1. Spectacle, Narrative,
and Screen

The term spectacle has become a shorthand phrase in film studies to refer to a number of different components of the cinema. Virtually all of these components—from the most general to the most specific, from the cultural status of film in Western society to the editing patterns of scenes in individual films—evoke the status of cinema as an institution, that is, as a form which embodies pervasive cultural myths of narrative, image, and representation. The term spectacle is fairly straightforward in its designation of subject object relationships, defining the object of the look as possessed and controlled by the subject of the look. But spectacle contains a number of competing, and sometimes contradictory meanings.

I begin this chapter by unpacking the various associations that spectacle has acquired in film studies, from consumerism and postmodernism to ideology and soectatorship and gender. My primary cinematic example is The Big Sleep (1946), a film which contains both obvious and not-so-obvious examples of the function of spectacle in film. I will argue that an exclusive focus on spectacle defined—as has been the case in feminist film studies—as a relation between male subject and female object obscures other functions of cinematic spectacle which do not lend themselves to such easy dichotomies.

I then read The Big Sleep in relation to other films with similar preoccupations, and the film screen emerges as a privileged figure for the cinematic spectacle defined in more complex and contradictory terms. I examine the screen on different textual levels—literally, as film screens which appear within films, and figuratively, as surfaces with screenlike capacities—shadows projected on opaque glass, translucent screenlike material. These representations of the screen suggest in their turn that the screen necessary for cinematic projection has been inadequately addressed in film theory. My aim in this chapter is twofold—to argue against an overly monolithic definition of the cinematic spectacle, particularly in the classical Hollywood cinema, and to establish the context for the women’s films to be discussed in chapter two, all of which explore and examine the metaphor of the film screen.

In the most general and obvious way, the definition of film as spectacle suggests that the relationship between viewer and screen is situated within—to use Guy Debord’s much-quoted phrase—the “society of the spectacle,” the society, that is, of modern capitalism, described from the outset by Debord as “an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that used to be experienced directly has withdrawn into a representation.”¹ While Debord’s analysis is not concerned with specific representational forms such as the cinema, there is an irresistible match between cinema and the society of the spectacle he describes, particularly when one notes the many coincidences that mark the birth of motion pictures, such as the emergence of modern advertising. Indeed, Charles Eckert’s examination of the practices of tie-ins between the film industry and corporations, and his attendant definition of film as a “living display window” for the products of industrial-capitalist society, suggest in quite specific and literal terms that the classical cinema not only is contained by the society of the spectacle, but contributes actively to its continuation. “Hollywood,” Eckert argues, “. . . did as much or more than any other force in capitalist culture to smooth the operation of the production-consumption cycle by fetishizing products and putting the libido in libidinally invested advertising.”²

Eckert’s evocation of the cinema as a “living display window” suggests a positioning of the film spectator which allows for an easy fit between cinema as a narrative and visual institution, on the one hand, and as a consumerist one, on the other. Yet the figure of the display window emerges in the writings of Jean Baudrillard to suggest a fundamental incompatibility between the society of the spectacle (implying as it does the delineation between spectator and spectacle, and the possibility of a position—however illusory—of contemplation) and the postmodern culture of flow (implying the erosion of any possible boundary between spectator and spectacle):

There is no longer mirror or looking-glass in the modern order, where man encounters his image, for better or worse; there is only the display window— a geometric site of consumption, where the individual is no longer a reflection of himself, but rather is absorbed in the contemplation of a multiplication of objects/ signs, in the order of signifiers of social status, etc. He no longer sees a reflection of himself there, rather he is absorbed and abolished by it. The subject of consumption is the order of signs.³

Baudrillard’s distinction between a society of the spectacle and a society of the simulacra—between contemplation and consumption of images and texts as discrete activities, versus the endless and continuous production of images so that any delineation of “spectacle” or “spectator” is impossible—argues for a radical break between the two different cultures of the image. In cinematic terms, this break reads as a firm and clear distinction between the classical cinema on the one hand, and the cinema of postmodernism on the other (although the very logic Baudrillard describes would make it impossible to isolate the cinema as a discrete form). Such a rigid distinction obscures the extent to which the classical cinema is never so absolutely or exclusively caught up in the myths of narrative causality, and the postmodern never so completely detached from those myths.

Despite Baudrillard’s distinctions between spectacle and simulacra, the term spectacle has also become a shorthand term for the particular way in which film embodies the postmodern—the fascination with pure surface, with the mixture of signifiers from radically different contexts, with moments of rupture and dislocation of conventional narrative and representational forms. As Dana Polan puts it, “what spectacle particularly aspires to is exactly that post-modern discrediting of significance for the sake of signifiance, in Kristeva’s sense of the term. Spectacle jettisons a need for narrative myths and opts for an attitude in which the only tenable position seems to be the reveling in the fictiveness of one’s own fictive acts.”⁴ In Eckert’s account, there is little to suggest that incorporation of consumerist modes into the cinema violates the narrative conventions of cause and effect, linearity, and binary oppositions that have come to be known as constitutive of the “classical Hollywood cinema.” However, the association of cinematic spectacle with the postmodern would appear to suggest just the opposite—that spectacle diminishes the importance of the narrative codes of causality, linearity, and rhyming opposition.

This apparent divergence of meaning in the term spectacle is problematic if one assumes that the self-conscious display and parading of artifice typical of the postmodern is necessarily contestatory, radical, or otherwise profoundly critical of so-called dominant forms. Otherwise, the ambivalent associations of the notion of the cinematic spectacle are useful reminders that the “spectacle” of the cinema refers simultaneously to consumerist practices that are naturalized by the conventions of the classical Hollywood cinema, or, conversely, which exercise their own power to denaturalize those very conventions. In either case, the effects of spectacle cannot be measured in terms of pure “form” (if there is any such thing), that is, cannot be adequately understood in the exclusive terms of techniques, be they the apparently seamless narrative devices of classical Hollywood films or the more defamiliarized strategies (direct address to the audience, self-conscious style, etc.) of music video, late-night television, performance art, or other postmodern forms. For whether cinematic spectacle is naturalized or self-proclamatory, whether it is embedded within narrative structures or deliriously detached from them, it assumes the equation between the film spectator and the consumer.

Not all definitions of the spectacle of cinema are so firmly entrenched in the equation with advertising and consumerism, however. The cinema has been described more than once as the realization of an ancient dream, or nightmare, depending upon your point of view. For André Bazin, cinema was the materialization of the idealist fantasy to imitate reality so perfectly that the spectator enjoyed a closer relationship to reality than was possible in everyday experience outside the movie theater. For other contemporary theorists—Jean-Louis Baudry in particular—cinema is better described as the actualization of the metaphor of Plato’s cave, with spectators so unquestionably passive that they are incapable of distinguishing between what is on the screen and what lies beyond it, or more precisely, incapable of separating perception from representation.⁵

Put another way, the cinematic spectacle as defined by Baudry may be susceptible to particular historical determinations because of its parallels with advertising and with the structures of consumerism. But in his account, “spectacle” is defined in a far more pervasive and embedded way, crossed by the ideological and psychic determinants of Western subjectivity. If the term spectacle lends itself simultaneously to definitions of cinema as part of the culture of consumerism (whether subservient to the codes of narrative, as in Eckert’s account, or more associated with the postmodern, as in Polan’s), and as shaped by the centuries-old formation of the “Western subject,” one might begin to sense that it is a term too general, too lacking in precision, to be of much use. This is not to say, however, that the language of spectacle has outlived its usefulness in describing the cinema, but rather that the term spectacle has tended, in film studies, to get lost in a sea of generalities.

Nevertheless the identification of cinema as spectacle evokes at least one common thread: the objectifying qualities of the cinematic institution, whether in the images offered as products to be consumed or in the positions of identification offered as participation in an imaginary world. Defined within the broad terms of bourgeois subjectivity as they have emerged since the Renaissance, or in the narrower historical terms of the culture of consumerism, notions of the cinematic spectacle assume a spectator who is held, contained, and regulated by the mechanisms of the cinematic apparatus, a spectator who is passive. While Eckert discusses the female viewer as the ideal spectator for motion pictures, an analogue to the female consumer pursued by advertising, the gendered contours of film spectacle have received more careful attention in the most specific terms, that is, when the notion of “spectacle” is appropriated to analyze the textual workings of individual films. Indeed, if there is any single notion which underlies virtually all feminist analyses of the dominant cinema, it is that of the film as spectacle, and more specifically, of the woman as object of spectacle. But in discussions of individual films, “spectacle” loses something of the equation with consumerism, particularly insofar as the female subject is concerned. For the equation between film and spectacle has been used to describe the ideal spectator of film as male and the typical object of spectacle as female.

In Laura Mulvey’s account of visual pleasure in film, the ideal psychic trajectory of the classical cinema involves the interweaving of spectacle and narrative. Within individual films there are numerous effects of spectacle, the most obvious of which occur in the musical, whether in the way in which the narrative is frequently subservient to performance, or in the overall preoccupation with theatricality and staging.⁶ In a more general way, most classical films create spectacles by defining objects of the look—whether the look of the camera or of protagonists within the film—so as to stage their quality of what Mulvey calls, referring specifically to the female object of the look, their “to-be-looked-at-ness.” The staging can occur through the literal representation of performances on stage, to scenes staged against the background of doorways or windows, with attendant performancelike effects.

The spectacle effect which has received the most critical attention, however, is the practice of systematized looks and gazes in the cinema that define the structures of editing and the creation of point of view, particularly insofar as the spectator is “sutured” into a trajectory of narrative and visual desire.⁷ It has become commonplace to note that however diverse the manifestations of spectacle in the cinema, they are all—sooner or later—about men looking at women. In Mulvey’s words, the classical cinema puts forth man as bearer of the look, woman as its object.⁸ In this way, the cinema is evocative of what John Berger describes, in his study of the female nude in Western oil painting, as the sexual dichotomy separating the male spectator from the “surveyed female,” that is, the woman defined as object of the male gaze. According to Berger, “Women are depicted in a quite different way from men—not because the feminine is different from the masculine—but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.”⁹

Yet there remains the nagging question of the fit between the textual structures of individual films and the cinema as cultural institution—between, that is, spectacle as a convenient term to describe how the various forms of the mise-en-scène of the look in cinema are shaped by the gap between the male subject and the female object, and spectacle as an equally convenient term to suggest how the cinema functions in a historical context shaped by the emergence of the Western subject (Baudry) or the emergence of consumerism (Eckert). The question nags in two ways. First, one might assume that despite the reluctance of theorists such as Baudry to address head-on the gendered component of bourgeois subjectivity (e.g., the fact that the ideal subject he describes is the male subject), this is a reluctance easily corrected by feminism.¹⁰ In other words, all one need do is add “male” to the list of attributes that define Baudry’s cinematic spectator, and the case is easily made for feminism that one large, continuous, unbroken narrative links the subject of Renaissance painting to the subject of psychoanalysis to the subject of the cinema.

Charlotte Bunch has commented on the limitations of what she calls the “add women and stir” syndrome—that is, the tendency to assume that theories of social formation from which women have been absent will nonetheless continue to be valid once women are fit into existing categories of “worker,” and so on.¹¹ While theories of the cinematic apparatus that exclude questions of gender and sexual difference can obviously be useful for their symptomatic status, it is not altogether clear how successful the strategy of “adding women” (or, more appropriate in this case, adding “the feminine”) can be. Second, Eckert’s designation of the ideal consumer as a woman would seem to conflict somewhat with those notions of sexual hierarchy in the cinema according to which the subject is always male, the object always female. To be sure, just because the woman is identified as a consumer does not necessarily mean she is any less an object, and according to Berger’s vocabulary, the woman who buys always buys a representation of herself as the “surveyed female.” So there is yet another easy feminist way out of the apparent paradox of the female consumer, this time by insisting upon yet another continuous seamless narrative, now one in which any appeals to the woman as subject are always false appeals, and in which her status as object is firm and absolute.

Commenting on the paradox between woman as (consuming) subject and woman as (consumed) object, Mary Ann Doane has observed that the tension is “only apparently contradictory.” The paradox leads Doane to “rethinking the absoluteness of the dichotomy between subject and object which informs much feminist thinking and analyzing the ways in which the woman is encouraged to actively participate in her own oppression.”¹² While Doane’s criticism of a feminist tendency to dichotomize subject and object is well taken, an analysis of how “the woman is encouraged to participate in her own oppression” can also affirm the dichotomy. For what is at stake is the inevitable consolidation of female subjectivity with female oppression, with the firm duality of the male subject and the female object. While I do not want to undermine the ways in which female consumerism does affirm the woman-as-object, I want nonetheless to suggest that the challenge to facile dichotomous thinking must also involve an examination of ways in which the language of spectacle—the language, that is, of the firm separation between the male subject of the look and the female object of the look—is not necessarily sufficient to analyze all of the spectacular effects of the cinematic apparatus.

Given the extent to which contemporary film theory has defined (implicitly or explicitly) “the subject” as fully consonant with patriarchal male authority, an obvious task for feminist theorists of the cinema has been to rearticulate the absolute division of subject and object to account for how women assume positions of desire and identification with the cinema, whether as spectators or as filmmakers. The focal point of most analyses of the subject in film has been the ubiquitous gaze, and virtually every exploration of women’s relationship to the cinema has returned to Laura Mulvey’s designation of the cinematic gaze as male by addressing and/or reformulating the question raised by E. Ann Kaplan in the first chapter of her book on women and film: “Is the gaze male?”¹³

Subsequent attempts to retheorize the gaze have covered a wide territory. There has been a “return to Freud” in this context, but one which departs significantly from Lacan’s famous return to Freud, in an attempt to rethink Lacanian categories as they have emerged in film studies. While Lacanian critics have debated extensively whether it is possible to read the modalities of desire in the strictly polarized terms of male versus female, in film studies Lacan’s analyses of the gaze and the construction of the divided self have been read as necessarily complicitous with the duality of the male gaze and the female object of the gaze. Some critics have thus “returned to Freud” to articulate a pleasure in the gaze that resides in bisexuality rather than rigid sexual difference, and which would then account, not only for how women respond to the cinema but also for how the pleasures of the gaze (male or female) follow an itinerary much more complex than that of the voyeuristic/fetishistic control of the female body.¹⁴

Mary Ann Doane and Laura Mulvey—two of the theorists whose models of the colonization of the woman by the regime of male scopic authority have been so influential—have also theorized a kind of oscillation whereby the gaze remains “male” but is assumed by the female spectator as a disguise, whether in the form of transvestism (Mulvey) or masquerade (Doane).¹⁵ Noting that “Freud conceived of femininity and masculinity primarily in narrative rather than visual terms,” Teresa de Lauretis has reread the intertwining paths of spectacle and narrative in Mulvey’s account, noting that narrative offers a “double identification with the figure of narrative movement, the mythical subject, and with the figure of narrative closure, the narrative image. Were it not for the possibility of this second, figural identification, the woman spectator would be stranded between two incommensurable entities, the gaze and the image.”¹⁶ The necessary movement of narrative complicates, then, the relatively simplistic hierarchy of the gaze that has tended to dominate discussions of the “look” in film.

De Lauretis’s insistence that spectacle and narrative do not necessarily make for a seamless fit brings to mind another theorist whose work has also sought to demonstrate that the classical Hollywood cinema is made absolutely and perfectly to the model of male desire. While some feminists have found Raymond Bellour’s analyses of the classical Hollywood cinema a kind of ideal companion to Mulvey’s critique, others have been less enthusiastic.¹⁷ Indeed, much feminist work of the last decade or so has been a response to the assumptions inherent in both Mulvey’s and Bellour’s work. Consider, in this context, an essay by Bellour which reiterates the monolithic structures of male oedipal desire in the classical Hollywood cinema. Bellour’s analysis of segment of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep might be taken as one relatively straightforward critical statement of the function of woman as the object of spectacle, and of the necessary fit between that objectification and the narrative development of the film.

The scene analyzed in detail by Bellour occurs near the conclusion of the film. Philip Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge (Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) leave one house to return to another, the scene of the crime. A brief dialogue takes place in a car, and seals the relationship between the man and the woman. Now they are working in unison, on the same side, and they declare their love for each other. Bellour shows how the alternation of two-shots and close-ups, and the differentiation of sound and image match, create a fundamental difference between Philip Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge. Bellour’s analysis is surely an important corrective to the reputation Howard Hawks has acquired, particularly because of films such as Bringing up Baby (1938), as a portrayer of emancipated women. As Bellour argues,

The well-known independence and initiative of Hawks’ heroines brings to certain of his couples—and to none more than to The Big Sleep—the slightly legendary character of a relationship of adult reciprocity. But this is only achieved through the codified marks which, in this instance, make it the woman whose magnified face simultaneously and wholly expresses and receives the admission of love.¹⁸

The Big Sleep is an interesting film to read in terms of cinema-as-spectacle, particularly insofar as its legendary incomprehensibility of plot is concerned (Hawks claimed he could never figure out the story, and Chandler described his novel as “more interested in people than in plot”).¹⁹ Despite that incomprehensibility—or even perhaps because of it—the film is quite readable within the conventions of the classical Hollywood cinema. And the film appears to be situated firmly within the confines of patriarchal ideology, containing many of the elements central to representation governed by sexual hierarchy—a male protagonist hired by a father figure, one mysterious woman and another disturbed one (eventually resolving in the stereotypical good girl/bad girl dichotomy), heterosexual romance.

From the very beginning of The Big Sleep, a system of difference is put into place, and it draws, in a dramatic way, upon the tensions between seeing and being seen, subject and object, male and female, that feminist critics have identified as central to the mechanisms of the classical Hollywood cinema. The film opens as Marlowe enters the Sternwood mansion for an appointment with the General, father of Vivian and Carmen. As he is led by the butler toward the adjacent greenhouse where the General awaits him, Marlowe’s path is intersected by a woman, the General’s daughter Carmen; and when he leaves the greenhouse after his discussion with the General, his departure is delayed, this time by Vivian Rutledge’s request (conveyed by the butler) to see him in her room. Thus any direct path leading to and from the father is interrupted by the daughters. The interruption is marked by setting off each of the two sisters as an object of spectacle, in a process very similar to what Bellour describes in the later scene. There are full close-ups of the women, while Marlowe is clearly and obviously designated as the subject, the spectator-within-the-film to whom those close-ups are directed, and who thus functions as a kind of stand-in for the spectator in the movie theater.

Marlowe’s discussion with the father, wedged between the two encounters with women, is, in sharp contrast, a paragon of symmetry. The two men are portrayed from similar vantage points, at similar distances, and in an unbroken rhythm. A close-up of one man is always matched by a close-up of the other, an over-the shoulder shot of one by a similar shot of the other, and so on. Marlowe’s discussion with the General occupies much more screen time than the two encounters with women that frame that discussion. The General introduces himself to Marlowe as a man who is “crippled, paralyzed in both legs. I can barely eat and my sleep is so near waking that it’s hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.” This self-described “survivor of a very gaudy life” seems initially to have little resemblance to Marlowe. However, in the course of their discussion, a sense of identification between the two men emerges. When Marlowe describes how his former career in the district attorney’s office ended when he was fired for insubordination (“I seem to rate pretty high on that”), General Sternwood remarks on their similarities (“I always did myself’). Sternwood refers to Shaun Regan—a central figure in Raymond Chandler’s novel who becomes but a shadow in the film—as the man who formerly occupied the seat now occupied by Marlowe.²⁰ Sternwood says that Regan “sat there with me sweating like a pig, drinking the brandy I could no longer drink and telling stories of the Irish revolution.” Marlowe may not tell stories of the Irish revolution, but he certainly is sweating, and an affinity between Marlowe and the absent Shaun is affirmed.

While Marlowe slides neatly into the patterns of male bonding and friendship, his relations with women, as introduced by the encounters with the two sisters, are marked by confusion and mystery. The ostensible motivation for Marlowe’s visit is that Sternwood is being blackmailed by Geiger, for reasons having to do with his daughter Carmen. It is up to Marlowe to get rid of the Geiger problem. Sternwood’s older daughter, Vivian, is somewhat more mysterious, since at the time of Marlowe’s discussion with the General, she has been spoken about but not yet seen on screen. Marlowe can respond to the General’s description of Carmen by recalling her attempt to “sit on my lap while I was standing up.” Of Vivian, however, he can only ask a question, one that will be asked again and again throughout the film: “Your other daughter, Mrs. Rutledge. She mixed up in this?”

The beginning of the film functions as a matrix, for over and over again in The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe’s access to the father’s room, the site of patriarchal authority, is diverted by a woman. This is a concrete example of Laura Mulvey’s description of how “[woman’s] visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.” Mulvey goes on to say, “This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative.”²¹ This is precisely what occurs in the scene described by Bellour. No longer does the woman occupy an “antechamber,” that is, a hallway in the case of Carmen Sternwood, a bedroom in the case of Vivian Rutledge, a room adjacent to the space of patriarchal authority, and which threatens to upset its balance. And despite the complex twists and turns of the plot of The Big Sleep, the sequence analyzed by Bellour does respond to the question Marlowe asks of the General—“Your other daughter, Mrs. Rutledge. She mixed up in this?”

But it is also worth noting that there is more information provided in the scene analyzed by Bellour than the declaration of love. Something very fundamental is explained. Vivian was attempting all along to protect her younger sister Carmen from blackmail and from prison. The relationship between the two sisters is spoken and alluded to, but rarely are they seen together in the same frame. In fact, only twice in the film do the sisters appear in frame together, and in both instances Carmen is posed as a threat to the nascent relationship between Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge.

Early in the film, Marlowe discovers Carmen in a drugged state at Geiger’s home, and proceeds to bring her home to the Sternwood mansion. When Vivian sees her unconscious sister, she asks Marlowe if he “did this.” With Carmen unconscious and quite literally in the background, the scene focuses on the exchange between Marlowe and Vivian, recalling both narratively and structurally the initial encounter between them. Carmen reappears within the frame as Marlowe leaves the room; Carmen lies on Vivian’s bed, and she and Vivian are framed by the camera. In the earlier conversation between Marlowe and Vivian, the bed figured almost comically in the background as the return of the repressed. Here, the figure of Carmen prone suggests most obviously the possibility that she may be in competition with her sister for the other half of the love relationship; but it suggests the return of a far deeper repressed as well—a bond between two women from which Marlowe may be excluded.²²

Later in the film, the only other instance where the two women appear in the same scene, Carmen enters an apartment occupied by Marlowe and Vivian. But it is only when the women exit the apartment that they are seen in the same frame, and Carmen is quite literally concealed from full view, as she wears a hood and exits with her back to the camera. A telling exchange during this scene establishes briefly a shot-reverse shot between Carmen and Vivian, although while Vivian looks at Carmen, Carmen speaks to Marlowe. Read one way, this “false” shot-reverse shot suggests that the relationship between the two women is significant only insofar as the relationship to the signifying authority of the man is concerned, but read another way, the scene suggests a disturbance in the field of male-female relationships. If, as Bellour suggests, The Big Sleep moves toward a resolution defined by a rigid sexual hierarchy, there nonetheless seems to be a strain in that resolution from the pressure of a possible revelation of the bond between two women.

For anyone acquainted with the history of contemporary film theory, a phrase such as “a strain from the pressure” is a familiar cliche, for it recalls the ways in which film theory and criticism in the 1970s were shaped by the central notion of symptomatic readings of the classical Hollywood cinema. The editors of Cahiers du cinéma, borrowing from Louis Althusser, described such readings as follows:

[There are] films which seem at first sight to belong firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous manner. . . . If one reads the film obliquely, looking for symptoms; if one looks beyond its apparent formal coherence, one can see that it is riddled with cracks: it is splitting under an internal tension which is simply not there in an ideologically innocuous film. . . ²³

That such an exposure of the repressed of classical film narrative should be appealing for feminist criticism is obvious, allowing as it does the pleasure of contradiction to substitute for the pleasure of dismissal and disavowal.

Yet however great the appeal of the return of the repressed, those so-called ideologically innocuous films, to which I might oppose a film such as The Big Sleep, are curious entities. Does the opposition between “ideologically innocuous” and “riddled with cracks” then suggest that in the majority of films, woman is firmly and simply objectified as spectacle in a straightforward way? Then there are other, exceptional films—usually, one might add cynically, films which the critic likes too much to dump in the trash can of dominant ideology—in which there is a “partial dismantlement of the system from within.”²⁴ A rigid and peculiar opposition is implied here, between those films that are completely contained by ideology and those that are resistant to it. Even “ideologically innocuous” films are often characterized not so much by a regurgitation of patriarchal ideals as by an ambivalence toward them, so that it is difficult to know when a film ceases to be “innocuous.”

It is unclear as well just what constitutes the critical potential of other films; often it appears to be ambivalence, but ambivalence is no guarantee of “dismantlement,” partial or otherwise.²⁵ Yet in Bellour’s analysis of The Big Sleep, there is no room for such ambiguity, but only for the straightforward affirmation of man as center of the cinematic narrative. I do not question that The Big Sleep is thoroughly imbued with the ideology of patriarchy and its attendant ramifications for the representation of woman. I do question, however, whether this particular film—and perhaps any example of the classical Hollywood cinema—can be so totally, uniformly, and univocally described as contained by patriarchy. My point is neither to “rescue” the classical Hollywood cinema for feminism, nor to affirm ambiguity as an inherently radical or progressive gesture. If women’s cinema entertains an ambivalent relationship to the Hollywood cinema, if women filmmakers engage in what Lucy Fischer describes as an “intertextual dialogue with their male counterparts,” then it is crucial to see that relationship in its complexity, and not as a series of variations on the same themes of voyeurism and fetishism, sadism and masochism.²⁶

Two different positions vis-à-vis the classical Hollywood cinema emerge in this context, both of which have been claimed by feminists. From one perspective, it is crucial to take into account the capacity of the classical Hollywood cinema to subsume every kind of difference into the hierarchy of sexual polarity—hence, the repressed relation between the two sisters in The Big Sleep can never be, within classical narrative cinema, any more than a brief eruption, a momentary disturbance.²⁷ But from another perspective, the momentary disturbances within a film speak to larger tensions and contradictions within classical film narrative that may well be submerged by patterns of crisis and resolution, but which suggest nonetheless that the ideology of patriarchy contains gaps and tensions which are as significant for feminism as the more explicit effects of patriarchy. This second position seems the more productive one insofar as the rethinking of the “absoluteness of the dichotomy between subject and object” (Doane) is concerned. However, the affirmation of these disruptions and tensions can involve a romanticization of marginality, and the attendant assumption that alternative positions exist, within the classical Hollywood cinema, wherever one wishes them to.

Analyses of the classical Hollywood cinema that refer only to homogeneity and hierarchy, on the one hand, or to heterogeneity and disruption, on the other, lose sight of the complex ways in which cinema functions both to legitimatize the patriarchal status quo and, if not necessarily to challenge it, then at the very least to suggest its weak links, its own losses of mastery, within which may be found possibilities or hypotheses of alternative positions. There is a great risk in arguing for this “both/and,” since the insistence upon competing ideological and representational levels can fall into either a vague pluralism (whereby incompatibility and conflict are transformed into peaceful, boring coexistence) or a naive ambiguity (whereby the competing levels become rallying points for a quivering oscillation that effectively denies the political ramifications of patriarchal hegemony). If it is crucial to maintain a tension between the two functions of hegemony and contradiction, and to examine their interrelationships, it is equally important to examine how that tension is constructed within criticism and theory.

One site at which the monolithic and contradictory effects of the classical cinema intersect in The Big Sleep is in the simultaneous evocation of the male-female couple as the resolution toward which classical Hollywood cinema moves, and the sisterly bond as the obstacle, however momentary, to that resolution. Does the brief allusion to, and subsequent repression of, the relationship between the two sisters have enough signifying power in the film to constitute a position from which to read The Big Sleep symptomatically? Does the relationship between the two women function as the feared underside of the relationship between two other likes, the father and the surrogate son? In a film in which so many plot strands are left unconnected, is there a compelling reason to isolate this particular bit of undeveloped motivation as more significant than any others?

The special significance of the relationship between the two women could be argued on a variety of levels. In a film which takes as its principal means of rereading the Chandler novel the relationship between its costars Bogart and Bacall, lovers in “real life,” as it were, the way in which that relationship is constructed, as well as the gaps in that construction (of which the bond between the two sisters is one example), will have particular signifying weight. But if the relationship between the two women could be the basis for a feminist symptomatic reading of The Big Sleep, the very possibility of such a reading needs to be approached critically.

For instance, one could demonstrate how one of the most conventional aspects of the classical cinema, a man and woman in love, is produced against the backdrop of the excessive visibility of the father and the accompanying invisibility of the mother, of the maternal, and of female-to-female connection. But to identify the missing maternal element in the film is, already, to assume an empty space that may be repressed by the film, but is also created by it. Put another way, such a feminist reading falls into the trap of what Luce Irigaray calls the “old dream of symmetry,” for it assumes—rather than challenges—the patriarchal logic of the film, whereby if men together replicate father-son relationships, then relationships between women must fall into the symmetrical other half.²⁸ But then again—the cycle continues—empty spaces may be spaces created by the text, but they are still empty, and an insistence on “filling them up” can have the effect of upsetting the logocentric hierarchy of presence and absence.

I would like to pursue the significance of the relationship between the two women in a slightly different direction. The relationship between Vivian and Carmen suggests a mirroring relationship between two likes, but which never attains any kind of visual authority in the film. The very repression of the relationship between the two sisters invites the hypothesis of similarly forbidden relationships between other, male likes. The Big Sleep entertains more than a passing preoccupation with the tensions of sexual identity, particularly insofar as male homosexuality is concerned. Geiger’s homosexuality in Raymond Chandler’s novel was one of several elements immediately censored when the screenplay for the film was begun. Annette Kuhn has argued that while censorship is usually understood as pure elimination, it is read more compellingly as a productive process, particularly insofar as censored elements do not necessarily disappear, but rather return with the force of the repressed.

Thus, Kuhn notes, Geiger’s house acquires some of the same characteristics of degenerate sexuality associated with the hothouse where Marlowe first meets the General. Noting that Geiger’s house is “shadowy, closed-in, cluttered and messy,” “the site . . . of mystery and enigma,” Kuhn writes: “The mise-en-scène of Geiger’s house figures in the film as a discourse across which may be read a series of displaced and condensed representations of an underlying and unexpressed perversity or menace in the area of sexuality.”²⁹ Kuhn’s analysis focuses on Geiger’s house as a privileged site in the film, where mise-en-scène articulates implicitly what is repressed on the level of narrative. Kuhn notes that the “menace” in the area of sexuality is read in relationship to women as well as “perversity” (“the disturbance in the area of sexuality . . . involves not only homosexuality and heterosexual promiscuity, but female sexuality as well”).³⁰ I want to suggest that the disturbance of which Kuhn speaks erupts in another context as well, in the formulation of spectacle and the attendant structure of the look—a disturbance which is more appropriately described as “homotextual” than “homosexual.”³¹

The repressed (female) homotextuality of The Big Sleep finds its echo in another form of homotextuality which creates another “scene,” another organization of visual and narrative desire, in the film. Woman becomes an object of spectacle in The Big Sleep to complicate but ultimately to facilitate the private detective’s access to the various sites signifying patriarchal authority, first represented by the greenhouse in the opening section of the film. This spatial representation of patriarchal authority takes on various guises in the film, from the back room of Geiger’s bookstore to Eddie Mars’s office in his club. Yet traces of a resistance to this facilitating role remain in the utterance of the relationship between two women. These narrative gestures of utterance and repression are echoed more emphatically in the traces of another kind of spectacle—that is, different from how the use of shot-reverse shot and close-ups identifies woman as the object of spectacle—that occupies a curious place in the film, a place that has an affinity with the homotextuality involving the two sisters. Marlowe repeats obsessively the itinerary introduced at the beginning of the film as he moves from one room to another. Woman represents a difficulty of access, a diversion, an obstacle, before she is contained within the conventions of Hollywood romance.

In a striking and somewhat unusual scene in the film, Marlowe’s movement from one room to another is obstructed by a male presence. Harry Jones (Elisha Cook, Jr.) offers Marlowe information on the whereabouts of Eddie Mars’s wife in exchange for a fee. When Marlowe arrives at the office in a deserted building where he has agreed to meet Jones, he overhears voices and sneaks into an adjacent office. Hence the distinctive spatial architecture of the film, where the primary room (like the greenhouse in the opening scene of the film) is connected to an antechamber (like the hall at the beginning of the film), is repeated in this scene. From his vantage point in the “antechamber,” Marlowe can hear the voices of Canino, one of Eddie Mars’s men, and Jones. The scene of what becomes another crime, the poisoning of Jones, is only partially visible through a door left ajar. Shadows of the men are visible, however, through a frosted window in the wall (Figure 1). The obstruction of vision marks the private detective’s inability to act, his impotence.³² A screen, of sorts, separates Marlowe from a room. This is a threshold which cannot be crossed, but through which light and shadow and voices are distinguishable.

This screen surface recalls the credits sequence prior to the beginning of the film proper, where we see shadow images, silhouettes of Bogart and Bacall smoking (Figure 2). One movement, one itinerary in The Big Sleep fleshes out that credits image—that is, endows the star personae of Bogart and Bacall with their fictional roles, and complicates those roles within the context of the developing narrative and visual structures of the film.³³ But first, other possibilities are tested against the first image of the couple—notably, Marlowe and Carmen, particularly in the opening sequence of the film in the Sternwood mansion (Figure 3). The successful resolution of the film is indicated by a two-shot of the couple, Philip Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge, now in a perfect match with the first image (Figure 4).

The credits image initiates another, more subtle movement as well. For this image also contains an opaque screen. The screen may be defined as a surface on which to project skeletal images of the film’s stars and the attendant promise that they will be quite literally fleshed out, but it also functions as a barrier, a boundary line to be transgressed. The function of spectacle in The Big Sleep has two components, both indicated in this credits image. First, and following the argument of Bellour, the screenlike image can be complemented only by its more realistic, detailed counterpart, the two-shot of Marlowe and Vivian at the film’s conclusion, once Marlowe has become “bearer of the look,” that is, once the formula of male subject and female object has been articulated. Second, spectacle in The Big Sleep suggests every bit as forcefully the threshold that separates two spaces, and the opacity of the screen.

These two components correspond roughly to the two different perspectives on the classical Hollywood cinema to which I have alluded: the one emphasizing cinematic spectacle as the insistence on separation and hierarchy, and the other emphasizing spectacle as the difficulty of that insistence, spectacle as a set of boundaries that are simultaneously omnipresent and permeable. In narrative terms, the former involves the heterosexual romance solidified in the union of Vivian and Marlowe, and the latter the various complications that make that union difficult, “dense”—Vivian’s bond with her sister, Marlowe’s positions of impotence, the “remnants” of homosexuality in the film. While the relationship between the two women functions primarily as a negative presence, temporarily complicating the emergence of the male-female couple, the impotence of Marlowe not only is visualized but affords the representation of another “scene,” the opacity of the threshold that separates him and Jones. These screens in The Big Sleep are figures not only of spectacle (there is virtually no such thing as “pure” spectacle in the classical Hollywood cinema, given the mediated quality of the image) but rather of the intersection of spectacle and narrative. For the screen is both surface and passageway, mirror and obstacle. Cinematic spectacle is, certainly, the fixing of the image of woman, with the accompanying narrative movement of penetrating the father’s room. But spectacle is also a relation to a screen, fixed as unattainable on the other side of a door, embedded in a narrative movement that is thwarted, stopped at the threshold.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Critics such as Noël Burch have suggested that many films from the “primitive” era function to act out what would become repressed or contained by the devices of the classical cinema, and Marlowe’s relationship to the frosted window makes for an interesting fit with another, “primitive” image of a spectator’s relationship to a screen, a relationship that plays on the double function of the screen as both surface and threshold.³⁴ In Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), a naive spectator visits the cinema for the first time. A variety of transactions occur between his box and the screen during the screening of the three films-within-the-film. After the last film, entitled A Country Couple, begins, Uncle Josh tears down the screen, imagining that he can enter the fictional world on screen; instead, he confronts the rear-projectionist, and the film concludes with a tussle between them.

Uncle Josh transgresses the space separating screen from audience. Transgression may be too strong a word, however, for in a sense Uncle Josh is—despite his naiveté—an ideal film viewer. In other words, what filmgoing promises is, precisely, transgression of the boundary line separating two spheres.³⁵ The two spaces in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show are not identical to the adjoining rooms that shape Philip Marlowe’s quest, but they are similar. The first two films that Josh sees are A Parisian Dancer, in which a woman dances and flounces her skirt, and along with which Josh dances on stage, and The Black Diamond Express, a variation on the famous 1895 Lumiere brothers short L’Arrivée d’un train en gare, which shows a train arriving at a station, and which elicits a terrified reaction from Josh. These two films set the stage for the reaction that will follow. The third film, The Country Couple, shows a man and a woman engaged in what appears to be slapstick. It is only when a man and a woman appear on screen that Uncle Josh is ready to get inside of the image. An image of a dancing woman may be seductive, and an image of a train thrilling, but they simply oil the machinery that A Country Couple sets into motion.

Over forty years separate Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show and The Big Sleep. But common to both films is a preoccupation with the relationship between a male protagonist and an ambivalent screen surface, a relationship that is foregrounded in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show and submerged by other details of narrative and visual structure in The Big Sleep. The value in moving from a classical narrative film such as The Big Sleep to an early, “primitive” film such as Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show lies in untangling further the strands of spectacle within narrative, and in identifying spectacle not just as the imposition of a rigid separation between subject and object, but also as the fantasy of submerged boundaries. Like many other early films, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show offers a rudimentary story which functions as a primal scene of the cinema, telling a story based on the cinema’s own power to affect and move its spectators.³⁶

Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show does not conclude, as well it might have, with Uncle Josh overcome and overwhelmed by the crumpled screen. Instead, Uncle Josh confronts the rear-projectionist and his machine. Talk about primal scenes of the cinema! If there is something of lifting a woman’s skirts suggested by Uncle Josh’s reaction to the screen—as the flouncing dress of the dancer surely suggests—then the projectionist appears precisely in order to block any sight of what might be concealed beneath those skirts. At the same time, the projectionist is defined as a puppeteer, the man behind the illusion. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show stresses the importance of the threshold in cinema, the crossing over, the movement from one space to another. The rear-projectionist re-marks the separation which the film had fancifully put into question. Philip Marlowe is a more sophisticated version of Uncle Josh, a spectator who conceals, or represses, his shock and surprise at the screen presence as he moves from one room to another.

In both films, the figures behind the screen, the rear-projectionist and the father and his stand-ins, are narrating authorities. They have a double-edged quality. On one level, they assure and maintain the position of the spectator-within-the-film—in Uncle Josh’s case by providing entertaining images, and in Marlowe’s by giving him the authority to conduct an investigation. At the same time they threaten to disrupt his authority—in Uncle Josh’s case by revealing the machine behind the illusion, and in Marlowe’s case by setting into motion a series of spectacles controlled by other figures of male authority. In this most obvious sense, both of these films do conform to the logic of oedipal desire and authority. However, the screen surface in both films marks the possibility of a desire where the boundaries between identification and objectification are no longer clear.

The implications of the screen and a narrating presence are further developed in another film which stands in between Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show and The Big Sleep—that is, as a film which is neither “primitive” nor classical, and which brings another dynamic of otherness to bear on the relationship between spectator and scene, that of race. Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat (1915) tells the story of a wealthy society woman who loses a large sum of money and accepts what appears to be the only solution available to her—a loan from an Asian businessman, the condition of which is that she sleep with him. The film’s intrigue is based on two systems that work across the female body. The one, Western, is based on money and located in the “smart set” of Long Island. The other, Asian, is based on an icon of ownership, an Oriental character literally branded onto all the belongings of an Asian ivory merchant, whom the film describes as the “rage” among the “smart set.”

Central to this intrigue is a privileged space, a room in the Asian man’s house where the branding takes place. It is filled with the accoutrements of exoticism, including burning incense and a Buddha. Two surfaces set off the boundaries of the room: a sliding door on one side, and a sliding translucent screen on the other. A love triangle forms the basis of the plot of the film. The Asian merchant desires the woman, wife of a wealthy businessman. She is inside the room with the Asian man when she discovers the loss of a large sum of money which she had “borrowed” from her club’s treasury and invested unsuccessfully. She collapses. The Asian man takes her outside the room and, while reviving her, makes advances to her (Figure 5). Suddenly the lights go on inside the room, and two shadows appear on the screen (Figure 6). The woman’s husband and another man are discussing money. The woman discovers that she will not be able to use her husband’s money to replace the club’s treasury, for he tells his friend that his funds are completely tied up. Thus this shadow theater confirms the woman’s acceptance of an offer made by the Asian man, to exchange money for sexual favors.

The screen marks a curious threshold between interior and exterior space, between sex and money, between East and West. The threshold separates, yet some projection still exists. Later in the film, the woman comes upon a sum of money (her husband’s investment has paid off). She returns to the room of the Asian man’s house to pay back his money and hopefully to get out of their bargain. He wants nothing of it. She resists his advances, and he brands her with the same iron, the same icon of ownership, that he uses for his other “possessions.” She shoots him and leaves. The husband, suspicious of his wife’s departure, has followed her to the Asian man’s house. He stands before the translucent screen, the same threshold on the other side of which he had been seen by his wife in the earlier scene. Now, another shadow, that of the Asian man, is projected on the screen, but with a significant difference—blood seeps through the translucent material. The husband tears down the screen and bursts into the room to find the wounded Asian man now crumpled on the floor.

Figure 5

Figure 6

The violence of tearing down the screen becomes the mirror image of the violence done to the body of the woman, with its obvious implications of rape. The woman’s body becomes, precisely, a screen surface. In tearing down the screen, the husband acts on behalf of Western civilization and white womanhood. And like Uncle Josh, he too wants to get inside the image. For the Asian man is a puppeteer, a manipulator of light and shadow. He is a narrating presence who, on one side of the screen, disperses his marks of possession, and, on the other side, interprets a shadow theater to his benefit. The projectionist in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show now acquires the sign of otherness and exoticism.

When the husband bursts through the screen in The Cheat, a chain of events begins which will conclude in a court of law. The Asian man’s narrative authority is stripped away as the woman rushes to the front of the courtroom to display her wound to the shocked spectators. His narrative power and authority are thus undermined by her spectacular display. Her husband had claimed responsibility for the shooting. In order to protect his wife’s reputation, he offers no reasons as to why he might have committed the act. Her display functions as her gesture of devotion to her husband, who is acquitted, while an angry mob descends upon the Asian man. Thus, order is restored—the guilty punished, the just set free—by designating the woman as object of spectacle. Ambivalence is regulated by defining the female body as a distinctively unambivalent object, that is, as the screen surface which, unlike the translucent screen in the Asian man’s house, returns the mark of otherness only as a sign of shame.

The Asian man’s position as a narrating authority is replaced by the authority of the reconstituted couple of (white) man and wife, and the law. However, a distinct irony persists in the film, for the only way in which the ambivalence can be regulated is by stressing the woman’s function as object, whether in an Asian or a Western sense. In other words, The Cheat also demonstrates, although in ways quite different from the early cinema, what would become repressed with the advent of the codes of the classical Hollywood cinema. The display of the woman’s body in the courtroom is not that unlike the Asian merchant’s possession of her. The only difference is that his brand is more literal, more dramatic, more visible than the narrative and visual codes that contain her. While the film wants to separate East and West as informed by two different laws, two radically different orders, it can do so only at the price of an equivalence played out on the woman’s body. The translucent screen thus is an embodiment of similarity between the two orders, as the woman’s body becomes an object of exchange between men.

A curious history unfolds in the movement from Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show to The Cheat to The Big Sleep. As threshold, the screen becomes both more embedded within the details of narrative development, and more endowed with the symbolic baggage of self and other—the West and the East, the son and the father. The functions of the screen, as both a surface on which to project and a veil to be torn down, become more dispersed, defined in relationship to a variety of cinematic elements. Yet something of Uncle Josh and the rear-projectionist lingers on into the classical cinema. The ragged edges of spectacle in a film such as Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show offer fundamental insights into the appeal and the evolution of film form. While there is certainly a long history of cinematic spectacle defined as the separation between self and other, between the male subject and the female object, spectacle has also meant something quite different—the fantasy of merging, the confused boundaries between self and other, now displaced from male/female to male/male relationships. In her classic essay, Mulvey distinguishes between the male gaze at the female body, which is voyeuristic and fetishistic, and the male gaze at the male body, characterized by identification with an ego ideal. Films such as these, however, trace the difficulty of such neat distinctions insofar as male-to-male identification is concerned.³⁷ Most significant, the representation of the screen embodies the ambivalence which it is presumably the goal of classical film narrative to regulate.

De Lauretis argues that Mulvey’s reading of spectacle and narrative as two dynamics working in tandem to support the centrality of male desire has led to a flattening of the differences between the two, the assumption of an equivalence which, if taken to its logical conclusion, would mean not just that women have no position from which to articulate desire in the classical cinema, but that they have not even the possibility of any identification whatsoever. Along somewhat similar lines, the reading of spectacle in terms purely of “image” and “gaze” is problematic not only for the impossible division of female and male with which it is aligned (as de Lauretis suggests), but also for a component that is frequently left out, ignored, or simply assumed to be the unproblematized “ground” for the gaze and the image. I am referring, as should be obvious by now, to the film screen.

De Lauretis makes a provocative observation vis-à-vis the film screen in her discussion of the myth of Medusa and Perseus. She asks the question “What did Medusa feel seeing herself reflected in Perseus’ shield just before being slain . . .?” After noting ironically that her equation between Perseus’s shield and the movie screen is “indeed naive,” de Lauretis continues: “not only does that shield protect Perseus from Medusa’s evil look, but later on, after her death (in his further adventures), it serves as frame and surface on which her head is pinned to petrify his enemies.”³⁸ De Lauretis’s “naive” equation plays upon the analogies between the film screen and the mirror, on the one hand, and the breast, on the other, that have been central to contemporary psychoanalytic readings of film, except that her equation foregrounds what is generally repressed or assumed in most accounts of the cinematic screen—the death and absence required of the woman so that the mirror-breast-screen can function “successfully.”

While the theories of Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry differ in important respects, they share what has become a commonly held assumption in film theory—that the experience of the cinema is a reactivation of the imaginary, a regression to an infantile state. Unlike the classical, presumably “idealist” film theory of Andre Bazin, in which the screen and the frame work in tandem to create a window on the world, Metz and Baudry substitute metaphors of regression—the mirror and the breast, respectively. This displacement of metaphors occurs not in the name of a principle of aesthetic or formal adequacy, but rather in the name of the subject positioning which is crucial to any theory of the cinematic apparatus.

While Metz has emphasized a complexity of factors that shape how this regression operates, his conception of the “imaginary signifier” of the cinema relies on the analogy between the cinema and the Lacanian mirror stage, the point at which the child’s (mis)conception of itself as a whole, unified self occurs through its mirror reflection—whether that mirror be a literal mirror, the gaze of the (m)other, or both. From that founding moment of cinematic identification emerge a variety of components of the classical cinema, and particularly interesting in the present context is the way in which, according to Metz, the classical cinema reactivates the primal scene. Melanie Klein suggested that “any performance where there is something to be seen or heard, always stand[s] for parental coitus—listening and watching standing for observation in fact or phantasy—while the falling curtain stands for objects which hinder observations, such as bedclothes, the side of a bed., etc.”³⁹ Daniel Dervin—writing in a more traditional psychoanalytic mode than Metz—has suggested that film may have a privileged relationship to the primal scene, noting in particular the power of film “to reproduce the scale of infant observation.”⁴⁰

For Metz, however, the imprint of the primal scene on the classical cinema has more to do with the properties of identification in the cinema, particularly insofar as the camera and its relationship to the cinematic screen are concerned. Metz notes that the cinema is unlike the theater, where the stage and the audience, despite the boundaries that exist between them, constitute a single space.

[The] space of the film, represented by the screen, is utterly heterogeneous, it no longer communicates with that of the auditorium. . . . For its spectator the film unfolds in that simultaneously very close and definitively inaccessible “elsewhere” in which the child sees the amourous play of the parental couple, who are similarly ignorant of it and leave it alone, a pure onlooker whose participation is inconceivable.

Hence, Metz concludes, “In this respect the cinematic signifier is not only ‘psychoanalytic’; it is more precisely Oedipal in type.”⁴¹

Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show in particular would seem to confirm, with striking precision, Metz’s observation, for Uncle Josh’s desire to intervene, to get inside the image, occurs only when the presumably parental couple appears on the screen at the movie theater. When he tears down the screen, the material resembles a crumpled curtain (hence evoking the frame of the child’s apprehension of its parents’ “amourous play,” as well as the obstacle creating a distance) and is also suggestive of the flouncing skirts of the “Parisian Dancer.” Once Josh has torn down the screen, the rear-projectionist emerges as a figure of simultaneous oedipal and cinematic authority. To be sure, Metz’s comments on the film screen do not refer specifically to the screen in the figurative context that I have been discussing, but rather to the screen as a basic element of cinematic representation and identification. However, even as the figure of the screen in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show seems to confirm Metz’s observation of the inevitably firm link between the Lacanian mirror and the cinematic screen, it suggests the limitations of a theory of cinema in which identification is equated so thoroughly and so firmly with regression, with a founding moment of (oedipal) identity.⁴²

For Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show achieves most clearly and boldly the equation between spectatorial identification and the mirror, not when Josh is astounded by the screen but rather when he tears it down and confronts the rear-projectionist. To be sure, the screen participates in the oedipal scenario Metz describes, but it is not reducible to that scenario. Indeed, the projector that is revealed by Josh’s naive intrusion into the screen would appear to suggest much more decisively the analogy between film and mirror, functioning as it does as a stand-in for the camera which Metz designates as the privileged instrument of cinematic identification. If, for Metz, the cinematic screen leads back to the primal scene as its privileged referent, the deployment of the screen as a figure in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, The Cheat, and The Big Sleep not only complicates any such direct link between the film screen and the oedipal scenario, but accentuates the contradictory movement within that scenario.

For Jean-Louis Baudry, the particular psychic function of the film screen is best understood in relation to regressive fantasies of fusion. As Baudry writes:

taking into account the darkness of the movie theater, the relative passivity of the situation, the forced immobility of the cine-subject, and the effects which result from the projection of images, moving images, the cinematographic apparatus brings about a state of artificial regression. It artifically leads back to an interior phase of his development—a phase which is barely hidden, as dream and certain pathological forms of our mental life have shown. It is the desire, unrecognized as such by the subject, to return to this phase, an early state of development with its own forms of satisfaction which may play a determining role in his desire for cinema and the pleasure he finds in it. Return to a relative narcissism, and even more towards a mode of relating to reality which could be defined as enveloping and in which the separation between one’s own body and the exterior world is not well defined.⁴³

Borrowing from Bertram Lewin’s observations on the significance of the screen in dreams, where it functions much like the mother’s breast in relationship to the child, Baudry suggests then that the power of cinematic representation has to do with the reactivation of the imaginary fusion between baby and breast.⁴⁴ As Robert T. Eberwein puts it in his study of film and dreams, the cinematic screen “serves as a surrogate, deriving from infancy, for the physiological and psychic union we enjoyed with the mother: the screen is both breast and infant, the mother and the self.”⁴⁵

Metz’s inquiries into cinematic identification are indebted to Baudry, and there are obvious connections between the emphases on regression in the two men’s work. While the breast/screen analogy may say quite a bit about cinematic identification in general, it shares—insofar as the figure of the screen is concerned—some of the same problems encountered in Metz’s model. The most obvious criticism to be made, of course, is that neither Metz nor Baudry takes any account of sexual difference, regression in both cases defined in relationship to a subject which can be read only as male.⁴⁶ The failure to address sexual difference relates to another characteristic of these theories of the apparatus: the assumption that in its projection of a regressive unity, in its recapture of the imaginary, the cinema functions successfully to ward off the threat of otherness, the division of the self, the impossibility of fusion.

Central to both Metz’s and Baudry’s theories is a definition of the cinema screen as a fixed ground, as the unwavering support for the fictions of (male) identity, whether as Metz’s mirror or as Baudry’s breast/dream screen. True, the screen is one of the most stable elements of the cinematic institution. As Stephen Heath notes, for instance, “it is important that the Lumière brothers should set the screen as they do in the Grand Café and not with the audience on either side of a translucent screen, that cinema architecture should take its forms in consequence, that there should be no feeling of machinery to the side of or beyond the screen, that the screen should be one of the most stable elements in cinema’s history . . .”⁴⁷ But institutional and psychic stability, however much they are connected, are not identical. If the screen is as stable a component of the classical cinema as Metz’s and Baudry’s theories claim, then one assumes that its function remains fixed, “invisible” within the institution of cinema, and that the visual and narrative codes of the dominant cinema work to maintain the screen as the unproblematized ground for projection. Following this logic, one would have to conclude that films such as The Big Sleep are either aberrations or subversive exceptions to the rule of the classical cinema, neither of which is the case.

Theorists such as Baudry and Metz replicate that stability. Put another way, the stability of the screen is as crucial to their articulations of the cinematic subject as it is to the institutional exhibition of films. Given the indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis that informs their work, it is perhaps surprising, however, that the screen is defined in such absolute, fixed terms. Noting that discussions of the “look” tend toward a not only rigid but also impossible separation of the (male) gaze from the (female) image, de Lauretis observes that film theorists in this confusion have followed Lacan and forgotten Freud.⁴⁸ That is to say that the entire arsenal of cinematic desire and identification is ascribed, via Lacan, to the gaze, which is ascribed to lack, which is ascribed to castration; the pleasure of film viewing is thus the desire for the phallus, and no matter how many times feminists are scolded into remembering that the phallus and the penis are not the same, the slippage from biological masculinity to psychic trajectory occurs with remarkable frequency.⁴⁹

While I do not wish in any way to “rescue” Lacan, several comments in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis on the construction of the gaze, specifically in relationship to painting, bear directly on the functioning of the gaze in cinema, particularly in relation to the screen. On the one hand, Lacan identifies the screen as having a kind of regulatory function insofar as the relationship between the gaze and its object is concerned:

If, by being isolated, an effect of lighting dominates us, if, for example, a beam of light directing our gaze so captivates us that it appears as a milky cone and prevents us from seeing what it illuminates, the mere fact of introducing into this field a small screen, which cuts into that which is illuminated without being seen, makes the milky light retreat, as it were, into the shadow, and allows the object it concealed to emerge.

At the same time, the screen evokes a quite different function: “that which forms the mediation from one [the picture] to the other [the gaze], that which is between the two, is something of another nature than geometral, optical space, something that plays an exactly reverse role, which operates, not because it can be traversed, but on the contrary because it is opaque—I mean the screen.”⁵⁰

The screen has an ambivalent status insofar as it both “positions” and obscures simultaneously. Describing the work of the screen and frame in film, Stephen Heath notes how the cinema “holds the subject” between “negativity and coherence, flow and image,” and observes that “the ‘screen’ as it figures in various Lacanian diagrams has a similar kind of ambivalence: locus of a potentially ludic relation between the subject and its imaginary captation, and the sign of the barrier—the slide—across the subject and object of desire . . .”⁵¹ In similar terms, Shoshana Felman has suggested that in Television, the written version of Lacan’s appearance on French television in a program entitled “Psychoanalysis,” “Lacan invites us not to take ‘the little screen’ for granted, but to rethink through it, provocatively, his complex structure of address.”⁵² Most psychoanalytic film theory conceptualizes the screen in dominant cinema only in its function as the support for the fictions of transparence. As Felman says, “As spectators, we are literally called into the screen and represented there as caught. The screen screens insofar as it reflects our act of seeing as complete, but does not reflect the screen within our gaze.”⁵³ What would it mean to “reflect the screen within our gaze”? Felman uses the phrase “bear witness,” the screen bearing witness simultaneously to the necessity of the fiction of completeness and wholeness and to its impossibility.

To be sure, Felman is addressing the screen not just as a function of the split between the gaze and vision, but as a complex figure of the analytic enterprise. It is easy to argue that in dominant practices, such as the cinema, the screen is quite literally covered over, bound within the conventions of narrative and visual coherence—if not rendered invisible, then at least neutralized. In this respect, the screen would be like virtually every other aspect of the classical Hollywood cinema, bound within that oedipal logic which Raymond Bellour and others have postulated as central to cinematic pleasure: “in the regulated order of the spectacle, the return of an immemorial and everyday state which the subject experiences in his dreams, and for which the cinematic apparatus renews the desire.”⁵⁴ But in the films examined thus far, the figure of the screen does emerge more on the side of “bearing witness” than on that of containment and regulation, and thus loosens up the tightly woven threads of masculine and oedipal fantasy.⁵⁵

Within the present context, I want to stress that in psychoanalytic theories of the cinematic apparatus, the screen emerges as something of a symptom, precisely because of its totally unproblematized status as ground, a symptom not only of the failure to account for sexual difference, but also of a refusal to engage with ambivalence in any kind of signifying capacity. The stakes of this “blind spot” in psychoanalytic theory are high for feminism, since so much feminist analysis of film turns simultaneously on the impossibility of any productive ruptures in the seams of classical cinema, and the exclusive focus on the gaze as the site of virtually all agency. Quite obviously, no one can ignore the function of the look in film, but the facile division of the (male) gaze from the (female) object of the gaze has led to a kind of simplistic either/or—woman either foregrounds her objectification or “returns” the gaze. Some of the most interesting examples of women’s alternative cinema which will be examined in the next chapter take as a central figure the screen—not “rather” than the gaze, but in relationship to it. The complex function of the screen must be taken into account, then, to better theorize some examples of women’s cinema, but also, and perhaps most important, to better theorize just what it is women filmmakers have sought alternatives to.

I have read the function of the screen in The Big Sleep “backwards,” to the foregrounding of the screen in the early film Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show. Several other practices of “foregrounding” the screen could be traced back to Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show as well. The rudimentary “film-within-a-film” structure suggests an early version of those films where characters act out their fantasy of entering into the fictional world of the film, for example, Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr. (1924) or Mia Farrow in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Echoes of Uncle Josh can also be seen in those films where scenes “at the movies” are represented to suggest a foregrounding of other visual and narrative components of the film, including the Disney cartoon of “Who Killed Cock Robin?” against which the heroine of Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) erupts in simultaneous laughter and grief over the loss of her young brother.

The function of the screen that I have isolated in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, The Cheat, and The Big Sleep as the embodiment of ambivalence is quite different from other representations of screen surfaces which function, rather, as reflections in miniature of the cinema. I am thinking here specifically of two kinds of films in which screen surfaces play a role quite different from the one I have described. Mary Ann Doane, in The Desire to Desire, discusses two films which contain scenes of literal film projection, scenes in which the woman is identified with the screen surface, and the entire process of projection is a representation of the power of the man over her. The two films in question, Caught (Max Ophuls, 1949) and Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), belong to what Doane calls the “paranoid” category of the woman’s film, and in each case a scene “at the movies” (a screening of an industrial film in the case of Caught, home movies in the case of Rebecca) condenses the impossibility of female spectatorship except as affirmation of the power and authority of the male gaze.

Unlike the screen surfaces in the films discussed thus far, the screen in Caught and Rebecca is but one element in a scenario of spectatorship that is absolutely polarized along gender lines. The difference here concerns not just the ways in which screen surfaces are evoked, but also and especially the context in which they occur. The projection scenes discussed by Doane “mobilize the elements of a specular system which has historically served the interests of male spectatorship. . . .”⁵⁶ While the projection scenes in the films discussed in this chapter suggest ambivalence rather than polarity, nonetheless they prove Doane’s point in a kind of circuitous way, since the ambivalence of the screen as simultaneous threshold and obstacle is evoked in these films uniquely in relationship to male ambivalence. In each case, the woman retains her function as image and surface. Yet there is an important distinction to be made between the functions of these projection scenes in relationship to the economies of homosexual and heterosexual desire. Although they do so in radically different ways, each of the films discussed in this chapter manifests a trouble in the realm of heterosexual desire and resolution. The screen surface thus becomes a nodal point in the representation of the difficulty of closure in any simplistic sense.

Another category of films in which screen surfaces play a central role is those whose subject matter is the cinema itself—films, that is, which take as their central premise a demonstration and exploration of the dynamics of cinematic desire and representation. In a famous scene at the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), a young boy glides his hands over a screenlike surface upon which are projected huge close-ups of women’s faces that merge into one another. While it is impossible to assign the boy a precise or single narrative function in the film, his infantile apprehension of the projections of female faces does correspond to the fascination demonstrated throughout Persona with the female body as both image and screen.

Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) is concerned at every level with the manifestations of male spectatorial desire in its most extremely sadistic forms through the character of Mark Lewis, the filmmaker-within-the-film who is compelled to murder women and film them simultaneously. At the beginning of the film, we see Lewis as he executes a film/murder—first, as it ostensibly happens, then as the filmmaker watches the film in his home. The scene in his home alternates between shots where the film-within-the-film coincides with the screen of the film we are watching, and shots of the film-within-the-film as watched by Mark Lewis. As extreme close-ups of the woman’s face—with her gaping mouth particularly foregrounded—appear on the screen, Lewis stands up in front of the screen and then collapses in his chair, suggesting the simultaneity of sexual release and identification with the woman as screen.⁵⁷

In the course of the film, a potential relationship develops with the young woman who lives with her blind mother on the floor below Mark. At one point, the mother comes to Mark’s apartment and asks that he “show” her his films. Mark projects the film of his latest murder, and he and the mother stand before the screen. She reaches out her hand to touch the image of the woman’s face, and Mark throws himself at the screen in despair. The irony of the blind woman who possesses keen insight into Mark’s condition is fairly obvious here.⁵⁸ More interesting in the context of the present discussion is the crisis provoked when a female figure looms large on both sides of the screen. Indeed, the split between the dominant paternal voice—Mark’s scientist/filmmaker father who made of his son an object of study, and whose invading eye is imprinted in his son’s desire to film and to annihilate simultaneously—and the unattainable maternal image is conveyed at the film’s conclusion. Mark commits suicide by thrusting himself upon the knife that he used to kill his victims, while he looks at the mirror in which he forced his victims to witness their own terror, thus, as Linda Williams puts it, “uniting voyeur and exhibitionist in a one-man movie of which he is both director and star.”⁵⁹

After the suicide, we hear the voice of Mark’s father booming from one of the ubiquitous tape recorders in Mark’s apartment, and Mark as a child saying “Good night, Daddy. Hold me.” The camera moves from the tape recorder, to the projector with the film spinning on its take-up reel, to, finally, the screen, half in light, half in darkness. If Peeping Tom may be said to delineate the centrality of male voyeurism in the cinema, the screen functions in the film to suggest the different levels on which Mark desires not voyeuristic separation from the woman but rather regressive fusion with the female image—an image, that is, to “hold me.” Peeping Tom in many ways demonstrates Metz and Baudry’s theories of regressive desire and the cinema, and the desire thus delineated in Powell’s film foregrounds in its turn the extent to which those theories are, precisely, very particular fantasies of how the cinema functions. Yet for all its closeness to the regressive desire postulated by Metz and Baudry, Peeping Tom suggests that the man’s presumably heterosexual desire is inevitably complicit with a desire for the father, in which the boundaries between identification and erotic attachment are not clearly delineated.

In the following chapter I will turn to a group of films by women directors in which the figure of the screen is a central device for the representation of a number of difficult and complex issues, which, while raised in relation to women’s specific relationship to cinema and culture, touch nonetheless on the issues that emerge in the films discussed in this chapter around the figure of the screen. It is tempting to draw two very different kinds of conclusions from the deployment of the screen in The Big Sleep, The Cheat, and Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show; and to be sure, the fact that this discussion serves in some ways as a prelude to a discussion of women’s films tempers how those conclusions will be drawn. Confronted with these two conclusions, however, I find myself in an ambivalent position, since the more clearly feminist one strikes me as too pat, while the one that is more problematic in feminist terms is too aligned with a position of male subjectivity to be of much use in making the transition from the classical Hollywood cinema to women’s cinema.

To wit: In each of the “screen” films discussed in this chapter, the ambivalent function of the screen as simultaneous passage and obstacle displaces attention away from the logic of the male look/female object, and engages a relationship between male likes—Uncle Josh and the projectionist, the American businessman and the Asian man, Marlowe and Harry Jones. It is tempting, therefore, to read this construction of screens as a paradoxical laying bare of a structure that Luce Irigaray has designated as central to patriarchal economies: “all economic organization is homosexual. That of desire as well, even the desire for women. Woman exists only as an occasion for mediation, transaction, transition, transference, between man and his fellow man, between man and himself.”⁶⁰ While there is more than a small degree of truth in the analogy between what Irigaray says and how these films function, it is “truth” that is precisely the problem. For in the name of such a truth, the ambivalent function of the screen surface is lost; the sense of the simultaneity of transparency and translucence, the one always holding the other in check, is sacrificed.

A central object of inquiry in what is commonly referred to as “French theory,” and specifically that French theory which articulates what Alice Jardine calls “gynesis,” the valorization of the feminine, is those in-between spaces, tentative boundaries that put into question the very possibility of demarcation.⁶¹ One well-known figure of that in-between is the hymen, which in its very etymology articulates contradictory meanings of marriage (archaically) and vaginal membrane—of, that is, both union and separation. In “The Double Session,” Jacques Derrida reads the function of the hymen in “Mimique,” a text by Mallarme which contemplates the gestures of a mime replaying the murder of his wife. Mallarme writes: “ ‘The scene illustrates but the idea, not any actual action, in a hymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and remembrance. . . .’ ”⁶² Derrida’s reading of the hymen is evocative of the screen:

Among diverse possibilities, let us take this: the Mime does not read his role; he is also read by it. Or at least he is both read and reading, written and writing, between the two, in the suspense of the hymen, at once screen and mirror. As soon as a mirror is interposed in some way, the simple opposition between activity and passivity, between production and the product, or between all concepts in -er and all concepts in -ed (signifier/signified, imitator/imitated, structure/structured, etc.), becomes impracticable and too formally weak to encompass the graphics of the hymen, its spider web, and the play of its eyelids.⁶³

That it should be the female membrane which embodies and disembodies simultaneously suggests what has become by now a familiar feminist discomfort with the celebration of the feminine in Derrida’s writing—the suspicion that the body of the woman supplies the metaphor for the male subject’s indecidability, with women’s bodies left once again subjected to the cold speculum of the male theorist.⁶⁴ But perhaps, insofar as the screen in classical cinema is concerned, there is room for both the female membrane as “read” by a male subject, and the feminist discomfort with the reading. In noting the kinds of feminist questions that might be asked of Derrida’s reading of Mallarme, Alice Jardine includes one with a decidedly Irigarayan tinge: “we could ask why Derrida silences the male homosexual potentialities for this Mallarmean/Derridean ‘double play.’ . . .”⁶⁵ Put another way, Irigaray’s reading of heterosexuality as ruse and Derrida’s reading of the hymen need not constitute an either/or choice insofar as the figure of the screen is concerned; indeed, the ambivalence of the screen in the films examined in this chapter may perhaps best be assessed, not by the tension between the two presumably stable entities of homosexual and heterosexual desire, but rather by the contradiction between the indecidability of the hymen and the “truth” of male homotextual desire.

In the case of women filmmakers, for whom the hymen can “work” only through a most problematic double displacement, the simultaneous celebration of “woman” and the feminist distrust of such celebrations become decidedly more difficult. Indeed, what happens when the female subject—whether as filmmaker, protagonist, or spectator—engages with the ambivalence of the screen? Since the number of classical Hollywood films shaped by the itinerary of female agency is limited, it comes as no big surprise that there are even fewer still in which the screen enters into play in complex ways in relation to female desire. In a recent commercial film, however, there is a kind of screen play comparable to what we have seen in The Big Sleep, in relation not just to a female protagonist but to her complicated relationship with another woman, a relationship that is decidedly homotextual.

In Black Widow (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1987), Debra Winger plays the part of Alex, a Justice Department investigator who becomes intrigued, and gradually obsessed, by a woman who assumes an identity in order to attract a wealthy husband, and then kills him before moving onto yet another disguise and another husband. At two crucial moments in the film, Alex’s relationship to Catherine (played by Theresa Russell) is depicted through the foregrounding of a screen. Early in the film, when Alex has collected a series of photographs of Catherine in various identities and with different husbands, she projects the images side by side on the blank wall of her apartment. Alex approaches the makeshift screen with a considerable aura of wonder about her, if not at the zero degree of Uncle Josh, then at the very least with a sense of discovery of a heretofore unknown (or unacknowledged) fascination. She assumes a variety of positions in relation to the images of Catherine. At one point she stands in the position of a husband, at another her hands touch the image in a way strikingly similar to the boy at the beginning of Persona, and finally she poses her body in such a way that her hand literally blends with the image of Catherine’s hand. This screen play isolates and combines with dizzying rapidity three modes of desire: substitution (for the husband), merging (in the child’s fantasy of fusion), and narcissistic identification. While the slides are still flashing on the wall, Alex moves to the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror, and after turning back to look at the slides again, she pulls back her hair, as if attempting to imitate the appearance of Catherine. The substitution of the mirror for the screen situates Alex’s fascination within the realm of the “surveyed female,” but the traces of other kinds of desire are in no way dissipated.

Later in the film, after Alex has followed Catherine to Seattle, the site of her latest conquest, Alex visits the local police station to present her evidence. The scene opens with a shot of a group of policemen watching a film entitled “Survival Shooting Techniques” on a small portable movie screen. The projected image is not properly aligned with the small screen, and the men yell for the screen to be fixed. The sound track of the film contains gunfire and music, and as the camera moves forward toward the police officer’s office located behind the screen, and separated from the makeshift “screening room” by a glass window, we hear an authoritative voice-over in the film-within-the-film warning that “just because you can’t see a suspect doesn’t mean he can’t see you.” Inside the office, a frustrated Alex cannot convince the police officer with her evidence. She stands in front of his desk, and behind her we see, in a kind of “rear projection,” the continuation of the movie. Framed by the screen and the incredulous police officer, Alex is as improperly aligned with the law as the projected image was with the screen.

Yet a connection is drawn between Alex and the law, on the one hand, and Alex in her desire for Catherine, on the other. And it will be the work of the film to draw the projected image—Alex’s fascination with Catherine—into proper alignment with the law. Black Widow is an example of a film that wants to have it both ways; that is, a film which wants to articulate desire between two women and yet remain within the conventions of classical narrative by drawing a line between “normal” and “abnormal” behavior. Hence, when Alex follows Catherine to Hawaii after the Seattle husband is disposed of, a number of more conventional devices of the representation of cinematic desire come into play—most notably, a male surrogate voyeur (a private detective hired by both women) and a male love interest, Paul, shared by both women. In this section of the film, Catherine’s capacity for manipulation is marked all the more strongly (she kills the private detective, and arranges for her next husband-to-be to sleep with Alex so as to facilitate her own marriage to him). In addition, several scenes are quite explicit in their delineation of lesbian attraction.

These disruptions are “managed,” as it were, in a somewhat silly conclusion whereby Paul’s death is faked, Alex is arrested, and Catherine unknowingly acknowledges all in a final visit to Alex in jail. Throughout the film, there is the (homophobic) suggestion that Alex’s obsession with Catherine is the result of her own absence of a social life—i.e., “a man.” While the film does not go so far as to pair Alex with an appropriate male significant other at the conclusion of the film, it does seal her marriage with the law, while Catherine is escorted off to prison. Black Widow may offer pleasures that are more frequently marginalized or invisible in commercial mainstream film, but it remains a film wholly part of the institutions of commercial cinema. At the same time that Black Widow suggests female investment in the processes of ambivalent identification, the possibilities of that investment are closed down with something of a vengeance. I turn now to a group of films that explore, on several levels, how relationships between women function in the creation of alternatives to patriarchal institutions, and how the figure of the screen might function as a trope for women’s cinema that refuses to be married to the law.