Love, Tears, and the Male Spectator 1611472423, 9781611472424

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Love, Tears, and the Male Spectator

Kenneth MacKinnon

Associated University Presses

Love, Tears, and the Male Spectator

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Love, Tears, and the Male Spectator

Kenneth MacKinnon

Madison • Teaneck Fairleigh Dickinson University Press London: Associated University Presses

䉷 2002 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-8386-3955-0/02 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 440 Forsgate Drive Cranbury, NJ 08512 Associated University Presses 16 Barter Street London WC1A 2AH, England Associated University Presses P.O. Box 338, Port Credit Mississauga, Ontario Canada L5G 4L8

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data MacKinnon, Kenneth, 1942– Love, tears, and the male spectator / Kenneth MacKinnon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8386-3955-0 (alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures and men. 2. Men in motion pictures. 3. Soap operas—Social aspects. I. Title. PN1995.9.M46 M23 2002 791.43⬘081—dc21

2002024110

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction

7 9

Part I: Questions of Sex and Gender 1. Sex and Gender 2. Feminism/Patriarchy/Masculinity

25 43

Part II: Maleness/Masculinity/Spectatorship 3. Gendered Identification: Fantasy, Masquerade, Readership 4. Spectatorship Theory 5. Genre and Gender: Melodrama and Soap Opera

59 74 84

Part III: Maleness/Masculinity/Spectacle 6. Hollywood’s ‘‘Feminization’’ of the Male 7. The 1950s: The United States, Hollywood, and Hitchcock 8. A Sample of Five 1950s Movies

107 121 140

9. Toward Some Conclusions

187

Notes Bibliography Index

194 208 217

5

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Acknowledgments AS ALWAYS, I AM ESPECIALLY AWARE OF THE GREAT DEBT I OWE TO THE HELPfulness and efficiency of the Learning Centre of the University of North London. Most of the books and articles that appear in the Bibliography had to be read in the single semester of sabbatical which was awarded to me by the University, on the recommendation of the Humanities and Teacher Education Faculty’s Research Committee. A glance at the Bibliography should give some idea of the work undertaken by those concerned with interlibrary loans, since only about one-half of the items could already be located on the shelves. I wish to record my genuine appreciation of the speed and efficiency with which that work was done, and my equally genuine gratitude to the University for its granting of sabbatical leave. At two recent celebrations, one a book launch, the other a farewell party, I heard the words, ‘‘I shall not thank anybody individually. So many of you helped in so many ways. You know who you are.’’ The trouble with this formula is that, while most are indeed aware whether they were helpful or not, they must wonder if the speaker knows. Or, if the speaker’s mental list is the same as the aware listener’s. I shall, therefore, mention some individuals who helped me. My colleague, Janet McCabe, lent me many important textbooks and articles, as did Carolyn Burdett and Wendy Wheeler, also of the School of Arts and Humanities. My Theatre Studies colleague, Colin Counsell, was particularly helpful in offering me information about reading that would be useful for my research. One of 1999’s finalist undergraduates, Eyal Lavi, made several valuable suggestions as to reading that might prove helpful. Bruce Carson, another Film Studies colleague, and Patrick Hopper lent me those videocassettes which were not available in the Media Centre. Those that were available were lent to me by Tony Hassan, to whom I am also grateful in this regard. Janet, Carolyn, and Wendy were gracious enough to discuss some of my ideas with me and to present their views on 7

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

them in ways that enabled me to reconsider and sometimes rewrite my own. Yet another Film Studies colleague, Guy Westwell, has shown considerable patience and forbearance in helping me with the intricacies of editing using Microsoft Word. A special mention should be made of Crispin Partridge, who helped me in so many ways with pre-sabbatical advice designed to allow me to make the best use possible of not just the Learning Centre’s acquisitions but of databases on the Web. The encouragement that sincere-sounding inquiries about the nature and progress of my book always provide should also be acknowledged: here I am aware of particular interest being shown by Chris Ward and Ruth Castle from among Film Studies graduates and also of the general enthusiasm shown for ideas developed further in the book, from former student, Dina Cordeiro CamposLopes, and continuing student, Mark Bedford. Having named the particularly helpful, I am aware of the risk that the speakers alluded to above must have attempted to avoid: that of omitting somebody who has legitimate reason to feel that a place has been earned in this company. If there is anybody of this sort, I apologise for his/her absence at this point.

Introduction TWO SUMMERS AGO, I MISSED AN EPISODE OF A TELEVISION SOAP OPERA that I had particularly wanted to see. I happened to be spending a week’s holiday at my sister’s house in the north of Scotland, where just about all of my extended family lives. My first thought on missing the episode was to try to learn the salient details from a member of the family who had seen it. I telephoned just about every female relation, with no luck. When I asked one of my nieces, she said, ‘‘I didn’t see it myself, but I know who will have. He watches all the soaps.’’ She did too. Her husband was able not only to offer a broad outline of the events of that episode, but suddenly remembered that he had recorded it as well, so that I could see it for myself. The point of the anecdote would be neater if I could claim that it set me to thinking about the male spectator and his relation to what is usually thought of as the feminine genre of soap opera, and that the present study was inspired by the incident. That would not be true, though. By that point in the summer, I had read and viewed nearly all the research material that I required for the present study and had even begun writing up the results. The fact is that, in spite of having convinced myself that there were far too many unexamined assumptions about the male spectator and the gendered nature of certain genres, my own assumptions were still so deeprooted that it never occurred to me to turn for soap information to a male in the family. This particular soap fan did not fit the stereotypes of the likely spectator of soap opera: he is young, a joiner by trade, an amateur footballer of some local distinction, the father of three, with some fairly traditionalist views about the upbringing of at least his two sons. Despite these few items from his ‘‘personality profile,’’ he seems to have been immersed in the soaps since his late teenage years. The surprise of this incident was that it should have been a surprise at all, given the nature of the research to which I had been 9

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INTRODUCTION

dedicating myself for the previous semester of sabbatical. Yet, it was. It acted as a salutary reminder that it is not only students but their teachers too who need to be aware what limits are experienced in relation to the ‘‘credibility’’ of certain theorizations considered fundamental in the context of lecture theater or seminar room. Film studies has, for instance, long recognized the doubts that should be felt about the usefulness of under-examined, ‘‘subjective’’ value judgments within academic discussion of film. It is unlikely, though, that this awareness is allowed to impinge with significant effect on the vigorous discussion of movies in more everyday social situations outside the classroom. Perhaps it is the tenacity with which at some level commonly held opinions continue to command credibility even with those who have educated themselves into moving beyond such opinions that needs to be constantly borne in mind. It is easy enough, for example, in academic writing to show awareness that the history of sex is in effect the history of sexual discourse. How far is that awareness carried over into what passes as ‘‘real life?’’ In broader terms, do academics, every so often, take a holiday from academic theory as well as exploiting their holiday entitlement to vacations from university buildings? The male spectator of film theory may well differ from the men in the audience for movies and, importantly now, for television and video—though that spectator awaits fuller conceptualization in the context of TV and video. Some of this difference might be accounted for by the way that the traditional account of masculinity seems to prohibit male pleasure in certain genres, in certain emotional experiences associated with these same genres. Surely that is why some genres are labelled ‘‘male,’’ others ‘‘female.’’ The present study is a reaction to the way that the most influential accounts of spectatorship within film studies have seen the male spectator as ‘‘active,’’ hard, phallic, objectificatory. Passivity, emotionality, empathy, have been identified with the female. The latter alignment has been both questioned and in some senses reified as ‘‘femininity’’ within feminist film studies. One obvious effect of this is that, whenever any of these qualities appears in a male, he is thought to be ‘‘feminized’’ and in this sense departing from masculine standards. What, though, if masculinity is not capable of being marked off from femininity so rigorously, as queer theory keeps suggesting

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that it is not? Perhaps that question raises another: what if male experience may not be so definitely separable from female? Psychoanalysis, for example, suggests that the male psyche from early infancy develops along lines that are utterly different from those of the female infant. Could we not still at least entertain the possibility that male and female experience in fantasy, for example, might not be so cut and dried in demarcation from each other? The apparent corollary of this—that there is an admixture of qualities deemed masculine within femininity—has already been suggested. Laura Mulvey’s 1975 Screen article ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’’1 clearly identifies the spectator of dominant narrative cinema with fantasized sexual subjectivity, whereby castration threat is warded off by voyeurism and fetishization of the female. Six years later, her ‘‘Afterthoughts’’ paper2 attempts to deal with the questions raised by those who, believing that the spectator so described is male and that the masculine pronoun for that spectator is more than coincidental, wonder about the female spectator. This spectator oscillates, Mulvey claims in the paper, between nostalgia for the ‘‘active’’ pre-Oedipal phase and the passivity of subsequently acquired ‘‘femininity.’’ In other words, the female spectator may experience a fantasy of masculinity within the cinema. (The ‘‘Afterthoughts’’ paper is valued in the context of the present study for another reason. One publisher’s reader of this work in draft manuscript form became so concerned about what was clearly seen as the careless use of what that reader took to be a rigorously technical term, ‘‘spectator,’’ that on almost every occasion when the word appeared in the draft the correction ‘‘viewer’’ was penciled in over the penciled-out ‘‘spectator.’’ I do not dispute that the spectator was conceived originally as constructed by the text, any more than I dispute that even the male viewer is more of a fantasy than an actuality. Nevertheless, there has been repeated questioning since the 1970s of the credibility of a spectator construction, conceived with gender and, to some extent, sexuality but without class or ethnicity. In any case, what is meant by ‘‘the female spectator’’ when Mulvey explores the question, ‘‘whether the female spectator is carried along, as it were by the scruff of the text, or whether her pleasure can be more deep-rooted and complex?’’3 She is, presumably, not discussing a text-constructed female spectator if the question under consideration is her being able to supersede (‘‘more deep-rooted and complex’’) the narrower pleasures on offer from

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INTRODUCTION

the text. She talks of ‘‘the female spectator’’ specifically in the context of the ‘‘what about the women in the audience?’’ question. If Laura Mulvey, as one of the chief artificers of the notion of spectator-as-textual-construction can talk, less rigorously, of the ‘‘female spectator’’ in these terms, I suppose I may write about the ‘‘male spectator’’ in relation to a set of ‘‘men in the audience’’ questions.) The assumption in both of Mulvey’s considerations of visual pleasure is that fantasies of mastery and control are pleasurable, but not fantasies of being mastered and controlled. This assumption in effect rules out of consideration masochism, which Sigmund Freud recognizes as a sexual pleasure enjoyed by some male subjects. It also blinds the reader to consideration of even the possibility that, just as the female spectator oscillates, so too may the male spectator. The spectator described by ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’’ seems in the wake of ‘‘Afterthoughts’’ to be not so much male as masculine. Female spectators may be ‘‘masculinized’’ in fantasy. Why then should male spectators not even hypothetically be ‘‘feminized’’ in fantasy? Analysts of the cinematic apparatus have largely either kept quiet about this possibility or else genuinely not seen it as a possibility.4 So often, the version of masculinity associated with Mulvey’s male spectator has been promulgated within and beyond film studies—as the only credible type—that men and their masculinities have largely been afforded the chance by such thinking to hide from scrutiny. In this peculiar and narrow sense, the conjuncture of feminism and film studies has worked in the interests of the patriarchal. Permitting no questions to be asked of the ‘‘naturalness’’ of its dominant elements, patriarchy instead encourages examination of what would seem to be the minority peculiarities of the social system. Thus, in the West, questions of race and ethnicity are usually directed to non-white categories, questions of sexuality deflected from heterosexuality on to homosexuality or bisexuality. And questions of gender raise expectations that they are to be asked about women exclusively. It suits the dominant order that this should be so. Why, in that case, should the maleness of the male spectator, together with his seamless version of masculinity, be left unexamined as if these categories were ‘‘true’’? Femininity is acquired, we have learned. Its artifactual nature can be exposed by the strategy of the

INTRODUCTION

13

masquerade (to be discussed more fully in chapter 3). Is masculinity any less artifactual, though? The possibilities—and limitations—of male masquerade have only begun to be explored in the 1990s. If masculinity and maleness are not subjected to the theorizations and analyses that femininity and femaleness have undergone during this century, then individual males learn to keep quiet, not to rock the boat. Masculinity drowns the voice of femininity. And, not only in women. The general assumption seems to be that patriarchy and maleness have so much to do with each other that one virtually stands for the other. This being so, the male spectator is conceived as thoroughly patriarchal even in his fantasy life. He is not even always seen as an effect of the dominant text but as an actual male. As will be shown later, horror is believed by one critic to be enjoyed sadistically by males, Coronation Street to be hated by men. When on the other hand genres are thought to embody the ‘‘feminine,’’ by, for example, appealing to the gentler emotions, or focusing on the domestic and private, they are hived off by film studies as films—or television series—‘‘for women.’’ This must be why Ien Ang, at the outset of her ethnographic research into Dallas, placed her advertisement for responses to the 1970s soap in a women’s magazine.5 The history of serious interest in melodrama needs to be reconsidered in this light. While the ‘‘woman’s film’’ is a genre recognized by the industry itself, the description ‘‘melodrama,’’ as Michael Walker and Steve Neale have made clear,6 was quite differently understood in Hollywood. Gangster movies could so clearly be labeled such that one famous title was Manhattan Melodrama (W. S. Van Dyke, 1934). However, ‘‘melodrama’’—in its film studies usage— has possibly been allowed in film studies to be subsumed within the ‘‘woman’s film.’’ It seems unusually telling that a key work on the subject, Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, should in its subtitle link melodrama with the woman’s film.7 The innocent-seeming linkage could act like a kind of sleight of hand, whatever the intentions of the book. The woman’s film, which was a known Hollywood generic category, at a stroke seems to embrace ‘‘melodrama’’ which was not, within the women’s cinema ambit. Melodrama as film studies understands it is film studies’ own creation. Barbara Klinger’s contribution to the present question cannot be overestimated. She shows that Douglas Sirk’s pivotal

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INTRODUCTION

‘‘melodrama,’’ Written on the Wind (1956), was considered an ‘‘adult movie’’ at the time of its release and was certainly not assumed by the industry to be of interest only to female audiences. Equally, many 1950s movies that have found their way into the peculiar categorization known to and created by film studies, melodrama, were not so categorized, marketed, watched, under that heading in the 1950s.8 Thus, movies perhaps justifiably deemed feminine by one (retroactive) set of arguments were available at the time to males in the audience and were expected to appeal to them in the 1950s. Men of the time were not made conscious of watching movies that were women’s films, for the simple reason that they were not so conceived at the time. The academic understanding of Written on the Wind is that it is a melodrama, and by reason of its genre addressed primarily to an audience of women. That ringfencing has been carried much farther today to popular television soap operas. The reaction from the industry against the claim of soaps’ essential femininity may be why, with economic considerations probably primary, it has made such strenuous efforts in the cases of, say, EastEnders and Brookside to include elements of crime and violence, as well as more straightforwardly a large number of male characters. This book is an attempt to re-examine the many assumptions which permit the male spectator to evade proper consideration. Thus, it represents an attempt to ‘‘out’’ that spectator as a more complex and less watertight entity than he seems largely to be taken within film studies, feminism, and wider society. The central portion of the book is organized into three distinct parts, which should, though, have relevance to each other. Not just because this is a study of the male spectator, but because spectatorship itself has historically been theorized so heavily in the direction of gender (rather than, say, ethnicity or sexuality), Part I (chapters 1 and 2) concerns debates around sex and gender. The next two parts deal with maleness and masculinity in relation to the specular: Part II (chapters 3, 4, and 5) concerns itself with the experience of the male spectator in the cinema audience; Part III (chapters 6, 7, and 8) engages largely with the male as cinematic spectacle and, particularly in Chapter 8, with male characters and their versions of masculinity in a sample of five Hollywood movies from the first half of the 1950s. The broad themes of the individual chapters are as follows:

INTRODUCTION

15

Chapter 1 This chapter attempts to explore the question, ‘‘Are male spectators different in fundamental ways from female spectators?’’ Underlying that question is a larger one, whether males are different in fundamental ways from females. Consideration is given to whether ‘‘sex’’ and ‘‘gender’’ should be conceptualized as neatly differentiated in terms of biological fact and social meaning, respectively. Chapter 2 Concentration here is on the way that masculinity is understood within feminism and, in an obvious relation which is also problematic, within patriarchy. It is accepted that the male spectator’s masculinity, as well as that of men in ‘‘classic’’ Hollywood movies, is usefully examined by the tools provided by feminism. Yet, feminism (singular) is by the present day largely unpersuasive. The common ground between feminisms (plural), between feminism and postmodernism, and again between feminism and queer theory is probably a distrust of discourses posing as objective truth. It may be surprising, therefore, when a desire for greater particularization and individualization of women is so clearly voiced in feminism, that there has not been a more sustained challenge from it to the assumption that maleness and masculinity fit easily together. More seriously, attention is turned to the (implicit) assumption that masculinity, if not biological and natural, still fits so neatly into the patriarchal that it might as well be so considered. Chapter 3 A question is asked here about the credibility or otherwise of ‘‘escape’’ from the implications of gender for viewing subjects. The chief foci are psychoanalytic analyses of fantasy, and feminist work on masquerade and on readership. Of these three, the most promising, as it were, in the present relation is fantasy. Fantasy being a close relation of cinematic pleasure, the distance between social gender’s role and that of fantasized gender is taken to be very little by some theorists, huge by others. Does the male spectator remain masculine in both social and cinema-fantasy terms? Or, has he the freedom to try on ‘‘femininity’’ within the parameters of fantasy?

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INTRODUCTION

Chapter 4 Here, the intention is to re-examine the work on spectatorship that emanates from the 1970s and is elaborated on in subsequent decades—this work tends to focus almost exclusively on gender and to produce quite divergent beliefs about male as opposed to female spectatorship through such argumentation as that concerned with temporary masculinization. Laura Mulvey’s highly influential account of cinematic spectatorship allows for a separation between socially gendered female spectator and a text-created femininity, so that the social female can become the fantasy male for a limited period. Yet, no equivalent of possible separability has been made available in the account for the socially male spectator. The reason may be that it is taken as beyond question that the chief, or exclusive, erotic pleasure is that of domination and mastery. But, spectatorship is vitally linked with fantasy. The lure of being dominated, being mastered, within fantasy is precisely why masochism may be considered as a pleasure, one that could have its place within an account of visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Chapter 5 The focus of chapter 5 is on the way that discussion of genre seems inevitably to be linked with gender issues and on the broad division of genres into ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female,’’ the latter prominently including melodrama (film studies’ version) and soap opera. There is a common belief both among the public and cinema/TV scholars that most genres are ‘‘gendered,’’ in the sense that they have obvious (and under-examined) appeal to either men or to women, but not usually to both. Still, it may be more fruitful to argue for a relationship between masculinity/femininity and the subject positions offered by certain genres than for a straightforward or direct relationship between gender and genre. Chapter 6 Of all the chapters so far, this, together more obviously with chapter 8, contains the most original subject matter. It starts by providing a synopsis of the work done by Steve Neale, Paul Willemen,

INTRODUCTION

17

Richard Dyer, and then myself (in another publication) to cast doubt on the belief that men in Hollywood narrative can be only subjects, never objects. Particular attention is paid in these accounts to the cruciality of ‘‘disavowal,’’ whereby what is happening is determinedly interpreted otherwise, so that the spectator of either gender is handed an alibi with which there may be protection from implications of eroticism and of the objectification of the male. The second portion of the chapter turns to consideration of something that seems to have counted for little hitherto in film studies scholarship—the importance of love and the love story as standard elements in Hollywood genre cinema. The ‘‘apparatic’’ theory embraced and developed by, for example, Laura Mulvey seems highly informed on themes of domination/submission, activity/passivity, in relation to diegetic sexual relations. As such, it is an excellent guide to the first parts of most dominant movies’ narratives. Where it seems deficient is in describing male/female relations after the love story element has ‘‘taken off’’ in the narrative. Consideration is given in this chapter to thoughts on the central importance and on the chief components and implications of love in Freud, Lacan, and Roland Barthes. Chapter 7 If one of the aims of the present study is to bring history to bear on 1970s theorization, then it is peculiarly important to situate the films of the ’fifties within their own period, as well as to re-open questions of how Hitchcock films, for example, have been harnessed to the project of precisely illustrating the operations of the male gaze, so-called. The chapter seeks to highlight how over-simplified those readings of American society in the period are which interpret it as lazily comfortable and complacent in a way that suggests Sirkian movies’ acuteness in terms of social comment. Incipient paranoia and insecurity are suggested by the escalation of ‘‘Cold War’’ rhetoric and by the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and their revelation in turn of anxieties about sexuality and gender. In this regard, it may be specially noteworthy that Hitchcock’s 1950s movies, particularly Rear Window and Vertigo, repeatedly center not so much on the reduction of the heroine to erotic object

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INTRODUCTION

as on the remarkable proximity of male and female psychical experience, particularly indicated in the castration fears of their heroes. Chapter 8 By far the longest of the book, this chapter offers readings of five movies of the early to middle 1950s, all of which seem to suggest a very different, more ‘‘flawed’’ account of masculinity on screen than that of apparatic theory. Since the male spectator of that theory is largely delineated on the lines of his fantasized relationship with onscreen masculinity, this finding would suggest that that account must be partial, and that a more complex sort of male spectator could legitimately be envisaged. The movies in the sample are: SUNSET BOULEVARD

This 1950 movie at a stroke subverts the claimed traditionality of male subject and female object of the gaze by rendering the youthful William Holden as a reluctant but assenting gigolo and object of desire for the ageing silent-screen star played by Gloria Swanson. THE MEN

Fred Zinnemann’s film of the same year portrays the painful adjustment of paraplegic male patients to a world which favors ‘‘activity.’’ Teresa Wright plays the traditionally ‘‘feminine,’’ supportive partner who has to break with parents and cultural expectations in order both to accept and to disguise the hero’s dependency on her. A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

The extremes of femininity and masculinity seem to be embodied, but also parodied, by Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando respectively. The brilliance of Stanley Kowalski’s characterization is that he plays up Blanche’s stereotyping of him as Neanderthal partly to weaken her vision of him. In adopting this tactic, however, he exposes his more vulnerable side in a way that is given direct expression only in relation to his screen wife, Stella.

INTRODUCTION

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FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

It is unusual to find, in the setting of an army barracks, slight and stooping figures in key roles; yet, this is one result of the casting of Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra. The more conventionally ‘‘masculine’’-looking character played by Burt Lancaster is also the most ‘‘maternal,’’ and, macho appearance to the contrary, the most afflicted by awareness of the disempowerment that is part of the experience of both parties in a love affair. The famous sequence in the Hawaiian breakers begins by looking like a visualization of Mulvey’s subject/object gender relations, but it becomes something else—his mistress’s pouring out of her distressing past humbles him, so that he falls from his level of lofty judgment on to his knees to embrace her. ON THE WATERFRONT

As well as being a highly controversial ‘‘political’’ film with obvious relevance to its director Elia Kazan’s ‘‘friendly’’ testimony to HUAC, it centers on the growing fascination of its dumb-boxer hero with the young and remarkably unfetishized woman played by Eva Marie Saint. The frequency of crucifix imagery and of visual and spoken references to Christ makes all the more sense when it is realized that the film turns on the conversion of a hyper-macho, aimless proletarian into one that is suddenly plunged into action but also moral uncertainty by his love affair. Before the study proper begins, with chapter 1, mention could be made of the frustration caused by some of the film studies writing which had necessarily to be studied in the period of researching the present area. What has for decades been the plaint of students of film studies—that some of its most cited writing is ‘‘needlessly difficult’’—has been taken up and at last given greater respectability by, for example, cultural historians.9 My own reading experience suggests at the most extreme an ‘‘emperor’s new clothes’’ scenario. The editorial departments of academic publishers seem sometimes to have been successfully resisted by writers who seem to favor obscurantism or else contrive to abdicate their concern with clarity of communication; the writers themselves either genuinely believe that they are communicating

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INTRODUCTION

clearly (with nobody daring to tell them otherwise?) or else set out to impress other (obscurantist?) colleagues with little regard for the less obscurantism-minded majority, still less for learners new to the subject area.10 The field is, of course, difficult. Writing that takes too great efforts to simplify those difficulties runs the risk of misrepresenting and ‘‘dumbing down’’ ideas from, say, psychoanalysis. Also, it must be admitted, ‘‘obscurantism’’ represents a subjective value judgment. Jacques Lacan, who has proved to be of such importance to feminist theory, seems to have strongly distrusted easy accessibility. This may be why his followers seem to have taken the posture of disciples. Franc¸ois Roustang says of Lacanians, ‘‘Those who understand his writings are content to repeat his words . . . Those who do not understand his writings assume that Lacan understands them and if they are very studious, they will one day also understand. Under no circumstances do they question Lacan’s sayings or presuppositions.’’11 Nevertheless, were practicing teachers to make such heavy weather of communicating ideas, they would face classroom censure (except from the few that insisted that the emperor was dressed in gorgeous robes). I assume that most of the academic writing which seems guilty of obscurantism comes from practicing teachers in higher education. Making these points can easily turn the present book into a hostage to fortune. What seemed perfectly lucid in the light of recent reading when it was freshly written may well seem a little less so as time goes on. By the time the book is published, confidence in its lucidity may have retreated that bit farther. (Incidentally, this awareness may help to mitigate the charge of obscurantism against some film studies writers.) The hope is still that the questions raised by the book make contact with the reader genuinely interested in this area of study without sacrificing what is the complexity of work by other researchers in this and related fields.

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Part I Questions of Sex and Gender

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1 Sex and Gender ‘‘SEX’’ AND ‘‘GENDER’’ HAVE LONG BEEN DIFFERENTIATED IN TERMS OF, respectively, biological fact and social meaning.1 In 1974, Ann Oakley put it thus: ‘‘ ‘[S]ex’ is a word that refers to the biological differences between male and female: the visible difference in genitalia, the related difference in procreative function. ‘Gender’ however is a matter of culture: it refers to the social classifications into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’.’’2

SOME CONTRIBUTIONS FROM GENETICS AND ANTHROPOLOGY According to Jerold M. Lowenstein, the following five components are minimally applied to the concept of sex: appearance of external genitals possession or absence of a Y chromosome amount of various hormones produced in the body sex assigned at birth the individual’s belief about his/her sex.3

Lowenstein further states that most human beings have 23 pairs of chromosomes in each cell nucleus, one set from each parent, containing DNA determining individual characteristics. All 23 pairs match (XX) in females. There is one unmatched pair (XY—maternal X, smaller paternal Y) in males.4 Thus, the basic body plan of mammals is female, with the Y chromosome transforming it into male. It would be a mistake, however, to deduce from the information above that this chromosomal differentiation creates the wide variety of observable physical differences between the sexes. Currently, the scientific view is increasingly ambiguous.5 Estrogen and testos25

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LOVE, TEARS, AND THE MALE SPECTATOR

terone are produced by both men and women, though in varying proportions. As Martine Rothblatt explains: Portions of the X or Y chromosome appear ultimately to govern the relative amounts of estrogen and testosterone produced, creating a continuum of ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ possibilities. When certain hormonal thresholds are reached, ‘‘male’’ or ‘‘female’’ reproductive organs are created. The specific levels of hormonal production, and their timing of release, are different for each person and result in a continuum of ‘‘maleness’’ and ‘‘femaleness’’ that may affect thought patterns and body shape.6

If this is so, then two of our culture’s most tenacious beliefs, that sex is natural and discretely binary, are unsoundly based as far as the science of genetics is concerned. If it is true that ‘‘as many as 10 percent of us are female by some of these criteria [the five itemised above] and male by others,’’7 then the intersexed state is natural, though it is made taboo, believed to be unnatural, within most cultures. Anthropology fails to substantiate the notion that sex is in all cultures differentiated into two, male and female. Some, admittedly very few, societies recognize a sexually intermediate category—for example, the Cheyenne berdache or Tahitian mahu.8 Despite such evidence from genetics and anthropology, observation of genitals at birth, for instance, has confidently resulted in the labeling by, say, medical ‘‘experts’’ of a human being as male or female. Thereafter, socialization has rigidly enforced the notion that that human being is of one sex or the other by using the ‘‘appropriate’’ stereotypes of masculinity or femininity as the correct ideals to which the individual should aspire. Where doubt persists, appeal may be made to legislation basing itself on what are believed to be objective tests. Thus, certain female athletes occasioned complaints at the Olympics by virtue of their deemed masculinity. From 1968, the International Olympic Committee began to require that individuals participating in women’s events should present evidence of their female gender. Today, there has been a cessation of the use of chromosomal tests for a second X as a way of disqualifying certain women—as women! During the time of the sex testing, however, certain athletes who believed that they were female and who had a vagina were disqualified because the test declared them not female.

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The culture/nature distinction may be seen as itself a product of culture. Yet, so deep-seated is the conviction that binary sex is natural and unambiguous that clear evidence of the intersexed state as ‘‘natural’’ is ignored or denied. Suzanne J. Kessler has investigated standard medical practices for the management of intersexuality and concluded that it is cultural understandings of gender that hold sway.9 Thus, when babies are born with some combination of what are culturally deemed male and female sexual or reproductive features, doctors insist on the only ‘‘natural’’ options as being either male or female (p. 4). All the physicians studied believed that they managed intersexed cases on the basis of the theory of gender first proposed by John Money, J. G. Hampson and J. L. Hampson in 1955, then developed in 1972 by Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt. This theory proposes inter alia that gender identity is changeable until about 18 months of age. Yet, the physicians attempted to act quickly and decisively, and to reassure the parents—Kessler believes out of kindness rather than in any self-serving spirit—that the true and ‘‘natural’’ sex of the baby had been discovered (p. 8). Money and his colleagues advise obviation of the problems of a micropenis in childhood and, thus, an ‘‘undersized’’ penis in adulthood by reassigning many such infants to the female gender. As Kessler observes, ‘‘This approach suggests that for Money and his colleagues, chromosomes are less relevant in determining gender than penis size and that, by implication, ‘male’ is defined not by the genetic condition of having one Y and one X chromosome . . . but by the aesthetic condition of having an appropriately sized penis’’ (p. 12). Surgical/hormonal intervention to correct the deformity of intersexed genitals is spoken of by the doctors concerned as ‘‘natural’’ in that such intervention returns the body to what ‘‘it ought to have been.’’ In this way, the non-normative becomes the normative, and the normative is deemed natural. Kessler puts it thus: ‘‘The genital ambiguity is remedied to conform to a ‘natural,’ that is, culturally indisputable, gender dichotomy’’ (p. 24). In the natural state, then—if it exists at all—in the words of the subtitle of Lowenstein’s article, two sexes are not enough.10

PSYCHOANALYSIS The relationship between maleness/femaleness and masculinity/ femininity in the writings of Sigmund Freud is complicated. At one

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point, he talks of male and female, significantly, in mental life, calling the use of these terms ‘‘an inadequate empirical and conventional equation,’’ so that ‘‘we call everything that is strong and active male, and everything that is weak and passive female.’’11 ‘‘Pure’’ masculinity or femininity for him ‘‘remain theoretical constructs of uncertain content.’’12 Human beings are combinations of characteristics culturally deemed masculine or feminine. Clearly, thus, Freud does not permit the mapping of the masculine/feminine dichotomy straightforwardly on to the male/female. Moreover, he conceives of a stage of infantile bisexuality in the human subject’s development. During that stage, there is no clear masculinity or femininity. Male and female children at that point are alike subject to the same drives and activities, with the only obvious difference being that boys’ genital interest is in the penis, girls’ in the clitoris.13 This postulation of bisexuality would appear to mean that a principal component of sexual identity for both sexes involves vacillation between the polarized opposites of (cultural) masculinity and femininity. The use of the terms ‘‘masculinity’’ and ‘‘femininity’’ in the context of mental life significantly relates to notions of activity and passivity. Thus, it could surely be legitimately deduced that for Freud the male subject’s psyche must have passive aspects, the female active. Yet, successful resolution of the Oedipus complex must also involve for Freud male striving to eliminate the feminine in himself, since the feminine is associated, from the point of the child’s trauma on ‘‘discovering’’ the mother’s castration, with the threat of his own castration. (Thus, for example, the fetish in Freud’s account may be explained as a representation of the desired phallus absent from the mother. ‘‘It is a compromise formation between the traumatic perception that the mother has no penis and the continuing wish that she should have one.’’)14 Freud betrays the promise of his refusal to use biology as an explanation for masculinity or femininity, and his apparent uncoupling of these metaphorical concepts from maleness/femaleness, however. His 1933 lecture on ‘‘Femininity’’15 includes generalizations concerning women: that their need to be loved is stronger than their need to love (p. 166); that they have little sense of justice and that envy is predominant in their mental life (p. 168); that they are weaker in social interests and have less capacity for sublimating their instincts (p. 169). Although he thus tends to construct an account of female nature

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strongly allied with that of femininity, his refusal to define hysteria as a disease affecting only women deserves attention. For him, both paranoia and masochism are vitally connected with femininity. The subject, whether male or female, assumes a feminine position within masochism. The fantasies of the male masochist, for example, place him in feminine situations. These situations are deemed by Freud to be characteristic of womanhood, the male subject thus playing in masochistic fantasy the passive part in sexual intercourse, for example, or giving birth. Mary Ann Doane concludes that it really does matter in Freud’s account of fantasy whether the subject is male or female.16 It is possible to read Freud’s account of male psychic development as an elaborate attempt to distance the male subject as far as possible from lack. The explanation, above, of the fetish as an attempt to disavow the mother’s lack could be supplemented: while women’s lack is, as it were, concealed from the male subject, this points unambiguously to his ‘‘awareness’’ of that lack and therefore of castration. In this sense, the male subject has been identified by Kaja Silverman as ‘‘structured by absence prior to the moment at which he registers woman’s anatomical difference’’.17 The boy child’s ‘‘recognition’’ of female lack seems thus to be retroactive in Freud, the delay capable of being read as ‘‘a device for protecting the male subject from a painfully and culturally disruptive confrontation with his own insufficiency.’’18 As for Jacques Lacan’s theorizations, feminist theory within film studies has repeatedly anthropomorphized the Lacanian Gaze, so that the male look is equated thereby with a strictly transcendental Gaze which can ‘‘belong’’ to no person or gender. It may be that this equation is a further demonstration of a means by which the male subject’s lack is disavowed, the male voyeur laying claim to the Gaze by imposture—or, indeed having that work of imposture done on his behalf in this case by feminist film theory. In an illuminating account of the relation of his disciples to their master Lacan within the Ecole Freudienne, Franc¸ois Roustang claims that Freud is read as a ‘‘text-to-be-analyzed’’ by Lacanians and yet Lacan plays for these readers the role of a guarantor and interpreter of truth, no less. Thus, their transference is resolved in relation to Freud, while they are ‘‘protected by an unanalyzed transference onto Lacan.’’ Lacan plays the roles of both mother and father. As a theoretician, he is a mother, ‘‘in part because he can

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say anything he likes, or its opposite, and it will immediately receive support.’’ But, ‘‘the one who knows is also a father . . . because he alone has a name.’’19 Roustang calls for an end to an uncritical fascination with theory and a willingness to pursue an analysis of ‘‘the fantasies or desires that gave rise to it.’’20 It is in this spirit, of analyzing the theoretician and his/her theory, that Silverman teases out what is achieved by Freud’s attribution to the male child of recognition of maternal castration. Similarly, she prosecutes the question of what is achieved for the male subject not so much by Lacan’s account of the Gaze but by feminist film studies’ attribution of mastery over the gaze to the male subject. In both instances, the achievement is the creation of distance between the male subject and lack, so that he is permitted by a fantasy of wholeness and power to avoid confrontation with his own castration and relative impotence. The Freudian-Lacanian scenario may well stand accused of an erroneous universalization which eclipses race-gender relations.21 More startlingly perhaps, gender relations are themselves, if not entirely eclipsed, obscured. An approach to that scenario which evades the implications of a psychoanalytic reading of the theorists themselves permits the male subject to disavow his shared experience with and similarity to the female subject. Of particular relevance to an investigation of Lacan’s theorizations in relation to understanding male subjectivity is his frequent claim that the phallus is not the penis (or indeed any other organ/ object). All the same, he can be sufficiently inconsistent in this regard to be accused of phallocentric bias by several feminists.22 Aware of the slippage between ‘‘phallus’’ and ‘‘penis’’ even in Lacan, as well as Freud, Jacqueline Rose concludes that there is not so much an equation of anatomical and sexual difference as ‘‘that anatomical difference comes to figure sexual difference.’’23 So, as Joan Copjec puts it, ‘‘the penis is privileged because it is taken to represent the phallus as grammatical or logical function.’’24 A similar potential for confusion, with particular relevance to gender, affects the Lacanian notion of castration. In one sense, all human subjects experience castration, since the condition for subjectivity is alienation. Yet, in another sense, that of sexual difference, only women are castrated, while men are merely threatened by it. It could, nevertheless, be argued that that threat of castration

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haunts the male psyche; that there is thus an insistent need created by the threat to deny similarity with the female in her castration; that a repetitious denial of femininity is assured by the very closeness to castration experienced by all human subjects. (We might be reminded here of Jung’s belief in the woman hidden in every man.)25 It is this very proximity of the male’s psychic experience to the female’s which leads Kaja Silverman in particular to emphasize the imposture by which the penis is equated with the phallus.26 It is an imposture constantly shored up by dominant fiction, which insists on images of unimpaired masculinity for the male subject and demands that the female subject desire him only through such images. Perhaps because dominant fiction makes far greater impact than psychoanalytic theory on the lives lived by men and women, there is a pervasive conception in our culture of men as phallic, rather than merely penile. Masculinity is experienced by males as involving at some level vulnerability and an awareness of frailty. Yet, because the conceptual separation of phallus and penis is so assiduously glossed over outside psychoanalysis and even within it, masculinity also downgrades that awareness and attempts to deny it. While Karen Horney was in some obvious senses a Freudian, she discovered as a therapist discrepancies between Freudian psychoanalysis’s theories and the therapeutic results of these theories when applied. She arrived at the belief that psychoanalysis was a male creation, and that it understood better the development of men than of women. Yet, her own explanation of that tradition’s concept of penis envy, for example, illuminates in particular male psychic life better than women’s. And this in turn implies that it was inadequately illuminated in Freud. Her paper, ‘‘The Dread of Women,’’ argues that it was male fear of women that contributed to the evolution of the concept of penis envy, and that male dread is countered by denial and defense. Struck with the depth of male envy of women in the matters of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, she accounts for male defense against dread under the tactics of adoration of women, on one hand, and of debasement and degradation of women, on the other. She argues here, too, that the male child’s desires are not naturally sadistic, and that it is inadmissible to align ‘‘male’’ with ‘‘sadistic,’’ ‘‘female’’ with ‘‘masochistic’’ without the adduction of specific evidence.27 Horney’s notion of male envy of the female is taken up by Susan

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Lurie, who locates the real trauma for the boy child in his awareness that his mother is far from castrated. Lurie detects in the concept of ‘‘woman-as-castrated-man’’ a comforting male fantasy designed to combat the child’s dread of his mother’s powerfulness and the damage that might be inflicted on him from that source.28

OBJECT-RELATIONISM Horney and Lurie recognize the willful distance created by the male from the female and attempt to account for it by, to some extent, highlighting the proximity of male to female psychic experience. Societal masculinity, particularly in the forms that ‘‘overvalue’’ or attempt to degrade/disparage the female, is thereby explicated as a bid to create or augment differences. A somewhat different tack is taken by Melanie Klein and, later, the theorists of the British object relations school. They argue that the most important stages in a child’s development are much earlier than in Freud and have a different source. Object relationism theorizes the cruciality of the pre-Oedipal period. The ‘‘objects’’ of the child’s inner world are internal representations of persons or things. The internalizations originally filtered through the child’s inner experience go on being carried within us. In both male and female infants, because of the common experience of being mothered, the earliest attachments and identifications are with a woman. Once the male child has to repress this identification, his attachment becomes ambivalent. ‘‘He still needs her, but he can’t be certain anymore that she will be there, that she can be trusted.’’29 In the unusually influential work of Nancy Chodorow (itself much influenced by Robert Stoller’s), male early psychic experience is fundamentally opposed to that of female, more strongly than it was allowed to appear to be even in Freudian work. Her most significant departure from the psychoanalytic tradition is the claim which she makes in common with the object relationists—of crucial importance for mothering: ‘‘Women, as mothers, produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother.’’30 While these capacities grow in daughters out of the mother-daughter relationship, sons are produced ‘‘whose nurturant capacities and needs have been systematically curtailed and repressed’’ (p. 7). For this reason, boys grow into men prepared for ‘‘their less affective . . . family

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role, and for primary participation in the impersonal extra-familial world of work and public life’’ (p. 7). She goes on to claim that, because of child-care responsibilities, women’s primary social location is domestic. On the other hand, men’s relations to domestic units are governed by their primary social location in the public sphere, where men are tied to one another apart from their domestic relationships (p. 9). From this, she concludes, ‘‘Culturally and politically, the public sphere dominates the domestic, and hence men dominate women’’ (p. 10). Male and female foundations for parenting are quite different, beginning in their different relationships to their mothers (p. 90). The resolution of the Oedipus complex involves ‘‘different psychological reactions, needs, and experiences’’ (p. 91). Relational possibilities for boys’ parenting are cut off or curtailed, while girls’ are kept open and extended (p. 91). Chodorow contrasts the Oedipus complex in its claimed masculine and feminine modes: relational capacities are curbed in boys as a result of resolution of the masculine Oedipus complex, but not in girls, whose feminine Oedipus complex involves far more than a transfer of affection from mother to father (pp. 92–93). The boy has to deal in separation, of himself from the mother, of the mother from the father (p. 97). In opposite fashion, ‘‘mother and daughter maintain elements of their primary relationship which means that they will feel alike in fundamental ways’’ (p. 110). Girls emerge from the mother-child relationship ‘‘with a basis for ‘empathy’ built into their primary definition of self in a way that boys do not’’ (p. 167). A sense of connection to the world marks the basic feminine sense of self, whereas the basic masculine sense of self is one of separation. The masculine personality rests on a denial of femininity, and thus of connection (p. 169). Masculinity in Chodorow’s view is more uncertain, as well as negative (in its rejection of the feminine and relational). ‘‘In their unattainability, masculinity and the masculine role are fantasized and idealized by boys (and often by girls), whereas femininity and the feminine remain for a girl . . . concrete’’ (p. 177). This new emphasis on mothering and the quite divergent relationship of male and female children to the mother is allowed explanatory potential: for the difficulties, say, involved in marriage and, less specifically, in heterosexuality. From this early relationship to or away from mothers, respectively, girls and boys grow up

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into women who can nurture and men who, because of their sense of separateness, cannot. Women are conditioned from childhood to give and receive nurture but can gain it only rarely from men. They can verbalize their feelings in therapy, but also state in therapy that there is great male resistance to their attempts to persuade male partners to verbalize theirs. One therapist detects a particular common origin for this: ‘‘men have integrated all too well the lessons of their childhood—the experiences that taught them to repress and deny their inner thoughts, wishes, needs, and fears: indeed, not even to notice them.’’31 Chodorow helpfully highlights the objections to her approach from friends and colleagues. She concedes that not all women are equally nurturant, and that some men are more nurturant than some women. She also concedes that the sex-gender system is constantly changing, so that her account might be thought ahistorical.32 Her premise, that the deep sense of self engendered in early childhood by interactions with the mother remains fairly constant thereafter, is also assailable, though. The premise takes no account of the input from class, ethnicity, sexuality. While it surely underestimates these latter areas, it probably overestimates gender, since in Chodorow’s account it is gender identity alone which provides the explanation for all actions and attitudes in adult life. These criticisms must apply readily to the work of the object-relations theorists in general. All the same, the very same criticisms could be taken to apply to psychoanalytic explanations for adult behavior. In Freud, too, male contempt is assumed in the very explanation of it, the castration of the creature over whom the male feels triumphant mastery. The issue of language in general, and of men’s claimed awkwardness, noted above, in the verbalization of their personal feelings, has been taken up by Carol Gilligan. Lacan taught that human beings are located within the social structure through the acquisition of language. By means of the acquisition of (for Lacan, verbal) language, dichotomies are learned— the masculine/feminine and male/female dichotomies among them. Gilligan33 talks not of different languages for the socialized male and female, but of different voices. Her particular interest is in the empirically observed association of a ‘‘different voice’’ with women. She does, however, recognize that the association is not absolute, and wants to avoid generalizations about either sex. Rather, she

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wishes to ‘‘highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus a problem of interpretation.’’ Her belief is that there is an interplay of these voices within each sex, and that ‘‘their convergence marks times of crisis and change,’’ that the experience of males and females is shaped by the combination of factors of social status and power with reproductive biology (p. 2). She corroborates Chodorow’s emphasis on separation and emotional distance as part of masculinity when she detects that there are gender-differentiated attitudes to violence, for example, in men’s and women’s fantasies, as these are mediated by narrative or ‘‘stories’’ woven around certain visual images (p. 42). Women perceive a connection between aggression and fracture of human connection, so that there is more threat of violence when individuals are depicted as isolated. Activities of care make the social world safe, since as isolation is avoided aggression is prevented. However, men see more potential for violence as people are brought closer together. ‘‘From this perspective, the prevalence of violence in men’s fantasies, denoting a world where danger is everywhere seen, signifies a problem in making connection, causing relationships to erupt . . .’’ (p. 43). Her conclusion is that relationships signify danger for men and safety appears in separation (pp. 43–44). Gilligan, like Chodorow, avoids strictly essentialist claims by linking her observations with biology linked with social status. She also claims that there is no absolute equation of what she observes about feminine and masculine thinking/feeling with female and male, respectively. All the same, her constant habit is to build on the notion of a commonality among most, if not all, women—and among most, if not all, men. Women’s different voice is still largely heard in Gilligan as unified. Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson find that ‘‘such theories tend to occlude axes of domination other than gender.’’34 In particular, what is missing from the women’s voice deemed different is a plural—the different voices of poor and working-class women, of women of color and of lesbians. And then what if women’s different moral expression were a function of their subordinate social position? Another question could be raised. Does the concern with verbalization leave out of account nonverbal communication? Male inexpressiveness, within the context of verbal language, has been accepted by some males as an inhibiting factor in their relationships with family and friends.35 Clearly, communication would be se-

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verely inhibited if one gender only were to communicate in verbal language. That is different, however, from the claim of male inexpressiveness in general. Dale Spender goes so far as to treat language as ‘‘man-made’’ and thus an instrument for expressing the meanings of a preexistent group, men. How can men preexist language, though? Are not ‘‘men,’’ rather, in some sense constituted as a group by language?36

‘‘BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONALISM’’ Within feminism the distinctions between ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ bodies have increasingly been related to social interpretation. In this sense, there is no clear contrast to be drawn between ‘‘sex’’ and ‘‘gender.’’ Yet, as Linda J. Nicholson shows, there are strands of feminism in which ‘‘sex’’ stubbornly resists being subsumed within ‘‘gender.’’37 Many feminists would reject the notion that character is founded in biology and would explain character formation on the basis of the social. Nevertheless, some of these same feminists are capable of retaining a notion of the physiological self as the foundation on which characteristics are, as it were, superimposed. This physiological self, in Nicholson’s words, ‘‘provides the location for establishing where specific social influences are to go.’’38 In this way, feminism seems both to undermine the notion of sex as biologically produced but yet to retain this conception under another guise. Gender is recognized as a discursive element, but that recognition is predicated on a belief in sex as pre-discursive. This way of thinking could be vigorously countered by a different approach to the question of the relationship between gender and sex: it is not so much that culture acts upon a preexisting nature, sex, to produce gender; rather, culture produces nature as explanation for its construction of gender. By this understanding, a rationale is offered for why we are tempted to think of the structures produced by the relations of sex—and gender—as ultimately natural; in other words, to forget that they are structures. Broadly, there is a current source of division among feminists as to the extent of the significance (and signification) of the body in relation to the oppression of women. This division is recognized in the division, again broad, of feminists into essentialists and social

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constructivists, with the latter seeking to counter the importance allowed by the former to biological givens. Even this distinction, though, might be muddied. ‘‘Biological foundationalism’’ is used by Nicholson as a label which seeks to indicate how the division between essentialists and social constructivists is not as clear-cut in some instances as it would at first appear. The so-called foundationalist agrees with the essentialist to the extent that certain facets of personality and behavior are taken possibly to emanate from sex-as-biology. At the same time, room is made for these aspects as not explicable purely, or in every case, on the grounds of biology.39 Nicholson believes biological foundationalism to be as counterproductive as essentialism. Both tendencies make a case for a universalized understanding of women, the case resting on a set of universalized distinctions from another universalized category, men. This mode of thinking appears to be that of patriarchy, which pits a different, but equally universalized, notion of female nature against male nature. The feminist description of a universalized female nature, even if that female nature should be conceived as socially constructed, unsurprisingly tends to reflect the perspective of those women responsible for the detail of that description: in other words, of white professional women implicitly defining themselves as heterosexual. One result is that historically there have been upheavals within, say, the feminism of the 1970s because women of color, and/or of working-class background, and/or self-defined lesbian sexuality, have felt excluded from the generalizations concerning female nature. These ructions help to demonstrate that gender is not to be abstracted unproblematically from ethnicity, class, or sexuality, for example. As Laurie Shrage puts it, ‘‘Even within a single society women experience female socialization differently depending on their social location in terms of class, ethnicity, religion, physical ability, sexuality, and family idiosyncrasies, such as parents who raise their daughters as sons.’’40 The particular idiosyncrasy selected by Shrage elucidates how the critique of the notion of female essence or ‘‘foundation’’ could be turned into an analogous critique of the notion of male essence. This latter notion is indeed a major part, whether explicit or implicit, of the essentialist or biological foundationalist argument. It is clearly a significant part of that argument’s project to re-

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verse the values placed by patriarchy upon female nature by contrasting it with male. Sexual politics crucially involves resistance to such definitions of female sexuality and nature as could provide a rationale for gender inequality. For this reason, feminist reliance upon the same sort of dichotomized thinking as that of patriarchy is attended by risk.

QUEER THEORY Queer theoreticians are particularly sensitized to tendencies of this sort within feminist and other theory. Although the 1990s is queer theory’s decade, the potential for its development is particularly obvious already in the work of Michel Foucault and discoverable even within early psychoanalytic theory. Foucault’s analysis of gender as discourse, and of power and resistance as operations where marginalized identities are argued to be complicit even with those regimes that they seek to counter, have particular resonance for queer theory. If gender is a matter of discursive practice, so, more startlingly, is sex for Foucault. He considers the restriction of each body to a single sex a matter of (Western) societal choice: ‘‘Biological theories of sexuality, juridical conceptions of the individual, forms of administrative control in modern nations, led little by little to rejecting the idea of a mixture of two sexes in a single body, and consequently to limiting the free choice of indeterminate individuals.’’41 Thus, gender and sex for Foucault are not essences. Queer theory above all develops the Foucauldian notion of gender as practice, undermining confidence in the binarism of sexual difference and intimately associating it with coercion. Psychoanalysis could historically be identified with shoring up belief in binary sexual difference, and has been resisted, if not rejected, by some areas of feminism for this tendency. Yet, Freud has been exploited by feminist and queer critics for at least potentially and temporarily offering up a means whereby the dominance of the white male heterosexual subject might be deconstructed. Such key notions within Freudian psychoanalysis as castration and the Oedipal narrative lose their univocal explanatory power when viewed through a gay or lesbian perspective. In particular, in his early theory, Freud argues that, the unconscious being bisexual, the apparent fact of the societal norm of heterosexuality presents a challenge

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for psychoanalytic explanation: ‘‘ ‘. . . the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is . . . a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact.’’42 The repression of this foundational destabilization of heterosexual hegemony in Freud calls for a psychoanalytic explanation of its own. Probably the most significant individual in the short history of queer theory so named is Judith Butler. She makes a break with certain tendencies in feminism, accusing French feminism in particular of increasing the strength of the binary between the categories of ‘‘men’’ and ‘‘women.’’ In prose that, it has to be said, challenges the reader not simply at the level of presupposition, she writes, ‘‘The implicit and compulsory presumption of heterosexuality supported the normativity and irreversibility of that binary and posited relations of complementarity or asymmetry between its terms that only shored up, without marking, the heterosexist assumptions of the paradigm.’’43 Crucially, she refuses to continue with the traditional belief that heterosexuality provides an explanation of the origins of sexual roles. For Butler, there is no original essence of femininity or, for that matter, masculinity. They are imitations of imitations. In addition, there is no one femininity, for example, with which to identify, but rather a proliferation of identificatory sites. Furthermore, the logic whereby identification and desire are mutually exclusive is for her that of heterosexism, which appears to assert that ‘‘if one identifies as a given gender, one must desire a different gender.’’44 Importantly, Butler’s thinking undermines belief in any notion of greater truth in gay or lesbian identity, for example. It calls, instead, for disruption of sexual identities of all sorts, as a development of Foucauldian thinking about the fundamental indeterminacy of these and wider identities. Butler’s 1990 publication, ‘‘Gender Trouble,’’45 sets out queer theory’s sensitivity to the risks of identity belief. It focuses on, among other objects, the ways that gender has played the part of a regulatory construct in the privileging of heterosexuality. Deconstruction of gender becomes a signal check on heterosexual hegemony and thus on attempts to delegitimize other sexual subject-positions. Gender is, for Butler, a cultural fiction. It is performative, ‘‘an ongoing discursive practice . . . open to intervention and resignification.’’46 The naturalization of heterosexuality is achieved by the performative repetition of normative gender identities. Gender

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identity appears to gain conviction through repetitive acts. Yet, these acts are not to be taken as evidence that a social identity is being expressed. The reverse is true: ‘‘the identity is self-reflexively constituted by the performances themselves.’’ 47 Nevertheless, all this awareness of performativity, however it serves to destabilize cultural certainties about identity, does not mean that gender can be set aside at will. It is matched by an awareness of the constraint enjoining performativity. Already in the 1980s, Teresa de Lauretis’s use of ‘‘technologies’’ in her account of the ‘‘sex/gender system’’ points to a shared belief in gender categories as a matter of constructedness.48 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the middle of that decade takes special interest in the way that, while ‘‘femininity’’ produces no rupture in the apparent continuum of female homosocial and homosexual bonds, ‘‘masculinity’’ seems to demand discontinuity between these bonds in the context of males. ‘‘The example of the Greeks . . . shows . . . ,’’ she believes, ‘‘that the structure of homosocial continuums is culturally contingent, not an innate feature of either ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness.’ ’’49 Once again, the emphasis is on the artifactuality of gender beliefs. This demonstrates the paramount importance of these for normative views of sexuality, while at the same time exposing both gender and sexuality as constructions. In the field of the cinematic apparatus, mined by feminism for its apparent replication and/or instruction in normative heterosexuality through the relations of spectator and spectacle, Jackie Stacey calls for a recognition of a variety of possible positionings for the female spectator. Her account gives particular force to Judith Butler’s already noted refusal of assent to the normative notion of the necessary sundering (through gender) of identification and desire.50 By such interventions, queer theory seeks to assault the Western world’s apparently rock-solid societal belief in the binaries of male and female gender and of heterosexual and homosexual identities. These binaries, queer theory insists, give a distorted impression of a subjectivity whose stability is illusory. They derive their ostensible explanatory power from patriarchy and heterosexism, which they also, not coincidentally, shore up. Some theorists would see the particular offense of binaries of all sorts as their claim to comprehensiveness. As Chris Straayer puts it, both sides of a question stand in for all sides of it.51 Queer theory sees gender not as something that we are, but

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something that we do. It is the incoherencies and mismatches between sex, gender, and desire that most signally represent the queer. It rejects the code of compulsory heterosexuality whereby masculine men desire feminine women. More widely, it represents ‘‘a resistance to normalization . . . by which,’’ to quote Ellis Hanson, ‘‘cultural difference—racial, ethnic, sexual, socio-economic—is pathologized and atomized as disparate forms of deviance.’’52 This wider concern with, for example, the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic, is made possible through queer theory’s radical questioning of identity in general, and of the various politics that found themselves on identity beliefs. Because queer is thus not aligned with identity politics, at the same time it can act as a support to a surprising number of discussions beyond gender, to, say, a reassessment of social identities considered marginal. If queer theory has implications well beyond marginalized sexual identities, the contested question of its relationship with mainstream popular culture is of special interest in the present study. Camp, which like ‘‘queer’’ resists definition and stabilization, could be taken at least in part to be represented by those readings which challenge heterosexism or ‘‘straightness.’’ (Notably, camp becomes by this understanding a strategy available to ‘‘non-straight heterosexuals,’’ those who, while commonsensically heterosexual in orientation, oppose the hegemonic status of heterosexuality.) Such readings could be limited in their understanding to an ‘‘against-thegrain’’ defiance of preferred readings. Arguments could be mounted, however, that the ‘‘grain’’ against which camp operates is better understood as a camouflage term for straight, white, middleclass male conceptions of a text. A more challenging use of camp would be to uncover the queerness at the heart of the mainstream. This would supply a corrective to the view that regards classic Hollywood as a bastion of heterocentrism, outlawing the ‘‘deviant’’ through such self-censoring agencies as were engendered by the Hays Code. An alternative approach would be the unmasking of mainstream popular culture’s maintenance of ‘‘straightness,’’ which depends for its authority on a notion of the natural that queer theory energetically refutes. This would open up, for example, possibilities of spectatorship that cannot be confined by rigid gender classification which works in the interests of heterosexism, or of spectacle that cannot be neatly categorized as female or, more controversially, feminine/feminized.

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Queer should not allow itself to be seen as straightforwardly either progressive or reactionary. Its emphasis on the mutability of and possibilities of intervention in what are usually taken to be unchangeable—because natural—workings of gender and other categories clearly has progressive potential. It is vulnerable, on the other hand, in its drive to unseat dominant systems of gender to charges of underestimation of the material conditions of the Western world in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, Robert Stam pays an important tribute to the near necessity of queer theory when he says of it that ‘‘ ‘queerness’ seemed retroactively to have been the blindspot common to virtually all the theories’ [these including pre-1980s film theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism].53 It is possible to go beyond the awareness that in visual media heterosexual relations are presented as the norm and to suggest that visual media play a significant part in the fixing of certain sexual and gender categories as natural. In addition, though, queer theory suggests that there are interesting results when filmmakers, spectators, ‘‘actors-as-spectacle’’ do not play the normative game. Alexander Doty considers the case of men in relation to ballet and art films. His conclusion is that these exemplify ‘‘not so much the queer mixing of the masculine and the feminine, or of the homosexual and the straight, as it is a queer resistance to dominant culture’s ideas that certain pursuits or attitudes are necessarily masculine or feminine, straight or homosexual.’’54 What then of male spectators and ‘‘feminine’’ genres? Of onscreen masculinity and ‘‘feminine’’ emotionalism? Of male-spectator identification? Desire? Is mainstream popular culture unable to hide the queer at its heart if these questions can be asked of it? Or, are the sex and gender binaries clearly appealed to here of such questionable status as to be capable of being bypassed? Not without a deal of further argument!

2 Feminism/Patriarchy/Masculinity IT SEEMS INEVITABLE THAT FEMINISM MUST FAIRLY WELL SELF-EVIDENTLY seek to promote the interests of one sex in the face of another sex. The nature of its project ensures a primary focus upon sex and, to a greater extent, gender. To some degree, that project constrains it to have less consideration for such elements relevant to social subordination as ethnicity, sexuality, or class. Despite this, it is at present from within that feminism is most heavily criticized for failing to pay sufficient (or, in some cases, any) attention to these elements. Its task in the present epoch must, it would seem, include a greater concentration on them so that they are allowed to mediate what is claimed by feminists about gender. From the criticisms made of the generalized feminist model of femininity, it can no longer afford to reproduce a white, middle-class, heterosexual perspective on gender without, at least, recognizing that that is the nature of that perspective. Feminism, since the 1960s, seemed to build itself on the challenging of the hitherto unchallengeable, the social and academic orthodoxies which passed themselves off as truth by refusing to acknowledge their discursiveness. Thus, there is at the least an irony in the creation of areas of orthodoxy within feminism. One of those areas might seem to be in the opposition of shared female experience to shared male. Broad claims about shared female experience, in opposition to shared male experience, must be an everpresent temptation within feminism. Much of what was said about gender in chapter 1 was either directly dependent on published feminist work or else on that from other disciplines which has been appropriated by academic feminism—the theorizing of Jacques Lacan, for instance, being of particular relevance here. Patriarchy and its workings are of vital concern to feminism. It is 43

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because Sigmund Freud, for example, offers exposure of the psychic workings of patriarchy within the bourgeois setting that recourse is so often had to him by feminist writers. Such concepts of his as penis envy help in some sense to buttress a patriarchal version of discrimination between men and women, but it is surely because of his insights into the workings and ‘‘logic’’ of patriarchy that Freud is most valuable to feminism. The overt object of the present inquiry is the male spectator. Without an investigation of what is believed within patriarchy about masculinity, the scrutiny of that spectator’s maleness is inadequate. Unsurprisingly, in view of the remarks above, this scrutiny owes a considerable amount to feminism and to its analyses of patriarchal versions of gender.

FEMINISM AND WOMEN To talk of feminisms plural is, in the light of history, far more convincing than to discuss a singular, unified feminism. These feminisms have been conveniently listed, for the 1970s and 1980s at least, by E. Ann Kaplan.1 Her list includes: bourgeois feminism (women’s concern to gain equal rights within capitalism) Marxist feminism (specific female oppressions linked to the larger structure of capitalism and to other groups’ oppression) radical feminism (women as different from men—separate female communities proposed to promote women’s specific desires) post-structuralist feminism (language to be analysed to discover how through the language order women and men learn to be what they are termed, at the same time as change beneficial to women is sought)

To this list could be added socialist feminism (entertaining the possibility of equal relations between women and men within socialism). Is there a specific femininity, as radical feminism surely must propose? One way of claiming that there is might appear to obviate the intellectual unrespectability of essentialism. This would be to follow the path of ‘‘biological foundationalism’’ and agree with object-relationism (both areas are discussed in chapter 1) that a combination of biology and divergent infantile psychic experience

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helps to establish woman as fundamentally different from man. Or shared gender identification could be seen as not the ground, but the effect, of politics. By this understanding, the category of woman is created by the forces of oppression against it, the work of feminism then being to invert the values placed on that category and its binary-opposite category, men. Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe place the belief in women’s homogeneity, created to some extent by social oppression, as originating from late 1976.2 Diane Elam has commented wryly on feminism’s founding issue, whether ‘‘woman’’ is primarily a natural or cultural category as follows: ‘‘[E]ither sex is privileged as a biological attribute upon which a gender ideology is imposed, or sex is denied as merely the ideological mystification that obscures cultural facts about gender. Thus, if women are a sex, they are oppressed by gender; if women are understood as a gender, they are oppressed by sex.’’3 She thus discerns a vicious circle in whatever argument is deployed by feminists, whether, broadly, they understand women as naturally sexed or culturally gendered. Curiously, a by-product of the concern with feminist discourse’s problematic ‘‘woman’’ is that man is sometimes seen within feminist writing as quite unproblematic, not determined by gender relations. If attention were to be turned to the question of their relation to gender, men could surely not be deemed as exempt from determination by gender relations. As Jane Flax argues, ‘‘That men appear to be and (in many cases) are the wardens, or at least the trustees within a social whole, should not blind us to the extent to which they, too, are governed by the rules of gender.’’4 One danger in the quest for a distinctive category of woman is that some women’s voices must be drowned out, as too distracting from the unitary. Another is, obviously, that oppressive categories seem, however involuntarily, to be revalidated. Judith Butler feels particular concern about the first of these dangers. She suggests that universalized woman is white, Western, middle-class and of the late twentieth century, and that notions of identity are constructed which are implicitly heterosexist. Both object-relations theory and Lacanian and post-Lacanian theory confer ‘‘a false sense of legitimacy and universality to a culturally specific and, in some contexts, culturally oppressive, version of gender identity.’’ She feels that the very belief in gender identity as a core unity effecting sexual orientation masks the processes which

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produce the apparent coherence of gender identity. Thus, notions of gender identity ‘‘are not the point of our liberation but rather the grounding of our continuing oppression.’’5 For that reason, she wishes to resist the ‘‘regulatory fiction’’ of gender coherence, believing that the psychological language that ostensibly describes the inner fixity of gendered identities ‘‘foreclose[s] . . . all manner of gender dissonance’’ or else ‘‘relegate[s] it to the early stages of a developmental and, hence, normative history.’’6 As long as the fiction is allowed to go unchallenged, feminists organize around an oppressive identity, which excludes much of their lived experience and the multifariousness of their personal identities. The relationship of feminism to postmodernism is a thorny problem, partly by reason of the feminist habit of making universal claims on behalf of female nature. Postmodernism would have it that claims of objectivity, and of criteria by which there might be demarcation into true and false, are internal to the traditions of modernity. These claims could not be validated outside these traditions. In one sense, by unsettling the notion of transcendent reason, which must lay claim to being capable of separating itself from historical time and place, postmodernism and feminism appear to be allies. Both after all seek to topple orthodoxies that had posed hitherto as objective truth. However, there is nothing postmodern in feminism’s concern to locate the distinctive perspective of women and then to project it over human history. Another fundamental concern within feminism has been the problem of women’s objectification. This is a major concern in Laura Mulvey’s description of the positioning of female characters on screen. ‘‘Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle,’’ she states.7 What escapes attention by concentration on women as objects is the problem of women as subjects. Subjectivity is seen as a self-evidently desirable aim. Yet, when women take up subject positions, even if they thus apparently achieve agency, this happens only if they conform to ‘‘specified and calculable representations of themselves as subjects.’’8 That is, subjectivity is a problem for women in that subject positions are taken up by objects.

FEMINISM AND MEN Feminism’s analysis of women’s oppression is understandably concerned with the illumination of the actuality of that oppression

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and with the patriarchal logic by which it is rationalized. By reason of that concern, men’s position within patriarchy has been relatively little examined. The implication seems to be that, patriarchy allegedly working in men’s interests, men have no problem worth investigating—certainly by feminism—within patriarchy. Yet, profeminist men of the late 1960s argued that male dominance adversely affected men’s lives, substituting competitiveness for emotional closeness, isolating men from each other and from their families. These men learned from feminism to argue that traditional gender roles were not natural or even necessary to a civilized society. Radical feminists were unimpressed. For them, what else could men be but oppressors, since they alone benefited from patriarchy? How could they be allies of feminists if they had so much to lose? Masculinity was characterized by radical feminism as essentially violent and misogynist. Liberal feminism saw the problem not so much as one of the entire male sex oppressing the entirety of women, but as of the masculine mystique and the mystification of the male role. Both men and women, by this argument, are subjected to exposure to social stereotypes and ideals of masculinity and femininity. It is less a case of men happily exerting dominance in patriarchal society as channeled into a dominating role by the masculine mystique. The suggestion that their oppressiveness is not, in some ways, the fault of the oppressors, that it is the male role that is to be blamed rather than the actual male, seems to many feminists and indeed profeminist men too fine a distinction. The reaction of the latter is often the unhelpful and ultimately self-indulgent one of guilt. Perhaps the answer is that the genesis of the male role and the degree to which it can be resisted ought to be analyzed with far more energy and rigor, at least by profeminist men, than has happened to the present. An interesting illustration of the way that the individual man feels himself lost in the universalization of the category, man, is offered by Robert Vorlicky. In 1988, though as appalled as his feminist woman friend by the brutality of the beating and gang rape of a female jogger in Central Park, he claims to have felt obliterated and rendered invisible as an individual male when she declared a blanket rejection of ‘‘men’’ as she reacted to the news. He accepts that

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his invisibility might seem justified to some, but maintains that pluralities among men are a fact.9

MASCULINITY The subject of masculinity is surprisingly under-explored, at least in relation to femininity. Perhaps this is not as surprising as it first appears, in that there is no men’s movement comparable to feminism that does not compartmentalize men (as Gay Rights movements must, for example) or else that achieves comparable intellectual status. David Gilmore, citing Judith Shapiro’s remark, ‘‘the social and cultural dimensions of maleness are often dealt with implicitly rather than explicitly,’’10 feels that masculinity is every bit as problematic as femininity but has been unfairly neglected in the present-day ever-growing feminist literature in cultural anthropology.11 Gilmore’s sense of masculinity’s comparative neglect must be shared well beyond the borders of anthropology. Anthropology, though, has helped significantly to establish that masculinity, sexual difference indeed, is societally learned, not a biological given. The social meanings of maleness and femaleness are constructed through kinship rules. These rules normally ordain patterns of sexual domination and subordination. Psychoanalysis adds to this that the kinship rules are inscribed on the unconscious by the redirection, thanks to resolution of the Oedipus complex, of sexual desire away from the mother (towards the father, in the case of the female psyche). Masculinity may be broadly equated in cultural terms with the notion of ‘‘being a man,’’ something that even culturally is not believed to happen naturally or biologically, but to be the result of struggle. The greater presence of testosterone in males than females, for example, can be thought to some extent to predispose males to greater aggression than women. Yet, that extent would not account for ‘‘masculine behavior’’ as it is empirically observed (and labeled). The evidence of popular cinema and of stars linked with notions of ‘‘natural masculinity’’ would suggest that its signifiers include a deep voice, quiet understatement and laconicism, minimal hand gesturing, ‘‘unfussy normalcy.’’ Tough-guy machismo only in cer-

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tain genres and at certain periods replaces this latter aspect. For example, Rock Hudson’s carefully constructed 1950s persona, lacking emotional complexity, demonstrating clear moral instincts, could be thought of retrospectively as embodying ‘‘a certain brand of traditional masculinity in the face of great public turmoil over appropriate social and sexual behavior for men’’ in a society ‘‘obsessively concerned with the problems of male ‘weakness,’ . . . as a result of such social specters as ‘the modern woman’ and the ‘homosexual menace’ . . .’’12 A much more surprising component of the masculine psyche may be the nurturing aspect discerned as a regular part of manhood ideologies by David Gilmore. Gilmore concludes that manhood is a nurturing concept, understanding nurturance in the sense of ‘‘otherdirected’’.13 This idea may command more immediate assent if reference is made to the self-sacrificial hero who fights and even dies for the sake of others, or even to that most traditional of masculine types, ‘‘the family breadwinner.’’ The above traits are associated with a societally approved and traditional view of masculinity as an ideal towards which men should struggle (at the same time as society likes to believe that masculinity may be ‘‘effortless,’’ as in the Hudson persona of the 1950s). Yet, masculinity has been typed in ways, and generalizations about it have found currency, which view it as problematic if not downright negative. We have already seen, in chapter 1, that object-relationists view masculine identification as rooted in denial of emotional need and in an impulse toward separateness and emotional isolation. Emotional isolationism may of course be termed ‘‘quiet self-sufficiency’’ and be attributed to heroes. Nevertheless, object-relationists, reinterpreting psychoanalysis along lines suggested by Karen Horney and Susan Lurie, have stressed the pre-Oedipal and discerned the traditionally admired male qualities indicating virility as signs of male anxiety and emotional illiteracy. These negative versions of traditional male virtues have found their way into societies which have been strongly influenced by popularized versions of feminism and offer a competing, and increasingly traditional-seeming, account of masculinity. Some writers, impressed by Judith Butler’s arguments exposing the illusory foundations of gender, recognize the proximity of the image of machismo to that of the gay clone, for example, the former

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reassuring society at large, the latter undermining that reassurance. Chris Holmlund, maintaining skepticism about the untroubled credibility of what Stallone is thought to epitomize, recognizes the importance of Sylvester Stallone’s masculinity to conservatives: ‘‘his mask of healthy, happy, heterosexual, white masculinity is eminently reassuring to the Right.’’14 Likewise, Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, editors of two books on masculinity in the movies, recognize in the 1995 volume that masculine anxieties are not so much to be located in the spectacle of female castration as within the structures of masculinity itself.15 What may need to be recognized is the high importance of an awareness of defensiveness as a vantage point from which to read the traditional attributes of masculinity. It may well be because male psychic experience is so akin to female that the dread of castration has the male constantly exploiting claimed areas of difference from the feminine as bulwarks which shore up his sense of a clearly separated masculinity. Empirical evidence suggests that men behave as if they too need and value love, for instance. This remains credible even though it is also credible that sex as a pleasure may often be used to distance the male from emotional dependence. What is claimed here is that the accoutrements of psychological femininity are well known to the male, but that that very familiarity breeds a form of terror, which seeks respite in denial of, for example, ‘‘feminine’’ need. If this in turn is credible, then we have to look harder at the view that men traditionally seek to dominate. It is not the generalization which is questionable but the assumption that the desire to dominate is founded in an incorrigibly dominating personality. The desire to dominate may alternatively be understood as a profound fear of submission. The real-life results may be entirely similar. It seems important, however, to attempt some understanding of the causation. The split in interpretation, between the wishful surface projection of traditional male confidence and the explanation of that confidence in constant anxiety about betraying the masculine ideal, is only one aspect of the multidimensionality of masculinity. The singular noun falsifies, it would appear. It also helps to mask the likelihood that masculinity is protean, changing at least in its particulars through history and through contact with popularized—and shifting—ideas of femininity as well as masculinity. In the 1970s, for example, white masculinity has been thought to have cracked apart

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under the pressures on it from the feminist and civil rights movements.16 Then, too, masculinity in one culture may be very different from its conception in another. Or, within the same culture, masculinity varies in different subcultures. It is the mistake of believing that what holds for male/female relations in wider white-dominated culture must hold for black subculture too that bell hooks remembers from her college days, the mistake augmented by the erasure of scholarship on the black family.17 Contemporary black men have been shaped, she avers, by myths and stereotypes. Yet, long before the promulgation of feminist notions that men could stay home and rear children, black men were happy with such domestic arrangements, worked out between them and black women. ‘‘In every segregated black community in the United States there are adult black men married, unmarried, gay, straight, living in households where they do not assert patriarchal domination and yet live fulfilled lives . . .’’18 The ideals of masculinity seem to be just that, ideals, albeit embodied by Hollywood stars who, for a time at least, lend them a strong measure of credibility. Freud himself recognizes the impossibility of either pure masculinity or (therefore?) the coincidence of a male subject and undiluted masculinity.19 Yet, the image of the ideals of masculinity alters in the movie world too, unsurprisingly if what is being represented is to some extent vitally linked with popular ideology. In popular silent cinema, with its strong links to nineteenth-century stage melodrama, unfettered ‘‘masculine’’ aggression may be the mark of the villain. Battling Burrows in D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) is a striking example, terrifying to his abused child and the ‘‘feminine’’ romantic hero of the movie as well as in the boxing ring. On the other hand, films of the 1940s have been taken by more than one writer20 to exemplify a massive loss of confidence in traditional masculinity during the Second World War and immediately thereafter. The reason for this could indeed be the ‘‘historical trauma’’ resulting not just from experience of warfare but from the sense of dislocation experienced by servicemen on their return home.21 By the 1950s, so changed is the societal understanding of masculinity, it would appear, that some of the biggest male stars of that decade, including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James

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Dean, combine in their characterizations violence with emotionality, self-doubt, a sense of only half-admitted vulnerability. Dean’s drastically early death in a car crash, Clift’s disfigurement in another, gave extra-cinematic dimensions to the personas already created by their movie roles. The admixture of the feminine within their particular versions of masculinity might have been downplayed by other stars, aiming at a more seamless embodiment of masculinity. The unlikelihood of these other stars’ success in attempting to occupy the role of, say, uncomplicated, innately confident, muscular hunk might be indicated by Jacques Lacan’s observation that ‘‘virile display itself appears as feminine.’’22 The comparative success of Rock Hudson’s version of unfussy, confident, occasionally bare-chested masculinity may be precisely that his persona embraces a form of femininity, particularly in his Douglas Sirk movies of the 1950s. What to make of these assertions of vulnerability, thus of male castration, in movies of the postwar years? Are they evidence of a revolt from the traditional masculinity that exists at femininity’s expense? Or, more probably, since the biggest male stars of the 1950s would seem to flaunt what some might term their impaired or failed masculinity, does masculinity incorporate elements of the feminine within itself? Does this masculinity therefore, as Cohan and Hark would suggest, ‘‘preserve its hegemony only by confessing its anxieties at every turn?’’23 Perhaps the exposure of male castration in the roles played by the top male stars of the 1950s or ubiquitously in the narrative and even non-stellar personifications of The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946) should not be confined to the years of postwar trauma. If self-pity is an underrated element of male fantasy, as Ian Green believes,24 then castration is in that sense already part of movie masculinity. It is not to be limited to the 1940s and 1950s, or explained as due to historical crisis in society. ‘‘Maudlinism’’ has been reckoned to be an integral part of the so-called men’s pictures of the 1930s—the Warner Brothers gangster film, Paul Muni biopics, and the war movie—and to continue with the figure of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942).25 These observations must cast doubt on the statement in 1997 that ‘‘the attribution to male characters of qualities traditionally coded feminine’’ is a major recent shift in movies.26 The surprise may be how long the feminine has been incorporated into screen masculin-

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ity, how exposure of male castration engenders sympathetic reception in both female and, presumably, especially male audiences.27 Perhaps the appeal to men of the sensitive outsider or, more broadly, of the romantic hero is that he permits them a fantasy escape from patriarchal male roles. The sensitive hero manages to suggest authenticity, sincerity, passion, creativity, but may also be paralyzed and rendered self-destructive by the clarity and sadness of his insight. The male nature of the fantasy is, for Julia Lesage, revealed by there being no necessity for the rebel figure to re-enter the domestic sphere ‘‘to raise a bunch of kids,’’ because, she believes, ‘‘[t]hat has just not been one of the options that men have imagined for themselves.’’28 In this way, the crossing of masculinity’s line involved in the incorporation of feminine suffering may be argued to be undertaken for the benefit of the male subject. Masculine powerlessness is for some feminists only a fantasy, a guise through which empowered beings play at masochism. The blanket dismissal of male experience of castration surely, though, depends on a blanket understanding of men as universally empowered. This is easier to achieve if no account is taken of class or ethnicity, for example. If all men are empowered in relation to all women (an absurd proposition in periods of slavery, for example), then there must still be relative degrees of empowerment among men. Tania Modleski’s claim, ‘‘men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it’’29 is echoed in the belief that patriarchal cinema’s trope is that the perfect woman is a man.30 This distrust of the wounded man or romantic hero is on the grounds that, as a man, he enjoys the privileges of patriarchy and that ‘‘woman is . . . denied as the proper site of the feminine.’’31 At this point, it seems as if the argument is being conducted on radicalfeminist lines and as if maleness dooms the male subject to an eternally oppressive role. Yet, it also sounds suspiciously patriarchal that the proper site of femininity is said to be women. Conversely, presumably, the proper site of masculinity is men. This implication of the proper mapping of femininity/masculinity on to male/female is more than psychoanalysis has achieved in its delineation of psychic life in patriarchy. It freezes the sexes in predetermined positions of oppressors and victims. Meanwhile, Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor call for a transformation of ‘‘the whole web of psycho-social relations in which masculinity and femininity are

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formed.’’32 How likely is that if any incorporation of the feminine into masculinity, even in fantasy, is viewed as an assault on women, a wresting away of what is properly theirs (femininity) by those who should have no part in it? Griselda Pollock, on the other hand, would seem to believe that the ‘‘feminine’’ represents a psychic position at least hypothetically available to either sex.33 In what direction does a male character who is disillusioned with machismo turn, as in the case of the nurturing/parental adolescent hero of Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) played by James Dean? ‘‘Is being a girl the only alternative to being a boy?’’, asks Peter Biskind.34 Being a girl would rightly be rejected as too extreme a description of the sociosexual positioning of non-WASPs in a white-dominated society. On the other hand, the greater ease of visual objectification of stars (Rudolph Valentino is an obvious example) and models under the rubric of ‘‘Italianicity’’ shows surely that some men are societally deemed less masculine than others—therefore, more feminine.35 By the same token, Black and Hispanic men are deemed readily appropriate for the catwalk or as backdrop for Madonna’s singing.36 In any case, men are feminized, to some degree stripped of ‘‘masculine’’ power, by such economic factors as redundancy and unemployment. By some forms of argumentation, femininity may properly find its site in women, but femininity is also, thus, forced upon men, not just eagerly seized by them in a bid to wrest further power from women. A less partisan position on ‘‘femininity-as-component-of-masculinity’’ might be of help in the analysis of its significance. The masculinity of a male moviegoer, indeed his very maleness, are to be approached as societal, not biological, phenomena. Since society is easily recognized to merit the term ‘‘patriarchy’’ as deployed by feminism, then his masculinity and that of the men in movies of which he is a spectator are usefully examined by tools provided by feminism. Yet, feminism singular at this stage in history seems an increasingly unpersuasive concept. There are marked differences between feminisms in both their analyses and aims; the common ground between feminism and postmodernism, thus between feminisms—a distrust of discourses which pose as objective truth—seems sometimes to be shrinking. Intellectual feminists are increasingly demanding that account be taken of women of color

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and lesbian women. The call is for a distrust of universalization and a concomitant promotion of analysis of the differences between women. Masculinity has—understandably—been of less consequence to feminism than femininity. What is less understandable is that, because of this lower status, the notions have often gone unchallenged that maleness and masculinity fit together and, most seriously, that masculinity, if not biological and natural, fits so well with patriarchy that it might as well be so considered. And, thus, unexamined. Even a highly selective list of components of traditional masculinity contains the surprise that castration is not so much feared as sometimes flaunted in screen portrayals by major male stars. This raises the question whether masculinity and femininity are, as would seem logical, mutually exclusive, or whether the masculine incorporates aspects of the feminine. The disapproval that this notion arouses in some feminist women may well be because an element that would be unremarkable in a woman and receive no special commendation is treated with respect in a man. Nevertheless, examples of the self-pitying or ‘‘vulnerable’’ masculine hero raise questions about even traditional masculinity. Is it the monolith that some would have it? Or, does it occasionally betray its affinity with female experience (whether that be taken as a sign of greater progressive potential or of greater anti-feminist threat than was hitherto appreciated)?

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Part II Maleness/Masculinity/Spectatorship

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3 Gendered Identification: Fantasy, Masquerade, Readership GENDER AND IDENTIFICATION IN FANTASY

IDENTIFICATION IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS OF CENTRAL IMPORTANCE well beyond cinema, playing a significant part in all relations between subjects and objects. The process is implied as early as within Aristotle’s notions of dramatic (and epic) mimesis. The procedure of identification refuses the commonsensical separation between self and other. The belief in media’s profound influence on readers/spectators/listeners through identification is all-pervading. For example, the case for censorship nearly always rests ultimately on the fear that people will be induced to imitate injurious or immoral actions performed by characters, identification with whom has blinded the identifiers to that injury or immorality. Given that processes of identification are thus of such moment within narrative cinema and other media narratives, a particular question arises: does commonsense social positioning overdetermine what characters and what positions are likely to be taken up as identification points? More precisely, does commonsense social gender dictate the limits of spectator identifications? In other words, for present purposes, do women identify only with female characters, men with male? In the work of Laura Mulvey, little doubt is raised that male spectators identify with ‘‘active’’ male heroes in cinema. So clearly, as far as her thinking is concerned, does the active hero invite identification that the female spectator may become temporarily ‘‘masculinized’’ in order also to identify with him across commonsense gender.1 No such trans-gender identification is suggested for the male spectator with the heroine of narrative cinema, possibly be59

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cause the passivity attributed to her position within the narrative is assumed to deflect identification. It has to be borne in mind that the male spectator of this account is ‘‘apparatic,’’ ‘‘hypothetical,’’ ‘‘ideal’’ or any of the other terms used to distinguish Mulvey’s sort of male spectator from the living, breathing male in the audience. This latter sort of male may have quite a different relationship with patriarchal masculinity and its empowerment. The apparatic female spectator is in still less sure alignment with the female in the cinema audience. Both male and female members of the audience may have far less predictable relations with ‘‘their’’ screen representations than is often assumed. For one thing, as Julia Kristeva says, ‘‘Believing oneself ‘a woman’ is almost as absurd and obscurantist as believing oneself ‘a man’ . . .’’2 This judgment of the belief’s absurdity and obscurantism is highly defensible if gender identity is multiple and partial, ever in the process of being freshly articulated. The fact is that work on the processes of gendered identification is far too sparse and under-theorized to permit large assumptions. Yet, conviction is not lacking when claims about these processes are made. It seems fair to believe that there is a prima facie case for some sort of relationship between patterns of gender identification ‘‘in life’’ and in popular art, for example. Thus, it seems fair to believe that there is social pressure on female and male persons to take up feminine and masculine subject positions, respectively. Yet, the pressure may be resisted. Gaps are evident between, say, maleness and masculinity. How else could ‘‘a feminine man’’ be conceived, let alone be a lived identity? Is not gender itself, according to such thinking as Judith Butler’s, a constant performance—an achievement, rather than a natural state? If so, how can gender identification be assumed to be predictable on commonsense gender lines? If that assumption cannot safely be made, with what validity can, say, Hollywood be labeled an ‘‘anthropomorphic male machine’’?3 bell hooks singles out the black female spectator as undergoing particular difficulties in the matter of pleasure from Hollywood cinema. In order to experience that pleasure fully, she has to close her mind to racism and sexism, and in more general terms to critical analysis, or else she has consciously to resist identification.4 Such reception of mainstream cinema forms no part of the accepted feminist account of female pleasure in cinematic identification. Because

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of this sort of absence, feminism has been accused of Third-Worldism, in that black women become the Noble Savages of the 1970s, on to whom are projected the familiar images of female oppression.5 The area opened up by bell hooks—how black spectators do identify,6 and with what impediments and difficulties—reintroduces gender, not just because hooks is chiefly interested in black women’s identification. The reintroduction is paradoxical perhaps, since the primary intent would seem to be to place race on the identification agenda. Several questions about the role of ethnicity and gender within spectatorial identification are raised in particular by Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985). Much of the controversy surrounding the director’s ‘‘credentials’’ to make such a movie centers on his failure to understand black culture. Thus, in Alice Walker’s novel, Harpo is unable to become the patriarch demanded by wider society. In the movie, it is claimed,7 Spielberg’s depiction of Harpo as a buffoon stems from his inability to grasp that any man might not be comfortable with the requirements of patriarchy. However, what may be especially germane to the present discussion of gender is the realization that reception of the movie by black audiences was split on gender lines. Male opinion-makers largely agreed with columnist and television host Tony Brown’s comment, that The Color Purple was ‘‘the most racist depiction of Black men since The Birth of a Nation and the most anti-Black family film of the modern film era.’’8 Manthia Diawara took exception to the elements of black women’s revenge against black men and the suggestion that ‘‘sexism is fundamental to black male and female relationships and that its locus is Africa.’’9 black women, on the other hand, were overwhelmingly positive in their responses to the movie. Commenting on the disparity of response, Jacqueline Bobo suggests that ‘‘different readings are based, in part, on viewers’ various histories and experiences.’’10 Rather than thinking of black women’s reception as an example of ‘‘false consciousness,’’ she finds the Althusserian notion of ‘‘interpellation’’ particularly helpful, seeing it as ‘‘the method by which ideological discourses constitute subjects and draw them into the text/subject relationship.’’11 Presumably the considerable attention in the movie to black women’s experience helps to effect the interpellation, black men feeling less obviously addressed. What seems to be suggested by the

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division of reactions between black genders may appear self-evident: that gender becomes an important issue within reception if gender is felt by readers of the text to be an important issue within the text. Ethnicity is already an important issue, to judge by comments from bell hooks, for example, within all black experience of all Hollywood entertainment. It becomes a markedly more important issue when there are representations of blackness on offer within the text. To extrapolate from the specifics of black spectatorship, it is possible to suggest as a first step that gender is particularly important for reception when gender representations draw attention to themselves, as it were—as gendered within the text. Since, however, gender cannot be the sole element in any audience member’s subjectivity, interpellation happens the more easily when some other element within that subjectivity is additionally ‘‘hailed’’ by the text. In this way, gendered identification continues to be of vital concern within discussions of, say, spectatorship, but it ought not to be isolated from all the other aspects which help to create a subject’s history. To return to gender as sole factor, then, the claim has been made—and is already implicit in Mulvey—that male identification is far more easily achieved because the process is less complex. This ease of achievement occurs, presumably, because the cinematic apparatus investigated by Mulvey’s work produces either a ‘‘patriarchal’’ active male with whom men may identify or a passive female object or fetish, made to order to supply men’s psychological need to ward off the image of castration. Since, by this argument, the woman is not ‘‘authentic,’’ but made up by and for men, male identification may as easily be with her, particularly as phallicized fetish object, as with the male subject of Mulvey’s analysis. As Anne Friedberg puts it, ‘‘For men the problem [of identification] is less complex. Either way, their power is endorsed; they are allowed the bisexual play of misrecognition (with the male body/with the female body) without losing their sameness to the male.’’12 The theorization works only, however, if empowerment is taken to be the only position in which the male subject invests psychologically. There are situations, such as that of the workplace, where the male who has enjoyed empowerment within a domestic setting may experience disempowerment. He can move in ‘‘real-life’’ terms from empowerment to disempowerment. But, more crucially, why should

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empowerment be the only aim of what is after all identification within fantasy? Ian Green, for example, considers elements of passivity in cult male heroes to be highly relevant to masculine identification with them.13 Awareness of the appeal beyond childhood of anthropomorphized characters in animated movies or generated by computer helps to make nonsense of the limitation of identification to human characters deemed commonsensically like, by virtue of gender, ethnicity, class, age, physical ability. Bugs Bunny is a star, as was Mickey Mouse before him. The pit-bull terrier and ‘‘faded’’ pink poodle, not even to mention the porcine star of Babe Pig in the City (George Miller, 1998) are immensely appealing to human audiences—and not just because the poodle is reminiscent of Blanche DuBois of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Commonsense identifications, or those exclusively with empowered individuals, are cogent only within the rarefied world of the cinematic apparatus’s masculine and feminine spectators. Freud’s analysis of fantasy, embodied particularly in ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten,’’ seems to theorize multiple masculine and feminine positions. It is possible to extrapolate from it the notion that spectatorship oscillates rather than basing itself on univocal identification. Although this particular fantasy was articulated by patients believed by Freud to be suffering from obsessional neurosis and hysteria, he seems nonetheless to treat it as pretty well universal. Certain layers of the fantasy appear to be gendered for Freud. Thus, the reading ‘‘My father is beating the child (whom I hate)’’ is related to the female patient only. Yet, ‘‘I am being beaten by my father’’ is a fantasy layer available to both genders. D. N. Rodowick suggests that there are two varying forms of fantasy, the sadistic and the masochistic, relating to two different modes of pleasure.14 The uncoupling of the two forms of fantasy from those of sexual difference seems to be achieved by Roland Barthes who, in S/Z, underlines Freud’s assertion of the fantasy spectator’s autonomy from textual effects. Nevertheless, most critical discussions of fantasy imply that sexual difference remains integrated within fantasy, as another fantasy element. The positions offered to the spectator are multiple and shifting, but there seems still to be a relation with sexual difference. That relation has sometimes been discerned as extremely close—Judith Mayne, for instance, believes that most discussion of fantasy ‘‘tends to assume that sexual difference is the

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ultimate binary out of which all fantasy proceeds’’15 and states that the multiplicity of positions on offer to the spectator ‘‘finds its most cohesive articulation in the fantasy of sexual difference.’’16 The debate continues, however. James Donald is impressed by the way that in Freud the sex of the beater and of the child can oscillate at different stages of the scenario. For Donald, the importance of fantasy is not its relation with ‘‘reality,’’ and, thus, its fictional or illusory quality, but ‘‘its role in organizing and representing sexuality.’’17 For Judith Butler, fantasy is ‘‘a staging of the person into a number of identificatory positions’’18 rather than the psychic activity of an already formed subject. Identification’s alignment solely with identity is seen as reductionist by Chris Straayer, who affirms: ‘‘I posit that a process of empathic, unconscious involuntary identification, which claims filmic engagement through repulsion as well as attraction, occurs alongside a sympathetic, conscious, voluntary one.’’19 This openness to the fluidity and contradictoriness of the fantasy text weakens the credibility of such unified readings as those of Raymond Bellour in the 1970s, which make sexual difference central. Fantasy may offer vital indications, but Robert May is able still to claim in relation to it, that ‘‘there may be an important difference [between men and women], yet there is still considerable individual variation, there is still overlap between the sexes on almost every dimension.’’20 The belief that the relationship between the fantasy of popular movies and the patriarchal imagination is close, if not indeed congruent, is an assumption. The assumption is based on a reading of fantasy as mere make-believe. Christine Gledhill forthrightly dissents from the commonsense view that the real world and fantasy are opposed. She talks instead of ‘‘a process through which public and private, social and psychic, the real and the fantasized intersect and interact in a series of ‘secondary elaborations’ woven out of source material derived from material and psychical experience.’’21 Her main objection to the concept of representation, in its present state, is its reference, which she terms ‘‘precipitate,’’ of the work and its reception to a reality ‘‘constituted and theoretically known outside the work.’’22 In other words, a broadly realist interpretation of what is broadly again the fantasy content of even dominant movies is insensitive to the fantasizer’s freedoms and oscillations within fantasy.

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Where, though, is gendered identification to be located? And, supposing that the spectator can move between masculine/sadistic identification and feminine/masochistic in fantasy, and, thus, can evade the implications of social gender, how is that fluidity related to the relative fixity of the social world? There surely must be some sort of relationship between the shifting subject positions of fantasy and gendered power’s social manifestations, since gendered identification is certainly organized at the social level at least. Is fantasy subversive, because of its shifting identifications, or is it merely ‘‘escapist,’’ returning the fantasizer to the intact social world unaltered, as it were? Importantly, Gledhill does not deny the probability of a relationship between the fantasized and the social or offer answers to these questions. Instead, she clarifies that the work remains to be done, and that in the meantime we should not rest satisfied with an account of representation which is content to read fantasy in terms of the ‘‘real.’’ Is fantasy overdetermined, by, for example, our gender identifications outside the fantasy, so that there must be separate masculine and feminine readings of it? And what would constitute the principal elements of those separate positions? One male fantasy pattern has been claimed by Robert May as keeping the more important relationships to those with other men, with a concomitant inability or unwillingness to imagine women’s thoughts or feelings. The more extreme version of this involves a separation from women, in envy of them for their apparently greater capacity for emotional warmth but also in disapproval of any demand for equality in relations between women and themselves.23 Conversely, female fantasy is thought to center on issues of caring and of emotional attachment.24 However, once May has analyzed fantasy in terms of male and female, he later offers a way out. Recognizing the difficulty and frustration involved in finding ways to talk sensibly of men and women, he suggests a quite different approach: ‘‘we will no longer speak of men and women, but rather of human beings who can either be masculine or feminine, or both, depending on the moment and on his or her . . . inclination.’’25 This separation between male/female and masculine/feminine seems too sanguine, though. The conclusion offered here seems to make the apparent choice of masculine or feminine too much within the control of the male or female concerned. Can the choice really be a matter of ‘‘inclination’’?

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There seems to be in some writers a distrust of fantasy, and a fear that stress on the unpredictability of its relation with social identifications will somehow protect the fantasizers from political assessment and judgment. The politics of representation, as now understood, might seem to be bypassed if the relationship between fantasy and its imagined referent in the social world is muddied. One of the fears believed to lie in the wake of such muddying is that the gendered positions of feminist political pronouncements are no longer accepted, if there is stress on the fluidity of fantasy. One reason for the unparalleled popularity of Laura Mulvey’s ‘‘Visual Pleasure’’ article26 could be that, despite the unclarity of some passages and the capricious-seeming structure of the exposition, it offers a comparatively clear-cut account of spectator positioning—in gender terms. Men on- and off-screen are active, erotically objectifying the female by the tactics of voyeurism or fetishization. Men are the doers, women the victims. Men are grouped together in viewing terms as the sadists. Women, however, are not termed masochists, whatever the binary appeal of that probability in the argument, but instead conceived as the passive recipients of sadistic objectification. The cinematic world thus offered has a nearly Calvinist simplicity and lucidity in its moral terms: the damned in feminist terms are the objectifiers; these seem to be masculine, and thus, it seems, male. When the fantasy element of dominant cinema is stressed, and the potential is grasped in Freud’s account of fantasy for undoing gender fixity, the world of the cinematic apparatus becomes more perplexing, not so easy to judge. It seems particularly galling that, if the male spectator is ‘‘freed’’ from the implications of his masculine viewing position, he should, thus, ‘‘get off.’’ That conclusion is strongly resisted, whether from this or more respectable reasons. Nevertheless, anger with the injustice of a situation where men are dominant—but, then can seem to be enabled to duck the responsibility for the fantasy which is dominant narrative cinema—should not be allowed to decide the issue. The components of fantasy itemized by the 1964 Laplanche/Pontalis essay ‘‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’’ suggest that, more than the dream analogy, cinema is most usefully analyzed psychoanalytically in terms of its embodiment of fantasy. One characteristic, crucial for the present argument, is that it is in the very nature of fantasy that it exists across many possible positions.

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Thus, ‘‘the notion of fantasy gives psychoanalytic grounding not only to the possibility but to the inevitability and necessity of the cinema as a form of fantasy wherein the boundaries of biological sex or cultural gender, as well as sexual preference, are not fixed.’’27 Hence, it must surely be a mistake to confuse social gender and gendered address in cinematic terms: to believe that an address by a movie to a male subject means that the male viewer and only the male viewer is, thus, addressed.

MASQUERADE Joan Rivie`re’s ‘‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’’ of 1929 concerns a defensive exaggeration of so-called femininity by women, so that their behaviors and ‘‘feminine’’ attributes produce an ultra-femininity which disturbs the perception of femininity and indeed places it in inverted commas. What is most startling about Rivie`re’s conception of femininity is that there is no original, no authentic femininity: ‘‘womanliness and masquerade are one and the same.’’28 This has been taken to mean that femininity is always a performance. The notion of the masquerade has contributed importantly to Mary Ann Doane’s work, but it is introduced to film studies in 1975 by Claire Johnston in her discussion of the heroine in male disguise, as in Anne of the Indies (Jacques Tourneur, 1951). During that discussion, she claims that movies centering on female masquerade in classic Hollywood cinema ‘‘serve as a paradigm for the trouble of the feminine for the classic Hollywood text.’’ She takes the central fantasy of Anne to be the ‘‘refusal of the reality of castration.’’29 Doane employs the masquerade as a means by which to urge female spectators to use the gap between woman and images of femininity in order to illuminate the artificiality of gender and the ‘‘network of power relations’’ within patriarchy, a network that acts both to define and then to limit women and femininity. The masquerade permits women to foreground that they pretend to embody what they lack—the phallus.30 It also highlights femininity as without essence, a matter of roles and external conduct, which could be called a ‘‘male design.’’31 How far, though, should the masquerade be confined to women’s performance of femininity? There is a tradition whereby an implicit attribute of masculinity is its revulsion from deceit and dissembling.

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Thus, for example, in his Republic, Plato expels poetry—and, for the ancient Greeks poetry included tragic drama—from his ideal state. This expulsion is due to the power of its irrationality, whereby men may be reduced to tears, hardly conducive to good order among his Guardian class. It is also, though, simply because poetry lies. If God is perfect, then, for example, any change in gods’ form, any disguise, must logically make these gods less perfect. This being an impossibility, poetry falsifies with its use of heroic legend. The philosopher’s attitudes are but one striking exemplar of the opposition created between the virility and soundness of sense of his state Guardians, on one hand, and pretense and playacting, on the other. What Plato’s example suggests, though, is the longevity of societal belief in the naturalness and authenticity of masculinity. A belief, rather than a truth, is illustrated. Queer theory has for the last decade and more sought to dismantle heterosexuality-as-the-realthing, and, with it, the confidence that (heterosexual) masculinity possesses an authenticity denied to femininity. Even before queer theory, the distinction drawn between sex and gender, whereby gender was distinguished from sex (biology) by being social, surely implied that gender behavior was learned. This may have been the implication but there was a persistent social belief in the 1960s and 1970s that gender identity was part of the true self. Harry Brod may well comment in relation to this: ‘‘to believe in the existence of gender as a role is to disavow the belief that one’s gender is a part of one’s essential self, because the conception of gender as role entails the separation of one’s gender from one’s self.’’32 Doane implies what queer theory states: that masculinity, like femininity, has no essence. Masculinity is, though, significantly predicated on the male’s possession of the female, so that his control of her femininity guarantees his masculinity. However, because he controls only the trappings of an essence, the reality of his masculinity is thereby brought severely into question. The ontological vacuity of femininity may be succinctly illustrated by the performance of femininity given by Luis Molina (William Hurt) in Kiss of the Spider Woman (Hector Babenco, 1985). The homosexual ‘‘drag queen’’ to which Molina at times approximates can, because of the tipping over of exaggeration into parody, sometimes be taken as distorting the feminine. An alternative way of considering that performance is that it is an imitation of another

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imitation (of Sonia Braga exaggerating femininity in the Nazi melodrama on the screen of Molina’s memory)—so that femininity is not authenticated but exposed, by this series of performances, as itself a performance. What is much more obviously exposed, of course, is the ontological emptiness of the effeminate side of the butch/fem divide as circulated in gay subcultures. However, if Molina’s side of the dichotomy is demonstrated as without substance, does that not necessarily impinge vitally on the machismo of Valentin Arregui (Raul Julia)? And also on the heterosexuality which he seems effortlessly to embody until, at least, his dalliance with Molina? Lest there may be misunderstanding on this last point, there is no intention here to raise questions of, say, just how many homosexual deviations should cast doubt on heterosexuality. Rather, the movie offers up, Foucault-style, both heterosexuality and homosexuality for consideration as discourses, with enormous real-life effects, but no ultimate reality. A man clearly performs gender in Kiss of the Spider Woman, but not masculinity, unless we can confidently categorize Arregui’s virility as performance in the movie’s terms. If, though, a woman performs gender every time she behaves in a feminine way, why should the implications be different for the man who behaves in masculine ways? If the masquerade of femininity helps, as a fantasy, to refuse the reality of castration, is man not also, in Lacan’s terms, castrated? Men and women may be differentially castrated (if that makes any anatomical sense), but they are nonetheless both castrated. The performative aspect of masculinity is well brought out in a discussion by Steven Cohan of William Holden in Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955). What makes the illustration so interesting is that it is not particularly the performance on-screen that is referred to, but the earnest performance of the masculine by the star in question off-screen. According to Cohan, Holden’s offscreen behavior emphasized his youthfulness and virility at a time when Picnic not only called both into question but made him the object of the spectatorial gaze. The writer asks, ‘‘Is it simply coincidence that every anecdotal account of the film’s production . . . mentions Holden’s discomfort with the role of Hal because of age and temperament . . . ?’’33 These accounts concerned his grandstanding performance of viril-

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ity off set, probably as a way of distancing himself from his apparently unwelcome casting in Picnic. Something more is intended here than what is indicated by functional sociology’s claim in the mid 1970s of awareness of a male role, as a sort of counterpart to late 1960s feminism’s discussion of a ‘‘female sex role.’’ What is at stake is whether or not there is a male masquerade, directly comparable with the female masquerade. According to Chris Holmlund, the idea of male masquerade is adopted by Joan Rivie`re, Jacques Lacan, Mary Ann Doane, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha, all of them conceiving of not only femininity but masculinity too as ‘‘a series of interlocking masquerades.’’34 Judith Butler extends the notion of masquerade beyond gender to sexuality, to argue that ‘‘gay is to straight not as copy to original, but rather as copy is to copy,’’35 thus proffering some kind of answer to enigmas about Arregui’s heterosexuality in Kiss of the Spider Woman. The masquerade suggests that there is no authentic self. What masculinity and femininity have in common is, according to this thinking, their being performed. It seems to be accepted that the performances may be highly energetic, and profoundly believed in by the performers, and yet that performance is not a type of Bazinian proof of an authentic original being ‘‘represented.’’ Hal in Picnic is brought to his knees by the accusation that he has been posing as a stud. Cohan believes that what is thereby exposed is ‘‘the castration motivating a male form of masquerade that constitutes virility out of fakery and spectacle.’’36 To what extent, though, does knowledge that men as well as women masquerade become an escape from gender? Is the dissolution of (intellectual) belief in the ‘‘reality’’ of femininity and masculinity the end of them, producing a more androgynous world? Surely not. And anyhow how could it be thought that androgyny is not as lacking in reality as the terms from which this compound noun is made up? Just because there may be no original, is belief in the copy destroyed? Few human beings today are students of Platonic philosophy. Men and women feel compelled to perform every day of their lives, particularly in social settings where a refusal or absence of performance would cast their masculinity or femininity into serious doubt—not the intellectual doubt that awareness of masquerading summons up, but old-fashioned doubt of the ‘‘Well, are you a man or aren’t you?’’ variety.

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READERSHIP/RECEPTION This chapter has so far primarily considered the contribution that viewer subjectivity, particularly gendered subjectivity, may or may not make to our understanding of how texts mean. Yet, reception of a text may clearly relate vitally to meanings and values produced by social forces beyond, to a great extent, those of subjectivity. The ‘‘ordinary viewer’’ enters the cinema to view any particular movie with, usually, meanings suggested for the movie by such external agencies as the publicity devised for it and critical reviews of it. There may even be some viewers of a movie influenced by exposure to academic arguments’ reference to it. Then, too, British cultural studies has argued, following Antonio Gramsci’s lead, that cultural texts are sites of struggle over meaning, rather than embodying only one meaning which the viewer is forced to accept (or even to reject). While the dominant cultural order will seek to impose its classifications, still the meanings of texts, including those ‘‘imposed,’’ must always to some extent be open to contestation. Such contestation is likely to be in terms of readers’ position in the social formation—positioned in class terms, say, or those of ethnicity or gender. Feminist writers who reject the fixity of the structures detected in 1970s theory are interested in the allied concept of ‘‘negotiation.’’ Readership, under such various names as ‘‘reader-response criticism’’ in relation to literature or as ‘‘reception studies,’’ has centered on the notion of negotiation. It has taken up the issues of the constitution of the reader in such terms as those outlined above. Some readership theorists have produced systems of reader classification. Thus, for instance, Gerald Prince talks of the real reader, the virtual reader, and the ideal reader.37 This categorization reminds us of such distinctions within film studies as that between a reader constructed by the text—the spectator of post-Metz/Mulvey film studies—and, the actual person in the cinema seat. There is potential in any text for oppositional readings. An oppositional reading has, presumably, to oppose what is arguably, according to the dominant reading, the aim of the text. If, on the other hand, a text-constructed reader seems to offer what at some level appears to be an oppositional account, then presumably this dividedness is ‘‘within’’ the text, so that reading is not automatically the liberatory activity that it might be purported to be in some ac-

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counts. In particular, reading ‘‘against the grain,’’ so frequently promoted in such contexts as Annette Kuhn’s important Women’s Pictures,38 implies a distinction in readership that may not be entirely appropriate to what can be said of fantasy, marked since Freud as a site of fluidity. The masquerade seems by this juncture to be more a means of exposing the constructedness of gender than of achieving freedom from the constraints of gender. The acquisition of a distance between social femininity and ‘‘femininity-as-performed’’ has its political relevance. Those who perform the feminine can educate themselves as to the performative and thus ‘‘unreal’’ elements within gender. This education depends, however, on an acceptance (awareness?) that gender performance has no original. It does not seem to be stretching the credibility of the converse to suggest that masculinity is no less a performance, and that a distance is created by the performance of the masculine from its ‘‘reality.’’ How far does this understanding of performance release the performer from gender, though? A group of aware performers is clearly created by this tactic. That group may enlighten another group, the audience for such performance. However, the range of societal beliefs about gender—among these notably that there is an original, unperformed, and that this is the ‘‘natural’’ version—seems relatively little touched by the masquerade. Men and women can adopt full transvestite garb. Yet, in doing so, they are taken to (mis)appropriate the true gender of other people. Gender may be all the more profoundly believed in because the copies can be so clearly discerned as such. Fantasy may offer a certain freedom from gender in the setting of, for example, the cinema, in that Freud’s ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten’’ seems to suggest fluidity in fantasy, and that fluidity is taken to involve a lack of gender fixity. Controversy continues, however, as to the role that gender plays in fantasy. Does it constrain fantasy identification, in that certain fantasies are ‘‘feminine,’’ others ‘‘masculine’’? Or, is gender in fantasy part of the fantasy? Can there be a complete separation between gendered power in the social setting, for example, and its fantasy version? Does a cinematic text, for instance, which addresses itself to the male spectator necessarily address itself to an actual male? Can males and females thus identify in trans-gendered fashion?

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What may be on offer in terms of the narrative cinema of fantasy is clearly not a world free of gender, but fantasy activity in spectators which bypasses commonsense gender. The debate has not reached a conclusion, however. There is an insistence in some theorists that fantasizing cannot be as free-floating in gender terms as the more ‘‘optimistic’’ interpretations of fantasy theory might suggest. Readership recognizes that a text cannot dictate its meanings, even if the text constructs its spectator in certain ways, including those of gender. On the other hand, the relative freedom of the reader to refuse and oppose the dominant reading is under-theorized. An additional problem about reading, even where it is claimed to be ‘‘against the grain,’’ is that the text may itself demand, in a sense, to be read ‘‘against the grain’’ established by itself. Inattention to irony, for example, might allow this grain to seem unchallenged from within, though another reading might see the contradiction as internal to the movie. Also, the role of gender in reading ought to be more fully explored. At present, it seems unlikely that a reader would be moved to produce a deviant reading without the stimulus of concern about, say, his/her ethnicity, sexuality, class, and/or gender. All these instances seem at first sight to provide some kind of exit from gender. The role of social gender in masquerade and reading seems too important as a first step to be easily dislodged, on the other hand. The most promising of the three is fantasy. Fantasy is a close relation of cinematic pleasure. The proximity of the role of social gender to that of fantasized gender is taken to be very close by some theorists, widely divergent by others. While gender at both extremes remains of crucial importance, the possibility that fantasy gender need not be tied to social gender is of clear importance in discussions of the maleness and masculinity of the male spectator. Does he remain male/masculine in both social and cinematicfantasy terms? Or has he the freedom to try on ‘‘femininity’’ within the parameters of fantasy?

4 Spectatorship Theory IT IS WIDELY RECOGNIZED NOWADAYS THAT THE SPECTATOR OF CLASSIC HOLlywood narrative cinema is subject to the ‘‘rules’’ of fantasy as adumbrated in the previous chapter. Fantasy is linked vitally with questions of gendered empowerment and disempowerment: recognized particularly by what remains the most popular account of cinematic spectatorship, Laura Mulvey’s ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’1 In that account, the male on the screen and, by identification with him, the male spectator enjoy sexual power over the female on screen by means of the gaze. This gaze is identified as male by Mulvey, although it is claimed by others as a transcendent and in that sense an ungendered Gaze in Lacanian terms. The crucial role permitted to gender in the classic account of spectatorship has been challenged on a number of grounds. Some of these might well be anticipated, since they arise from awareness that the relationship of fantasy gender to social gender might not be totally predictable. Mulvey in another paper accounts for female spectatorship in terms of an oscillation permitting at one end of the spectrum a fantasy identification with the male position of mastery.2 To this extent, she allows for a separation between the socially gendered female spectator and a textually created femininity, so that the social female can become the fantasy male for a limited period. No equivalent theorization has been made available by her for the socially male spectator. This absence may be intentional in an account which does not question the ubiquity of the lure of domination and mastery in fantasy. Nevertheless, it needs to be noted and considered, just as the assumptions about the overriding appeal of domination in fantasy need also to be, along with those about the relevance of the spectator’s social positioning. 74

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LOOKING One of the more trenchant critiques of Mulvey’s work on spectatorship comes from Marian E. Keane.3 Keane takes it to task especially on the author’s use of Freud. She points out that, in his ‘‘Three Essays’’ and ‘‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,’’ Freud singles out scopophilia, exhibitionism, and sadism-masochism because these are the best-known sexual instincts ‘‘that appear in an ambivalent manner’’ (p. 238). These instincts always appear in pairs, according to Freud, so that, for example, ‘‘a sadist is always at the same time a masochist.’’ Additionally, he rejects the association of active controlling looks with men and passivity with women, by using ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ in ways that are not to be aligned with ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female.’’ Instincts are always active in Freud, even if a passive aim is in view (p. 238). Near the conclusion of her essay, Keane suggests: ‘‘Perhaps because at some level Mulvey’s own vision is unacceptable to her, she presents it as though it were an acceptable transcription of Freud and as though she were speaking for all women about the things that we already know to be true about Hollywood films’’ (p. 247). One of the curious results of Mulvey’s alleged wish to speak for all women is, paradoxically, that her account leaves no active spectatorial position for them. They seem to be able only, as indicated above, to identify through fantasy with the ‘‘male-as-subject’’ or else with the ‘‘female-as-object.’’ Many commentators dissociate themselves from Raymond Bellour’s monolithic account of spectatorship, an account crystallized by Mulvey and borrowed by so many analysts of feminism’s relations to spectatorship. Some have taken to heart the sort of criticism offered by Keane, that voyeurism and exhibitionism are not mutually exclusive in Freud. Thus, for both men and women, they are interdependent, though in different ways depending on the gender. The one who gazes may thus also be objectified. Otto Fenichel, in his ‘‘The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification’’ of 1935, augmented the range of the object by writing, ‘‘In the unconscious, to look at an object may mean various things, the most noteworthy of which are . . . : to devour the object looked at, to grow like it . . . or, conversely, to force it to grow like oneself.’’4 In Laplanche/Pontalis, furthermore, identificatory relations are either heter-

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opathic/centripetal (the subject identifies self with other) or idiopathic/centrifugal (subject identifies other with self). Thus, the cinema ‘‘plays upon introjective identification while at the same time providing the illusion of projective identification.’’5 In other words, subjects and objects need not be widely, or at all, separated in psychic terms, at least within relations of identification. Mulvey’s account of voyeurism, involving distance, implicitly stresses lack of identification. It would be unconvincing, though, to suggest that dominant narrative cinema does not depend strongly on identification processes or that only women identify emotionally. The importance of these points is appreciated by Annette Kuhn when she writes, ‘‘A spectator (male or female) has the option of identifying with, rather than objectifying . . .’’6 Even here, though, there may be understatement of objectification’s ability to include a (covert?) form of identification, so that the either/or tendency— either identification or objectification—remains unquestioned. A helpful illustration of a different sort of look than that which merely objectifies is provided by Steve Neale, when he says of Broken Blossoms that Cheng Huan’s look is ‘‘loving, tender and protective,’’ unlike Evil Eye’s ‘‘leering, menacing and sexual’’ look.7 (The potential of awareness of this sort of variation in the meaning of looks will be taken up in later parts of this book.) For all these reasons, looking codes do not seem to have the consistency that Mulvey requires of them. They need to be revised, with an eye to gender and to gendered fantasy. For one thing, the notion of the female subject is far from bizarre or unlikely. In her discussion of the Gainsborough costume melodrama, for example, Sue Harper claims that female stars function as the source of the female gaze, and that ‘‘males, gorgeously arrayed, are the unabashed objects of female desire.’’8 Fanzines and male movie stars from at least the days of Rudolph Valentino have played to a female gaze, a gaze that has been assumed in current advertising and women’s magazines, for example.9 I have elsewhere pointed out the considerable burden of responsibility placed upon the actively gazing, desirous woman and identified that with ‘‘responsibility for the appearance of all objectificatory visuals [of males] in a context which would otherwise threaten the peace of mind of males proudly identifying as heterosexual.’’10 While it has to be conceded that there must be due attention to the social needs that the text-created female spectator responds to (chiefly, to pro-

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vide an alibi for the exhibitionism of males), the point remains, that the female subject of the gaze is by no means an improbable figure in popular culture. This female subject, in a heterosexual economy of desire, provides cover of a sort for the male object. Once again, the dichotomies of Mulvey’s article are upset. Even when attention is returned to the male as subject of the desiring look, it must be recalled that not all males have the same social ‘‘right’’ to gaze. Startlingly, Jane Gaines points out that looking by black males once, in the period of Reconstruction after slavery, carried the threat of actual castration.11 Laura Mulvey establishes the unvarying activity of the male spectator’s gaze by identifying it with the camera’s look, also treated as active. Thus, ‘‘the active male figure . . . demands a three-dimensional space . . . [T]he function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology . . . and camera movements . . . tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage . . .’’12 But surely the camera is not always active. As Marian E. Keane argues, ‘‘Every shot in which the camera does not perform a gesture declaring its active attention to persons or parts of persons and objects within the frame realizes and displays the camera’s ontological passivity in relation to the world it views.’’13 A truer description of the camera would recognize that it can be both active and passive. Much as the male spectator? Then, too, the point-of-view shot is not limited to a sentient observer whose viewpoint we are invited or compelled to share. It may represent the point of view of the dead, as it were, or of non-human viewing subjects.14 The notion of the eternally active male subject of the desiring look is persuasive only if it is held that the male is eternally a voyeur or fetishist, emotionally detached from, and certainly not identifying with, the female object. The at least repetitious presence of the active ‘‘male gaze’’ in movies might be explained, all the same, as the projection of male lack on to the female. For Kaja Silverman, Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) precisely illustrates this displacement.15 The example cited by Steve Neale, whereby there are two quite contrary male looks at the same female,16 suggests the strong relevance of emotional distance or proximity as factors helping to determine the ‘‘masculinity’’ (activity) or ‘‘femininity’’ (passivity,

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empathy) of the male gaze. Roland Barthes, in his writings about the lover’s discourse, contrasts the look at a loved, but sleeping, body with the look at the awakened, thinking beloved. When he looks at the sleeping body, he describes the operation as ‘‘conducted in a cold and astonished fashion . . . Certain parts of the body are particularly appropriate to this observation;’’ in contrast with this ‘‘process of fetishizing a corpse,’’ his desire ceases to be perverse if the corpse, as it were, awakens, if it begins to do something (‘‘once again, I love’’).17 In other words, not all looking in narrative cinema indicates a desire for control of the object of the look. The camera in two-shots may gaze at a male and female so rapt in their attention to one another that their emotional proximity (and presumably the spectator’s to both of them) is emphasized. The woman who looks with desire at another woman casts doubt on the notion that gazing always involves emotional distance and a desire for mastery. The problem for Teresa de Lauretis of such a film as Sheila McLaughlin’s She Must Be Seeing Things is expressed as ‘‘how to construct, for both spectators and filmmakers, a new position of seeing, a new place of the look . . .’’18 Then, too, the concern may be with seeing, rather than looking. De Lauretis, in discussing Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980), thinks that the film is less concerned with the problem of seeing as such than ‘‘the problem of seeing as understanding events, behaviors and motivations.’’19

DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE TEXTUAL AND SOCIAL SUBJECT The question of the relationship between the subject position purportedly assigned by the cinematic apparatus and that of the real person watching the movie has not so far been resolved. In the 1970s, film theory tended to be little interested in the ‘‘real viewer,’’ attending instead to the discursive positions given to the apparatic subject. However, in the revolt against the ironclad fixity of some conclusions of apparatic theory, there has since then been a tendency to consider only the ‘‘actual’’ viewer as creator of meaning. Perhaps the two terms are incompatible. (For some of those interested in the viewer and fond of promoting ethnographic research, the apparatic viewer is inconceivable in human terms, unless it be reduced to a pair of staring eyes.)

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Still, the negotiations between the two sorts of viewer may rescue the studies which concentrate solely on only one of them from oversimplification or the sort of fixity with which Laura Mulvey’s account is increasingly charged. The psychoanalytic model of spectator-text relations displays a problematic tendency to universalize, as well as to narrow down ways of seeing to the unitary. On the other hand, the study of specified instances runs the risk of descriptiveness and of a much restricted analysis. The challenge is to theorize the relations between images and viewers without succumbing to what Linda Williams terms ‘‘anything-goes pluralism.’’20

SPECTATORSHIP AND SOCIAL POSITIONING Apparatic spectator theory tends implicitly to envisage its male spectator as white. And paradoxically—since the male spectator is always termed ‘‘active’’—as passive (subjected to instruments of control within the cinematic apparatus). It also conceives of its ideal spectator as heterosexual, in the sense that psychoanalytic theory, on the basis of which so much of ‘‘Visual Pleasure’’ takes its stand, presumes a particular sort of unconscious. Thus, Ellis Hanson believes that heterocentrism inheres in the Freudian-Lacanian model through which desire is conceptualized and calls for deconstruction of the psychoanalytic: ‘‘Whatever its investments in Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory might offer a deconstructive or Foucauldian assessment of psychoanalytic theories of sexuality that have been influential in the study of film.’’21 Without abandoning apparatic theory in surrender to anythinggoes pluralism, there is surely a middle position, where cultural decoding strategies are recognized to differ, depending on the history of the individual, and his/her relation to ethnicity, class, gender, and so on. Unlike the apparatic spectator, this latter sort of viewer may apparently negotiate his/her response or offer a subversive, ‘‘againstthe-grain’’ reading of the work in question. Or, particularly where the viewer experiences social marginalization, the work may be rejected. Manthia Diawara, emphasizing that spectators are socially and historically, as well as psychically, constituted, is unclear whether

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the black spectator is included in the descriptions offered by apparatic theory.22 He cites Birth of a Nation and Tarzan films as examples where the black spectator must adopt a position of ‘‘resistance.’’23 In such viewing experiences, the pleasure which is presumably on offer can be identified as afforded to the white male spectator and denied to the black. bell hooks takes this idea of ‘‘resistance’’ further to posit a critical gaze, one that is oppositional, drawing upon her awareness that in resistance struggle the dominated may assert agency by learning to look a certain way.24 At the same time, hooks allows that in the private realm of televisionwatching or in the darkness of the theaters the repressed gaze could be unleashed. ‘‘There they could ‘look’ at white womanhood without a structure of domination overseeing the gaze, interpreting, and punishing . . .’’ Thus, black spectators ‘‘could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation.’’25 To that extent, then, cinema (and television) fantasy permits a temporary forgetting of individual history in order to surrender to the pleasures of fantasy. In this at least there seems to be common ground between the apparatic female spectator’s pleasure in temporary masculinization and the black spectator’s temporary access to phallocentric power. Not for the first time it must be asked, though: If female spectators can be male in fantasy, cannot male spectators be feminized to enjoy the presumed pleasures of passivity, objectification, masochism?

VISUAL CULTURE Recent studies of what has come to be termed Visual Culture have re-invigorated debates about looking and have suggested the wisdom of returning to Jacques Lacan’s account of the Gaze. Yet, the primary focus is on culture rather than psychology. As Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, for example, put it, ‘‘meanings are produced not in the heads of the viewers so much as through a process of negotiation among individuals within a particular culture, and between individuals and the artefacts, images, and texts created by themselves and others.’’26 While Visual Culture takes the image as a central area of its interest, the other crucial area is the process of looking. Of particular

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relevance to this latter area is the Lacanian Gaze, which undermines the idea of a spectator with the power of controlling the ‘‘gazed-at.’’ It does so by refusing to allow a simple dichotomy between seeing and being seen. Gazing in Lacan may be described as ‘‘reciprocal.’’ A principal point in Lacan’s mirror stage is that, through misrecognition, the idea of selfhood is born. The viewer does not master the viewed. Rather, the viewer is mastered by it, placed, as Julia Thomas puts it, ‘‘in a pre-existing specular order over which he or she has no control.’’27 In that sense, the subject has to be conceived as being positioned by the visual, without the capability of positioning itself. Yet, the effect of misrecognition at the mirror stage is the delusion that the subject has agency, that it is the source of vision. The distinction that has set off so many debates in the 1980s and 1990s—between apparatic and social spectators—is echoed in the field of Visual Culture by that between address and reception. This distinction is related to the ideal viewer of an image (address) and the ways that actual viewers respond (reception). It is not an absolute distinction. Each is incomplete in itself.28 There are, therefore, elements of a basis shared with the earlier accounts of spectatorship, as applied to cinema. Yet, while it is accepted that the Gaze is undemocratic and to an extent overdetermining, there are elements in Visual Culture of greater optimism about change in spectatorial relations. Precisely because spectatorial positions are ideologically and historically constituted, meanings are potentially at least unfixed. Thus, it takes from queer theory that ‘‘it is the circulation and repetition of such images [those in which heterosexual relations are presented as the norm] that actually define sexual categories as fixed or natural.’’29 There is growing impatience today with a model of spectatorship in which the spectator is forever condemned to stay within the role of predatory voyeuristic/fetishistic subject (male) or victimized object of the erotic gaze (female). That impatience results in a wish to give due recognition to the history and social positioning of the spectator, to see the spectator in terms of social actuality, not just as an effect of the text. Yet, there is a danger in believing the reading of a text to be so free within the cinematic apparatus that it is determined by nothing but individual experience. The case made by Diawara for black

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spectators’ rejection of fantasy when it flagrantly violates black life experience seems cogent. That case suggests more broadly the possibility that it may be just when racism, sexism, homophobia, class prejudice, and so on are particularly flagrant (as is racism in Birth of a Nation, for example) that the spectator shakes him/herself free of fantasy and exits from it. Why otherwise should women have to be more or less told, by the apparatic account of dominant cinema, to jettison the cinema which so manifestly does them damage? Why should they clearly be felt to experience pleasure? Otherwise there is little rationale for the offering of an account of the nature of that pleasure. Are women whose interests are clearly damaged, by one sort of analysis, so much the dupes of ‘‘false consciousness’’ that they cannot see the nature of their oppression except in such isolated cases as De Palma’s Dressed To Kill and Carrie?30 Are they in this so readily distinguishable from the black spectator, for example, whose awareness of racism seems so much more acute than, say, white women’s awareness of misogyny? This last question may not be as rhetorical as it sounds. There may indeed be a difference of degree of sensitivity to the racism and to the misogyny imputed to certain texts. The question, though, is not at present capable of being answered positively with total confidence. What might be suggested while that uncertainty remains is that the ‘‘actual’’ spectator finds the freedom and strength to resist the subject positions offered by the text when the offense done to the socially positioned spectator is especially blatant. This hypothesis would avoid the simplistic overstatement and ‘‘anything-goes pluralism’’ sometimes discoverable in ethnographic research while also avoiding the determinism easily located in untrammeled apparatus theory. In particular, an interest in the ‘‘actual’’ spectator could suggest that the overdetermined psychic positions of dominance and (erotic) mastery offered to the male by apparatic theory are altogether too simple. For one thing, especially within fantasy, masculinity is not to be straightforwardly equated with maleness, any more than femininity is with femaleness. Laura Mulvey herself suggests that female spectators may enjoy masculine subject positions in fantasy. There is no logical barrier surely to the suggestion that ‘‘actual’’ male spectators might enjoy feminine positions, even feminine object positions, in fantasy.31 Only the belief that unwavering mastery is the single pleasurable position within fantasy prevents

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awareness of that possibility. The unlikelihood of the belief is, however, suggested by the psychic phenomenon of masochism, a ‘‘perversion’’ particularly linked culturally with maleness. Men surely have at least the potential to identify with the feminine, and, thus, with females on screen.

5 Genre and Gender: Soap Opera and Melodrama GENRE AND GENDER

THE PRACTICE OF MARKETING POPULAR READING/VIEWING MATTER OF MAGazines, say, by explicit gender categories is common. Today, for example, the titles of Playgirl and the British For Women claim an intention to offer their articles and features, including those of visual erotica, to only one gender. The magazines may of course be bought and read by men, but their public face, as it were, seems to deny knowledge of such readership or attention to its wishes. In the 1950s, the decade which will prove to be of particular relevance to the present study, erotica aimed at women was unknown, at least by specifying title. Scandal magazines, such as Confidential, and fanzines could easily be argued to have had a largely female readership in mind, all the same. An obvious piece of evidence for this conclusion is that advertising in them was weighted noticeably towards the promotion of beauty products and female undergarments. Erotica aimed at men was markedly visible, however, in the 1950s. Playboy is well established by that decade. And there is a more specialised gay male erotica cloaked by an ostensible interest in athleticism and bodybuilding available in Athletic Model Guild’s Physique Pictorial and the British Man’s World. Outside the field of erotica, there is a postwar tradition of magazines, such as Britain’s Woman’s Own, dedicated to helping with women’s imagined domestic needs. The titles cannot prevent the magazines being bought or read by men (or for that matter by adolescent girls). They do, nevertheless, declare a specific gender of reader as the intended target. Movies are not quite so direct in their handling of spectatorships. Titles with ‘‘men’’ and ‘‘women’’ featuring in them can only hesi84

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tantly be directly linked to Hollywood’s catering for imagined gender needs or demands. Rather, certain linguistic formulae in movie titles—Gunfight at the O.K. Corral for a western, say—seem usually to suggest certain genre categories. Historically, cinemas have not operated men-only or women-only screenings, even if the porn movie theaters of the 1970s seemed far more welcoming to men than to women. Yet, men-only viewing is not unexampled. In 1908, it was reported that on ‘‘men’s days’’ in Paris, ‘‘moving pictures are shown for the gaze of the male gender only,’’ the subjects being ‘‘spicy.’’ In order for women to attend, it was claimed, they had to adopt male attire.1 The question of gendered viewing largely concerns, though, the spectatorship connotations of certain genres: does the western, for example, cater to male fantasy and psychological masculinity? is the melodrama so called in the film-studies/feminist sense2 equatable with the woman’s film? whether or not, is the woman’s film relevant only to female spectators? Westerns, war, and gangster films, as well as action movies, are often stated to be for men.3 Because the narratives of these genres seem so concerned with individuation and male bonding, there is a reading back to a further reading of the nature of masculinity as involving fear of intimacy, especially with women. The conclusion is then reached that the underside of the dramatization of masculine individuation is the dramatization of fear of intimacy, that men’s psychological needs are catered to within these genres, both in terms of heroization of their striving and achievement but also in veiling and/or assuaging their anxieties. There are other possible interpretations. Charlotte Brunsdon, who seems to believe that boys and men have action movies, thrillers, war films, and westerns to themselves,4 interestingly gestures towards other ways to approach understanding of such genres. She writes of the change in atmosphere in women-only screenings, ‘‘Suddenly you can get an intimation of the power and pleasure boys feel as they guffaw their way through horror films. There are circumstances in which the audience can be ‘stronger’ than the text.’’5 In other words, it is not that the horror genre is in itself a male genre, but that it is transformed by male audience behavior into a genre that lends itself to the promotion of machismo. More caution, though, might be exercised in interpreting the alleged guffaws. Is loud laughter in horror a proof of power felt? Might it not be a reac-

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tion to a sense of the text’s aggression against the spectator and thus to a sense of comparative powerlessness? I remember an interpretation on my part, similar to Brunsdon’s here, of the loud laughter from both male and female spectators that greeted the earslicing sequence of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992). In retrospect, the original private judgment seems to have been simplistic. It may be more fruitful to argue for a relationship between masculinity/femininity and the subject positions offered by certain generic texts than for a straightforward relation of gender and genre. Horror seems to work by means of an oscillation between subject positions of mastery and being mastered, sadism and masochism—and thus between traditional masculinity and femininity. The masculine subject is confronted repeatedly in horror with his object status, his castration. The shock of recognition of his feminization through the workings of the horror text may help to account for the noisiness of the male reaction to horror movies. This seems a safer claim than that horror is a male genre, when its appeal to female spectators now seems widely attested. Brunsdon steps back from any such claim. Yet, she seems to feel far less caution in, as it were, awarding other genres wholesale to the boys. In this, she is merely following a more widespread belief in feminist film studies that the western, for example, self-evidently belongs, in some equally self-evident sense, to men. The converse belief is that there was at least one Hollywood genre that self-evidently belonged to women. This time, there seems to be corroboration for the belief in that the industry itself talked of ‘‘the woman’s film.’’ Even then, it could be asked whether the woman’s film was expected to be seen only by women and to deny pleasure to men. This could be a more important question than it might seem, since some claims of a specifically female psychology rest in part on working back from a reading of the pleasures on offer in the woman’s film. Further, it could be asked whether melodrama can safely be collapsed into the category of woman’s film and thus whether the alleged femininity of melodrama can offer pleasure only to a female spectator. Clarity in the understanding of the relation of melodrama to the female or male spectator would help. When Laura Mulvey writes of the ‘‘few Hollywood films with a female audience in mind,’’ pointing out that they ‘‘evoke contradictions rather than reconciliation,’’6

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she bases this claim on evidence from Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1956). While this is differentiated from Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill (1960) on the grounds that it has ‘‘a female point of view,’’ both are taken to be examples of the few Hollywood films made with a female audience in mind, since both are labeled by Mulvey and other feminist writers as melodramas. How likely, though, is it that a movie starring Robert Mitchum in a far more obviously stellar role than that given to Eleanor Parker or to Luana Patten and featuring an extended boar-hunting sequence, for example, was intended for largely or exclusively female viewing? Surely any expectation that Home from the Hill would alienate male spectators to the extent of their self-exclusion from the audience for it would have occasioned alarm in the movie industry. The classification of the Minnelli movie as melodrama, together with the generalized understanding that melodrama is aimed at the female audience, has much more to do with the history of feminist film scholarship than with the movie industry of the 1950s and 1960s. The family melodrama—a feminist label, never used by the industry7—is called ‘‘female-oriented’’ by Jackie Byars.8 It is difficult to tell if the context allows for the possibility that there are male-oriented family melodramas. (The Godfather movies spring to mind immediately, but do these, by the largely feminist film studies definitions of the term, qualify as melodramas?) Whether or not, the family melodrama is directly contrasted by Byars with ‘‘male-oriented films.’’ This blind spot in film studies whereby melodrama is more or less elided with the woman’s picture9 remains troubling. While it is unresolved or, much more often, unrecognized, claims continue to be made not just about melodrama as a genre (as opposed to an aesthetic) but also as a genre which is female-oriented. These claims are then used to investigate the specifics of the female spectator and her relation with the ‘‘few Hollywood films made with a female audience in mind.’’ Showcasing of women’s fashion; importance of certain stars; exploration of problems concerning domestic life, the family and children, self-sacrifice; primacy of emotionality and intimacy, combined with a dread of separation from loved ones; emphasis on dialogue as opposed to action; on ‘‘excess’’ as opposed to repression—all these have been identified as hallmarks of the female-oriented movie, and (thus?) of the melodrama. May there not,

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though, be melodramas which omit one or more of these? Or, is the putative femaleness of melodrama so crucial that omissions or alterations could mean that some other generic label is then needed for the movie under consideration? Annette Kuhn, one of the few writers on melodrama who pauses to consider the meaning of ‘‘aimed at a female audience,’’ asks whether women are thereby to be understood as a subgroup of the social audience, ‘‘distinguishable through discourses which construct a priori gender categories.’’ Alternatively, does reference to a female audience imply allusion to gendered spectatorship, ‘‘to sexual difference constructed in relations between spectators and texts.’’ She concludes that the two meanings are probably condensed.10 This answer, particularly the latter part, goes some way towards recognition of, and towards a sort of answer to, the question of how we can claim with confidence that melodrama, for example, is in all or most cases ‘‘aimed at a female audience.’’ This section began with the point that, just because the titles of magazines seem to demand reading by a particular gender to the exclusion of another, readers may simply not accept the demand. One female voice cited by Cheris Kramarae insists on this possibility. Talking of female reading and women’s magazines, she says, ‘‘I think boys read them also. They read their sisters’ or they buy them saying they are for their sisters . . . Boys are ashamed to admit reading it [Tiger Beat]. It’s sissy to read fan magazines . . .’’11 Both the speaker’s doubts about the credibility of rigidly gendered reading and her recognition of the threat to the male readers’ masculinity from reading female-aimed material seem well-founded. To cast doubt on the effectiveness in this regard of texts that apparently claim a gendered aim is one thing. Yet, to deny the importance of that aim’s enunciation, whether upfront or more subtle, is foolhardy. Whatever idiosyncrasies there may be in individual spectators’ classifications and expectations, evidence for genres’ existence and of generic elements is primarily to be found in the discourses of the film industry and of related film journalism. Such labeling as is to be found in industrial or journalistic discourses is the primary resource for historical study of genre and its perception. This is why Steve Neale demands that the parameters of genre be determined with reference to the empirical, not the theoretical.12 As we shall see in this chapter’s later section on melodrama, this is also why reference to the empirical, to the labels used by the indus-

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try and by film journalists of the 1950s, raises significant questions about the generic nature of certain movies taken today as unproblematically melodramas. In their temporal context, these movies were in marketing and exhibition terms and thus in terms of audience reading taken as something quite different.

SOAP OPERA The ending of the woman’s picture’s heyday coincides with the twilight of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s. Whether or not it is wise to lump family and other melodrama together with the woman’s picture, it is customary to think of American television as co-opting melodrama by means of both its daytime soaps and its prime-time domestic dramas. In the 1960s, this process is epitomized in the offering of the prime-time TV serial Peyton Place, which had been one of the now classic 1950s movie melodramas (Mark Robson, 1957). Soaps had already been established in the 1930s as radio serials, their popular name gained from sponsorship by such soap powder manufacturers as Procter & Gamble. This connection helps to clarify the assumption that the soap opera was directly aimed at a female audience, as does its being broadcast on daytime radio. The subject matter of the soaps concerned the home, accentuating domesticity and everyday human relations. The contempt deployed by critics at the radio and television genre until the interventions of feminist critics may be seen as part of a male-oriented downgrading of concern with the domestic and personal, the sphere outside waged labor. Female critics can be as dismissive of soap as male, perhaps because they internalize masculine contempt for that which is understood as sentimentality and then linked with femininity. Perhaps awareness of the generalized distrust of what is culturally seen as the strongly feminine element within soap opera makes such British television soaps as EastEnders and Brookside display a tendency to ‘‘defeminize’’ the material. These introduce more male characters, intermingle generic elements from crime series, for instance, and place greater emphasis on business themes. Yet, the importance of the personal is not lost even with these shifts. The relevance of the business theme, for instance, is usually in terms of the effect of the success or failure of

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commercial ventures on the domestic relations of the businesswoman/man. In general, soaps continue to be thought of as enjoying a special relationship with a female audience. This is not only because the origins of soap in radio daytime drama revealed sponsor interest in homebound housewives, or because, say, the publicity, scheduling, and commercials of the original, defunct, Crossroads implied a female audience for it. Charlotte Brunsdon argues that the viewer constructed by that television soap’s discourses of motherhood and romance must be seen as feminine: ‘‘It is the culturally constructed skills of femininity—sensitivity, perception, intuition and the necessary privileging of the concerns of personal life—which are both called on and practised in the genre.’’13 She specifically sidesteps the essentialism that could otherwise be implied by this through her statement that these attributes are not natural to women but more likely to be possessed by women under present cultural and political arrangements. (On the other hand, we would do well at this point to remember the argument offered in chapter 1 by Linda J. Nicholson, that what she terms ‘‘biological foundationalism’’ has become a means of avoiding overtly essentialist claims although the effects of recourse to it are markedly similar.) The narrative of soaps is discerned to have a special relation with the feminine in another respect—that the pleasures of repetition, interruption, and distraction mean that soap consumption connects more obviously with the rhythms of female work experience, especially that of mothers in the home. Shaun Moores claims, on the other hand, that ‘‘there is nothing essentially feminine about soap as a textual form,’’ and yet goes on, basing the statement on no evidence, to state, ‘‘In practice, as a consequence of current masculine discourses and subjectivities, men rarely do [occupy the same imaginative world as that provided by the soaps].’’14 In 1982, Tania Modleski offered the statistic that almost 90 percent of the daily viewers of American soap operas are female.15 What would be interesting to pursue is not just the implication that over 10 percent of viewers are male. Much more helpful would be to know to what extent there could be explanation of the apparently strong female bias in the audience in the scheduling. What would a comparison of daytime soap statistics with those for prime-time drama (of the Dynasty or Dallas variety) tell us about the salience of gender?

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The question is particularly prompted by awareness of Ien Ang’s skewing of her investigation of Dallas. She reports that 69 percent of the Dutch public which watched the program at its time of peak popularity, March 1982, was female. (That 31 percent would thus seem to have been male makes the appeal of the prime-time soap to men much more significant and much more worthy of investigation than Modleski’s statistic would allow to appear.) Ang, on the basis of letters to her from viewers of Dallas, concludes: ‘‘Dutch women seem most interested in the mutual relations within the Ewing family and in the love complications . . . while they respond much less to the business relations and problems, the cowboy elements and the power and wealth represented. It is not really surprising that for male viewers exactly the opposite is the case.’’16 What undermines the usefulness of her observations on particularly male response is that she appears to assume as beyond the need for examination the close link between female viewers and soap opera. Why else would she base her book on responses to an advertisement which she placed in the Dutch women’s journal Viva? Near the outset of her book, she notes that she had 42 replies from females, and only 3 from males. Surely, though, it is remarkable that 3 out of the total of 45 replies should be from males, given that the advertisement was placed in what she herself recognizes as an ‘‘officially’’ women-oriented periodical. Yet, that sample is far too meager and specialized surely to allow her to make claims for male response on the basis of male replies to an advertisement placed outside the sphere of most men’s cognition. Most TV soap investigations at some point suggest that the soaps offer certain ‘‘structures of feeling’’ and then go on to claim that these structures, because not fully recognized in the normative order of patriarchy, validate and celebrate women’s concerns. It is obvious that there are noticeably ‘‘strong’’ women characters in soap, and that female oppression is recognized and good-humoredly both accepted and also protested.17 While these findings may be uncontroversial, what surely is under-examined and sometimes not examined at all is the assumption that these ‘‘structures of feeling’’ cannot make an appeal to the male viewer. Terry Lovell remarks of Coronation Street, when she has identified its concern with multifaceted depictions of female oppression and of female reactions to that oppression, ‘‘No wonder men dislike it!’’18 Do they, though? Even if men should make a public show of disliking soaps, should this posture not be investigated?—just as male guffawing at horror

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calls for investigation, not merely reporting. Traditional masculinity may require regular exorcizing assertions of contempt for what is culturally regarded as the feminine. Lidia Curti writes of soap, ‘‘The intimacy and closeness are . . . defined by a particular contextual area, and take their sense from an atmosphere which is an essential part of a feminine way of viewing.’’19 Does this atmosphere exclude men, though, since work on fantasy, for example, would suggest the feasibility of trans-gendered spectatorship? To argue otherwise about the particular contextual area of soaps would be highlighted as unpersuasive if, for example, the ‘‘Northern’’ quality of Coronation Street were held to exclude the metropolitan or Scottish viewer, for example, or EastEnders to appeal only to workingclass Londoners. Incidentally, it is not just soaps’ relation (because of the peculiar closeness detected between their concerns and those of women) with male spectatorship that is at issue, but, paradoxically, their relation with feminism. Ang summarizes this latter difficulty when she notes, ‘‘A new antagonism is constructed here: that between the fantasies of powerlessness inscribed in the tragic structure of feeling, and the fantasies of protest and liberation inscribed in the feminist imagination.’’20 The solvent for the apparent impasse is found in ‘‘the relationship between fantasy life, pleasure and socio-political practice and consciousness.’’21 Ang’s awareness of the cruciality of pleasure and of the unpredictability of its relationship with social and political positioning surely helps in some measure to resolve that other impasse: between the ‘‘feminine’’ pleasures of soap and the sociopolitical situation of men. It must be allowed some place in that debate. By 1988, the viewing figures for soap opera suggest that women still form the majority but that ‘‘men are not too far behind.’’22 Reacting to this new awareness, Lidia Curti suggests that the difference between male and female viewers is smaller than ‘‘one would have thought’’23 and that therefore distinctions possibly more worthy of investigation are those between North America and Britain, for example, or between daytime and prime-time series. This suggestion, that the emphasis on gender as distinguishing factor within viewing of the culturally ‘‘feminine’’ may be misplaced, is interestingly echoed by Ien Ang and Joke Hermes: ‘‘non-gendered identifications may sometimes take on a higher priority than gendered

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ones, allowing for a much more complex and dynamic theorization of the way media consumption is related to gender.’’24 Recourse could be had to the growth of male unemployment in the 1980s as a means to explain the greater openness of social males to the feminine in entertainment. Or, it could be suggested that for commercial reasons there must be a wide ‘‘family appeal’’ within all prime-time fiction. Yet, this may be unnecessary. Some would claim that the woman’s picture itself could not have survived economically without the significant presence of men in its audience, even in its heyday. As David Thomson puts it, ‘‘Cinema’s tortured attitude to women may only stand for the confused lust and guilt in men.’’ For him, the woman’s picture ‘‘projects and protects men’s dreams of emotional life and is colored by men’s private shame— that they do not feel as intensely as women do . . .’’25 If this can be suggested about the woman’s picture, how much more easily could it be offered as an explanation for male enjoyment of television soaps. We have reached a period when male enjoyment of soaps seems to be both recognized and further encouraged by such devices as the growth of male characters and the greater presence within the narrative of what are culturally deemed male interests in, say, business life. The notion of the soaps as ‘‘feminine’’ territory seems safe enough. What can no longer be claimed without proper examination of evidence is that the soaps are devoid of appeal to the male viewer.

MELODRAMA All Hollywood cinema could be termed melodramatic, when, that is, it is not comedic. In some obvious ways, it makes less sense to talk of melodrama as a genre than of many noncomedy genres as subcategories of melodrama—or to think of film narrative as the overriding element of genre.26 Laura Mulvey correctly traces thinking on melodrama as a genre to ‘‘an accumulated body of writing’’ rather than to ‘‘the production system of the Hollywood studios.’’27 One of the most useful accounts of the range of melodrama is offered by Michael Walker.28 Tracing the cinematic roots of melodrama to literary and theatrical traditions, Walker recognizes two broad categories of melodrama, those of action and those of passion. He categorizes the latter variety further into four subgroups.

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In so doing, he takes the woman’s picture as but one variety of the melodrama of passion (with romantic melodramas, family or smalltown melodramas and melodramas in the Gothic horror tradition as the other three).29 He sees melodrama as a structure rather than in any obvious sense a genre, although his work recognizes the effect of the ‘‘accumulated body of writing’’ when he itemises the generic elements and types of melodrama.30 Walker’s awareness of this effect is reinforced by Steve Neale’s recent work on genre.31 In this, he draws attention to the way that the feminist/film studies use of the term ‘‘melodrama’’ as if it had a peculiarly intimate relation with the woman’s film so-called is entirely different from the film industry’s use and understanding of the term: ‘‘As used within Hollywood’s inter-textual relay, the term ‘melodrama’ is shown to have implied action and suspense, to have been used as a synonym for ‘thriller,’ rather than applied, as Film Studies has assumed, to the woman’s film’’ (p. 3).32 Neale agrees with Walker’s division of the heritage of (multi-generic) nineteenthcentury stage melodrama into ‘‘melodramas of action’’ and ‘‘melodramas of passion’’ (p. 4). When these categories are translated into movie terms, Neale notes that ‘‘accounts of melodrama in Film Studies have focused on the latter, Hollywood itself has nearly always understood it to refer to the former’’ (p. 4). His belief is that subsequent Film Studies articles over-relied on Thomas Elsaesser’s account, one which was not ‘‘solely or even principally concerned with the provision of an historically precise account of melodrama’’ (p. 184). Mulvey’s articles on melodrama, in particular, are said by him to have used ‘‘Sirk’s films, the 1950s canon, and the identification of melodrama with the family and domesticity . . . to pose and insist upon the importance of issues of gender, but also to identify melodrama with women . . . ’’ (p. 184). Involved in the process by which melodrama has acquired particular meanings and inflections at the hands of film critics has been the understanding of the family melodrama, derived from the bourgeois novel, as scarcely distinguishable from the woman’s picture, given recognition within the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s alongside radio soaps aimed at housewives. The considerable work on the woman’s picture by feminist film critics has generated analysis of other, less obviously ‘‘female,’’ types of melodrama as though they were as clearly addressed to a female audience and as clearly focused on primarily women’s concerns. It

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may fairly be suggested of the family melodrama that one of its primary interests is in the formation of gender identity through its relationship with the family structure. It may be less fair in this regard to focus on one gender to the exclusion of the other or to argue that bourgeois ideology may be equated with the ‘‘feminine’’ because the family is treated largely within the sphere conventionally assigned to women (home, family relations, romance, for example).33 The hero of romantic melodrama in particular appears to be feminized, so that his masculine identity is destabilized. A stock figure in the family melodrama of especially the 1950s is the tormented son, James Dean arguably basing his career on his effectiveness in this role. Does this mean that the (sub-)genres of romantic and family melodrama should be approached only through feminism, or be thought to be ultimately of interest to women only because of their generic femininity? Historically, a distinction does seem to be created by the end of the nineteenth century between the realm of ‘‘feeling,’’ assigned to women, and that of tragedy and realism, associated with maleness through restraint and underplaying.34 This distinction broadens into that between popular and high culture. In this sense, the voice of movie melodrama could be argued to be feminine, particularly because of the lack of masculine restraint associated with melodramatic ‘‘excess’’ and the utopianism of melodramatic feeling associated with the irrational and thus apparently feminine aspects of the psyche. To this extent, there is a case to be made for the grouping together of all melodramas of passion, to borrow Michael Walker’s classification, as of relevance and interest to women’s concerns. Nevertheless, it seems altogether too patriarchal to assign the feminine exclusively to the world of women, as if the obsessional concerns with love, or with parental, filial, sibling or marital relations within the family, had nothing to do with maleness—as if, in other words, passion, and thus the melodramas of passion, could be hived off as exclusively or primarily women’s concerns. This way of thinking may be exactly how the male protects himself socioculturally from the ‘‘threat’’ of femininity, but should that justification of the habit be thought sufficient? In any case, as has been stated above on several occasions, movie-viewing involves fantasy, and the common sense of the quotidian world seems to have far less place in movie fantasy than the repetition of comfortably segregated gender concerns might lead us to expect.

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It may be from less ‘‘responsible’’ motivations that movies and television have from the 1980s welcomed more and more male characters and ‘‘action-melodrama’’ generic elements into their melodramas of passion and prime-time soaps, respectively. Thus, there are on the one hand the ‘‘male melodramas’’ represented by, for instance, Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979) and Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980) and on the other the international spy rings of the American soap General Hospital or the mad scientists of One Life to Live.35 The principal aim would appear to be the maintenance and then increase of a significant percentage of the viewing audience as male. Nevertheless, it is arguable that these trends simply make more visible what was already known about even melodramas of passion in their more ‘‘classic’’ movie manifestations, that they can have a masculine point of view, whether or not it could still be concluded that identification remains with the female protagonist. This element of masculine point of view is, after all, unsurprising if patriarchal right is to be regarded as central to the most feminine of melodramas of passion. Moreover, the nurturing male lionized in Kramer vs. Kramer is already well known in such 1950s melodramas as All That Heaven Allows or Picnic. The history of melodrama is at some peculiar level the history of academic writing on films claimed by the academy as melodramatic. What seems to be only capable of suggestion about melodrama up to then is more or less overtly acknowledged by the 1980s—that there is both a female and, probably to a lesser but also appreciable extent, a male spectator for melodrama. One of the most important contributions to this debate is made by Barbara Klinger, who argues that many of the 1950s movies claimed as melodramas by film critics were sold to the public of the 1950s in quite other terms. They were marketed as ‘‘adult movies.’’36 We have already noted in this chapter the considerable emphasis that Steve Neale would place on empirical, as opposed to theoretical, knowledge in generic discussion. Klinger, by wresting such movies as From Here to Eternity, Peyton Place, and Written on the Wind away from the category of melodrama altogether, achieves much more than an argument about nomenclature might initially suggest. She removes doubts about the gender of the audience expected for such movies. The ‘‘adult’’ movie was expected to be attended by both genders, albeit perhaps for different reasons—

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though the differentiation suggested by Klinger herself seems a little pat and schematic (the male spectator courted through explicit representation of the female body, the female through the rhetoric of the expose´).37 In one sense, Klinger’s intervention at a stroke shifts attention away from the debates about gendered spectatorship for what film studies has determined as melodrama (beyond the subcategory of the ‘‘woman’s film,’’ that is). What, say, if Marx is more important than Freud in comprehension of the melodramatic message? What if melodrama speaks to the oppressed—so that it addresses women as one important political minority among others? Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) becomes exemplary in relation to the matter of address of oppression. The centrality of two mother-daughter relations ensures that this is a movie that focuses on women in the family. At the same time, the comparisons and contrasts between the two in terms of white/black come to dominate the narrative. By the end, it is difficult to care about Lora’s (Lana Turner) emotional estrangement from her daughter (Sandra Dee), so emotionally devastating is Annie’s (Juanita Moore) funeral and the aftermath, in which Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) renounces her attempt at passing for white in a public and, in context, embarrassing acknowledgment of her now dead black mother. The social oppression of black characters is addressed repeatedly, but episodically, hitherto, but from the moment of the inception of Annie’s last illness audience involvement shifts drastically. It is not so much that the audience has to choose to see the primacy of ‘‘race’’ questions over those of gender inequality. Rather, the two issues are so intermingled—and, so successfully does the movie subsume a further issue, class, under these—that it is impossible to extricate one from the others. If Annie and Sarah Jane occupy center-stage in the last section of Imitation of Life, they do so as black women, with equal stress on both words. Martha Vinicius’s observation, ‘‘Melodrama sides with the powerless,’’38 helps to open the door to the distinct probability that questions of social power play a far more crucial role in the melodrama than gender; analysts of melodrama are understandably drawn to gender as the chief focus because so often power conflicts are fought out in terms of male and female within the family. Yet, if they are so, then there are all sorts of varieties of male power within patriarchy, right down to what is clearly male powerlessness. Patri-

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archy may seem to enshrine male privilege, but that privilege is relative to such aspects as nationality, class, degrees of wealth, social centrality or marginalization, color, physical ability. In this sense, there is absolutely no theoretical or actual barrier to the melodramatic focus being on male characters in conflict with each other, both inside and well beyond the family. Still less is there a barrier if many of the 1950s movies that aficionados have been encouraged to see as melodramas are, instead, ‘‘adult movies,’’ expected to appeal to an audience made up of both genders. In one sense, yes, Klinger shifts attention from what is claimed of melodrama to what is known of the adult movie. However, academic discourse has real-life effects. Written on the Wind was never taken seriously with its ‘‘adult’’ status and required the earnest attention of feminism-educated film critics of the past three decades to establish its enormous reputation. It is almost impossible now for the movie to be seen as other than a prominent example of the Sirkian melodrama. So elevated is Sirk’s authorial reputation since the 1970s, so particularly lauded is this example of his œuvre, that it is well-nigh impossible for audiences, journalists or viewers to see Written as trashy ‘‘adult’’ sensationalism rather than as a masterpiece of melodramatic irony. The former description would, according to Klinger, have been the norm in newspaper reviews in the 1950s. Neither is ‘‘true,’’ but the latter seems today to be the only correct response to the movie. The idea has become as fixed as the former idea would have been in, say, East Coast reviews contemporaneous with the movie’s release. Given this status at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense to discuss many of Klinger’s ‘‘local genres’’ in a context, that of melodrama, which would have seemed alien to the original.

SPECTATOR RESPONSE TO MELODRAMA One of the reasons why Douglas Sirk was so admired in the 1970s was that his movies were deemed to have used Brechtian techniques to criticize the bourgeois surface of their action; the ‘‘excess’’ of his most celebrated melodramas of the 1950s seemed to shake the spectator out of an identificatory empathy with dominant ideology into a more critical distance. Sirk was thus the auteur of ironic melodramas. Reception of them seemed to be split between

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their indulgence of a mass audience saturated in desire for bourgeois luxury and their critical castigation of that same audience through alienation techniques. It was discovered that in his (and the century’s) twenties, he had had theatrical experience in Germany of such Brechtian devices as the ‘‘boomerang effect’’—whereby the audience’s desires are for a time given full play and then held up to it through a form of dramatic distorting mirror. Thus, the attribution of critical distance to both the director and to his melodramas seemed thereby to be on surer ground. Interviews with the director encouraged the belief that his work was addressed to different sorts of spectator too—both the less critical, less aware mass audience and the intellectual elite, the very sort of elite from which his 1970s admirers seemed to be drawn. These intellectuals seemed much more comfortable with the laudation of a director who practiced irony than one who made his audiences cry. Because the genre of melodrama, itself (as shown above) largely created by academics, was the creative field in which Sirk chose to operate, it was considerably rehabilitated. Its refurbished reputation rested in part on its fondness, particularly in the 1950s, for ‘‘excess,’’ which was deemed to ironize and thus to spur its audiences to a more questioning attitude towards, say, sexual and familial politics. Along with Sirk’s œuvre, Vincente Minnelli’s and Nicholas Ray’s melodramas, for example, were now permitted critical reassessment. There is, though, something uncomfortable about melodrama being hailed as the exception to most of what is said about narrative cinema by Laura Mulvey. There is also something uncomfortable about the decision to see melodrama as the ally of the intellectual, of the feminist intellectual in particular, and to edit out of consideration the clear invitation to a lachrymose, emotionally cathartic audience response in the final twenty minutes of Imitation of Life, for example. By some accounts of the Sirkian melodrama, the audience would seem to divide between a distraught, weeping horde of critically unaware dupes and a small band of film scholars and students, viewing the mayhem with the occasional condescending smile of the initiated, too cool to be taken in by the ‘‘excess’’ of Annie’s funeral. This picture seems fanciful on empirical evidence. Yet, the critical approaches to Sirk and 1950s melodrama seemed largely to leave out of account the very reasons for Sirk’s immense box office appeal in the decade. Or, if not to leave them out of account, to down-

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play them in scholarly eagerness to move on to the real goal, melodramatic distanciation. In some ways, it is easy with hindsight to see why melodrama’s tearfulness had to be denied or else soft-pedaled. The association of emotional catharsis through tears with political irrelevance and, more problematically, with traditional femininity was hardly likely to make a strong appeal to feminists. If this hindsight has any fairness to it, the assumptions implicit in it need to be unpacked. These seem to be twofold: that tearful responses make for political quietism if not political illiteracy; that female audiences, unlike male, are prone to them—if, that is, they are not alerted to the ‘‘true’’ meaning of melodramatic excess. From the mid 1980s, there have been several attempts to reconsider the place and effect of tears as an audience response to the melodramatic. These attempts are not only valiant, given the massive energy invested in film studies’ denial of them, but long overdue. The persistent awareness of melodrama’s appeal to the heart rather than the head makes scholarly insistence on alienation seem peculiarly hard for film students to swallow. Some feel as duped by the overattention to the Brechtian quality of certain isolated sequences as film scholars have insisted that the uneducated spectators of melodrama are. They fear that the old barriers have been lifted once again, so that the tenets of high art serve to protect intellectuals from the debased qualities of mass entertainment. Steve Neale, to whom is owed much of the impetus towards a reassessment of the place of tears in melodrama, points out that, in Denis Diderot’s time, weeping was ‘‘central to the cultivation of a sensitive and sentimental moral sensibility.’’39 In awareness of the shift away from a cultural belief in weeping as character-forming, Roland Barthes asks in 1978, ‘‘Since when is it that men (and not women) no longer cry? Why was ‘sensibility,’ at a certain moment, transformed into ‘sentimentality’?’’40 By the time that Jane Shattuc considers tears as an element in audience response, she puts feminism, rather than three centuries of cultural change, under the spotlight: ‘‘What is it that middle-class feminists fear that causes them to support intellectual distance over emotion?’’41 She suggests, provocatively, that their fear is loss of control over black and working-class women, and bids them to question the patriarchal tradition of thinking which would align tears with ‘‘feminine weakness.’’42 This tradition is seen as explained by the ‘‘leftist vision of

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false consciousness,’’ whereby ‘‘tears become the marks of enthrallment not only intellectually but emotionally (the ultimate sign of control) by the bourgeois morality of the film’s [The Color Purple] content.’’43 What happens, she asks, if we forget the modernist view of melodrama as distancing and read it ‘‘straight’’? Should we not realize that excess is an invention of the Western academy and that the cultural competency involved in the reading of excess is ‘‘a class and racial privilege’’?44 Tears are analyzed by Neale as always the product of powerlessness. The pathos of Minnelli’s Some Came Running and Sirk’s Imitation of Life is generated thus by ‘‘a realization that comes too late, . . . underlined by the death of one of the characters.’’45 Some melodramas permit a coincidence of points of view (the narrative’s and the audience’s) which means that realization does not come too late. Even here, pathos is produced by the possibility that it may come too late.46 The muteness and blindness that play such significantly frequent parts in melodrama help to mark the gap, which is so moving because it marks ‘‘a form of failure of the fantasy of union—a fantasy of oneness, therefore total and effortless communication and mutual understanding.’’47 Sarah Jane’s crying for her mother at the end of Imitation of Life coincides with the realization of the loss of this sort of communication in the loss of union of mother and child. It is easy to see why tears are so distrusted if they are indeed the product of powerlessness that Neale believes them to be; easy to see why feminism reacts against something which seems so counterproductive in political terms. Shattuc wants to dig beneath the surface, though, and to argue that there is political importance in tears. For her, that importance lies in ‘‘ideology’s necessary staging of the Utopian aspiration to which it attempts to provide an answer.’’48 She therefore calls for feminist reading of the ‘‘reason of emotion.’’ A similar conclusion is reached by Neale when he notes that crying is a demand for reparation. ‘‘There would be no tears were there no belief that there might be an Other capable of responding to them.’’49 The comfort of tears is in the articulation of a demand for reparation of the failure of a wish. Tears imply that the demand can be met and thus that reparation is possible. Particular characters in a particular movie melodrama may be unable to fulfill the fantasy of reparation, but that does not mean that the fantasy can-

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not still be retained. ‘‘It is always too late, yet it might have been possible.’’50 These attempts at questioning feminist film studies’ apparently deep distrust of the lachrymose reaction to movies which seem to invite that reaction are admirable. They go some way to providing a political and positive relevance to tears and help to heal the rupture created in the apparently high-art insistence on ironic detachment from what feels emotionally attaching. Perhaps their only potential flaw is in the exclusion, or else downgrading, of the psychoanalytically related pleasure of masochism in their explanation of the appeal of tears. Masochism is already a highly suggestive absence in Laura Mulvey’s classic account of narrative cinema’s pleasures. It would be a pity if, in the reconsideration of melodrama’s ‘‘straight’’ relation to politics, that absence were to be repeated. Male sensibility in the seventeenth century was expected to have as one component a susceptibility to tearfulness. In the twentieth, masochism may be ‘‘officially’’ associated with women thanks to Freud’s observations but it would appear to be a pleasure secretly but commonly enjoyed by men too. If this is the case, tears as the product of powerlessness and the genre(s) which most skilfully produce that sense of powerlessness could be expected to make a strong appeal to the male psyche. By today, it is a truism that the western, the action movie, gangster, and war films are ‘‘male genres.’’ They explore masculinity in its heroized or else at least individuated, emotionally repressed, forms and in some cases unabashedly celebrate that masculinity. Yet, it is one thing to observe that maleness and masculinity are promoted therein, another to conclude that the only audience for the male genre is itself male. (Laura Mulvey’s ‘‘Afterthoughts’’ essay51 shows awareness of the unlikelihood of this conclusion when it attempts to account for women’s relation to male-oriented narrative cinema.) It is no more likely that the male spectator is excluded from melodrama, in some senses as much an invention of the academy as its ‘‘excess,’’ created from the 1950s in the face of contemporaneous evidence that the ‘‘adult movie’’ was the genre which promoted such so-called excess. That genre was certainly not expected to be any sort of bar to male spectators. Even if the adult movie of the 1950s has been since the 1970s transmogrified into the family melodrama,

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say, there is still no theoretical bar to male enjoyment in fantasy of that genre, however allegedly female-oriented it has been argued to be. Moreover, there is no bar to male enjoyment of even the socalled woman’s picture or of television soap opera, which appears to enjoy a close relationship with the latter movie genre. The statistics would suggest a minority but nevertheless significant component of male viewers. Debate centers mainly on the relevance and pleasures of these genres to the female spectator. Perhaps it is time that further consideration was given to the nature of male spectatorial pleasure in the allegedly women’s genres. Is this pleasure as psychologically transvestite as Mulvey’s female spectator pleasure in the western? Alternatively, is belief in the neatly dichotomized gendered pleasures of spectatorship of dominant cinema outmoded, given more recent work on such areas as readership and fantasy? Tears may be at the very center of audience reaction to melodrama. If tears are the product of powerlessness, does this mean though that tears are a mark of melodrama’s political irrelevance or (worse?) its importance as a force of quietist political reaction? Do tears mark melodrama off as a category of women’s entertainment, or has the evolution of Western society driven male tears underground instead? Are tears unknown to the male spectator just because sentiment may be officially denied by him? Is not subjection to the emotional ravages of melodrama in any case a feature of masochism as a pleasure made available by narrative cinema to spectators of both genders?

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Part III Maleness/Masculinity/Spectacle

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6 Hollywood’s ‘‘Feminization’’ of the Male ‘‘[T]HE GAZE OF THE SPECTATOR AND THAT OF THE MALE CHARACTERS IN the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude,’’ says Laura Mulvey in her highly influential account of cinematic looking.1 The idea is, obviously, that the cinema spectator looks through the eyes of the (male) hero. What both look at is the women of the narrative. The on-screen woman, according to Mulvey, functions as a double erotic object: for the (male) characters onscreen, and for the (male or ‘‘masculinized’’)2 spectator in the auditorium. Whether or not the spectator looks at the woman as erotic object, the suggestion that he does that looking through the eyes of the onscreen hero seems a strikingly partial account of this activity. Surely a spectator looking at the screen must to some extent be looking at, not just with, the hero. It could be that he suppresses awareness of the look at the male. It could be that the look is often other than erotic. Yet, the on-screen male must at some level be an object of the cinema spectator’s gaze. If, by this argument, the onscreen male is to some appreciable extent objectified, then the question of whether that objectification involves eroticism needs to be investigated, not assumed as out of the question. Furthermore, the erotic pleasure of Mulvey’s spectator is intimately tied in with the exercise of fantasized subjectivity/sadism/ aggression through what in narrative terms is the ‘‘real’’ subjectivity/sadism/aggression of the on-screen male hero in relation to the woman who is his object of his gaze. What, then, if the male onscreen appears at points in the narrative to be objectified, or experience pain (pleasurably or otherwise)3 or to be victim rather than aggressor. What, in other words, if he is to some extent or for some significant duration ‘‘feminized’’—the term being used with the signification that it would have in ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’’? 107

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The bulk of this chapter will focus, firstly, on work that would suggest that erotic objectification is not to be confined to one sex only. Secondly, it will begin to consider the effect that ‘‘classic’’ Hollywood’s fondness for love, rather than sex, stories might have on the reading of on-screen masculinity. Hollywood seems to experience little of the puzzlement and reserve that academics might experience if trying to pinpoint the meaning of ‘‘love’’ and then to analyze it. It may be taken that people are in love on-screen because they repeatedly say that they are. The surprise may be that Sigmund Freud talks with comparable confidence about the existence of love and about its nature, and that Jacques Lacan follows in his wake in this regard. Roland Barthes devotes an entire work to the lover’s discourse. The relative absence in film studies of even tentative consideration of what is such a ubiquitous phenomenon in narrative cinema is startling. It is particularly so, when visual pleasure is identified with an erotic, sadistic viewing experience as if that were the only such pleasure on offer. Eros is, after all, the god of love in Greek mythology. The god more strongly associated with sex and the pleasure of voyeurism is Dionysus. Indeed Euripides’ tragedy, The Bacchae, renders in dramatic terms the sparagmos (rending and scattering) of his opponent King Pentheus as punishment for Pentheus’ secret spying on the Bacchant women worshipping Dionysus on the hillsides of Thebes. This surrender to the desire to peep at the women from his hiding place in a tree happens to Pentheus only when he has fallen under the spell of the disguised god.

THE ON-SCREEN MALE AS EROTIC OBJECT As indicated above, the auditorium male’s looking through the eyes of the male on-screen ensures, according to Mulvey, his fantasy position of activity, sadism, domination. If the male spectator’s identification with the on-screen male is so total, it must be asked what happens to the erotic fantasies of the male spectator when the on-screen male is demonstrably compromized in his subject position or denied it altogether. For Mulvey, male objectification is an impossibility: ‘‘According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear

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the burden of sexual objectification.’’4 Interestingly, the very next sentence suggest improbability, rather than impossiblity: ‘‘Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like.’’5 This suggestion of reluctance points the way to an exit from the apparent impasse created by her reasoning for those unimpressed with her ruling out of male objectification. As early as 1976, Paul Willemen argued that ‘‘in patriarchy the direct object of scopophilic desire can also be male.’’6 Both Willemen and Steve Neale7 argue for the importance of disavowal as a sort of alibi for the eroticization of the male even in genres as ‘‘masculine’’ as the western. The male body is capable of being presented as erotic spectacle in mainstream cinema as long as there is no explicit admission or direct recognition of the erotic nature of the spectacle. Fighting and wounding, as in movie epics, draw attention to rippling muscles and stripped bodies at the same time as they furnish a narrative pretext for audience concentration on them. Disavowal implies that rationalization can be offered, from the point of view of narrative coherence, for intense gazing at the male body. The spectator does not have to take responsibility for his decision to gaze at the male. Or, rather, his gaze at the male can be explained as free of erotic charge. A similar sort of argument is offered by Richard Dyer in the apparently more up-front context of the male pinup. 8 This time, the disavowal is on the part of the model rather than the viewer. The imaged male is shown to disavow the photographed object’s erotic passivity—by the expedient of being photographed in strenuous, ‘‘masculine’’ activity, or else by ignoring the camera and thus the looker, or fixing the camera with a ‘‘castrating’’ stare. My own book-length study of this area9 takes as part of its project exemplification of male erotic objectification over a variety of media (including fine art, dance, photography, advertising, comic books, pornography, the sports pages of tabloid newspapers). The array of evidence suggests that erotic objectification of the male has been happening for well over two millennia. The major difference between the eroticization of female and male bodies seems to be that the absence of disavowal in the former context augments the sense of the male spectator’s virility while disavowal appears to be a sine qua non of enjoyment of the eroticized male object. As in Dyer’s study of pinups, it would appear likely that even classical statuary

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‘‘explained’’ its splendid, nude males as engaged in such strenuous and heroic activity that their nudity is a mere detail. What was covert in 1975 has become over roughly the last two decades highly overt. The male stripper’s place in mainstream (albeit gendered) entertainment contexts, the sale on ordinary newsstands of magazines devoted to male pinups, might be taken as a sign that disavowal is no longer necessary. This is unlikely. Rather, disavowal has changed. What was once an attempt to deny that the male was eroticized at all has been converted into terms that enforce sexual binaries. Erotic male nudes are labelled as ‘‘for women,’’ in such magazines as Playgirl or, unsurprisingly, the British For Women.10 Alternatively, they may be marketed as ‘‘gay’’ erotica, in magazines which declare that their erotic nudes are intended for men. Once again, there is a clear suggestion in these strategies that no ‘‘real’’—that is, self-categorizing heterosexual— male is expected to see a male object in erotic terms. Disavowal remains. In relation to Hollywood, it would seem bizarre to deny that male film stars are seen in erotic terms. Yet, male film stars, at least in their movie vehicles, may have their eroticization far more masked and alibied than female stars. Much useful work on Rudolph Valentino in this regard has been done by Miriam Hansen and Gaylyn Studlar.11 A range of eroticized male stars have been considered in my own work: including Johnny Weissmuller, James Dean, Rock Hudson, Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone.12 The attempt has been to follow up the notion of disavowal to highlight various manifestations of it. Thus, for example, it is suggested that, just as ‘‘Italianicity’’ helps to protect the all-American male from involvement with the erotics of Valentino, the Otherness of Paul Robeson’s star persona performs similar work. The suggestions of ‘‘youthful inexperience’’ in James Dean and Tom Cruise help to defuse the threat that the overt eroticization of an adult WASP male might produce for the spectator. These examples might suggest that the work of eroticization of the male star is more easily performed if there is some ‘‘feminine’’ element in the relevant star persona. Racial Otherness and quasiadolescent uncertainty can provide that element, a means to disavow male eroticization by recourse to a disavowing belief that such stars are not ‘‘regular guys’’ or not yet fully adult. Rock Hudson’s star persona, on the other hand, seems to have

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both WASP and adult status. Yet, ‘‘[i]t is not difficult to argue that Hudson was feminized, particularly in his Sirkian melodramas with their women’s film status (whether accurately labeled or not). If he is, the process should not be made dependent on an extra-cinematic attribution of homo- or bisexuality to the man.’’13 This example is a useful reminder that one of the most effective means of disavowal is where a female gaze can be thought to bear the weight of responsibility for male eroticization. The spectatorship of the desiring female is in serious doubt as even a possibility in the work of Laura Mulvey. It is ironic that one of the most energetic rationalizations for that female spectator’s existence arises from the need to disavow male eroticization. If the on-screen male is overtly and undeniably eroticized (as with John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever [John Badham, 1977] or Richard Gere in Breathless [Jim McBride, 1983]), then male reluctance to gaze is obviated by believing the eroticization to be ‘‘for women’’—both on-screen and in the auditorium. Today, it is likely that male strippers and male-eroticizing moviemakers feel entitled to claim a form of equal-opportunity eroticism. Men have been gazing at women lustfully for centuries. Isn’t it time that women had the chance to turn the tables? The variety and inventiveness of disavowals is impressive. The essential point remains, though, that the male erotic object, now with less disguise than ever before in the last century, exists. That object has been around for many further centuries. If so, then the represented male has been ‘‘feminized,’’ in a sense that derives from Mulvey’s work in particular, for far longer than is guessed at in her work. If the spectator empathizes with what is claimed to be his on-screen surrogate, then his aligment with the male is unlikely to cease at the point when he seems within the narrative to be more object than subject.

LOVE It is remarkable that so little attention has been paid within film studies to the fact that most of the movies of classic Hollywood are or at the least include love stories. One notable exception to this generalization is Stephen Neale’s first book on genre.14 In his discussion of dominant narrative, Neale states that there is a significant erotic element within all Hollywood genres. Talking of the

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prominence given in musicals and melodramas (a category obviously used in a feminist-film-studies sense here) to the love element, or, more precisely, ‘‘heterosexual desire,’’ he states that that desire ‘‘is of course by no means exclusive to the musical or to the melodrama.’’15 One difference between genres is to be found in the articulation of, the importance given to, that common element in these two genres. Love is at the very forefront of the melodrama and the musical, but of more cursory interest in, say, the war film or western. Yet, it is nearly always there, albeit often in flashbacks in the 1950s Hollywood war film.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND OBJECT-RELATIONISM ON LOVE Many of the theorizations that are now central to film studies are inspired by, or claim a basis within, psychoanalysis. Given Sigmund Freud’s evaluation of love, film studies’ comparative lack of interest in the subject, or comparative lack of concern with the way that subject/object relations are taken to tell the whole story of classic Hollywood love stories, is even more remarkable. ‘‘Sexual love,’’ Freud claims, ‘‘is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly; science alone is too delicate to admit it.’’16 Perhaps today science is not alone among the disciplines in this habit, though whether ‘‘delicacy’’ should continue to be held responsible is another matter. The love story, according to Mary Ann Doane, is one of the most vulnerable sites in patriarchal discourse. As she says, ‘‘Its flaw is to posit the very possibility of female desire.’’17 The love story’s importance in relation to patriarchy goes well beyond that, though. The male, in being feminized by love, engenders a divided identification for the female spectator, Doane believes. That spectator identifies with both the man desiring the woman, and the woman desired by the man. For this reason, Doane rightly considers that in the love story it can be difficult to tell whether the man or the woman is the real protagonist. ‘‘The idea that two lovers are not two separate, integral individuals enables the representation of female desire as necessitating a divided subjectivity.’’ 18 The impossibility

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of totally separating the male in love from the beloved woman suggests surely that the man can no longer be seen as the subject individuated and separated from the object. Does it not also suggest, as both From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront seem to in chapter 8, that the man in love is feminized, has his subjectivity much reduced, by the awareness of ‘‘something bigger than both of us’’? And that means, surely, that male spectatorship too involves a divided identification. After all, by Doane’s argument, the man in love is no longer ‘‘masculine’’ enough to be the singular identification point that Mulvey’s analysis, for example, seems to demand. This sense that love to some significant extent unmans the masculine may be why Freud claims that ‘‘we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.’’19 While his 1914 essay ‘‘On Narcissism’’ contrasts love for the mother with love for the self, and so divides love into that associated with object relations on the one hand against narcissism on the other, it also argues that a developed capacity to love indicates maturity and psychic health.20 The conflict and anxiety which love engenders seem to be indicated by Freud’s account of the infant’s divided feelings toward the mother. According to Melanie Klein, he detects persecutory anxiety in the infant, when he ‘‘directs his feelings of gratification and love towards the ‘good’ breast, and his destructive impulses and feelings of persecution towards what he feels to be frustrating, i.e. the ‘bad’ breast.’’ Klein’s account of Freud continues, ‘‘In these ways at a very early stage persecutory anxiety and its corollary, idealization, fundamentally influence object relations.’’21 Freud clearly has a somewhat turbulent relationship with the concept of love, so that it is one of the chief things in life but also something that produces anxiety. This may perhaps be illustrated in his uncertain evaluation of transference love as therapeutic or, on the other hand—at least earlier in his thinking—as unhelpful and not related to a ‘‘cure’’ for neurosis. He is, in short, ambivalent. When Laplanche and Pontalis attempt to define ‘‘ambivalence,’’ they discover its origin in Freud’s work of 1912, ‘‘The Dynamics of Transference.’’ The term is there used for the first time, in relation both to the negative form of transference and also, in contradistinction, to ‘‘affectionate transference, often directed simultaneously towards the same person.’’22 Love and hate strive together in Freud’s thoughts on the cases of ‘‘Little Hans’’ and the ‘‘Rat Man’’: ‘‘A battle between love and hate was raging in

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the lover’s breast, and the object of both these feelings was one and the same person.’’23 These ideas show that, at the very least, love unbalances the neurotic experiencing transference love in Freud. In that sense love, for Freud, disempowers. He seems to believe that transference love is to be distinguished from what he calls ‘‘genuine love,’’24 although he then asks the question, ‘‘can we truly say that the state of being in love which becomes manifest in analytic treatment is not a real one?’’25 Every state of being in love, he claims, has as its essential character that it consists of ‘‘new editions of old traits’’ and repeats infantile reactions. The difference between transference love and what he calls ‘‘normal’’ love is a matter of degree: the former has less freedom; ‘‘it displays its dependence on the infantile pattern more clearly and is less adaptable and capable of modification.’’ And that is all. One of the reasons for the similarity of the two forms of love is that love in ordinary life is, like transference love, ‘‘more similar to abnormal than to normal mental phenomena.’’26 It becomes clear, thus, that love, however admirable Freud sees it as being, is nevertheless a form of impairment. As in the transference love situation, even ‘‘ordinary love’’ lacks regard for reality, and differs only to some degree. Transference love may not be sensible or concerned about the consequences. It may be blind in its valuation of the loved person. Nevertheless, it still shares these tendencies with ‘‘normal love.’’ Earlier in ‘‘The Dynamics of Transference,’’ he indicates economically the peculiar status of love: ‘‘To a well-educated layman . . . things that have to do with love are incommensurable with everything else; they are, as it were, written on a special page on which no other writing is tolerated.’’27 Love clouds vision, undermines rationality. Love is a matter of the Jungian imago (of, for example, father, mother, brother). In transference love, a patient’s libidinal cathexis may be directed to the figure of a doctor, who will be introduced into one of the psychical ‘‘series’’ formed by the patient. ‘‘If the ‘fatherimago’ . . . is the decisive factor in bringing this about, the outcome will tally with the real relations of the subject to his doctor.’’28 What is said by Freud about transference’s connection with ‘‘prototypes’’ or imagos may surely be extended to what Freud believes about ‘‘normal love,’’ since it is only in degree that one form of love differs from the other. Thus, the relationship to parental figures is relived

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in love, as certainly in transference. That last relationship is characterized by ‘‘instinctual ambivalence.’’29 Freud recognizes a difference between love and sex, even if he also locates the origin of the more emotional feelings (which may surely be related to love) in sexuality: ‘‘. . . all the emotional relations of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good account in our lives, are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from purely sexual desires through a softening of their sexual aim, however pure and unsensual they may appear to our conscious self-perception.’’ 30 The need to be loved is not a neurotic phenomenon. Rather, the need for love is increased in the neurotic, according to Karen Horney.31 Mladen Dolar, writing on the subject of Lacan and the Uncanny, raises the interesting question, all the same, of the automatic nature of falling in love. He uses as illustration E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story, ‘‘The Sand-Man,’’ where the hero falls in love with a humanmade automaton. ‘‘His love,’’ Dolar states, ‘‘is itself automatic . . . The question arises as to who is the real automaton in the situation . . .’’ Dolar believes that the analyst makes himself an automaton ‘‘in order to give rise to the dimension of the Other, the real interlocutor of the patient’s ‘monologue,’ and also to produce that strange kind of love, perhaps love in its strictest and purest sense, which is transference love.’’32 Olympia, the doll of the story, is the hero’s missing half, and as such she could make him whole. Yet, she ‘‘presents the point where the narcissistic complement turns lethal, where the imaginary stumbles on the real.’’33 Once again, transference love is thought to illuminate ‘‘normal’’ love. This time, though, questions of narcissism and of the overdetermination of the love object, so that both lover and beloved could be thought automata, are foregrounded. For Jacques Lacan, love has its basis in narcissism: he believes that the ‘‘field of love, that is to say . . . the framework of narcissism . . . is made up of the insertion of the autoerotisch in the organized interests of the ego.’’34 Even Freud, whose trust in the positive and therapeutic power of love seems greater, appreciates its kinship with aggression. ‘‘A powerful tendency to aggressiveness is always present beside a powerful love, and the more passionately a child loves its object the more sensitive does it become to disappointments and frustrations from that object; and in the end the love must succumb to the accu-

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mulated hostility.’’35 Horney, however, has no doubt that the aggression which love often engenders is a feature of male experience. The craving that drives men to women ‘‘is very often overshadowed by their overwhelming inner compulsion to prove their manhood again and again to themselves and others.’’ This type of man has one interest only in love, that of conquest.36 The notion that seems to be derived from such observations as Horney’s is the popularized belief that love is for females alone to experience, with the greater distance involved in sexual pleasure—or in pursuits that have nothing to do with either love or sex—reserved for males. Betsy Kay, for example, in researching teenage magazines, found that ‘‘the editorials, letters to editors, and articles in the magazines for females were concerned with love, with relationships with people, while those in the magazines for males were concerned with people and things not assumed to be intimately related to the reader.’’37 Nevertheless, it is precisely that popularized belief and the psychoanalysis-based theorizations that help to shore it up which are being questioned in the present study. Explanations as to why masculinity might prefer love to be ghettoized, so that it is exclusively of female interest, ought to be sought from within masculine ideology. Its ghettoization ought not to be taken as a psychological fact. It is relevant to Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the primacy of domination and subordination in male/female relations to find Jean Baker Miller interestingly considering the complications that at least permanent inequality sets up for a long-term emotional relationship. In such relationships, she believes, ‘‘power cements domination and subordination, and oppression is rationalized by theories that ‘explain’ the need for its continuation.’’38 Carol Gilligan believes both in men’s tendency to dominate but also in the intertwining of both genders in relationships, so that mutuality appears at some level to co-exist with power differentials: ‘‘though subordinate in social position to men, women are at the same time centrally entwined with them in the intimate and intense relationships of adult sexuality and family life.’’39

BARTHES ON LOVE Roland Barthes, in his A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, seems to share with Freud the belief in love as fundamental to all human

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relationships: ‘‘There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other: we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally; we return to the root of all relations, where need and desire join.’’40 Like Freud again, he appears to recognize the symbiosis of love and sex while he also recognizes that ‘‘tenderness’’ at least continues beyond sexual gratification and is thus distinguishable from it. ‘‘Sexual pleasure is not metonymic: once taken, it is cut off . . . Tenderness, on the contrary, is nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy . . .’’41 The idea of the separability of sex and love is given special clarity by Karen Horney’s belief that a man may experience sexual pleasure with a woman for whom he feels no particular tenderness and that he may be impotent with a woman of whom he is fond.42 For Barthes, love cannot but feminize men: ‘‘[T]his man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized. A man is not feminized because he is inverted but because he is in love.’’43 The only way that a lover can love is ‘‘precisely insofar as he feminizes himself.’’44 Love stories are identified as ‘‘a feminine genre’’ by Mary Ann Doane,45 who would do well to remember that Neale (see above) has identified heterosexual desire, if not ‘‘the love story,’’ as part of far more Hollywood genres than those few where it takes center stage. She agrees with Barthes that men in love are feminized, but her explanation is that ‘‘the male undergoes a kind of feminization by contamination.’’46 In other words, he is feminized only because he appears alongside women in love in the feminine genre of the love story. Surely, though, men in love are found in genre after genre, some of these being traditionally understood as thoroughly ‘‘masculine’’ genres. Barthes does not hedge his assertion about with such contextualization as Doane’s conclusion requires. Doane also believes that the love story speaks to the female spectator, not the male. Little boys avert their eyes, she tells us, when confronted by a love story.47 To this, it could be rejoined that little boys are not men. She then has to think, in a way that recalls Mulvey on melodrama, of the male gaze as excluded in the love story, which is exceptional precisely by reason of that exclusion. Doane is at her most Lacanian on the love story when she makes the interesting observation that, because men often act like women, showing skill say in reading women’s faces as women have learned to read

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faces, men in love stories could be thought to be what woman want them to be—like themselves. Thus, the thematics of narcissism would seem to be revealed as endemic to the love story.48 Although Doane cites Barthes on love as feminizing the male, her thinking on the matter is far from Barthesian. Her work on ‘‘the woman’s film’’ seems in fact to illustrate one of Barthes’ initial ideas in his book, that the lover’s discourse is ‘‘of an extreme solitude,’’49 being spoken by thousands of subjects but warranted by none. It is, instead, ‘‘completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority (sciences, . . . arts).’’50 Paradoxically, the love story itself is described by Barthes as ‘‘the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.’’51 It is ‘‘subjugated to the great narrative Other.’’ In other words, the lover is rendered acceptable to the world if he creates a narrative fiction from the disorder of his discourse; the fiction may be interpreted according to causality or finality and he may be accommodated ‘‘to that general opinion which disparages any excessive force and wants the subject himself to reduce the great imaginary current, the orderless, endless stream which is passing through him, to a painful, morbid crisis of which he must be cured, which he must ‘get over’ . . .’’52 Barthes is careful to distinguish his observations on the lover from those which might be made on the love story as a narrative that shuts down the disorder of love by rendering it amenable to a public that wants a cause-and-effect tale. (Here, it might be remembered, with regard to the above remarks on Doane’s work, that Barthes attempts to examine the discourse of the lover, while she focuses on the narrative of the love story, the tribute that the Barthesian lover has to pay to the world.) Steve Neale offers a characteristically illuminating aside into the audience experience of the love story when he argues that the spectator wishes the melodramatic hero and heroine to be loved ‘‘in order to satisfy his or her own wish for the union of the couple.’’ This wish is narcissistic, rooted in a nostalgic fantasy of childhood, ‘‘characterized by union with the mother: a state of love, satisfaction, and dyadic confusion.’’53 In this way, he shows the audience pleasure in the love story to accord with Lacan’s emphasis on narcissism in the experience of love itself.

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The untenability of a view where only women can be objectified and where men can allow themselves only to be subjects seems apparent when there is consideration of the frequency of male erotic objectification. That that latter objectification has been in turn thought untenable is both curious and easily comprehensible. Male erotic objectification constantly seeks cover in disavowal. Thus, it happens only because of the exigencies of the narrative, or it happens to men who are performing such prodigiously ‘‘masculine’’ feats as to banish belief that these feats enable straining muscles and shining skin to be eroticized. Or, again, it happens because women demand that it happen. Or it happens to males who are not, by reason of ethnicity, sexuality, or class, say, the men that male fantasy determines to be fully men. The ‘‘feminization’’ consequent on erotic objectification—of the male, just as of the female—is discovered in another context, that of the love story that so frequently plays a part, of varying importance, in Hollywood movies. The fundamental importance attributed by Freud and Barthes to love, as the basis for all relationships in human society, seems to have been largely underappreciated within film studies. Where love and love stories are recognized as relevant, film studies has tended to hive discussion of them off under the category of ‘‘feminine genre,’’ and to treat reciprocity, the feminization of the male, aggression giving way to tenderness, as explicable largely by the feminine context. Love stories are not confined to melodramas and musicals, however. They are often part, sometimes a significant part, of all other Hollywood genres. Moreover, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, such work as Barbara Klinger’s shows that the habit of claiming love stories as ipso facto melodramas is false to the habits of the times in which they were made. Only if we broaden the understanding of ‘‘melodrama’’ to include such movies as The Men, From Here to Eternity, and On the Waterfront (all to be analyzed in Chapter 8), and thus recognize the strongly ‘‘male’’ nature of such melodramas, can we continue to think that a study of melodrama is sufficient to allow us to comprehend the contribution of the love story to Hollywood narrative. That broadening seriously strains the explanation of Hollywood narrative as driven by male desire to subjugate and objectify women. If ‘‘melodrama’’ were rethought, it would no longer in many

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cases be the exception—something which, focusing on women and feminine sexuality, can thus be left to feminist critics who attempt to account for only female pleasure in such narratives. If it were reconceptualized as the rule, then consideration would have to be given to the presence of love in the very love stories that account for so much of the Hollywood product. If melodrama is viewed as the rule rather than the exception, then masculinity on screen alters. Though Barthes prefers to talk of lovers rather than their fictions, Freud, Lacan and he too recognize that love always feminizes, always disorients and undermines power, masculine power included. In that case, by the end of most Hollywood movies even the most unreconstructed masculinity has been tampered with, rendered less aggressive, less distant. And in that case the male spectator’s relationship with dominant on-screen narratives of at least the classic period of Hollywood cannot amount merely to fulfillment of fantasies of omnipotence. Love feminizes. It does not equalize. Freud, even at his most rapturous, does not suggest that love puts the sexes on a footing of equality. Nevertheless, it does affect both parties in the love relationship. A man in love cannot be the whole, untouched being that ‘‘male fantasy’’ is taken to promote. His being in love must, more potently than his sexual objectification of the female, speak to his castration.

7 The 1950s: The United States, Hollywood, and Hitchcock CHAPTER 8 CONCERNS A SAMPLE OF MOVIES FROM THE FIRST HALF OF THE 1950s. The present chapter is intended as an introduction to the period. The 1950s is a time of particular importance to analysis of those films which have played a prominent part in film studies debates on gendered spectatorship. For one thing, the Hollywood output of Douglas Sirk has since the opening of the 1970s been given widespread attention with special regard to what have been termed his melodramas of the mid to late 1950s. Among these are, most notably, his Written on the Wind and his final film in 1959, Imitation of Life. In addition, some of the most admired movies of Vincente Minnelli and Nicholas Ray, again categorized by film studies as melodramas, belong to the same decade. The focus of the rest of this study will be on the male spectator, and thus for obvious reasons to an extent on what is almost received wisdom about the male spectator and his on-screen identification points, male heroes. Much of this springs from Laura Mulvey’s views on visual pleasure and its allegedly ‘‘masculine’’ qualities—reinforcing notions of activity and mastery as properly male within patriarchy.1 Her most widely influential work belongs to the mid 1970s and early 1980s, but a significant support for her theorizing is evidence taken from Hitchcock’s films of the 1950s, especially Rear Window and Vertigo—and, also his Marnie. In addition, Mulvey cites the films of von Sternberg; and it should be noted that Marnie belongs to the 1960s. Nevertheless, it would be odd not to focus particularly on Hitchcock 1950s films, especially in the light of the belief that they expose the workings of the look, whereby woman is objectified to ward off the male’s castration anxiety and to offer him the illusion of mastery and control. In any case, as Creekmur and Doty put it, ‘‘Hitchcock’s films, more than those of 121

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anyone else, have become the ‘test cases’ for each new position in film theory and criticism.’’2 It is also important to re-examine the now traditional ways of looking at the decade. That will take up the first section of the rest of this chapter. It might be worth making the point here that, even if Hitchcock’s films are to be the focus of this chapter’s second and final major section, the basic point of their inclusion—that Hitchcock is taken to show awareness of the operations of the look and what could be termed its male bias—has relevance to 1950s movies of different authorship. Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, for example, seems at some important level to be concerned with the absence of paternal masculinity to provide role models for a lost generation of angstridden teenagers. Jim (James Dean) despairs of his over-domesticated, henpecked father as a guide towards mature masculinity. Plato (Sal Mineo), already rudderless and bereft of both parents, seems to be a hopeless case, who dies at the finale of the film. Before then, though, Plato has been a surrogate child to the potential mother played by Natalie Wood and potential father, Jim, in a sort of idealized ‘‘pretended family relationship,’’ to use the jargon of the 1980s. The masculinity which Jim learns from his vicarious experience of parenthood is protective and affectionate as well as assertive. In view of this, it is hardly a coincidence that Rock Hudson, playing the favorite male hero in Sirk, offers a picture of quiet strength, unfussy dependability, a reassuring supportiveness that is, indeed, rocklike. The revelation of the star’s homosexuality through exposure of the facts of his AIDS-related death in the 1980s has resulted in many attempts to reread his ‘‘feminized’’ hero in terms of closeted gayness. While this may be unavoidably attractive to culture critics since Hudson’s death, his Hollywood persona seems, on the contrary, to have represented a bastion of unquestionable male ‘‘normality’’ in the 1950s. If this is so, then masculinity as an ideal in the 1950s, at least in Sirk, is less aligned with aggression and shows of superiority than Mulvey’s analysis might lead us to suspect. (It nevertheless needs to be remembered that she regularly sees melodrama as an exception to the patriarchal rules that seem to obtain in other genres. All the same, our present-day assumptions about the identity of melodrama ought to be revised in the

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light of knowledge about Hollywood marketing in the 1950s of what we now take to be melodrama.)

THE UNITED STATES IN THE 1950S Today, the popular imagination conceives of the 1950s as a time of growing material security for American families and concomitantly of notable complacency within the United States of that decade. If film studies has viewed the Eisenhower period as having such connotations as those associated with glittering possessions and soulless lives, this is in no small measure attributable to the analysis since the 1970s of what has been taken to be 1950s melodrama in general, Douglas Sirk’s melodramas in particular. This analysis has detected an awareness of spiritual emptiness beneath the headlong pursuit of material goods, and has tended to read this back to the historical period. Sirk, in the role of social critic, is thought to have merely highlighted a nearsightedness, or possibly blindness, that afflicted an entire society. Yet, attention to the political events and beliefs of the time suggests that this reading—when it is applied to American society of the historical period, at least—may be too simple, that, whatever the growing affluence of the American family, it was afflicted by a generalized malaise manifesting itself both within the nation and with relevance to foreign relations. Above all perhaps, public exposure to knowledge of the destructive potential of nuclear weapons undermined confidence not just in humankind’s but also in the planet’s powers of survival. A sober awareness of the possibility of global annihilation does not contribute to domestic self-confidence, although the psychological mechanisms of denial could admittedly work intermittently to produce intense concentration on personal and familial well-being. (This would to some extent validate the reading of 1950s American society as blinkered and uncomprehending, but less from complacency than overpowering fear.) The Korean war in the early part of the decade was sold to the public as a form of police action. Yet, it served to remind the United States of grimmer matters concerned with the possibility of nuclear conflict. The Cold War was largely based on fears that the former Soviet Union was capable of building up its armaments on a scale

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which could make aggression against the United States a feasibility. Hence, the particular seriousness with which the alleged leaking of what were taken to be American nuclear secrets was viewed both by Government and populace. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 augmented American alarm about the former Soviet Union’s capabilities. It was the atmosphere of deep distrust of and competitiveness with the USSR that helps to make sense of the hold that Senator Joseph McCarthy acquired over not only public but governmental attitudes to ‘‘Communism,’’ a useful postwar American label for just about all liberal and leftist dissent from mainstream Republican thinking. Communism was linked immediately in the public imagination with Moscow. Therefore, to hold ‘‘Communist’’ sympathies was rendered tantamount to collaborating with what was held to be the chief external threat to not only the purportedly American way of life but to American survival. McCarthy’s investigations into what he claimed to be fully fledged Communists or fellow-travellers were much aided by cloaking them in the guise of a crusade against ‘‘unAmerican activities.’’ On 9 February 1950, McCarthy claimed in a speech at a Republican party dinner in West Virginia that more than 200 members of the State Department were registered members of the Communist Party. The falsity of the claim ought soon to have been obvious. In later speeches, he significantly reduced the number by over half, and what were once card-carrying Communists became ‘‘security risks.’’ By 1954, he had lost face thanks in particular to the televizing of his arguments with the United States Army. Nevertheless, that his claims should have been taken so seriously for such a length of time (his anti-Communist work had begun in the previous decade) must surely suggest the paranoia that the Cold War engendered. No serious investigation of their credibility was undertaken at the time. Instead, HUAC sought evidence by which to authenticate McCarthy’s today outlandish-seeming scenario of Communist infiltration into even Hollywood. It was confident of the broad McCarthyite picture, anxious only about whether it could successfully search out the damning evidence through, for example, the use of ‘‘friendly witnesses.’’ Desegregation was another profoundly unsettling issue in American political life of the decade. Martin Luther King in 1955 challenged the ‘‘back of the bus’’ rules by which black citizens were

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routinely degraded in the South. The challenge to white supremacy, experienced in such areas as public-school education, reached into the sports world too. Again by the mid-1950s, statistics suggested that American marriages were far less stable than had been assumed. In 1956, the number of couples which separated was reckoned to have reached the two million mark, while over a sixth of the couples which remained together claimed to be unhappy. If the American teenager was practically an invention of the 1950s, so was the term ‘‘juvenile delinquency.’’ Adolescent dress, social habits, slang, proved fascinating to the media. By the time of rock ’n roll’s major advent in the mid 1950s, teenage reaction— screaming at such idols as Elvis Presley, jiving to Bill Haley and the Comets—was capable of being viewed as evidence of American youth’s running wild. It is no accident that The Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) opens with Haley’s ‘‘Rock Around the Clock’’ on the soundtrack. Issues of antisocial teenage behaviour, of sexuality and ‘‘race,’’ were popularly tied in with the arrival of a music which, however it might seek to deny its roots in Black rhythm ’n blues, appeared to have massive appeal for teenagers of every hue across the nation. (Evidence for part of that denial can be found in disc jockey Alan Freed’s introduction of the new music to New York under the title of the Big Beat.) The appearance of the new Playboy magazine, together with the publication of paperbacks by Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins, notorious in particular for their titillating cover illustrations, marked a shift in standards of public acceptability. The mammary fetish was made evident in the popularity of movies undisguisedly promoting the curvaceousness of their female stars, whether that of the ‘‘European’’ Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida or Anita Ekberg, or of the homegrown American (and usually blonde) variety, such as, obviously, Marilyn Monroe, but also Jayne Mansfield or Mamie Van Doren. When sex and violence were thought to have pervaded comic books, pressure groups largely formed of ‘‘concerned’’ parents were created. Postwar family ideology stressed familial ‘‘togetherness,’’ with husband and wife conceived as partners, their relations with each other and their children as more democratic than formerly. Conflict was supposed to be settled on the grounds of consensus. Each member of the family had a particular share in both household and gar-

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dening chores and in problem-solving. It might be worth noting, in relation to the present study, that thanks to family ideology there was an attempt to ‘‘feminize’’ the male partner in marriage through greater appreciation of and contributions to domestic happiness at a time when work experience was becoming more complex. As Peter G. Filene puts it, ‘‘Home beckoned as a refuge where he hoped to validate his worth, amid the love of his wife and children and amid the possessions that he had provided for them. Because the occupational setting furnished increasingly tricky mirrors for his identity, he looked more than ever to domestic mirrors.’’3 At the same time, however, the 1950s marks a loss of centrality for the image of the harmonious American family, thanks to the movies of, particularly, Nicholas Ray, Vincente Minnelli and, especially, Douglas Sirk. Part of Hollywood’s problem in this decade was, though, its commercial insecurity because of sharp movie audience decline since its peak year of 1946. This decline is attributable to greater diversification in the use of leisure time, a proliferation of other entertainments (primarily TV), including that of driving around in new automobiles with rock ’n roll music on the car radio. Movies remain an important indicator of social concerns, but not the only indicator worth taking seriously, when, say, television and rock music seem to make obvious addresses to Americans of the time. One medium which appears to be particularly noticeable in its relations with Hollywood is that of the theater. Lee and Paula Strasberg’s Actors Studio promoted ‘‘The Method’’ as a reinterpretation of Stanislavski’s ideas on acting. In so doing, it transported from New York to California a style of performance—so intensely emotional as to seem at times inarticulate—associated with Montgomery Clift and James Dean but in particular with Marlon Brando. Then too, several ‘‘serious movies’’ of the 1950s are adaptations of plays written by Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Arthur Miller. Another medium is that of the novel. The best-seller status of work by James Jones, Norman Mailer, and Irwin Shaw encouraged the awareness in Hollywood that sexual explicitness and iconoclastic attitudes to organizations such as the military might be exploited without alienation of the mass audience. Then, too, a quite different sort of book, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, is traditionally taken to be the inspiration for the Beat Gener-

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ation, popularized through the term ‘‘beatniks.’’ The Beats gave visibility to the beginnings of a counterculture, rejecting violence and the excessive materialism associated with American affluence, claiming connections with French existentialism and Zen Buddhism. Their questioning of norms extended to those of sexuality. Through the particular branch of entertainment known as standup comedy, which veered now towards the ‘‘sick’’ humor associated primarily with Lenny Bruce, marriage, monogamy and notions of sexual decency were further targeted Hollywood in the 1950s incorporated public fascination with at least popularized Freudian psychoanalysis by means of such movies as the asylum-set The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli, 1955) or the multiple-personality investigation offered in The Three Faces of Eve (Nunnally Johnson, 1957). It associated psychological problems with female and adolescent characters in particular, especially in the setting of family dysfunction. (This means that the directions in which film studies has since the 1970s approached its own creation, movie melodrama, accord to some extent with pointers from the industry.) In view of the above, it might seem surprising that women at the start of the 1950s had so significantly deserted Hollywood movies as to be virtually equal with the male audience which it had once so clearly exceeded. Marjorie Rosen cites a Variety report of 1951 which shows that the female audience had dropped from 67 percent to 52 percent since 1944. She credits as reasons for the decline women’s intolerance of the inanity of their representation and of the male domination of movies.4 Yet, those 1950s movies which centered on, for example, the dissection of small-town life to show the emptiness and dissatisfaction gnawing at the fac¸ade of contentment seem precisely to refocus both aspects of Rosen’s concern. It would clearly be useful to have some more precise idea of the distribution of percentages in terms of area—particularly the area of genre. (That said, Barbara Klinger has shown that genre classification may change significantly over time, so that what is taken unproblematically as melodrama from the 1970s onwards may have been comprehended quite differently in the original context of the 1950s.)5 What does seem true of, at least, those movies that are taken today to be melodramas of the 1950s is that a questioning of masculinity and of male/female relations within the family is on the

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agenda. Perhaps the paradox is, as Margaret Mead claims in 1957, that, whatever gains woman had made in terms of education and ` -vis men, she was still hamstrung by confinement to rights vis-a homemaking as the only task deemed suitable for her.6 Interestingly, Mead seems to be implicitly as dubious about the new domestication of American man, in that she sees the hamstringing of women as effecting that of men too. At the end of this section, the danger of oversimplying the ‘‘meaning,’’ the overall mood of the United States in the 1950s, should be clearer. The inappropriateness of labeling the 1950s as the decade of repression in the field of sexuality at least is argued by Barbara Klinger: ‘‘Such a depiction ignores the high visibility and complexity of discourses on sexuality characterizing this era.’’ She calls for a rethinking of ‘‘the relation between the family melodrama, frequently preoccupied with sexual turmoil, and its original social context.’’7 This call could be widened to embrace all reading back between Hollywood movies of the 1950s and the wider social context in which they were made.

HITCHCOCK In hindsight, it seems almost perverse that Laura Mulvey in 1975 used the films of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly Rear Window and Vertigo from the 1950s, and Marnie from the 1960s, as significant supports for her views in ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’8 She seeks to illustrate her contention that the erotic objectification of women in Hollywood cinema offers a psychological means to the hero, and by identification to the spectator, of warding off castration anxiety. There is little doubt that in Vertigo, for example, Scottie’s (James Stewart) vertigo signifies such anxiety, and that his (ab)use of Judy (Kim Novak) to reincarnate the fetish of what he now believes to be the dead Madeleine becomes pathological. One problem, though, is that Hitchcock’s heroes seem in the 1950s not just to experience castration anxiety but to be already castrated; if the James Stewart character in Rear Window is symbolically castrated by having his leg in the plaster cast from the start, he ends up ‘‘doubly castrated.’’ This may be an anatomical improbability. Yet, it should be recalled that in Lacanian psychoanalysis women are castrated twice over, by not being men and yet by also sharing

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with them humankind’s condition for entry into the Symbolic Order. Few male stars could so graphically bespeak their castration as Stewart in this movie. Few could afford to suffer emasculation so clearly, an emasculation that is dramatically intensified even at the happy ending. Perhaps knowledge of Hitchcock the man, and his documented obsessions with and punishment of such prized blondes as ‘‘Tippi’’ Hedren overinfluences critical judgment. In his underappreciation of Kim Novak and his persecution of Hedren, he seems so obviously a domineering, bullying personality, neglecting the sensitivities and indeed the talents of his actresses in pursuit of his own ends. Perhaps Hitchcock himself, better than his movies, deserves an analysis of the fantasy of male activity by means of the subjugation of his otherwise captivating heroines through voyeurism and fetishization—especially since the fantasy, because of his peculiar access to and control over filming, is in some senses actualized. Yet, so much energy on the director’s part channeled towards domination suggests surely an overwhelming sense of subjugation, passivity rather than activity. After all, it may well be disappointment over Grace Kelly’s ‘‘abandonment’’ of Hitchcock that blinds him to Novak’s perfect rendering of her entrapment in another man’s scenario in Vertigo, her ‘‘rejection’’ that helps to explain his acquisition of Hedren and his subsequent attempts to possess and control the actress. The more unconcerned with the women in his movies the director becomes after Kelly departs for the throne of Monaco, the more glaring is evidence of the deep wound that that departure inflicts on his psyche. Tania Modleski recognizes that ‘‘the claim to mastery and authority not only of the male characters but of the director himself’’ is subverted by ‘‘the strong fascination and identification with femininity.’’9 Jay Presson Allen, screenwriter of Marnie, believes that Hitchcock identified not with the glamorous male stars of the Cary Grant type but with the victimized blondes.10 These conclusions seem to work against the notion of the creation of strong identification between male or ‘‘masculinized’’ spectator and on-screen male, on which Mulvey’s arguments seem to depend. They seem to stress less the distance between male (director as much as character) and female star as his psychological proximity to her. Modleski resists the emphases of such critics as D. N. Rodowick and Gaylyn Studlar on the fluidity and multiplicity of identifications,

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men’s included. She refuses to consider bisexuality outside the context of power relations, which context renders female and male responses asymmetrical. ‘‘As Hitchcock’s films repeatedly demonstrate,’’ she argues, ‘‘the male subject is greatly threatened by bisexuality, though he is at the same time fascinated by it; and it is the woman who pays for this ambivalence—often with her life itself.’’11 In this spirit, she accuses Studlar and also Kaja Silverman of downplaying the importance of sadism in the male viewer’s response.12 And surely, it might be added, in Hitchcock’s own response to the trauma. While thus she helps to reaffirm part of Mulvey’s emphasis, she also believes that the latter ‘‘unwittingly undercuts her own indictment of narrative cinema as possessing no redeeming value for feminism,’’13 precisely in her use of Hitchcock’s films. To clarify further, it would be foolish to deny the dominance of the male spectator on-screen and thus the reality of external appearances of male activity and female objectification; on the other hand, the suppressed closeness of the hero’s psychical experience to that of the heroine significantly alters the import of what the binary oppositions in Mulvey’s article might at first sight seem to suggest—the unbridgeable chasms between male and female experience. Rear Window The one character most unambiguously in the spectator position for almost the entirety of the film’s running time in Rear Window is surely Jefferies (James Stewart). His broken leg symbolizes his castration. The spectatorship guaranteed by his profession as photojournalist and indulged as he passes his time in looking into the apartments surrounding his courtyard is some sort of compensation for that. Yet, it is noteworthy that the smashed camera seen on display in his room near the start of the movie indicates that his apparent power over the look is only partial, dependent on the instrument by which he consummates the power latent in looking. Thus, the male look is always in danger of losing its power. Even when it does maintain it, it may be dependent on agencies outside the human. The partiality of the look’s power, so that it requires non-human intervention to complete its workings, is demonstrated in the film by the hero’s dependence, at key moments, on binoculars

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and telescope, as well as, finally, on his flash bulbs as a means to obliterating for moments at a time the male look directed with lethal intent at him by Thorwald (Raymond Burr). While the audience must, in order to ‘‘see’’ the events of the film’s narrative, identify with the hero’s look, it is made unusually aware of the gaps in its own power, the possibility of temporary or final powerlessness. What, for example, if the hero falls asleep as he does at one vital point where a man and woman leave Thorwald’s apartment during the night and are observed by the audience but not Jefferies? Surely one effect of this is to remind the spectator of the complete impotence of his/her own look at that point, since the knowledge gained cannot impinge on the unfolding of the onscreen story. If Rear Window is a tale centering on voyeurism, it is a cautionary tale. To some extent, it seems to warn against its perils, as when Lisa (Grace Kelly)—another, but this time human, instrument of Jefferies’ partially-empowered look—lands herself in serious danger in full sight of the hero. Yet, his look can do nothing of itself to rescue her. Questioning of the moral position of the Peeping Tom is included within the screenplay, when Lisa reproaches herself for participating in Jefferies’ viewing, although her distanced curious look becomes a concerned look when she recognizes that Miss Lonelyhearts is in trouble. The case for the look seems largely to be in terms of such empathy and concern, or socially constructive outcomes. After all, the hero’s curiosity does end with the unmasking of a killer. Nevertheless, Jefferies’ look is usually kept at the level of disinterested game, whereas Lisa draws back, uncomfortable with that position, since she conceives of herself as an element in, not as spectator of, ‘‘coming attractions.’’ Is Lisa representative of female spectatorial experience, then? If so, her viewing is of a different kind than that of Jefferies: more involved, more concerned. Yet, the analogy breaks down. She so seldom and so uncomfortably occupies the role of ‘‘passive’’ spectator—unlike the female viewer in the audience, she can and does take action when the need is felt to be there—that it is hard to think of her as the female version of the hero voyeur. If, though, Lisa is only fleetingly a spectator, keeping herself resolutely to the side of the seen, the spectacle, this is not coincident with an impression of powerlessness. She is by far the hero’s superior in stature, since he is in an enforced sedentary position in his

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scenes with her while she is mobile and often standing. The first kiss between hero and heroine is oddly discomfiting. The descent of Lisa’s face is unnervingly slowed down. It is filmed as if there is something predatory in this descent to his level. The sense of the man’s vulnerability in the face of female insatiability, her consumption of him like the praying mantis after intercourse, is echoed in the joke about the male honeymooner’s moment of respite from the incessant demands of his bride. In some ways, the rhyming of the detecting couple with the Thorwalds works in a direction that crosses the gender divide. Jefferies, in his immobility and dependence—on camera equipment, telescopes, binoculars, and notably on two women, Lisa and his nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter)—and even in his resentment of his dependence on the human helpers, links with Mrs. Thorwald, bedridden, nagging, querulously dependent on a member of the opposite sex to be her nurturer, far more convincingly than with Mr. Thorwald. Lisa is the first to tangle with Thorwald. She survives and en route finds the evidence of the abandoned wedding ring. She is a more formidable adversary, as Thorwald seems to recognize, than Jefferies in his wheelchair. If Lisa is not cogently to be seen as the proxy for the female spectator, it is still noteworthy that Jefferies, who clearly does permit vicarious seeing to the cinema spectator, alters to become more like Lisa in her viewing moments. When Lisa looks, there is immediate understanding of and empathy with the female viewed. Thus, she understands that Miss Torso is not really interested in the men whom she entertains, that Mrs Thorwald would never have left her wedding ring behind if she were alive, that Miss Lonelyhearts needs help. On the other hand, Jefferies has to metamorphose, according to Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson, ‘‘from distant observer into excited vicarious participant;’’ and that metamorphosis ‘‘’allegorizes’ the transformation engendered in us by the narrative procedures and identificatory mechanisms of Hitchcock’s cinema, and even that engendered by Rear Window itself.’’14 These authors claim to discover that the pleasures of the film are bound up with a near-subliminal inculcation of the cure for voyeurism constituted by concern for others. This sounds a little like Robin Wood’s approach to Hitchcock in the 1960s. Perhaps, though, the playfulness of the ending disallows the solemnity of the abjuration of voyeurism that seems to be discerned here. In any case, a cinema without some element of voyeurism, a Hitchcock cinema without a near total sub-

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mission to its pleasures, is difficult to imagine, although that alone sounds too commonsensical and generalized an objection to the reading offered. All the same, it can surely be suggested that there is at least a measure of self-conscious irony in a photojournalist’s flight from prying and in Lisa’s final choice of fashion magazine (repositioning herself as spectacle after her Nancy Drew fling?) in preference to instruction about foreign travel in inhospitable climes. Vertigo Stanley Cavell speaks for many admirers of Vertigo when he suggests that audiences should not be deluded into thinking that they are watching a film noir (it has to be said, a remarkably ‘‘slow’’ noir thriller) rather than a highly introspective meditation on male-female relations. According to Marian E. Keane, he ‘‘instructs us to look more deeply at Vertigo’s story and figures by revealing their proximity to what are typically called women’s films . . . Vertigo’s attentiveness to . . . both the man and the woman in the film results in its deep affinity with, not film noir, but film melodrama.’’15 In at least one obvious sense, the film provides poor evidence for Laura Mulvey’s stress on male activity and female passivity. Although Madeleine is created out of Judy by a male controller, Judy herself at a key moment in the latter part of the narrative takes the independent decision not to run away but instead to stay with Scottie and try to win his love. Scottie throughout seems helpless in the grip of his obsession. Finally, his climbing of the tower rids him of the affliction and presumably, when Judy confesses, of his submission to the Madeleine myth. Until then, he has been as driven and helpless as his vision of himself in the nightmare sequence. Another casualty in his depressive state is his sense of humour. He cannot take the joke that Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) offers to him when she paints herself as the self-absorbed Madeleine-asCarlotta, complete with distinctly unromantic spectacles. Presumably he would be equally hostile in his overreaction to Hitchcock’s own joke, where the bra on display in Midge’s workroom is claimed by her to have been designed on the principle of the cantilever bridge. As Tania Modleski points out, through the importance of the Golden Gate bridge, Scottie’s vertigo is humorously, thus, linked with femininity.16 Yet, Midge’s irreverent playfulness, daring to mock romantic obsession and its solemnity, proves to be far more

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clear-sighted than Scottie’s blind surrender to the projection of his own desires. Spectacles may undermine the ethereal quality of the mysterious femme fatale, but they correct blurred vision, from which Scottie, for all his presumed detecting skills, suffers as clearly as he does from vertigo. At the point where Judy is at her most active, when she makes the decision not to proceed with her initial plan of running away to avoid detection, she breaks an unwritten law of narrative cinema and looks into the camera. Scottie looks and looks, and for a large part of the film the audience sees what he sees. Nevertheless, in this sequence, it is as if the camera has always operated in Judy’s favor, as if she has some complicity with it to which Scottie can never lay an equal claim. For all his looking, he refuses to see. Midge looks too, and, even though she is absent from the scenes of his obsession, she sees with remarkable clarity. Judy as Madeleine has played the passive, ‘‘to-be-looked-at’’ object to perfection. Suddenly, as she looks at the camera, she in effect looks out to the audience. Her look suggests what we may be as reluctant to believe as Scottie proves to be, and for much longer—that the romance of Madeleine is a featherlight concoction, not the agonized necrophiliac passion that Scottie is induced to believe that he is now experiencing. The letter-writing sequence has always been criticized. Reviewers thought, when the film was first shown, that Hitchcock had made a thriller—ineptly. He had given away the solution far too early and left audiences with no mystery to fathom. Hitchcock and his admirers argued for a time that what was on offer instead was suspense—when and how would Scottie tumble to the truth? It seems fairer to suggest that what has happened instead is that a startlingly economic and effective wedge has been driven between the spectator and his/her original unwavering identification point. The spectator is now forced to watch the hero with more critical distance as he robs Judy of her dignity and indeed her humanity in his relentless pursuit of a lost, or more truly nonexistent, ideal. If Judy’s intimacy with the camera is far more than we hitherto realized, it is not enough to make her the on-screen surrogate, however. She remains nearly as cut off as an identification figure for the audience as a woman in her own right for Scottie. The audience must be slow to forgive her for her demonstration of the illusoriness of romantic love. Judy may be the most isolated figure in film narrative. Kim Novak’s discernible ‘‘nervousness’’ and near-glacial self-

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absorption in other 1950s vehicles make her the perfect actress for this role, more troubling than the warmer and ultimately more crowd-pleasing ‘‘ice maiden’’ Kelly is likely to have been. Vertigo, for all its revelation of the lengths that the male will go to keep his fantasies of romance alive, does not seem to lend itself easily to being a significant element in the tale of the ongoing battle of the sexes. There is something too hopelessly lost in Scottie to make him the highly active objectifier that Mulvey’s theory demands. As indicated above, there is also something too clearsighted about both women, something too bravely determined about Judy to make her the hapless object of the gaze. When she, as Madeleine possessed by the soul of the dead Carlotta, captures his erotic look, her fetishization is actively achieved by herself—not just with her cooperation but through the character’s extraordinary skills of impersonation. She may not know any more about the real Carlotta than is discernible in the picture that she studies. Yet, her own lack of distinctive personality (the ‘‘hick’’ from Kansas who came to San Francisco to make it but who is still working as a shop girl after Gavin Elster has rewarded her for neutering detective Scottie as observant investigator) allows her to inhabit the ghostly world of the dead woman with more conviction than she does her one-room apartment. The love that ‘‘was not meant to happen,’’ Judy’s love for Scottie, renders her as helpless and vulnerable as Scottie, despite her courage in the decision to stay put. Neither character seems to be the active party that spectatorial identification would seem to demand. As Marian E. Keane puts it, ‘‘What is shown to be brutal in Vertigo is the nature of human desire and need, not some function of a particular phase of male development whose correction it is fairly simple to imagine.’’17

HITCHCOCK IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 1960S The confusion which is sown in Vertigo about the distinguishability and clear identification of active and passive roles is repeated in Hitchcock’s films of the early 1960s. In 1960, when the audience is provided with the explanation of Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh) death in Psycho, it has to face the bewilderment of knowing that Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) has

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been highly active, in the sense that he has carried out all the murders shown or alluded to in the film, but also remarkably passive, in that he believes that his mother executed them. The extent of his activity in the instance of Marion’s murder seems, at first viewing, to be the aiding and abetting of his psychotic mother’s killing of Marion, in the disposal of evidence. It is apparently in this spirit that he mops up her blood and gets rid of her body in the car consigned to the swamp. The sincerity of his belief that ‘‘Mother’’ has run amok once more communicates itself to the audience and disarms it, deprives it of knowledge, just as Marion clearly felt that she could trust this hotelier, despite his nervous tics and otherworldliness. The final bird attack on Melanie Daniels (‘‘Tippi’’ Hedren) in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) does indeed achieve the enclosure of that heroine in a tomb of silence and passivity. What makes this end so dismaying and even disturbingly misogynistic is that Melanie is so different beforehand. It should be conceded right away that she is erotic spectacle, she admits to Mitch (Rod Taylor), when she is photographed being thrown into a fountain in Rome against her will. This is the part of her history that she feels distorts her true personality, which she would prefer to associate with her work for charity, for example. It should also be conceded that she looks the part of erotic spectacle in her flawless makeup, metallic, upswept blonde hair, fur coat and sports car when she arrives in Bodega Bay, just as she looked it in San Francisco. Yet, she repeatedly proves resourceful and determined, handling a difficult situation with another ‘‘strong woman,’’ Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), with tact and yet honesty, protecting Mitch’s mother and sister from the birds as far as she is able, demonstrating a strength that is rewarded with brutal accusation from at least one of the visitors trapped in the diner during a bird attack. In effect, Melanie does not so much signify castration as indicate such strength and wholeness as to arouse hostility and fear in those around her, more regularly female than male in this film. Sean Connery, as Mark Rutland, hero of Marnie (1964), seems altogether more confident in and of his masculinity than James Stewart was in the 1950s films discussed earlier. While he seems more clearly the enunciator of the narrative than Scottie proves to be in Vertigo, for example, this is quite different from saying that the only narrative interest is in Mark. Far from it. Perhaps the

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greater security of the enunciative position this time simply provides a surer standpoint, less ambivalent and therefore less interesting in its own right, from which to consider the enigma of Marnie’s behavior. Robert Kapsis’s discussion of the film declares its debt to Kaja Silverman’s work. Impressed with the way that the familial conflict, which is of such importance to an understanding of Marnie’s sociopathy and psychopathy, is between mother and daughter, Silverman suggest that the female subject ‘‘takes into herself the values of inferiority and powerlessness embodied by the mother rather than those of superiority and power embodied by the father.’’18 She believes that the climactic sequence revealing the roots of Marnie’s illness in the killing of a father-figure sailor represents a ‘‘perversion’’ of the Oedipal scenario. In it, Marnie fulfills the ‘‘masculine’’ wish to kill the father, and, most radically of all, organizes her desires around the mother, rather than the father.19 This is all very well, but it is hard to credit that Marnie’s mother deserves the description of ‘‘powerful and adequate’’ because, it is believed, she has never learned the lesson of her ‘‘castration.’’ Surely, the injury to her leg and her constant instructions to her daughter, ‘‘Mind my leg, Marnie,’’ are as unequivocal proof of her castration as James Stewart’s broken leg in Rear Window. Maybe, like Melanie at the climax of The Birds, but this time from the start of Marnie, the mother has been sharply ‘‘reminded’’ that, as a woman, she must accept castration. If so, the time of her power and adequacy is prior to the opening of the film. Of the Hitchcock texts dealt with so far, this may be the most ambivalent and multivocal. Perhaps the sequence most difficult to read is that in which Mark rapes his terrified, ‘‘frigid’’ wife. Repeated viewings do not easily help the viewer to decide if the invitation is to approve or disapprove of the frustrated husband’s reaction. Both reactions can be defended by readings of the evidence. Possibly the viewer oscillates between identification with the ‘‘masculine’’ aggression involved in the rape and horrified empathy with the violated heroine, since she is clearly ill (as if the rape were not reason enough for condemnation of the hero). It may be worth offering as a sort of footnote that Marnie is not merely a drama of male activity and female vacillation between ‘‘incorrect’’ activity and patriarchal passivity. The film, like the Winston Graham novel which is its source, is much concerned with

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social inequality, in terms of class. Mark Rutland makes himself Marnie’s boss, as well as lover; the Rutland family clearly feels that Marnie has gained vast social privilege by marrying into it. Mulvey may be right to believe that a photojournalist or, more obviously, police detective is lent a mask of legitimacy when he indulges his voyeuristic inclinations under the excuse of investigation. By discovering a crime and using his knowledge of it to blackmail the perpetrator into compliance, even within a marriage, the mask is much less effective, the legitimacy much more doubtful this time. The theme of forcing a social inferior discovered committing a misdemeanor to perform sexually as a means of ensuring silence is common—in pornographic writing. The questioning of male authority, always present to some extent in Hitchcock, is that bit more blatant in Marnie than it was in his films of the 1950s. This chapter is intended to lay the groundwork for an examination of male spectatorial experience of certain Hollywood movies from the early 1950s. In particular, it has attempted to show that the United States during this decade was far from the lazily comfortable, complacent society that it has been thought to be since the start of film studies’ interest in Sirk. The HUAC investigations show how insecure the country was about the loyalty of its nationals, how easily it could be led to believe in the enemy within, working at State Department, military and mass-entertainment levels to further the interests of the former Soviet Union. That nation, in turn, was viewed as a would-be murderous aggressor, which had to be stopped at all costs from outstripping the United States in its buildup of weaponry and from which believed secrets of nuclear arms creation had to be hidden away. Postwar social turmoil could surely be expected in the fields of sexuality and gender behavior. It could also be expected that traditional masculinity would be promoted in its usefulness for the Cold War context. (Homosexuality was, after all, deemed ‘‘un-American’’ in the McCarthy period.) Perhaps, though, it is only in certain areas—the usefulness of undeviatingly traditional qualities of masculinity in the depiction of a country ready to defend its key values from foreign attack, say—that no chinks are allowed in male armor. Reconsideration of key Hitchcock films of the 1950s, as well as of his other celebrated works of the early to mid-1960s, suggests that the confidence with which they have been taken to shore up such

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binary oppositions as male/female, active/passive, looker/looked-at may be misplaced. Rather than the anticipated picture of powerful hero reducing heroine to erotic object or breathtaking fetish, the films repeatedly suggest the remarkable proximity of male and female psychical experience. Both Rear Window and Vertigo open and then continue for almost all the rest of their running time with symbolically castrated male protagonists. Moreover, the principal females in these films seem unusually active and even, in the case of Judy, paradoxically self-determining—paradoxically because Judy was paid by Gavin Elster to impersonate his wife, possessed by the spirit of Carlotta. In this regard—the admixture of conventional femininity within the concept of masculinity embodied by the hero—Hitchcock’s films do what several other apparently melodramatic texts of the 1950s also do. They offer a masculinity which is troubled and uncertain, lacking the confidence and ‘‘virile’’ aggression, the sense of superiority and control, which traditional notions of masculinity suggest are part of it. Robert Samuels puts it well when he says, ‘‘[M]en attempt to visually master females . . . [but] these attempts at control often fail . . . the failure to master the representation of the female subject has been shown to present a form of masculine loss that motivates the male subject to find new ways to convert lack into a form of representational plenitude.’’20 If these examples of the male identification figure provide a less clear-cut experience of masculinity than Laura Mulvey’s theorizations would suggest, then perhaps the male spectator’s experience could be less clear-cut than film studies has often taken it to be. Consideration of five Hollywood movies from the first half of the 1950s ought to provide further material of use in reassessing the now traditional picture.

8 A Sample of Five 1950s Movies THE AIM OF THE PRESENT CHAPTER IS TO CONSIDER A SELECTION OF FIVE movies from the first half of the 1950s. These are: Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950) A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953) On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954).

These five have been chosen primarily by reason of their ‘‘excessive’’ mise-en-sce` ne and strongly emotional qualities, the importance accorded to their musical scores, the centrality of ‘‘tortured’’ male-female personal relations. The generic categorization of some is unclear, probably more hybrid than usual. Their aesthetic is largely melodramatic, although each was thought of in terms other than melodrama, in either Hollywood or film studies senses, by the industry and moviegoers of the time: Sunset Boulevard as a darkly ironic thriller/horror/film noir; The Men as a social document in the ‘‘realist’’ tradition of such ‘forties moves as The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946); A Streetcar Named Desire as, variously, Southern, gothic and part of a growing and prestigious screen collection of highly respected theatrical adaptations, those adaptations of Tennessee Williams being most popular of all; On the Waterfront as a ‘‘fearless expose´’’ of union corruption on the docks; and, most straightforwardly of these perhaps, From Here to Eternity as a sort of war film, even if its war sequences are confined to about fifteen minutes at the end of the movie. All of these movies give significant importance, often prior importance, to their male characters. Yet, these male characters’ crises are traceable, as is audience understanding of these, to the personal, the psychological, the sexual. 140

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The aim of more detailed consideration of each of the five movies is to allow time for scrutiny of their representations of masculinity, or just of male experience in these, since one way of approaching comprehension of the male spectator’s experience is, if we follow Laura Mulvey’s logic, through his psychological identification with the on-screen male. That male has too often without scrutiny been assumed to be dedicated to activity, mastery, sadism, subjectivity in gazing terms. It is surely high time that these assumptions were put to the test.

SUNSET BOULEVARD ‘‘Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California,’’ William Holden tells the audience in voiceover as the police motorbikes and cars fill the frame, while sirens wail on the sound track. ‘‘It’s about 5 o’clock in the morning. That’s the Homicide Squad, complete with detectives and newspapermen. A murder has been reported . . .’’ The opening of Billy Wilder’s movie seems to promise a ‘‘male’’ entertainment, of the tough private-eye variety popularized by Humphrey Bogart or that of the noir thrillers of the 1940s. The two men who have come to repossess Joe Gillis’s (William Holden) car in the early stages of the first flashback sequence have the look and sound of noir goons—their strict alignment with each other, their hats, their accents as they utter sarcastic threats. When they reappear later in the narrative and Joe knows that he is in danger of physical damage, the car chase that ensues is accompanied by energetic music that could have come from a Bogart or Cagney gangster movie to indicate a moment of danger. Near the end of the movie, a cop rings the coroner’s office from Norma Desmond’s (Gloria Swanson) bedroom. These scenes within a movie of grainy claustrophobic black-and-white have noir resonances. Nevertheless, there is a knowingness about them, as if they are self-conscious quotations from the noir repertoire. This is a Hollywood movie set in Hollywood itself in the last years of the studio system. It veers often towards self-referentiality. The overall tone of the movie is closer to camp theatricality than generic verisimilitude (if admittedly because the representation of Hollywood here is as a place of camp theatricality). Thus, Joe responds to threats from the two repo men, ‘‘You say

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the cutest things.’’ When he asks his agent for financial aid to prevent his loss of his car, the latter replies, ‘‘Sweetheart, maybe what you need is another agent.’’ In the ordinary-folks party sequences that contrast with Norma’s grandiose and solitary celebration, Joe’s friend Artie (Jack Webb) greets him with ‘‘Where have you been keeping that gorgeous face of yours?’’ and describes himself as ‘‘the Elsa Maxwell of the Assistant Directors.’’ Joe may well remark as he does of the Desmond mansion and its occupants, ‘‘It was all very queer.’’ Nevertheless, the pre-theoretical (but not exactly homosexual) queerness of Sunset Boulevard does not reside in its brittle banter or even bitchy repartee. These lines are instead ‘‘given’’ as the discursive currency of everyday Hollywood. Artie (Jack Webb), for example, is depicted as not just heterosexual but dully conventional when he is not hosting a bottle party. Arch one-liners are no more to be trusted for their insight into character than Joe’s bullshitting about interest in his story from Twentieth Century-Fox and Tyrone Power. Where everybody deals in gay bar ‘‘wit,’’ nobody is marked out thereby as gay. The key to understanding Norma’s actions may well be to see her as acting, giving a star performance in the drama that she has decided to make of her whole life. She takes to a new degree of intensity the habits of those employed on even much lower rungs of the Hollywood ladder within this movie. Norma not only casts herself as a temptress of the Salome mode, as much in life as potentially in art, but casts Joe as her lover. She even dresses him to play the part. Thus, she wants to buy clothes for him, representing it as ‘‘a little fun’’ for herself. ‘‘I just want you to look nice. And must you chew gum?’’ Joe eventually responds by returning her kiss after the disaster of the New Year party and her wrist-slashing suicide attempt. What, though, prompts his response? Desire seems unlikely, given his earlier revulsion. Naked self-interest also seems unlikely, though, since he is portrayed throughout as reluctant to be totally dishonest. He is ambitious but on his uppers, using the chance entry into Norma’s mansion to make money by working on a script which seems ludicrous to him. Until the New Year, he has resisted the signs that he is expected to behave as her gigolo. Surely his sudden immersion in the part of gigolo is at some level a tribute to Norma’s creativity and flair for drama—dated, silent drama, but drama, and Hollywood

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drama, nonetheless. She has achieved what he has failed so far to do—to gain a hold on the upper echelons of power in the industry. Her achievement may be some time in the past, but her dedication to the recreation of the present in terms that deny that the past is over seems to strike a chord in him. She has cast him in her drama, just as she has expected him to help to write it. She has been willing to die to protect her illusions. Surely, he can pay a form of tribute to her dedication—to what in other circumstances would be her professionalism—by learning how to act in the role that she has given him? Before this point, Joe treats romance as something from the movies. At Artie’s party, he precedes his attempt to kiss the apparently down-to-earth Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) with an obvious reference to movies dated even in 1950: ‘‘After twelve years in the Burmese jungle, I am starving, Lady Agatha.’’ Although his move to kiss her is interrupted by blondes rushing in because the phone is at last free, he completes it. Yet, the romantic moment seems acted, played as a cute scene for the intruders or, more credibly, for themselves—so that there is no threat to Artie, for example, in his kissing Artie’s girlfriend. In a later sequence, Joe and Betty walk through the studio lot at night, passing by parts of sets. She talks of her early days, her nose job. Joe tells her that she smells special: ‘‘It’s no shampoo. More like freshly laundered linen handkerchiefs.’’ It is less a romantic encounter than a quotation of the same, using dialogue that they both could have written for other players—they are, after all, working late on the writing of a movie script—shot as other directors might shoot a nocturnal love scene, even if there the sets would have been expected to be taken straight as representations of real buildings or streets. When Joe warns Betty against coming too close, he could practically be reminding the movie audience of the importance of the Hays Code. Thus, unexpectedly perhaps, the romance with Betty is not contrasted by its simple naturalness with Norma’s simulation. In their different ways, each romance is equally sincere, as it were, each equally phoney. From the moment that Joe first encounters Norma, she acts as his superior. ‘‘Have him come up,’’ she orders Max (Erich von Stroheim), her butler (and former husband), mistaking Joe for the undertaker arriving to provide her dead pet monkey with a casket. When he recognizes Norma and makes the social error of saying,

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‘‘You used to be big,’’ she responds with one of the most celebrated lines from the entire movie: ‘‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’’ Like the pictures, Hollywood in the 1950s is too small for Norma. It is peopled by struggling artists and artisans, by such scriveners as Betty and Joe. There is no doubt that Norma sees herself as still big. The question is whether this is a matter of sad delusion or whether it has some credibility in context. Joe at first pretends that she has stayed big, playing the dutiful employee so that he can pocket her cash. As he is drawn deeper into her fantasy, particularly as a young man who deals in fantasy daily, does he surrender power in some manner that goes further than financial need? Beginning by mocking her, he remarks of her later, ‘‘You don’t yell at a sleepwalker.’’ When he acquiesces to such misjudgments on her part as restoring scenes that he has cut from her script, he recognizes the potency of her dreaming. She attempts to control Joe. When he claims that he ‘‘hasn’t done anything’’ on his night out while she prepares herself punishingly for her imagined resumption of her movie career, she remarks almost automatically, ‘‘Of course you haven’t. I wouldn’t let you.’’ Is her control of Joe merely a matter of economics, or has his submission to her dream bound him to subjection more than a clearheaded wide-awake account of their relationship might suggest? After all, her butler and former director—then called Max von Mayerling— has submitted to her stellar self-assurance, has played the submissive since the end of their marriage. If it is playing, though, it has become second nature. Joe himself is fooled on this score until late into the movie’s running time. Whether it makes any sense to talk of Max as ‘‘playing at’’ subjection needs consideration. He is as convincing in his role of protective manservant as Norma herself has become (at least to herself) in her 24hour performance as star and femme fatale. When he is called upon in the final sequence to take up the role of old-time director once again, he does so immediately. ‘‘Are you ready, Norma?’’—‘‘What is the scene? Where am I?’’ she asks.—His answer comes quickly: ‘‘This is the staircase of the palace.’’—Reassured, she takes his direction and understands: ‘‘Oh yes, yes, down below they’re waiting for the princess. I’m ready.’’ He has continued to direct her ever since she stopped making movies, it would seem, even writing fan letters daily to maintain her sense of stardom. For us to know whether Norma is the subject rather than the

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more typical female object of the gaze, we would have to be presented with a convincing ‘‘male gaze’’ within the movie’s world. We are conditioned to expect it when Betty first appears before Joe’s eyes, in the scene where he is trying to sell a hackneyed baseball story to a producer. Betty, as the latter’s secretary, walks in to advise the producer not to take it. She is remarkably unfetishized in the scene, however, wearing a neck-high blouse, cardigan, and skirt, her hairstyle simple. Joe betrays no interest in her as a woman. Instead, his body language is defensive, as if he sees her purely as a threat to his designs. When the two are introduced, she turns her head towards him only reluctantly. He comes forward in mid-shot, hands on hips, looking away from her face. She seems embarrassed, he annoyed. ‘‘I’m sorry, Mr Gillis, I just didn’t think it was any good. I found it flat and trite.’’ Does she, Joe retorts, want James Joyce or Dostoevsky? ‘‘I just think a picture should say a little something.’’ Throughout their exchange, they are filmed in separate one-shots, and viewed from Sheldrake’s (the producer) angle of vision. There is no recourse to shot reverse-shot. Joe ends by talking to Sheldrake about her rather than addressing her directly or looking at her. It is true that Betty seems more fetishized at Artie’s party. This could easily be explained, though, in almost realist terms, as a sign that she has taken more care with her appearance in order to fit in better at the celebration. If there is no narratively identified individual male subject of the gaze for either Norma or Betty, Norma does frequently take command of it. As Joe works on her script, he is aware of her judgmental gaze on him. She protects herself from any return of that gaze by wearing dark glasses. ‘‘I could sense her eyes on me from behind those dark glasses . . .’’ (She is always looking at him, he claims later.) When she removes the glasses, piqued by his suggestion of more dialogue, she declares, ‘‘I can say anything I want with my eyes.’’ After all, according to another of the most celebrated lines, ‘‘We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.’’ This line is delivered while they watch her old silent movies at home, with Max projecting. In a sense, she forces Joe to watch, slipping her hand round his arm, becoming her own fan and insisting that he join her in admiration of the star. At the end of the home-movie sequence, she steps into the projector’s light. ‘‘I’ll be up there again, so help me.’’ As she turns her profile to the light, closing her eyes, she embodies

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the female fetish of Hollywood, with Max standing in for Josef von Sternberg, who plays as important a role as Alfred Hitchcock in illustrating the credibility of Laura Mulvey’s claims about the female star’s objectification. For Sternberg, it was Marlene Dietrich to whom he dedicated his directorial craft, Dietrich who became the site of fetishistic scopophilia.1 In other words, it is not so much that Sunset Boulevard fetishizes or objectifies Norma, but that she constantly revives memories of such fetishization and objectification before Max’s cameras. She has gained such control over the director that, to satisfy her desires, he has to bring her into the final close-up in the last moments of the Wilder movie, when she offers a travesty of the silent-screen vamp’s fetishistic allure. Earlier, Joe—forced to watch, forced to admire—is hardly the powerful subject of the gaze. His subjectivity is forced upon him by a much superior subject, demanding paradoxically to be admired as erotic object. In the most playful sequence of the movie, when she is elated at the thought of returning to her rightful place as Hollywood star, Norma chooses to dress up as Chaplin for Joe’s entertainment. ‘‘Open your eyes,’’ she demands of him. If she requires that he turns his male gaze upon her, this must happen only when she chooses. Elsewhere, she is the gazer at and the judge of his conduct. ‘‘You must be very careful as you cross the patio,’’ Max warns Joe after his return from Betty. ‘‘Madame may be watching.’’ Given this apparent power over the gaze, it is ironic that, when she visits the set of De Mille’s latest movie, it is suggested to her that she ‘‘just sit here and watch.’’ Aware of her declining allure, but not of the ‘‘30 million fans [who] have given her the brushoff,’’ she admits to Joe during her beauty routines, ‘‘I don’t want you to see me. I’m not very attractive.’’ The converse is that she most definitely does want to be seen when she is more certain of her attractions. Thus, in the final sequences, she preens at a mirror as she readies herself for the cameras that she is assured have arrived as in former days to capture her image. For all this, it is Joe, and indeed the male star William Holden, who is recognized by the characters of the narrative, and by the camera itself, to be far closer to an erotic object than Norma. (Perhaps the cruel corollary of the female fetish is, in this film, the ‘‘waxworks,’’ the old [real-life] silent-screen stars with whom Norma surrounds herself to play bridge and whom she resembles at such times.)

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He is presented at the very start of his own flashback as half` la Sternberg. As his voiceover dressed, even parodically ‘‘veiled’’ a proceeds, during which he tells the audience of the tough life he is living, grinding out original stories, the camera forsakes its longshot view of a car- and palm-lined street to pan right to a particular palm tree and apartment building. It ‘‘selects’’ a window in a manner which the opening of Psycho ten years later sensitizes the viewer to read as voyeuristic. Gauze curtains fade into view before the camera moves in through the open window to contemplate the bare-legged Holden in a dressing gown. Only when the buzzer sounds and he confronts the repo men does he seem to play the more appropriate-seeming active, if devious, noir hero. Yet, as he moves to the buzzer, he not only remains bare-legged and barefoot, but exposes his chest. After he has responded to Norma’s New Year kiss, we almost immediately thereafter see him emerging from her swimming pool in trunks. There is no easily identified spectator—Norma wears dark glasses at the time—but, his expression betrays awareness that his body is objectified. ‘‘Turn around, darling. Let me dry you,’’ she bids him. He keeps his back to her, as if protecting himself from some of the implications of her subject position. While she talks of her happiness, he looks tense and almost fearful as she touches his neck. An echo of this seems to be heard when Betty takes her final leave of him. ‘‘I can’t look at you any more, Joe.’’ What is noteworthy in this regard is that, even if Joe seems half repelled by his objectification, he does not occupy the subject position with any ease. We have already seen how, at his first encounter with Betty, he does not for an instant make her the object of his gaze. She may well seem to relinquish control of the look when she bids him goodbye. In the office sequences, where he ‘‘plays hookey’’ from his imperious mistress’s demands, Joe is looked at by Betty far more clearly than Joe looks at her. If looking relations in this movie contradict the most influential accounts of looking, they do confirm surely that traditional masculinity and its impairment are indicated through looking patterns. Norma breaks out of the constrictions of femininity by manipulating her desired objectification to her own self-serving ends; Joe, an unwilling but also submissive object of the gaze, fails to compensate for that objectification by confident seizure of subjectivity when the chance is given to him. Each is depicted as somehow ‘‘unnatural,’’

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breaking the rules and therefore liable to such severe penalties as death by gunshot and drowning (Joe), or madness (Norma). A major question to be asked of the movie is what it suggests about the assumed ‘‘masculinity’’ or, perhaps more accurately, confident authority, of the voiceover. While the voiceover is from the start identifiable with Holden and thus Joe, it is whining and selfpitying when we first hear it. Holden’s voice is heard on the sound track: ‘‘You see, the body of a young man was found floating in the pool . . .’’ Then we recognize Holden’s face as that of the floating corpse. ‘‘Nobody important really. . . . the poor dope, he always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool. Only the price turned out to be a little high.’’ Sarah Street relates the ambiguity in Joe’s depiction to the experience of the male viewer, and decides that Joe’s position as gigolo is ‘‘to a certain extent compensated by his handsome looks and glamorous appearance and, of course, his voiceover control of the narrative.’’2 Apart from the question of Joe’s glamor—since it aligns him with ‘‘feminine’’ objectification—does this voiceover ensure his control of the narrative, though? How can the man who offers a voiceover suggest overall control of the story if he is presented from the very start of the movie as dead—moreover, dead at the hands, it transpires, of the woman whose gigolo he has allowed himself to become? If instability is indeed the mark of female subjectivity,3 surely the uncertain hold that a dead man has over the direction of events, and the way that the living Joe has been constantly reluctant or unable to seize the subject role, suggest that he is akin to the female when he attempts a ‘‘subjective’’ voiceover—that, in other words, his ‘‘feminization’’ is indicated in his severely compromised and curiously unauthoritative voiceover. There is a great deal of irony, surely, as Elham Afnan detects,4 in Joe’s being hired as a ghostwriter. He is equally, though more obviously, a ghost voiceover. As such, he has become one of Norma’s ‘‘waxworks;’’ on the night when they first make love, it becomes in this context more significant that Norma has just had the floor waxed, since their dance on the empty waxed floor suggests that their sexual relations will be ‘‘lifeless and deadening.’’5 How, moreover, does Joe’s voiceover relate not just to masculinity but to ‘‘truth’’? He promises nothing less from the start: ‘‘before you hear it [the story] all distorted and blown out of proportion, before those Hollywood columnists get their hands on it, maybe

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you’d like to hear the facts, the whole truth.’’ Perhaps it is in the spirit of truth-telling that another kind of objectivity seems to be approximated when the voiceover refers to the dead Joe in the third person, marking a separation between Holden’s view/voice(over) and Joe’s status as character within the story. From its present vantage point, the voiceover has knowledge of the past (‘‘Let’s go back about six months and find the day when it all started.’’) and remarkable prescience, since it knows how Norma is behaving after Joe’s death, as well as awareness of the handling of Joe’s own corpse by the police (‘‘Funny how gentle people get with you once you’re dead.’’) That supernatural or certainly superhuman prescience may help to explain the dichotomy to which Street refers, when she notes that we are told that Norma’s house resembles Miss Havisham’s before we see Norma herself behind the blinds wearing dark glasses.6 Rightly, she concedes late in her essay that Joe is not given total control over narrative, sound and image.7 One way of understanding this absence of total control is, though, to detect a difference between the living Joe, with his unmasculine willingness to compromise or submit, his lack of interest in the morality of his choices, and the dead Joe, whose judgments have become more acerbic and are delivered with more deadly accuracy than might have been appropriate to the living version. In the example of the comparison with Miss Havisham’s house, the ghostly voiceover has the power to see past and future, to see ‘‘the truth’’ at a time logically prior to a living person’s verification of it. Perhaps then the voiceover gives Joe an insight that belongs properly to the more clear-sighted (though impotent) ghost. We are left at the end with a male hero who has shown little ability to take up the subject role and little taste for it except in so far as he takes the initiative in exploiting his objectificatory potential. If at times an unhappy object, all the same he chooses to be one. Norma, on the other hand, is a subject in obsessional pursuit of object status in the movies. It may be in this that the film’s palpable ‘‘queerness’’ resides—in the separation of the masculine and subjective from the males in the movie and of the exposure of the performance of femininity—as performance. The separation is economically expressed from the outset: it is there in the split between Joe as depotentized hero, on one hand, who repeatedly refuses to look or to see, and thus to be

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‘‘masculine,’’ and Joe as helpless corpse who sees all, but has no power left to affect events. If there is no female capable of holding the erotic gaze in this movie, it is probably because there is no male gazer. Joe rapidly relinquishes his gazing ‘‘rights’’ for the status of gigolo, while Max is too busy creating the scenario and settings for the female star to be capable of joining her admirers in the cinema audience. ‘‘It was all very queer.’’ Yes, very queer indeed.

THE MEN As with the opening of Sunset Boulevard, the first sequences of Fred Zinnemann’s 1950 movie seem to promise that a ‘‘male genre’’ film—the genre being the war film this time—will unfold on screen. Sad military music, with drums increasing in volume and significance, can be heard on the sound track behind the credits. When these are over, men in military uniform walk with rifles in their hands towards or away from the camera, engaging neither with it nor with each other. The title may suggest already that the film proposes to deal with conceptions of masculinity. This possibility is made more certain and more specific when the credits include notice of what it calls ‘‘Forty-Five of THE MEN of Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital.’’ At the close of the battleground sequences, Lieutenant Ken Wilozek (Marlon Brando in his first screen role) is shot in the back. When he reaches for his rifle, another shot prevents him from making use of it. Although the bulk of the action occurs within a hospital ward dealing with the trauma, physical and mental, dealt to Ken and other paraplegics created by war, much of the social behavior in the ward is coded as typically male. Because he seems to be giving in to self-pity while in a separate hospital room, the decision is made to move Ken into boisterous male company. There, the other male patients resent his misery and ridicule him as ‘‘laughing boy.’’ Leo (Richard Erdman) ribs him mercilessly, while Angel (Arthur Jurado) wants to give him a break. When Ken is angered by the volume of radio noise, he reacts with physical aggression by throwing a carafe at the radio—whereupon water is thrown over the Lieutenant to ‘‘cool him off.’’ The retention of as much conventional masculinity as he is physi-

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cally capable of is emphasized later by a montage sequence in which Ken exercises in bed, then with the physiotherapist, concentrating on the building up of his arms by weight-training and pressups in view of the other men. Angel in particular demonstrates his commitment to activity and feats of physical prowess by climbing the gym ropes bare-chested. At the point where he decides to get married to Ellen (Teresa Wright), Ken decides also that he will insist on standing up at the ceremony, and so devotes himself to exercise in his bed and at the gym, bare-chested as Angel once was and ‘‘whole-looking.’’ The music on the sound track sounds upbeat and optimistic when he hops out of his wheelchair to take over the wheel of a car, to visit the home being built for the soon-to-be-married pair. He takes part, while seated in his chair, in 10-pin bowling and plays basketball in the water, wearing a rubber ring. In other words, his progress towards a sense of triumph over his paraplegia is linked with energetic sporting activity. After the disastrous night of the wedding, he returns to the ward and expresses his anger not by talking with the men in the television lounge, who notably are watching a boxing match, but by smashing the panes of glass in the door with his crutch. In the immediately ensuing sequence, when a World War I veteran insults him, he lashes out with his fists and later, when he and his companion are ejected, turns to reckless driving while his passenger drinks. The way that he is encouraged to manage his recovery and his reactions to disappointment or hurt seem to belong within Hollywood depictions of traditional masculinity, with their emphasis on ‘‘properly masculine’’ activity and silence to cover feelings of inadequacy or hypersensitivity. (It is not that men may not be rendered traditionally as feeling deeply, rather that they must not be rendered as verbally expressing that sense of hurt.) A particularly crucial moment in the depiction of the hero as exercising himself towards a belief in his restored capacities comes when he walks towards a mirror and sees himself as newly glamorous, looking as if he is upright once again although in actuality he is resting on the bars of the walker. The moment seems to offer an economic illustration of the Lacanian mirror phase’s (mis)recognition, when the subject reintrojects the image in the mirror, with its apparently greater power of mobility, as not so much an image as a true reflection of strength and wholeness.

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What is implicit in the stress both on actual ‘‘masculine’’ achievement and the dream of restoration to full strength and corporeal activity is a dread of what otherwise constantly threatens the stricken, wounded male in this film—the loss of masculinity and its replacement by what is apparently seen as overwhelmingly passive, and to that extent feminine, suffering. At the outset of the film, Brando recounts his shooting: ‘‘It was a bad shot or else he was impatient. He must have aimed for my head but he got me in the back.’’ In close-up, the fear, not just of the injury, but of fear itself, manifests itself as he continues: ‘‘I was scared. I couldn’t feel anything from the waist down. I thought I was dying.’’ Once he reaches his hospital bed, the camera regards him in longshot, keeping a distance as if not yet sure what to make of the new Wilozek. ‘‘That’s funny. Very very funny. I was afraid I was going to die. Now I’m afraid I’m going to live.’’ When his voiceover ends, the camera moves into medium closeup as his face expresses pain and he presses the buzzer on the pillow for the nurse. On the sound track, the music now sounds tormented rather than elegiac. Interestingly, the collapse of the hero’s voiceover, so that it is suppressed in favor of some other (male) expert’s, should remind us of Mary Ann Doane’s remarks about melodramas of the 1940s: ‘‘The inability of the films to sustain the female protagonist’s voiceover or the collapse or undercutting of point-of-view shots or flashbacks identified with her is one example of . . . instability. More significant, however, is the tendency, during the course of the narrative, to replace her point of view with that of an authoritative masculine discourse. This discourse, most frequently the medical discourse, diagnoses the female protagonist’s ‘symptoms,’ by subjecting her to the ‘medical gaze,’ and then proceeds to restore her to normality . . . by ‘curing’ her.’’8 The exact parallelism here, whereby Ken’s voiceover and flashbacks are brought to an end and then superseded by the opinions of Dr. Brock (Everett Sloane), is difficult to miss. The audience, as well as the heroine, are guided as to how to read the stages in Ken’s evolution towards less neurotic adjustment by Dr. Brock’s opinions. He puts Ken at a further remove from the audience, making him an object of scrutiny rather than a hero to be identified with. This may not exactly mark his ‘‘feminization’’—just because something markedly similar happens to the women of 1940s melodrama. It cer-

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tainly, though, suggests that what is at stake in the bulk of the narrative is whether the hero will struggle falteringly towards a version of masculinity or stay down with the passivity and helplessness that could be understood societally as either ‘‘unmanly’’ or even ‘‘womanish.’’ If the men of the Veterans Administration Hospital are worthy of the title ‘‘the men,’’ it is surely because they have striven to overcome their adversity. The breach in gender relations that marks at least the early stages of reaction to paraplegia is indicated by Ellen’s first sight of the traumatized Ken. She is the active partner, in being able to walk towards him, although he has indicated his unwillingness to be visited by her. ‘‘How’d you get in here? . . . I told you I didn’t want anything to do with you. Can’t you understand English, you stupid idiot?’’ All he can do now is to use words as a weapon, though. When he orders her to get out, she simply refuses and stays with him. As if to emphasize their near switch in terms of at least physical power, she is clearly seen as—literally—looking down on him. When he objects to the thought of her waiting on him hand and foot, so that he is reduced to baby-like dependence, resentful that he can no longer work, she disagrees, emphasizing what she hopes may be her continuing submission to him, ‘‘but you could do lots of things . . . Please try . . . I need you.’’ Ken’s need to believe that he continues to be the decision-maker is echoed in the traumatized Angel’s wish to go home to look after his aging mother and his siblings. At Angel’s death, Dr. Brock turns upon Norm (Jack Webb) when he seems to lose hope: ‘‘You can develop a sense of responsibility about yourselves or get out, all of you.’’ Late in the film, he turns upon Ken too, with the question of what he would have done if it were his wife confined to the wheelchair. In the final seconds, Ellen asks, ‘‘Do you want me to help you up the steps?’’ It is when he nods, ‘‘Please,’’ that she can run to him and that the music swells sweetly on the sound track. Masculinity in this film seems to include as great a measure of self-reliance as can be achieved. It is also, though, measured in the mature assessment of limitations and the acceptance of female help in dealing with these. Because the men of the film have to learn the barriers to their full subjectivity, a greater place than usual is given to women as crucial elements working towards or against their male loved ones’ adjustment to their new form of masculinity. An early sequence expresses

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both the importance of women’s conduct in light of the men’s paraplegia and the variety of responses to the call upon them. As they listen to a lecture on the meaning of paraplegia, groups of women are regarded fixedly by the camera. Thus, when the lecturer talks of the pain, muscular spasms, bedsores, paralysis of the bladder and bowels that most of these men will suffer, the faces of the women, of different ages, social classes, attitudes, are searched for their reactions. Ellen looks attentive and concerned, but in no obvious way does she seem defeated or discouraged by this information. Another fur-coated woman with a haughty look on her face seems to offer a contrast with her. When the doctor lecturer moves amongst them, this ‘‘colder’’ woman asks about the possibility of cure. The doctor assures her that the mortality rate is low. ‘‘I didn’t mean that. I meant the spine injury.’’ Surely some specialists could be hired to cure the problem, she suggests. The doctor stresses that there is no known method for the regeneration of spinal cord tissue. Another woman talks of how her husband has changed. ‘‘He isn’t different,’’ she is told. ‘‘He’s the same man with a spinal cord injury. . . . He says to himself, ‘I’m not a man any longer. I can’t make a woman happy.’ Is it any wonder he finds it difficult to adjust to the situation?’’ That this sequence is placed before the paraplegics’ efforts to reenter the world of males and females helps to indicate that in this film paraplegia primarily concerns the dread of failure to be male and that women are enlisted to bolster the self-image of men facing such trials as impotence or incontinence. Where uncertainty about the relations of male and female—in terms of their abilities to be masculine or feminine respectively—is so central, it might be anticipated that looking relations would also play a key part. The old habits and gendered subject/object relations to some extent continue. Thus, one patient is jocularly labeled a moron by Dr. Brock because he loves to look at naked women by means of his peep-show toy. In contrast with Ellen, who belongs to a tradition of screen femininity which does not permit her fetishization, there are fetishized women in more peripheral roles: notably, Dolores in her tight sweater, Laverne playing the seductress and eventually fleecing the deluded and duped Norm. Largely, though, gazing becomes of major interest when judgmental looks are turned on the paraplegics. In Ellen’s first encoun-

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ter with the resolutely uncooperative hero, it is her ability to look at him unimpeded that continually irks him. ‘‘Don’t look at me’’ is the first command which he addresses to her. ‘‘Alright,’’ he retaliates when she will not obey, ‘‘I’ll give you what you want. Want to see what it’s like?’’ Then, on throwing back his covers, he tells her, ‘‘Alright, look. I said, look at me. Get a good look. Does it make you feel healthy?’’ When her tenderness to him causes him to start crying, he covers his eyes, attempting to evade her gaze. ‘‘Don’t you see it’s all over?’’ After their wedding, it is surely significant that Ken’s quarrel is with the way Ellen now regards him. As Ken later tells Dr. Brock, ‘‘She looked at me like I was a bug.’’ If a former girlfriend can upset the hero with her newfound control of the gaze, how much more violently does he resent the coldly superior look of women and men at the bar on an evening out. ‘‘Look at them, staring at us,’’ he snarls before turning tail. These men, conscious of their uncertain place in gazing transactions, tend to distrust fetishized women and to value honesty and lack of artifice in their womenfolk. The camera seems to view on their behalf in its apparent approval of the plainer, more matterof-fact women during the doctor’s lecture and question-and-answer session. In the final sequence, where Ellen welcomes a newly acquiescent Ken into the house, she wears very simple clothes buttoned to the neck. When women do look, in this film, it is for help from Dr. Brock or for mutual support in their looking at each other. Ellen’s eyes linger on Brock, with no erotic interest in him, while he interprets Ken but also herself on Ellen’s behalf. ‘‘I have a feeling you don’t like me very much,’’ she begins.—‘‘That isn’t so,’’ he responds. ‘‘. . . You seem to be a very nice girl, but—you could turn out to be very bad for him. . . . Men like Ken with drive, ambition, high hopes usually find it hard to make an adjustment . . . but I don’t think you realize that you’ve an adjustment to make too.’’ The old male-female order is over. Ellen tells Brock that Ken always wanted to be boss with her. ‘‘I let him think he was . . .’’ He cannot, though, continue to believe as things now are in his power over her. The best that she can offer him now, when in his original self-pitying state in the hospital bed, is her declaration that she needs him still. At the end, before he submits gracefully to asking and receiving her help with the wheelchair, she remarks, ‘‘You’ve

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come a long way,’’ and he responds, little-boy-like, with a smiling ‘‘Yeah.’’ ‘‘Ellen, you don’t know pity from love, and you don’t owe me anything,’’ Ken claims when he is still at the stage of rejecting her concern for him. She retorts, ‘‘You owe me something. I’ve waited four years . . .’’ How is love to be recognized in its new form in the paraplegic world? How credible can it ever be? One patient states, ‘‘Normal is normal and cripple is cripple, and never the twain shall meet . . . We make other people uncomfortable—because we remind them that their own bodies can be broken just like that, and they don’t like it.’’ Angel disagrees, though, and Ellen counters Ken’s claim, ‘‘We’re not the same as other people,’’ by affirming, ‘‘I’m not marrying a wheelchair. I’m marrying a man.’’—‘‘You make it sound real,’’ he comments, bewildered. Ellen’s parents feel that they have to protect her from the selfsacrifice that her continuing to love Ken must entail. Her father tells her, ‘‘Love can be fragile . . . Even healthy people can’t always hold on to it or take it for granted.’’ She is in effect signing a contract to be his nurse. ‘‘Is it so wrong for us to want a grandchild?’’ her mother queries. Ellen continues to insist that her love for Ken is distinguishable from pity. The new order introduced in the wake of paraplegia involves a parent figure more aware and with wider understanding than Ellen’s real parents, in Dr. Brock. ‘‘If you were a woman, would you marry a paraplegic?’’ he is asked in the session where he tries to deal with the women’s concerns. He points to a nurse who is about to marry one of the patients and invites them to check with her. When, later, Ellen asks him rhetorically, ‘‘Don’t you think I’m the best judge of my own emotions?’’ his response suggests that she may not be. He feels personal loss when Angel dies of meningitis: ‘‘I liked that boy.’’ In this new order, women have to recognize their proximity to subject status, while also acting out a more ‘‘feminine’’ dependence on their broken-bodied menfolk. Male bonding is an—in context, temporary—refuge from the impossible strains put on male-female relations. When Ken flees from the marriage with Ellen, it is to the other paraplegics in hospital that he returns. ‘‘I want you to come home,’’ she pleads. He responds, ‘‘I’m home. This is my home. This is where I belong.’’ Ken’s clinging to male patients’ company is seen as a phase in

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what is remarkably like his growing up afresh. The more matureseeming members of the patient group decide for all of them what is to be done with such timid specimens as Ken. He is arraigned before the Paralyzed Veterans Association for gaining bad publicity for the hospital by reason of newspaper reports of his reckless driving. He should not be in the hospital, the veterans decide. When five members discuss whether to eject him from it or not, two are for, two against. The decision to throw him out is reached by means of Norm’s vote. In The Men, the postwar world of male insecurity considered in the guise of a paraplegic hospital ward suggests that the old certainties have gone, that survival depends ultimately on adjustment, which means adjustment to new versions of masculinity and femininity, to acceptance of severe limitations on breadwinning, breeding or even marriage and romance. The key seems to be in the willingness to take on board hitherto undreamed realities, which threaten to shake old and fixed beliefs out of existence altogether. In the event, though, some of the old is retained, albeit in compromised and acted forms, to help to make sense of the new. Out goes unreconstructed machismo of the war-hero variety. In its place comes the mature version of virility, which will seek help when it needs it and which no longer resents the superiority that that need must at some level recognize.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE The New Orleans streetcar which names ‘‘Desire’’ as its destination, like another headed for ‘‘Cemeteries’’ with a stop at ‘‘Elysian Fields,’’ was clearly of irresistible metaphoric attractiveness to Tennessee Williams. Yet, it could be asked from the start, whose desire is centered upon? ‘‘Well, they told me to take a streetcar named Desire,’’ Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) tells the whistling young sailor that she asks to help her when she first arrives off the train. From the start, desire is thus linked with her, although her apparent unawareness of its applicability in her relation makes the attribution less certain. Desire for what? In terms of the movie’s chronology, the first struggle in which Blanche engages is over her sister Stella (Kim Hunter). The conflict for Stella is with Stella’s as yet not properly

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glimpsed young husband Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando). Before she has even met up with Stella, Blanche asserts that she is looking for her sister—forcing herself to remember that she is not Stella DuBois any longer, but now Mrs. Kowalski. Later in the movie, Stanley overhears Blanche deploy her eloquence in an attempt to open Stella’s eyes to the unsuitability of the match with Stanley and, by implication, her greater affinity with Blanche. At this point, it is Stanley’s brutal desire that is said to be like that of the streetcar; Blanche claims to be ashamed to have ridden on it. She says of Stanley that he has no gentlemanliness in his nature, that he is an animal. ‘‘Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is—Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle, and you—you’re waiting for him. Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you. That’s if kisses have been discovered yet.’’ Finally, she pleads, ‘‘Don’t hang back with the brutes.’’ The sisters embrace as they hear Stanley’s whistling on his return home. Yet, Stella immediately thereafter throws herself into his arms, leaving Blanche to look on appalled. To this extent, desire seems to be brutish and experienced between Stanley and Stella only. Blanche consciously separates herself from Kowalski on the grounds of his lack of ‘‘Southern’’ refinement. ‘‘If you’ll forgive me, he’s common.’’ When, in an early sequence, Blanche wonders if the absence of a door between herself and Stanley will be ‘‘decent,’’ Stella brushes aside her doubts on the curious grounds, ‘‘Oh, Stanley’s Polish, you know.’’ The viewing of the Polish workman with the condescension of would-be Southern aristocracy becomes a matter of bitter resentment. ‘‘Where were you?’’ Blanche asks Stella cruelly. ‘‘In there with your Polak?’’ To Stanley, she remarks, ‘‘You’re simple, straightforward and honest. A little on the primitive side, I should think.’’ Stanley later erupts in fury at her characterization of him, shouting, ‘‘I am not a Polak. . . . What I am is 100 percent American.’’ As he remarks in the same sequence: ‘‘Pig, Polak, disgusting, vulgar, greasy—those kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister’s tongue too much around here. Who do you think you are? A pair of queens? . . . I’m the king around here and don’t you forget it.’’ He believes that it is his very commonness that attracted Stella to him in the first place. ‘‘I pulled you down off them columns and you loved it. Having them colored lights going. And wasn’t we

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happy together? Wasn’t it all OK till she showed here? Hoity toity. Describing me like a ape.’’ Blanche makes use of the imagined superiority of DuBois breeding to recover from the blow of rejection by Mitch (Karl Malden). Their backgrounds were incompatible, she tells Stanley, who yells back in denunciation of her ‘‘imagination and lies and deceit and tricks.’’ If, then, Stanley and Stella are caught up, in Blanche’s view, in a world of animalistic desire, her weapons against him in order to win back her sister would seem to be her consciousness of inbred gentility and a feeling that Stella must return to her Belle Reve past, pulling herself out of the Kowalski mire. When Stanley and Blanche begin their overt conflict, it is over property and inheritance. ‘‘You get swindled,’’ he tells Stella, ‘‘and I get swindled under the Napoleonic Code.’’ Unconvinced that the Dubois’s former property has been entirely lost to them by reason of unpayable debts, spurred on by his belief that Blanche has been able to afford jewels and finery (‘‘Well, it certainly looks like you raided some stylish shops in Paris, Blanche’’), he threatens to bring somebody in to appraise these things. ‘‘The Kowalskis and the Dubois just have a different notion on this.’’ Blanche concurs: ‘‘Indeed they have, thank heavens.’’ When told by Blanche that an expensive-looking string of pearls was given to her by an admirer, he counters, ‘‘He must have had a lot of admiration.’’ Blanche’s past includes not just the memory of being a member of a propertied Southern family, but a bereavement. Her dead husband is now, for her, a ‘‘boy’’ with poetic talents. She is haunted by the memory of the gunshot which killed him and by what she believes to be her cruelty to him, for which she feels that she is now paying. ‘‘I hurt him the way that you would like to hurt me,’’ she tells Stanley, snatching his poems back from his grasp. ‘‘I’m not young and vulnerable any more, but my young husband was . . .’’ Meetings with strangers, ‘‘even at last a seventeen-year-old boy,’’ have been all that was left to her after his death. Blanche’s desire then is not for the men with which her past appears to be littered, but for the recapturing of her former life with the husband to whom she was so insensitive and for gaining forgiveness for that insensitivity. Her attraction to the young (manifested when a young stranger calls at the house, and hinted at in her seeking help at the opening of the film from a young sailor at whom she affects to be

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too shy to look), an attraction for which she has been sacked from her post as schoolteacher, thus has an explanation. Her attempt to win Mitch as her husband has nothing to do with desire, except as a wish for him to want her. She needs, she says, ‘‘to breathe quietly again,’’ to go away with him and not be anybody’s problem. As when she plays the role of ‘‘hoity-toity’’ Southern belle, Blanche lives partly in the past. She gains access to it by dreaming, by liquor, or the illusions permitted by low lighting. Most of her present behavior, bizarre and ersatz as it seems to Stanley, makes fuller sense only when judged from the standpoint of fuller knowledge of her past. Blanche’s desire is for the impossible, a restaging of past misfortune in a fresh present where she is youthful, cultured, attractive, and has not caused her husband’s suicide or superintended the decline and demise of Belle Reve. In another sense, her desire is for death. Her quasi-triumphant exit on the arm of the old doctor is at one level a reassertion of her dream of herself (‘‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’’), but at another her entry, so understood by Stella and Mitch, into the halfworld of the shades and the moribund. In the present, the dominant term for Blanche is ‘‘faded.’’ When she emerges from the steam of the train engine into mid-shot at the start of Kazan’s film, she is wearing a low-cut buttoned blouse, her hair ‘‘too young’’ in style. Her awareness of her vulnerability with this attempt at girlishness seems to be indicated by her protective holding of her handbag aloft and the apprehension with which she looks about her. On first meeting up with Stella, who appears authentically young and contrastingly ‘‘natural,’’ she wears flowers on her hat and pinned to her shoulder which are, once again, fading. ‘‘Don’t you look at me, no no no,’’ she simpers to Stella. ‘‘I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare.’’ Jessica Tandy played Blanche on Broadway. The casting of Vivien Leigh in the film version generates an extra layer of intertextuality. It is almost impossible to see Leigh’s desperate recall of her Southern belle past without the memory of her Scarlett O’Hara reinforcing the picture of the present-day fading of her past glory. Thus, her disappointment to find Stella’s address at 642 Elysian Fields recalls her shock on her return in Gone with the Wind to Tara to find it scarcely recognizable as the prosperous plantation house in which she had grown up before the Civil War. ‘‘Can this be her home?’’ she allows herself to wonder. ‘‘Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe

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could do justice to it,’’ she tells Stella later.—‘‘You didn’t know Blanche as a girl,’’ Stella reminds Stanley. ‘‘Nobody, nobody, was as tender and trusting as she was.’’ There is thus an extra poignancy in the final sequences, when Blanche is tended by her sister and the woman from upstairs as if they were Mammy fussing over Miz Scarlett in the prime of her youth. As Blanche confesses earlier, ‘‘I have to admit I love to be waited on.’’ At one point, she has a moment of clarity about herself and her dreams. ‘‘It isn’t enough to be soft. You’ve got to be soft and attractive. And I’m fading now . . .’’ With this awareness, she tries to convince Stanley that the transitory possession of physical beauty is compensated by beauty of mind, richness of spirit, tenderness of heart. ‘‘I have all these things. They increase with the years.’’ This hopefulness is soon after mocked by Stanley’s rape of her. Blanche, in her increasingly desperate and impossible bid to recreate herself as the young belle, attractive as ever to the men that she encounters, is almost obsessed with the ‘‘male’’ gaze and tries frantically to present herself as a suitable object for it. Even with her sister in the bowling alley, she turns the light away from her face before she will lift her veil. ‘‘You look just fine,’’ Stella assures her, a remark which produces a smile on Blanche’s face. Later, Blanche has to resort to alcohol before she can accept Stella’s halfhearted attempt, ‘‘It’s just incredible, Blanche, how well you look.’’ On Stanley’s first appearance in his home, Blanche runs to attend to her appearance. He is not impressed. However, Mitch is when he first lays eyes on her. Stella remarks that she is standing in the light when Mitch is in the Kowalski home playing cards. ‘‘Am I?’’ she purrs. Stella’s first concern when Stanley is to meet Blanche is that he should say something nice about her appearance. ‘‘How do I look?’’ she asks him. His response is cool: ‘‘You look OK.’’ In her more pessimistic moments, Blanche is terrified of the gaze. If it finds her wanting as an object, it then becomes hostile and judgmental. ‘‘I don’t want realism,’’ she wails. ‘‘I want magic.’’ Part of that magic is achieved by covering naked bulbs, avoiding the clinical glare of lights that aid realism but damage illusionism. Nevertheless, despite her almost constant concern to meet the demands of the gaze, she can be remarkably oblivious on occasion of the evidence of the mirror, for example. She thus resembles a Douglas Sirk character such as Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) in Imita-

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tion of Life (1959), who does not ‘‘see’’ her own unhappy reflection in the dressing-room mirrors which at times are the spectator’s only access to the characters in the drama. In the bowling alley, for example, though so aware of the light and the importance of its repositioning for her creation of an impression of youthfulness with Stella as her audience, Blanche fails to notice that the mirror to her right at the very start of the sequence presents her to the cinema spectator under a remarkably bright light. Her curious relation to the mirror, sometimes giving it her full attention, sometimes showing unawareness of what it reveals to spectators, makes the shattering of the mirror at the moment of her rape by Stanley curiously apt and not just a heavy metaphor designed to ward off Production Code objections to explicitness. Pamela Anne Hanks considers that the mirror ‘‘embodies the specular, illusory quality of Blanche’s identity.’’9 Is there beneath Blanche’s obsessional desire to impersonate the conventionally pleasing sight, the suitable object of the gaze, a repressed desire, perhaps to be subject too, to seize satisfaction for herself? David Downing believes that she is irresistibly drawn to Stanley and what he represents.10 Similarly, Graham McCann argues that Stanley’s lack of pretension and his ‘‘raw physicality’’ are qualities that she ‘‘strives to repress in herself’’11 Marjorie Rosen too thinks of Blanche’s sexuality as ‘‘repressed, even unaware.’’12 What certainly does seem to be true of Blanche’s relation to her sexuality is that she recognizes in it a weapon in her battle for magic as against realism. She employs conventional (and Southerninflected) femininity as masquerade. Thus, after denouncing the Kowalski home as worthy of a description by Poe, she affects to recover her senses. With hand held apologetically to face, she gasps, ‘‘Oh, what am I saying? I didn’t mean to say that. I meant to be nice about it and say, ‘Oh, what a convenient location.’ Precious lambie, you haven’t said a word.’’ When Stella suggests that they have a drink, she greets the idea with ‘‘What a lovely inspiration,’’ adding, ‘‘One’s my limit.’’ This coyness on the subject of alcohol suggests to keener observers that over-indulgence may be part of Blanche’s present character. Stanley at once sees this probability. When she claims to him that she rarely touches liquor, he remarks drily, ‘‘Uh, there’s some people that rarely touch it but it touches them often.’’ She sometimes affects awareness of her decline. ‘‘Daylight never exposed so total a ruin,’’ she claims lightly in discussion with Stella. Yet, with Stanley, her self-deprecation is calculated to produce swift

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rebuttal, her performance of modesty to be met with a gentlemanly sign of disappointed desire. Stanley does not act his part, though. ‘‘Will you excuse me while I put on my pretty new dress?’’—‘‘OK,’’ he says, but makes no move to leave the room. She plays the coquette by asking him to button the back of her dress and to let her have a drag on his cigarette. ‘‘Have one for yourself,’’ he responds, taking another cigarette from his ear. She persists. ‘‘Look at me now. Would you think it possible that I was once considered to be attractive?’’—‘‘You looks OK.’’—‘‘I wasn’t fishing for compliments, Stanley.’’—‘‘I don’t go in for that stuff . . . I never met a dame yet didn’t know she was good-looking or not without being told. . . . I once went out with a dame who told me, ‘I’m the glamorous type.’ . . . I said, ‘So what?’ ’’—‘‘And what did she say then?’’—‘‘She didn’t say nothing. I shut her up like a clam.’’—‘‘Did it end the romance?’’—‘‘Well, it ended the conversation, that was all.’’ When even this does not cut short her masquerade, he yells at her, ‘‘How about cutting out that bebop?’’ For Blanche, though, ‘‘a woman’s charm is 50 percent illusion.’’ Her performance of the feminine is much more successful with Mitch. He is impressed when, referring to herself as an old-maid schoolteacher, she claims, ‘‘I can’t stand a naked light bulb any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.’’ True to this picture of herself, she expresses disapproval for her school charges’ attitudes: ‘‘Their literary heritage is not what they treasure above all else.’’ Even then, she seems to forget her primness in her delight that the schoolchildren discover love in spring as if for the first time. Mitch joins her in waltzing around the room. In Stanley’s words, ‘‘There’s some men took in by this Hollywood glamor stuff and there’s some men that just aren’t.’’ Before he rapes Blanche, Stanley avers that he has been ‘‘on to her’’ from the start. ‘‘And not once did you pull the wool over this boy’s eyes.’’ Sticking a paper lantern over the lightbulb does not turn his place into Egypt or make her queen of the Nile. One of the questions that Stanley’s immunity to Blanche’s masquerade of femininity raises must concern its source. What sort of masculinity does he represent to be so confident of perpetually ‘‘reading’’ her so accurately, when Mitch is for a time ‘‘taken in’’ by her or when Stella is prepared to ignore the evidence of what she names once as Blanche’s hysteria? Audiences of the film version tend to be so charmed by the wit of Brando’s delivery of his caustic

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comments, so willing to approach Blanche from the angle that his version of her dictates, that he can even be held to represent the realism that Blanche’s belief in magic shuns. Nevertheless, Stanley, as played by Brando, has a much less straightforward relation with both ‘‘masculinity’’ and ‘‘truth’’ than an uncritical reading at first suggests. At first sight, Stanley seems lacking in self-consciousness about his body. Blanche has glimpsed him only from a distance in the bowling alley. She asks questions about him before he arrives home. When he enters the house, she watches him. He is chewing gum when he catches sight of her in turn, but he betrays no particular interest in, or hostility to, her at this stage. His manner is friendly enough. ‘‘Oh, you’re Stella’s sister. . . . Oh, hiya.’’ He then lowers his eyes and walks on, seeming to have his mind on other things. Ripping open the buttons of his jerkin, he asks Blanche about Stella’s whereabouts. His jerkin comes off as he walks past Blanche. He eyes his sweaty T-shirt. ‘‘Where you from, Blanche?’’ he asks casually, as he scratches below his left nipple. The sequence continues with Stanley walking about the room, talking in a friendly but fairly uninterested fashion, and, when he scratches his back, not looking at her. After offering Blanche a drink, he asks, ‘‘Mind if I make myself comfortable?’’—‘‘Please, please do,’’ she offers. He is already removing his T-shirt. She looks away as he stands bare-backed. ‘‘Be comfortable,’’ he says. ‘‘That’s my motto where I come from.’’— Blanche tries to redirect attention to herself. ‘‘It’s mine too. It’s hard to stay looking fresh in hot weather. Why, I haven’t washed or even powdered.’’ He turns towards her, exposing his chest to her. She looks at him but he on the other hand does not look at her. The impression given by Stanley is that he feels no social embarrassment about changing in her presence. When he does look at Blanche, his look seems more appraising but also more impartial and distanced than the male gaze tends to be. He is noncommittal about her visiting, neither exactly welcoming nor exactly opposing it. A cat yowls. She puts out a hand in alarm and touches his arm. Amused at her nervousness, his reaction is to imitate a cat noise. Near the end of the movie, Blanche is sufficiently aware of his apparently spontaneous self-exposure as a mark of disrespect for her that she bids him to close the curtain before he undresses any further. He ignores her request and carries on, suggesting mock-

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ingly, because he sees that she is drunk, ‘‘Do you want to bury the hatchet and make a loving cup?’’ If Stanley has been really, as he says, on to Blanche from the start, aware of her maidenly pretensions and also sure of the sleaziness of her past, then the habit of undressing in front of her is much less casual than it would appear. The ‘‘masculinity’’ of being apparently so unaware of his seductiveness as a half-naked Neanderthal is much compromised if suspicions grow that he is using his body to test her responses and showcasing his muscular arms and torso, wresting erotic objecthood away from her to himself. Brando’s body is almost self-evidently an object of the erotic gaze for the cinema spectator. Stanley’s may be no less manifestly for the diegetic spectator, Blanche. Stanley seems to have cast her in that role, refusing to play the audience for her masquerade of her femininity and yet seducing her into acting as spectator of his stripping and dressing again. The very first time that Stanley is pointed out to Blanche by Stella, he seems to be posturing as a worthy male object of erotic interest. ‘‘Isn’t he wonderful-looking?’’ is Stella’s only response to him at this stage. Blanche’s other view of him before she meets him face-to-face is as a military image in a framed picture admired by Stella. Throughout the bulk of the movie, Stella remains as receptive to his looks and apparent virility as he says that she was originally. ‘‘I can hardly stand it when he’s away for a night,’’ she confides to her ostensibly shocked sister. In the famous sequence outside in the courtyard where he calls for Stella to come down to him, he falls to his knees before her, she leans over him to stroke his back before he lifts her up so that they can kiss. He does indeed seem to set the colored lights going for her. She expects Blanche to share her delight in viewing him. Blanche’s withholding of the gaze from him seems to irk him as much as her unspoken demands that Stanley should learn to objectify her. When he is taunting Blanche in the sequence immediately prior to the rape, he puts on the silk pajamas that he wore on his wedding night and parades in them in her sight, perhaps lording it over her as spectacle, since she is dressed in tawdry make-believe princess fashion while he may think of the spectacle that he embodies as the real thing. Graham McCann comes close to suggesting that Stanley is the

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genuine article when he writes, correctly, that Stella and he enjoy each other, and also describes Stanley as ‘‘without any fear of social censorship,’’ as being ‘‘a sweaty, soiled, sensual self,’’ or the interaction between Stella and Stanley as involving ‘‘sex and sanity.’’13 These vaguely Lawrentian emphases place Stanley on the side of spontaneous, ‘‘natural’’ masculinity, leaving Blanche as tiresomely phoney in contrast. What seems nearer the mark is to suggest that Stanley is thoroughly, and from the start, aware of his ‘‘animal’’ allure and willing to project it, to exploit it to win his point: thus, that Stanley is not so much sane as more confident of his ability to play the erotic object to dethrone ‘‘queen’’ Blanche and clear-sighted enough to know when he can most damage her regality by so doing. In other words, Stanley seems as adept at masquerading as Blanche, if not much more so. His dry wit and sharp intelligence in peeling away the layers of Blanche’s pretentiousness do not fit comfortably with the portrait of a man of pure spontaneous masculinity. Given what we see of Stanley’s behavior when he first returns home, Stella’s admission that she was ‘‘sort of thrilled’’ when Stanley smashed all the lightbulbs on their wedding night does not, though, authenticate her vision of his masculinity. His playing up of the macho hunk seems to mesh well with Brando’s own uneasiness with the hypermasculinity of the role, his fear that his performance might not come across as convincing. This may be precisely its strength—that it allows a gap to open up between the image of himself that Stanley purveys and the psychological credibility of the man, so that Brando permits us to see the hard work involved in masculinity as performance. Chris Holmlund notes that Lacan claims, ‘‘in the human being virile display itself appears as feminine.’’14 Thus, it seems legitimate for her to conclude, ‘‘For all their cocky, self-assured, flaunting of masculinity . . . straight men and butch clones both are merely masquerading.’’15 The judgment has clear application to the Stanley of Streetcar. By bringing in the element of class, Holmlund helps to complete the picture of Stanley as masquerading masculinity. ‘‘The butch clone’s muscles and macho attire, in particular, ensure he ‘looks like a man,’ and a working-class man at that.’’16 McCann, who came close to seeing Stanley as somehow more ‘‘authentic’’ as man than Blanche as woman, shifts direction: ‘‘As the movie progresses, we come to see Stanley’s crude behavior as another kind of contrivance, another pose: his masculinity is overpowering in order to ob-

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scure his ‘feminine’ qualities.’’ Stanley’s wish to dominate is indeed, as McCann says, ‘‘the desperate aggression of a man unsure of his manhood.’’17 Brando’s machismo, as in the case of his Stanley Kowalski, might well be called that of maquillage. ‘‘The attributes of masculinity, generally admired and encouraged by society, when taken to their extreme, rebound with apocalyptic effect.’’18 At isolated moments in Streetcar, that much-feared and strongly denied femininity is allowed expression: when he weeps alone and cries out for Stella to return to him; in his final rejection by her when all he can do is to yell her name in pain. It is important that we gain clarity about the meaning of Stanley and the credibility of his impersonation of ‘‘natural’’ masculinity, since it makes more sense to deplore his raping of Blanche if we discern it as the wantonly cruel act of a man profoundly unsure of his masculinity (just as, for example, the rape and murder of the heroine Teresa [Diane Keaton] in Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar [1977] are carried out by a man who believes that she is laughing at his homosexuality). The film’s director seems to have believed that the play did not take sides, and that the cinema spectator should not be in there ‘‘rooting for somebody.’’19 If, though, it is left to the spectator to judge unguided, as it were, between two realities, then it surely is the case that Stanley’s will be, as Pamela Anne Hanks states, privileged.20 After all, his hardheaded, witty acerbity as against the clearly exposed fakery of Blanche’s magic, the way that he seems to represent commonsense sanity against Blanche’s flights into fey illusions of her own to which not even her sister feels allegiance, has obvious appeal to a modern audience. So too does Brando himself in the part. However, we need to see Stanley’s performance of masculinity as simply more misleadingly persuasive than Blanche’s now weary performance of the feminine. Most importantly, we need to see Stanley and Blanche not as opposing principles (masculinity/femininity; realism/illusionism; authenticity/fakery) but as caught up in the same game of playing their gender roles to the hilt in order to deflect attention from their growing panic. Stanley acts and looks like a man, to re-stress Holmlund’s formula. That is very different from saying that he is a credible and coherent version of the male. In Streetcar, the cost of masculinity’s demand to be taken seriously is Blanche’s rape and subsequent/consequent descent into mad-

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ness. These adversaries actually compete for limelight as objects of the erotic gaze. It is because they are so alike, appearances to the contrary, that their warfare cuts so deep.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY The setting for much of the movie is Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Given this location and the fact that the action is dated from the start as taking place in 1941, American audiences, even those unfamiliar with James Jones’s book of the same title, would surely have expected the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to occupy a central place in it. The surprise attack does indeed appear to climax the movie, coming as it does in the final 15 minutes or so. When it arrives, though, it acts as a marker between peacetime and wartime lives/values. The movie has centered on the experiences of a number of men and women living in the barracks or in the neighboring town where the military find their entertainment. The ‘‘war section’’ de´nouement quickly ties up the remaining loose ends of the plot—covering Prewitt’s (Montgomery Clift) death as he returns, still wearing civvies, to fight as a United States Army soldier, Milt Warden’s (Burt Lancaster) preparedness to take unorthodox action that shows his peculiar fitness to lead in warfare, and the sad shipboard farewell in the final scene from Karen (Deborah Kerr) and the now bereaved ‘‘Princess’’ Lorene/Alma (Donna Reed) to Hawaii and to the men that they have lost. Thus, even when the movie shifts decisively from the leisure of pre-Pearl Harbor peace to the sudden urgency of war, that war’s major function in the narrative is to pose questions of love and duty, and to shift the focus from the more ‘‘feminized’’ relationships between men in the barracks, between men and women beyond them, to the revitalized ‘‘masculinity’’ associated with the fighting man facing a major emergency. Warden finds new meaning in his fondness for army life, a fondness that has earlier prevented his seeking promotion to the rank of officer just to enable him to please Karen, his married mistress; Prewitt learns that his love of military life, despite his recent persecution by the army for refusing to take part in the boxing championships, is greater than his need to evade capture for killing ‘‘Fatso’’ (Ernest Borgnine). The women who love them

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are discarded in the crisis, not because the men cease feeling love for them, but because a greater love is calling them back to duty. There is little doubt that World War II is going to disrupt the personal lives of all the characters who have survived this far—Maggio (Frank Sinatra) is dead by now, from a beating undergone in the stockade—but the war and the disruption are only begun at the movie’s end. If this is a love story, it focuses on fierce sexual attraction between, primarily, Milt Warden and Karen Holmes, the latter married to an officer who is Warden’s immediate superior. In their first scene alone together, Warden responds to her desolation as she talks of her past—‘‘The lady’s not what she seems. She’s a washout—if you know what I mean,’’—by making to depart without further explanation. ‘‘What are you doing?’’ she asks of him.—‘‘I’m leaving. Isn’t that what you want?’’—‘‘I don’t know, sergeant. I don’t know.’’ When he turns back, she returns his kiss, clasping him to her. The close proximity of sexual longing and a form of compassion that has Milt respond protectively to Karen permeates the sequence. More surprisingly, this proximity is shown in the celebrated love scene played out on the beach by Kerr and Lancaster, frames from which are still sold as erotic posters. The beach sequences (they run into the surf in their bathing costumes in the first of these, emerge to make love in the second) seem to center on the physical release of their lovemaking on the sand close to the breakers, but there is more to the sequence than is now easily remembered. The movie keeps shifting between the arenas of desire and pleasure, on the one hand, and a different sort of reciprocal concern. Because this is shown most clearly in the interaction between Milt and Karen, attention will be turned in this analysis more closely to this pair of characters than, say, to the club where the hostesses seem to offer Production Coded versions of prostitutes working in a servicemen’s brothel. An early sequence, where Warden first gazes at Karen, of itself demonstrates that Laura Mulvey’s account of the ‘‘male’’ gaze and its fairly undifferentiated objectification of the female needs to be fuller, more sensitive to the differences between certain male gazes. Here, Warden has by his side Lever (Mickey Shaughnessy). Lever, by his presence and his particular version of the gaze, helps to delineate Warden’s attitudes more subtly. The latter clearly ‘‘uses’’ the male gaze, but there is also a suggestion within the sequence

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that he is not to be understood as simply ‘‘on the make,’’ as Karen herself seems first to believe when she plays to the erotic gaze that she takes him to deploy. He shares basic sexual interest in Karen’s looks with Lever, but even more evidently he does not see himself as looking in quite the same obvious way as Lever. Early in the sequence, Warden walks outdoors from the office. Lever follows the trajectory of his look to Karen as she leaves a building in the distance. The two men stand side by side watching. ‘‘Her and them sweaters!’’ Lever exclaims. Warden half smiles. Because the smile is Lancaster’s, the audience is alerted not to see it as a sign of his complicity with Lever or as a sign of uncomplicated pleasure in what he sees. ‘‘I’ll bet she’s colder than an iceberg,’’ he remarks. (As the exchange already alluded to—‘‘the lady as washout’’—will soon indicate, he already ‘‘knows’’ her before meeting her, sees more deeply than Lever will ever be capable of doing.) ‘‘She knows the score, I’m telling you,’’ Lever continues. Warden is unimpressed. ‘‘Is that right?’’ Karen pauses and seems to look across at the watchers. She starts to walk over to them, playing up the erotic object status that presumably she believes both men have conferred on her. Lever busily gossips about her, seeking to wreck her reputation, to share Karen with Warden as their possession, even if she is by his account damaged goods. ‘‘. . . when I soldiered at Fort Bliss with Holmes [Karen’s husband] I heard plenty about this lady. Plenty.’’—‘‘You did, huh?’’—‘‘OK, not me, but I know some of the guys she played around with, so don’t tell me.’’ All the time that he is talking, Karen is still approaching with almost threatening deliberation. Warden remains noncommittal, skeptical about the worth of the information Lever is so anxious to impart: ‘‘I ain’t telling you. You’re telling me.’’ The camera faces Karen as she confronts Warden directly by stopping in front of him. ‘‘Good morning, Sergeant.’’—‘‘Good morning, Ma’am.’’—‘‘I’m looking for my husband.’’ Both men look back at her, apparently forming some near-instinctive male solidarity with Holmes—although they are also inferiors in rank to him. Warden takes it upon himself to explain: ‘‘Captain Holmes just went into town, Ma’am. On business.’’ Karen’s face is in close-up when she asks, ‘‘Oh? He was to have left some things for me. Do you know anything about them?’’ In a reverse-shot close-up, he replies, ‘‘No, I don’t, Ma’am. Anything I can do for you?’’ The import of this sly ‘‘male’’ remark is not lost on Lever, who just previously seemed mo-

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mentarily at a loss during the exchange between Karen and Warden. It is certainly not lost on Karen. The camera moves back into mid shot as she turns to walk away from him. ‘‘No thanks.’’—‘‘I’d be glad to help—Ma’am.’’ She turns round and once again walks up to him. ‘‘My husband’s been telling me a lot about you, Sergeant. He says you’re very efficient.’’ Warden, smiling again in medium closeup, responds, ‘‘Yes, Ma’am.’’—‘‘What is it that makes you so efficient, Sergeant?’’—With a slight raising of the eyebrows, ‘‘I was born smart, Ma’am.’’—Karen and Warden are held in a two-shot. ‘‘I love that! Well, goodbye, Sergeant.’’ The audience watches from the standpoint of the two men as she walks away again. ‘‘Man,’’ Lever opines, ‘‘She sure is one, ain’t she?’’—‘‘One what?’’—‘‘One woman.’’—‘‘I’ve seen better.’’ Lever glances over at him, apparently puzzled by his coolness. At an obvious level, the dialogue suggests that we are witness to the sexual banter of a pair who probably have the hots for one another. The looks between them, the pauses between ‘‘smart’’ lines, the boldness of Karen’s walk right up to close quarters with Warden, are reminiscent of scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The dialogue is more opaque, however. It may not simply be Lever who is puzzled as to what exactly is going on. The one point where the subtext is more obvious—‘‘Anything I can do for you?’’—is unexpectedly witless and ‘‘laddish.’’ Yet, while each party seems fully versed in the rules of the game, neither party seems to have attention exclusively focused on it. ‘‘I’ve seen better’’ suggests relative indifference to Karen’s powers of seduction. It also, though, indicates Warden’s need to separate himself from Lever and the standards of his gaze. By rejecting Lever’s invitation to leer at the woman whose reputation he has sought, in the ‘‘sadistic’’ manner of Mulvey’s male gazer, to destroy even as he thrills to the view, Warden is warning him off—both in order to stake a more exclusive claim on Karen, but also to separate whatever reaction he is experiencing from the run-of-the-mill male voyeur’s. Karen has also played the part of conventional object to what she at first believes to be conventional male gazers. Her surprise at Warden, as well as her wish to look back at him hard, suggest that she too knows that something is not quite as conventional as had once appeared in Warden as active gazer. The conventionality of subject/object positions reappears as an initially important-seeming element in their next encounter, where

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Warden, outside in the rain, looks through the screen door as Karen approaches, in shorts, a cigarette between her lips. She hesitates before opening the door to him, but still does not move backwards to let him in. In response, he lowers his eyes. ‘‘Well, if it isn’t Sergeant Warden.’’ His face is filmed in close-up as he glances up at the rain and at her. She follows his glance and responds, ‘‘You’d better step inside or you’ll get wet.’’—‘‘I am wet,’’ he tells her as he enters the house. ‘‘If you’re looking for the Captain, he isn’t here.’’ His response to this is to look at her with hooded eyes. He seems to be filmed here to appear suddenly taller than she is, and looking down at her. The pattern of the visuals is that of shot reverse-shot. ‘‘And if I’m not looking for him?’’—‘‘He still isn’t here.’’—‘‘Well, I’m looking for him. You know where he is?’’ His voice becomes unctuous and seductive as he asks the latter question. She answers bitingly, ‘‘. . . Perhaps he’s ‘in town on business.’ That’s the way you put it the other day, isn’t it?’’ Persisting with his story that he has business for Captain Holmes to attend to, papers to sign, he then abandons it. The ironic half-smile seemed to be Lancaster’s secret weapon in the barracks meeting with Karen. Now it is she who smiles to herself as he invites himself in for a drink. Ah, just as I thought. He’s like all the others. We are going to play that old familiar game. She indicates her irritation by tearing up the papers that he cannot quite admit that Holmes does not really need to sign. She declares to him that she likes, but also dislikes, his confidence.—‘‘It’s not confidence, Ma’am. It’s honesty. I just hate to see a beautiful woman going all to waste.’’—The last word triggers a bitter response in Karen. ‘‘I know several kinds of waste,’’ she comments as she pours herself a drink. ‘’’You’re probably not even aware of some of them. . . . For instance, what about the house without a child? There’s one sort for you.’’ The sequence, which promised to detail the skilled seduction of a traditionally bored housewife by a virile visitor to her home, has switched direction. He falls silent. He looks at her fixedly, but listening attentively. For the first time, there is music on the sound track. ‘‘You’re doing fine, Sergeant. My husband’s off somewhere and it’s raining outside and we’re both drinking now.’’ This is where she begins to talk of the lady as washout, he makes to leave and she half invites him to stay. Once again, there is a traditional male-gazer quality about the

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sequence, but also once again the import shifts. The male look becomes one of concern, though it may look as hard and phallic and castrating as ever. If it were not in danger of being so taken, why would Karen feel uncertainty in her interpretation of it? In the (divided) beach sequence, they begin by behaving like carefree lovers, no longer the anxiously waiting adulteress or soothing but hurt seducer that they were moments before. The music is cheerful and romantic. He helps her down from the rocks on to the beach. She runs first into the water, looking remarkably Monroelike, while Warden watches her from the shore, half out of his clothes. When they leave the water, they first embrace in the waves, Karen on top of his body. She runs from him. He gets up to follow. She flings herself on to a beach towel and lies back on it with her eyes closed. He towers over her, lowers his legs on to the towel, and in a kneeling position leans over her and kisses her on the mouth as the sound track music soars. She is open-mouthed as he lifts his head from hers. ‘‘I never knew it could be like this. Nobody ever kissed me the way you do.’’—This triggers off suspicion in him. ‘‘Nobody? . . . Not even one? Out of all the men you’ve been kissed by?’’ It is small wonder that this part of the movie seems today to sum up sexual romance, to celebrate joyful abandon to physical pleasure. Yet, almost as soon as it has started, their lovemaking is marred by Warden’s return to his previous suspicion that she is the same woman whose sleazy past Lever attempted to describe. Even then, there is a clear demarcation of the positions of male subject and female object, the former physically overpowering the latter in the rapturous lovemaking, or probing like the traditional sadistic investigator in the aftermath. However, there is a distinct echo of the scene in Karen’s home when she moves away from him and half collapses on the sand. Stung by his taunt, ‘‘Tell me the story. There’s always a story,’’ Karen calls him to her: ‘‘Come back here, Sergeant. I’ll tell you the story.’’ He stands distant from her, once again towering above her as she starts the tale. Then again, he never takes his eyes from her, though hers do not meet his. The look on his face changes from one of ‘‘masculine’’ distrust to one of concern. ‘‘He [her husband, Holmes] was drunk when he came in at 5 A.M. I was lying on the floor. I begged him to go for the doctor but he fell on the couch and passed out. The baby was born about an hour later. Of course it was

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dead. It was a boy. But they worked over me at the hospital, they fixed me up fine. They even took my appendix out.’’ Now, Warden is moving towards her, his face still betraying his concern. ‘‘They threw that in free.’’ He at last abandons his superior stance above her and crouches down to her level. He speaks her name in a near whisper. ‘‘And one more thing—no more children.’’ He scans her face as she begins almost to laugh. ‘‘Sure, I went out with men after that. And if I’d ever found one that—’’—‘‘Karen, listen to me, listen—’’—‘‘I know. Until I met you, I didn’t think it was possible either.’’ His hands are now on her shoulders. He leans towards her, putting his head on her shoulder. The sequence has once again shifted its expected direction. The first shift was when lovemaking became a jealous quarrel. Her excuses are almost vetoed before they can be heard. Then, they are heard and compassion returns. ‘‘I didn’t know it could be like this’’ becomes ‘‘I didn’t think it was possible.’’ The addition of ‘‘either’’ to this last remark is as significant as Warden’s lowering himself to be on Karen’s level and placing his head on her shoulder. She recognizes that there is a bond between them, a reciprocation that she has never been able to find, for all her searching, up till now. The look from male to female is as evident in the second part of the sequence as the first, but its significance has vastly altered. In another sequence, the developing love affair reaches a later stage where both suffer. ‘‘You’re probably not even in love with me,’’ she accuses him. His reply is interesting: ‘‘You’re crazy. I wish I didn’t love you.’’ Karen looks at Warden in surprise. ‘‘Maybe I could enjoy life again.’’ He shelters her with his body against the glare of oncoming headlights.—‘‘So they were married and lived unhappily ever after.’’—‘‘Never been so miserable in my life as I have since I met you.’’—‘‘Neither have I’’—‘‘I wouldn’t trade a minute of it.’’— ‘‘Neither would I.’’ What this exchange seems to signify is that, once love and commitment take over from sexual desire, the male has his power limited. This is not for the simple reason that the female now has power over the male. It is clear from their dialogue here that they both feel unable to make free choices, though they would choose also not to be free of their ‘‘misery.’’ Rather, both are subject to some higher power, as it were—surely, in this context, the power of love. This is not to suggest that the difference in social power between male and female is thus canceled out, even if the male comes

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closer to what could apparently be female experience of masochism, pleasure in powerlessness. There may be a broad analogy between this state, ‘‘being in love’’—subject to the power not so much of the loved one as of Love itself—and the experience of male and female subjects in relation to the phallus. The phallus is ‘‘both the (dis)proportion between the sexes, and the (dis)proportion between any sexed being by virtue of being sexed (having parts, being partial) and human totality.’’21 Karen has not abolished the gendered power distinctions between herself and Warden just because he has fallen in love with her. Karen’s question, ‘‘I wonder why men feel so differently . . . than women,’’ Warden’s response, ‘‘It’s just not the same,’’ occur at the same point in the movie as the exchange three paragraphs above. Later, he turns down her plea that he should train as an officer. He protests that he still loves her, despite his decision. ‘‘I know,’’ she concedes, ‘‘I know.’’ Both are unable to fulfill each other’s wishes. Love has power over them, but does not empower them in turn. In the same sequence, Warden says, ‘‘I don’t want you to go back to Holmes.’’ Karen’s response is, ‘‘I don’t want to either but I am. There’s nothing else for me to do.’’ They still love each other, but each lets the other down. Karen’s opinion that there is no help for this seems not to be denied or qualified by other events in the movie. This is true of affection between men in the film. ‘‘I feel for you . . . but from my position I can’t quite reach you,’’ could be a line from Warden to Karen. It is in fact said by Maggio as he talks to Prewitt through a screen door. He sometimes experiences the same punishments that Prewitt undergoes at the hands of Holmes’s fellow schemers but he cannot finally take his suffering on to himself. When Maggio dies, Prewitt insists on paying him tribute on his bugle. He weeps, helplessly, for him. The movie highlights not just the shared, but unequal, powerlessness of men and women in love, but the surprisingly frank—for the time—affection among some of the men. When they first meet, there is a forthright exchange of looks between Prewitt and Warden. ‘‘I heard about you,’’ Warden tells him. ‘‘I heard about you too, Sergeant,’’ Prewitt responds. Warden exerts his authority over the maverick pool-playing loner with tactful benignity. ‘‘This is a rifle outfit, Prewitt. You ain’t supposed to enjoy yourself before sundown. Put up your cue and come along.’’ Notably, in his final parting from

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Karen, Warden suddenly interrupts their conversation to run after a young man that he thinks may be the fugitive Prewitt. ‘‘You’re already married,’’ Karen affirms in some despair, ‘‘—to the army.’’ Many of the male characters in the movie are played by men of such slight build (Clift, Sinatra) as to suggest anorexia, or else men of such bulk as to be quite unheroic in looks (Borgnine, Shaughnessy). The casting of the former sort at least seems to fit James Jones’s viewpoint in his novel. When Harry Cohn raised objections to Zinnemann’s enthusiasm for the casting of Clift as Prewitt, he rationalized his hostility to him on the grounds that he was no soldier, no boxer, and probably homosexual. Yet, in the first paragraph of the novel, Prewitt is described as a ‘‘deceptively slim young man.’’22 That a film that purports to deal with the United States’ entry into World War II, made at a time when the Production Code and McCarthyism had such influence over what movies seemed to say, should expose maleness as so lacking in machismo, so physically limited, so prone to self-doubt and anguish, makes From Here to Eternity a quite extraordinary movie in its context. Perhaps, though, what it is saying about masculinity when it is dominated by love is not so very unusual. Perhaps instead it provides an approach to male gazing which both recognizes the cultural meaning of the look but also the limitations and qualifications placed upon its signification.

ON THE WATERFRONT Storms about the political import of On the Waterfront have understandably dominated discussion of the film since its original release. So painful to so many in Hollywood and beyond was its director’s ‘‘friendly testimony’’ to HUAC that the honoring of Elia Kazan at the Academy Awards ceremony of 1999 divided its audience: graphically into those who were enthusiastic enough to give him a standing ovation and those outraged enough by the Academy’s conduct to stay, resolutely not applauding, in their seats. The film has been read as a self-serving vindication of tale-bearing, as an apologia for it through the film’s centering on the breaking of the ‘‘deaf-and-dumb’’ rules by which the waterfront union lives, despite its full knowledge of the corruption and brutality of the

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union bosses. Lindsay Anderson believed that particularly in its final sequences, with their individualizing and personalizing of the issues dividing workmen and union bosses, so that the former are passive and incapable of organization or group action, the underlying fascism of On the Waterfront was revealed.23 One obvious consequence of the furor occasioned by Kazan’s consistently unrepentant attitude to his naming of names is that the politics of this film seems extremely difficult to separate from the political attitudes of and about its director. Another consequence is that attention is deflected from the central love story. Yet, that love story plays such a crucial part in the highly individualized and personalized decision by Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) to defy Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and to smash the hold of the bosses over the union. It is the treatment of the relationship between Terry and Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) that this analysis will chiefly concern. If the objectifying male is a traditional element in Hollywood’s narrative cinema, then to some extent the film and its hero are traditional. Male reaction to Edie when she is first seen at the docks indicates that she is an object of the longshoremen’s gaze, even though her appearance is coded as completely unfetishized. When Terry first meets Edie in that sequence, he seems not to notice her distraught state and has to be informed that she is the freshly bereaved sister of Joey Doyle, whose murder Terry himself has inadvertently played a key part in setting up. His first impulse is to tease and flirt with her. She tries to fight him for the token that will secure her father a day’s labor. Terry’s reaction as he grapples with her is, ‘‘Oho, things are looking up on the docks.’’ Later, in his walk with her through the park, he talks of how she looked as a schoolkid, her braids looking to him ‘‘like a hunk of rope,’’ the wires on her teeth, her glasses, making her ‘‘really a mess.’’ Aware of her reserve, he feels that he must restore her confidence, and does so by referring once more to her appearance: ‘‘I’m just kidding you a little bit. I meant to tell you that—you grew up very nice.’’ In a later sequence, he takes her to a neighborhood bar and plays up his ‘‘masculinity,’’ incidentally ridiculing her ‘‘feminine’’ caring. She asks him to say more about the subject he has first chosen for discussion, boxing. He talks of his childhood, with his older brother Charlie, of running away and then being sponsored by Johnny Friendly. Suddenly, he interrupts himself. ‘‘What do you really

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care? Am I right?’’—‘‘Shouldn’t everybody care about everybody else?’’—His reaction is to stare at her in disbelief. ‘‘Oh, what a fruitcake you are.’’—‘‘I mean, isn’t everybody a part of everybody else?’’—‘‘And you really believe that drool?’’ This exchange indicates something that the film develops much more fully, that Edie is a good Roman Catholic, that she will open him up to church teaching through Father Barry (Karl Malden) so that the initially macho ‘‘laddish’’ Terry will be ‘‘feminized’’ into social and moral responsibility. If Terry starts out as the unthinkingly and typically masculine subject of the gaze, Edie indicates a willingness, under the spell of her attraction to him, to learn to be a suitable object. When she returns from her walk in the park with Terry, she spends part of the time in the subsequent scene with her father looking at herself in the mirror and brushing her hair. For the first time in the narrative, she shows interest in how she looks and how to make herself more pleasing in appearance implicitly to Terry. Complementing the early impression of Terry as uncomplicatedly male, there is much male affection expressed in physical terms, masked as good-natured roughhousing, throughout the first scene with Johnny Friendly. It is made clear that Terry is seen as a lovable sort, short of intelligence, to be respected, if at all, for his body rather than his brains. ‘‘Go on,’’ Friendly tells him as he thrusts at him cash to be counted up, ‘‘It’s good for you. Develops your mind.’’—‘‘What mind?’’ asks Terry’s brother Charlie (Rod Steiger).—‘‘Shut up. I like the kid.’’ He shows this by leaning on Terry’s back (Terry is bending over the money in his concentration on the task) as he talks to Charlie. While they reminisce about an incident from Terry’s past, Johnny’s hand clasps his waist, while Charlie reaches out to touch him on the shoulder. ‘‘I lost the count,’’ Terry wails. In the recuperative final sequences, Edie after the toughness of her moral certainties and refusal to compromise with Terry (‘‘What more do you want me to do?’’ he asks and she replies, ‘‘Much much much more.’’) goes on her knees beside Terry, whose only thought is for his dead brother. She wants them to go ‘‘some place we can live in peace.’’ It is he who vows revenge, while she can only plead that he look out for himself. ‘‘Do what I tell you,’’ he orders her and obediently she stays behind with Charlie’s corpse. Once Terry has given his testimony, she still talks of their leaving for a farm out west. ‘‘What are you trying to prove?,’’ she asks, no longer the

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scourge of moral indecision, now without the acuity of vision with which she has earlier read his character. ‘‘They always said I was a bum. Well, I ain’t a bum, Edie . . . I’m just going to go down there and get my rights.’’ When at the film’s climax he is beaten to a pulp, she tries to join him but can only scream as she is pushed aside by one of the Friendly mob. At the point where she and the priest tend to him, he seems to be Christ to their ‘‘women-at-the-foot-of-theCross.’’ By the end of the film, then, traditional masculinity and femininity have been restored. They seem possibly more traditional than ever. Terry makes his lone stand, and then leads the workmen back into the workplace as his final act of destructiveness towards the old regime. Edie, who was at the very center of the investigation of Joey’s death and who has been preaching the doctrine of universal responsibility throughout the central area of the film, accepting his love only when Terry can no longer tolerate Friendly’s iniquities, turns at the end into just another western-style heroine, wringing her hands on the sidelines and begging him to come home alive. Neither the opening, with its invocation of traditional gender behavior, nor the ending, which dusts off and restores those traditions, tells the whole story. Nor would they be expected to in dominant cinema. The bulk of the movie offers a quite different account. One of the more significant aspects of the mediation of Terry’s machismo is that it is to some extent an act and that Edie sees after her first lengthy encounter with him that he is playing a part, a role that does not properly express his identity. She refuses to believe that Terry is like his brother Charlie, who has just been described by her father as ‘‘a butcher in a camel coat.’’ Terry ‘‘tries to act tough,’’ she explains, ‘‘but there’s a look in his eye.’’ Edie who at one level has to remind herself of the attributes of the object of the gaze cannot remain satisfied with being just an object when she has come home (from a rural teacher-training college) in the aftermath of Joey’s murder. In going down to the docks with and on behalf of her father, she sees, in his words, ‘‘things not fit for the eyes of a decent girl.’’ In the church, partly by reason of her inexperience in playing deaf and dumb like the other longshoremen, partly because of her obstinate frankness, she continues to look at Terry and about her when the men have lowered their glances, to avoid trouble. When she does lower her head, it seems

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to be in shame at their fear rather than because she has learned to defer to authority, legitimate or otherwise. Terry, in his protest to Edie at the way that he is scrutinized, must incidentally be suggesting that Edie is fearless and active, a scrutinizer who is not content to play the looked-at. ‘‘Everyone’s putting the needle on me. You and the mug in the church and Father Barry. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.’’ ‘‘What are you doing up there, on the roof?’’ he has earlier asked her. Her reply is significant—‘‘Just looking.’’ It is to the roof that the official investigator comes to question Terry. It is on the roof that (stool pigeon) Terry’s pigeons are killed in their coop. In another sequence, she sounds remarkably like a homicide detective of the more regular sort. ‘‘It was Johnny Friendly had Joey killed, wasn’t it? He had something to do with it, didn’t he? . . . You can’t tell me because you’re part of it. Because you’re just as bad as the worst of it. Tell me the truth, Terry.’’ She is right to discern that Terry nevertheless is not to be classed with Charlie or the rest of the Friendly mob, just as she is right to suggest that he acts tough. The remarkable tenderness that is only a little below Terry’s macho surface is most fully demonstrated in the park sequence where he senses Edie’s unease with his more formulaic teasing and flirting and tries to compensate by paying genuine-sounding compliments about her growing up ‘‘very nice.’’ It is during this sequence that Terry picks up Edie’s dropped glove. It is not his retrieving it and then retaining it that make the moment so memorable. It is that he tries it on his own hand. He keeps it not particularly because he wants to tease but almost as if he has forgotten that he has put it over his fingers in the first place. Before he returns the glove to her, he has induced her to talk of her teacher-training course and he has touched on Charlie’s years at college, his memories of her when they both attended parochial school. It is one of the clearest signs in the visuals of the film that he tries to empathize, as it were to try on her femininity before abandoning the attempt. ‘‘You don’t remember me, do you?’’ he asks insecurely when she walks away with both gloves once more in her possession. Unexpectedly, music starts on the sound track, she turns back to him and tells him, ‘‘I remembered you the first moment I saw you.’’— ‘‘By the nose, huh?’’ he grins, obviously reassured, moving his nose to one side with his fingers. ‘‘Well, some people just got faces that stick in your mind.’’—Because for the first time she laughs so eas-

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ily, he joins her. ‘‘I remember, you were in trouble all the time.’’—‘‘. . . The way those sisters used to whack me . . . They thought they was going to beat an education into me, but I foxed them.’’—‘‘Maybe they just didn’t know how to handle you.’’—‘‘How would you have done it?’’—She replies, in a reverse-shot, ‘‘With a little more patience and kindness. That’s what makes people mean and difficult. People don’t care enough about them.’’ In the next shot of Terry, he seems awkward and uncomfortably moved. He breaks the spell by trying to act as if he is in command, wanting to escort her home because ‘‘there are too many guys round here with only one thing on their mind.’’ By reverting to childhood and then trying to reimagine the past with Edie as his teacher, Terry has for the moment found a way to alibi his feelings of dependency upon her. She becomes less the castrating all-seeing mother than the good parent, the caring teacher who is contrasted with the nuns who believed that punishment inculcates education. By the end of the sequence, although he ‘‘recovers’’ his proper position as male subject, we have seen too much not to agree with Edie that he acts, but is not, tough. Or, at least that he does not have his heart in the performance. When he dances with her amid the wedding party, this is a chance for his romantic attachment to her to be allowed to surface, albeit amid the rituals of the wedding breakfast and of group dancing. Their romance is not yet quite real, though. This is somebody else’s wedding party that they have gate-crashed. One cause of Edie’s giddiness—she feels as if she is floating—is the alcohol that he has made her imbibe. Yet, once again, there is a sign in Terry’s behavior that he cannot find a rationale for the nurturing tenderness that he feels. His remark, ‘‘It’ll do you good,’’ as he feeds Edie a stick of chewing gum, is clearly nonsense. Yet, it indicates that he feels a strong maternal desire to take care of her by feeding her, even though what he has to hand is not food by any normal understanding of the term. Terry becomes aware that love is feminizing him, in the sense that he has started to lose his ability to protect himself against predators. This becomes clear in a sequence on the rooftop with the pigeons. He talks of the city as being full of hawks, with the pigeons as their prey. When Edie takes a pigeon into her hands, a special point is made in the dialogue of its male gender. The boy who has been Terry’s admirer and fellow pigeon-fancier looks at her blankly

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and distrustingly, as if delivering the male pigeon into her hands, literally, is something that does not feel right to him. It is this boy who later kills the pigeons as an act of revenge upon Terry for breaking the deaf-and-dumb rule in his public testimony against Friendly. Even if the characterization of Terry in this film did not indicate that his increasingly overt love for Edie allowed his latent femininity of spirit to emerge, Brando’s star persona might suggest as much. The moments with the glove and the chewing gum feel today, even if they should turn out not to have been, like Method invention on his part. During the filming, he was, as Eva Marie Saint herself says, ‘‘like an open wound.’’24 When he remembers his formerly untroubled loyalty to Friendly and feels that he cannot relate to Edie the facts of Joey’s death as far as he knows them, Terry still clearly suffers anguish to have to refuse her his help. ‘‘Edie, I’d like to help. I’d like to help, but there’s nothing I can do.’’—‘‘Alright, I shouldn’t have asked you. . . . You just stay here and finish your drink.’’—‘‘Oh no, no. Listen, don’t go. I have my whole life to drink.’’ Later, he tries to talk more roughly to her. ‘‘You’d better go back to that school out in Daisyland. You’re driving yourself nuts. You’re driving me nuts . . .’’—‘‘I should have known you wouldn’t tell me . . . No wonder everyone calls you a bum.’’—‘‘Don’t say that to me, Edie. Don’t say that to me now.’’—‘‘No wonder, no wonder.’’ All the same, she is aware that he is worth more than the men around him have realised. This is indicated when, for instance, he pulls her out of the attack on the church and she clings to him for a second as the fire escape seems to give way under their feet, or when she lays her head on his chest up on the roof at nightfall. Despite Edie’s ‘‘feminine’’ loss of confidence or poise in these last examples, it is generally she who is confident and courageous, Terry who is tortured and afraid, wanting to do the right thing but yet for much of the time unable to find the strength to act accordingly. Once again, as with Karen Holmes and Milt Warden in From Here to Eternity, love becomes, to adapt the words of the old cliche´, bigger than both of them. If it is in that sense analogous to the phallus in the Zinnemann film, here the eros that Edie inspires in Terry is again and again linked with Christian agape¯. Christian imagery seems to permeate the rooftop sequences. Is it purely chance that the ubiquitous television aerials are all cruciform?

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When Edie appears to talk with Terry, is it coincidental that her head is just to the right of what appears to be a cross of wood? At the moment of Terry’s unheard confession to Edie of his sin against Joey, Father Barry watches her run from him in horror. He views the couple from a distance, looking through a railing that forms a forest of crosses. Even in one of the more unequivocal love scenes, with Edie in her slip and the door broken down by Terry, he thinks of her as the voice of conscience. ‘‘Shut up about that conscience. That’s all I been hearing.’’—‘‘I never mentioned the word before.’’ A crucifix, the ‘‘real thing’’ this time, can be seen on the wall when he declares, ‘‘Edie, you love me.’’ She comes back to him, in rising anger. ‘‘I didn’t say I didn’t love you. I said, stay away from me.’’ It is at this point, when they are united in losing a brother— Charlie’s corpse soon to be discovered hanging in the shape of a crucifix—that their love is most fiercely physical. Edie starts by hitting Terry in the chest with her hairbrush, he grabs her hands, she stops struggling against his kiss and returns it. A voice from below calls to Terry, ‘‘Your brother’s down here and wants to see you.’’ Peter Biskind says of Terry’s eventual martyrdom, ‘‘In a democracy, . . . power is not confronted with power, but with Christian virtue. When Terry chooses to inform, spiritual values become immanent. In Christian terms, he assumes the role of the dove (the meek); in secular terms, he assumes the role of the stool pigeon . . . and the two become one.’’25 Biskind’s discovery of the political relevance of Terry’s final masochism, his sacrificial beating nearly unconscious and the conversion of his suffering into an inspiration for others to throw off their shackles, is cogent. All the same, the proximity of Christian values in this film to those of love offers a memorable demonstration of the way that love’s powerlessness-becomestrength imbues the Terry-Edie liaison with a meaning which supersedes that of male subject/female object. As in From Here to Eternity, while love does not erode the power differentials of man and woman, it takes power away from the male subject, rendering him more accepting of the woman in him. Saskia Reeves may well say of On the Waterfront, ‘‘It’s the scenes between Terry Malloy and Edie Doyle . . . that stay in my mind the longest.’’26 The masculinity that is highlighted in these films is not the traditional sort: active, sadistic, voyeuristic/fetishistic in its relations with the gaze. When Marlon Brando is at his most overtly macho,

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as Stanley Kowalski, his masculinity seems least assured, least ‘‘natural.’’ Generally, machismo is a cloak in these films, made of fairly thin material, for the feminine side of the hero. As Terry Malloy, Brando soon stops relying on unreconstructed masculinity as a means to court Edie Doyle’s good opinion. The gigolo hero of Sunset Boulevard, the paraplegic hero of The Men, wear their high degree of uncertainty about their masculinity on their sleeves. Perhaps it is only in From Here to Eternity that masculinity is not clearly an area of contestation. Milt Warden, like the persecuted Prewitt and Maggio, simply does not question his masculinity. All three, however, present a picture of masculinity which includes a capacity for suffering and an empathy with the feminine that suggests much about the feminine component of their psyches. What may be most interesting is that the relations of men and women in love clearly occupy central places in these films. The one clear exception is Streetcar, in that Blanche and Stanley are in conflict throughout. This conflict, far from suggesting a species of Strindbergian battle of the sexes, is so bitter precisely because, appearances to the contrary, it is fought by creatures who bear a startling resemblance to each other. They compete for the gaze, the male scarcely granting it to the female, the female seduced against her conscious will perhaps to deploy it very occasionally towards a male object. Both seem to understand the masquerade. Stanley even fully understands when it occurs in Blanche’s case and what it is supposed to achieve. His own masquerading, his performance of the masculine, is seldom allowed to be seen as that. Yet, it is difficult to know what else to call the conduct of a man who strips his clothing off on his first meeting with Blanche and who revels in his power over the ‘‘colored lights.’’ Sunset Boulevard seems to have no traditional masculinity against which to measure Joe’s or Max’s performance of gender. The Men, on the other hand, is peopled by paraplegics who know what the traditional trappings of masculinity are but betray uncertainty of their relationships with those traditions, now that they have lost partial control of their bodies—which normally would play such an important part in the way that traditional masculinity may be recognized and measured. The centrally important love stories of From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront help to cast further light on masculinity, and how it is transfigured by the experience of love. The suggestion

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would seem to be that when love seizes hold of the hero he can no longer be an island of unreconstructed masculinity. In giving up his apparent self-determination, he submits to forces that render him liable to calls upon him that compromise his heroic stature. He may have to try to entertain ambitions for which he has no taste (training to be an officer when he wants to stay with the enlisted men), or to inform in public upon the misdeeds of men with whom he once felt total solidarity. If in these circumstances he retains a measure of superior control over the woman he loves, love itself keeps him unable to assert himself and his own interests. These five films offer a very different version of the male spectator’s likely experience. If the male in the cinema seat identifies with the male on screen, then his surrogate is either afflicted with doubts about his masculinity or learns to alter the previously obtaining macho version of it under the influence of a higher power, that of reciprocal love. Significantly, though, it is sometimes made unusually difficult for the spectator to lose self-awareness in looking, by immersion in the surrogate onscreen male’s looks. During the love scenes of From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront, the intensity of feeling between male and female is underlined by the use of close-up and shot reverse-shot. Even then, the spectator’s sense of closeness is more credibly read as with both parties than with the male alone. Apart from this, the contrasting responses of Warden and Lever to the sight of Karen Holmes in the former film serve to drive a wedge between the objectifying gazer onscreen (not, noticeably, played by the star) and the spectator. More curious, perhaps—since it is the effect of some love stories to draw the viewer or reader into a less gender-bound empathy with both parties—is the way that the ‘‘male gaze’’ is so unclear or even absent in three of the films. Wherever it may be, it is not deployed by the hero on the spectator’s behalf in Sunset Boulevard. It seems peculiarly appropriate that, in a film where Norma wants so desperately to play the object of the gaze but is prevented by the passage of time from doing so, there should be no male gaze other than that of the camera, particularly the camera-within-the-film of the final sequence. A Streetcar Named Desire also centers on a woman who wants to turn back time in order to resume her role as ‘‘proper’’ object of the desiring gaze. In Sunset Boulevard, the male gaze seems to have disappeared, at least as far as its human beings are

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concerned. Blanche has, though, to undergo the further indignity of watching erotic objectification wrested from her by Stanley. Both heroines descend into madness, Blanche’s rape marking not so much overpowering sexual lust on the part of the male as a final insult to her dreams of inspiring desire. Where is the spectatorial gaze in The Men? It seems to move away from Ken and the other ‘‘men’’ of the title, since not only the heroine but also the audience tends to look to Dr. Brock for his authoritative reading of their words and conduct. That alignment is not directly comparable to the identification with the erotic power wielded by the on-screen male in Laura Mulvey’s account of traditional Hollywood looking. It is de-sexualized, less a source of visual pleasure than of relative security of access to the little-known or understood world of post-war paraplegia and to its meanings. Perhaps the unifying factor among all five films is their excision or downplaying of the on-screen male gaze. Without an on-screen gazer, surely they underline the need to find an account of spectatorial pleasure different from, or even just additional to, the most popular version.

9 Toward Some Conclusions RESISTANCE TO SEVERAL OF THE ARGUMENTS OF EARLIER CHAPTERS, PARticularly those of chapter 6, is easily anticipated. It has become customary since at least the 1970s to think of sexual domination as a male obsession, and of tenderness, caring and love as essentially female characteristics. To argue, therefore, that classic Hollywood man is nearly always to some extent feminized by love seems to fly in the face of what is believed to be known, not just of the social world but of dominant narrative’s fantasy. The attempt to redirect attention on to love and its effects on the domination/submission patterns convincingly discovered in the ‘‘pre-love’’ areas of the narrative must raise worrying suspicions. The suggestion that the male on screen is thus rendered less traditionally masculine, so that the male spectator’s relationship with on-screen males is not so single-mindedly dedicated to voyeuristic or fetishisistic objectification of the on-screen female, seems no less suspect. It must sound like a politically reactionary ‘‘iron John’’ type of special pleading, of a piece with the invention of the New Man and his celebration and promotion in such ‘‘male melodrama’’ as Ordinary People and Kramer vs. Kramer. One crucial aim of this study is an attempt to reconsider what passes as knowledge. Was Written on the Wind seen in its temporal context of the 1950s as a melodrama by audiences of that time in the ways that screen melodrama of the 1950s is taken by film studies to have been? In any case, is melodrama straightforwardly to be understood as a feminine genre? Or, to put it another way, does the believed femininity of that genre then exclude the male spectator from it, on the grounds that his fantasies are too ‘‘masculine’’ to allow him to be addressed by movies that to an appreciable extent deal with the realm of private emotion? Chapter 8 suggests that at least in the instances of certain cele187

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brated and prestigious Hollywood movies of the early to mid 1950s—the decade that is now believed to be supreme in its auteurist melodramas—masculinity is both clearly addressed and clearly found wanting in, or abusive of, its traditional qualities. If this is so, then the male spectator’s believed identification with the male hero must be a matter of more ambivalence than is realized in the most influential accounts. This is not, though, to suggest that the ‘‘feminine’’ uncertainties and impairments associated with male experience in the more ‘‘excessive’’ movies of the period are easy to read. To put this another way, there may be resistance on the part of both male spectators and feminist critics to seeing the flawed versions of traditional masculinity that some 1950s’ male protagonists embody. Alternatively, or additionally, there may be excuses offered in the diegeses, or greater indulgence invited for ‘‘masculine impairment.’’ The admiration for Marlon Brando as male star may help to account for the way that audiences regularly ‘‘side with’’ Stanley against the fluttering, neurotic Blanche in Elia Kazan’s film version of A Streetcar Named Desire.1 The fact that Stanley is a rapist, and is rejected by his devoted wife by the end of the film, ought to turn the viewer against Stanley. It does not entirely. Perhaps heavily symbolic rape, so that a mirror rather than its victim is seen to shatter, does not feel to the viewer like actual rape. Or perhaps, more sinisterly, Blanche is taken on Stanley’s terms to need a dose of cold truth to terminate her pathetic lies and her tawdry ‘‘magic,’’ and in that sense is believed to be ‘‘asking for it.’’ Today, the movie appears to have paid its dues to the Production Code, despite its daring, but more seriously to have tried to muffle audience objections by narratively punishing Stanley and suggesting that he will henceforth be a social pariah. (And yet, he is still playing cards with the men, rejected only by women.) That may be the moral problem. Pieties are observed, as it were, so that the fantasy of identification with Stanley’s (masquerade of) machismo may continue uninterrupted. If there is credibility in this reading of the import of the final sequences of Streetcar, these observations may be helpful beyond the context of that single film. Perhaps what would now be termed ‘‘political correctness’’ in the handling of the narrative provides a cover for the less considered or aware ‘‘male pleasures’’ which classical Hollywood is thought to

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provide. Rape is in a token manner penalized. At a conscious level, the rapist is to some extent ostracized and marked out as repellent. When, though, he is played by the young Marlon Brando, identification is not seriously threatened. The effect is similar to, though more subtle than, that achieved by the inclusion of law-enforcement officers’ disclaimers at the start of some gangster movies. The hero is not admirable if he violently breaks the law. The warning would not be necessary, though, if cinema audiences of the 1930s had not apparently been so perverse as to admire him. Streetcar seems an exceptional case even among the five sample films of Chapter 8. Two of the other four—From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront—present men who seem vulnerable and uncertain that their masculinity is of the cast-iron variety. The fear of serious impairment to that masculinity seems to be at the very center of both The Men and Sunset Boulevard. The male spectator, like the female, is confronted with male identification points who do not provide the fantasy of seamless masculinity that male heroes of Hollywood movies are generally supposed to provide. If their impairment is rendered attractive, it is largely by virtue of their falling in love. Love is both the explanation for Milt Warden’s unhappiness in Eternity and a powerful factor in Terry Malloy’s Waterfront telling of tales, naming of names. Elia Kazan, as the director, no less, of On the Waterfront, is likely to have invested a great deal in Terry’s version of masculinity if he hoped that the public would warm to his own friendly testimony by reason of its fascination with Brando in the part. When, in 1981, Laura Mulvey provided an account of the female spectator’s relation with the ‘‘male’’ visual pleasures of narrative cinema, she resorted to the description, ‘‘an internal oscillation of desire.’’2 This oscillation ‘‘lies dormant, waiting to be ‘pleasured’ in stories of this kind [as that of Duel in the Sun].’’3 The oscillation is ‘‘between the deep blue sea of passive femininity and the devil of regressive masculinity.’’4 Perhaps it is not just the female spectator who oscillates. Evidence for male vacillation between fantasies of phallic, sadistic ‘‘activity’’ and ‘‘the deep blue sea of passive femininity’’ might be claimed in some of the films of the 1950s other than the sample of five. (Just as Pearl, the heroine of Duel in the Sun, may be understood as a surrogate for the female spectator, her oscillation to represent that of the woman in the audience, male heroes who visibly

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shift uneasily on screen seem to testify to conflict in the male spectator.) For example, one of the trademarks of Frank Sinatra’s screen persona is the unblinking, ‘‘castrating’’ stare that often accompanies his character’s wisecracks or ironic asides. It is not coincidental that many of these act as a putdown for female characters, with whom he is at risk of falling in love. Interestingly, for the present discussion, it may be when he is most at risk of feminization that the Sinatra hero of the 1950s most flagrantly parades the apparently unreconstructed ‘‘masculinity’’ of his flip superiority. One of the most noticeable phallic stares from Sinatra features in the musical Pal Joey (George Sidney, 1957). The plot concerns his choice between the hard-edged, erotic sophistication of the ‘‘older woman’’ Vera Simpson (Rita Hayworth) and the younger, softerseeming Linda English (Kim Novak). As nightclub owner, the hero bows, towards the end of the film, to Vera’s wish that he demand of his employee, Linda, that she perform a striptease onstage. It is clear both that he dislikes the issuing of the demand but also that he cannot find the courage to defy Vera. It is even clearer that Linda feels outrage that he will so demean her and yet determines to go ahead with the striptease, as an act of defiance, a form of punishment for his cowardice. During the course of the rehearsal, he deploys a fixed, hard stare at her undressing. This is the sort of stare that can easily be seen as an outward manifestation of the will to control. Visually, Sinatra is at this point the very epitome of the male subject, using his look at what is contextually clear as the ‘‘to-be-looked-at’’ object of his gaze. The surface impression is that he is the controller, she the controlled, undertaking the strip to provide erotic spectacle. The sequence appears to be an almost textbook illustration of the key points in ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’5 Yet, the audience does not have to be particularly clever or sensitive to discern that the stare indicates the hero’s will to control not Linda, but himself. He attempts to impersonate the male subject. He is not able to be that subject. Linda makes a brave show of impersonating the female object that such a male subject requires. The charade breaks down. The strip rehearsal is suddenly interrupted, Linda sent to her dressing room. By the logic of the love story, this acceptance of diminished subjectivity means that he has ‘‘come out’’ as really being in love with

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Linda, not Vera. The tension encapsulated in this sequence from Pal Joey is between, on the one hand, the sex story, with its male subjects and female objects the very stuff of its erotic fantasy appeal, and, on the other, the love story with its necessary loss of masculine control. Perhaps this tension is at the very heart of spectator experience of classic Hollywood movies. Another example, again involving Frank Sinatra as hero, is Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running (1958). The movie itself seems split right down the middle, that split expressed in mise-ensce`ne. Some eighteen years ago, I said of the movie, ‘‘the contrasts in Some Came Running’s Parkman, Illinois are much heightened visually by decor, lighting and use of color.’’ The sound track contributes to that impression of violent contrast: ‘‘Elmer Bernstein’s brassy, strident score complements the garishness of the sets for Smitty’s cocktail bar, the transient gambler Bama’s home and the spectacular town carnival at the film’s climax.’’6 The antithesis is provided by ‘‘the respectable side of town,’’ which is ‘‘housed in white-pillared domains, with Ideal Home interiors of marked spaciousness, polished surfaces, winding staircases, handsome bookshelves, the women . . . lacquered and groomed . . .’’7 In accordance with these contrasts, the hero Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) is pursued by the ‘‘available’’ and slutty-seeming Ginny (Shirley MacLaine) while he pursues the ‘‘classy’’ teacher of creative writing, Gwen French (Martha Hyer). In a very obvious sense, Dave feels himself placed between having a good time with what he sees as the eminently discardable Ginny—it is not coincidental that most of the gambling and hard-drinking scenes also feature Ginny—or dressing up for a respectable date with Gwen. In the film’s terms, he is in love with the latter but emphatically not with the former. Dave loses much of his bravado and abandons his self-consciously ironic one-liners when he is in Gwen’s company. If he does use quips, they are directed more obviously against himself than her. In any case, she seems poised enough to be immune to them. At one point, he is willingly reduced to her pupil, waiting anxiously outside the summerhouse where she is reading his short story. She even forbids him to interrupt her when his nervousness turns to impatience. Interestingly, it is when he has most willingly played the submissive student to her fair but firm schoolmarm that she seems, for once, erotically attracted to him. Dave’s use of Ginny often amounts to evident abuse. He allows

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Bama (Dean Martin) to refer to her and her girl friends as ‘‘pigs’’ up to the point where—inexplicably to Bama—he deals with his rejection at Gwen’s hands by asking Ginny to marry him. Even then, when his venom toward her is considerably watered down, he greets her desire to ‘‘do anything’’ for him with a request that she clean up the house. His exploitation of Ginny’s infatuation with him is now less blatant—unnoticed by Ginny herself—but still unmissable. This time, the Sinatra character deals with acute emotional vulnerability—he is, after all, a writer!—by reserving the predatory, sadistic subject side of his personality for one woman while he relinquishes authority over the other because he is in love with her. Even when he softens considerably towards Ginny, this is to protect his ego. Moments before he asks her to marry him, she confesses that she likes, but does not understand, his story, just as she loves him, but does not understand him. His macho brutality in the company of Bama and the gamblers, who treat women as disposable objects, is here rendered a temporary phase, masking his need for a deeper commitment. Once again, there is an element of impersonation in his performance of the harddrinking ex-soldier rather than the writer that even Gwen knows he is at heart. Some years before either of these movies, Sinatra won his Academy Award for From Here to Eternity. In this film, his most obvious affection is for Maggio (Montgomery Clift), perhaps. Yet, he is coded as uncomplicatedly heterosexual by his cheerful behavior with the Club hostesses (prostitutes, by a less Hays-minded reading). The lasting impression is of a man more done to than doing, killed by male brutality and mourned by male tenderness. Frank Sinatra’s screen persona in the 1950s may well provide some clues as to the sort of part that male activity, sadism, ‘‘looking-at,’’ play in the psyche of the male hero. The thoroughly ‘‘masculine’’ subjectivity that gains free rein in Hollywood movies may be temporary or partial rather than total, just as love often replaces sexual desire in these same movies. What certainly seems to be true is that unreconstructed machismo serves a useful purpose in the narratives—as a posture by which to evade recognitions of feminization, a sometimes intolerable corollary for the male of being in love. The crucial difference in this analysis from that of Mulvey, for

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example, is that here the male subject’s is taken as usually a performed rather than lived identity. The necessity for such performance tells its own story about the precariousness of male/female social relations, and still saddles women with the burden of men’s ambivalence about their dread of feminization. It tells the story from a distinctly different angle, though. The tale and the performer have a more complicated psychology. It is surely safe to conclude that so too must the male spectator.

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’’ in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). 2. Mulvey, ‘‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),’’ in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures. 3. Ibid., 29. 4. Kaja Silverman is possibly the most notable of the few exceptions. (See, for example, Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins [New York: Routledge, 1992].) 5. See chapter 5. 6. See chapter 5. 7. Christine Gledhill, ed., Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987). 8. See Barbara Klinger, ‘‘Much Ado About Excess: Genre, Mise-en-Scene and the Woman in Written on the Wind,’’ Wide Angle 11, no. 4 (1989): 4–22. 9. One keynote address in the University of North London’s conference of September 1999, ‘‘Researching Culture,’’ made precisely this point in its consideration of obstacles to a more catholic, and more ethnographic, approach to questions of culture which would include film studies’ published theorizations. 10. It is difficult to be overimpressed by the learning showcased by one of the less accessible writers when she constantly uses ‘‘apparati’’ as the plural form of what is presumably taken wrongly to be a second-declension Latin noun ‘‘apparatus.’’ 11. Franc¸ois Roustang, Dire Mastery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 21.

CHAPTER 1: SEX AND GENDER 1. Joanne Entwistle, ‘‘Sex/Gender,’’ in Core Sociological Dichotomies, edited by Chris Jenks (London: Sage, 1998), 152. 2. Ann Oakley, quoted in Joanne Entwistle, 152. 3. Jerold M. Lowenstein, ‘‘The Conundrum of Gender Identification: Two Sexes Are Not Enough,’’ Pacific Discovery 50, no. 4 (1987): 38. 4. Ibid.

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5. See Martine Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender (New York: Crown, 1995), 6. 6. Ibid., 7. My emphasis. 7. Lowenstein, 38. 8. David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 9. 9. Suzanne J. Kessler, ‘‘The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants,’’ Signs 16, no. 1 (1990): 3–26. 10. Lowenstein, 38. 11. Freud, ‘‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis,’’ Standard Edition 23 (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1964), 188. 12. Freud, quoted in Parveen Adams, ‘‘A Note on the Distinction between Sexual Division and Sexual Differences,’’ m/f 3 (1979): 56. 13. See Kenneth MacKinnon, Misogyny in the Movies: The De Palma Question (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 25–28. 14. John Fletcher, ‘‘Versions of Masquerade,’’ Screen 29, no. 3 (1988): 50. 15. Freud, ‘‘Femininity,’’ New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). 16. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 17. 17. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 15. 18. Ibid. 19. Franc¸ois Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan, trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 31. 20. Ibid., 58. 21. Jane Gaines, ‘‘White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory,’’ Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 12–13. 22. The accusation would hardly be surprising if the ‘‘phallus’’ of ‘‘phallocentric’’ were always sharply differentiated from the penis. Those feminists who charge Lacan with phallocentrism must be concerned with a blurring of the boundaries between the two terms. 23. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 66. Rose’s emphasis. 24. Joan Copjec, ‘‘The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine,’’ October 23 (Winter 1982): 51. 25. See Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 83. 26. She does this particularly in, for example, her The Acoustic Mirror (see note 17 above) and Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992). 27. Harold Kelman, M.D., ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Karen Horney, M.D., Feminine Psychology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 20. 28. See Linda Williams, ‘‘When the Woman Looks,’’ in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America/The American Film Institute, 1984), 89.

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29. Lillian B. Rubin, Intimate Strangers: What goes wrong in relationships today—and why (London: Fontana, 1985), 56. 30. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 7. 31. Rubin, 71. 32. Chodorow, 215. 33. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 34. Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson, ‘‘Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism,’’ in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33. 35. Cheris Kramarae, Women and Men Speaking: Frameworks for Analysis (Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1981), 29. 36. See Maria Black and Rosalind Coward, ‘‘Linguistic, Social and Sexual Relations: a Review of Dale Spender’s Man Made Language,’’ in The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader, ed. Deborah Cameron (London: Routledge, 1990), 112–13. 37. Linda J. Nicholson, ‘‘Interpreting ‘Gender,’ ’’ in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: The Big Questions, ed. Naomi Zack, Laurie Shrage, and Crispin Sartwell (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 187–88. 38. Ibid., 189. 39. Ibid. 40. Laurie Shrage, ‘‘Gender: Introduction to the Readings,’’ in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Zack, et al., 166. 41. Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin, quoted in Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 8. 42. Freud, quoted in Robert Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 135. 43. Judith Butler, ‘‘Against Proper Objects,’’ in Feminism Meets Queer Theory, ed. Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 2. 44. Butler, ‘‘Critically Queer,’’ in Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories, ed. Shane Phelan (New York: Routledge, 1997), 24. 45. Butler, ‘‘Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytic Discourse,’’ in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990). 46. Butler, quoted in Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 84. 47. Moe Meyer, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London: Routledge, 1994), 4. 48. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1989). 49. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homoscial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 5. 50. Jackie Stacey, ‘‘Desperately Seeking Difference,’’ Screen 28, no. 1 (1987): 48–61.

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51. Straayer, 6. 52. Ellis Hanson, ‘‘Introduction: Out Takes,’’ in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 4. 53. Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 263. Stam’s emphasis. 54. Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York: Routledge, 2000), 10.

CHAPTER 2: FEMINISM/PATRIARCHY MASCULINITY 1. E. Ann Kaplan, ‘‘Feminist Criticism and Television,’’ in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. by Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge, 2d ed., 1992), 251–52. 2. Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, ‘‘Feminism and Materialism,’’ in Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, ed. Annette Kuhn, and AnnMarie Wolpe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 1. 3. Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en abyme (London: Routledge, 1994), 42. 4. Jane Flax, ‘‘Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,’’ in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 45. 5. Judith Butler, in ‘‘Introduction,’’ Feminism/Postmodernism, 15–16. 6. Butler, ‘‘Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse,’’ Feminism/Postmodernism, 339. 7. Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’’ in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 19. 8. Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction, 29. 9. Robert Vorlicky, ‘‘(In)visible Alliances: Conflicting ‘Chronicles’ of Feminism,’’ in Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, edited by Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 10. Judith Shapiro, quoted in David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making, 2. 11. Ibid., 1. 12. Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 99. 13. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making, 229. 14. Chris Holmlund, ‘‘Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The ‘mature’ Stallone and the Stallone clone,’’ in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: 1993), 225. 15. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, ‘‘Me Jane,’’ in Me, Jane: Masculinity, Movies and Women, ed. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), 45. 16. Amy Taubin, ‘‘God’s Lonely Man,’’ Sight and Sound 9, no. 4 (1999):19. 17. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 88–89. 18. Ibid., 93.

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19. Freud, quoted prior to the Contents page of Gilmore, Manhood in the Making. 20. See, for example, Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 8. 21. Ibid., 52. 22. Jacques Lacan, quoted in Chris Holmlund, ‘‘Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade,’’ 217. 23. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Screening the Male, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. 24. Ian Green, ‘‘Malefunction: A Contribution to the Debate on Masculinity in the Cinema,’’ Screen 25, no. 4–5 (1984): 43. 25. David Thomson, America in the Dark: Hollywood and the Gift of Unreality (London: Hutchinson, 1978), 208. 26. Jude Davies and Carol R. Smith, Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997), 20. 27. The cult status of many of Bogart’s film noir private-eye tales and particularly the Jean-Paul Belmondo character’s fondness for ‘‘Bogie’’ in A Bout de Souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959) surely suggest as much. 28. Julia Lesage, ‘‘Artful Racism, Artful Rape: Griffiths’ Broken Blossoms,’’ in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), ed. Christine Gledhill, 247. 29. Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘‘Postfeminist’’ Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 7. 30. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 34. 31. Ibid, 33. My emphasis. 32. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, ‘‘In Defence of Patriarchy,’’ in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 372. 33. Pam Cook, The Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 1985, reprinted 1987), 78. My emphasis. 34. Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pluto, 1983), 262. 35. See Kenneth MacKinnon, Uneasy Pleasures: The Male as Erotic Object (London: Cygnus Arts, 1997), 59. 36. Ibid., 56–57.

CHAPTER 3: GENDERED IDENTIFICATION 1. See especially Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),’’ in Visual and Other Pleasures, Laura Mulvey (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 29–30. 2. Julia Kristeva, quoted in Teresa de Lauretis, ‘‘Now and Nowhere: Roeg’s Bad Timing,’’ in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, et al. (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, Inc., 1984), 159. 3. Constance Penley, quoted in Jackie Stacey, ‘‘Desperately Seeking Difference,’’ Screen 28, no.1 (1987):50.

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4. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 120–21. 5. William R. Beer, ‘‘Introduction: Third-Worldism in France and the United States,’’ in The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, by Pascal Bruckner, trans. William R. Beer (New York: Free Press, 1986), xix. 6. Manthia Diawara wonders if Black spectators identify with dominant cinema’s representations of Blacks by means of disavowal. (Manthia Diawara, ‘‘Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,’’ Screen 29, no. 4 [1988], 75.) 7. By, for example, Barbara Christian, cited in Jacqueline Bobo, ‘‘The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers,’’ in Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, ed. E. Deidre Pribram (London: Verso, 1988), 97. 8. Tony Brown, quoted in Bobo, 90. 9. Diawara, 75. 10. Bobo, 95. 11. Ibid., 101–2. 12. Anne Friedberg, ‘‘A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification,’’ in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Routledge, 1990), 42. 13. Ian Green, ‘‘Malefunction: A Contribution to the Debate on Masculinity in the Cinema,’’ Screen 25, no. 4–5 (1984): 42. 14. D. N. Rodowick discussed by Donald Greig, ‘‘The Sexual Differentiation of the Hitchcock Text,’’ in Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 186. 15. Judith Mayne, discussed by Linda Williams, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 15. 16. Mayne, ‘‘Paradoxes of Spectatorship,’’ in Viewing Positions, 169. 17. James Donald, ‘‘Introduction to ‘The Mise en Sce`ne of Desire,’ ’’ in Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 138. 18. Jan Campbell, Arguing with the Phallus: Feminist, Queer and Postcolonial Theory (London: Zed Books, 2000), 152. 19. Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 5. 20. Robert May, Sex and Fantasy: Patterns of Male and Female Development (New York: W W Norton, 1980), x. 21. Christine Gledhill, ‘‘Women Reading Men,’’ in Me, Jane: Masculinity, Movies and Women, ed. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), 76. 22. Ibid., 74. 23. See May, 59–60. 24. Ibid., 64. 25. Ibid., 163. 26. Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ 27. Mayne, ‘‘Paradoxes of Spectatorship,’’ 167. 28. Joan Rivie`re, quoted in Chris Holmlund, ‘‘Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The ‘mature’ Stallone and the Stallone clone,’’ in Screening the Male: Explor-

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ing Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1993), 213. 29. Claire Johnston, quoted in John Fletcher, ‘‘Versions of Masquerade,’’ Screen 29, no. 3 (1988): 48. 30. Mary Ann Doane, quoted and summarized in Chris Holmlund, ‘‘Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade.’’ My emphasis. 31. It has been so called by, for example, Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. Reprinted in paperback (London: Routledge, 1989), 91. 32. Harry Brod, ‘‘Masculinity as Masquerade,’’ in The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation, eds. Andrew Perchuk and Helaine Posner (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 14. Brod’s emphasis. 33. Steven Cohan, ‘‘Masquerading as the American Male in the Fifties: Picnic, William Holden and the Spectacle of Masculinity in Hollywood Film,’’ Camera Obscura 25–26 (1991): 64. 34. Holmlund, ‘‘Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade,’’ 214. 35. Judith Butler, quoted in Holmlund, ibid., 218. 36. Cohan, ‘‘Masquerading as the American Male,’’ 56. 37. See Jane P. Tompkins, ‘‘An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism,’’ in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), xi–xii. 38. Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).

CHAPTER 4: SPECTATORSHIP THEORY 1. Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ 2. Mulvey, ‘‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ ’’ 3. Marian E. Keane, ‘‘A Closer Look at Scopophilia: Mulvey, Hitchcock, and Vertigo,’’ in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986). 4. Otto Fenichel, quoted in Anne Friedberg, ‘‘A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification,’’ in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 39. 5. Friedberg, ‘‘A Denial of Difference,’’ 39. 6. Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 31. 7. Steve Neale, ‘‘Melodrama and Tears,’’ Screen 27, no. 6 (1986): 15. 8. Sue Harper, ‘‘Historical Pleasures: Gainsborough Costume Melodrama,’’ in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 190. 9. See MacKinnon, Uneasy Pleasures. 10. Kenneth MacKinnon, ‘‘After Mulvey: Male Erotic Objectification,’’ in The Body’s Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture, ed. Michele Aaron (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 20–21. 11. Jane Gaines, ‘‘White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in

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Feminist Film Theory,’’ Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 23–24. And compare bell hooks, Black Looks, 115. 12. Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’’ 20. 13. Keane, ‘‘A Closer Look at Scopophilia,’’ 239. 14. See Edward Branigan, ‘‘Formal Permutations of the Point-of-View Shot,’’ Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 56. 15. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 32ff. Tania Modleski objects, though, to the refusal in this account to cede importance to the sadism of the male viewer’s response. (Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, Reprinted in paperback. London: Routledge, 1989, 12.) 16. Steve Neale, ‘‘Melodrama and Tears,’’ 15. 17. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 71–72. 18. Teresa de Lauretis, ‘‘Guerrilla in the midst: women’s cinema in the 80s,’’ Screen 31, no. 1 (1990): 22–23. 19. de Lauretis, ‘‘Now and Nowhere: Roeg’s Bad Timing,’’ in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane et al. (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America/The American Film Institute, 1984), 154. de Lauretis’ emphasis. 20. Linda Williams, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 4. 21. Ellis Hanson ‘‘Introduction: Out Takes,’’ in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 15. 22. Diawara, ‘‘Black Spectatorship.’’ Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 66. 23. Ibid., 68. 24. bell hooks, Black Looks, 116. 25. Ibid., 118. 26. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4. 27. Julia Thomas, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Reading Images, ed. Julia Thomas (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 2. 28. Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking, 72. 29. Thomas, Reading Images, 7. 30. See MacKinnon, Misogyny in the Movies, especially chapter 6. 31. See chapter 2, ‘‘Cultural Secrets: Femininity as a Male Pleasure,’’ in MacKinnon, Uneasy Pleasures.

CHAPTER 5: GENRE AND GENDER 1. Variety report quoted by Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream (London: Peter Owen, 1975), 26. 2. In view of the much wider—and much different—use of the term ‘‘melodrama’’ within the film industry, it needs to be underlined that the word is used

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here in the sense established by film studies and particularly by feminist film studies. 3. See, for example, Charlotte Brunsdon, Films for Women (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 1; E. Ann Kaplan, ‘‘Feminist Criticism and Television,’’ in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allen (London and New York: Routledge, 2d ed. 1992), 263; Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,’’ in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 76. 4. Brunsdon, Films for Women, 1. 5. Ibid., 182. 6. Mulvey, ‘‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,’’ 79. 7. Steve Neale states that, in all his reading of publicity and literature from and concerning the Hollywood film industry, he has never come across the term ‘‘family melodrama’’. (Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood [London: Routledge, 2000], 187.) 8. Jackie Byars, ‘‘Gazes/Voices/Power: Expanding Psychoanalysis for Feminist Film and Television Theory’’ in Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, ed. E. Deidre Pribram (London: Verso, 1988), 116. 9. It would be particularly interesting to know the relation of ‘‘melodrama’’ and ‘‘the woman’s film’’ in the subtitle of Home is Where the Heart Is (Christine Gledhill, [ed.], Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film). Is the reader invited to take the terms as virtually synonymous? If not, what exactly is the relationship, and where and how exactly does the melodrama stop being the woman’s film? 10. Annette Kuhn, ‘‘Women’s Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory,’’ in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Gledhill, 344. 11. Cheris Kramarae, Women and Men Speaking: Frameworks for Analysis (Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1981), 88. 12. Neale, ‘‘Questions of Genre,’’ Screen 31, no. 1 (1990): 58. 13. Brunsdon, ‘‘Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera,’’ Screen 22, no. 4 (1981): 36. 14. Shaun Moores, Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Mass Consumption (London: Sage, 1993; reprinted 1996), 39. 15. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Methuen, 1982), 85. 16. Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, transl. Della Couling (London: Methuen, 1985; reprinted London: Routledge, 1989), 118. 17. See, for example, Terry Lovell, ‘‘Ideology and Coronation Street,’’ in Coronation Street, ed. Richard Dyer et al. (London: British Film Institute, 1981), 51. 18. Ibid. 19. Lidia Curti, ‘‘Genre and Gender,’’ Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (1988):160. 20. Ang, 132. 21. Ibid. 22. Curti, 157. 23. Ibid.

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24. Ien Ang and Joke Hermes, ‘‘Gender and/in Media Consumption,’’ in Mass Media and Society, ed. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (London: Edward Arnold, 1991), 320. 25. David Thomson, America in the Dark: Hollywood and the Gift of Unreality (London: Hutchinson, 1978), 205. 26. This latter approach is taken by, for instance, Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980). 27. Laura Mulvey, ‘‘ ‘It will be a magnificent obsession’: The Melodrama’s Role in the Development of Contemporary Film Theory,’’ in Melodrama: Stage/Picture/ Screen ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 121. 28. Michael Walker, ‘‘Melodrama and the American Cinema’’, Movie 29/30 (1982): 2–38. 29. Ibid., 17. 30. A similar awareness of the ‘‘diversity of forms . . . gathered under the heading of melodrama’’ and of the ways in which film critics have established melodramatic nomenclature different from that used by the film industry itself is shown in The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook (London: British Film Institute, 1985, reprinted 1987), 73. 31. Neale, Genre and Hollywood. 32. Neale himself is not above suspicion of carelessness in sometimes seeming to collapse the distinction between melodrama and the woman’s film here and in certain other passages of his book, though clearly he believes, on the evidence of page 184, that such work as Laura Mulvey’s is responsible for the confusion. 33. This latter argument is, though, offered in Christine Gledhill, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Home is Where the Heart Is, ed. Gledhill, 12. 34. See, for example, Gledhill, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 33–34. 35. The ‘‘de-feminizing’’ of American television soaps by the augmentation of numbers of male characters and inclusion of story lines conventionally confined to male action genres is usefully described and illustrated by Ellen Seiter, ‘‘Men, Sex and Money in Recent Film Melodramas,’’ Journal of the University Film and Video Association 35, no. 1 (1983). 36. Barbara Klinger, ‘‘ ‘Local’ Genres: The Hollywood Adult Film in the 1950s,’’ in Melodrama: Stage/Picture/Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1994). 37. Ibid., 144. 38. Martha Vinicius, quoted in Home is Where the Heart Is, 21. 39. Neale, ‘‘Melodrama and Tears,’’ Screen 27, no. 6 (1986): 6. 40. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 180–81. 41. Jane Shattuc, ‘‘Having a Good Cry over The Color Purple: The Problem of Affect and Imperialism in Feminist Theory,’’ in Melodrama: Stage/Picture/ Screen, 149. 42. Ibid., 154. 43. Ibid., 151. 44. Ibid., 148–49. 45. Neale, 10.

204 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

NOTES

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 19. Bratton, Cook, and Gledhill, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Melodrama, 6. Neale, 22. Ibid. See Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 29–38.

CHAPTER 6: HOLLYWOOD’S ‘‘FEMINIZATION’’ OF THE MALE 1. Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ 2. The term is owed to Mulvey: ‘‘Pearl’s position in Duel in the Sun is similar to that of the female spectator as she temporarily accepts ‘masculinization’ in memory of her ‘active’ phase.’’ (Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ ’’ 37.) 3. Noticeably, while Mulvey atttributes sadism to the hero, she does not attribute the pleasure of masochism to the heroine or to the spectator in the auditorium. 4. Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’’ 20. 5. Ibid. 6. Paul Willemen, quoted in Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 57. 7. Paul Willemen, ‘‘Voyeurism, the Look and Dwoskin,’’ After Image 6 (1976): 40–50 and Steve Neale, ‘‘Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,’’ Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 2–16, as well as in other publications argue their dissent with Mulvey concerning this area. 8. Richard Dyer, ‘‘Don’t Look Now: The Male Pin-Up,’’ in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, ed. Screen (London: Routledge, 1992). 9. MacKinnon, Uneasy Pleasures. 10. Interestingly, the letters ‘WO’ are occasionally blocked out on the cover of this hitherto unambiguously titled magazine by a coverboy’s head. 11. For example, Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) and Gaylyn Studlar, ‘‘Valentino, ‘Optic Intoxication,’ and Dance Madness,’’ in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1993). 12. MacKinnon, ‘‘The Male as Object of Desire: Film Stars,’’ in Uneasy Pleasures, 72–92. 13. MacKinnon, Uneasy Pleasures, 80. 14. Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980). 15. Ibid., 23. 16. Freud, ‘‘The Dynamics of Transference,’’ in The Standard Edition of the complete psychological works, trans. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis), vol. 12 [1911–13]), 169–70. 17. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 118. 18. Ibid., 117.

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19. Freud, quoted in Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 47. 20. See Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 24. 21. Melanie Klein, ‘‘The Origins of Transference,’’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 3 (n. d.; the paper was read in August 1951): 433. 22. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (reprinted London: Karnac Books and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1988), 27. 23. Freud, ‘‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’’ (1909), quoted in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 191. 24. Freud, ‘‘The Dynamics of Transference,’’ 167. 25. Ibid., 168. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 160. 28. Ibid., 100. 29. Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 458. 30. Freud, ‘‘The Dynamics of Transference,’’ 105. 31. Karen Horney, M.D., Feminine Psychology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 245. 32. Mladen Dolar, ‘‘ ‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny,’’ October 58 (1991): 8–9. 33. Ibid., 10. 34. Lacan, quoted in Neale, ‘‘Melodrama and Tears,’’ Screen 27, no. 6 (1986): 16. 35. Freud, ‘‘Femininity,’’ New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, translated by James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 157. 36. Horney, M.D., Feminine Psychology, 145. 37. Betsy Kay discussed in Kramarae, Women and Men Speaking, 85. 38. Jean Baker Miller discussed in Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 168. 39. Gilligan, 24. 40. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 224. 41. Ibid. 42. Horney, M.D., Feminine Psychology, 167. 43. Barthes, 14. 44. Ibid., 126. 45. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 97. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 96. 48. Ibid., 116. 49. A Lover’s Discourse, n. p. The phrase quoted is stressed by italics in Barthes. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 7. 52. Ibid. 53. Neale, ‘‘Melodrama and Tears,’’ 17.

CHAPTER 7: THE 1950S 1. See Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ 2. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Out in Culture:

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Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 8. 3. Peter G Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 171. 4. Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream (London: Peter Owen, 1975), 260. 5. Klinger, ‘‘ ‘Local’ Genres.’’ 6. Margaret Mead, ‘‘American Man in a Woman’s World,’’ New York Times Magazine (10 February 1957), see especially 11 and 22. 7. Klinger, ‘‘ ‘Local’ Genres,’’ 141. 8. Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ 9. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 3. 10. Jay Presson Allen, speaking on the Reputations program on Hitchcock, broadcast by BBC2 at 21.00–22.00 on 31 May 1999. 11. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 10. 12. Ibid., 12. 13. Ibid., 14. 14. Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson, ‘‘Hitchcock’s Rear Window: Reflexivity and the Critique of Voyeurism,’’ in A Hitchcock Reader, 205. 15. E. Keane, ‘‘A Closer Look at Scopophilia,’’ in A Hitchcock Reader, 243. 16. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 90. 17. Keane, 236. 18. Kaja Silverman, quoted in Robert E. Kapsis, ‘‘The Historical Reception of Hitchcock’s Marnie,’’ Journal of Film and Video 40, no. 3 (1988): 56. 19. Ibid. 20. Robert Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 77.

CHAPTER 8: A SAMPLE OF FIVE 1950S MOVIES 1. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 22–23. 2. Sarah Street, ‘‘ ‘Mad About the Boy’: Masculinity and Career in Sunset Boulevard,’’ in Me, Jane: Masculinity, Movies and Women, ed. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), 228. 3. Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory (London: Arnold, 1997), 53. 4. Elham Afnan, ‘‘Imaginative Transformations: Great Expectations and Sunset Boulevard,’’ Dickensian, 94, no. 444, part 1 (1988): 8. 5. Ibid., 11. 6. Street, ‘‘ ‘Mad about the Boy,’ ’’ 225. 7. Ibid., 232. 8. Thornham, Passionate Detachments, 52–53—summarizing Doane’s views. 9. Pamela Anne Hanks, ‘‘The Viewer’s Role in Filmed Versions of A Streetcar Named Desire,’’ Journal of Popular Film and Television, 14, no. 3 (1986): 121. 10. David Downing, Marlon Brando (London: W. H. Allen, 1984), 21.

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11. Graham McCann, Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and Dean (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 95–96. 12. Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Vemus, 256. 13. McCann, Rebel Males, 96. 14. Jacques Lacan, quoted in Chris Holmlund, ‘‘Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade,’’ 217. 15. Holmlund, ‘‘Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade,’’ 217. 16. Ibid., 219. 17. McCann, Rebel Males, 96–97. 18. Ibid., 102. 19. Elia Kazan, quoted in Downing, Marlon Brando, 21. 20. Hanks, ‘‘The Viewer’s Role,’’ 122. 21. Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction (London: Macmillan, 1982), 22. 22. Fred Zinnemann, ‘‘From Here To Eternity,’’ Sight and Sound 57, no.1 (1987): 21. 23. Lindsay Anderson, ‘‘The Last Sequence of On the Waterfront,’’ in Coming to Terms with Hollywood, edited by Jim Cook and Alan Lovell (London: British Film Institute, 1981). 24. Eva Marie Saint, quoted in Downing, Marlon Brando, 56. 25. Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing, 179. 26. Saskia Reeves, ‘‘Caged Birds,’’ Sight and Sound, 6, no.1 (1996): 61.

CHAPTER 9: TOWARD SOME CONCLUSIONS 1. It seems unthinkable that a stage version of Streetcar could be taken as so much a platform for Stanley. Scenes from a theatrical production of it are included ´var’s All About My Mother (1999), a film that takes such pains to in Pedro Almodo offer a near hagiography of femininity, and that appears to value its males precisely by reason of their transsexual renunciation of maleness. 2. Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ ’’ 37. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 30. 5. Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ 6. MacKinnon, Hollywood’s Small Towns: An Introduction to the American Small-Town Movie (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1984), 117. 7. Ibid.

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Index A Bout de Souffle, 198 n. Afnan, Elham, 148 Alexander, Sally, 53 All About My Mother, 207 n. All That Heaven Allows, 87, 96 Allen, Jay Presson, 129 Anderson, Lindsay, 177 Ang, Ien, 13, 91, 92 Anne of the Indies, 67 anthropology, 25, 26, 48 Aristotle, 59 Babe Pig in the City, 63 Bacall, Lauren, 171 Bacchae, The, 108 Bad Timing, 78 Barthes, Roland, 17, 63, 78, 100, 108, 116–120 Bellour, Raymond, 64, 75 Best Years of Our Lives, The, 52, 140 Birds, The, 136, 137 Birth of a Nation, The, 61, 80, 82 bisexuality, 12, 38, 111,130 Biskind, Peter, 54, 183 Blackboard Jungle, The, 125 Bobo, Jacqueline, 61 Bogart, Humphrey, 52, 141, 171, 198 n. ‘‘boomerang effect,’’ 99 Brando, Marlon, 18, 51, 150, 152, 158, 163, 164, 166, 167, 177, 182, 183, 188, 189 Breathless (1983), 111 Brechtianism, 98, 99, 100 Brod, Harry, 68 Broken Blossoms, 51, 76 Brookside, 14, 89 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 85, 86, 90 Butler, Judith, 39, 40, 45, 49, 60, 64, 70 Byars, Jackie, 87

Carrie, 82 Cartwright, Lisa, 80 Casablanca, 52 castration, 11, 18, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38, 50, 52, 53, 55, 62, 67, 69, 70, 77, 86, 109, 120, 121, 128, 129, 131, 136, 137, 139, 173, 181, 190 Cavell, Stanley, 133 Chodorow, Nancy, 32–34, 35 class, 11, 34, 37, 43, 53, 63, 71, 73, 79, 97, 98, 101, 119, 138, 166 Clift, Montgomery, 19, 51, 52, 126, 168, 176, 192 Cobweb, The, 127 Cohan, Steven, 52, 69, 70 Cohn, Harry, 176 Cold War, 17, 123, 124, 138 Color Purple, The, 61, 101 Confidential, 84 Connery, Sean, 136 Copjec, Joan, 30 Coronation Street, 13, 91, 92 Creekmur, Corey K., 121 Crossroads, 90 Cruise, Tom, 110 Curti, Lidia, 92 Dallas, 13, 90, 91 De Lauretis, Teresa, 40, 78 De Mille, Cecil B., 146 De Palma, Brian, 82 Dean, James, 51–52, 54, 95, 110, 122, 126 Diawara, Manthia, 61, 79, 81, 199 n. Diderot, Denis, 100 Dietrich, Marlene, 146 disavowal, 17, 29, 30, 109, 110, 111, 119, 199 n. Doane, Mary Ann, 29, 67, 68, 70, 112, 113, 117, 118, 152

217

218

INDEX

Dolar, Mladen, 115 Donald, James, 64 Doty, Alexander, 42, 121 Downing, David, 162 Dressed To Kill, 82 Dyer, Richard, 17, 109 Dynasty, 90 EastEnders, 14, 89, 92 Elam, Diane, 45 Elsaesser, Thomas, 94 essentialism, 35, 36, 37, 38, 44, 90 ethnicity, 11, 12, 14, 34, 37, 41, 43, 53, 61, 62, 63, 71, 73, 79, 119 exhibitionism, 75, 77, 109 fantasy, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 29, 30, 32, 35, 53, 54, 59–67, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 82, 85, 92, 95, 101, 103, 108, 119, 120, 129, 135, 144, 187, 189 femininity, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 60, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 77, 82, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 100, 110, 129, 139, 147, 154, 156, 157, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 177, 179, 180, 182, 184, 187, 189, 207 n. feminism, 10, 12, 14, 15, 20, 29, 30, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43–48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 60, 61, 66, 70, 71, 75, 85, 86, 87, 89, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 112, 120, 130, 188, 202 n. feminization, 10, 12, 41, 80, 86, 95, 107– 20, 122, 126, 148, 152, 168, 178, 181, 187, 190, 192, 193 Fenichel, Otto, 75 fetish, 29, 62, 128, 139, 146; fetishization, 11, 66, 77, 78, 81, 129, 135, 145, 146, 154, 155, 177, 183, 187 Filene, Peter G., 126 film noir, 133, 140, 141, 147, 198 n. film studies, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17,19, 20, 30, 67, 71, 85, 86, 87, 94, 97, 100, 102, 108, 111, 112, 119, 121, 27, 138, 139, 140, 187, 194 n., 202 n. Flax, Jane, 45 For Women, 84, 110 Foucault, Michel, 38, 39, 69, 79

‘‘foundationalism, biological,’’ 36–38, 44, 90 Fraser, Nancy, 35 Freed, Alan, 125 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 17, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 44, 51, 63, 64, 66, 72, 75, 79, 97,102,108, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 127 From Here to Eternity, 19, 96, 113, 119, 140, 168–76, 182, 183, 184, 185,189, 192 Gaines, Jane, 77 gangster movies, 13 gaze, 17, 29, 30, 69, 74, 80, 81, 109, 135, 145, 146, 147, 154, 161, 168, 179, 185; female, 76, 77, 111, 155, 162, 165, 183, 184; male, 77, 78, 117, 141, 145, 146, 150, 161, 164, 169, 171, 172, 176, 185, 186, 190; medical, 152; oppositional, 80 gender, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17,19, 25–42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 59–67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 79, 84–103, 138, 153, 167, 179, 184 General Hospital, 96 genetics, 25, 26 genre, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 42, 49, 84–103, 111, 112, 117, 119, 122, 127, 140, 150, 187 Gere, Richard, 111 Gilligan, Carol, 34–35, 116 Gilmore, David, 48, 49 Gledhill, Christine, 64, 65 Gone with the Wind, 160 Gramsci, Antonio, 71 Green, Ian, 52, 63 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 85 Haley, Bill, 125 Hanks, Pamela Anne, 162, 165 Hansen, Miriam, 110 Hanson, Ellis, 41, 79 Hark, Ina Rae, 52 Harper, Sue, 76 Hedren, ‘‘Tippi,’’ 129, 136 Hermes, Joke, 92 heterosexuality, 12, 33, 37, 38, 39, 40,

INDEX

219

41, 42, 43, 50, 68, 69, 70, 76, 77, 79, 81, 110, 117, 142, 192 Hitchcock, Alfred, 17, 121, 122, 128–39, 146 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 115 Holden, William, 18, 69, 141, 146, 147, 148 Hollywood, 13, 14, 15, 17, 41, 51, 60, 62, 67, 74, 75, 85, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 108, 110, 111, 112, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 128, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, 151, 163, 176, 177, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 202 n. Holmlund, Chris, 50, 70, 166, 167 Home from the Hill, 87 homosexuality, 12, 40, 42, 49, 68, 69, 111, 122, 138, 142, 167 176 homosociality, 40 hooks, bell, 51, 60, 61, 62, 80 Horney, Karen, 31, 32, 49, 115, 116, 117 horror, 13, 85, 86, 91, 140 HUAC, 17, 19, 124, 138, 176 Hudson, Rock, 49, 52, 110, 111, 122 hysteria, 29, 63, 163

Klinger, Barbara, 13, 96, 97, 98, 119, 127, 128 Korean War, 123 Kramarae, Cheris, 88 Kramer vs. Kramer, 96, 187 Kristeva, Julia, 60 Kuhn, Annette, 45, 72, 76, 88

identification, 59–67, 75, 76, 77, 83, 96, 121, 129, 132, 134, 135, 139, 141, 188, 189 Imitation of Life, 97, 99, 101, 121, 161–62

Madonna, 54 Man’s World, 84 Manhattan Melodrama, 13 Marnie, 121, 128, 129, 136–38 Marxism, 42, 44, 97 masculinity, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18,19, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 48–55, 60, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 77, 82, 85, 86, 88, 92, 96, 102, 108, 113, 116, 120, 121, 122, 127, 136, 138, 139, 141, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 176, 177, 178, 179, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 masculinization, 12, 16, 59, 80, 107, 129, 204 n. masochism, 12, 16, 29, 31, 53, 63, 65, 66, 75, 80, 83, 86, 102, 103, 175, 183, 204 n. masquerade, 13, 15, 67–70, 72, 73, 162, 163, 165, 166, 184, 188 May, Robert, 64, 65 Mayne, Judith, 63 McCann, Graham, 162, 165, 166, 167

Johnston, Claire, 67 Jung, Carl, 31, 114 Kaplan, E. Ann, 44 Kapsis, Robert, 137 Kay, Betsy, 116 Kazan, Elia, 19, 140, 160, 176, 177, 188, 189 Keane, Marian E., 75, 77, 133, 135 Kelly, Grace, 129, 131, 135 Kerouac, Jack, 126 Kerr, Deborah, 168, 169 Kessler, Suzanne J., 27 King, Martin Luther, 124 Kirkham, Pat, 50 Kiss of the Spider Woman, 68, 69, 70 Klein, Melanie, 32, 113

Lacan, Jacques, 17, 20, 29, 30, 34, 43, 45, 52, 69, 70, 74, 79, 80, 81, 108, 115, 117, 118, 120, 128, 151, 166, 195 n. Lancaster, Burt, 19, 168, 169, 170, 172 Leigh, Vivien, 18, 157, 160 Lesage, Julia, 53 Looking for Mr. Goodbar, 167 love, 17, 19, 111–20, 134, 135, 156, 163, 168, 169, 174, 175, 176, 189, 190, 191, 192; love story, 17, 108, 111, 112, 117, 118, 119, 120, 169, 177, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 190, 191; transference love, 113, 114, 115 Lovell, Terry, 91 Lowenstein, Jerold M., 25, 27 Lurie, Susan, 31–32, 49

220

INDEX

McCarthy, Joseph, 124, 138; McCarthyism, 176 McLaughlin, Sheila, 78 Mead, Margaret, 128 melodrama, 13, 14, 16, 51, 76, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93–102, 111, 112, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 128, 133, 140, 152, 187, 188, 201 n., 202 n., 203 n. Men, The, 18, 119, 140, 150–57, 184, 186, 189 ‘‘Method, The,’’ 126, 182 Miller, Jean Baker, 116 Minnelli, Vincente, 87, 99, 101, 121, 126 127, 191 Mitchum, Robert, 87 Modleski, Tania, 53, 90, 91, 129, 133, 201 n. Moores, Shaun, 90 Mulvey, Laura, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 46, 59, 60, 62, 66, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 82, 86, 87, 93, 94, 99, 102, 107, 108, 111, 113, 116, 117, 121, 122, 128, 129, 130, 133, 138, 139, 141, 146, 169, 171, 186, 189, 192, 203 n., 204 n. narcissism, 113, 115, 118 Neale, Steve (aka Stephen), 13, 16, 76, 77, 88, 94, 96, 100, 101, 109, 111, 117, 118, 202 n., 203 n. Nicholson, Linda J., 35, 36, 37, 90 1950s, 123–28, 138, 139, 188, 190, 192 Novak, Kim, 129, 134, 190 Oakley, Ann, 25 object-relationism, 32–36, 44, 49, 112–116 objectification, 76, 148, 177, 179; female, 17, 18, 46, 62, 66, 75, 77, 81, 119, 120, 121, 128, 130, 134, 139 145, 146, 147, 162, 165, 169, 170, 171, 173, 177, 178, 183, 185, 186, 187, 190, 191; male, 17, 54, 69, 76, 77, 80, 107, 108–11, 119, 146, 147, 149, 165, 166 On the Waterfront, 19, 113, 119, 140, 176–83, 184, 185, 189 One Life to Live, 96 Ordinary People, 96, 187 Pal Joey, 190, 191 paranoia, 29

Parker, Eleanor, 87 patriarchy, 12, 13, 15, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 47, 53, 54, 55, 60, 61, 62, 64, 67, 91, 95, 96, 97, 97–98, 100, 109, 112, 121, 122, 137 Patten, Luana, 87 Pearson, Roberta, 132 Peeping Tom, 77 Peyton Place, 89, 96 Physique Pictorial, 84 Picnic, 69, 70, 96 Playboy, 84, 125 Playgirl, 84, 110 Plato, 68, 70 Pollock, Griselda, 54 postmodernism, 15, 46, 54 Presley, Elvis, 125 Prince, Gerald, 71 Psycho, 135–36, 147 psychoanalysis, 11, 15, 20, 27–32, 38, 39, 42, 48, 49, 53, 66, 67, 79, 102, 112– 16, 127, 128 queer theory, 10, 15, 38–42, 68, 81 race, 12, 41, 61, 80, 97, 101, 110, 125 Ray, Nicholas, 99, 121, 122, 126 readership, 15, 62, 71–72, 73, 103 Rear Window, 17, 121, 128, 130–33, 137, 139 Rebel Without a Cause, 54, 122 Reservoir Dogs, 86 Rivie`re, Joan, 67, 70 Robeson, Paul, 110 Rodowick, D. N., 63, 129 Rose, Jacqueline, 30 Rosen, Marjorie, 127, 162 Rothblatt, Martine, 26 Roustang, Franc¸ois, 20, 29, 30 sadism, 13, 31, 63, 65, 66, 75, 86, 107, 108, 130, 141, 171, 173, 183, 189, 192, 201 n., 204 n. Saint, Eva Marie, 19, 177, 182 Samuels, Robert, 139 Saturday Night Fever, 111 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 110 scopophilia (see also voyeurism and fetishization), 75, 109, 146

INDEX

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 40 sex, 10, 11, 14, 15, 25–42, 43, 45, 67, 68 sexuality, 11, 12, 14, 17, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 64, 70, 73, 79, 115, 119, 120, 125, 127, 128, 138, 140, 162 Shapiro, Judith, 48 Shattuc, Jane, 100, 101 She Must Be Seeing Things, 78 Shrage, Laurie Silverman, Kaja, 29, 30, 31, 77, 130, 137, 194 n. Sinatra, Frank, 19, 169, 176, 190, 191, 192 Sirk, Douglas, 13, 17, 52, 87, 94, 97, 98, 99, 101, 111, 121, 122, 123, 126, 138, 161 soap opera, 9, 13, 14, 16, 89–93, 96, 103 Some Came Running, 101, 191–92 spectacle, 14, 40, 41, 42, 46, 109, 131, 133, 136, 165, 190 spectator (apparatic), 11, 12, 40, 60, 63, 66, 71, 73, 74–83, 98–103, 107, 111, 132, 134, 162, 165, 167, 185, 191; black, 61, 62, 80, 82; female, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 40, 59, 60, 67, 74, 76, 80, 85, 86, 87, 88, 96, 97, 103, 109, 111, 112, 128, 130, 131, 132, 165, 189, 204 n.; male, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 42, 44, 54, 59, 60, 66, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 86, 87, 92, 96, 97, 102, 103, 108, 109, 113, 120, 121, 129, 131, 138, 139, 141, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 193 spectatorship, 10, 11, 14, 16, 41, 62, 63, 74–83, 84, 85, 88, 97, 103, 111, 130 Spender, Dale, 36 Spielberg, Steven, 61 Stacey, Jackie, 40 Stallone, Sylvester, 50, 110 Stam, Robert, 42, 132 Stewart, James, 128, 129, 130, 136, 137 Straayer, Chris, 40, 64 Street, Sarah, 148, 149 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 18, 63, 140, 157–68, 184, 185, 188, 189 Stoller, Robert, 32 Studio, Actors, 126

221

Studlar, Gaylyn, 110, 129, 130 Sturken, Marita, 80 Sunset Boulevard, 18, 140, 141–50, 184, 185, 189 Swanson, Gloria, 18, 141 Tandy, Jessica, 160 Tarantino, Quentin, 86 Taylor, Barbara, 53 television, 10, 13, 14, 16, 80, 89, 90, 93, 96, 103, 126, 182, 203 n. Thomas, Julia, 81 Thomson, David, 93 Three Faces of Eve, The, 127 Thumim, Janet, 50 Travolta, John, 111 Valentino, Rudolph, 54, 76, 110 Vertigo, 17, 121, 128, 129, 133–35, 136, 139 video, 10 Vinicius, Martha, 97 visual culture, 80–81 Viva, 91 von Sternberg, Josef, 121 146, 147 Vorlicky, Robert, 47 voyeurism, 11, 29, 66, 75, 76, 77, 81, 108, 129, 131, 132, 138, 147, 171, 183, 187 Walker, Alice, 61 Walker, Michael, 13, 93, 94, 95 Weissmuller, Johnny, 110 Wilder, Billy, 140, 141, 146 Willemen, Paul, 16, 109 Williams, Linda, 79 Williams, Tennessee, 63, 126, 140, 157 Wolpe, AnnMarie, 45 ‘‘woman’s film,’’ 13, 14, 85, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 97, 103, 111, 118, 133, 202 n. Woman’s Own, 84 Wood, Natalie, 122 Wood, Robin, 132 Wright, Teresa, 18, 151 Written on the Wind, 14, 96, 98,121, 187 Zinnemann, Fred, 18, 140, 150, 176, 182