Before analyzing Cecilia Condit’s videotapes Beneath the Skin (1981) and Possibly in Michigan (1983), marvelous tales told from the princess’ point of view, I will wander through the metaphorical, treacherous forests of other stories, discovering “invisible adversaries” along the path. The first is a handsome prince in a cautionary fable, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”:³ “Once upon a time there was a king who had twelve daughters, each more beautiful than the other. They slept together in a hall where their beds stood close to one another. At night when they had gone to bed, the king locked the door and bolted it. But when he unlocked it in the morning, he noticed that their shoes had been danced to pieces, and nobody could explain how it happened.” Although imprisoned by patriarchy, these dancing daughters gleefully and confidently escaped the king’s gaze of surveillance and power; together “they danced, every night, on the opposite shore, in a splendid light, till three in the morning, when their shoes were danced into holes and they were obliged to stop.”

In this celebration of female adolescence and adventure, however—as in most of the “once upon a time” of fiction—something is wrong, and the youngest sister is suspicious: “I don’t know what it is. You may rejoice, but I feel so strange. A misfortune is certainly hanging over us.” For women, on a par with being scrutinized and contained by vision, the end is the dire, dreaded misfortune—in this fairy tale, marriage to a prince, a quick and unhappy conclusion which separates the sisters and censures their nightly escapades. Anne Sexton’s rewriting: “Now the runaways would run no more and never/again would their hair be tangled into diamonds, / never again their shoes worn down to a laugh, / He had won.”⁴ A fellow had been given a cloak of invisibility by an old woman and had secretly spied on their nightly pleasures and reported to the king. For his voyeurism (and successful surveillance), he was given the kingdom and a princess of his choice. The peril of being the visible, private object of desire and the safe power of being the invisible, desiring, public subject are two morals of this and contemporary theory’s story. The undisciplined sisters had transgressed the patrolled frontier between private and public—that demarkation line of power—and their passionate, dancing bodies were duly arrested.

Although the prince inadvertently revealed his presence through touch and sound, eleven of the princesses paid no attention: “And, as he broke off a twig, a sharp crack came from the tree. The youngest cried out, ‘All is not well! Did you hear that sound?’ ” No one else listened to these sounds, which made “the youngest princess start with terror.” While many feminists are proudly standing on opposite shores, watching the “splendid light” of independent films and videotapes and being invited to the intellectual dance of postmodernism by scholars and the art world,⁵ we might heed the alarm of the youngest sister, for there are warnings in the academic air of godly wrath and signs of virulent condescension, brazenly heralding a resurgence of reactionary, antifeminist positions—signaled by arguments for women’s return to private space, the home. “New traditionalists,” we are told in magazine ads, are women garbed in tailored, professional fashion; rather than being in the office, they are photographed with children, in domesticity, preferring to remain at home.

Lawrence Stone, Dodge professor of history at Princeton, another prince of a fellow and the second adversary of this essay, caused me to “start with terror” and conclude with furor at his patronizing, biblical admonishments in the New York Review of Books—at best a naked emperor when the topic rarely turns to feminism; at worst, which is usually the case, a wolf without the guise of sheep’s clothing. In the first paragraph of “Only Women,” a foreboding title, King Stone speaks to the princesses: “I must first set out the ten commandments which should, in my opinion, govern the writing of women’s history at any time and in any place”—certainly a specious claim when discussing the writing of history. (Ruminous sounds, awkwardly famous movie stars, and unearthly special effects restage this spectacle in the film version of Only Women, co-directed by Lizzie Borden and Cecil B. De Mille, in which Stone plays himself and is duly disemboweled in the film/ theory remake of the beginning of Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.) Having claimed truth and the world for all times and all places, the Stone tablets are thus writ by this Moses impersonator: “1. Thou shalt not write about women except in relation to men and children. [The wife/mother plea suppresses the very reality of women’s lives, forgetting both women’s relationships with other women and the exhausting fact that most women always have at least two full-time jobs—taking care of children and men.] Women are not a distinct caste, and their history is a story of complex interactions; 2. Thou shalt strive not to distort the evidence and the conclusions to support modern feminist ideology. . . . 4. Thou shalt not confuse prescriptive norms with social reality. . . . 9. Thou shalt be clear about what constitutes real change in the experience and treatment of women.”⁶ Because Stone is male and thus omnipotent, he, like his godly predecessors, knows “what constitutes real change” in the experience of women or “thou.”

This catalogue of imperative “shalts” is an intellectual aberration—a paranoid delusion of divine intervention into feminist scholarship and history. I “start with terror” when I imagine the collective, knowing laughter of educated readers at his chastisement of women writers and feminism. For Prince Stone, women (not just feminists) have broken the bonds of propriety and chastity by entering priestly male domains of “history”; he marshals his defensive attack on women under the disguise or banner of research. Like the prince’s cloak, scholarship and prestigious chairs (a veritable star system of academia reminiscent of the Hollywood studio era, replete with gossip and credits, is operative in this magazine) provide various screens, briefly concealing, like the prince’s invisible presence, the argument.

American Film joins the New York Review of Books in mockery through the terrain of “with-it” popular culture in a breezy piece by Raymond Durgnat on Grace Jones—an essay and a female subject made strangely respectable (as if Jones were not) by dropping sundry names, e.g., Visconti, Renoir, and Vertov, in a swaggering display of his superior knowledge of and desire for her “phallic-narcissistic swagger and strut.” (This lurid psychoanalysis suggests Lee Marvin’s black-leathered Liberty Valence in John Ford’s film and describes Durgnat’s argument and style.) After glorifying Jones and her traversals of boundaries, Durgnat suddenly turns on feminism, on women as the objects of his contempt, the real reason for his essay. He smugly writes with scorn: “Jones disturbs the Brand X forms of feminism. She’s too frivolous for its schoolmarms, too sexual for its puritans, too strong for its sensitive plants, too competitive for its pacifists, too capitalist for its radicals, too effective for its neurotics, too hetero for its separatists, too responsibly independent to put the blame on pop for everything (war, the weather, old age).”⁷

Durgnat’s dismissive compendium, modeled on Linnaeus rather than the Bible, reiterates the nauseating typologies used to assault feminism and employs biological arguments used to contain women, e.g., frivolous, sensitive, pacifists, puritans, schoolmarms, and, of course, neurotic and dependent. It is not insignificant that American Film would publish, without notation, words of undisguised racism and sexism, setting women in opposition under the cover of praising a black woman—the imperialist tactic of divide and conquer, the king’s move against the sisters, a gambit of subjection rather than subjectivity.

These all-knowing enunciators protest too much, however; perhaps they are afraid of something, including the assertive, stylish representations of Grace Jones. Perhaps women, white and of color, are upping the ante, redirecting the terms of vision and spectacle in stories and theories which dance on opposite shores without the fatal end of patriarchy. In vastly different ways, Condit and other feminist artists “play with our curiosity and finally refuse to submit to our gaze. They turn being looked at into an aggressive act [my emphasis] . . . they are playing with the only power at their disposal— the power to discomfit, the power, that is, to pose ... to pose a threat. . . . They must exceed definitions of the proper and the permissible. . . . And there is pleasure in transgression.”⁸ (As a qualification or addition to this acute remark by Dick Hebdige, women also have language “at their disposal”—for some, a troubling incursion into grammars of power as women interrupt the masculine ecology of speech and dispose of, or trash, kingly discourses—which Condit does in the garbage sequence which concludes Possibly in Michigan.) Along lines similar to Hebdige, Mary Russo writes about masquerade: “To put on femininity with a vengeance suggests the power of taking it off.”⁹ Condit does “pose a threat” by putting on femininity with a visual and narrative vengeance; her disconcerting irony and sweetly gruesome stories also put on and undo societal prescriptions and taboos regarding women’s options to subjugation by violence or the gaze, letting us see and hear what often remains hidden, behaving with impropriety. Feminist films and video are telling stories differently and looking at difference differently—the latter, a key to feminist influences on current debates on postmodernism, particularly the issues focused on notions of the Other. As I argued in the preceding chapter, women are posited as the schizophrenic subject of postmodern culture, just as television is its latent object—the embodiment of every emblematic feature. Yet rarely are either subject or object acknowledged other than for feminism as Other—as a “great divide”¹⁰ or bipolarity (containing, in order of historical fashion, vestiges of Lacan’s endless division of the subject in language, the split between “I” of enunciation and “I” of enounced, the separation of the inner world of the “self” from the outside “world” of reality and facticity which can be mastered and owned, the division of subject from object, men from women, women from women, word from image, and soul from body.¹¹)

I want briefly to elaborate on this strange situation of feminism’s acclaimed marginality and unstated centrality through a selective reading of an October essay, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” by a leading figure in the debate, Hal Foster. Among complex, political issues, he explicates bricolage: “Myth is a one-way appropriation, an act of power; bricolage is a process of textual play, of loss and gain: whereas myth abstracts and pretends to the natural, bricolage cuts up, makes concrete, delights in the artificial.” (Condit’s work literally “cuts up” and “delights in the artificial.”) Up to this point, drawing on Levi-Strauss and Barthes, Foster’s definition of the “primitive style” is uncannily similar to feminist art and argument—against biology, which for women emerges as the “eternal,” the goddess/ whore myth. Foster provocatively asserts that “the rupture of the primitive, managed by the moderns, becomes our postmodern event”; he concludes by invoking feminists for whom “there are other ways to narrate this history.”¹² Thus, by extension and in/direct elision, feminism becomes the repressed, managed rupture of postmodernism—posited, like “primitivism” earlier, outside the debate as the estranged, unknowable other, along with other races and cultures. I repeat: in postmodern discourses, “woman” is not fascinating as she was to modernism; “feminism” is.

If feminism is going to be invoked as a desirable dialogue or a discourse of salvation, it is time to realize that at least white, intellectual, middle-class feminism is not Other in the sense of being outside a shared history and politics of class and race; white women are Other for psychoanalysis’ male subjects and analysts for whom “woman” is the problem; “she” is a paradoxical dilemma which grants male identity and exists as an inscrutable mystery, in both myths serving as the object of male desire/fear rather than as a subject. Indeed, an exceedingly primitive unconscious is posited by the modernists Freud and Lacan. Within this European, historical account of male sexuality/subjectivity, yes, “woman” is other and lacking, truly a problem—with an essay by Freud “On Femininity” but no comparable piece on masculinity. But for political and fashionable U.S. writers on postmodernism? The blind yet concerned visage of Oedipus, now miserable at Colonus, again misreads women or feminism which is alluded to rather than translated and which servilely works, without recognition, as source of the argument and/or the condemnation of postmodern culture.

The task for feminists involved “re-vising the old apprehension of sexual difference and making it possible to multiply differences, to move away from homogeneity,”¹³ a notion picked up, then amplified by de Lauretis to include “differences among women” and “differences within women”: “differences which are not purely sexual or merely racial, economic, or (sub)cultural, but all of these together and often enough in conflict with one another.”¹⁴These delineations of hetereogenity, together and in conflict, of historical women are resolutely against the notions of “purely” and “merely” usually applied to eternal “woman” and veer from princely mastery through colonization, bipolarity, hierarchy and otherness. These gambits which divide and conquer rely on a central, defining term or superior reality (usually white and/or male) rather than a series of equivalent or nonhierarchical options.

Several strategies of “hetereogeneity” are apparent in recent feminist cinema and video: (1) the emphasis on enunciation and address to women as subjects (including multiple voices in personal dialogues and the use of private speech), a reciprocity between author, text, and audience involving collective/contradictory identifications and shared “situations”; (2) the telling of “stories” rather than “novels” or grand master narratives as Walter Benjamin distinguished these two forms; (3) the inextricable bricolage of personal and theoretical knowledge; (4) the performance of parody or the telling of jokes, with irony and wit as women’s allies rather than enemies; no wonder women in the audience laugh with such bursts of mutual delight; neither tale nor laughter are at their expense; (5) an implicit or explicit critique and refashioning of theories of subjectivity constructed by vision; and (6) a transgression of the boundaries between private and public spaces and experiences, entering with intimacy the “public sphere” and unsettling these metaphorical and real spaces of power through confinement by looking and talking back. I will scatter these intersecting issues throughout the discussion of Condit’s sassy video work.

Beneath the Skin (1981) and Possibly in Michigan (1983) are unnerving and funny retellings of Oedipus as tabloid sensationalism. Imagine Freud’s essay on the uncanny as either a feminist fairy tale or a murderous scandal, excerpted in the National Inquirer and Art Forum, illustrated by photographs of masquerade women or mutilated corpses, and accompanied by bold headlines of first person quotations. This lucid critique/lurid exposé would return—collapsing criticism’s bipolarity of art versus popular culture, fiction opposed to fact, simulation against the real, canny against the uncanny—as a performance staged by Cindy Sherman with voices by Lily Tomlin. Scholarly explications via “theoretical” postmodernism would be published in October while personal stories of the artists would appear in People; clips from the piece would be shown on CBS on Sunday morning in the sacred art slot near the end of the program. Condit, Sherman, Tomlin, and Annette Michelson would intimately/polemically chat/assert on “The Phil Donahue Show” before a female audience of nonfeminists. Or as real life would have it, Condit’s work would be broadcast on “The 700 Club”—without its sound track—and dubbed over with a poet reading his work about homosexuality. We would be held in a disconcerting uncertainty concerning origins, originals, mastery, truth, art, popular culture and “the real” (all of which are complex processes, dispersed discourses which, like mass culture, most criticism posits as monoliths or “things” which are locatable, almost tangible)—currently labeled “pastiche” and “schizophrenia” as the emblematic condition of the postmodern object and its confused subject.¹⁵ Or, as Barthes argued earlier, “Taken aslant by language, the world is written through and through; signs, endlessly deferring their foundations . . . infinitely citing one another, nowhere come to a halt. . . .”¹⁶

Or, in another interpretation of this crazy return, we would be as ambivalently delighted and unwarily off-centered as we are by watching Condit’s videotapes. Their status as hyperreal—the mesmerizing, fibrillating images of masquerade and the grotesque—is undercut by the irony of the smiling voice speaking of violence and death with the amazed, homey incredulity of backyard gossip or doubly displaced by innocent, sing-song exchanges and girlish operettas. Grizzly scandal collides with female adolescence, just as sound intercepts image, derailing spectators and interpretation alike; the real violence in women’s lives coincides with fairy tales and princesses. Teresa de Lauretis concluded Alice Doesn’t with a marvelous, riddling question: “it is the signifier who plays and wins before Alice does, even when she’s aware of it. But to what end, if Alice doesn’t?”¹⁷ Cecilia doesn’t and Condit’s work unravels the sentence’s paradox while imaging blackly ironic, startling “endings” to de Lauretis’s question.

Condit’s tapes unequivocally position us in the princess’ place, Sleeping Beauty’s swoon, that nightmare of Anne Sexton’s poem in which the awakened princess “married the prince”:

Unlike Freud and Sexton, Condit has no interest in either marriages to princes or thieves’ viewpoints, however fascinated she is, as they are, by sleep and dream, violence and death. Her strategy, however unaware of either source, is a combination of Freud and Sexton, rewriting the “uncanny” as a fairy tale (a form which Freud absolutely and repeatedly denied was an instance of uncanny experiences) and taking Sexton’s feminist revisions to different, less lonely and suicidal ends. Condit’s translucent, artificial, video bodies are interrupted by recreations and documentary footage of epileptic seizures and still photographs of mummies’ heads; the “classical” body is disrupted by the “grotesque” body; the private, controlled, sleeping beauty is transformed into the public, uncontrollable epileptic or the decaying body of a murderous scandal; all are instances of violent spectacle, exquisite corpses. No longer effaced or held in private spaces by “proper” discourse and decorous words, these are “undisciplined,” speaking bodies—on the frontier between the modern body and the carnival body before the seventeenth century incarceration in asylums, prisons, and homes, before the ascendancy of the word over the carnal, guilty flesh and other great divides of power—adolescent rather than grown-up bodies which suggest that another interpretation of masquerade as a possibility for feminism rather than a disguise, lure, or mark of envious lack is necessary.

Via Bakhtin’s work on carnival and Rabelais, Mary Russo writes in “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory”: “The grotesque body is the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed, and sleek. . . .” Condit’s work alternates and merges the “classical” body with the grotesque body—the latter the uncontrollable, erupting body as spectacle on public display. Russo writes of historical, female performers: “They used their bodies in public, in extravagant ways that could have only provoked wonder and ambivalence in the female viewer. . . .”¹⁹ This image of the body and the ambivalent spectator is applicable to the “style” of Condit’s work: “a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body ... a double body in which one link joins the other, in which the life of one body is born from the death of the preceding, older one . . . the body can merge with various natural phenomena. . . .”²⁰ The carnival body is an indivisible body without inner/outer, self/other polarities in which the exterior is inauthentic, merely a cover-up; it is a body of doubled surfaces rather than inner recesses which are analyzed, explained. Video is well suited to this transforming, seamless emergence of one surface from another, a fluid editing/processing capacity which Condit utilizes with skill.

“[T]his hyperbolic style, this ‘overacting’ can be read as double representations. . . .”²¹ “Double representation” (both Bakhtin’s “double body” and the “double-directed discourse” of parody)—extended to include the critique of the schizophrenic subject and the intersection of sound and image tracks—aptly describes Condit’s tapes, which also demonstrate a tactic suggested by Luce Irigaray and endorsed by Russo: “to play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself simply to be reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself. . . to ideas . . . that are elaborated in/by masculine logic, but so as to make ‘visible’ what was supposed to remain invisible.”²² (In certain ways, this reads like a summary of Foucault’s and perhaps Bakhtin’s projects, which, however, were mainly about and for men.) Among the seemingly contradictory yet comparable exploitations to which Condit “resubmits” are masquerade and epilepsy, which she restages as extravagant, hyperbolic spectacle, challenging the divisions of vision and the body while escaping the confines of “discourse.”

Beneath the Skin (1981) opens with Condit’s conversationally intimate, incredulous voice narrating: “Let me tell you what a nightmare that that was. Most of the time it just feels like the news extravaganza that it was.”²³ Benjamin argued that storytellers speak of the “circumstances” they have directly learned or “simply pass it off as their own experience.”²⁴ Eliding story with the teller (raising issues of authorship), Condit’s rehearsed, naive voice scales Midwest verbal registers of astonishment, stressing and elongating words like “body,” and relates a lurid, first person account of her boyfriend’s murder of his previous lover, whom he dismembered, “mummified, decapitated, and wrapped in plastic” and stored in his apartment during his affair with her, the storyteller “I.” The film is about “this guy I had been seeing for the last four years, the police just found a body in his apartment. . . .” The passions of the body are rumors, gossip, and scandal; perhaps they are real, or not: “I’d never know if he killed her or not. . . a helluva way to continue a relationship. . . .” The audience is caught off guard by off-handed comments and laughs—The Star as standup comedy and everyday life. The details of decapitation and odorous decay on the ironic sound track—“But one of the funniest things about it. . . it came out that her head was missing”— parallels rapidly edited images of the fragmented female body, which decays in video as the corpse in the story rots. The tape goes “beneath the skin” by traversing the “inside/outside” of the body (a sack, a container) to reveal skeletons, aging, death; beneath surfaces to uncover horror or the “unconscious”; beneath the romance of relationships—of the lyrics of Frank Sinatra dreamily singing “I’ve got you under my skin”—to reveal beatings and murder. Perhaps these are separate but equal terrains; or they are equivalent planes of representation; or, perhaps, this is not a modern body at all which can be present only through the distance of representation but an archaic, violent, repressed body. Recurring closeups of red lips and white teeth are juxtaposed with the verbal description of the corpse’s dental records. (“But the most important of all human features for the grotesque is the mouth. It dominates all else. The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth . . . a bodily abyss”: Bakhtin.²⁵) Life and death, the pin-up and the coroner’s report, the fetish and the fact, the beautiful and the grotesque, and the word and the image are of equal representational value.

The collision, or (in)vertical montage, of a lurid tabloid story akin to Rear Window, Psycho, and Frenzy of murder, dismemberment, and investigation (including Hitchcock’s perversely comic, cannibalistic dinner-table scenes conjoined with scenes of crimes) with images of young, masquerading girls and glimpses of death, illness, and age, resembles a gyrating Mobius strip in which sound and image tracks never meet but are indissolubly connected by us in the process of enunciation—a reciprocity between author, text, and audience. As Linda Hutcheon writes in A Theory of Parody, parody, like Bakhtin’s medieval carnival, “exists in the self-conscious borderline between art and life, making little formal distinction between actor and spectator, between author and co-creating reader.”²⁶ For her, parody “enlists the audience in contradiction” and activates “collective participation.”²⁷ Depending on one’s gendered experiences, the collective contradictions elicited by Condit’s disarming, eye-catching work are more extreme, less appetizing, hard to swallow and even harder to digest for some viewers (mainly men) than others.

Her distinctive style involves an intricate montage which spirals and loops back, intersecting the lurid narration. Studio footage alternates with processed location shots; found black and white footage is mixed by/with video in an uncanny enunciation, placing the enounced of murder in a precarious irony. Visual delicacy, like the images of the sweet young woman, disguises and underscores the sensational story—is this real, is this possible, is this a fable, is this serious—or not? “This” exemplifies contradiction—of response, of the structure of irony, of women’s lives, crossing the “self-conscious borderline between art and life.” This emphasis on process and experience in a reciprocity between speaker/listener is also central to Benjamin’s valorization of the story as opposed to the novel which “neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what [she] tells from experience—[her] own or that reported by others. And [she] in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to [her] tale. The novelist has isolated himself.”²⁸ In this, the storyteller (“The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales”²⁹) resembles the chronicler (rather than the contemporary historian) who is interested in interpretation rather than explanation, the terrain of the novel’s narrative which has been divorced from “the realm of living speech.” Thus, the listener has a stake not only in hearing but in remembering the story—a shared experience, a process. “A [woman] listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a [woman] reading [watching] one shares this companionship.”³⁰ It is this realm of interpretation via “living speech” forged in shared experience which is intriguing for feminism and what distinguishes the work of Condit—a telling as much as a watching.

The initial and recurring visual image is an overhead, “glamor” close-up of a young woman’s face—sleeping, artifically made up and lighted. This shot is overlaid with another female face, a visual trace outlining a divided, schizophrenic subject—a complex dialogue imbricated in much feminist work. “Call them femininity and feminism, the one is made representable by the critical work of the other; the one is kept at a distance, constructed, ‘framed,’ to be sure, and yet ‘respected,’ ‘loved,’ ‘given space’ by the other.”³¹ (In this writing, women are “other” with/for each other rather than another, a man, and thus, a very different story.) The teller begins to identify with the murdered woman: “I always thought that she was epileptic and I, diabetic, and I identified with her.” (Because Condit is epileptic, the status of “I” is complicated, biographically elided with “she.”) As the tape returns to the opening shot, the dreamer/teller, self/other, voice-over/“other woman,” the dead and the living merge, taking up the question of the real and fiction, the possible and the impossible, in a double denial that, like de Lauretis’s Alice riddle, reaffirms women and the story’s reality: “But it was never real, it was just a bizarre story . . . but I had this dream that it was so real. I dreamed that it was me, not her, that he killed two years ago.”

“It is characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life—and this is the stuff that stories are made of—first assumes transmissable form at the moment of his death. . . . Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”³² (Benjamin and Bakhtin analyze the “modern” concealment of death with arguments remarkably similar, again, to Foucault’s theses.) Like the “he” of Benjamin’s remarks, Condit takes her authority from death and goes public as few women storytellers do, speaking about violence through the forbidden terrain of femininity, with sacrilegious moments of gallows humor. This rewriting of Freudian bedtime stories as sensationalism concludes with “And that’s another story.” Like Scheherazade, Condit continues the tale two years later, this time radically revising Freud’s interpretations and conclusions with a sweet-tasting vengeance and without his proper cover of “scientific discourse” which explains and contains the hysterical, spectacular body.

Possibly in Michigan (1983) is a feminist musical in which the couple doesn’t, continuing the deathly, stifling scenario of Beneath the Skin which foreshadowed the musical style of musical voices in a chanting, childlike operetta, “gee i jo”: “Talk to us about Barbie and Ken, Barbie and Men, Ken and Men. . . . Never ends.” Both tapes reverse the classical text’s heterosexual inevitability of Barbie and Ken, marriage or murder—both resolutions or ‘endings’ functioning as containments of the male fear of castration posed by the “lacking” spectacle of the female body. On the contrary, Condit gleefully realizes Freud’s imaginary, anxious scenario; cannibalism, an extreme extension of dismemberment, castration, and other Freudian metaphors and/ or fairy tales, is the “happy” ending.

Unlike the mainly singular storyteller of the first tape, three styles of voice alternate in this gruesomely enchanting fairy tale of female adolescence: the a cappella chorus; the sing-song dialogue/conversation between the two girl/women “stars”; and the voice-over of Condit speaking about her characters, Sharon, Janice, and Arthur, in a conspiratorial, editorial voice no longer an “I” but dispersed throughout the telling. This postmodern “once upon a time” opens in a shopping mall of diffused pastels where two young women are pursued by surreal men wearing business suits and grotesque animal heads. (“The head, ears, and nose also acquire a grotesque character when they adopt the animal form . . . the eyes have no part in these comic images; they express an individual . . . not essential to the grotesque”: Bakhtin³³) The opening lyrics of the chorus cheerily prophesy: “I bite at the hand that feeds me, slap at the face that eats me. Some kind of animal, cannibal. . . . Animal? Cannibal?” Music sweetens the scenario which equates men with animals as the frog/prince is made literal and visible. While the mundane of shopping malls and everyday life is transformed into fantasy, the second use of the voice, a sing-song dialogue, exemplifies Condit’s disarming wit: “He has the head and it’s the size of a wolf.” A deep, echoing, male voice says: “The better to eat you with, my dear. . . . You have two choices. . . . I will cut your arms and legs off and eat them, one by one, slowly.” The female chorus intones “Why?” He: “For Love.” Chorus: “Why?” He: “For Love.” Chorus: “But love shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.”

As Sharon, the dreamer/actant, rides down the escalator, the third style of voice, Condit’s voice, discusses women and violence, the complex concern beneath the veneer of fairy tales, of her work, and of women’s “private” lives: “Sharon attracted violent men. She had a way of making the violence seem as if it was their idea. Her friend, Janice, was cut from the same mold.” This frank, disconcerting analysis reiterates a line from Beneath the Skin: “I realize that if I courted violence more, I might get myself seriously hurt.” In that tape she laughs, reminding me of the opening laugh of Sally Potter’s 1979 film, Thriller, a laugh which occurs in blackness before the white of the first image, a laugh in concert with an aria of death. As Herbert Blau writes: “that seeming remembrance of/in laughter which is a mnemonic stoppage of breath. It is the mystery of the interruption which preserves something tragic in comedy, since it seems a synopsis of death. . . . Which is to say that meaning stops for that moment, as if in homage to more than meaning. . . .” Violence is always more or less than meaning; Condit’s art and laughter are “synopses of death,” stopped, as if gasping, by laughter; “when laughter comes the meaning is deadly, or there’s just no meaning at all.”³⁴

The posing, giggling girls/women are from Beneath the Skin, including the raven-haired, sleeping/decaying beauty surrounded by red roses. Unlike the earlier tape, this story’s violence exists more on the image track with sound as an ironic chorus or commentator: “Arthur longed for that sexual scent that smelled like home . . . he had used so many masks to disguise himself that he had forgotten who he was. He imagined himself a frog transformed into a Prince Charming. He felt the moment he kissed her, he would become the man she wanted him to be.” This frog/prince inversion of Lacan’s female masquerade as carnival follows the imaginary woman, Sharon, enters her home, kisses, then beats her—a startling intrusion of domestic life, reality amid the colors of fantasy. Janice, her friend, races to Sharon’s house, rescues her, and shoots Arthur. These gossamer girls, together again, cook, eat, and toss Arthur’s remains into the garbage after sharing Arthur with their dog, a girl’s best friend. Hacking the body into stew meat is a comic parody, a shared act of intimacy, and grotesque equation of the body with food. This grizzly meal concludes with the innocent, satisfied “girls,” presumably naked, made up, smoking cigarettes, and coughing in a delightfully perverse, soft-focus rendering of adolescent friendship and misbehavior. The tape concludes with the “real” garbage man and truck picking up the garbage or prince, accompanied by “natural” sound as the credits roll in this “reality.”

This sensational remake of Freud, which fragments and fetishizes the female body while dismantling oedipal narratives, does indeed have conflicting effects on audiences, inverting Freud’s analysis of the uncanny as an experience, a frightening effect which hinges on two figures—loss of the eyes and dismemberment—and which involves a discrepancy between the “incredible” and the “possible.”³⁵ (It is important to “remember” that this essay depicts the dismembered, spectacular body—that “animistic” body of yore which is not fully contained by Freud’s discourse, dependent as his argument is on uncertainty.) Epilepsy and the beautiful female automaton create “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.” Freud’s fear of confusing the biological with the technological, the real with its simulation (a model and an essay which fits Fritz Lang’s Metropolis like a historical glove) suggests that the “uncanny” is the precursor (or the repressed) of Baudril lard’s simulacrum which, unlike Freud, skirts the castration it fears with the loss of the real, referents, and mastery. This notion of the “double” becomes, for Freud and Condit, “a harbinger of death.”³⁶ Condit’s beautiful faces decay, dissolving into eyeless skulls; her narratives detail the dismemberment which Freud feared and analyzed: “the substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ which is seen to exist in dreams and myths and phantasies . . . the threat of being castrated is what first gives the idea of losing other organs its intense colouring.”³⁷ Cannibalism, not only the losing but the devouring of “other organs,” is an “intense colouring” of Freud’s book. Possibly in Michigan is a serious and amusing challenge to the “relation between the eye and the male organ,” a personal, historical, and recent equation certainly not “substitutive” in “women’s dreams and myths and phantasies.”

The fear of/defense against castration is also elicited by what Freud labels “the Medusa effect,” a tactic which produces the very image which is feared for protection—yet another Freudian trope literalized in Possibly in Michigan in a shot of the masked man picking up a rock revealing a skull crawling with snakes which he throws through Sharon’s window; it lands on her bed. The Medusa effect is reiterated in a close-up of worms/snakes crawling over a photograph of Sharon. These special effects “serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror.” Freud seriously goes on to say: “This is a confirmation of the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration.”³⁸ (No wonder Helene Cixous’s Medusa is laughing! This reads as if Freud were writing directions for a Milton & Bradley board game, or better, a television game show. I can hear the referee’s admonition: “You lose ten points on a technical rule: no multiplication of penis symbols.” With the elevation of the phallus as the dominant signifier, Lacan was the big winner on “Jeopardy.”)

Condit’s Medusa scene, like the images of epilepsy and the automated doll-like women, takes Freud at his word; however, her Medusa effect portends violence to women and rape rather than or before castration. Because of this, she breaks Freud’s crucial rule by not symbolizing disavowal but joyously “performing” dismemberment, turning the imaginary scenario of the Oedipus complex into the conclusion of cannibalism and female friendship—uniting women in an ending and relationship that classical texts have avoided and contained. It’s as if the two women of Beneath the Skin, like Mimi and Musetta of Puccini’s La Boheme, then Potter’s Thriller, joined forces and refused their murder by seemingly but perversely playing by, then inverting or rewriting the rules and kicking Oedipus out of the narrative. As Benjamin suggests, “The wisest thing—so the fairytale taught mankind ... is to meet the forces of the mythological world with cunning and high spirits.” The mythological world of Freud is met by Sharon, Janice, and Cecelia, a creative trio—“with high spirits and cunning,” living “happily ever after” so that Scheherazade, speaking to/with women, will continue this trilogy in Not a jealous Bone concerning an old woman, another fairy-tale figure which Condit imagines in her off-center way.

“In every case the storyteller is a [woman] who has counsel for [her] readers. But if today ‘having counsel’ is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. . . . After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.”³⁹ Unlike all the recent declarations of the death of feminism because completed, old-hat, a failure, or a mistake, the public, artistic formulation of female subjects, desires, pleasures, and peculiarities continues to “unfold” fifty years after Benjamin’s words; the “communicability” of women’s private experiences is going massively, transgressively public. Cecilia Condit, just an “old-fashioned girl” but what a wickedly clever one, is giving us counsel, making outrageous proposals, with laughter from the audience signaling possibilities. After all, without his cloak of invisibility, the prince doesn’t stand a chance.