“Breaking the Frame”
In 1985 a statue of the French film actress Catherine Deneuve was chosen to represent “Marianne,” the female symbol of France. The French populace themselves were invited to choose from among twenty-four competing statues, to be put up in every mairie (local seat of government). The face of Deneuve replaced that of Brigitte Bardot; Deneuve was said to be more representative of the “woman of the 80s.”1 Roland Barthes, who discusses the “myth” of Greta Garbo in his Mythologies, would have had much to say about this new addition to the pantheon. For it illustrates dramatically one of the basic tenets of his work: that modern-day myths are symptomatic of commonly held beliefs in our society.
This chapter will examine some of the beliefs surrounding the “star” quality of Deneuve. What follows is not a global analysis of the film star, but one that focuses on a single example. Nevertheless I feel that the effects I will describe are symptomatic of the representation of women and sexuality in the period stretching from the industrial revolution to the present day. Woman’s desire, I will argue, is represented as a kind of motor that must be alimented by reserves of male energy; it is seen as a negative force that consumes without fecundity. The female film star is constructed to be the embodiment of that desire. She circulates arbitrarily among men who are helpless to win her permanent attachment. As a result, she is both admired and feared.
This view of the place of women in a mechanized sexual economy has analogies in a variety of other domains. The French philosopher Michel Serres has described the way in which the steam engine, at the time of the industrial revolution, became the master metaphor of the age. According to Serres, the Freudian unconscious and the Marxian theory of the accumulation of capital are seen to be “translations” of one and the same informing mental set, which also gives rise to the appropriate artistic expression in fiction, philosophy, and painting: Zola, Bergson, and Turner.2 The steam engine metaphor is a metaphor of thermodynamics, and the inclusion of Freud and Marx is explained by the fact that both posit the buildup of pressure (either the repressed unconscious or the suppressed proletariat) which then sets certain compensatory events in motion.
Serres might well have included cinema as a new artistic medium called into being by the imagination of the nineteenth century. Cinema is of particular relevance here as an instance of the cultural product of a given social formation, since, as André Bazin has pointed out, the scientific conditions for the creation of cinema and photography existed long before anyone actually bothered (or needed) to invent them.3
What brought cinema into being, finally, was its ability to fulfill a social need for representation. It is important to stress that the cinema is an apparatus whose very existence is predicated on the desire of the spectator. The elementary pleasure that a film gives is that of seeing, the satisfaction of curiosity. As films began to be shown in theaters before audiences, the spectators’ desire to “see more” was matched by the development of the narrative film, and by the institutionalization of voyeurism in the erotic content of the cinematic spectacle.
Because of the close ties of the spectacle to box office profitability, the apparatus of cinema has from the beginning been in a position to echo the unconscious fears of society. There is thus a double edge to the motorized version of the erotic in which the female star is represented as a machine or automaton against which the masculine could define itself. On the one hand, this representation expressed the fear that people experienced when dealing with an increasingly mechanized world over which the individual had less and less control. The portrayal of the threatening eroticism of women that appear as robots (as in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1928) is an instance. On the other hand, the metaphor of mechanization lent concrete form to an unconscious fear in patriarchy: that of the return of the repressed woman in a form that would be difficult to control because it would not be human.
In this guise the mechanical woman represents the threat that the traditional split between science and nature, that came into being in the seventeenth century, might fall apart. As Evelyn Fox Keller states, the mechanical philosophy that gained the ascendancy at that time was expressed in terms of the masculine domination of science over nature, represented as feminine. This polarization of gender, she argues, was required by the economics of the rising industrial capitalism. Specifically, mechanical science replaced the alchemical metaphor for science which was based on the union of male and female elements: “The goal of the new science is not metaphysical intercourse but domination . . . the triumph of those who have been generally grouped together as ‘mechanical philsophers’ represented a decisive defeat of the view of nature and woman as Godly, as of a science which would accordingly have guaranteed to both at least a modicum of respect.”4
In the fiction that attends the industrial revolution, the fear of machines found expression in the creation of imaginary “celibate machines” (machines célibataires). First coined by the painter Marcel Duchamp to designate his project “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (“La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même”), the term has been extended by the French critic Michel Carrouges to include a variety of literary works which depict the machine creations of their protagonists. The imaginary machines are called “bachelor machines” because, unlike industrial machines, they are unproductive. According to Carrouges, “the myth of bachelor machines is a clear signpost for the simultaneous rule of the mechanical and reign of terror.”5 As examples Carrouges cites two novels that I will discuss here, Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Eve future and Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes. In addition he mentions some of the machines described in Raymond Roussel’s Locus solus, in Franz Kafka’s “The Penal Colony,” in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and in Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmâle (among others).
In order to understand how these machines “operate,” we must return to Michel Serres’s steam engine metaphor. Serres states that the steam engine has three requirements. In the first place, there must be a difference between two poles of temperature. In the second place, there must be a reservoir of energy. And thirdly, there must be circulation between the reservoir and the machine in order to ensure its operation. In the case of philosophical systems built on the machine model, these elements become quite metaphorical (in Marxian theory, the categories of difference, energy reservoir and circulation are filled by class differences, capital, and revolution; in Freudian theory by repression, the unconscious, and neurotic or psychotic symptoms).6 In the “bachelor machine,” the two poles are sexualized. The “difference” operates between the “male” and “female” parts, whose interaction constitutes its force. As is the case with other machine models (such as the Marxian and the Freudian), the end result may be cathartic or even catastrophic.
There are many reasons for arguing that the “machine célibataire” functions with the force of an epistemic paradigm for an entire system of intersubjective relations that stretch from postromantic ideology into our present cybernetic age (and perhaps even beyond it). I think a strong case can be made for the idea that the structure of desire embodied and encouraged by film spectatorship is furthered by a system of values discernible elsewhere in some literary works as well as in Freudian and Lacanian psychology. Even the current inquiry into artificial intelligence has tended to reinforce existing cognitive typologies rather than to explore the problem of originality (and hence the possibility for change).
Duchamp’s “La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même” (“The Bride Stipped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”) will form the paradigm for my analysis. It is the quintessential “bachelor machine.” Moreover, its sexual politics are echoed in the cinematic apparatus of the film star which is the focus of my interest. Standing some ten feet tall, Duchamp’s work (also called “The Large Glass”) appears as a kind of portal, one of the thresholds of twentieth-century consciousness.
Duchamp’s “Large Glass” (Fig. 41) has clearly divided masculine and feminine hemispheres. In the upper portion, “la mariée” is a wasp-like figure that seems to hang by, but also at the same time to generate, a series of frames with amorphous borders—shapes that Duchamp described as the “cinematic blossoming” in the extensive notes he made about the work. Between the “bride” and the lower portion there is a sharp division. Here various male forms, whose geometric shapes are meant to evoke the costumes of various professions, are perched on a kind of Glider which is connected to a Chocolate Grinder. Thanks to the operation of male desire on this machine, the notes say, the bride is “stripped,” and releases the “cinematic blossoming” described earlier.7
Because the “bride” is both generated by and generates the “cinematic blossoming,” she can function as a metaphor for the cinema of spectacle, which uses the female star as the point and focus of representation. The bachelors, in this perspective, become the spectators whose desire fuels the economic possibility of the cinematic machine; they both desire the undressing and pay for it. But much more than cinema is at stake. Duchamp’s laying bare of the illusionist workings of art goes a long way toward explaining the complex set of drives and inhibitions that make modern men (and their relations to modern women) conform to the model of the unproductive “machine célibataire,” a “closed circuit system,” in the words of Michel Carrouges, with little possibility of escape. As Albert Cook points out, Duchamp has represented “a machine that will not work mechanically, and one whose parts are greater, not less, than the sum of the whole.”8 Its avowed purpose—the erotic stripping of the bride—is subverted by the incompatible mechanics of the Glider and the Chocolate Grinder. Among other disjunctive components, Cook notes that the gliders on the Glider “are actually facing the wrong way. . . . If they glided, they would glide right out of the picture in one direction and collide head-on with the Chocolate Grinder on the other.”9
Duchamp’s work thus contains an implicit critique of modern sexuality. Not only will the machine not work, but there is a rigorous separation between the male and female spheres. For literary predecessors to this view of the erotic, we can look to Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Eve future (1880-86) and Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes (1892). Both have been discussed as literary metaphors for the birth of the cinema.10 They also figure prominently in Carrouges’s discussion of “machines célibataires.”
The opening of L’Eve future (Eve of the Future Eden, in the excellent translation by Marilyn Gaddis Rose which will be quoted here)11 finds Thomas Edison musing about his new invention, the phonograph, in a vein that may best be described as the prototype of reader-response criticism. Even if he could capture, retrospectively, some of the great voices of history, he reasons, they would not be considered “real” by modern men, for “it is not the sounds which have disappeared but rather the impressive character attached to them in and by the hearing of ancient peoples” (12). In Edison’s terms, sounds, thoughts, and images are determined by reflection off the historical subject, who must provide the receptive surface. It follows that Edison’s current invention, an ideal woman who, by satisfying every wish of her partner, both physical and mental, will protect him from the snares of human women, cannot truly come into existence until he finds the man for her. The female prototype he has created and which he keeps in a subterranean cavern must be refined by the addition of qualities that will satisfy an individual user’s fantasies.
By these meditations Villiers sets the scene for the arrival of Lord Ewald, an English benefactor who declares himself on the brink of suicide because Alicia, the woman he loves, lacks the noble sentiments he admires. Edison finds it a simple matter to entice the aspiring actress into his studio where the form of her body is copied (“photosculpted”) onto his prototype model Hadaly, while she is coached to recite lines of poetic dialogue under the mistaken assumption that she has gained a part in a play. These dialogues, engraved on golden records, are set into Hadaly, where they can be activated by the speech of her beloved.
How, then, will Lord Ewald be made to feel that Hadaly is “real”? Edison subjects his friend to what amounts to a “Turing machine” test (A. M. Turing, considered to be one of the “fathers” of artificial intelligence, argued that machine intelligence could be said to be equal to human intelligence if, under certain experimental conditions, you could not tell which was which).12 At the very moment when Lord Ewald, lured into the garden by Alicia, decides to forgive her for her shallowness and to abandon the robot Hadaly, she reveals herself as Hadaly rather than Alicia; Edison’s gamble to replace “intellect by Intelligence” succeeds in fooling the lover, for whom the robot functions as the perfect reflection of his illusions.
Still, Hadaly has to fight for her “life” against the horrified reaction of Lord Ewald. An Eve true to her name, she vanquishes him with seductive logic: “at your despairing cry I agreed to put on the radiant lines of your desire in order to become visible.”13 Like Duchamp’s bride, Hadaly is fueled by her bachelor, who is instructed to administer doses of chemicals to keep her joints from rusting—to keep her functioning as a desire-machine. But her sophisticated machinery also causes romantic confusion in her lover who proves himself no longer the master of his illusions. Those illusions, once made flesh, enslave him, as he sets out for Athelwold Castle with his doll in her tightly sealed carrying case—a mahagony coffin similar, perhaps, to the one in which Count Dracula traveled to London. Hadaly is, Villiers suggests, the vampire tamed whom one can turn on and off with a key.14
Her ancestry in literature is long. In his thought-provoking study of the myth of the actress from Nerval to Proust, Ross Chambers has shown the importance of the actress as the embodiment of the feminine ideal since the postromantic era. This ideal was predicated on the twin concepts of distance (unattainability) and emptiness (artifice rather than substance). Her emptiness allows her to be “filled in” by the poet: “elle est une écriture qu’on regarde” (she is a writing that one contemplates).15 Written by the man who loves her, she is created by his look, without which she would not exist. In this sense Hadaly is Alicia “filled in” by Lord Ewald’s writing, anticipating the spectator’s filling in of the essentially blank screen actress. In fact, Villiers has Edison claim that all women worth loving affect a blank expression; their eyes are mere mirrors: “In our day, carefully reared women have acquired a unique glance . . . wherein everyone can find the expression he desires but which allows them to think their own thoughts while appearing to pay profound attention. This glance can be photographed. After all, isn’t it just a photograph itself?”16
Freud’s writings suggest that his model of woman closely corresponds to the myth of the actress as explained by Chambers and illustrated in L’Eve future. In one instance, he even states that “woman is different from man, for ever incomprehensible and mysterious, strange and therefore apparently hostile.”17 According to the Freudian model, the little girl adopts the masquerade to attract the father, learning the role she will later play with other men. Of necessity such a role is narcissistic on both sides, since the men will be satisfied to discover in her the mirror image of their desire (like Lord Ewald), and the women are put in the role of performing in order to be loved.18 What both the literary and the psychoanalytic models expose is a form of mental pathology, as Ross Chambers warns: “To make the actress our ‘Muse’ is . . . to declare our distance from a culture in which we no longer see anything but a universe of signs, one we observe instead of live.”19
Nor are we better served by the Lacanian model. Lacan explains the ability of individuals to identify with others (whether these be parents, role models, characters in fiction or film) with the crucial childhood experience of the “mirror stage”—the first moment in which the child can recognize itself in the mirror. The recognition of self as separate from one’s surroundings, he argues, means that one can later project oneself into others. I find it somewhat disturbing that “little men” are mentioned in the mirror stage, but not “little women”: “the jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child (‘le petit homme’) at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form.”20 After all, what creatures but vampires fail to see themselves in the mirror? My view is that Lacan, like Freud, suspected women of not having an “I” in the sense that men have, since the masquerade dictates that a woman’s body is always partial and fragmented, even to herself.
Moreover Lacan’s own model of the psyche is a motorized model in which men and women are forever separated. The child learns language by recognizing difference. Language, after all, is structured by differences between the phonetic, grammatical, and spatial arrangement of words. The perception of difference is what allows the child to enter into the axis of what Lacan calls the symbolic. This entry is, however, not a liberation but a confinement. Because the most elementary difference is sexual difference, the acquisition of language is indissolubly linked to the trauma of that discovery (the girl’s discovery of her missing penis, the boy’s fear of castration). Secondly, the site of language is the site of the “Other” (different from the self). This means that an individual is controlled by language rather than mastering it. Finally, and this is where Freudian and Lacanian theory coincide, the desire for the “Other” can never be fulfilled, since one’s love objects are never more than a replacement for an imaginary, lost object (for instance, for the feeling of connection with the mother’s breast that one had before the realization of oneself as a separate entity in the mirror stage). The Lacanian model is therefore one of irrecoverable loss, that of the “fall” into language.21
In the film actress—the star—the masquerade is most developed, since she is physically absent from the spectatorial space. Here the masquerade affects both mise-en-scène (the placing of the star in exotic settings that become the springboard for the fantasies of the spectator, the star’s makeup and “glamorous” image) and montage, through which her body is divided up and delivered to the spectator’s gaze by closeups. The ideal beauty of a star like Garbo depends on the anonymity of the mask. Roland Barthes has described the way the Garbo face becomes a form of mimicry: “In spite of its extreme beauty, this face, not drawn but sculpted in something smooth and breakable, that is, at once perfect and ephemeral, comes to resemble the flour-white complexion of Charlie Chaplin, the dark vegetation of his eyes, his totem-like countenance.”22
A mask, as Chambers has said, is “a sign of the face.”23 The blank face of the screen star is a surface onto which desire is written—she is a construction, an automaton.24 This is the role Catherine Deneuve plays as Séverine in Belle de jour (1967). Though apparently happily married, she constantly puts off the sexual advances of her husband. A year or so after her wedding, she is drawn to prostitution (Fig. 42). A “Madame Anais” becomes her employer, and intiates her into the speciality of the house (Fig. 43), which aims at the mise-en-scène of the sexual fantasies of the clients (somewhat like Jean Genêt’s Le Balcon). This acting out can be seen as the representation of total cinema, the actress come down off the screen. It is the embodiment of the other, phonetic translation of Marcel Duchamp’s “La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même”: The bride stripped bare by her bachelors loves me (m’aime).
The spectator’s attempt to follow the plot of Belle de jour is complicated by the narrator’s unreliability: it is often impossible to tell from whose point of view the film images are presented. As in many other Buñuel films, the events presented may or may not be the dream or fantasy of the one of the characters. One episode that seems particularly problematic in that regard begins in an outdoor café. Séverine is joined by an aristocratic gentleman who alights in front of the of the café in a horse-drawn landau (similar to the one that appears in fantasy scenes where, on the orders of her husband, she is stripped and whipped by coachmen). The aristocrat asks her if she likes money, and then invites her to his chateau to perform a ceremony for which, he says, she will be financially rewarded. The scene now shifts to the landau which is bringing Séverine to the chateau. The ceremony in question turns out to require her to “play dead” while lying in a coffin in the chapel of a chateau, nude except for the most transparent black veil. The aristocrat lies underneath and performs some motions that cause the coffin to shake. It is easy to see in this scene a reenactment of Duchamp’s “La Mariée.” The “bride,” in the coffin above, has effectively been stripped bare; separated from her by the wooden box, the “bachelor” gives himself over to the rhythmical motions of desire. One commentator on Duchamp’s work unequivocally qualifies the operations of the treadmill and the chocolate grinder as masturbatory;25 the indications are just as indicative in this scene. But Buñuel goes farther than Duchamp, suggesting that the “machine célibataire” is driven by death, something beyond the pleasure principle. Belle de jour shows up the fallacy of the myth of total cinema, since to desire a reproduction of reality that cannot be distinguished from the original is to embrace a lifeless model—to be in love with death.
Séverine’s adventures lead to an unhappy end, or at the very least to the suggestion that the “closed circuit” is one which allows no escape. At Madame Anais’s, one of the male clients becomes jealous of her other life. He follows her home and shoots down her husband. To the wheelchair-bound husband a male friend finally reveals the details of Séverine’s double life. At the end of the film, the heroine appears to fantasize that the tragic events have not, actually, taken place. In a scene that appears metadiegetic from her point of view, the husband arises from the wheelchair as from a deep sleep. She moves over to the window and hears again the bells of the landau with which the story began.
Buñuel’s demonization of the feminine in Belle de jour can be attributed to displacement, in which women are blamed for men’s frustrated desires. Many literary works, as though in acknowledgement of that fact, show that the men who fall for the “perfect woman” are narcissistic and suicidal. According to Chambers, the “myth of the actress” stemmed largely, in France at least, from the influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’s story “The Sandman,” which was widely diffused as an opera and play. In this story, Nathanael, the protagonist, witnesses as a boy some alchemical operations performed by his father and a friend, Coppelius. During one of those experiments, Coppelius grabs the boy and threatens to take his eyes. Nathanael later falls in love with an automaton doll fabricated by an eyeglass merchant, Coppola, and his university professor; the professor passes the doll off as his own daughter, and Nathanael falls in love with her when looking at her through a pair of binoculars Coppola sells him.26 She is born of Nathanael’s look, as he observes her through the window of his student quarters.27 But it turns out this doll has Nathanael’s eyes—his love for her amounts to a love of self.28 When Nathanael discovers the truth about Coppelia, he goes mad. Returning home to his first love, Clara, he seems rehabilitated until catching sight of Coppelius while on top of a tower. His jump (as he shouts Coppelius’s sales pitch “eyes, lovely eyes”) is reminiscent of the leap of Narcissus into the well.
The theme of Narcissus becomes overt in films that actively foreground the woman as automaton by putting forth a literal robot in her place. In the course of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1928), for instance, the scientist Rotwang has fashioned a robot to replace his lost love, Hel, who married the technological overlord of the city, Joh Frederson. In doing so he has created a machine to respond to his desire in place of the woman who would not. Rotwang gives the robot the bodily form of Maria, the woman to whom the workers look for guidance and consolation (and with whom Joh Frederson’s son is in love). The robot Maria persuades the workers to destroy their machines and then parties as a vamp seductress among the men who rule the city. Yet the real Maria, being simply more “ideal” than the robot who replaced her, is no less mechanical. Like the robot, she is a projection of male fantasy—a narcissistic echo of male desire. As Enno Patalas writes, “Invariably, the woman, virgin, mother, whore, witch, vamp is constituted—and de-constituted—under the direction of one of the male characters, which in turn predicates the look of another, or many others, including the spectator.”29
The narcissistic representation of women as robots is one male defense, as I have said, against both the threat of women’s sexuality and the feeling of powerlessness in the machine age. Another possiblity is the replacement of women with fetishistic representations of their bodies or voices as in Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes (The Carpathian Castle). These models do not aspire to be completely lifelike; they are recognized as illusions. Yet they work so well that the viewer is constantly slipping between the awareness that they are constructions and the belief that they are real. As such they replay the structure of disavowal that gives rise to the fetish.
Le Château des Carpathes takes place in Transylvania, where a certain Baron Gortz has retired to his impenetrable castle with a treasured recording of the last performance of his favorite opera singer, La Stilla. The singer had intended to retire from the stage and marry, but she dies of fear upon catching sight of the Baron in the audience. By means of a complex system of mirrors and lights applied to a full-size portrait of the singer, and with the aid of a phonograph, the Baron has been able to recreate her farewell song in the privacy of his chambers. The likeness is so convincing that he fools even the young Count Frank de Télek, her fiancé, who penetrates the castle in the hope of finding La Stilla. This story is fetishistic on two counts: the Baron loves not the woman but her voice, and the young Count is tricked into denying the death of his beloved by the substitution of a mechanical double.
The concept of fetishization in psychoanalysis refers to a mental substitution by the male child for the mother’s missing penis; it is a defensive reaction to the perceived threat of castration.30 For this reason, Christian Metz has argued that while a photograph is more likely to become a fetish, film is more capable of playing on fetishism: “Thanks to the principle of a moving cutting off, thanks to the changes of framing between shots . . . cinema literally plays with the terror and the pleasure of fetishism, with its combination of desire and fear.”31 Fetishism substitutes a safe alternative for the real thing; as such it fits squarely into the system of the machine célibataire and its cinematic clones. It mimes not life, but death, preserving, as Bazin has said, objects in a state of mummification: “For the first time, the image of things is likewise that of their duration, change mummified as it were.”32
Fetishism is the motivating force behind the Deneuve character in François Truffaut’s Le Dernier métro (The Last Metro, 1980). Marion’s role in the play La Disparue dramatizes the gaps and holes of the body and of the narrative that is constructed so as to fill in these fissures. Taking place during the Occupation, the film recounts how the Jewish director Lucas Steiner hides in the basement of the theater, continuing to direct the play in secret and to listen in on rehearsals and performances through a loudspeaker mechanism operating through the heating vents (Fig. 44). Like Duchamp’s bachelors, he assures the motion of the mechanism that undresses the “bride” on the stage above, even going so far as to orchestrate Marion’s affair with her costar Bernard Granger. There is, again, the hint of vampirism as Steiner compares his situation to that of the wife in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), who sees the lights go down mysteriously at night while activities she is unaware of are taking place above her head. Here fetishism affects the “body politic” as well, since the conditions of Steiner’s existence are dictated by the German Occupation; the theater of desire functions as a disavowal of political castration, just as the multiple fetishizations of Marion by Steiner and others (who comment on her legs, voice, and photographic image) prevent anyone from seeing her as a fully enfranchised individual.
Finally, we have to consider instances of the bachelor machine metaphor in which women are punished.33 In psychoanalytic terms, the sadistic response relates to the perception of women as castrated men and to men’s fear that they are vulnerable to the same punishment. The defense is to punish women for any infringement on male territory or authority. In cinematic narratives, women are often punished for their active sexual curiosity. As Stephen Heath writes, “If the woman looks, the spectacle provokes, castration is in the air.”34 In her perceptive analysis of silent films starring Rudolf Valentino, Miriam Hansen has demonstrated that this convention was in place from the inception of Hollywood cinema: “Whenever Valentino lays eyes on a woman first, we can be sure that she will turn out to be the woman of his dreams, the legitimate partner in the romantic relationship; whenever a woman initiates the look, she is invariably marked as a vamp, to be condemned and defeated in the course of the narrative.”35
Looking is equated with sexual curiosity, and like The Wizard of Oz, classical films intimate that women should not know too much. In the horror film, women who have not remained “pure” are allowed projective point-of-view shots of the monster who kills them. As Linda Williams points out, such shots feed on male anxiety by suggesting a tacit alliance between the sexual, desiring woman and the monster that threatens to destroy the rest of the characters (men and “good” women).36
A similar split occurs in many films of the 40s that were specifically addressed to a female audience. Typically these films show the projective view of the woman’s traditional space—the home—as confining. In many cases, the women seem to be on the brink of insanity (Gaslight; Now, Voyager). Mary Anne Doane refers to the women characters’ paranoid seeing: “The paradigmatic woman’s space—the home—is yoked to dread, the crisis of vision.”37 These films present women who must be cured of looking and reintegrated into the passive role of seeing through men (often the mediating man is a psychiatrist) or being seen (and chosen) by them.
In Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1982) Deneuve plays the role of a female predator—a bisexual vampire who turns her lovers into vampires as well (Fig. 45). It turns out, though, that only one vampire can be immortal at a time; each of the lovers she converts to vampirism ages prematurely and has to be filed away in one of the coffins she keeps in the attic (the “victims” on whom they feed are dumped unceremoniously in the incinerator). But the machine célibataire functions here too, as the “bride” pulls victims and lovers off the street into her elevated apartment (Fig. 46), is disrobed by her male and female lovers, and then retreats to the eerie heights of the attic which is peopled by doves, more veils, and coffins containing the empty shells of those who have paid dearly for their desire (Fig. 47).
In this film the Deneuve character does not survive. At the end she dissolves into a twisting, repugnant mass of wrinkled flesh before disintegrating into a skull whose mouth is still opened in a scream. Her openly expressed desire has been fatal to her lovers, and she herself is punished for it, according to cinematic convention.
As we leave the machine age for the cybernetic age, there seems to be no answer to the despairing cry of Baron Gortz, who, on losing the box that encloses La Stilla’s voice, realizes her true name: the silent one. On the other side of the conundrum, Lord Ewald wonders how Alicia can sing so well without a soul. Hadaly’s machine intelligence will mimic that “soul” for him, play for him his own “preprogrammed script of the Other.”38 Edison’s robot seems to typify not only the machines of the industrial revolution, but current artificial intelligence models of the mind as well.
The problem is that cybernetic models proceed from descriptions or intuitions about human cognitive functioning, and that all the indications are that we tend to understand ourselves in terms of how well our life patterns conform to preexisting scripts. Why should models of us be any different? Erving Goffman has described in Frame Analysis the way in which our everyday social interactions are aided by conventional understandings that enable us to cope with—to frame—both expected and unexpected events. These cognitive frames, he argues, affirm our beliefs in the workings of the world.39
Goffman’s examples are fascinating and numerous and it would be unnecessary to add any more. Nevertheless, I found his views corroborated by an important example he does not mention: the “life summary,” as exemplified by college reunion notes. This is a particularly fascinating instance since it suggests that people perceive their lives according to preset scripts that are imposed on them from outside. Whether or not life narratives read as a “success” story (at least for my own class), turns out to depend on a limited number of frames: job, marriage, children, and travel. Here are two typical examples (from male members of the class):
It seems I turned out rather well—at least according to my somewhat surprised parents! Here I am, three happy kids, a lovely wife, a solid member of the depressed middle class with a fine variety of experiences since ’68 . . .
In the last five years I: finished a fellowship in nephrology; got married; took a year-long honeymoon; returned to U.S.; became a staff physician; bought a house; had a kid, stopped going out.
The irony discernible in these notes only serves to underscore the fact that the writers are conscious of the frame constraints. Those who were not conventionally successful also betray a knowledge of the frame; one member complains that he is “still, inexplicably, perhaps permanently, single;” another is at pains to explain that the “woman” slot for his success frame is now filled by his dog: “After college, I discovered how warm it feels to live with a woman. It’s still true. Now I also sleep with a dog, a German short hair. That feels warm too.” Some of the women commented on their inability to break out of the “success” frame: “Girlhood dreams of being a composer or stand-up comic in a nightclub have been deferred. I settle for motherhood and professordom;” “I wanted to be a country and western singer, but somehow got sidetracked into politics.”40
These class notes showed that people not only script themselves; they set goals for their children which end up scripting the children’s lives in conventional ways. None of the male children are described as “beautiful,” though many of the female children are. Frames also emerged for gender roles. Only one male member of the class said that raising children was a lot of work, though many of the female members described the difficulties of mixing child care and career. None of the female members gave the impression that their husband was a possession, though a significant number of the male members listed their wives along with other material gains. A number of the men, incidentally, said that they were still looking for “the ideal woman.”
There is a surprising coincidence between these “life stories” and the plot structures of fiction. Apparently, we cannot see ourselves as anything but text.41 Roger Schank has developed computerized models of our experience that proceed along the assumption that real-world expectations function as “scripts”: “Scripts are prepackaged sorts of expectations, inferences, and knowledge that are applied in common situations, like a blueprint for action without the details filled in . . . a script tells what is likely to come next in a chain of events that are stereotypes.”42 Finally, Schank also instructs his computer program in human needs and desires, developing representations that he calls “goals.” From reading these class notes, one gets the feeling that Schank wouldn’t have much trouble computer-generating the knowledge and belief structure of a typical Harvard graduate.
Psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence furnish endless repetitions of our self-image as coded combinations of texts, which we can understand but are at a loss to change. As Michel Serres says, “the transformational motor of our fathers has simply changed into an informational one, just as thermodynamics has changed into information theory. The conditions (of their functioning) remain those of closure, of difference, of circulation, and their end . . . is chaos, dissolution, and disorder.”43
How, then, do we break out of the scripts that constrain us? Feminist film theory has demanded a new filmmaking practice that would either break the patriarchal models of narrative or would construct the place of the female subject differently in the processes of identification (some of these options are taken up again in the conclusion to this book). Another possibility is the creation of new readings of existing films, readings that concentrate on the subversive, rather than subservient, moments of the classical cinema. It is an ingenious strategy, and one that informs Teresa de Lauretis’s exciting suggestion that certain contemporary films can be read as “remakes” of patriarchal narratives: Hitchcock’s Rebecca remade as Les Rendez-vous d’Anna or Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman), Vertigo remade as Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (Nicholas Roeg).44 In a similar vein, Gertude Koch argues that feminist readings of existing films (or of star personae like Marilyn Monroe and Mae West) can come up with new interpretations.45
Such a strategy would regroup existing films into new textual systems, discovering new typologies and reading them against the ideologies that produced them for signs that do not fit into the system of specularity and fetishism. One thing we might look for are moments in film where the illusion fails, and the masquerade is discovered. Marcel Proust has described such a moment in the theater: “As in a transformation scene on the stage a crease in the dress of a fairy, a quivering of her tiny finger, indicate the material presence of a living actress before our eyes, whereas we were uncertain, till then, whether we were not looking merely at a projection of limelight from a lantern.”46 I take this to be the spirit of Annette Kuhn’s justification for the feminist analysis of mainstream images of women: “may it not teach us to recognise inconsistencies and contradictions within dominant traditions of representation, to identify points of leverage for our own intervention: cracks and fissures through which may be captured glimpses of what might in other circumstances be possible, visions of a ‘world outside the order not normally seen or thought about’?”47
There is such a moment in Belle de jour; significantly, it is the moment when Husson, the friend of the husband, comes to tell him of Séverine’s double life. As Séverine waits in the hallway, she slides her hand delicately and expressively across the edge of a marble table top. The effect on the viewer is the transmission of a tactile sensation, which gains additional power because it is also an instance of “seeing with” the character. This combination of physical communication and dual narration (which comes about through the fusion of the camera-narrator and the character) is one way to break the distance and emptiness Chambers describes as being characteristic of the myth of the actress. In fact projective point-of-view shots frequently mediate a tactile experience to the viewer, a fact noted many years ago by the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer.48 Luis Buñuel’s films often communicate to the spectator on a startlingly physical level, whether by the slicing of an eye in Un chien andalou (someone has suggested calling this a “flinch shot”)49 or the eliciting of physical responses from the spectator through identification with characters.
There is hope from another side as well. The bachelor machines of fiction and film often dramatize a self-critical male viewpoint. This was already true in L’Eve future. To the grateful Lord Ewald, Edison explains that by giving Hadaly the right cues, which will always activate the identical responses on the golden records created from the best writings of poets, he will be able to replay their first meeting, immobilizing “the first (and finest) hour of love” (155). Indeed, if we never do more than recite lines at one another, why not opt for the best ones? Yet in the end, Hadaly goes down in a shipwreck that takes Alicia with it as well. Only Lord Ewald survives to meditate on his close encounter with the machine célibataire. Prophetically, Villiers predicted the end of the machine age, and correctly estimated the social pathology that finds expression in the literature, psychoanalysis, and cinema of the past hundred years.
In line with this, there is a suggestion, at the end of Belle de jour, that the whole series of fantasies has been, all along, the dream of the husband. As he sits in his wheelchair sleeping, an involuntary movement of his hand suggests that he is presently awakening from a dream. Suddenly, the supposedly invalid man stretches and awakens normally. This suggests that the film can be read as a male fantasy about a woman rather than as a woman’s fantasy of sexuality. Buñuel, after all, was a filmmaker who started out in surrealism, where the emphasis was on the older alchemical model of union between male and female. The repeated failure of his male characters to enter into a reciprocal relationship with a woman (from his 1928 film Un chien andalou [Andalusian Dog] all the way through his last film, Cet obscur objet de désir [That Obscure Object of Desire, 1978]) leaves us with a very ambiguous message. On the one hand, the men’s failure can be read as a critique of the mechanical metaphors I have been describing. On the other hand, their anxiousness speaks to the difficulty of changing inherited models of perception. But I am anticipating my conclusion.
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