Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess Author(s): Linda Williams Reviewed work(s): Source: Film Quarterly, Vol.

44, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), pp. 2-13 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1212758 . Accessed: 08/11/2011 07:57
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

Contributors in this issue

RichardAbel, author of two distinguished works on French film and theory, teaches at Drake University. CarolynAnderson teaches at the University of Massachusetts,Amherst. D. Castillo Edward is a CaliforniaCahuilla Indian and chair of Native American Studies at Sonoma State University. DariusCooper teaches at San Diego Mesa College. David Desser, our Book Review Editor, teaches at the University of Illinois,

Linda Williams

Film

Bodies:

Gender,

Urbana.

John Fell, of our editorial board, is the

authorof Filmand theNarrative

Tradition(UC Press). Dan Greenbergteaches in Michigan and keeps a sharp eye on the film reference book field.

is the authorof A RobertP. Kolker Cinemaof Loneliness.

Sarah Kozloffwrote Invisible Storytellers: Voice-OverNarration in American Feature Film (UC Press). George Lellisteaches at Coker College, Hartsville, SC.

is a film historian. James L. Neibaur

LelandPoague teaches at Iowa State University, Ames. Dana Polan, editor of Cinema Journal, teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

of is the co-author Quart Leonard

American Film and Society Since 1945. MarkA. Reid teaches at the University of Florida and is finishing a book on black film-making. Gregg Rickmanteaches at San Francisco State University.

andteaches is a film-maker AlanRosenthal

at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Turk teachesat MITand Baron Edward

wroteChildof Paradise,on MarcelCarn6. WilliamC. Wees's Light Moving in Time: Studies in the VisualAesthetics of Avant-GardeFilm will be published early next year by the UC Press. LindaWilliamswrote Hard Core, and is a member of our editorial board. Tony Williamsteaches at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Don Willisis the author of several film referencebooks.

my seven-year-old son and I go When to the movies we often select from among categories of films that promise to be sensational, to give our bodies an actual physical jolt. He calls these movies "gross." My son and I agree that the fun of "gross" movies is in their display of sensations that are on the edge of respectable. Where we disagree-and where we as a culture often disagree, along lines of gender, age, or sexual orientation-is in which movies are over the edge, too "gross." To my son the good "gross" movies are those with scary monsters like Freddy Krueger (of the Nightmare on Elm Street series) who rip apart teenagers, especially teenage girls. These movies both fascinate and scare him; he is actually more interested in talking about than seeing them. A second category, one that I like and my son doesn't, are sad movies that make you cry. These are gross in their focus on unseemly emotions that may remind him too acutely of his own powerlessness as a child. A third category, of both intense interest and disgust to my son (he makes the puke sign when speaking of it), he can only describe euphemistically as "the 'K' word." K is for kissing. To a seven-year-oldboy it is kissing preciselywhich is obscene. There is no accounting for taste, especially in the realm of the "gross." As a culture we most often invoke the term to designate excesses we wish to exclude; to say, for example, which of the Robert Mapplethorpe photos we draw the line at, but not to say what form and structure and function operate within the representations deemed excessive. Because so much attention goes to determining where to draw the line, discussions of the gross are often a highly confused hodgepodge of different categories of excess. For example, pornography is today more often deemed excessive for its violence than for its sex, while horror films are excessive in their displacement of sex onto violence. In

Genre,

and

Excess

contrast, melodramas are deemed excessive for their gender- and sex-linked pathos, for their naked displays of emotion; Ann Douglas once referredto the genre of romance fiction as "soft-core emotional porn for women" (Douglas, 1980). Alone or in combination, heavy doses of sex, violence, and emotion are dismissed by one faction or another as having no logic or reason for existence beyond their power to excite. Gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence and terror, gratuitous emotion are frequent epithets hurled at the phenomenon of the "sensational" in pornography, horror, and melodrama. This essay explores the notion that there may be some value in thinking about the form, function, and system of seeminglygratuitous excesses in these three genres. For if, as it seems, sex, violence, and emotion are fundamental elements of the sensational effects of these three types of films, the designation "gratuitous" is itself gratuitous. My hope, therefore, is that by thinking comparatively about all three "gross" and sensational film body genres we might be able to get beyond the mere fact of sensation to explore its system and structure as well as its effect on the bodies of spectators.

Body Genres
The repetitiveformulas and spectacles of film genres are often defined by their differences from the classical realist style of narrative cinema. These classical films have been characterizedas efficient action-centered, goal-oriented linear narratives driven by the desire of a single protagonist, involving one or two lines of action, and leading to definitive closure. In their influential study of the Classical Hollywood Cinema, Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger call this the Classical Hollywood style (1985). As Rick Altman has noted in a recent article (1989), both genre study and the study of the some-

what more nebulous category of melodrama has long been hamperedby assumptions about the classical nature of the dominant narrative to which melodrama and some individual genres have been opposed. Altman argues that Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, who locate the Classical Hollywood Style in the linear, progressive form of the Hollywood narrative,cannot accommodate "melodramatic" attributeslike spectacle, episodic presentation, or dependence on coincidence except as limited exceptions or "play" within the dominant linear causality of the classical (Altman, 1988, 346). Altman writes: "Unmotivated events, rhythmic montage, highlighted parallelism, overlong spectacles-these are the excesses in the classical narrative system that alert us to the existence of a competing logic, a second voice." (345-6) Altman, whose own work on the movie musical has necessarily relied upon analyses of seemingly "excessive" spectacles and parallel constructions, thus makes a strong case for the need to recognize the possibility that excess may itself be organized as a system (347). Yet analyses of systems of excess have been much slower to emerge in the genres whose non-linear spectacles have centered more directly upon the gross display of the human body. Pornography and horror films are two such systems of excess. Pornography is the lowest in cultural esteem, gross-out horror is next to lowest. Melodrama, however, refersto a much broader category of films and a much larger system of excess. It would not be unreasonable, in fact, to consider all three of these genres under the extended rubric of melodrama, considered as a filmic mode of stylistic and/or emotional excess that stands in contrast to more "dominant" modes of realistic, goal-oriented narrative. In this extended sense melodrama can encompass a broad range of films marked by "lapses" in realism, by "excesses" of spectacle and displays of primal, even infantile emotions, and by narrativesthat seem circular and repetitive. Much of the interest of melodrama to film scholars over the last fifteen years originates in the sense that the form exceeds the normative system of much narrative cinema. I shall limit my focus here, however, to a more narrow sense of melodrama, leaving the broader category of the sensational to encompass the three genres I wish to consider. Thus, partly for purposes of contrast with pornography, the melodrama I will consider here 3

their traditional status under patriarchy-as wives, mothers, abandoned lovers, or in their traditional status as bodily hysteria or excess, as in the frequent case of the woman "afflicted" with a deadly or debilitating disease.' What are the pertinentfeatures of bodily excess shared by these three "gross" genres? First, there is the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion. Carol Clover, speaking primarilyof horror films and pornography, has called films which privilegethe sensational "body" genres (Clover, 189). I am expanding Clover's notion of low body genres to include the sensation of overwhelming pathos in the "weepie." The body spectacle is featured most sensationally in pornography's portrayal of orgasm, in horror's portrayal of violence and terror, and in melodrama's portrayal of weeping. I propose that an investigation of the visual and narrative pleasures found in the portrayalof these three types of excess could be important to a new direction in genre criticism that would take as its point of departure-rather than as an unexamined assumption-questions of gender construction, and gender address in relation to basic sexual fantasies. Another pertinent feature shared by these body genres is the focus on what could probably best be called a form of ecstasy. While the classical meaning of the original Greek word is insanity and bewilderment, more contemporary meanings suggest components of direct or indirect sexual excitement and rapture, a rapture which informs even the pathos of melodrama. Visually, each of these ecstatic excesses could be said to share a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm-of the body "beside itself" with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness. Aurally, excess is marked by recourse not to the coded articulations of language but to inarticulate cries of pleasure in porn, screams of fear in horror, sobs of anguish in melodrama. Looking at, and listening to, these bodily ecstasies, we can also notice something else that these genres seem to share: though quite differently gendered with respect to their targeted audiences, with pornographyaimed, presumably,at active men and melodramatic weepies aimed, presumably, at pas4

these genres the bodies of women figured on the screen have functioned traditionallyas the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain. In other words, even when the pleasureof viewing has traditionally been constructed for masculine spectators, as is the case in most traditional heterosexual pornography, it is the female body in the grips of an out-of-control ecstasy that has offered the most sensational sight. So the bodies of women have tended to function, ever since the eighteenth-century origins of these genres in the Marquis de Sade, Gothic fiction, and the novels of Richardson, as both the moved and the moving. It is thus through what Foucault has called the sexual saturation of the female body that audiences of all sorts have received some of their most powerful sensations (Foucault, 104). There are, of course, other film genres which both portray and affect the sensationalbody-e.g., thrillers, musicals, comedies. I suggest, however, that the film genres that have had especially low cultural status-which have seemed to exist as excesses to the system of even the popular genresare not simply those which sensationally display bodies on the screen and registereffects in the bodies of spectators. Rather, what may especiallymark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female. Physical clown comedy is another "body" genre concerned with all manner of gross activities and body functions-eating shoes, slipping on banana peels. Nonetheless, it has not been deemed gratuitously excessive, probably because the reaction of the audiencedoes not mimic the sensations experiencedby the central clown. Indeed, it is almost a rule that the audience's physical reaction of laughter does not coincide with the often dead-pan reactions of the clown. In the body genres I am isolating here, however, it seems to be the case that the success of these genres is often measured by the degree to which the audience sensation mimics what is seen on the screen. Whether this mimicry is exact, e.g., whether the spectator at the porn film actually orgasms, whether the spectator at the horror film ac-

iiiiiii-:: ?iiiiii,

:: i::: I:::' ::::::::::: :: ?s

iii iii iiliigiiii'?'i.~ilili iii iiiii iiii :iiiiii::i:r; iiiiii -::::::::?::?-: :::,:,;: -.,:: ?:i:?_: ::: iii?ili?ii?iii:i:ei:iiii:

in StellaDallas-classicweepie. Barbara Stanwyck

in fear, whetherthe spectatorof the tual shudders melodramaactuallydissolvesin tears, the success matterof meaof thesegenresseemsa self-evident of suchmeasuresuringbodilyresponse.Examples in the "petermeter" mentcan be readilyobserved: capsulereviewsin Hustlermagazine,which meaof erection surethe powerof a pornfilm in degrees of little cartoon penises; in horror films which measuresuccessin termsof screams,fainting,and Wilheartattacksin the audience producer (horror with kind in of liam Castle specialized this thing such films as The Tingler,1959);and in the longstanding tradition of women's films measuring theirsuccessin termsof one-, two-, or three-handkerchiefmovies. What seemsto bracketthese particular genres from othersis an apparentlack of properesthetic in sensation distance,a senseof over-involvement these and emotion.We feel manipulated by texts-of "tear thatthe verycolloquialisms an impression jerker"and "fear jerker"express-and to which even crudersense as we could add pornography's texts to which some people might be inclinedto of violenceof thejerksug"jerkoff." Therhetoric gests the extentto whichviewersfeel too directly, too viscerally by the textin specifically manipulated Ann Doane, for example, genderedways. Mary writingabout the most genteel of these jerkers-- example of this maternal pathos. With the above genre stereotypes in mind we the maternalmelodrama-equates the violenceof this emotionto a kindof "textualrape"of the tar- should now ask about the status of bodily excess geted female viewer, who is "feminizedthrough in each of these genres. Is is simply the unseemly, "gratuitous" presence of the sexually ecstatic pathos" (Doane, 1987, 95). Feminist critics of pornographyoften evoke woman, the tortured woman, the weeping woman similarfiguresof sexual/textualviolencewhende- -and the accompanying presence of the sexual scribingthe operationof this genre. Robin Mor- fluids, the blood and the tears that flow from her

objectified victims of pornographicrepresentawoman ecstatic tions, thatthe imageof the sexually of female to the genreis a celebration so important to femalevictimization and a prelude victimization in real life. Lesswellknown,but related,is the observation of the criticof horrorfilms, JamesTwitchell,who meansto bristle.He noticesthat the Latinhorrere the way the napehairstandson end durdescribes ing moments of shiveringexcitement.The aptly namedTwitchellthus describesa kind of erection of the hair founded in the conflict betweenreactions of "fight and flight" (Twitchell,10). While male victims in horror films may shudder and screamas well, it has long been a dictum of the genrethat womenmakethe bestvictims."Torture the women!" was the famous advice given by Alfred Hitchcock.2 In the classichorrorfilm the terrorof the female victim shares the spectacle along with the monster. Fay Wray and the mechanizedmonster exin KingKongis a familiar thatmadeherscream in the Janet form. classic the of Leigh ample showerin Psycho is a familiarexampleof a transition to a more sexuallyexplicitform of the tortured and terrorizedwoman. And her daughter, Jamie Lee Curtisin Halloween, can serve as the more contemporary version of the terrorized womanvictim.In both of theselaterfilmsthe spectacleof the monsterseemsto take secondbillingto numerousvictims slashedby the the increasingly sexuallydisturbedbut entirelyhumanmonsters. classicis the In the woman'sfilm a well-known motherof the two earlyversionsof long-suffering StellaDallas who sacrificesherselffor her daughfilm goers ter's upwardmobility. Contemporary could recentlysee Bette Midlergoing throughthe same sacrificeand loss in the film Stella. Debra Winger in Termsof Endearmentis another familiar

lation to one another, as a system of excess in the popular film? And finally, how excessive are they really? The psychoanalytic system of analysis that has been so influential in film study in general and in feminist film theory and criticism has been remarkably ambivalent about the status of excess in its major tools of analysis. The categoriesof fetishism, voyeurism, sadism, and masochism frequently invoked to describe the pleasures of film spectatorship are by definition perversions. Perversions are usually defined as sexual excesses, specificallyas excesses which are deflected away from "proper" end goals onto substitute goals or objects-fetishes instead of genitals, looking instead of touching, etc. -which seem excessive or gratuitous. Yet the perverse pleasures of film viewing are hardly gratuitous. They have been considered so basic that they have often been presented as norms. What is a film, after all, without voyeurism? Yet, at the same time, feminist critics have asked, what is the position of women within this pleasure geared to a presumably sadistic "male gaze"? (Mulvey, 1976) To what extent is she its victim? Are the orgasmic woman of pornographyand the torturedwoman of horror merely in the service of the sadistic male gaze? And is the weeping woman of melodrama appealing to the abnormal perversions of masochism in female viewers? These questions point to the ambiguity of the terms of perversion used to describe the normal pleasures of film viewing. Without attempting to go into any of the complexities of this discussion here-a discussion which must ultimately relate to the status of the term perversion in theories of sexuality themselves-let me simply suggest the value of not invoking the perversions as terms of condemnation. As even the most cursory reading of Freud shows, sexuality is by definition perverse. The "aims" and "objects" of sexual desire are often obscure and inherently substitutive. Unless we are willing to see reproduction as the common goal of the sexual drive, we have to admit, as Jonathan Dollimore has put it, that we are all perverts. Dollimore's goal of retrievingthe "concept of perversion as a category of cultural analysis"--as a structureintrinsicto all sexualityratherthan extrin6

,:: _...:: ?: iiiiiiiiiiiiiii: ii: i,

??

.......

iiiiiii''':'-':' -i:- :i:

Pleasure:BabylonPink (porn) sic to it-is crucial to any attempt to understand cultural forms-such as our three body genresin which fantasy predominates.3

Structuresof Perversionin the "Female Body Genres"

Each of the three body genres I have isolated hinges on the spectacle of a "sexually saturated" female body, and each offers what many feminist critics would agree to be spectacles of feminine victimization. But this victimization is very different in each type of film and cannot be accounted for simply by pointing to the sadistic power and pleasure of masculine subject positions punishing or dominating feminine objects. Many feminists have pointed to the victimization of the woman performersof pornographywho must actually do the acts depicted in the film, as well as to the victimization of characterswithin the films (Dworkin, 1979; MacKinnon, 1987). Pornography, in this view, is fundamentally sadistic. In women's weepies, on the other hand, feminists have pointed to the spectacles of intense suffering and loss as masochistic. In horror films, while feminists have often pointed to the women victims who suffer simulated torture and mutilation as victims of sadism (Williams, 1983), more recent feminist work has suggested that the horror film may present an interesting, and perhaps instructive, case of oscillation between masochistic and sadistic poles. This more recent argument, advanced by Carol J. Clover, has suggested that pleasure, for a masculine-identifiedviewer, oscillates between identifying with the initial passive powerlessness of the abject

of a film like Halloween finally grabs the phallic knife, or ax, or chainsaw to turnthe tableson the monster-killer,that viewer identification shifts from an "abjectterrorgenderedfeminine"to an activepowerwithbisexualcomponents.A genderconfusedmonsteris foiled, often symbolically castratedby an "androgynous""final girl" (Clover, 206-209). In slasherfilms, identificationwith vic-

em
. ....

taken seriouslyas pleasure. Thereis thus a real needto be clearerthan we have been aboutwhat is in masochismfor women -how powerand pleasureoperatein fantasiesof dominationwhich appealto women. Thereis an equal need to be clearerthan we have about what beis in sadismfor men. Herethe initialopposition tweenthese two most genderedgenres-women's weepies and male heterosexual pornographyneedsto be complicated.I have arguedelsewhere, has too simplistifor example,that pornography fantasystruccallybeenalliedwitha purelysadistic ture. Indeed, those troubling films and videos of tortureon the bodies whichdeployinstruments withmasof womenhavebeenalliedso completely culine viewing pleasuresthat we have not paid enoughattentionto their appealto women except to condemn such appeal as false consciousness (Williams, 1989, 184-228). One important complication of the initial schemaI haveoutlinedwouldthusbe to take a lesson from Clover'smorebisexualmodel of viewer in horrorfilm andstressthe sadomasidentification ochistic componentof each of these body genres

Fear:JanetLeighin Psycho(norror) timizationis a roller-coaster rideof sadomasochistic thrills. We couldthus initiallyschematize the perverse in these of the pleasures genres followingway:pornography'sappeal to its presumedmale viewers would be characterized as sadistic, horrorfilms' appealto the emergingsexualidentitiesof its (frequentlyadolescent)spectatorswouldbe sadomasochistic and women's films appeal to presumed female viewerswould be masochistic. The masochisticcomponentof viewingpleasure for womenhas beenthe most problematic term of perversionfor feministcritics.It is interesting, for example,that most of our important studiesof masochism-whetherby Deleuze(1971),Silverman (1980;1988)or Studlar (1985)-have all focusedon the exoticismof masculinemasochismratherthan the familiarityof femalemasochism.Masochistic

ii' i~.-.~-i i --ii: -:? ::: ~~ :-:::::-::-::::

::::j:i:-:-::::a::: iiiiiii:?ii -::::;: _::::::::::: -'iiii~ii:iij-l:--:---:i:l?:i:.:.::: : i:i i:liiiii -:-;-:----: 'il'?i:ii :iii_:ii.iiiii 'ii'iii :::?:?::??:-:: iaii~iiiii:s:i:-i:i:;i-s?il:l,:~:.:: :::::: \ii?iiiiii:iiiili i::: :---::::i::

Pain: Imitationof Life (melodrama)

of melodrathroughtheir variousappropriations matic fantasies that are, in fact, basic to each. All of these genrescould, for example,be said to enactmentsof sexually offer highlymelodramatic if not sexually explicit,relations.Thesubcharged, genre of sadomasochisticpornography,with its
7

melodramatic scenario of the passive and innocent female victim suffering at the hands of a leeringvillain. We can also see in horror films of tortured women a similar melodramatization of the innocent victim. An important difference, of course, lies in the component of the victim's overt sexual pleasure in the scenario of domination. But even in the most extreme displays of feminine masochistic suffering, there is always a component of either power or pleasure for the woman victim. In slasher horror films we have seen how identification seems to oscillate between powerlessness and power. In sadomasochistic pornography and in melodramatic woman's weepies, feminine subject positions appear to be constructed which achieve a modicum of power and pleasure within the given limits of patriarchal constraints on women. It is worth noting as well that non-sadomasochistic pornography has historically been one of the few types of popular film that has not punished women for actively pursuing their sexual pleasure. In the subgenre of sadomasochistic pornography, however, the female masochist in the scenario must be devious in her pursuit of pleasure. She plays the part of passive sufferer in order to obtain pleasure. Under a patriarchaldouble standard that has rigorously separated the sexually passive "good" girl from the sexually active "bad" girl, masochistic role-playing offers a way out of this dichotomy by combining the good girl with the bad: the passive "good girl" can prove to her witnesses (the super-ego who is her torturer) that she does not will the pleasure that she receives. Yet the sexually active "bad" girl enjoys this pleasure and has knowingly arranged to endure the pain that earns it. The cultural law which decides that some girls are good and others are bad is not defeated but within its terms pleasure has been negotiated and "paid for" with a pain that conditions it. The "bad" girl is punished, but in return she receives pleasure. In contrast, the sadomasochistic teen horror films kill off the sexually active "bad" girls, allowing only the non-sexual "good" girls to survive. But these good girls become, as if in compensation, remarkably active, to the point of appropriating 8

For these pleasures spell sure death in this genre. In the melodramatic woman's film we might think to encounter a purer form of masochism on the part of female viewers. Yet even here the female viewer does not seem to be invited to identify wholly with the sacrificinggood woman, but rather with a variety of different subject positions, including those which empathically look on at her own suffering. While I would not argue that there is a very strong sadistic component to these films, I do argue that there is a strong mixture of passivity and activity, and a bisexual oscillation between the poles of each, in even this genre. For example, the woman viewer of a maternal melodrama such as Terms of Endearment or Steel Magnolias does not simply identify with the suffering and dying heroines of each. She may equally identify with the powerful matriarchs, the surviving mothers who preside over the deaths of their daughters, experiencing the exhilaration and triumph of survival. The point is simply that identification is neither fixed nor entirely passive. While there are certainly masculine and feminine, active and passive, poles to the left and right of the chart on which we might position these three genres (see below), the subject positions that appear to be constructed by each of the genres are not as gender-linkedand as gender-fixedas has often been supposed. This is especially true today as hard-core pornography is gaining appeal with women viewers. Perhaps the most recent proof in this genre of the breakdown of rigid dichotomies of masculine and feminine, active and passive is the creation of an alternative, oscillating category of address to viewers. Although heterosexual hard core once addresseditself exclusivelyto heterosexualmen, it has now begun to addressitself to heterosexualcouples and women as well; and in addition to homosexual hard core, which has addresseditself to gay and (to a lesser extent) lesbian viewers, there is now a new category of video called bisexual. In these videos men do it with women, women do it with women, men do it with men and then all do it with one another, in the process breaking down a fundamental taboo against male-to-male sex.5 A related interpenetration of once more separate categories of masculine and feminine is what

Pornography excess
Ecstasy: Bodily sex ecstatic sex violence ecstatic violence

Melodrama
emotion

-shown

by

orgasm
ejaculation men (active) sadism seduction on time!

shudder

Presumed audience: Perversion:

blood adolescent boys (active/passive) sadomasochism castration too early! "classic"horror: Dracula
Frankenstein Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde King Kong

sob

ecstatic woe

tears girls, women (passive) masochism origin too late! "classic"women's films: maternalmelodrama:
Stella Dallas Mildred Pierce romance: Back Street Letter from an Unknown Woman

fantasy:

Originary

Temporality "classic

of fantasy:
Genre cycles:

stag films (20's-40's)

The Casting Couch

contemporary

Deep Throat, etc. The Punishment of Anne Femme Productions Bi-sexual

feature-length hardcore porn:

post-Psycho: Texas Chainsaw

Massacre Halloween Dressed to Kill Videodrome

male and female "weepies"

Steel Magnolias Stella Dad

Tri-sexual has come to be known in some quarters as the "male weepie." These are mainstreammelodramas engaged in the activationof the previouslyrepressed emotions of men and in breakingthe taboos against male-to-male hugs and embraces. The father-son embrace that concludes Ordinary People (1980) is exemplary. More recently, paternal weepies have begun to compete with the maternal-as in the conventional Dad (1989) or the less conventional, wild paternal displays of Twin Peaks. The point is certainlynot to admire the "sexual freedom" of this new fluidity and oscillation-the new femininity of men who hug and the new masculinity of women who leer-as if it represented any ultimate defeat of phallic power. Rather, the more useful lesson might be to see what this new fluidity and oscillation permits in the construction of feminine viewing pleasures once thought not to

exist at all. (It is instructive, for example, that in the new bisexual pornography women characters are shown verbally articulating their visual pleasure as they watch men perform sex with men.) The deployment of sex, violence, and emotion would thus seem to have very precise functions in these body genres. Like all popular genres, they address persistentproblems in our culture, in our sexualities, in our very identities. The deployment of sex, violence, and emotion is thus in no way gratuitous and in no way strictly limited to each of these genres; it is instead a culturalform of problem solving. As I have argued in Hard Core, pornographic films now tend to present sex as a problem, to which the performance of more, different, or better sex is posed as the solution (Williams, 1989). In horror a violence related to sexual difference is the problem, more violence related to sexual difference 9

Structuresof Fantasy
All of these problems are linked to gender identity and might be usefully explored as genres of gender fantasy. It is appropriate to ask, then, not only about the structures of perversion, but also about the structures of fantasy in each of these genres. In doing so, we need to be clear about the nature of fantasy itself. For fantasies are not, as is sometimes thought, wish-fulfilling linear narratives of mastery and control leading to closure and the attainment of desire. They are marked, rather, by the prolongation of desire, and by the lack of fixed position with respect to the objects and events fantasized. In their classic essay "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis (1968) argue that fantasy is not so much a narrative that enacts the quest for an object of desire as it is a setting for desire, a place where conscious and unconscious, self and other, part and whole meet. Fantasy is the place where "desubjectified" subjectivities oscillate between self and other occupying no fixed place in the scenario (16). In the three body genres discussed here, this fantasy component has probablybeen better understood in horror film, a genre often understood as belonging to the "fantastic." However, it has been less well understood in pornography and women's film melodrama. Because these genres display fewer fantastic special effects and because they rely on certain conventions of realism-the activation of social problems in melodrama, the representation of real sexual acts in pornography-they seem less obviously fantastic. Yet the usual criticisms that these forms are improbable, that they lack psychological complexity and narrative closure, and that they are repetitious, become moot as evaluation if such features are intrinsic to their engagement with fantasy. There is a link, in other words, between the appeal of these forms and their ability to address, if never really to "solve," basic problems related to sexual identity. Here, I would like to forge a connection between Laplanche and Pontalis's structural understandingof fantasies as myths of origins which try to cover the discrepancy between two 10

address the insoluble problem of the discrepancy between an irrecoverable original experience presumed to have actually taken place-as in the case, for example, of the historical primal scene-and the uncertaintyof its hallucinatoryrevival. The discrepancy exists, in other words, between the actual existence of the lost object and the sign which evokes both this existence and its absence. Laplanche and Pontalis maintain that the most basic fantasies are located at the juncture of an irrecoverable real event that took place somewhere in the past and a totally imaginary event that never took place. The "event" whose temporal and spatial existence can never be fixed is thus ultimately, according to Laplanche and Pontalis, that of "the origin of the subject"-an origin which psychoanalysts tell us cannot be separated from the discovery of sexual difference (11). It is this contradictorytemporal structureof being situated somewhere between the "too early" and the "too late" of the knowledge of difference that generates desire that is most characteristic of fantasy. Freud introduced the concept of "original fantasy" to explain the mythic function of fantasies which seem to offer repetitions of and "solutions" to major enigmas confronting the child (Freud, 1915). These enigmas are located in three areas: the enigma of the origin of sexual desire, an enigma that is "solved," so to speak, by the fantasy of seduction; the enigma of sexual difference, "solved" by the fantasy of castration; and finally the enigma of the origin of self, "solved" by the fantasy of family romance or return to origins (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1968, 11). Each of the three body genres I have been describing could be seen to correspond in important ways to one of these original fantasies: pornography, for example, is the genre that has seemed to endlessly repeat the fantasies of primal seduction, of meeting the other, seducing or being seduced by the other in an ideal "pornotopia" where, as Steven Marcus has noted, it is always bedtime (Marcus, 269). Horror is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat the trauma of castration as if to "explain," by repetitious mastery, the originary problem of sexual difference. And melodramatic weepie is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat

by the body of the mother. Of courseeachof thesegenreshas a historyand does not simply"endlesslyrepeat." The fantasies activatedby these genres are repetitious,but not fixed and eternal. If traced back to origins each withthe be shownto haveemerged couldprobably the intenand formationof the bourgeoissubject to this subjectof specifiedsexsifyingimportance ualities. But the importanceof repetitionin each genreshouldnot blindus to the verydifferenttemporal structureof repetitionin each fantasy. It could be, in fact, that these different temporal constitutethe differentutopiancompostructures in each form. Thus the nent of problem-solving fantapornographic typical(non-sadomasochistic) sies of seductionoperateto "solve" the problem of the origin of desire. Attemptingto answerthe insoluble question of whether desire is imposed from withoutthroughthe seductionof the parent or whetherit originateswithinthe self, pornography answersthis questionby typicallypositing a fantasy of desirecoming from withinthe subject and from without. Non-sadomasochistic pornogto posit the utopianfantasyof perraphyattempts a subjectand object(or fect temporalcoincidence: seducerand seduced)who meet one another"on time!" and "now!" in sharedmomentsof mutual of the genre that it is the specialchallenge pleasure to portray. the fantasyof reIn contrastto pornography, to a temporalstruccent teen horrorcorresponds turewhichraisesthe anxietyof not beingready,the problem, in effect, of "too early!" Some of the momentsof the horror most violentand terrifying in film genreoccur momentswhenthe femalevictim meetsthe psycho-killer-monster unexpectedly, beforeshe is ready.The femalevictimswho arenot readyfor the attackdie. This surpriseencounter, too early, often takes place at a momentof sexual anticipationwhen the female victim thinks she is about to meet her boyfriendor lover. The monster's violent attack on the female victimsvividly whichoften functions enactsa symboliccastration for an ill-timedexhibition as a kindof punishment of sexualdesire.Thesevictimsaretakenby surprise in the violent attackswhicharethen deeplyfelt by malespectators the adolescent (especially spectators

iii i:ili :i: i-i?i ::i _i-:-::::::-?::::

-::

iiii:ii iii ii-ii _ iii: i i - i iiiii iiiiiiii:iii: i:ii ii :.:...

The Story of Joanna (s-m porn)

drawn to the slasher subgenre)as linked to the knowledgeof sexualdifference.Again the key to the fantasy is timing-the way the knowledgeof both charovertakes too suddenly sexualdifference for which a actersandviewers,offering knowledge we are neverprepaired. meeting Finally, in contrastto pornography's "on time!" andhorror'sunexpected meeting"too
early!," we can identify melodrama's pathos of the

"too late!" In these fantasiesthe quest to return to and discoverthe originof the self is manifestin the form of the child's fantasyof possessingideal parents in the Freudianfamily romance, in the parentalfantasyof possessingthe child in materand evenin the lovers' nal or paternal melodrama, another in romantic one of possessing fantasy the fantasies In these questfor connection weepies. is alwaystingedwith the melancholyof loss. Origins are alreadylost, the encountersalways take place too late, on death beds or over coffins. (Neale, 1988). ItaliancriticFrancoMorettihas argued,for exvia thatmakesus cryoperates ample,thatliterature whattriggers of temporality: a specialmanipulation of the our cryingis not just the sadnessor suffering moment but a characterin the story very precise in the storycatchup withandrealwhencharacters ize what the audience already knows. We cry, do, Morettiargues,not just becausethe characters is desire when but at the precisemoment finally recognizedas futile. The release of tension producestears-which becomea kind of homageto a happinessthat is kissedgoodbye. Pathos is thus a that pays to realitybut it is a surrender surrender homage to the ideal that tried to wage war on it a subverthusstresses (Moretti,1983,179).Moretti
11

too late canthusbe seenas baseduponthe utopian desirethat it not be too late to remergewith the other who was once part of the self. Obviouslythere is a great deal of work to be the formand functionof these done to understand threebody genresin relationto one anotherand in relation to the fundamentalappeal as "original fantasies."Obviouslyalso the most difficultwork of understandingthis relation between gender, genre, fantasy, and structuresof perversionwill come in the attempt to relate original fantasies to historicalcontext and specific generichistory. However, there is one thing that already seems clear:these "gross" body genreswhichmay seem so violent and inimicalto women cannot be disandunchanging missedas evidence of a monolithic misogyny,as eitherpure sadismfor male viewers and for females.Theirveryexistence or masochism hingesupon rapidchangestakingplace popularity in relationsbetweenthe "sexes" and by rapidly changingnotions of gender-of what it meansto be a man or a woman. To dismissthem as bad excess whetherof explicitsex, violence, or emotion, or as bad perversions,whetherof masochismor sadism,is not to addresstheirfunctionas cultural problem-solving.Genresthrive, after all, on the but genres of the problems theyaddress; persistence thrive also in their ability to recastthe natureof these problems. Finally, as I hope this most recentexampleof of tearssuggests,we maybe wrong the melodrama simthatthe bodiesof spectators in our assumption on bodies exhibited sensations the by ply reproduce the screen. Even those masochisticpleasuresasof the "too late!" sociatedwith the powerlessness are not absolutelyabject.Eventearjerkersdo not operateto force a simplemimicryof the sensation
exhibited on the screen. Powerful as the sensations of the jerk might be, we may only be beginning to understand how they are deployed in generic and gendered cultural forms.

2.

3.

4. 5.

Christine Gledhill's introduction to the anthology Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman'sFilm (Gledhill, 1987). For a more general inquiry into the theatricalorigins of melodrama, see Peter Brooks's (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination. And for an extended theoretical inquiry and analysis of a body of melodramatic women's films, see Mary Ann Doane (1987), The Desire to Desire. Carol J. Clover (1987) discusses the meanings of this famous quote in her essay, "Her Body/Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film." Dollimore (1990, 13). Dollimore's project, along with Teresa de Lauretis's more detailed examination of the term perversion in Freudian psychoanalysis (in progress) will be central to any more detailed attempts to understand the perverse pleasures of these gross body genres. I discuss these issues at length in a chapter on sadomasochistic pornography in my book Hard Core (1989). Titles of these relatively new (post 1986) hard-core videos include: Bisexual Fantasies; Bi-Mistake; Karen's Bi-Line; Bi-Dacious; Bi-Night; Bi and Beyond; The Ultimate Fantasy; Bi and Beyond II; Bi and Beyond III: Hermaphrodites.

WorksCited
Altman, Rick. 1989. "Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today." South Atlantic Quarterly 88:321-359. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Clover, Carol J. 1987. "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film." Representations 20 (Fall): 187-228. Deleuze, Gilles. 1971. Masochism: An Interpretationof Coldness and Cruelty. Translatedby Jean McNeil. New York: Braziller. Doane, Mary Ann. 1987. The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940's. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Doane, Mary Ann, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, eds. 1983. Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. American Film Institute Monograph Series, vol. 3. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America. Dollimore, Jonathan. 1990. "The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault." Genders 8. Douglas, Ann. 1980. "Soft-Porn Culture." TheNew Republic, 30 August 1980. Dworkin, Andrea. 1979. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Perigee Books. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1915. "Instincts and their Vicissitudes." Vol. 14 of the Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. 14.

Notes
I owe thanks to Rhona Berenstein, Leo Braudy, Ernest Callenbach, Paul Fitzgerald, Jane Gaines, Mandy Harris, Brian

12

and Law. Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversityPress.

Marcus, Steven, 1964/74. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century

England.New York:New AmericanLibrary. Morgan,Robin, 1980. "Theoryand Practice:Pornography raphy,editedby LauraLederer.New York:Morrow. In Signs Taken Morefti,Franco. 1983. "Kindergarten." for Wonders.London:Verso. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."Screen 16, no. 3: 6-18. Neale, Steve. 1986. "Melodramaand Tears." Screen 27 (Nov.-Dec.): 6-22. Silverman, Kaja. 1980. "Masochism and Subjectivity."
Framework 12:2-9. and Rape." In Take Back the Night: Women on Pornog-

FILM HIEROGLYPHS of ClassicalCinema Ruptures

TOMCONLEY Filmmaking considered from the points (ruptures) at which story, image, and writing appear to be at odds. $15.95paper

and Male Subjectivity."Camera . 1988. "Masochism

Obscura 17: 31-66. Studlar, Gaylyn. 1985. In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich and the Masochistic Aesthetic. Urbana:

ENCOUNTERS CLOSE and Feminism, Film, Science Fiction

Edited by CONSTANCE PENLEY, ELISABETH SPIGEL, LYNN LYON, BERGSTROM ANDJANET Addresses the ways conventional notions of sexual difference are reworked in science fiction films. Includes the complete script of Peter
Wollen's 1987 film Friendship's Death.

Universityof IllinoisPress.
Twitchell, James. 1985. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. New York: Oxford.

Williams,Linda. 1983. "Whenthe WomanLooks." In ReVision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. See Doane

(1983).
. 1989. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible." Berkeley: University of California Press.

$12.95paper

Errata
in We inadvertently omittedtwo contributoridentifications ourlastissue.Apologiesto LloydMichaels, whoteachesat Aland to leghenyCollegeand edits the journalFilm Criticism; Maurizio Viano, who teachesat Wellesley Collegeand whose
A Certain Realism: Towards a Use of Pasolini's Film Theory

ONE CINEMA The Movement-Image

CINEMA TWO
TheTime-Image
DELEUZE GILLES "In Cinema 1 Deleuze saw the cinema prior to WW II as essentially narrative in character, dedicated to developing images of movement. In Cinema2 he perceives images of time being developed since the war to supplant those of motion and sees fragmentation and solitary images replacing the previous narrative well worth reading." emphasis....
Choice $15.95 paper(each volume)

and Practicewill be publishednext yearby the Universityof CaliforniaPress.

About FQ's Index

Heretofore, we have prepared our own Index to each four-issue "volume" of the journal; it has been bound in at the end of the Summer issues. However, our contents are indexed in the many indexing services listed on the contents page, and they are also accessible through the new publiclibrary data bank system, Infobank. We are therefore discontinuing our own indexes, confident that readers will be able to locate anything that has appeared in our pages by other easily accessible means.

orfromthe at bookstores OF MINNESOTAPRESS UNIVERSITY

800-38-3863ext.5

13