A wealth of feminist film criticism has been produced in the last ten years. The following selections are representative of the richness and variety of those pieces addressing mainstream cinema. This section could easily have filled a book on its own and hence the selection was very difficult. Final choices were based on a decision to include a variety of approaches—particularly those using theories covered in the previous section of this book and, where possible, to provide a debate by using two essays on the same film as a case study.

The first piece, by Maureen Turim, “Gentlemen Consume Blondes” (1979), focuses on the Hawks film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Here, Turim applies a Marxist approach to the work, demonstrating how capitalist values lie at the base of this Hollywood movie. As Turim shows, the film is split between the “sexual display made of these women (their exploitation as objects within the film’s narrative and for the film’s appeal) and the women’s expressed cynicism and cleverness (the satire in which the objects take on the role of critical subjects).”¹ The article demonstrates the ways these contradictions alternate throughout the film.

Turim analyzes how the film’s oppositions—“come ons” vs. “put downs”; musical numbers vs. narrative segments; blonde Monroe looking for money vs. brunette Russell looking for love—are ultimately reconciled. For instance, she shows how the stars’ seductive performances are embedded in the narrative so that viewers need not consider themselves voyeurs. The prurient interests of the movie audience are disguised by the fact that the women’s performances seem directed at the on-screen nightclub audience. Similarly, the superficial differences between the two women mask the ways in which both are sexually displayed and both finally tamed (through marriage) to form the film’s closure.

Turim returns to the question of the film’s satire and to whether indeed it serves as a critique of the movie’s ideology. In answer, she points to Hawks’s use of the female body, which is not merely displayed as a sex object but also serves as an object of exchange, one that is incorporated into another commodity (the film) and sold. For Turim this is part of the 1950s consumer society. And it is for this reason that Lorelei’s (Monroe) gold digging is not condemned within the film, but rather viewed as a form of female enterprise and thus justified by the film’s unquestioned acceptance of capitalism. In the final analysis, the satire never seriously undermines this assumption.

Another analysis of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “Pre-text and Text in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1982) by Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca, provides an example of “reading against the grain,” a type of subversive reading made possible when there are internal contradictions within the narrative.

Arbuthnot and Seneca begin by investigating why watching Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell as showgirls in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes produces pleasure for them as women viewers. They isolate several factors including the energy of the two actresses, their ability to resist male objectification, and the film’s depiction of a friendship between two strong women. Reading beneath the story of heterosexual romance, they discover another story which celebrates women’s pleasure in each other.

The two authors then provide a subversive reading of the film, showing how the romantic narratives (the pre-text) is disrupted and undermined by the women’s resistance to male objectification and by their bonding with one another (the text, which contains both narrative and non-narrative elements).

In analyzing the ways in which the stars resist objectification, the authors focus on many of the film’s visual elements, especially its examples of body language (the women’s refusal to avert their eyes in submission, their active looking at men, their assertive body stances, their encroachment into male space, and their control over their own space), costume, and Hawks’s directorial choices (lighting and medium close-ups which emphasize the actresses’ zest and personality).

Arbuthnot and Seneca also look at the relationship between the women. Here they find that pre-text and text collude to offer a positive image of the Monroe/Russell friendship. They note that the narrative constantly reinforces their commitment to one another and their lack of competition. Again on the visual level, body language (the interchange of loving glances, their affectionate touching), directorial choices (Hawks’s use of point-of-view shots to show the women looking at one another and of framing which highlights their connectedness), and genre expectations (normally we expect to see musical numbers featuring a heterosexual couple—not two women—who perform the musical numbers and who represent the film’s love interest) play a central role in creating a sense of female bonding. The authors further assert that the female characters’ connection with each other facilitates the female viewer’s connection and identification with them.

Although Arbuthnot and Seneca recognize that elements of heterosexual romance and of objectification of women are always present, they feel that the actions of Monroe and Russell work to subvert the film’s intended meaning, thus producing tensions that open the way for a feminist reading. They conclude that feminist film criticism needs to focus more centrally on these types of readings, and on female experience, rather than on theories by male authors.

The next three essays analyze works which have been assigned to the genre of “the woman’s film.” The first piece, “The Case of the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor’s Stella Dallas” (1983), by E. Ann Kaplan begins by charting the ways in which the Mother is repressed in patriarchal society. Utilizing the work of recent feminist writers who offer psychoanalytic and socio-economic insights, she discusses how mother figures are mythologized and how Hollywood perpetuates these myths, dichotomizing Mothers into “Good” (all-nuturing and self-abnegating) or “Bad” (sadistic, neglectful, or ineffectual).

Kaplan views Stella Dallas as a perfect example of how films “reinscribe the Mother in the position patriarchy desires for her and, in so doing, teach the female audience the dangers of stepping out of the given position.”² In her reading of the film, Kaplan describes how Stella initially resists her role as Mother and establishes her own mores and manner of dressing. For this she is punished. More serious, she later refuses to give up her close relationship with her grown daughter Laurel. This not only violates the myth of the self-abnegating Mother, but it also threatens patriarchy in that female bonding excludes men. This transgression must also be punished.

Kaplan points out the ways in which the film is structured through editing and point of view to guide our judgments of Stella. The film wrenches us away from Stella’s perspective, replacing it with that of other characters, so that we, like they, view her disapprovingly as a spectacle. She is further denigrated by being adversely compared with Helen Morrison, the film’s ideal mother figure. From Mother-as-spectacle it is a small step to Mother-as-spectator, a marginalized figure who passively observes life from the sidelines. Focusing on the film’s final scene, Kaplan draws a comparison between Stella, standing outside in the rain watching her daughter’s wedding inside the Morrison mansion through the lighted window frame, and the spectators in the audience who, watching the screen, “learn what it is to be a Mother in patriarchy.” She feels the time has come for a new treatment of the Mother as a participant in the action and a person in her own right.

Linda Williams’s “ ‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama” (1984) was written in direct response to Kaplan’s ideas. Williams sees Stella Dallas as an interesting test case for recent theories of female subject formation and female spectatorship. She feels strongly that the rejection of realist narratives and the substitution of a counter-cinema does not solve the problem of creating a feminine subjectivity. What is needed, according to Williams, is an understanding of how women do speak to one another, especially in discourses where women express the contradictions they encounter in patriarchy. Melodrama is one such place.

For Williams, Stella Dallas is of special importance because it is a film containing a reading position for female viewers that is based on how women take on a female identity and function as the primary nurturers. Williams treats the work of several feminists addressing these topics, especially that of Nancy Chodorow, who sees the life-long closeness between mother and daughter as a positive model for connectedness to others rather than as a weakness or deviation from the male norm as many psychologists have previously thought. Williams addresses some of the same issues as Kaplan: Stella’s transgression of proper behavior, the ways in which she is viewed by other characters within the film, the mother-daughter bond, the fetishization of Barbara Stanwyck’s Stella, the establishment of Helen Morrison as the ideal mother, and finally Stella’s role as a sacrificing mother. However, unlike Kaplan who sees the film as a lesson for female viewers in regard to their proper place as mothers, Williams, drawing on Tania Modleski’s writings on multiple subject positions in soap opera,³ feels that the film’s ending is too complex for such a response. Instead of identifying with one viewpoint (which contains the “lesson”), we, like empathetic good mothers, identify with all of the conflicting points of view and characters.

Furthermore, Williams observes that we do not see and believe in the same way that Stella does. “We see instead the contradictions between what the patriarchal resolution of the film asks us to see—the mother ‘in her place’ as spectator, abdicating her former position in the scene—and what we as empathetic, identifying female spectators can’t help but feel—the loss of mother to daughter and daughter to mother.”⁴ In this regard, Williams also argues against Mary Ann Doane who calls for women viewers to distance themselves from an over-identification with female images on the screen (see “Film and the Masquerade” in Section One). For Williams, women viewers need not give up their identification with the female image (anymore than they need give up their first love object—the Mother). She sees female spectatorship as a constant juggling of the non-exclusive positions of closeness and distance. “The divided female spectator identifies with the woman whose very triumph is often in her own victimization, but she also criticizes the price of a transcendent ‘eradication’ which the victim-hero must pay.”⁵ Thus, for all its masochism, the maternal melodrama offers an important source of realistic reflection on women’s lives and demonstrates the possibilities of Hollywood films to generate feminist readings.

In addition to motherhood, the woman-in-love constitutes a recurrent theme in the woman’s film. In “Seduced and Abandoned: Recollection and Romance in Letter From an Unknown Woman” (1989), Lucy Fischer draws upon the work of Simone De Beauvoir and other feminists writers in order to focus on the psychological dimensions of women in love. Fischer shows how the film dramatizes such common characteristics as women’s efforts to find self-worth in their lovers’ eyes, to live through and sacrifice for these men, to idealize them, to be swept away by sexual passion and delusional fantasies, and finally to indulge in long periods of waiting. Fischer notes however that, unlike many woman’s films, Letter From an Unknown Woman elides over those periods in the heroine’s life characterized by hardship and suffering and thereby avoids an emphasis on female masochism.

Fischer observes that despite certain heroic aspects, Lisa, the film’s central character and seeming narrator, is ultimately denied a position of authority through restrictions on her point of view. Through the crucial shift from Lisa writing her letter, to Stephan, her lover, reading it (and thus taking over control of the voice), and finally through Stephan’s chronic inability to remember her, Lisa as a person is diminished. Fischer concludes that in the end Lisa is an “unknown” woman, not simply to Stephan, but to herself. By living her life through him, she has accepted a traditional view of love and negated her own existence.

Elizabeth Ellsworth’s essay, “Illicit Pleasures: Feminist Spectators and Personal Best” (1982), like Arbuthnot and Seneca’s, argues for a negotiated reading. In addition, like these two authors (and others in this volume), Ellsworth is interested in coming to terms with historical (i.e., actual) female spectators. “I will discuss how feminist reviewers used their interpretations of Personal Best as attempts to build alignments and pleasurable identifications with particular feminist communities as oppositional groups.”⁶ For Ellsworth, interpretation is not just a rejection of dominant meanings, but also a process whereby a group defines itself collectively and politically.

Borrowing methods from cultural studies, Ellsworth analyzed reviews of Personal Best as an indication of the film’s reception in different types of communities and what that revealed about their priorities and perceptions. Of primary interest was a comparison of feminist reviews with those in the dominant press. For feminists, three issues emerged as central: (1) the representation of women’s bodies, (2) the status of women in sports, and (3) lesbianism. Most feminist reviewers were sensitive to how the film’s style and narrative structure worked to undermine or celebrate feminist attitudes. Personal Best also became the occasion for women within the feminist community, both lesbians and non-lesbians, to engage in ongoing debates around issues such as pornography and female sexuality. In contrast to the feminist reviews, those in the dominant media gave only tacit acknowledgment to feminist issues, then submerged them beneath other themes such as “competition,” “coming of age,” or “goal seeking.” The study of pressbooks revealed that Warner Bros. was most interested in selling Personal Best as a “sports film” about women athletes.

Finally, Ellsworth discusses the oppositional interpretations of the lesbian feminist reviewers. For Ellsworth the importance of Personal Best rests with lesbians’ use of oppositional readings to produce illicit pleasures (personal) and more important, social pleasures (public), which are collectively constructed through a group’s shared experiences as an audience. Such experiences create a sense of solidarity and validation and in itself constitute an oppositional act. Ellsworth sees Personal Best as a limit case for what is currently possible within a community maneuvering for pleasure.

The section ends with Jane Gaines’s “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory” (1986), an attack on much current feminist film criticism, especially on its insistent use of the psychoanalytic concept of sexual difference as the sole explanation of women’s oppression. She points out that women of color often realize their oppression first as blacks rather than as women. Similarly, she voices her concern about the banishment of sociological and historical reference points in film criticism, especially in works about racial difference and sexuality. To bring these issues into focus, she offers an analysis of a Diana Ross star vehicle, Mahogany (1975), a film about a black fashion model.

Gaines chooses Mahogany because the film’s connection of sadism, voyeurism, and photographic acts seems to invite a psychoanalytic reading along the lines offered by Mulvey and others. However, Gaines demonstrates that an analysis based on male/female opposition “locks us into modes of analysis which will continually misunderstand the position of many women” (women of color, working-class women, lesbians) and reinforce white middle-class values “to the extent that it works to keep women from seeing other structures of oppression.”⁷

Gaines discusses Mahogany in terms of how race complicates the issues of female sexuality, pointing out the need to develop a theory of black female representation that accounts for black women’s history. Most revealing is her analysis of how the black male protagonist’s “look” is either repudiated or frustrated, proving that not all male characters are free to engage in sexual looking. She also points out the ways in which the film obscures the connections between race, class, and gender. Finally, Gaines concludes that there are issues relevant to Mahogany (issues of race, class, and gender as they occur in history) that override psychoanalytic interpretations, and that feminist film theory, and by extension all film theory, must find ways of incorporating the crucial role of history into its criticism.

NOTES

1. Maureen Turim, “Gentlemen Consume Blondes,” Wide Angle 1, no. 1 (1979). Revised and reprinted in Movies and Methods Vol. II, ed. Bill Nichols, Berkeley: University of California Press (1985), p. 371 and the present volume.

2. E. Ann Kaplan, “The Case of the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor’s Stella Dallas,” Heresies, no. 16 (1983), p. 82.

3. Tania Modleski, “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Opera: Notes on Feminine Narrative Form,” Film Quarterly 33, no. 1 (Fall 1979), pp. 12-21.

4. Linda Williams, “ ‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (Fall 1984), p. 18.

5. Ibid., pp. 22-23.

6. Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Illicit Pleasures: Feminist Spectators and Personal Best,” Wide Angle 8, no. 2 (1986), p. 46.

7. Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory,” Cultural Critique, no. 4 (Fall 1986), p. 65.