocks against the sky: an image of overcrowding and isolation. When, later in the film, at the time of the Spring Festival, we finally see a series of far more conventional shots of the Hong Kong skyline, the night sky lit up with exploding fireworks above celebratory crowds, the camera pulls back to show us the television set on which they are being displayed. This, too, is a constructed spectacle, and Ah Tao is watching alone. Yet these marginal and indeterminate spaces are also the site of unexpected warmth and beauty, and of intersecting stories that we are allowed to glimpse but do not wholly discover. As Ah Tao wanders the corridors of the care home at night, early in her stay, she comes across a scene of tenderness between the most mobile and rebellious of its residents, Uncle Kin, and a confused, wheelchair-bound old woman whom he carefully steers back into the lit space of the foyer. Following them, Ah Tao

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discovers there a scene of t’ai chi being practised by a group of residents whose movements possess an unexpected grace and beauty. Later this space is the scene of laughter and dancing, as well as of pain and loss. Ah Tao is welcomed and receives gifts from its poorest residents. Recovering from her stroke, she begins in turn to offer warmth and support to those who are most isolated and helpless. As she sits and waits for Roger’s visits, we hear snatches of the histories of the home’s occupants, and glimpse for a moment the loneliness not only of its residents but of its supervisor, Ms Choi. Alone together at the time of the Spring Festival, she tells Ah Tao about the oldest of the home’s residents, the wheelchair-bound old woman, abandoned by her family when they emigrated twenty years earlier. When Ah Tao asks about her own life, however, Choi’s face remains closed, and she painfully withholds her story.

An Impossible Relationship It is in this context that the relationship between Roger and Ah Tao develops. It is initially one of duty on his part—we later learn that she nursed him after a heart operation a few years earlier. Now, he will pay for all her care but also ensure that he gets the best possible deal from Grasshopper; his command of the financial details of the home’s operation contrasts with his vagueness about Ah Tao’s age and life. But it gradually becomes one of a never quite acknowledged love. On Ah Tao’s part, her insistence after her stroke that she wants to retire and ‘live in an old people’s home’ seems born of self-sacrifice. ‘You get one stroke, you get another’, she says when Roger informs her that she is likely to recover up to 80% of her movement, and though she insists that such a retirement is what she wants, the sideways flicker of her eyes as she says it belies her words. In his early visits to the home, Roger is as dominant, and as evasive, as he was earlier. His staccato list of items he might bring for her is spoken as he busies himself in tidying her cubicle, never looking at her. When she suggests that he might bring her some marinated tofu, his response is defensive: ‘You don’t like the food here? … If you haven’t had [tofu], you don’t need it’. As it develops, their relationship, itself always marginal and unnameable (‘[Is he] your son? … Godson?’), is itself played out in transitional and marginal spaces, outside the linear trajectory of Roger’s life. As it acquires its own rhythms and language, these are the cyclical rhythms and the language of Ah Tao’s life, the language of food. We see them, then, in the

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public spaces of the care home, in cafés, and in a small park to which they pay repeated visits. As they share memories, they are of food. ‘The fish is not bad’, she says in the café, ‘but the sauce is too salty’. ‘Next time’, he responds, ‘we’ll bring your own soy sauce. You were always so fussy, you spoiled the rest of us’. It is a language that Roger only gradually, and imperfectly, acquires, but it is central to Ah Tao’s world. Towards the end of her life, she will sum up its temporality in a conscious reworking of the verse from Ecclesiastes; there is, she says, ‘a time for steaming melons and a time for salted eggs’. Two scenes are central in this development. The first comes when Roger takes Ah Tao back to the flat they have shared. He has now cooked for her (she is critical of his efforts) and brought back for her visit the cat that was her companion. As they attempt to sort through her few possessions, all of them implements of her caring role (a sewing machine, a rice cooker, casserole dishes), they open a wooden trunk of mementos. These are objects that signify her memories, but they are all memories of him. In this return to the apartment, the past is recalled, but it is also remade. The pair now sit close together in the kitchen, touching, and holding between them the photograph she uncovers of the two of them, he as a child, she as a young woman. Photographs, as Annette Kuhn writes, can constrain our memory, funnelling it into conventional channels. But they can also do the reverse, ‘questioning identities and memories and generating new ones’, offering pasts that ‘reach into the present’ (2000: 183–184). There is no separation between these two characters now, and no splitting or blocking of the cinematic frame. Her face fills the screen as she gazes at the photograph; he is behind her, gazing not at the photo but at her face. Yet what for her seems to be pure happiness as past and present merge is for him more painful. What he appears to recognize now as love remains unnameable, outside and in transgression of the familial relationships that these mementos both displace and, more subtly, reinforce. The second scene comes shortly afterwards, at the mid-point of the film. Ah Tao has regained her strength and mobility, so that as the scene begins, we see her exercising alone in the park she has visited with Roger. As she exercises, a wedding party walk past, ignoring her, and she gazes after them. Their exit coincides with Roger’s entrance. ‘Thinking of getting married?’ he asks her. The theme of marriage has already been suggested in the episodic series of scenes that has preceded this sequence,47 and what now ensues is a display of gentle flirtation, as he teases her about past suitors and she him about previous girlfriends. It is clear that for both

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of them this relationship is the most important one in their lives. For Roger this is another transient moment, outside the mainstream of his life—he is carrying his customary rucksack, poised once again to leave— but within it, it is Ah Tao who is mobile, active, and assertive, moving back and forth across the small square, touching and even hitting him as he teases, whilst he sits facing her, leaning in towards her, absorbed. Recounting her rejection of her suitors, her condemnation is, as ever, spoken in the language of food. They were, she pronounces, ‘fishy’, a term that will become a private term of disapproval between them. In the scenes that follow, we see both Roger’s attempts to bestow on Ah Tao an identity that will make her, and their relationship, legible in the world that he inhabits, and its impossibility. He takes her to the premiere of his latest film, introducing her as his ‘aunt’. As she waits for his arrival, we see her in front of a mirror, applying lipstick and putting on rings that appear to be new. Her hair is styled, and she is smartly dressed. When Roger arrives and gives her his arm, she comments, ‘Handsome feller’. ‘Gorgeous girl’, he replies. The scenes of the premiere itself are studded with directors, producers, and actors from The Hong Kong film world. ‘He’s a very famous director’, says Roger of Ninh Hao, to whose smoking Ah Tao has objected; ‘Let me introduce you. This is my aunt’. As Roger and Ah Tao walk down the street afterwards, arms linked, away from the luxury, lights, and shiny reflective surfaces, we see their intimacy. But we also hear that the film was not, as Roger admits, ‘good’, and that she fell asleep during it. This too, then, has been a performance, and we have already seen that it is unsustainable, as Roger’s mother enters the film, and with her the claims of a proper familial, social, and historical order. Returning briefly to Hong Kong from the USA, Roger’s mother takes over his apartment—he sleeps on the sofa and is instructed to turn off the television—and patronizes Ah Tao, firmly reinstating her status as servant. Although Ah Tao momentarily reasserts her authority, and the centrality of her relationship with Roger—the birds’ nests soup brought by Roger’s mother is, she pronounces to his delight, ‘fishy’—Roger is increasingly reclaimed by a world in which he functions efficiently but without intimacy or ease. His mother arranges Ah Tao’s future without reference to Ah Tao’s or Roger’s wishes. It is she who insists that the long tenanted run-down apartment is a more appropriate (and cheaper) setting for Ah Tao’s final days, but Roger does not demur. In the care home, meanwhile, residents die or are removed. As a weeping daughter is escorted from the foyer, Ah Tao gazes after her, and Roger at Ah Tao; the brief flowering of

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this impossible relationship is already ending. Ah Tao will shortly be readmitted to hospital. A final public scene punctuates the story of Ah Tao’s decline. Roger’s extended family visits Hong Kong to celebrate the first birthday of his great-nephew, son of Roger’s nephew and his English-speaking Korean wife. Ah Tao, now in a wheelchair, is invited to the celebrations in a plush hotel. Against the intimacy of the photograph discovered by Ah Tao and Roger, with its power to evoke both a newly recovered fullness of relationship and, simultaneously, a sense of unspoken loss, this scene provides us with two very different public photographic images. The first is the more immediately jarring, because it suggests another role that Roger plays that has been barely visible in the film. Informed that it is customary for a Korean child to be presented with several symbolic gifts, from which it will choose its future path, he holds up, grinning, a centrefold image of scantily dressed models for the boy’s gaze. But the more telling image is the one that closes the scene. Against the background of a reproduction of a Chinese water painting like the one we saw at the start of the film, the several generations of this successful transnational Hong Kong family pose, facing us, for their ‘group photo’. The photograph will show Ah Tao smiling at its centre, but we have seen that she is a belated addition, inserted with difficulty into the group by Roger after it has already formed for the camera. The later scenes of the film show Ah Tao’s rapid deterioration. The pair return to the small public square of their earlier flirtatious meeting, but this time Ah Tao is buckled into a wheelchair, her body twitching and her head lolling to one side. Roger continues to tease (‘Are you putting on weight?’) and she to talk of food—‘Roast goose. I want to have roast goose’—but her words are repetitive and barely distinguishable. Roger turns his back on her not, this time, to avoid her but to hide his pain. In the hospital, faced with her imminent death, he must decide whether to discontinue treatment. In another cramped institutional space, it is now Roger who is squeezed into doorways and corridors, the frame split by a vertical pillar and our view of him blocked by the bank of lockers that takes up half the shot. Outside the windows we can see the movement of a city in which life continues as usual. In this last return to the hospital, however, as Roger sits by her bed, he puts off a caller and sits holding her hand, before finally, tenderly, smoothing back her hair and making sure that her feet are warm.

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Yet at the end of his final visit, Roger resumes his public life. He authorizes the ending of any treatment for Ah Tao, calls his assistant to tell her that he’ll stick to his planned schedule, and informs the doctor that if Ah Tao dies whilst he is away he will complete the paperwork on his return. Her funeral is formal and impersonal, the only emotion provided not by Roger but by the unauthorized entrance of the reprobate Uncle Kin. This time, we realize, when we watched Kin, as so often, borrowing money, it was not to pay for prostitutes, as we saw him do earlier, but in order to be able to place a small bunch of white roses on Ah Tao’s coffin. At the end of the service, Roger resumes his life of constant journeying. The film’s close sees him once more with rucksack on his back, leaving the car park below his apartment block. He climbs the external stairs and, after pausing to glance up, proceeds to open his front door.

A Simultaneity of Stories Time and history, it seems, have been restored. A relationship that interrupted ‘change, movement, history, dynamism’, and blurred temporal boundaries, mixing Hong Kong’s past and present, the feudal and the familial, ownership and love, has closed. It was a relationship, indeed, that was strictly speaking impossible: not only anachronistic but a-temporal, already over before the film began, perhaps a figment of Roger’s nostalgic longing. Yet this is not quite the film’s ending. As Roger returns to his apartment in this repetition of a much earlier scene, the film cuts to a shot of Ah Tao on its balcony, watching for his return. As he enters the now dark apartment we again see her, listening for his entrance from behind the kitchen door. We do not know, then, whether this is the end of the film or its beginning, the retelling of its opening with Ah Tao and her love now at its centre or a haunting of the film’s—and Roger’s—present by memories, or fantasies, of its past. We remember perhaps the sense of his insubstantiality without her at its opening. The final shot is of the memory text at the film’s centre: the photograph of Roger as an infant and the young woman Ah Tao who holds him. Writing of the difference between autobiography and memory texts, Kuhn argues that in autobiography, ‘[t]he present, the time of writing, is set up at the outset as the goal towards which the story will inexorably direct itself’.48 In the memory text, however, time is neither purposive nor fully continuous and sequential. Instead, ‘events are somehow pulled out of a linear time-frame’,49 cyclical rather than sequential, and we find ‘an

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insistence on [the primacy of] place’50 (original emphasis). In this sense, then, A Simple Life can itself be seen as a memory text, both a staging of memory and haunted by a further layer of fragmentary memories in which shared events are recalled—the buying of a watermelon, the cooking of a meal—but remain unanchored in a linear story. Patricia Brett Erens makes a similar argument about Hui’s Song of the Exile (1990) which, she argues, is not an autobiography but a specifically female memoir: a text which does not construct a unified subjectivity but refracts that subjectivity through the views of others and through ‘the “invisible presences” that are the most profound determinants of subjectivity’. Such a memoir constitutes, she writes, ‘a kind of countermemory’.51 But this memory text is also political. The relationship that it charts, whether lived and only belatedly understood or reimagined and restaged through memory, is not only unnameable and transgressive, mixing flirtation and filial love, and claiming for itself the intensity and closeness that should properly belong within familial or romantic bonds. In its emphasis on space and place, on the sensuous detail of food and the rhythms of everyday life, it also constitutes an interruption of the relentless movement of capital and people that is Hong Kong’s history, and the self-serving rewriting of that history as myth that is its present. The patriarchal world of power and money that Roger inhabits is not overthrown, and we can have no doubts about either his full implication in that world or his continuing occupation of it. But Hui’s film, which ‘suspend[s] the course of time and … contribute[s] to spreading the narrative in space’,52 also comments on that world and the history it constructs. This, then, is a film in which time and history are felt not as driving forces but as pressures at its edges. Its focus is instead on small, transient, and liminal spaces, on the cyclical rhythms of the everyday, and on the ways in which, beyond the grand sweep of history, the past may exist in a relation of simultaneity with the present. Through this interruption of Roger’s life and all that it represents, Ah Tao comes slowly into focus and with her not only a history of love and mutual dependence that Roger has repressed but also that which Hong Kong’s relentless push to modernity renders invisible. In the spaces that we now must look at, too, we glimpse a host of other stories with which that of Ah Tao and Roger intersects. In her reconceptualization of space, Doreen Massey asks what it might mean if we ‘refuse to convene space into time’53 and think instead of ‘a meeting­up of histories’,54 of ‘interrelations’ and ‘embedded practices’.55 This, she insists, is a political question about how we conceive of history and its

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accustomed narrative of ‘the inevitability of … neoliberal capitalist globalisation’.56 It is also a gendered question. With its feeling of a suspension of time and time’s ‘overarching narrative’, A Simple Life takes us into this other space and makes visible the lives and relationships that this dominant narrative renders impossible.

Notes 1. Annette Kuhn. ‘A Journey Through Memory’. In Susannah Radstone (ed.) Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 2000), pp. 179–196. 2. Doreen Massey. Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 3. Ibid., pp. 256–257. 4. Ibid., p. 250. 5. Julia Kristeva. ‘Women’s Time’ trans. A.  Jardine and H.  Blake In The Kristeva Reader Tori Moi (Ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 187–213. 6. Massey 1994, p. 252. 7. Kuhn 2004 8. Liedeke Plate. Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 122. 9. Kuhn 2000, p. 188. 10. See, for example, the work of Luce Irigaray, Michèle le Doeuff, and Elizabeth Grosz. In particular, Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (2004/1993), Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary (2002), and Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (1995). 11. Or ‘visual pleasure’, as it is termed in Laura Mulvey’s (1989/1975) critique of Genette’s gendered opposition as it translates into cinema. 12. Gerard Genette. Figures of Literary Discourse. Translated by Alan Sheridan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982/1969), p. 136. 13. Ibid., p. 134. 14. Stephen Heath. Questions of Cinema (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), p. 118. 15. Ibid., p.49. 16. Dorothy Massey. ‘Landscape/space/politics: an essay’, The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image (2011). Accessed at: http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/landscapespacepolitics-an-essay/. 17. Dorothy Massey. ‘Landscape as a Provocation: Reflections on Moving Mountains’. Journal of Material Culture, 11: 33 (2006), p. 46. 18. Massey 2011. 19. Dorothy Massey. For Space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 11. 20. Ibid., p. 62.

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21. Ibid., p. 63. 22. Ibid., p. 10. 23. Meaghan Morris. ‘“Too Soon Too Late”: In Memory of Claire Johnston, 1940–87’. Too Soon Too Late (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. xv. 24. The term ‘women’s cinema’, as Patricia White has recently observed (2015: 3–4), remains a contested term. In a ‘post-feminist cultural climate’, she writes, it is often identified with the ‘industry-produced chick flicks’, films for women, which are the successors to the ‘women’s films’ (Doane 1987) of the 1940s. Like White, and like Alison Butler (2002), I use it here in the sense first introduced by Claire Johnston in 1973, to refer to films made—directed, and with a visible signature—by women. 25. Teresa De Lauretis. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1984). For a fuller discussion of this, see my What if I Had Been the Hero? (2012) and Spaces of Women’s Cinema (2019). 26. Massey 2005, p. 4. 27. Elaine Yee Lin Ho. ‘Women on the Edge of Hong Kong Modernity’. In Spaces of their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, Mayfair Mee Hui Yang (ed.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 162. 28. Ibid., p. 163. 29. Ackbar Abbas. ‘The New Hong Kong Cinema and the Déjà Disparu’. In Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, D.  Eleftheriotis and G.  Needham (eds.) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006/1997), p. 81. 30. Patricia Brett Erens (2000a and b) adds a third group: genre films. 31. Ka Fai Yau. ‘Looking Back at Ann Hui’s Cinema of the Political’. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 19:2 (2007), p. 122. 32. Roger Clarke. ‘Film of the Month: A Simple Life’. Sight & Sound, August 2012. Accessed at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/film-month-simplelife-0. 33. Rachel Saltz. ‘In Old Age the Servant Becomes the Served’. New York Times 12.04.12. Accessed at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/ movies/a-simple-life-directed-by-ann-hui.html. 34. Roger Ebert. Review of A Simple Life, August 8, 2012. Accessed at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-simple-life-2012. 35. Justin Chang. Review of A Simple Life, Variety September 7, 2011. Accessed at: https://variety.com/2011/film/reviews/a-simple-life1117945991/.

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36. Patricia Brett Erens. ‘The Film Work of Ann Hui’. In The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, P.  Fu and D.  Desser (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000a), pp. 176–195. 37. Wing Fai Leung. ‘The Postmodern Life of my Aunt—a Chronotope of Postsocialist China’. Annales de Géographie 2014/1 (n° 695–696), p. 849. 38. Ho 2001, p. 169 and p. 173. 39. Saltz 2012. 40. Clarke 2012. 41. Ben Sachs. ‘Three questions for Ann Hui's A Simple Life’. Chicago Reader 5.07.12. Accessed at: https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/ 2012/05/07/three-questions-for-ann-huis-a-simple-life. 42. Saltz 2012. 43. Sachs 2012. 44. Ebert 2012. 45. ‘Another version?’ comments Grasshopper, when told of the subject of Roger’s film; ‘There’ve been so many’. The ‘Three Kingdoms’ was the tripartite division of China during the Han and Jin Dynasties. 2008 had seen two film versions of the story, one of which, Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon, had a budget of US$25 million and a reputed 40,000 extras, and starred Andy Lau. 46. Lau began his acting career as an action hero and continues to star in such roles. 47. In these scenes, we see Ah Tao interview potential successors as Roger’s maid, none of whom is willing to meet her requirements. After the final applicant has left, her vacant seat is occupied by Ms Choi who asks, direct to camera, ‘Picking a wife for Roger?’ 48. Kuhn p., 180. 49. Ibid., p. 188. 50. Ibid., p. 190. 51. Patricia Bret Erens. ‘Crossing Borders: Time, Memory, and the Construction of Identity in Song of the Exile’. Cinema Journal 39:4 (2000), pp. 43–59. 52. Genette, p. 136. 53. Massey 2005, p. 5. 54. Ibid., p. 9. 55. Ibid., p. 10. 56. Ibid., p. 4.

Intergenerational Archipelagoes: TransMotherhood and Transing the Indonesian Family in Realita, Cinta, dan Rock n Roll and Lovely Man Alicia Izharuddin

Non-normative genders and sexualities were firmly sutured into the cultural fabric at the dawn of Reformasi in Indonesia, the period of democratic renewal after the fall of General Suharto in 1998, when same-sex romance and transgender identities began to make a significant presence in the wave of counter-cultural filmmaking. Relaxation of censorship laws led to a creative boldness especially in the onscreen treatment of gender and sexuality.1 Shifting power relations between traditional authority figures of the old regime and vanguards of the new democracy granted a space for the redrawing of gender and sexual boundaries in the postSuharto public sphere more generally. Suharto legitimated his authoritarian rule for 32 years using the discourse of the heteronormative nuclear

A. Izharuddin (*) Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4_12

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family. He styled himself as the ultimate ‘father’ and the Indonesian people his children. Women were circumscribed to strict domestic and reproductive roles even when they were absorbed into male-dominated arenas such as the military.2 Films that subvert the hegemony of the ‘father’ whether consciously and otherwise were received with great acclaim in the decade after 1998. This chapter examines two films that do so through the figure and intimacies of a trans-woman mother. The first is the popular 2006 film Realita, Cinta, dan Rock n Roll (Reality, Love, and Rock n Roll, dir. Upi Avianto) about a pair of teenagers finding themselves and reconnecting with their family. One of the young characters re-establishes connection with an estranged father whom he later discovers has transitioned into a woman. A similar plot is found in Lovely Man (2011, dir. Teddy Soeriaatmadja) about a young woman who, in search of her father, finds that ‘he’ had been living as a trans-woman sex worker in Jakarta. Both films feature the stereotypical conventions of transgender identities onscreen—hyperfeminine drag, the embodiment of trans-femininity by muscular leading men, and the reveal.3 Mediated by trans-motherhood, trans-identities who are brought intimately into the domestic drama index queer moments in contemporary Indonesian cultural discourse. But such queer moments presently face threats of erasure by the wave of new conservatism sweeping the country. In recent years, transgender women were among the most frequent victims of police violence, and gay men have been publicly flogged in the sharia-governed state of Aceh. Transgender subjectivities in Indonesia both live in and are effects of the overlapping discourses of developmentalism, nationalism, and globalisation. The term ‘waria’ is a portmanteau that combines the words woman (wanita) and man (pria). It is applied only to transgender women who regard themselves as men with the soul of a woman or identify themselves as women. It is a term coined in 1978 that granted male femininity social recognition during a period of Indonesian nation-building that placed much emphasis on heteronormative gender performance and identity.4 ‘Waria’, however, later developed new meanings and attachments. As Benjamin Hegarty5 observes, ‘waria’ has gained transnational salience through its relationship with global discourses of transgender identity in the post-­New Order years. The waria in Indonesia have gained international attention and developed something of a quid pro quo relationship with western journalists and documentary filmmakers. They recognise that the framing of waria life necessitates the theme of suffering and

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victimhood to be intelligible in an unequal global relation of media representations. For many decades, Indonesia maintained a reputation for relative tolerance and acceptance of non-hetero and non-cis conforming individuals. The country boasts communities that accommodate multiple genders and traditions that rely on ritual cross-dressing performed by gender non-­ conforming men and women.6 However, not long after the end of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998 came a period of ideological and cultural redrawing of boundaries that sought to exclude queer and trans communities across Indonesia.7 Attitudes towards non-normative groups took a turn for the worse in the 2000s when religious and political leaders across Indonesia declared ‘LGBT’ people as dangerous as the nation-­ state’s historical enemies, the communists and terrorists. Accused of threatening the sanctity of the heteronormative family and the nation, non-normative people in Indonesia have found ways to redefine themselves in their own terms. They attach registers of prestasi or ‘good deeds’ to their everyday and professional practices that are perceived to align with the developmentalist logic of nation-building.8 Waria characters in Indonesian cinema are typically portrayed as comedic relief in New Order cinema. As Ben Murtagh9 argues, part of the comedy is the maleness of the waria that lies just beneath the veneer of femininity. In Betty Bencong Selebor (Betty the Scatty Bencong 1979), the comedic waria character played by Benjamin S. shifts from a highly theatrical male femininity to hypermasculinity when faced with male aggression. Under these circumstances, the waria’s strength re-emerges and overpowers that of her male aggressors. There is also a playful undoing of the waria that draws attention to their unstable gender performance. Dewigging and undressing are standard tropes that demystify the ambiguity of the waria. In their own lived reality, the waria do not have any qualms about the fluidity of their identity, that one can become a waria (jadi waria) because of the company they keep and if the social environment so permits. In fact, they understand that being waria is subject to historicity and enmeshed in the politics of visibility and nationhood.10 This is in contrast to the popular entertainment star and Indonesia’s very own Oprah Winfrey, Dorce Gamalama who is transsexual and identifies herself unequivocally as a woman. Dorce’s stardom may be a rare exception in Indonesia: her personal rags to riches life story endears her to a public that is equally drawn to her flamboyance and wide range of talents in the entertainment industry.11

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Attention to transgender characters in Indonesian cinema inevitably brings issues pertaining to national belonging, sexualities, moral hypocrisy and Otherness into proximity. Most films about transgender individuals focus on their survival and struggles to be accepted in a strongly cis-­ heteronormative world. They are occasionally lovers and children of prejudiced parents but rarely placed higher in social prestige as parents themselves. As parents, they must bear the weight of kinship relations and negotiate well-trodden boundaries of gender roles and expectations. Realita, Cinta, dan Rock n Roll and Lovely Man are two films that, in different ways, offer audiences and readers alike cinematic texts that make and remake categories-in-motion like ‘transgender’. They rehearse certain tropes of cross-dressing and journeys of (self)-discovery that parallel the transgender experience and acceptance while at the same time propose provocative ideas about the family and its possibilities. This chapter is critical of transsexuality as a trope and metaphor in both cultural texts. Instead, it aims to think with trans-motherhood to elaborate on what appears to be the recurring theme of intergenerational archipelagoes and the trans-mother as subjects of love in modern Indonesian cinema. The films discussed in this chapter are not about transgender subjects per se, but they place emphasis on relationality between heteronormativity and gender variant identity. To follow Helen Leung Hok-Sze’s recommendation, one must ‘[look] askance at issues of relationality’ and the ‘transing of relational bonds: the ways in which the crossings of gender realign desire, affection, and affinity between people, in a manner that is unpredictable within hetero or homonormative narratives’.12 This chapter considers the ways in which trans-motherhood reconfigures the Indonesian nuclear family into a more unsettling/unsettled unit that resists fixity of boundaries. I argue that ‘archipelagic intergenerational relations’ bring into focus the ways in which the Indonesian family is transed when the transgender mother and biological child reunite after estrangement. Archipelagic intergenerational relations are intertextual and rely on the ever-shifting ways transgender characters are defined and captured in Indonesian cinema and discourse.

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Some Notes on Archipelagic Relations and Transing with and Beyond Transgender The trope of the family dominated New Order13 (1966–1998) social engineering. Adult women and men were ‘mother’ and ‘father’ whose roles in service to the nation were, respectively, reproductive and productive. Women were disciplined to be the embodiment of servitude and docility. Government programmes ensured that women were equipped with the skills to play their roles as wife and mother effectively. After the end of the New Order’s authoritarian regime in May 1998, programmes that reproduced the patriarchal social order were reinvented into ‘feminist’ ones that dismantled the biological essentialism of Indonesian femininity. State-­ sponsored family welfare institutions were renamed to ‘empower’ women. The Dharma Wanita, an organisation which functioned to remake all women in the Indonesian civil service into subservient wives and mothers, was replaced with the National Committee for Violence against Women (Komnas Wanita).14 The centralist logic of the state as family and the nuclear family as the microcosm of the state in which strict hierarchies were maintained was also chipped away with the decentralisation of power across the archipelago. How does one explain a post-New Order context in which generations of Indonesians live in a ‘third space’15 of overlapping logics which meld together the past and present, authoritarianism and a new democracy, and the traditional model of a biological nuclear family and new, hybrid ones? How do we take into account the cultural flows that take place between bodies of subjugated knowledge? Or as Tom Boellstorff asks: ‘What analytic purchase might be gained by positing […] a postcolonial order of things in which relationships between same and other were characterised not as boundaries transgressed but as boundaries blurred, not as borders crossed but as borderlands inhabited, not as spheres adjoined but as archipelagoes intertwined?’.16 To echo Boellstorff, I turn to the archipelago as a conceptual framework appropriate for examining hybrid and ever-transforming categories of marginal identity and practices in Indonesia. By doing so I am spatialising the representations of cross-generational relations and waria identity to make better sense of the new and provocative ideas of the Indonesian family. In his influential elaboration on thinking with the concept, Jonathan Pugh argues that the archipelago ‘unsettles static tropes of singularity, isolation, dependency and peripherality’.17 Archipelagic assemblages

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illuminate relations between shifting categories and bodies-in-motion across and within national boundaries. They help us to appreciate the trans-regional similarities of non-normative subjectivities across Southeast Asia. Emmanuel David’s use of archipelago as a framework to examine the collective identity of transgender beauty queens in Philippines is especially instructive. Through their performance of translocalities and multilingualism which include global island references, the Filipino trans pageant contestants make an ‘archipelagic turn’ away from Manila as the ‘primary site of identification’ and towards regions, provinces, and islands that as a consequence disrupt the coherence of nationhood.18 More than just a geographical reality, the archipelago can be reimagined as selfhood and sociality that do not possess ‘sharp external boundaries, yet [are] characterised by islands of difference’.19 The archipelago helpfully functions as ‘an analytic to theorise the coastline-like boundaries and porous edges of transgender as a collective identity and as an emergent field of study’.20 Like the Philippines, Indonesia is comprised of an archipelago whose inter-island relations form the basis of the nation and multicultural identities under its official slogan of ‘unity in diversity’. It is a geographical assemblage defined by a long history of translocal mobility and traditions of migration. The foregoing is consistent with the idea of the archipelago as ‘island movements’ that ‘act in concert’ in ‘sites of abstract and material relations of movement and rest, dependent upon changing conditions of articulation or connection’.21 Archipelagic thinking dismantles the rigid binaries of west and non-west by decentring singular ‘origins’ of categories and produces instead lateral categories that co-constitute, rub against one another, or fail to contact each other. This spatial turn maps these lateral categories in motion against global relations of power with the aim of upending centres and peripheries. Of particular interest in this chapter is the porosity of boundaries that are held together in archipelagic relations. This chapter examines the intimacy and affective transformation between unlikely social outcasts and how their isolated island-like status is overcome by interconnected networks of intimacies, multiple centres, and blurred edges. Archipelagic thinking permits the same flexibility of movement by bodies across different spatialities and temporalities performed by expanded ideas of ‘trans-’. Rooted in transgender practices and experience, transalludes to transition, metamorphosis, and transformation. Trans- therefore is a protean definition that begins with and launches from transgender embodiment. It allows us to set aside for a moment, without relegating

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completely out of view, the numerous pitfalls of transgender and transsexualism22 as clichéd trope in cinema and the casting of cis-gendered actors who gain critical praise for performing transgender characters. Recent examples of award-winning ‘trans-face’, seen as a parallel to ‘blackface’,23 in films like Dallas Buyers Club (2013) have raised fierce debates about discrimination in film casting and the meaning of acting. Thus I propose paying more attention to the use of ‘trans-’ as a verb rather than just a noun. ‘Trans-’ with a hyphen implies relationality and an open-­ ended status awaiting connection with other categories yet at the same time ‘resists premature closure by foreclosure by attachment to a single suffix’.24 Comparable but distinct from ‘queering’, Stryker, Currah, and Moore define ‘transing’ as the shifting reconfigurations of gendered subjecthood and unit of relations: “Transing”, in short, is a practice that takes place within, as well as across or between gendered spaces. It is a practice that assembles gender into contingent structures of association with other attributes of bodily being, and that allows for their reassembly.25

In broader terms and in ways explained in further detail below, ‘“transing” also enables intersectional work in which diverse forms of trans processes that transform or realign boundaries between self and other can be considered together’.26 Like the metaphor of archipelago, ‘trans-’ also makes spatial references. The transgender experience involves occupying the social space of womanhood and manhood but without necessarily being accompanied with the normative and fixed conventions of sexed bodies. Transing can be taken as an orientation and movement of bodies either horizontally or vertically across space. Typically, horizontal transing takes place between two gendered spaces of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ but also across a spectrum and archipelago. Vertical transing is the movement ‘between the concrete biomateriality of individual living bodies and the biopolitical realm of aggregate populations that serve as resource for sovereign power’.27 By looking at the trans-mother waria, her children and their orientation towards forging intergenerational relations in two Indonesian films as the practice of transing, we can do away with establishing whether or not such representations are ‘positive’ or otherwise. Instead, transing expands the purview of critical articulation about trans- practices of being and (intergenerational) relations.

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Desperately Seeking Post-New Order Trans-Motherhood ‘Trans-motherhood’ here takes its meaning from the social practice of mothering by a transgender woman and not to be confused with the work of ‘trans-border mothering’ by migrant domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia although the conceptual overlaps, discussed in this chapter’s conclusion, are worth illuminating. It is a concept that reflects the widening discursive space of acceptance and contestation towards non-normative identities in Indonesian cinema of the last two decades.28 Trans-motherhood in Indonesian cinema is also formed through relational categories of space, mobility, gender, and sexuality. The first half of the 2006 film, Realita, Cinta, dan Rock n Roll (Reality, Love, and Rock n Roll, RCRR hereafter), follows the unremarkable lives of two spoiled teenaged young men, Ipang and Nugi. They bear all the stereotypical hallmarks of male delinquency; they disrupt the classroom and then gleefully play truant, they embroil themselves in mindless fights with gangsters, and they are a general nuisance to society. But true to poetic justice, the two young men fall victim to numerous humiliations which arise from their mischievous machinations. Their rebellious identities are seen as arising from the conflict and unhappiness in their respective families. To escape, Nugi and Ipang embark on a road trip with a woman, Sandra, to find themselves. They are forced to re-evaluate their lives when they meet Nugi’s father who reappears in his life after many years of estrangement as a transgender woman (see Fig. 1). RCRR is similar to the US film Transamerica (2005, dir. Duncan Tucker) in which the intergenerational reunification between a transgender parent and her estranged son, a drifter and sex worker, serves as the dramatic heart of the narrative. And like Transamerica, the ‘message’ of the film may be as much a provocative reflection on fractured family relations as it is about transgenderism. RCRR’s director Upi Avianto argued that her film is more about the impacts of familial breakdown on young Indonesians than cis-gender engagement with transgender women.29 Transamerica deploys what Cavalcante (2013) calls ‘strategies of paratextual domestication’30 to promote to a wider audience including those who may be undecided or hostile to positive LGBTQ narratives.31 But Upi’s uncontroversial claims do not erase the unsettled and unsettling undercurrents of gender and sexuality that underpin the Indonesian family in transition. These undercurrents are best exemplified in Mariana’s ‘coming out’

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Fig. 1  Nugi and Ipang gaze upon an impressive image of Mariana before realising that she was previously Nugi’s father. Realita, Cinta dan Rock n Roll (Reality, Love, and Rock n Roll 2006)

to her son, Nugi. In a conversation at a dinner table, a typical site of middle-class familial conflict, Mariana reveals her transgender identity to her son in a statement that combines both past and present and gendered contradictions. She says to him, ‘I am your father, I was your father’. The film turns to a dramatic action scene that combines cross-cultural references and a sly performance of gender transgression to change Nugi’s mind about his parent’s new gender identity. It is a memorable scene in RCRR that employs the powers of intertextuality which positively transforms their relationship. It begins when Mariana takes the two young men out for shopping in a busy market place where she thwarts a thief’s attempt to steal another woman’s handbag. Mariana runs after him until they reach a cul-de-sac which necessitates a confrontation between the two. A crowd forms to witness them in what follows to be a truly extraordinary sequence. The thief perceives Mariana as a middle-aged woman and proceeds to physically intimidate her. But Mariana reveals herself as a skilled martial artist who had practiced long before her transition and stymies the thief’s attacks. The fight scene escalates with references to kung-fu and The Matrix with Mariana’s improbable leaps into the air and even more incredible 90 degree backward dodge in slow motion. With the thief vanquished,

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Mariana emerges as a hero and gains Nugi’s admiration and acceptance. Her happiness is evident, but she tempers it with her bemusement that all that fighting has chipped her expensively manicured nails. Mariana’s playful gendered performance is testament to Jack Halberstam’s assertion about the transgender body, that it is a ‘symbol par excellence for flexibility, [however] transgenderism also represents a form of rigidity’.32 Mariana’s gender identity is circumscribed by dominant ideas of femininity that indexes aesthetic cultivation as success and of hypermasculinity that valorises muscular strength in the service of protection. It explains why Mariana’s role is played by the action film actor Barry Prima, an icon of super masculinity in Indonesian cinema. The stark gender contrast in Mariana’s heroic performance is for comedic effect as it is for critical meditation. The ‘truth’ of Mariana’s gender is framed as the ultimate moral boundary for young men like Nugi and Ipang who, as free spirits, ostensibly have very few boundaries. Mariana’s gender identity brings to their attention unrecognised prejudices and psychological barriers that call into question their liberal freewheeling ways. In Ben Murtagh’s analysis,33 Mariana’s gender identity raises their awareness of male homosexuality and discomfort with it. As I will discuss in the next section, her transgender self has the effect of challenging the unquestionable status of straight male sexuality. Nugi and Mariana are thrown into another crisis of gender and sexuality when Mariana brings home a boyfriend. In one scene, Nugi walks into the living room where Mariana and her boyfriend are about to kiss. Gripped by homophobic panic, Nugi storms out of Mariana’s house and resumes his road trip with Ipang and Sandra. In between the familial crisis that plays out between Nugi and his now mother, Mariana, is a rather bland love triangle that threatens to tear apart the friendship between the young men and Sandra who joins them on the road trip. The film’s ending, when the young men have healed the anxiety they have towards their family, brings them into an embrace with cosmopolitanism. As a nod to Mariana’s influence on the two young men who were shy and reluctant to dance, Nugi and Ipang participate in a Latin dance competition and, showing only perfunctory dance skill and technique, manage to win it to Mariana’s obvious delight. The young men’s other family members are also impressed, and they come together in their respective nuclear units reconciled once more. In Lovely Man (2011) directed by Teddy Soeriaatmadja, the same plot of trans-parental estrangement and discovery is played out. But in contrast

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Fig. 2  Cahaya embraces Ipuy, relieved that her estranged parent has accepted her return. But Ipuy is more reluctant and is visibly uncomfortable with her daughter’s demand for connection and intimacy

to the more complex narrative in RCRR, Lovely Man takes place over the course of one night in Jakarta where a young woman, Cahaya, travels from a small town to the capital city in search of her father. Like Nugi, Cahaya has not seen her father, Ipuy, since she was a child. Night time Jakarta is an unfamiliar and foreboding place but she is guided by his home address and a vague direction to where he works. Their reunion is difficult; Ipuy is irritated and ashamed that her daughter, who announces she is pregnant and unmarried, has re-entered her life as a sex worker (Fig. 2). Ipuy’s remittances to Cahaya throughout her childhood had been their only thread of connection. But she is uncomfortable knowing that Cahaya might discover that the years of financial support had been built on precarious and risky circumstances as Ipuy owes a violent loan shark money she is unable to repay. The night takes a darker turn when Ipuy is pursued and then sexually assaulted by the loan shark’s thugs. As the turbulent night draws to an end and a new day begins, Ipuy sends a visibly distraught Cahaya away on a train back to her hometown in their final meeting. Ipuy and Cahaya have a tense trans-mother-daughter relationship due to the shame associated with the former’s profession and her debt bondage to ruthless loan sharks in the city. Ipuy’s understanding of her own

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gender identity is more ambiguous compared to Mariana’s strong desire to be recognised as a woman. Addressed as ‘bapak’ or father by Cahaya, Ipuy is firmly within the orbit of masculinity. Her self-identification as banci, a pejorative term for a range of male femininities and homosexualities, situates her along the spectrum of non-normative practices and subject positions that evade easy binaries of identity. This renders Ipuy’s trans- portrayal within the ethnolocality of genders and sexualities that intersect with working-class and stigmatised subjecthood compared with the vibrantly intertextual and upwardly mobile Mariana who identifies herself unambiguously as a woman and mother. There is little display of Ipuy’s social mothering in Lovely Man. In fact, her parental obligation to Cahaya is primarily financial and that is the promise she makes to her daughter in their final farewell. Ipuy performs aspects of the traditional Indonesian breadwinner, a man who financially supports his family whom in many cases does so in absentia. The cultural practice of merantau or the ‘leaving one’s cultural territory voluntarily whether for a short or long time, with the aim of earning a living or seeking further knowledge or experience’34 is a tradition across the archipelago. Indonesia’s scattered geography of islands necessitates merantau and long-distance parenting for the survival of the family. Merantau is historically performed by men who seek their fortunes and prestige but is now ‘unmoored from particular ethnic groups, becoming widely practised throughout Indonesia and associated primarily with the new underclass rather than the country’s elite’.35 By contrast, Mariana’s acts of social mothering are hallmarks of middle-class feminine domesticity. Her desire to be a mother to Nugi is especially evident in her food preparation, complete with a heart-shaped fried egg for emphasis. They spend leisure time together shopping and learning to dance. These practices of social mothering have as much impact in reconfiguring the intergenerational relations between trans-mother and child as their respective relational subjectivities on the margins of society.

Transing the Indonesian Family The concept of ‘space’ brings our attention to the dynamic ways intergenerational relations and transgender are made and remade as categories-in-­ motion. As Halberstam argues in his comments on The Crying Game (1992) and Boys Don’t Cry (1999), transgender serves as ‘a metaphor for other kinds of mobility and immobility’.36 It is not a coincidence that a

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significant journey and road trip occur in many films about transgender identity and acceptance.37 In RCRR and Lovely Man, the children of the trans-mother perform the journey towards reunification and reconciliation. In contrast to the mobility of their children, accentuated further by Nugi and Ipang’s freewheeling and unregulated movement and behaviour, Mariana and Ipuy’s movements are more measured, slowed down by the various accoutrements of femininity. An attempt at freeing herself from loan sharks and thugs by running away in the city leads to Ipuy’s brutal punishment. The issue of (im)mobility of Mariana and Ipuy is traced back to their respective femininities. The limits of performative femininity immobilise them in certain aesthetic and socioeconomic practices. Both are middle-aged but that is where their similarity ends. Mariana is affluent and popular. In her large home festooned with symbols of luxury, she hosts dancing lessons for women. Her grooming reflects her status; a grand dame who is somewhat fussy and walks slowly and carefully to maintain her stylised femininity. By contrast, Ipuy is a street hustling sex worker who wears an ill-fitting short sequined red dress. Less demure than Mariana, we see Ipuy teetering precariously by a busy road in her stilettoes hailing down potential clients. It is unnecessary to elaborate on her obvious poverty as it is to state that Ipuy reinforces the stereotype of the sex worker transgender woman in Indonesia. The contrast between the two trans-mothers can be also made alongside their respective children. That their own children are representative of moral irregularity in the eyes of Indonesian society and nationhood suggests a subtext of shared failure of attaining social prestige. Their respective marginal status is typically constructed to isolate them as social islands and thus it is interesting why film narratives pair the trans-mother with other social outcasts. They present themselves and to each other initially as polarities of femininity and masculinity but discover intimacies due to their shared marginal status. Ipuy makes a similar observation when she says to Cahaya: ‘Look at us. People will be so surprised to see us together, a banci and a girl. A girl who wears the headscarf, too!’ Their femininities are deliberately binary. Ipuy is a lady of the night, and Cahaya, whose name means ‘light’, is her symbolic other (Fig. 3). Their reunification and reconciliation across assumed polarities explode the moral hypocrisy that pervades intolerant attitudes towards non-normative individuals and unwed mothers who attend Islamic school. Dewigging and unveiling play an important role in the resolution of intergenerational conflict in the two films. Acts of dewigging typically

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Fig. 3  Cahaya meets Ipuy for the first time in Lovely Man (2011). She is very clearly a visual and moral counterpoint to Ipuy, a sex worker, seen here out of focus smoking a cigarette

conclude transvestite and drag queen performances and cross-dressing narratives as a means of restoring the heteronormative order. They affirm the ‘true’ sexed body behind the gender confusion made by clothes, makeup, and wigs.38 Wigs, however, carry a more potent meaning than clothes and makeup in the act of unveiling. They simulate hair and when worn well, naturalise the body and gender and produce an ‘authentic’ subject. In Indonesian cinema, the subversive meaning of dewigging destabilises the category of transgender, bringing it closer to the trope of cross-dressing and the orbit of cis-masculinity.39 However, I would argue that dewigging reveals the porosity of various categories that describe the transgender experience in Indonesia. Does it matter that Ipuy and Mariana are male-­bodied and operate in the ‘male orbit’? Perhaps not. Instead, they demonstrate that waria, banci, wanita (woman), and pria (man) are fluid, dynamic categories-in-motion even for individual subjectivities who identify in multiple terms, switch from one to the other, or may refuse to be either, a testament to the ‘fuzzy edges of transgender experience.40 Both Ipuy and Mariana are shown dewigged in the presence of close family members. Their wigs are not forced off them but are removed in a moment of intimacy and emotional revelation. In a conversation with her ex-wife, Mariana expresses her frustration with Nugi’s initial reluctance to

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accept her. She appears with her wig off as she speaks to her ex-wife. In Lovely Man, Ipuy ‘returns’ to her male form in the privacy of her home. After a traumatic night together, Cahaya sees her parent in another light, as father rather than mother. By showing them dewigged, the diegetic characters and audiences alike can be certain of Ipuy and Mariana’s sexed bodies, that they cannot hide the ‘truth’ of their sex from anyone. They do not attempt the transgression inherent in the global discourse of transgender identity which is to pass as a woman. After dewigging, Ipuy is no longer seen in her work clothes for the rest of the film. Rather, she ‘returns’ as a father, in men’s attire, as she drops Cahaya off at the train station in their final farewell. Cahaya has also reworn her Islamic veil. Ipuy’s voice is gentler, more loving, as she addresses herself as ‘father’ (bapak) to her. By contrast, dewigging does not end Mariana’s transgender experience. She appears as she always does right until the narrative’s denouement. Mariana and Ipuy’s status as trans-mothers transforms their archipelagic relations with their children while similar transformations occur in the children themselves. These transformations in the children have the effect of producing multiple intimacies rather than polarities of gender, sexuality, and morality. After being informed of Mariana’s gender identity, Nugi and Ipuy are made aware of sexualities beyond that of heteronormativity. The two men are used to sharing a bed at night and sleep without their shirts on. But when they sleep in Mariana’s house knowing that she is trans-, they lie awkwardly in bed together before deciding to put their shirts back on. To eliminate any possibility of arousing male homoeroticism between them, they lie with their backs towards each other throughout the night. Cahaya’s relationship with her own Islamic identity is more muted and underexplored, but her unveiling and confession of her pregnancy outside marriage reveals her moral ambivalence and contradiction of Muslim femininity. Her transformation is established early in the film when the two first meet. After their tense conversation following many years of separation, Ipuy takes her to an eatery when Cahaya showed signs of illness. When Cahaya returns from the ladies’ toilet without her hijab, she appears happier and relaxed, easing the tension between herself and Ipuy. They smile at each other for the first time. By displacing the father, the trans-mother plays multiple social roles at once. She is the pillar of a queer family, a family that ‘[destabilises] gender essentialism and other taken-for-granted assumptions about gender, sexuality, and family as well as poses challenges to regimes of normalisation that shape contemporary institutions’.41 Similar to ‘drag mothers’ who

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provide a haven of support to ‘drag orphans’ or young gay men who have been rejected by their families, the trans-mother is a mentor to individuals who defy a range of heteronormative expectations. Queer families form ‘new patterns of intimacy’ and raise radical claims to relational rights that challenge cultural understandings of what is ‘natural’.42 Closeness and acceptance in the trans-mother and child relationship demonstrate that alliances across difference undergirded by intergenerational kinship are possible and powerful. Reconciliation fostered via the lateral aggregation of subjects who each fall foul of society’s moral standards is exemplary of an intimacy from below. Thus the nuclear family with a trans-mother as one of its members provides the possibility for a transgender continuum ‘on which so-called male-born men and female-born women can find themselves building political connections with those whose gender is more obviously outside society’s narrow “frame” of the normal’.43 To what extent does the incorporation of trans-motherhood into the Indonesian family traffic in homonormativity or the assimilation of heteronormative ideals and constructs into queer culture and individual identity? For Lisa Duggan,44 homonormativity does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions such as monogamy, procreation, and binary gender roles. In their own ways, Mariana and Ipuy make a living, with various degrees of success, to maintain a financially independent wellbeing as a transgender woman. Mariana’s insistence on maintaining domestic femininity within a middle-class household but as a transgender woman is incoherent to her son. But she only gains his acceptance through her masculine role as protector but not without first impressing him with her wealth and martial arts skills. RCRR offers closure with the tentative regrouping of Nugi’s affluent middle-class family and restoration of procreative bonds between parent and child. In Lovely Man, the transing of Ipuy and Cahaya’s relationship is incomplete and open-ended. By daytime, Ipuy presents herself as male and wears men’s attire as she bids goodbye to Cahaya who has reveiled herself. In the light of day, they embody the portrait of Indonesian heteronormativity comprising of a male-identifying father who pledges to financially support his piety-performing daughter during the course of his practice of merantau.

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Conclusion: Trans-Motherhood on the Move The eventual reconciliation between estranged child and transgender parent offers an important commentary about Indonesia’s interconnected understanding of gender, sexuality, and the family. That a waria can finally be inserted into the hegemonic discourse of the family dismantles the rigid alignment of gender, kodrat (fate), and familial role of the New Order era. Mariana and Ipuy also belong to a bygone generation whose ‘location’ and ‘actuality’45 as individuals who occupy a defining historical period that cannot be fully appreciated by a younger generation who come of age in a more democratic Indonesia. In the current era of transition, the waria has herself transitioned to become not just economically productive but reproductive. Once constructed as the microcosm of the New Order state, the nuclear family and its constituents have been redefined to accommodate difference. The archipelagic family decentres the hegemonic state and establishes multiple centres of identification and privileges mobilities across space. Realita Cinta dan Rock n Roll and Lovely Man are films that offer a critical if rather incongruous commentary on the state definition of the Indonesian family. They are cinematic texts that carry images and ideas-in-­ transition—ex situ before moving on to the next provocative idea. Archipelagic relations between the trans-mothers and their children unearth intimacies between marginal identities in Indonesian society and the intimacies of gender, sexuality, and morality that decentre a singular model of familial relations and wellbeing. The reappearance of the father as a transgender mother signals the necessity for a resignification of kinship relations. That is to say, familial relations are transed in a process of reconfiguration. Instead of a father and mother, a young Indonesian gains two mothers. The trans-mother traverses the hitherto rigid definitions that fix male to men to father and female to women to mother. In doing so, the trans-mother crosses different gendered social spaces. Their children meanwhile are the ones making journey towards and with their trans-­ mother. They represent the symbolic ‘wild child’ of the post-New Order era whose marginal status and experimental morality are recuperated in a period of transition.46 The metaphor of space and movement across space underpin this chapter. A gendered pattern of movement and mobility across space is a defining characteristic of Indonesian life. However,

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(trans)-women’s translocal and transnational mobility beyond the sphere of domestic femininity are in perpetual tension with the state’s vision of the ideal family. New ways of spatialising intergenerational family relations bring to the forefront productive continuities between transgender identities, gender relations, and roles. Thinking with the archipelago and transas process expands future discussions on relationality and marginal categories of motherhood and mobility in Indonesia. Motherhood itself has since the colonial period become a category in motion with the rise of trans- and intra-national migration of women who are paid to perform the social work of mothering in more affluent households. Although disparate and discontiguous, at least for now, trans-­motherhood and trans-border motherhood may one day productively converge in the politics of gendered labour and marginality in a geographical region that is ever in transition. Such alliances across the transgender continuum are necessary in the present political and cultural situation in which non-normative and disenfranchised groups are violently harassed and isolated as irredeemably Other and the antithesis to the nation.

Notes 1. Katinka van Heeren. Contemporary Indonesian Films: Spirits of Reform and Ghosts from the Past. (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2013). 2. Saraswati Sunindyo. ‘When the earth is female and the nation is mother: Gender, the armed forces and nationalism in Indonesia’. Feminist Review 58:1 (1998), pp. 1–21. 3. The reveal is a climactic scene in many Western media narratives characterised by the discovery, typically through dewigging and exposure of genitalia, of a transgender character’s ‘true’ biological sex. In comedy and, less frequently, in drama (see Grist 2003), the reveal is meant to resolve gender ambiguity both onscreen and off. 4. Tom Boellstorff. The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005). 5. Benjamin Hegarty. ‘The Value of Transgender Waria Affective Labor for Transnational Media Markets in Indonesia’. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. 4:1 (2017), pp. 78–95. 6. Sharyn Graham Davies. Gender Diversity in Indonesia: Islam, Sexuality, and Queer Selves (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2010). 7. Tom Boellstorff. ‘The emergence of political homophobia in Indonesia: Masculinity and national belonging’. Ethnos 69:4 (2004), pp. 465–486.

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8. Tom Boellstorff 2005. 9. Ben Murtagh. Genders and Sexualities in in Indonesian Cinema: Constructing Gay, Lesbi and Waria Identities on Screen (London: Routledge, 2013). 10. Benjamin Hegarty. ‘Under the Lights, Onto the Stage Becoming Waria through National Glamour in New Order Indonesia’. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. 5:3 (2018), pp. 355–377. 11. Ben Murtagh. ‘Double Identities in Dorce’s Comedies: Negotiating Gender and Class in New Order Indonesian Cinema’. Bijdragen tot de taal- land-en volkenkunde/Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 173:2/3 (2017), pp. 181–207. 12. Helen Hok-Sze Leung. ‘Trans on screen’. In Transgender China, Howard Chiang (ed.) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 183–198. 13. Following an attempted coup and bloody leftwing purge in 1965, the ‘New Order’ (Orde Baru) was installed under General Suharto and the Indonesian military. For 32 years, the New Order authoritarian regime was defined by its anti-communism and systematic repression of opposition. 14. Julie Suryakusuma. State Ibuism: The Social Construction of Womanhood in New Order Indonesia. (Depok: Komunitas Bambu, 2011), p. xxiv. 15. Homi Bhabha. ‘The Third Space’. In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, Jonathan Rutherford (ed.) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp. 207–221. 16. Boellstorff 2005, p. 29. 17. Jonathan Pugh. ‘Island Movements: Thinking with the Archipelago’. Island Studies Journal 8:1 (2013), p. 11. 18. Emmanuel David. ‘Transgender Archipelagos’. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. 5:3 (2018), p. 336. 19. Boellstorff 2005, p. 7. 20. David, p. 333. 21. Pugh, p. 11. 22. Transgender and transsexualism represent distinct yet overlapping subjectivities; the former refers to the gender identity that is in opposition to their sex assigned at birth. Transsexualism is the experience following gender-­affirming transition. 23. https://planettransgender.com/transface-vs-blackface-the-same-yetdifferent/?cn-reloaded=1. 24. Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah and Lisa Jean Moore. ‘Introduction: Trans-, trans or transgender?’ Women’s Studies Quarterly. 36:3/4 (2008), p. 11. 25. Ibid., p. 13. 26. Leung, p. 185. 27. Stryker, Currah and Moore, p. 14.

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28. Murtagh 2013. 29. Laura Coppens. ‘Films of Desire: Queer (ing) Indonesian Cinema’. In Asian Hot Shots: Indonesian Cinema. Yvonne Michalik and Laura Coppens (eds.) (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2009). 30. Andre Cavalcante, ‘Centering Transgender Identity via the Textual Periphery: TransAmerica and the “Double Work” of Paratexts’. Critical Studies in Media Communication. 30:2 (2013), pp. 85–101. 31. Niall Richardson. Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2010). 32. Jack Halberstam. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005) pp. 76–77. 33. Murtagh 2013. 34. Mochtar Naim. ‘Voluntary Migration in Indonesia’. In Internal Migration: The New World and the Third World, Daniel Kubát and Anthony H. Richmond (eds.) (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976), p. 150. 35. Johan A. Lindquist. The Anxieties of Mobility. Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), p.30. 36. Halberstam, p. 77. 37. Other than Transamerica, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994) and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), are two ‘road trip movies’ about drag queens and transgender individuals who travel to an isolated town and challenge the prejudices of its inhabitants. 38. Marjorie Garber. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). John Phillips. Transgender on Screen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 39. Murtagh 2013. 40. David Valentine. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p.100). 41. Nancy A. Naples. ‘Queer parenting in the new millennium’. Gender and Society. 18:6 (2014), pp. 679–684. 42. Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy, Brian and Catherine Donovan. Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 43. C.L.  Cole and Shannon Cate. ‘Compulsory Gender and Transgender Existence: Adrienne Rich’s Queer Possibility’. Women’s Studies Quarterly. 36:3/4 (2008), p. 282.

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44. Lisa Duggan. ‘The new homonormativity: the sexual politics of neoliberalism’. In Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, Russ Castronovo and Dana D.  Nelson (eds) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 45. Karl Mannheim. ‘The problem of generations.’ In Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge. In Karl Mannheim (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1952). 46. Intan Paramaditha. The Wild Child’s Desire: Cinema, Sexual Politics, and the Experimental Nation in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. Diss. New York University, 2014.

Index

NUMBERS, AND SYMBOLS #Metoo, 34 A Abject, 20 Adore, 6 Age-appropriate norms, 37 Age disparity, 24 Age-inappropriate way, 44 Ageing femininity, 9 Ageism, 23 The Apartment, 84 Autobiography, 110 B Baby Boom, 80 Beginners, 8 Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, 42 Bisexual, 125 Blue Velvet, 9 Brève Traversée, 36

The Bride of Frankenstein, 141 C Celibacy, 23 Ce vieux rêve qui bouge, 125 Cheri, 24 Chick flick, 56 Cinéma du milieu, 43 City of Your Final Destination, 108 Class, 58 Cléo de 5 à 7, 40 Coming-out, 111 Coppola, Sofia, 83 Corporeality, 26 Cougar, 3 Cougar Town, 4 D Death in Venice, 108 Desexualised figure, 106 The Devil Wears Prada, 59

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Gwynne, N. Richardson (eds.), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40064-4

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INDEX

Dollimore, Jonathan, 136 Dyer, Richard, 145 E Effeminacy, 106 Entertaining Mr Sloane, 9 Ethnicity, 65 F Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 39 Fassin, Eric, 34 Father of the Bride, 80 Feminist, 34 Femme fatale, 25 Fertility, 17 Film history, 83 Foucault, Michel, 124 Frankenstein, 141 French Kiss, 56 Friedan, Betty, 17 G Gay men, 105 Gay rights, 109 Gaze, 205 Genet, Jean, 124 Gerontology, 22 Gerontophilia, 8 Gods and Monsters, 108, 141 The Graduate, 187 Greer, Germaine, 17 Gullette, Margaret Morganroth, 22 H Harold and Maude, 115 Heteronormative hedonism, 2 Heteronormative society, 109 Heterosexual male, 2 Hiroshima mon amour, 40 Hollywood, 2

Home Again, 7 Homoerotic, 145 Homoeroticism, 143 Homosexual, 108 Homosexuality, 107 Horror, 178 Hypersexuality, 173 I Inclusivity, 95 Intimacy, 21 Intouchables, 42 It Happened One Night, 59 It’s Complicated, 85 J Jeune cinéma français, 42 K The Killing of Sister George, 9 Kristeva, Julia, 216 L La Pianiste, 36 L’Avenir, 6 The Leech Woman, 106 Le Roi de l’évasion, 125 Les Beaux Jours, 36 Lesbianism, 174 Les Egarés, 36 LGBT, 8 L’Inconnu du lac, 125 Love and Death on Long Island, 108 Lovely Man, 10 M Malèna, 9 Manhood, 23 Masculinity, 23

 INDEX 

Massey, Doreen, 215 Materialist, 124 Matriarchal configurations, 66 Matrilineal heredity, 82 Memory, 10 Meyers, Nancy, 7 Middle-aged, 96 MILF, 36, 188 The Mother, 6 Motherhood, 37 N The Nanny Diaries, 59 Naturalism, 50 Neoliberal political economy, 135 Normative, 95 Nostalgia, 142 Notes on a Scandal, 191 O Oedipal, 28 Old queen, 106 Only You, 56 Orton, Joe, 170 P The Parent Trap, 85 Patrilineal relationships, 83 Phallic potency, 24 Post-coïtum animal triste, 6 Privileged, 95 Projansky, Sarah, 4 Q Queer, 8 Quentin Crisp, 109

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R Realita, Cinta, dan Rock n Roll, 10 Reid, Beryl, 9 Relationality, 8 Retirement, 27 Romance, 1 Rom com, 56 Russo, Mary, 9 S Sadomasochism, 199 Same-sex relationships, 111 Scopophilia, 207 Segal, Lynn, 28 Sex and the City, 4 Sexual desire, 19 A Simple Life, 10 Sinfield, Alan, 124 Single mother, 87 Sleepless in Seattle, 60 Something’s Gotta Give, 7 Sontag, Susan, 16 The Sound of Music, 113 Spectatorship, 111 Spinster, 170 Star persona, 67 Staying Vertical, 8 Stereotype, 23 Stigma, 28 Subjectivity, 41 Sunset Boulevard, 142 T Taboo, 23 The Tango Lesson, 224 A Taste of Honey, 171 Temporality, 37 Theatre of Blood, 178

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INDEX

The 39 Steps, 59 This Sporting Life, 171 Transfemininity, 10 Transgender, 10, 236 Transgressive relationships, 27 Transsexualism, 241 27 Dresses, 56 U Un Chateau en Italie, 6 V Voyeurism, 199

W Waria, 236 The Wasp Woman, 106 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 174 What Women Want, 85 Whelehan, Imelda, 29 When Harry Met Sally, 56 While You Were Sleeping, 59 Whiteness, 58 Women filmmakers, 81 The Women Film Pioneers Project, 83 Working Girl, 59 Y Youth, 19