“Breaking the Frame”
Although separated by more than forty years, The Wizard of Oz and E.T. have in common the fact that they are two of the most popular films of all time. More interesting than the circumstance that the films made money—a lot of it—is the fact that they are movies that children (and some adults, too!) insist on seeing many times. In this sense the film viewing experience recreates the repetition that Freud and others have seen as central to the activity of play in children.1 Moreover, the psychologist Jean Piaget links children’s play to unconscious fantasies; it is a form of acting out psychic conflict.2 Play is “symptomatic” in that it is one way that repressed feelings or ideas surface—yet another return. It is very intriguing, in this perspective, that both films deal with a departure and return: Dorothy is removed from home by a tornado and must find the way home; E.T. (his initials stand for Extra-Terrestrial) is abandoned by his “mother” spaceship and must also find a way to summon it so that he can go back home. Probably the explanation for the success of these films lies with the fact that they dramatize some unconscious fantasies that children feel to be primordial; these films speak to the deepest part of themselves.
As fictions, E.T. and The Wizard of Oz engage their viewers in a type of play that fiction supremely allows: the play of identification. That is to say, the films mediate the experience of identifying with various characters, allowing playful and hypothetical identifications that repeat in some way the important identifications in life which have led to the child’s formation of self. Moreover, as myth, the films evoke the question which is of central importance to children: the myth of origin.3 Although they do not answer this question, the films provide a coherent narrative that stands as a fictional answer, one that children can accept because of their nostalgic sense of past. Both films, then, are narrative creations by which children are expected to perform a cognitive act.
Film has often been described as a voyeuristic medium, enabling the viewer, in the relative privacy of the darkened theater, to enjoy the vicarious enactment of unconscious wishes. The absence of live actors paradoxically creates a stronger feeling of presence in the viewer, who easily identifies with the characters of the fiction and is pulled mentally into the narrative space by various cognitive strategies employed by the filmmakers.4 The fascination of a film, its “hold” on the spectator, depends to a great extent on how close it comes to portraying material from the viewer’s own unconscious. Moreover, if such material is conveyed in a cryptographic form, the way our dreams are, we are likely to gain additional pleasure from reflecting on what we have seen, in an attempt to puzzle it out. As will be seen in the case of E.T. and The Wizard of Oz, the fictional disguise enables the films to become vehicles for a number of scenarios which employ, to varying degrees, material from the unconscious. The concealment of unconscious fantasies is necessary because no one wants to confront their unconscious wishes outright; even in dreams, these are concealed by mechanisms Freud described as “the dreamwork.”
As narratives, The Wizard of Oz and E.T. appear as a complicated fabric of possible meanings, all of which must be “unpacked” as it were and sought for below the surface. Like the story of a recounted dream, their surface coherence is only a manifest content under which latent unconscious material is concealed. Moreover, there are a number of different condensed meanings, not all of which are consistent with one another. This should not surprise us, since we know from Freud that in the unconscious there is no logical contradiction, nor is there any sense of linear time. Indeed the multiplicity of cognitive schemas that the films activate accounts for their appeal and success, what Peter Brooks has called the “force of fiction.”5
From the perspective of the influence of any given film on a spectator, a psychoanalytic approach to film should emphasize not the hypothetical mental state of the characters in the film, nor that of the film’s creator (who may be more or less unconscious of the set of significations I am about to propose), but rather the constructions that the film activates in the viewer. These constructions should be visualized as various schemas, nested one within the other, that are playfully considered by the viewer. Piaget provides my model for the constructive reading that includes conscious as well as unconscious thoughts: “The nesting of schemas as seen in symbolic thought is no more mysterious than that to be found in any work of intelligence. The unconscious is everywhere, and there is an intellectual as well as an affective unconscious. This means that it does not exist as a ‘region,’ and that the difference between consciousness and the unconscious is only a matter of gradation or degree of reflection.”6
Watching film is a form of play that we should take seriously. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg has explained the cognitive import of children’s play, in which the “play attitude is not ignoring of reality, it is not ‘primary process,’ nor is it primarily motivated by untamed drives of sex and aggression. Rather, children’s play, like their work’ attitudes toward the world, is directed toward mastering reality.”7
In our culture films are not just objects of consumption. They are formative, in that they help to “script” children’s minds: they are a factor in determining the attitudes and behavior children will develop in life. Part of the popularity of the two films I have chosen to discuss is no doubt due to the fact that they deal with issues of gender identity and role playing that are central to children.
The films’ ideology in relation to these issues is not only a matter of content; it is part of their narrative structure and system of visual representation. The concepts I will be using to unravel these many-layered messages will include cognitivist Roger Schank’s notion of scripts and their relation to learning, and psychologist Donald Spence’s exploration of narrative truth in psychological development.
To begin with, both films lay the groundwork for the ideological messages by creating an atmosphere of what Donald Spence has called “narrative truth”—a mix of plausibility, familiarity, and repetition.8 The plausibility of both narratives is strengthened by the fact that both are stories of going home that children can identify with: Dorothy wants to return to Kansas and Elliot wants to help E.T. get back to his own planet. They are also stories about the resolution of cognitive conflict and thus replay the real-life contradictions that children are called upon to resolve in passing through successive stages of their cognitive development; they call upon the faculties of what psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg calls “the young child as philosopher.” For instance, Elliot must decide to help E.T. over the competing demands of adult authority, and Dorothy must decide to put aside her immediate goal in order to help her three friends, the lion, the tin woodsman, and the scarecrow.
The familiarity of the stories is assured by intertextual references: Peter Pan is a continuous motif in E.T., whereas The Wizard of Oz is well-stocked with such fairy-tale staples as wicked witches, the little animal as helper (Toto), the fairy godmother, and magic shoes.
The narrative truth of both films hides a deeper script about gender identification. By script I am referring to Roger Schank’s notion of clustered concepts that typically occur together in narratives of a given culture; scripts are also associated with plans or goals.9 I shall argue that E.T. encourages children to identify traditional, phallocratic behavior as part of the cognitive growth and development of boys, while the fairy tale Dorothy dreams illustrates her coming to terms with the double-bind of femininity. That double-bind is expressed by the syllogism that gets her back to Kansas: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard; because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.”10 Thereafter she will be locked into her role as woman; either she has never left or lost “home,” or it is all she can hope to find by leaving it. The film’s technological profusion and visual and verbal display are marshalled in the service of this simple restatement of a familiar script.
The Wizard of Oz must be read backwards against this closure to demonstrate its avoidance of the question of what Dorothy really wants; for the question of what women “want” is said to have elicited a frustrated outburst from Freud himself. What Dorothy wants cannot be solved by wizardry, the way the desires of the men can in the film. In the face of such mystery, she does what women have always done—she gives up her claim. The effect of the film is to dramatize this lesson that, it suggests, all little girls must learn. Its appeal comes from its familiar ring and its parcel of truth about the fate of women in the social construction of reality.
What does Dorothy (woman) want? Simply to be able to arrange the external world according to her own definitions of “rightness,” rather than being manipulated into a position of what is good “for her” by others. At the beginning of the film, she is terrified by the prospect of losing her dog Toto to Miss Gulch, who threatens to confiscate him. Toto has been tearing up Miss Gulch’s vegetable garden, a threat to the only fertility available to spinsterhood. That fertility, however, is, by implication, already compromised (a gulch is a negative image of the fruitful earth). In the Oz sequence, the bad witches of the east and west are associated with winter—the forest ruled by the witch of the west is a bleak autumnal forest, and the winged monkeys wear death-like masks. From the beginning, Miss Gulch (who later reappears in the guise of the wicked witch of the west) illustrates the terrifying image of what happens to women if they do not become “real” women and marry. The spinster is an embodiment of what psychologist Melanie Klein has called the “phallic mother” who withholds rather than giving, and she represents the chaos that ensues when women are not kept in their place: even the law is afraid of her, and she is able to obtain a court order for Toto’s removal. The wizard, in the dream transformation of this state of affairs, is equally afraid of the wicked witch of the west who compromises his power. His condtion for helping Dorothy and her companions is that she bring him the witch’s all-too masculine broomstick.
The Oz story can be read as Dorothy’s navigation between two female role models who reproduce almost literally what Melanie Klein has described as the splitting of the mother-imago into good and bad.11 It helps that Dorothy is an orphan, so that these two sides of the mother are not contradicted by any fictional representation of her “real” mother. According to Klein, both girls and boys initially turn away from their mothers when they experience oral frustration at the time of weaning; both turn toward their fathers. The boy does so with a sense of identification; but the girl’s relation to the father is one of jealous rivalry with the mother. This, combined with the original frustration, initially leads the girl to create a cruel mother-imago that becomes part of her superego—a punishing mother.12 When the girl passes into the genital stage, that image is counterbalanced by the image of a kind and bountiful mother.
Miss Gulch is a frightening image of what Dorothy might become if she continues to make her insistent demands. Like the spinster, Dorothy sows chaos into the ordered fertility of the farm, interrupting her aunt and uncle who are trying to save some baby chicks, and keeping the men from their work by falling in the pigpen. Is it any wonder that no one listens to her? Like Miss Gulch, she is unable to see that others are more important than herself. Nevertheless, the film’s strategy is to make the viewer feel sorry for Dorothy (initially) and then to show, through the Oz parable, that her claims were wrong-headed.
Dorothy runs away when Toto returns, having escaped from the spinster’s bicycle basket. She scoops him up and runs away from the farm into the hands of Professor Marvel. But if Miss Gulch represents one kind of death, the Professor is another. A death’s head actually ornaments the door of his trailer—a visual warning of what might happen to overly independent little girls. She is caught in between: there is literally no exit. In the first of a series of manipulations, the “Professor” decides what is good for her and sends her back to Auntie Em.
The tornado arrives just in time to objectify, by external forces, what amounts to the girl’s catastrophic discovery of the claims she must give up. It is not only that she must learn to allow the equal claims of others; she must learn to subordinate her own. Knocked out by a flying shutter that has been loosened by the wind, Dorothy now embarks on an elaborate imaginary journey in which she rationalizes her farewell to childhood. When she returns, she will no longer be the center even of her own universe.
As a myth, the story that Dorothy experiences addresses itself to the following question: how can she find a space for herself when both spaces, home and away from home, seem to offer no place for any kind of claim? In the world of her dreams, her frustrations of powerlessness are transmuted into symbols of power: her house crushes the wicked witch of the West and she is welcomed as a liberator. Her weakness becomes a form of protection and allies her with the fertility she was in danger of compromising back in Kansas.
“Home,” the endpoint toward which the fantasy moves, starts out by crushing the wicked witch of the east, so that Dorothy opens the door of her farmhouse onto a technicolor celebration of spring in Munchkinland. In the dream transformation of the (black-and-white) world of Kansas, the dwarves function as displacements of the baby chicks, which she has now managed to save by killing the witch. The rest of her trials, which happen along the way of her attempts to get back to Kansas, will be similar expressions of her identification with the “good mother” figure and will depend similarly on the exercise of feminine symbols: the protective red shoes (a severed limb is perceived as a male organ, but shoes “fit” the foot and are hence perceived as female), and water (associated with birth). In her fantasy, Dorothy herself becomes a goddess of fertility along with the focus of her identification, the good witch of the north. The position of witch of the south is, after all, unclaimed; and if winter and fall are the province of the bad witches, spring and summer are still there to be shared by the two good ones. The tornado, which was a threat to summer, is thus overcome at the level of seasonal symbolism as well.
I think it important to stress that Dorothy’s power is as destructive as that of the wicked witches; the point of her allegorical journey is that she must learn to bend this destruction to constructive aims, e.g. the encouragement of men. For she helps each of her companions to believe that they have the phallus they long for, in whatever form it takes. What the wizard gives them is an appendage (a diploma, a clock, a medal), but it is only through her—service to a lady—that these signs gain their true significance. In this way the film allegorizes and justifies through what Donald Spence might call its “narrative fit” the power relations of phallocratic society. The three have by then already proven themselves as resourceful, courageous, and loving by helping Dorothy. And, by allowing herself to be served, she also gains her identity as a woman. Men, it seems, have it easy. The scarecrow is already smart: he tricks the talking trees into throwing down their apples, and masterminds the attack on the witch’s castle. The tin man already has a heart: he cries so much about Dorothy’s plight in the wicked witch’s castle that his friends have to admonish him to stop (“Don’t cry now; we haven’t got the oil can and you’re squeaking enough already”). And the lion actually leads the way in the steep ascent up the witch’s cliff. All the men need is to be reassured that they already possess what they want. Freud suggests as much: men’s lives, after the resolution of the Oedipus complex in which they learn to displace their love for mother or sister onto an external object, stretch out in uncomplicated fashion, offering them the possibility of one conquest (intellectual, military, or sentimental) after another.
The film’s celebration of phallocratic male scripting is echoed in the wizard’s words: he calls universities “seats of learning where men go to become great thinkers” and speaks of “men who are called heroes” and “men who do nothing all day but do good deeds”. It is true that Dorothy unmasks the wizard and reveals him as a small, powerless man. But this does not lead to a solution of her problems, for he is unable to take her back to Kansas. Notice that his balloon can take him there—a man—even though he shouts in parting that he doesn’t even know how it works. Like the heart, the brain, and the courage bestowed on the other men, this power, too, is hardly explainable because it rests on a myth. And women, after all, must not find out too much lest the wizardry of the phallus be totally unmasked (that would mean revolution). There is a strong implication that Dorothy’s exposure of the wizard is like the witnessing of a primal scene, exciting because forbidden.13 Yet, since the wizard’s machinery may be taken as a metaphor for the technology of cinema itself, everything depends on the film’s disavowal of its own self-exposure, and the mystery is quickly reinstated. Like the masquerading woman Dorothy will become, the film charms and seduces by its appeal to the irrational and disarms the viewer.
Before Dorothy returns to Kansas, the wizard departs, leaving her three companions in charge of Oz: whether they are perceived by the viewer as men or as surrogate children Dorothy has created with the wizard-as-father, the fact remains that she internalizes a male standard in her ideal fantasy world.14 Dorothy learns nothing except the substitution of her masculinity complex (her demanding attitude) for feminine strategies of attention-getting through mothering, falling sick, and acting helpless. She wakes up in Kansas in bed, a prediction of either future neurasthenia or childbearing. As before, no one listens to her.
In her discussion of the way the child splits the nurturing and withholding mother into two personae, Melanie Klein is at pains to stress the deep-seated roots of that split in culture. In the Greek myth of Orestes, the two facets of the mother are represented as the persecutory fates (the Erinyes) and the protecting goddesses (the Eumenides). If Dorothy, like Orestes, is guilty of killing the bad mother (the first wicked witch), she must expiate the guilt associated with that destructiveness (exemplified in the projection of her harsh superego in the persona of the wicked witch of the west) in order to be accepted by society. In Aeschylus, that expiation is mediated by the goddess Athena, who has no mother. Like Athena, the witch Glinda stands for the “wise and mitigated” superego.15 She thus provides an identification for Dorothy who adopts her as a fantasy mother.
Dorothy’s compromise fantasy allows her to adopt a new identity as a royal child living among commoners. Hereafter she will masquerade, turning her “true self” inward. Freud has described the little boy’s “family romance,” a fantasy in which he attributes to himself a high-born father, as a way out of the guilt arising from the Oedipus complex: if the man who lives with his mother is not his real father, then it is all right to wish to get rid of him so as to gain possession of his mother. The Wizard of Oz suggests the value for girls of fantasizing a high-born mother, a value which does not consist in the simple reversal of the masculine terms of the boy’s fantasy. Here the illusion of nobility provides a rationalization for the severe compromise formation necessary to the girl’s adjustment to her inferior status in society (“since I am royal, my role is to be kind to my inferiors”). And, whereas Freud speaks of the little girl’s masquerade as a means of seducing the father,16 it would seem to have a more serious consequence: the masquerade becomes a part of women’s identity because women are blocked from self-realization. In women, it serves as a necessary and mature defense against what otherwise would be an intolerable position.17 Ultimately, of course, the masquerade has perverse effects: it turns the exterior into a shell that is easily filled in by men’s fantasies, because their love objects are surrogates for earlier object choices.
Frank Baum’s original book was far more progressive than the film that was eventually made from it.18 In 1986 a fundamentalist group of parents in Greenville, Tennessee sued (Mozert vs. Hawkins Public Schools) to protect their children from the harmful influence of the Wizard of Oz book on the grounds that it promoted feminist ideas (an excessively independent heroine) and witchcraft.19 In the film, however, Dorothy is far from being independent. What Dorothy’s three companions receive from the wizard is a script; they are automata which can now function “as if” they were genuine (just as everyone else does). And Dorothy too becomes an automaton by her assumption of the feminine masquerade.20 Everyone, it seems, is condemned to experience at second-hand.
Few children, it may be supposed, can resist the verbal euphoria of the lion’s song (“What makes the Hottentot so hot/What puts the ape in apricot”), or such expressions as “gentle as a lizard, clever as a gizzard” (to rhyme with “wizard”), or the wizard’s description of the tin woodsman as a “clinking clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk,” all of which anticipate the playful use of language that has been so successful on children’s TV programs (Sesame Street, for one). If play has been shown by Piaget to be close to the child’s unconscious, then this play on language is equally close to the mechanisms of dreamwork: condensation and displacement in the examples above, figurative representation in the “horse of a different color” which actually changes color during the friends’ brief ride, or the scarecrow who is told “they really knocked the stuffing out of you.” As harmless as these word games seem, they set up a suspension of rational defenses that feeds into the child viewer’s identification with Dorothy. This identification becomes a learning experience in which role models are reinforced.
Now just try, for a minute, to rewrite this film for a male protagonist, a young boy about Dorothy’s age. Imagine the following scenario: a boy whom I shall call “Daniel” is threatened with the loss of his dog and a mean spinster comes to take the dog away. Dan doesn’t run away from home because by the time he is Dorothy’s age, he is expected to stand up to aggression, shoulder responsibility, and take part in the work of the farm. If he does leave home in anger (rather than run away), it is these responsibilities that he feels guilty about. The tornado comes and Dan lands in Oz, killing the wicked witch. Glinda appears and Dan sees her as a fantasy replacement for mom. To win her approval, he sets off toward Oz, wearing the witch’s magic belt. On the way, he meets three companions who follow him because they recognize him as a leader. Dan exposes the wizard, thus gaining the phallus for himself. However, rather than remain content in Oz, he returns to earth to carry out his responsibilities to his fellow men. The transposition of the Oz story brings some of the latent sexual content to the surface, but it can be reassimilated by other familiar fairy tales. As we shall see, gender transposition won’t work in the case of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., which does an equally good job of scripting a conventional “narrative truth” for boys.
Even before E.T. enters the scene, we find out that Elliot’s father has left the mother and three children and is in Mexico with another woman. The mother is having a hard time controlling the three children, Elliot, Michael, and Gertie, who are competing for the mother and against each other. As middle child, Elliot is the most fiercely competitive, condescending toward his younger sister and resentful of his brother. Elliot is a loner and seems cut off from masculinity by his older, more prepossessing brother and by the absence of the role model a father might provide.
In E.T. the boy has a “secret” that makes him special, gives him power over others. Here E.T.’s phallic shape comes into play; as one analyst has pointed out, children never mistake E.T.’s gender for anything but male (Fig. 38).21 Elliot’s special relation to E.T. endows him with superiority, not only over the little sister, whose frightening screams cause an alarming tumescence in the extra-terrestrial, but also over his classmates, whose attitude changes to one of respect and co-conspiracy against the adults. Needless to say, the absence of Elliot’s father makes it easier for Elliot to gain the ascendancy at home.
The multiple incarnations of E.T. in Elliot’s (and the viewer’s) fantasies amount to a complex web of condensations, displacements, and figurative representations characteristic of the unconscious. Woven into the more superficially visible narrative, this unconscious material becomes subtly manipulative of the child spectator’s wishes and fantasies.
E.T. is a displacement of the paternal phallus, as can be seen by Elliot’s desire to acquire E.T. for himself and to use him exclusively against his brother and sister in order to gain leadership of the family. In a comic scene in which the mother fails to see E.T. in the kitchen and living room, Elliot shows that he secretly has control over his mother. The possession of E.T. also gives him very real powers, and he suddenly gains a peer group (like the one his brother has at the beginning of the film) which asserts itself against adult authority. Through E.T. the boys are able to outrun the police by flying on their bicycles and to outwit a team of scientists who descend upon the home to study the extra-terrestrial.
By combining Freud with Piaget’s theory of stages in the child’s development, one doesn’t need to see this sexual content as more “primal,” but as corresponding to topics that young children are especially preoccupied with. Kohlberg has produced evidence to show that, in his words, the six-year-old boy is a “full-fledged male chauvinist” whose concept of gender identity actually becomes more flexible as he grows older.22
E.T.’s situation in the narrative is also a condensed metaphor for birth. The opening scene is shown from the point of view of E.T.’s confused consciousness as he realizes he is “left behind” on earth. Elliot subsequently becomes the “parent” of E.T. Finally, in a scene near the close of the film the whole house is enclosed in a womblike plastic structure attached to large hoses (the birth canal). Within this “womb,” E.T., who is assumed to have died, experiences a rebirth. Elliot’s role becomes that of facilitator, ushering him down the “canal” and conveying him in a bicycle basket (recapitulating the story of Moses) to the place of rendezvous with his “mother” spaceship.
To the extent that Elliot identifies with E.T. as foundling, he is excused from appropriating the phallus at his father’s expense. E.T.’s telepathic communication with Elliot suggests that he is, in one schema, Elliot’s double and that his birth is also Elliot’s (witness the real grief when the scientists “separate” their twin existence; Elliot says to E.T.: “You must be dead because I can’t feel anything anymore”). Elliot’s internalization of his companion’s feelings stands for the viewer’s identification with Elliot, a point underscored by the scene in which Elliot’s kissing his girl classmate is motivated by E.T.’s identification with characters shown on a TV screen.
As a projection of Elliot’s (and the child viewer’s) phallic fantasies, E.T. is also a fantasy replacement for dad. In this sense the telepathic TV communication described above is one in which “dad” takes Elliot to the movies once again, as in the old days that the children nostalgically wish for at the beginning of the film.
In order to further disarm the viewer, Spielberg laces the film with intertextual references to other children’s tales and films. The Peter Pan story is touched on in several instances; the mother reads the story to Gertie; E.T. is able to cure wounds (Fig. 39) by the touch of his finger (“Tinker Bell will get well,” etc.); and E.T., like Peter Pan, enables his friends to fly through the air. The appearance of another surrogate father figure, Yoda, from The Empire Strikes Back (of the Star Wars film series) in the form of a child’s Halloween disguise is another instance.23
The familiarity the spectator feels on experiencing the story of E.T. is created, therefore, by both the unexpected return of repressed unconscious material and citations of familiar stories and films. Another source is cultural memory. E.T. is a romantic hero, untouched by the anxieties and skepticism of modernism and at one with nature.
The appeal to romanticism is necessarily appreciated more by adults than by children. The adult’s reaction to the story is one of nostalgia. Through identification with Elliot, he or she is able to become a child again, thus reversing the separation from nature caused by the assumption of rationality. Lest the adult viewer resist the invitation to identify with the boy, an adult surrogate is supplied to authorize that move—he is the scientist who assures Elliot that he is glad the boy met E.T. first.
Against the adult world, E.T. uses the typical weapons of the hero of romanticism; hypnotism, magnetism, telepathy. He fights not men but the split between self and world that prevents him from going “home.”24 There is a strong suggestion that it is E.T.’s communication with Elliot’s unconscious that allows him to repair this rift; they save each other. If E.T. is the foundling that appears over and over again in the texts of the romantic era, he makes a foundling of Elliot who is now specially marked to live the life of the imagination.25 Throughout, E.T. is marked by narcissistic euphoria, as Elliot comes to know his own powers through his companion, a metamorphosis of the imagination presaged, in the first family scene, by the symbolic steam rising from the dishwasher and enveloping him in the mists of fantasy, like the locomotive’s steam in another cinematic poem to childhood, Jean Vigo’s 1933 film Zéro de conduite. At the end of the film, Elliot has become the hero-survivor of his own birth and of his family’s destructive tyranny. Like H. G. Wells’s time-traveler in The Time Machine, E.T. takes away with him the flower that will prove his trip to earth was not just the dream that it has been for us, the viewers.
If we try to transpose the gender of the child hero in E.T., some of the latent sexual content I have been discussing easily surfaces. Suppose that little “Ellery” finds the extra-terrestrial and hides him in her closet. She would then have something that her brother doesn’t—a phallic pet whom she mothers. E.T. bestows great power on her and becomes her best friend. We have here the beginnings of a revolutionary scenario, for one can’t easily imagine E.T. in the silly posture of Dorothy’s male companions; the extra-terrestrial is too powerful a helper for the accommodative wishes that Dorothy is limited to in The Wizard of Oz. In the right hands, the story could become a feminist parable, although not one that could be produced for the mass market. The idea, on the other hand, that E.T. could be female is made fun of in the film when Gertie attempts to dress him in her doll’s clothes—E.T. in drag is a ridiculous figure (Fig. 40). Entertainment films are expected to reinforce stereotypes, not challenge them. The transformation I have suggested is a way of foregrounding the conventions within which traditional narrative operates; the very real constraints on story-telling become much clearer once we think about changing them by crossing gender lines.
The social conditioning that young audiences undergo as a result of seeing these films should be taken seriously. Freud has stressed how identification plays a role in character formation; this identification can occur with another person (it occurs inevitably with the parent, or parental figure),26 but also with the characters of fiction.27 Christian Metz has laid the groundwork for the way the specular relation between filmgoer and film—the absent presence of the actors, which allows the imaginary substitution of self for the “absent presence” of the character fictively embodied on the screen—actually binds the viewer more tightly than the written word into its structures of address.28 All this suggests that films take part in the formation of the viewer as a subject in society. As subjects in history, we are partly defined by the ideological and discursive formations that surround us. We are already in The Wizard of Oz as our children are in E.T.
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