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Works Cited

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Dear my fellow students of horror,

 

Disney ‘princess movies,’ a musical based on a fairy-tale with a young woman protagonist overcoming a dangerous or precarious origin and finding true love with a prince (he, who is tasked with defeating the story’s villain), of the mid-century and its last two decades had terrifying characters and episodes to them. Adapted from their source materials to similarly scare children into following the lessons that a particular film delivered, just the printed image of these villainous figures and the destruction they inflicted on the floppy paper-covers of my ‘princess movie’ DVDs made me sob with fright as a child. My early inability to see a single still of something that struck me with fear, leading my mother and father to buy only “Sing-along” editions of these films – anthologies of princesses’ musical numbers – for our household. Skipping ahead to fifth grade, once girls in my grade began to get their first periods, whispers of the ‘falling bucket of pigs’ blood’ scene from Brian De Palma’s Carrie, in the confused and shy language of sheltered; especially regarding sexual health and education; ten-year-olds came into my ears. High-school student Carrie White, coated in blood from her tiara to her navel underneath her baby-pink prom dress, frozen in place, eyes wide and petrified, on my first very own laptop’s screen struck me with as much fear as periods did. Yet, this feeling was as muggy as it made me want to shut my eyes. Whether it were my older age or that Carrie soaked in dripping pigs’ blood had something to do with girls’ bleeding approximately every month for – according to my mother – three to five days, I was moved to know why she was covered in the pigs’ blood. Growing older I discovered the mass and plurality of horror movies centred on girls and the subject of girlhood, either textually in their scripts or symbolically. I came to learn that Carrie White belonged to horror cinema’s trope of the ‘girl monster,’ a character that contrasts against the genre’s trope of the “final girl” – young women whose behaviour even prior to the film within they feature, constitutes them as ‘good girls’ by the social standards of their periods, that fight their film’s villain, defeat them, and survive until the story’s end. I know firsthand the bodily, psychological and social experiences of being a girl can be scary to girls themselves, but until my early adulthood in this decade, most horror movies depicting girlhood as horror, were made by men. What did these male makers think was so scary about such bodily, psychological and social experiences that they were observers of? Why were symbols of girlhood present in horror films that did not have a “final girl” lead, that had as their subjects, men’s or boys’ stories? And why did horror films depicting bloody, torturous violence, choose female characters to either inflict this violence onto, or save the most gruesome, bloodiest of this violence for? While this research project took up a not-not inordinate portion of my free-time from sixth grade through my teenage years, since my upper years of university I have allocated my consumption of horror to my hours of study, where I can formally take up with the help of feminist horror scholars, my questions. From “Golden Age” horror movies of the 1970s, to feminist body and psychological horror films that have been made more and more in the 21st-century looking at the relationship between girl/womanhood and monstrosity, or horror, or the horrific experiences endured by women and girls; my scholarship’s and personal favourite “horror films” being Jennifer’s Body, Ginger Snaps and X’s trilogy, dissecting sexual violence, female puberty and traditional women’s roles and sexuality’s place within them, respectively; I seek to continue, and to learn and ask new questions.

    This primary research paper understands how Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jean Baker), upon her arrival to Hollywood, gave Hollywood's players a role model of 1950s femininity. The films which Monroe starred were teaching mediums of appropriate gender roles in the 1950s first, for boys and men at the turn of the decade, and secondly for girls and women, from 1951 and forwards during the decade. The representation of her self and her personal life and the choices of what the Hollywood industry and its fan presses placed Monroe into played a hand-in-hand role in this objective with her film materials.

 

    Marilyn Monroe was introduced as a Cinderella story. Her heart-shaped face, blue eyes, pouty lips, long eyelashes, blonde curls, and soft curves (Dudley 103) introduce the starlet. Her physical attributes were paired in her early representation in the fan press with her growing up in very poor neighbourhoods around Los Angeles. A primary concern of her story in becoming a starlet was the sudden accidental death of her birth father very soon after her birth (that her memory has difficulty with). Her mother suffered from debilitating mental illness, severely harming her ability to provide financially, care and love for Marilyn. Upon becoming an orphan, the Great Depression denied the state-appointed guardian to care for her; thus she was handed between foster families. Young Marilyn dreamt about and wished to build for herself a career of creating stories that gifted happiness to herself and to all, but particularly to those that were needing hope. Her happiest memories were her years with her foster mother Mrs. Ann Lower, her only maternal figure. Mrs. Ann taught virtuousness of character and its importance, promised Marilyn that she could make a better life, and supported her dreams. Her childlike, naive, cutesy nature in spite of a childhood lost caused by the troubles that had befallen America touched American readers (Monroe, "I Was An Orphan" 65). Her shyness as a teenage girl in her self and looks, not being able to afford performing lessons, and then scouting and working as a model first for army posters, and then as a cover-girl, formed a Cinderella narrative. Her becoming a starlet thus, was a fairytale that you (a female film fan / reader) too could have for yourself (Dudley 104).

 

    In her starlet story, naiveté and a need of her own safe home and of love were given as the reason for her choice to model, and of her first marriage (Monroe, "I Was An Orphan" 65). Her fondness and warmth for her first husband ("Who'd Marry Me?" 86) were deeply admired. In her pin-up photographs, an innocent aura radiates, and she was commonly pictured in themes of high school girlfriend, ("Cutest Trick In Town" 35); therefore, Monroe became known as the purest 'cheesecake girl' (Skolsky, "That's Hollywood For You," Jun. 1951 12). Her angelic quality gave hope, and the all-American sweetness of her dreams and of her early story, and the luckiness of her receiving the opportunity to pose for an army poster endeared her to young women, as well as to men (Dudley 104). 

 

    Coloured pin-up photographs of Monroe were her early features in the film press, for young male readers that were drawn to her beauty, and, for young female readers to study her beauty ("Cutest Trick In Town" 35; "Marilyn Monroe" 38). Along with her photographs, Monroe's leaning on the kindness of pure-hearted individuals and her giving back to all anytime she could, giving even more in time, once she could (America's dream of how it sees itself), was read (Dudley 103). She had healed herself from the pains of her early tragedies with empathy, forgiveness and optimism that the future would be bright (Monroe, "I Was An Orphan" 65). In the final months of 1950, she was given the opportunity to write personal articles to introduce her self to the audiences of her pin-up photographs. In her first, she voiced her aspiration since childhood for true love - her aspiration to that day, like a little girl's dreaming of romance. She authored and believed in an ideal picture of making and caring for a family - for her, dating was only a path to settling down as a wife and a mother. Monroe possessed and advocated a romantic view of and the wishes to learn and to perfect this role's duties (Monroe, "Who'd Marry Me?" 89). These attributes defined her as a role model for girls and young women and her humbleness and earthiness, need and love to help out, and gratitude for kindness, supplemented this belief (I Was An Orphan" 65). As well, she voiced that her dream man was hard-working, athletic, strong, well-mannered, family-oriented, and ambitious (Waterbury, "Jury Chooses Male Pin Ups" 70). Marilyn was the female star whom boys and young men beloved and thus who could teach family ideals (Skolsky, "That's Hollywood For You," Sept. 1951 12). At this early stage of her time in Hollywood, acting in pictures was framed as Monroe's achieving a high school diploma prior to becoming a wife and mother.

 

    In 1951, Monroe's ranking 9th place in "New Female Personalities" ("Topliner New Female Personalities" 79) and naming as the "1951 Model Blonde" ("National Pre-Selling" 8) communicated that the uniting of innocence, her sweetheart quality, and sensuality could make an imprint in cinema, at this particular moment. Marilyn's vulnerability, sincerity in sharing her self, past, thoughts, and insecurities, and want to have genuine intimacy with her fans strengthened her ability to be a role model (Monroe, "Who'd Marry Me?" 87). She held heartfelt and sincere advocacy of achieving a beauty standard and following of femininity, manners and submissiveness ("Make It For Keeps" 92). She happily voiced her bashfulness, nerves, and eagerness to please ("Who'd Marry Me?" 89). Her believing in her lack of knowledge, her selflessness, and her nature of helping further contributing to Hollywood's choosing her to be a role model of 1950s femininity, as well ("Make It For Keeps" 92). Monroe's fashion touched female and male fans - an admirable childlike wish and try to embody what a little poor girl would think was the picture of American glamour ("Report From The Studios" 15). Her glamour was portrayed as a ballgown - as if she was a little girl playing dress up. 

 

    From 1950 to 1951, the starlet honed her approach to the 'ornament' role across barely received parts in A Ticket to Tomahawk, Home Town Story, and Love Happy. (Kann 5; York 26; Dudley 40). For her performance as the 'ornament' in Love Happy, she was named in one press article as the doll chased by Groucho Marx (40). Monroe expanded the boundaries of the young female 'ornament's' ornamental attributes - she bounced, shimmied, wriggled, had soft and flowing movement, and hung upon the male characters' bodies and each word. She was doll-like yet could be touched, and had a childlike innocence to be protected. She had a pure heart needing to be controlled, and at the same time, a motherly caring sensibility (Abrams 11; The Independent Film Journal Staff, "Niagra" 9; Hamilton, "Shadow Stage," Aug. 1951 30). The studios perceived of Marilyn in a fatherly perspective as well as most of her audiences as represented in the popularity of her treating Monty Woolley as a paternal role in As Young As You Feel and of her character's representation as a girl searching for a paternal figure in the film press (30). As the elder Louis Calhern's mistress Angela in The Asphalt Jungle Monroe's docile nature and angelic aura placed her character at a distance from the role's moral impropriety; Monroe could bridge purity and sexuality (Abrams 11).

 

    Marilyn proposed that her shyness to speak up and wish and nature of listening and learning meant her mind was fit to ordering - such as that of the guidance of her Fox acting coach, Natasha Lytes (Monroe, "I Was An Orphan" 65). This, and Marilyn's punishing of her self for disappointments of her not gifting what was asked and loved of her, were praised (Riley 104). Monroe's small town girl-next-door virtuousness was the key to her American embrace as a sex symbol ("Report From The Studios" 15). Greater erotic capital was drawn from this and her innocence of her awareness of her sensual draw ("Cutest Trick In Town" 35). Her understanding of simple things as glamorous made her that much more loveable to (most especially male) American audiences, and deserving to be a role model of 1950s femininity (Monroe, "I Was An Orphan" 65). Her continuing to pose for pin-up photographs as her star began to reach its height showed her loyalty and dedication, (Monroe, "Want Women To Like" 58) while upholding her eternal girly quality and innocence. Further, this act upheld the promise that she could be the wife and to-be mother to the children of her male fans (Waterbury, "Hollywood's Top Pinups" 41).

 

      Her winning such awards in 1952 as "Most Promising Personality," ("Modern Screen's Party Of The Year," Feb. 1953 45) "Star of Tomorrow," (20th Century Fox, "Marilyn Monroe Is Voted" 6) and "Rise to Stardom" (Sammis 59) voiced American film audiences' desires for femininity's gentleness, docility, innocence and visual displays sexuality, for the 1950s. Monroe was then placed in different erotic themes - each possessing a paternal nature - safe in the knowledge of her true sweetheart character. This choice was to protect the popularity of the films which she played by trading upon male sexuality. Further, however, it was to teach male virtues and expectations, and what was the appropriate 1950s masculinity ("Report From The Studios" 15; Rogers 31).

 

      Monroe was the promotional draw of Love Nest ("Triple Plus Appeal" 35). Monroe, in her innocent cheesecake style, plays a disciplined, hard-working former female soldier (Harrison, "Harrison's Reports," Oct. 1951 166). She seeks domesticity and to become the wife of Will Lundigan's struggling and heartbroken soldier (Herbstman 6). Love Nest's draws are the cuteness and girlishness of her playing at being a traditionally strong female character, (Harrison, "Harrison's Reports," Oct. 1951 166) and the imagination of a power dynamic in which she is stronger than the male lead ("Triple Plus Appeal" 35). In Niagra, her vulnerability to violence, strangulation by her husband, and perhaps forthcoming death, ignited (male) fans' need to protect her (20th Century Fox, "Marilyn Monroe In 'Niagra'" 28). Monroe's character, seeking protection, falls into the arms of a protective man, who turns possessive and violent in their marriage. To meet her need for paternal safety and care, and true love, she takes a lover, and the two, to free her from her husband, develop a plot for her love to murder her captor. Niagra mounted male fans' desire to rescue her, and to build a safe home for her (Harrison, "Harrison's Reports," Jan. 1953 14; "'Quotes'" 24). But, her character's draw, different than that in Asphalt Jungle for she plays this role as the star that she is, is to look upon her shy attempts at playing a coy and sultry vixen (The Independent Film Journal, "Niagra," Jan. 1953 9).

 

      In between two darker films, RKO gifted her fans monroe as the naive, ornamental fiancée of a humble, hard-working fisherman in Clash By Night (Hamilton, "Shadow Stage," Aug. 1952 25). Her 'ornament'-like character is defined by her blondness and innocence, angelic quality and vulnerability (RKO Radio 17). As in Niagra, Don't Bother To Knock drew upon fears of Marilyn's endangerment to inspire her male fans to physically and morally save her (Harrison, "Harrison's Report," Jul. 1952 111). At first, she plays her innocent cheesecake self in the part of a babysitter (Kilbourn 23). But out of grief, and her tortured delicate mind, she is drawn to kill herself and the child that is in her care. Her childhood beloved, a soldier, had died, and the heartbreak, loss of innocence and of her dream to marry and have a family with him, drove her to madness (Phillip 8; Harrison, "Harrison's Reports," Jul. 1952 111). As had occurred for her role in Niagra, critical reception of her performance spoke of the peeking of her sweetheart cheesecake self (her innocence, gentleness, and motherly caring) (111; "What The Picture Did For Me" 40). Like Niagra, (20th Century Fox, "Marilyn Monroe In 'Niagra'" 28) the promotional materials for Don't Bother To Knock promised the intimacy of Monroe's bedroom and domesticity with her ("Don't Bother To Knock" 6).

      

    Monroe's starry-eyes for Hollywood glamour and society, and wish to be loved by and to love in return every man, meant that her all-American girl had to be taught right from wrong. Paternal protection became outspokenly tied to her and to 1950s femininity, and Hollywood's choosing of her as the 1950s role model for young women was strengthened ("Modern Screen's Party Of The Year," Mar. 1951 34; Monroe, "I Was An Orphan" 85). Monroe's wholesomeness and virtuousness untainted by her visual sexuality gifted Hollywood the opportunity to tie this last attribute to the appropriate femininity of the 1950s ("Report From The Studios" 15). On her nature, beliefs and commitments' grounds, Hollywood's studio-friendly magazines chose her to be the guide for the femininity, decisions, and virtues of girls and young women (Monroe, "Who'd Marry Me?" 89). 

 

    Marilyn's true kindness, wish to become sisters with all women, voicing of insecurities, and wishing happiness to her female readers in the choices that they made ("Make It For Keeps" 92) drew young women to adore her ("Winners All: For Surf and Sun" 79). Her early roles represented the jobs achievable and popular for young women, she represented who contemporary young woman could be, and she answered their fears of the decade's changing times (Monroe, "Make It For Keeps" 92). Thus she was chosen and gratefully obliged to be the face of young female products (including blonde-enhancing shampoo, foundation, face powder, and lipstick) (Lustre-Creme 6; Westmore 15). She also portrayed the romance of 1950s men's and women's roles to encourage young women to adopt the 1950s beauty ideal and societal places, so as to win a boyfriend or husband, or to not have the love of theirs stolen by a young woman who had or by the pleasures of the 1950s men's role (Rogers 31).

 

      As well, Monroe's attributes were admired against to censure stars and starlets in the 1950s (published in the fan press as a form of teaching). This occurred to starlets unbecoming by or threatening to 1950s femininity, respectively, who intimated tomboyishness, aggression, (Connolly, "Impertinent Interview," Jun. 1952 23) and a self-centred nature, and untamed sexuality and male ambition (Henaghan 99). To control femininities emerging in America outside of Hollywood, fan magazines would form a relationship of starlets embodying such to Marilyn's all-American sweetheart femininity. These valuable femininities in the earliest years of the 1950s; represented as compatible with Monroe's; were rustic, blue-collar and teacherly, and darker-skinned, intelligent and hard-working (Henaghan 99). Once Marilyn began to have private times of sharing with female stars that she trusted fan magazines' (Ott 43) published pieces on the 'secret drama' between her and Hollywood's female stars and starlets. Coverage of this matter followed the forms of if sweetheart Marilyn Monroe had betrayed her girl-next-door wish for friendship (Anderson 56), or a female star had attacked her insecurities or her character (Churchill & Churchill; Baskette 88). This coverage sought to make her fans to become upset and defend her in the fan press and in her films' popularity; the intimacy of her female and male fans with her and their need to protect her were tools of the 1950s ("Joan And Marilyn Talk" 93; Sherwood, "Luckiest Blonde Alive!" 58). Often in the same magazine, articles would disprove the proposals to the contrary of her true wholesomeness. Those at Fox who aided her doted on her for she was the most grateful; her enjoyments were self-improvement and taking good care of her health; ("Helping Hand For Marilyn" 51) and she gave gifts to anyone that she could (York, "Cal York's Gossip" 33). In addition to male fans' envy of sharing her heart with and her giving her time to men besides them, their need to know the truth was motivated by fears of such men hurting her, (Monroe, "Who'd Marry Me" 86) taking advantage of her, and trampling upon or stealing her innocent girlish nature ("Temptations Of A Bachelor Girl" 95).

      

      In spring 1952, to state Monroe's character in light of fan magazines' coverage of her 'secret drama' her next role was as a naïve and pure-hearted sweetheart, that year's Mrs. Missouri and a hopeful Mrs. America, in We're Not Married. Marilyn's ability to augment this character's characteristics revealed her own sweetheart cheesecake quality to be greater than that which any film role could write for her (20th Century Fox, "Marilyn Monroe" 6; Hamilton, "Shadow Stage," Sept. 1952 23). The character, Annabel, is a nod to the fan press proposal of Monroe's wish to be the biggest Hollywood glamour girl over a doting mother, as well. Annabel intimates the wish to learn - voicing a truth of Marilyn's own - and to share responsibilities of the home and the child. Thus, teaching young women to have or to learn such domestic abilities and to see the romance of being a wife and a mother (23; Kilbourn 24). Annabel and her husband choose to marry again after receiving letter that prior to, they were not married in a legal sense, and he allows her to pursue her dream of winning the Miss. America title - a representation of 1950s American patriarchy's allowing young women to work in forms of employment that were regarded as women's work (Neil 12). To promise the truth of Monroe, We're Not Married represented Monroe's self as a docile ornament of her husband, and the film's cast of male characters (Father O. 206).

      

      At the beginning of 1952, for such reasons as her being chosen in 1951 to guide girls and young women in the film fan press (as well as her endurance of such reasons), Monroe was trusted as the guide of the subjects of young women's private lives and presence in the workforce and public sphere. She gratefully obliged. To represent her true narrative at the height of her star and of the fan press' reporting of her 'secret dramas' with female stars and starlets, Monroe wrote articles on living on one's own as a young woman. She described the virtues of young women's independence in between living at home with their families and attending high school, and marrying and living in a home with a husband. She writes that a young woman becomes more hopeful, caring, and learned in the duties that she will perform as a housewife and mother in the 1950s. She discussed how to appropriately find true love as a working young woman and what she has learned about the protection of chastity and moral purity (Monroe, "Temptations Of A Bachelor Girl" 95).

 

    In 1952, a parental eye was placed on young women's aspiring to and embracing of contemporary femininity, which Monroe was understood to be, and upheld as, representative of. each detail of the amount Marilyn made, the manner with which she navigated the workplace, which public events she attended and how she behaved in attendance, how she beautified her self, and how she decorated her home and which purchases she made was sought (Monroe, "Temptations Of A Bachelor Girl" 95; Sherwood, "Helping Hand For Marilyn" 51; Peterson 56). Upon Marilyn's becoming a Hollywood star and entrance into the world of Hollywood stars, her achievements in the former, and being in the latter, were depicted in the terms of her blushing happiness, gratefulness and surprise. Her choosing to be connected to her humble beginnings - not becoming poised and refined at the height of her star - promised her special warmth, vulnerability, genuineness and trusting nature ("Photoplay Picture Gallery" 74; "Maggi's Private Wire" 47). As a form of her regulation, Fox supported paternal concerns that her naiveté and trusting nature may lead to her falling into the trappings of moral impurity and the loss of chasteness. Likewise supported were paternal teachings of what is right and what is wrong when Marilyn may be nearing what could cause her to make a wrong choice (Monroe, "Temptations Of A Bachelor Girl" 95; Gulman 63). Paternal worry over her earning a salary of money that was nearing the higher salaries that young men could have been making in the 1950s became present. At this time in Monroe's career, paternal calls for her to give up her career for she had accomplished what a young woman ought to in the workforce were made. Likewise, paternal calls for her to marry, to make a home and to have children - raised with her moral purity, the lessons a young woman could learn in the workforce, and the greatest luxuries that a 1950s family could afford (the 1950s American dream) (Collins 102; Gulman 63; Armstrong 98). Such second calls counselled that a happy marriage and family with former New York Yankees' outfielder Joe Dimaggio, could give her such a happy ending (Gulman 63).

 

      In 1952 Marilyn's now-famous all-American sweetheart star helped to introduce her male and female fans to Hollywood technological expansions. This helped to relieve fears over cinematic technologies and to brand them with Monroe's sweetheart values (Johnson 88; 20th Century Fox, "All This...And Cinemascope" 5). It was in 1952, as well, that a calendar of nude photographs taken of the star in her earliest years as a model was published. Marilyn's heartbreak and self-punishment upon the calendar's public release were published very soon after. She announced her reasoning that she posed as so that she would not starve (Connolly, "Impertinent Interview," Jun. 1952 18). As she was the representation of all-American sweetheart femininity by the 1950s, she was held liable for making such a mistake ("Secret Life" 93). Fox announced how Monroe should be understood in the aftermath of the calendar in O'Henry's Fun House. She plays a young lady aspiring to begin making a life of her own that she is proud of and trusting of the goodness of humanity that is betrayed by a con-man in the film (Allen 12; 20th Century Fox, "Marilyn Monroe Is Voted" 6).

 

      Towards the end of 1952, Fox began to compose roles for Marilyn which reflected the proposed - and countered - drama involving the star in 1952. This, was to draw audiences seeking to know with their own eyes and hearts the material and moral truths of the trusted girl-next-door sweetheart (Sherwood, "Helping Hand For Marilyn" 51). Furthermore, to prove the truth of her girl-next door sweetheart after her journey from starlet to the star representative of all-American femininity in the 1950s (Monroe, "Temptations Of A Bachelor Girl" 95). At this second official phase of her career, her roles reflected Hollywood's role model for femininity and womanhood in the context of 1952 (leaving behind the earlier aspect of 1950s erotic fantasy). Further, these roles reflected the threats to young women's moral purity that had arisen as a result of social changes (Armstrong 98; 20th Century Fox, Dynamo 21). This second batch of films were teaching materials that would show how Monroe herself, understood what was right and what was wrong (Cronin 74).

 

      At the height of her star in 1952, a trusted confidante who knew Marilyn's true self asked to meet a traditional gentleman with the priority of being a father (Collins 102). At this stage in time, she was prepared to marry and begin a family (Cronin 74). National hopes of a happily ever after for Marilyn, inspired reporting of her meeting, courtship with and marriage to Joe DiMaggio to be a fairytale that grew with each article adding a piece to the story. The two fell in love at first sight, and their love could heal her tragedies and childhood scars (Collins 102). Marilyn's giddiness, cutesy-ness and nervousness were the themes of her dating DiMaggio. The coverage of this was to give young women their best friend, Marilyn; furthermore, Fox sought to teach young women (what they should look for) in her dating DiMaggio (Cronin 74; Armstrong 98; "Marilyn As A Housewife" 66). The fan press sought to learn how she prepared for him - such as the books she read, getting ready for a date routine, and especially, her beauty secrets, her date outfits, and her choice of a wedding dress (Cronin 74; Parsons, "Good News," Dec. 1952 7). Their feelings for each other and their romance were presented as homey, with articles detailing their needing to be by each other's sides. He sought to know her heart and of her wholesomeness, and to understand her vulnerability. Like Marilyn, he shared an appreciation of and found the value in the simple and little things (Collins 102). DiMaggio was patient with Marilyn's responsibilities in her work, safely driving her back to her home after she had to attend Hollywood events ("He's Her Joe!" 37). He gave her safety, searched for her wishes, (Collins 102) and vowed his loyalty to protect her from the Hollywood ‘wolves’ (Cronin 74). Despite this, his baseball star, its potential connection to vices that she had been saved from and the women looking to win his love for themselves, made her male fans believe that she ought rather to be with a true boy-next-door like themselves. Her male fans therefore, wanted to know all that could be found about DiMaggio (74; Collins 102).

 

      He had a temper, which would rise when Monroe's being a Hollywood star was brought up, and if she sought to build beyond 1950s sweetheart cheesecake roles (Cronin 74; Graham 69). It was discovered how he was raised well with a small town boy-next-door's manners. He wanted to honour and make proud his passed on mother and father, (Collins 102) and he held the dream to have, and had learned from this romantic marriage union. From the beginning, he wished to begin a family with her and trusted in her as a mother (102; Cronin 74). He soon introducing her to each of his living family members as the one he believed he would marry. Joe was dedicated to traditional fatherhood, and wanted for Marilyn to adopt the role of traditional motherhood (Collins 102). Joe reflected her male fans' desire to take her away from Hollywood, her being a Hollywood star, and having a career to have her as their own, as a housewife and the mother of their children (Cronin 74). His ire came from the protection of the unity and tradition of their union, and of her nurturing of her mothering abilities (74; Armstrong 98). Thus, Joe and Marilyn became wish-fulfillment. Her male fans wished for documentary coverage of the pair so that they could feel as if they were there on dates with her, and later, preparing for a wedding with her. Making a home with her, and learning how to be as good a father as they could while she was learning to be a mother ("Marilyn As A Housewife" 66; Armstrong 98).

 

      Marilyn felt at home with and heard by his teenage girl cousins and their friends, helping them with fashion, hair and make-up (Parsons, "Good News," Dec. 1952 7). She pursued feminine bonding with the women of his family, and gave gifts to DiMaggio and to the members of his close-knit family (Hoffman 85). The domestic joys of Marilyn and Joe living with each other were covered as well. The humble, romantic decoration of his San Francisco home and how Marilyn thought of making the home into a family's safe place (or, the two's purchasing of a new home which they believed to be family-safe) (85; Hoffman 88) were pictured. The bucolic and pastoral nature of their chosen hometown was represented ("Marilyn As A Housewife" 33). Similarly, her embrace by and admiration of his very large Italian-American family was recorded in detail. in these articles, Marilyn's learning how to be a homemaker, housewife and mother from the women of DiMaggio's family was a central feature.

 

      Her belonging to and learning from the rich humble and family-oriented Italian-American and Italian cultures of his family were happy endings to be grateful for (Hoffman 85). Playing with DiMaggio (Collins 101) and his family's children was Monroe's dream pastime (Hoffman 85). She took the most pride and happiness in perfecting how to cook, clean up, and home-make, and she shared her contemporary romantic viewing of these duties ("Marilyn As A Housewife" 66; Hoffman 85). Yet, a contemporary social dilemma for 1950s American patriarchy found itself. The neatness of uniting the decade's two promoted identities for young women, docile, sweetheart housewife and stay-at-home mother and hard-working, aspirational young woman in possession of 1950s virtues, was not very neat (Collins 102; Cronin 74). The sanctity of 1950s marriage was thus a primary concern of portrayal after the popularity of young women's working during the late 1940s and early 1950s (74; Hoffman 88). Marilyn asked if the values, virtues, and skills she may still learn in her work would help with her mothering abilities (Graham 69). To dissuade her from developing her work as a star, DiMaggio reminded her of the truest value of and her truest happiness in becoming a mother (Collins 102; Hoffman 88). In order to protect her young female fans' belief in and aspirations and romance of marrying, becoming a housewife and having and raising children, articles represented the finding of truest happiness in a trusted marriage and family. Furthermore, the safety of family in the 1950s world that was always changing (88; Graham 69). Marilyn could teach the lessons that she had learned as a girl and a young woman to her children (69). By the nature of Monroe's star (and the handsomeness of DiMaggio), worry over the physical intimacy that the two shared was a major concern as well. Since her male fans had 'been' in a courtship for years, they sought to know all that could be known of this subject (Collins 102). At the same time, studios and the film press sought to protect young women fans' romance of marriage, domesticity and becoming a mother (Cronin 67). Therefore, coverage of the two's physical intimacy was hidden in the 'blooming' of true love (Collins 102; Hoffman 87).

 

      The film press was eager to represent her maternal warmth and the kind of mother that she would be in the companionship of a child (Joe Jr.) that she could be the true mother to. Her generousness and selflessness as a child's mother and the tender care which she gave to him always were reported. She invited Joe's child to be as close to her and his father as much as his mother allowed, making efforts with Fox to withdraw further from her duties as a star. She protected the safety of Joe's child, Joe Jr., and of her own children to-be (Collins 102). Monroe herself presented her planning of the following handful of years to make sure that she was never away from the side and care of her husband and children (Graham 28). She and DiMaggio's wedding happened at city hall in San Francisco to obtain a marriage license in his father and mother's chosen and his close family's hometown, and where the pair had put their roots. The wedding and the two's honeymoon represented that true love does not need riches. Each represented the pair's leaving Hollywood behind, making a home and beginning to introduce children into their union. That the wedding and honeymoon were a secret to anyone not belonging to the few that the couple invited into their home was learned warmly. Older men wanted close coverage of the couple for they sought to guide her and to ensure that she was heeding their guidance (and the orders given to her to her regarding her morality's preservation and feminine purity, over the years). They voiced appreciation of her growing up, and a desire to be a part of the blossoming of her womanhood (Hoffman 88).

 

      Akin to 1952's We're Not Married, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was Fox's answer to her heightened coverage in fan magazines as a high-priced glamour girl taken with Hollywood's finest that swooned men for money (Epstein 22). She plays a hard-working young woman needing to eat is enchanted by and becomes caught up in luxuriousness and the promise of a life where she wants for not. But true happiness is finding true love, with Monroe's Lorelai marrying Tommy Noonan's mannered, family-oriented romantic lead to end the film. The star's real happiness in Lorelai's romantic moments and scenes with Noonan presenting her firm belief in marriage and the traditional role of a wife and mother (Harrison, "Harrison's Reports," Jun. 1953 102). The sparkly-ness and cutesy-ness of this film communicated that Monroe was the little girl dressing up Hollywood glamour she had been from the beginning (The Independent Film Journal Staff, Jun. 1953 10). The star's bashfulness in her attempt to play the coy and falsely and manipulatively innocent Lorelai, and the true innocence and naiveté that she cannot hide, proving the falsehood of this such notion (Stone 23). This film communicated, for the first time in Monroe's body of work, that she had a gifted mind fit to protect her moral purity and chastity (The Independent Film Journal Staff, Jun. 1953 10).

 

      1953's Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire was to present Monroe as a role model in light of the social threats to young women's moral purity and the working world that many of them chose to enter to be 1950s young women. As well, to historiographically place Monroe in the canon of female stars as the embodiment of 1950s femininity. Monroe plays a model struggling to find employment and to pay for groceries and her apartment, with kindness and an appreciation of simple things as her character's attributes. Her character Pola is defined by her acting with her heart, helping anyone before they even need to ask, and unquestioning of the choice for true love above all else. She is only touched by true connection, admiring and wanting to marry boy-next-doors trying to achieve in order to take care of a family of their own. Her innocence is intimated in each word she utters and move she makes - a fact notable of any of her less girl-next-door roles - and her obedience is a principle in the film. Promotional materials drew upon her fairytale dreaminess and that of her becoming a starlet. At the same time, drawing on her humbleness in her looks and her self, vulnerability, caring, gentleness, selflessness, and hard work (20th Century Fox, Dynamo 21).

      

      In spring 1953, Fox-backed fan magazines had to confirm the that she had not been wholly truthful about her life story. A primary concern founded was her mother's unreliable condition - and that the two's fragile relationship put an ache in her that inspired her own motherly kindness and forgiving nature. The truth of her birth father abandoning her mother before her birth was discovered, and presented as an issue that was the blame of men, and their weakened family values in the 1920s and 30s. That ought to be remedied in the 1950s. Her hard work as a young girl in school trying to begin a path to what she hoped to accomplish, as a model in her earliest years, and as a starlet pulling herself up by her bootstraps followed the truths of her childhood. Her dedication and her learning since her earliest years were placed in the fore ("Secret Life" 93).

 

      The sister of her first husband voiced the loneliness of her childhood, innocence which guides her and kind heart with which she makes her decisions. This source spoke of Monroe's loyalty to anyone that had shared kindness with her, and especially those whom did so in her poor childhood. Teenage Marilyn's need for familial love and loved ones, and her need for and her following of guidance were discussed to make sense of the baby starlet's lying (Nelson 64). One Fox-backed paper gave voice to a modelling agent that was the first in Hollywood to meet Monroe. Her gratefulness to the army poster-makers who believed that she ought to model, and hope to give joy and to help Americans was the first spoke to. Secondly, her sensitivity to and wish to save America's social ills. Such a source described her insecurity in her looks and her self from her earliest years, and her innocence in her dreams to become an actress in Hollywood. Marilyn's need to please and to make proud all, and crucially, those who believed in and supported her, was connected to her true early story as a young starlet. Early model Marilyn greeted anybody with kindness - giving back kindnesses which she received as much as she could once she could. Those whom she gave back to had to promise her that she had done enough (Snively 78). Young women spoke out on how she had been their role model since they were younger girls in the early 1950s. For the first time, older traditional women praised her dedication to self-improvement, learning to be as good of a mother as she could, traditional courtship and choice in husband, and belief that true happiness comes from making a home and a traditional family (Lee 60). Older traditional and young women spoke on their understanding of Monroe's choices to fault the nation's social issues that had placed her in that position, among them poor childcare, food and welfare programs, few jobs for women, and sex work (Benedict 59; Lee 60).

 

      By 1953's end, Monroe was the representation of her decade's feminine values, virtues and still, expectations, representing in her films, social issues which placed young women's moral purity and chastity at risk, as social changes occurred. Her cinematic role by 1953's end developing from her representing appropriate contemporary feminine values and virtues from 1951 to 1952, and her teaching 1950s male virtues and expectations to young men in the earliest years of the 1950s. As the 1950s wore on, until the decade's end, Monroe would go on to depict how Mrs. America would grapple with and triumph over contemporary conflicts. Her studio and Hollywood's trust in her to do so proven in her being found as lying at first to achieve her dreams, and the revealing of her truth that is truer, in fact, to America's principles in the last years of the 1940s and early years of 1950s, and the tragedies from the post-(First World) war years to the 1940s' last years (20th Century Fox, Dynamo).

At the edge of the West End in a city called London, there was a Cabaret at the Donmar Warehouse – it was the end of the 20th century, and the audience was dancing with Alan Cumming’s Emcee, Jane Horrocks’ Sally Bowles, Adam Godley’s Cliff Bradshaw, Sara Kestelman’s Fraulein Schneider and George Raistrick’s Herr Schultz with how close they were seated to the stage.

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Traditional to Cabaret’s theatrical staging, the orchestra suspends above the stage in a well-lit box – alongside sparse chairs and suitcases furnishing protagonist Cliff, an American novelist, and deuteragonist, English cabaret performer Sally’s Berlin apartment, this is the only set-piece for most of Sam Mendes’ adaptation of the 1966 musical. Black-outs transition between scenes; this absence culminating in Mendes’ final scene where bars line the background, queer performers of the Kit Kat Club (the titular cabaret) locked behind them, in mimicry of Nazi concentration camps and the vulnerable minorities of 1930s Germany that the fascist party persecuted and punished. This is one of Mendes’ choices for the musical foremostly to empathize with such targeted and de-humanized groups.

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Others, including the nationalist, Nazi-tied song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” playing on a gramophone by the sexually and gender-queer Emcee (rather than its traditional singing by a young boy Nazi) that he stops before it can finish and his disrobing his leather trench-coat costume to reveal an Auschwitz uniform with yellow and red star and pink triangle badges at the show’s conclusion. Lea Anderson’s choreography and Sue Blane’s costume design depict the creeping presence and power of Nazis at the Kit Kat Club. In between Cabaret’s plot scenes; following Cliff and Sally’s finding themselves then falling in love and preparing to raise the baby Sally falls pregnant with as a family; are cabaret numbers representative of Berlin’s culture – beginning with fetish-wear and pantomime sex acts, and becoming army-inspired lingerie and showgirl high-kick lines.

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Sara Kestelman gives older apartment-owner Fraulein Schneider an empathetic strength and heartbreaking hopefulness. In contrast to Cliff and Sally’s melodramatic romance, the Fraulein and Jewish grocery shop-owner Herr Schultz’s tragically-fated love is organic and vulnerable. Such choices make the story of an ambitious and resourceful young female performer and a queer young man navigating his sexuality set against the rise of fascism and its casual support by the German majority into a more focused study of how the Nazis transformed the liberated and progressive-looking Weimar Germany and why Germans, with rooted lives and having survived much, did not fight this.

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Godley’s Cliff is sensitive and hopelessly altruistic, his passionate resistance to fascism shining like a beacon, despite the naivety his American-ness affords him that Mendes’ directorial choices ground. And Horrocks’ Sally is strongest when the chinks in her over-the-top primadonna act show – her grappling to forgive herself for the tragedies in her past and to move beyond them and coping with Nazism’s rise climaxing with the actress’ rendition of closing number “Cabaret,” guttural screams, manic eyes and twisting mouth. Sam Mendes’ staging of Cabaret’s 20th-century-classic story does not sit by and observe freedom-granting Berlin’s decline into a fascist stronghold, instead foregrounding the beauty of queerness and the human faces of those people groups imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps – a landmark adaptation of Joe Masteroff’s original text.

Mirabelle cartwheels on the plush, dewy grass. The fluffy ruffles of her strawberry-pink dress brush past her knees as a springtime breeze floats by. She wished to wear her baby brother’s powder-blue overalls sprinkled with tiny ducklings, but her mommy shook her head no. After the smiley tyke’s first spring from the earth, her palms are kissed with patches of light green. Her pinky rubs one of the spots, and it is fuzzy and scratchy.

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As Mirabelle’s chubby legs lift to the sky for the second time, a curly, cloud-white poodle nuzzles its wet nose back-and-forth on the side of her calf. She giggles, bright and sugary, and crashes back onto the grass with a thump. Her peachy arms squeeze her belly tight, and the puppy whose fur matches dollops of whipped cream leaps onto her lap. It licks its cold, peanut butter-brown tongue in little swirls on the pillowy apples of her cheeks.

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Mirabelle sticks out a thumb to catch a butterfly flapping above the poodle’s ears – it is violet, just like the spiky-cone flowers her daddy helps her water, and it has milky-white spots that look like eyes. Sweetly-smelling tulips waft through the chilly air and tickle her pink-blushed nose. Noontime sunlight splashes her face, arms and legs with warmness.

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When the butterfly and puppy are gone, her sparkly eyes peek around the backyard and spot a bunch of cotton candy-pink and butterscotch-yellow weeds. She toddles over, lifting up clunky, glittering sneakers and making shapes in the soft, freshly-cut grass. Mirabelle digs her plush fingers into the freezing, downy dirt, and picks each weed up, one by one.

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***

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Josephine’s hazel eyes touched with glints of violet are wide. Her lithe right arm is snaked around her husband’s shoulder, bird-like yet gripping hard. Her jaw is clenched, but a thin, close-mouthed smile is painted on. Her only daughter Mirabelle is acting like a feral creature, soiling her Sunday best and ruining her well-primped locks.

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Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” rings like a police siren in Josephine’s ears – too shrill and frenetic to quiet her nerves. The dining room’s chandelier, with tens of arms encrusted in hundreds of diamonds, is skewing to the far-left – searing the skin pulled taught across her collarbone and shoulders. The blood-red of the dining room’s wallpaper punctures a migraine into the centre of her forehead, its twisting damask print becoming serpentine with each look. Beads of sweat at the crown of her hairline and in crevices around her nostrils threaten to pierce her porcelain face.

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Her husband’s wrinkled hand pinches her waist, forming dull sapphire bruises on the flesh beneath the thin, ivory lace of her evening gown. A droplet of matte, golden foundation descends from her temple to the edge of her jawline, leaving in its wake a chalky streak, and halting her breath.

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Boney, pale fingers – ofttimes hidden in gaudy satin gloves – pick up of morsels of tomatoes dribbled in gluey vinaigrette, oysters smothered in translucent butter and sweating, salted prawns, and suspend them before trembling, paper-thin lips. Sickly saccharine pleasantries reverberate around the dining room’s four walls like the humming of wasps. Glasses of acrid, grey-yellow wine, each at the price of a diamond, clink by the tens, injecting chills up Josephine’s rigid, straightened spine.

Part One:

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A prince rides an alabaster-white steed. A creature gifted for his twelfth birthday. Purple-and-gold bridle and saddle declare noble birth.

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Winter’s chill reddens the prince’s cheeks. Planted maple and oak trees, long gone. Lush emerald meadows become untamed wilderness. Songbirds’ chirping and farm animals’ trotting quiet.

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A brown-velvet satchel thumps against his chest. Dozens of letters are hidden inside. Each, a charcoal-black-inked promise of love. Miles of overgrown flora are passed. Towering ancient sycamores, shielding sunlight from entering. Spiky stems digging into woolly, dark-green bellies.

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At last he reaches the woods’ neck. Willow trees bend to form a gateway. Elderly branches spiral like barbed wire. Thorny, grey-violet weeds engulf the grass. A gust hisses like a rattlesnake’s tail. His steed whinnies, rearing its front legs. The letters lurch back and jumble together. He prays no wet ink is smudged.

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The prince pulls the rein taut. Creature and master land back to earth.

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The prince puffs his chest. He knits his brow and exhales. His palms tenderly stroke his steed’s mane. The two march forwards into the unknown.

 

Part Two:

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Sycamore trees with ruby-red leaves and jasper-green fir trees are the kings of the forest, fluffy strawberry and blueberry bushes are the knights of the East, and spiny bushels of lavender and blackthorn are the cavalry of the West: a hazel-eyed, auburn-ringleted maiden who calls the forest home, winds around the thick trunks of the few oak trees and thorny blackberry brambles with a fawn’s grace, the frail cotton of her tunic lifted over each branch and leaf that could snag and her bare feet finding spots of soft grass to land; she bends next to a crystal-clear lake, cups her hands in the cool water, brushing aside snow-white water lilies, and splashes her face, darkening her penny-brown freckles and thick, doe’s eyelashes – spotted on the edge of the lake is a golden-yellow iris that she plucks from the root to give as a gift.

McMurdo examines a fan community on the social networking site Tumblr that countered the American-filmic tradition of spectator-jurists determining whether somebody accused of a crime was guilty or innocent – the fans of American Horror Story’s Tate Langdon (McMurdo, 2019). Despite witnessing Langdon commit a mass-shooting at his high school, this community of fans regarded him as somebody that was innocent of the charges he was guilty of, and somebody that was morally good (McMurdo, 2019: 58-63). Langdon, the ghost of a seventeen-year-old and the love interest of the show’s first protagonist, fifteen-year-old Violet Harmon, became featured in blog posts which pedestaled him as a “twisted dream boy” (McMurdo, 2019: 57). This paper inquires why Langdon was interpreted by his fan community on Tumblr as a “twisted dream boy”; where McMurdo takes a critical perspective on this fan community this paper attempts to reason why Tate was embraced as a romantic figure as well as what drew fans to perceive the character as an innocent “dream boy.” Fan-identification with Violet Harmon and ‘Murder House’s’ creators’ characterization of Tate as a morally good young person that was driven to violence by external factors are suggested as why his Tumblr fan community overlooked the fact that he was guilty of mass-killing.

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Many of the Tumblr blog posts that McMurdo examines are representative of another, wider community on Tumblr: the “sad girl” community (Thelandersson, 2018). On the “sad girl” approach to mental illness Thelandersson writes that the community focused on shamelessly discussing how sadness is felt, how sadness can be dealt with (with strategies other than hospitalization and medication), and how sadness as an ordinary state of mind can be reconciled with (Thelandersson, 2018: 4-13). In “Pilot” Violet and Tate discuss their shared feelings of disconnection from, and rejection by, the society that they both belong to, because of their mental illnesses (“Pilot” 27:23-28:30). The two show the self-harm cuts and scars on their wrists to one another: “This one I did after my father left. I was ten,” Tate discloses as the cause of one of his scars, and Violet responds to him with the causation of one of her cuts: “Last week, first day at my new school, sucks,” (27:23-27:30). Tate expresses that he was treated poorly at the same high school that Violet is attending and that she feels like an outsider at, and Violet agrees with his contempt towards such an institution, declaring, “I hate it here. I hate everyone,” (27:32-27:36). Violet explains that she, her mother and her father relocated to Tate’s neighborhood because her mother suffered a miscarriage and her father coped with this tragedy by having an extramarital affair (27:46-28:10). In response to this information Tate states, “If you love someone, you should never hurt them. Never. (27:52-27:55)” Then, Tate takes Violet’s hands in his and tenderly runs his fingers along her scars (28:16-28:18). Three points are communicated by this scene: that Violet and Tate accept one another’s psychiatric issues; that difficulties in school and at home are presented as contributing factors to the pair’s suffering (a point recognized by the two characters’ themselves); and that Tate is someone that is separated from the vicious world that Violet feels hopeless towards. Another point communicated by this scene is that Tate is tempered and uplifted by Violet: compared to the sullen and aggressive teenager that the spectator witnesses him being with Violet’s psychiatrist father, (“Pilot” 25:55-26:57) Tate is gentle and supportive with the similarly mentally ill teenage girl. “Pilot’s” Tate is represented as in alliance with “sad girls,” and his hostile opposition of Westfield High School and of Violet’s psychiatrist father lends to the romanticization of him as a “twisted dream boy” (McMurdo, 2019: 57).

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            In “Halloween (Part 2)” spectator-jurists hear from Tate about his time in high school: sitting on the beach with Violet at night, he intimates, “I used to come here. When the world closed in, and got so small I couldn’t breathe. And I’d look out at the ocean, and I’d think, ‘Yo douchebag! High school counts for jack shit.’ (“Halloween (Part 2)” 9:50-10:13)” According to Thelandersson, apathy and the glamorization of suffering, both personal and societal, were characteristics that the “sad girl” community believed to be idealizable (Thelandersson, 2018: 13-17). Tate’s apathy towards the dominant society that is represented by his high school would therefore be attractive to “sad girl” spectator-jurists that identified with the thinking that apathy is glamorous, just as Violet herself appears to be romanticizing this aspect of Tate’s character (“Halloween (Part 2)” 10:09-10:21). Tate then associates himself with a list of celebrity figures that symbolize social marginalization and personal suffering, “Kurt Cobain, Quentin Tarantino, [Marlon] Brando, [Robert] De Niro, [Al] Pacino, (10:18-10:20)” consequently linking Tate to a lineage of “twisted dream boys,” and communicating that Tate, like “sad girls,” romanticizes suffering. Dialogue then differentiates Tate as a morally good character, in contrast to a dominant society that has a vicious and callous nature: “I hated, high school. So I’d come here. And I’d look at this vast, limitless expanse. And it’s like, ‘That’s your life, man. You can do anything. You can be anything. Screw high school,’ (10:37-11:11)” His monologue characterizes Tate as not only a “sad girl’s” “dream boy” (McMurdo, 2019: 57), but their “dream boy” that is also fundamentally virtuous. Five teenagers covered in (what Violet assumes to be) fake blood and prosthetic wounds descend towards, and encircle, the couple (11:35-12:40). One boy snarls at Tate, “We’ve been waiting for years for you to show your face, but you like mommy’s little safehouse. (11:49-11:54)” Tate shields Violet with his body, and asks the group not to hurt her (12:08-12:10). The same bully responds, “We don’t want her. We want you. (12:10-12:12)” One girl pipes up, “How about we drown him? (12:13)” and the first bully that spoke offers another form of violence to subject Tate to, “No we should shoot him right between the eyes. (12:14-12:15)” When Violet interjects the group’s planning of Tate’s murder to defend him, one of the female bullies demands to the group, “Someone please waste this bitch,” (12:16-12:18).” This second half of this scene from “Halloween (Part 2)” testifies to the conceptualization that Tate was martyred at his high school for his perceived abnormality. Tate and Violet are presented as outcasts, victimized by a society that maligns mental illness and persecutes and terrorizes those that suffer from mental illness, and that together, they make up a star-crossed pair of anti-heroes. To a spectator-jurist that understood apathy and suffering to be romantic, a relationship constituted of going up against the world hand-in-hand with a “twisted dream boy” (McMurdo, 2019: 57) like Violet and Tate’s, would thus far, be regarded as romantic.

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Browder suggests that a draw of true crime books about men who kill for female readers is not just a desire to make sense of the killings, but to save the men somehow from reoffending (Browder, 2006: 940-941). Where “sad girls” believed that medical and institutional models were not capable of curing Violet and Tate’s psychiatric illnesses, they thought that the trueness of the couple’s love could be a cure (McMurdo, 2019). At the opening of this scene from “Halloween (Part 2),” Tate declines Violet’s request to have sex because, “Violet, I just want to be with you so badly. And that’s never happened to me with a girl. (“Halloween (Part 2)” 8:45-8:56)” Thinking that he has rejected her, she offers to leave, but he begs her to stay, signifying that he does not want to ruin the purity and perfection of their budding romance by having sex (9:24-9:38). If Tate’s psychiatric issues are caused by a disorder that Violet’s father is trying to treat, having been bullied at school, and a troubled relationship with his father, and Violet’s psychiatric issues are attributed to her own mental illness, her father’s affair, and experiencing a similarly rough time in school, their romantic relationship is represented as a remedy for both of their struggling. This scene ends with Tate pulling Violet away from the bullies that want to kill him and hurt her, an act represented as his protecting her, (12:32-12:41) and which contributes to the arguments that Tate has a virtuous heart, and that he seeks to save those that are, like him, victims of a society that maligns those with psychiatric issues as abnormal, from the terrorization that he received in his lifetime.

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Walters argues that the feeling of guilt accompanies the observance of violence occurring to other human beings (Walters, 2021: 26-27). However, if a spectator-jurist can empathise with the reasoning behind such violence being committed, then guilt might not accompany this observance. “Sad girl” spectator-jurists’ reasoning of Tate’s criminal actions contributed to their perception of him as an innocent character, despite the mass-killing that he commits. In “Piggy Piggy” spectator-jurists witness Tate’s school-shooting, and his capture by a SWAT team in the aftermath of the event (“Piggy Piggy” 0:23-4:57). In 1994, gunshots fire from a hallway of Westfield High (0:38-1:20). One of Tate’s bullies from “Halloween (Part 2)” runs into the library and barricades the door, shouting, “Somebody is shooting up the school! He’s just shooting people! (0:51-0:57)” Gunshots fire into the library, and all five of Tate’s teenage bullies from “Halloween (Part 2)” run to find hiding places (1:08-2:00). Tate enters the library, his slow movement appearing as if he is sleepwalking (2:05-4:12). He sneaks up behind his first female victim hiding behind a bookshelf, and shoots her in the head (2:40-2:58). Tate finds his next victim behind a couch; despite the boy begging, “No, no! P-please, no,” Tate shoots him (3:08-3:13). His next victim he shoots in the mouth, as the victim attempts to call for help with the library’s phone (3:17-3:34). His final male victim steps out from his hiding place: attempting to stop Tate he states, “That’s enough. Get out of here,” but he is shot and killed (3:45-3:56). Tate hunts down his final victim underneath a table, and her last words before being shot are, “Why! Why! Please…,” (3:58-4:29). As Tate carries out his killings he is silent (apart from a couple of bars of whistling when he first enters the library) (0:37-4:29). The only time that the spectator-jurist sees Tate’s face during the event is before he kills his final victim; his face is blank as if he is not cognizant of his actions, as if he is in a trance (4:20-4:24). The trance-like state that Tate seems to be in, judging by the absence of mind communicated by his movement, his silence, his demeanor, his impenetrability by any external stimuli, and the irrationality of his actions during the school-shooting, points to an episode of one or a combination of the mental illnesses that the character is being treated for by Violet’s father in the present-day. If a “sad girl” spectator-jurist received Tate as a victim of a society that contributes to the formation of psychiatric issues but is ill-equipped to meaningfully help said individuals survive while suffering with these issues, a society that enables high school students to torment those with psychiatric issues without significant retribution, then they could rationalize Tate’s actions. Due to his inadequately addressed psychiatric issues and the harassment from his schoolmates, Tate retaliated against those that had terrorized him (or at the least, did not discourage this terrorization) up until the day of his school-shooting; all that Tate is guilty of, in this reading, is being born into an unfit family, being mentally ill, being targeted in school because of his perceived abnormality, and having no support to help him cope with any of these issues. Tate’s punishment for the 1994 school-shooting is compatible with a reading of Tate as a victim of an unjust and cruel society, and that that society is the true guilty criminal. From the crime scene, the spectator is transported to Tate’s bedroom after the shooting, and Tate’s head is hung as if in apology of the violence that he had earlier committed (4:29-4:38). The same blank expression is on his face however, indicating that the incoherent state within which he committed the school-shooting has not yet disappeared, and suggesting that he has yet to consciously recognize the factuality of his murderous actions. Before Tate is able to emerge out of his incoherent state, a group of armed guards storm into his bedroom as his mother pleads, “No, please, he’ll go peacefully. He’s just a child! (4:36-4:40)” Still in a trance, he holds his hands up in surrender, and the guards mark each of their targets on his heart (4:41-4:45). To a spectator-jurist that empathized with Tate, these officers belong to the dominant American society that interprets mental illness as an abnormality, that demands those with mental illnesses to function as if they are not struggling, that allows them to be tormented by their peers because that torment is not viewed as unrighteous violence by the individuals that hold positions of authority. No services were offered to help Tate cope with his psychiatric issues and the struggles in his life that contributed to his internal suffering, but incorporated into the society that Tate inhabited, were armed guards tasked with hunting and (as is later revealed) killing him – to a “sad girl” spectator-jurist, the society is to blame, not Tate, “a child!”

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Jenkins writes, “A monster is a warning that we must set things right, and the exact nature of the monstrosity is a lesson in how we must rectify our behavior. We must be what the monster is not. (Jenkins, 2002: 14).” “Monstrosity” and “monster” are terms that are subjectively attached to certain members of society that are deduced, in hegemonic terms, to be incompatible with thinking and behaviours that have been established as normative and lawful. While individuals like Violet and Tate are perceived as “monster[s],” the “we” that believes psychiatric issues are a sickness that must be cured, that upholds the acceptance of harassing those with psychiatric issues, that supports a group of guns be drawn on a teenage boy, and that believes that boy’s execution by firing squad to be a form of justice (“Piggy Piggy” 40:54-41:03), is “right.” Khapaeva thus considers the allure of the “monster” label to individuals that are marginalized within society: for those that are judged as abnormal, as “monstrous,” due to their selves, embracing the identity of the figure of the monster, with its connections to the supernatural, the horrific, the dark and the macabre, is a way to reclaim autonomy (Khapaeva, 2017: 3-20). If one is discounted from being seen as belonging to a dominant society because of some innate difference, adopting the persona of the monster can provide one with a sense of belonging (Khapaeva, 2017: 3-20). By 30:30 of “Piggy Piggy” Violet has learned from Tate’s mother that he had killed the five teenagers that bullied him and Violet on the beach in “Halloween (Part 2),” and that he was killed by one of the bullets fired by the armed officers that hunted him down after his school-shooting. After learning this, Violet returns to her house to forbid Tate from seeing her again (“Piggy Piggy” 30:34-31:43). In her search for him, she is confronted by a number of other ghosts that have chosen to haunt her home – encounters which remind Violet of the lives that her boyfriend had taken when he was alive (31:22-31:44). Fear and panic build in Violet and she rushes to her bedroom, where Tate has written “I LOVE YOU” on her blackboard; rather than calming her, his declaration worsens her state (31:44-32:30). Violet uncaps her bottle of sleeping pills and shoves them all down her throat in a successful suicide attempt (32:31-33:06). Where Violet could not go on living with the knowledge that the love of her life had taken five lives, the factuality of his being a school-shooter added qualities of poeticism and mythologization to his “sad girl” fans’ romanticization of the character (McMurdo, 2019: 60-67). For a spectator-jurist that romanticized apathy and suffering, that had no sympathy for the victims of Tate’s school-shooting nor the scholastic institution that permitted his bullying, and that took on the label of the monster, his criminal actions could be embraced as an act of retributive justice. This history of violence against Jenkins’ “we” mob (Jenkins, 2002: 14) lends to Tate’s mythologization as a monster figure, and if a “sad girl” spectator-jurist romanticized not just tragedy, societal abandonment, and criminality, but monstrosity (meaning the attribution of all that is regarded as dark and fearful by the society that judges mental illness as a form of abnormality (Khapaeva, 2017: 15-20)), his being a school-shooter could contribute to his poeticism as a romantic partner. If a spectator-jurist could romanticize Tate’s school-shooting, the relationship dynamic of a “sad girl” and a “twisted” (McMurdo, 2019: 57) boy challenging their enemies (previously established between Tate and Violet in “Halloween (Part 2)”) would increase in poeticism – this couple transforms into a romantic pair of monsters, killing anyone, that wanted to kill them.

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Violet’s suicide suggests that her character is more aligned with the dominant society that sees Tate as a monster because of his psychiatric issues, than those that are stigmatized and rejected by that society. This response to Violet’s gaining the full picture of who Tate is as a character, is compatible with his fans’ thinking that Violet had betrayed Tate with this act: (McMurdo, 2019: 63-68) that she was unwilling to accept him, and incapable of recognizing the society that had tormented and killed Tate as the true guilty criminal. After her death, Tate finds Violet’s body, and drags it to a bathroom, shouting, “Don’t you die on me Violet! (“Piggy Piggy” 33:06-33:10)” Sobbing and repeating this command, he pulls her corpse into a bathtub and turns on the shower (33:12-33:22). He shouts her name, then sticks his fingers down her throat to try and purge whatever substance has made her unconscious and stopped her breath (33:22-33:24). Eventually, her eyes flutter open (33:24-33:28). As Violet sobs, Tate brushes her hair, holds her body and kisses her (33:28-33:45). Thus far, Tate and Violet's relationship has been presented as an antidote to both individuals’ mental illnesses – that their perfection as a match, is capable of working as a cure for one another’s particular illnesses. This idea is evidenced by Tate motivating Violet's will to live throughout ‘Murder House,’ and Tate’s becoming a changed young man because of Violet having entered his life, as his mother discloses earlier in this episode (“Piggy Piggy” 8:00-9:58). The second half of this “Piggy Piggy” scene argues that Tate needs Violet to stay alive; that, as had been represented prior to Violet's suicide, Tate and Violet are capable of becoming cured so long as they have one another in their lives; and that therefore, what would be best for both Tate and Violet, even if the latter has wavered in recognizing such, is for them to be together. As believed by his Tumblr fans, (McMurdo, 2019: 64-68) the creators of ‘Murder House’ communicate that a “sad girl” like Violet, and a “twisted” boy like Tate are meant to be – this final act of Tate's should prove to Violet, that nobody who belonged to the society that viewed them as abnormal would fight for her to live, like Tate does. Where Tate is a “monster” in Jenkins’ binary between “monster[s]” and “we,” (Jenkins, 2002: 14) and though he aligns with Khapaeva’s account of individuals that self-identify as the figure of the monster, (Khapaeva, 2017: 16-20) this scene shows how he is virtuous at his core and that he fights for those that are like him, victims of a cruel and unjust society.

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In “Pilot,” Tate Langdon is introduced as a young person who, like ‘Murder House’s’ protagonist Violet Harmon, struggles with mental illness, has a troubled family life, and was victimized by bullies for his being perceived as abnormal at Westfield High School. Tate does not judge Violet but accepts her, promises that he would “never hurt [her] (“Pilot” 27:54-27:55),” and voices his opposition to the morally corrupt dominant society that Violet condemns and is marginalized by. In the “Pilot” episode, ‘Murder House’s’ creators establish that as Tate understands and supports Violet, with Violet, the hopeless and aggressive sides of Tate disappear. Even as Tate self-identifies with the “twisted” aspect of McMurdo’s figure of the “twisted dream boy” (McMurdo, 2019: 57), his monologue in “Halloween (Part 2)” demonstrates that he is someone with virtuous morals, despite his malignment by the Westfield High community. In this same scene, the creators of ‘Murder House’ present the love between Violet and Tate as perfect, so true that it is capable of curing both individuals’ psychiatric issues. Tate and Violet defend one another from the teenage bullies that seek to kill Tate and are interested in harming Violet, and this dynamic was interpreted by the couple’s “sad girl” Tumblr supporters, as their ideal of a “sad girl” and a “twisted dream boy” taking on the world that judges them, together (McMurdo, 2019: 64-68). A spectator-jurist that could justify Tate’s school-shooting; a reading that is promoted by evidence of the character’s being targeted and tormented in “Halloween (Part 2)”; would not feel guilty about observing him carry out his criminal actions in “Piggy Piggy.” A “sad girl” spectator-jurist could rationalize these actions with reference to the absence of any resource that meaningfully aids individuals that suffer from psychiatric issues to cope with them and the external issues that contribute to them, (Thelandersson, 2018: 3-7) and his high school’s enabling of his being bullied within the institution. Moreover, that the society which contributed to the formation of Tate’s mental illness(es) and that allowed his harassment in school, responded to his eventual retaliation against that society with armed officers that aimed to fatally shoot him frames such a society as unjust, and Tate as a victim of it. According to Khapaeva, for some individuals that are marginalized because of their perceived abnormality, taking on the mythical persona of the monster figure is an act of reclamation (Khapaeva, 2017: 3-20). For spectator-jurists that were welcoming of this persona, Tate’s being a school-shooter made the character even more poetic as a “twisted dream boy.” The poeticism of the antiheroic romantic relationship introduced in “Halloween (Part 2)” increased in relation to the factuality of Tate’s being a school-shooter – together, “sad girl” spectator-jurists and Tate could be monsters who killed those that wanted to torment them for their being mentally ill. ‘Murder House’s’ creators contrast Violet’s suicide – an act that demonstrates her inability to adopt the counter-hegemonic label of the monster – with Tate’s reviving Violet – an act that demonstrates his dedication to her survival, a dedication that foils the dominant society that maligns and mistreats her because of her own mental illness. “Piggy Piggy” communicates that Tate is virtuous and acts virtuously to those that have been victimized by the same society that he has been, that Violet should recognize the society that harasses Tate and herself as the true “monster” (Jenkins, 2002: 14), and that what would cure a “sad girl” like Violet, is to be in a romantic relationship with a character like Tate.

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Works Cited

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Browder, Laura. “Dystopian Romance: True Crime and the Female Reader.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 39, no. 6, 2006, pp. 928-953.

“Halloween (Part 2).” American Horror Story, created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, season 1, episode 5, FX, 2011.

Jenkins, Philip. “Catch Me Before I Kill More: Seriality as Modern Monstrosity.” Cultural Analysis, vol. 1, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1-17. Accessed 3 June 2023.

Khapaeva, Dina. The Celebration of Death In Contemporary Culture. University of Michigan Press, 2017.

McMurdo, Shellie. “‘It’s a filthy goddamn helpless world’: Reimagining Columbine, Tate Langdon and the spectre of school shooters.” European Journal of American Culture, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, pp. 57-69. doi.org/10.1386/ejac.38.1.57_1. Accessed 25 May 2023.

“Piggy, Piggy.” American Horror Story, created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, season 1, episode 6, FX, 2011.

“Pilot.” American Horror Story, created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, season 1, episode 1, FX, 2011.

Thelandersson, Frederika. “Social Media Sad Girls and the Normalization of Sad States of Being.” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 2, 2018, pp. 2-21. doi.org/10.22387/CAP2017.9. Accessed 25 May 2023.

Walters, Elizabeth. “Netflix Originals: The Evolution of True Crime Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 88, vol. 88, no. 88, 2021, pp. 25-37, https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8803. Accessed 27 May 2023.

“I’m not interested in reality, I’m interested in images…The film is a rescue fantasy…That’s the attraction to Marilyn,…[t]hat we could have saved her somehow. And maybe the flipside of that is a punishment fantasy, or a sexual fantasy,” spoke Andrew Dominik, the director of 2022’s Blonde (“blonde makes a spectacle out of marilyn monroe's suffering (blonde 2022 review),” 11:48-12:00). The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis summarizes Dominik’s film as a sadistic (mis)interpretation of Marilyn Monroe’s biography: most of the film’s sequences document Ana de Armas’ Monroe in emotional, psychological and physical torment – (“‘Blonde’ Review: Exploiting Marilyn Monroe for Old Times’ Sake”) with two histrionic abortion scenes, and two violent sexual exploitation scenes. Blonde’s cinematography lingers lasciviously on de Armas’ body while her Monroe is confined to crying, wearing glamorous costumes and posing before cameras, entangling herself in exploitative – and at least two clearly non-consensual – sexual relationships, and monologuing about her absent father’s probable disappointment in her and her desire to prevent the men in her adult-life from abandoning her.

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Blonde’s thematic and aesthetic ethos is encapsulated by a passage of Elizabeth Warner’s:

…“because it triggers the most basic and powerful emotion in all of us—fear,” evoking pleasure akin to that experienced when watching a horror film. Bonn further theorizes that the voyeuristic pleasure derived from the real misfortune of others prompts feelings of guilt, which accentuates the guilty-pleasure effect of true crime programming. This guilty-pleasure effect is also aesthetically and acoustically evoked by the unrestrained style that can mark a program or genre as “trashy,” including such true crime tropes as melodramatic narration, music, and reenactments—heightened stylistic elements that serve to exacerbate tension…Gray Cavender and Lisa Bond-Maupin argue that true crime series…deploy this sensationalistic style in a way that conjures another salacious tradition: urban legends. (27)

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Walters reasons that true crime is so acutely popular as a genre, because the human mind is fascinated by consuming sights that trigger a fear response within humans. Like those of fictional horror, spectators of true crime media experience a sensation of pleasure that derives from another physically experiencing the sorts of trauma that we, the spectator, fear experiencing ourselves in real-life. I would expand upon Warner’s argument by positing that visually and/or aurally taking in accountings of real-life crimes satisfies our species’ epistemophilia, and in particular, our drive to gain all of the knowledge that we can to better protect our own survivals. Whether it is truly delusional to ascertain the assurance of our own survivals, learning the events which lead to victims befalling the tragedies that they had, enables spectators to feel like if we do not make the same decisions that such victims had, then we will not become victims ourselves. Walters’ then cites criminologist Scott Bonn’s theory that the feeling of pleasure that humans derive from observing suffering brought upon another human being, is accompanied by a sense of guilt. The cyclicality of pleasure-then guilt-more pleasure-more guilt, intensifies the reactiveness of true crime on the person that consumes stories of others’ suffering.

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Walters argues that – either intentionally or circuitously – the tropes of the true crime genre contribute to causing conflicting feelings of pleasure and guilt; in other words, the genre’s stereotypical representational style creates a diegetic environment that dances between eliciting pleasurable sensations, and forcing the spectator to recognize the inhumanity of finding pleasure in another human’s suffering. “Tension” and “trashy” are words that the author attributes to this traditional style. Gluttonously melodramatic approaches to a story’s narration, musical scoring, and recreations (or more aptly, interpretations) of events are taken to ensnare the spectator.  Dramatizing true events into spectacular presentations easily draws out feelings akin to pleasure, and yet heightening certain appalling aspects of real-life cases prevents the spectator from getting lost in the visual and aural drama (thus reminding that such immersion is reprehensible, and cannot be felt conscientiously without an association with guilt). Blonde relies on “trashy,” melodramatic cinematic techniques to represent Anna de Armas’ Marilyn Monroe in a manner that both titillates, and draws out pity. The first abortion scene that the audience endures is a heightened example of the film’s reliance on the spectacular and on the gruesome. White noise in the hospital room is stylized to mimic heavenly harp playing and bright white light floods the room, washing Monroe in soft, romantic lighting (1:02:34-1:03:37). Her exclamations of fear are quieted first by a female nurse’s, “You’re in good hands, dear, (1:03:04)” and then by an injection of anesthesia that adds hazy and glowing filters onto her sights (1:03:16-.1:03:37). At 1:03:44 the heavenly soundscape ceases, Monroe lets out an agonizing shriek, and she launches herself off of the hospital bed (1:03:45-1:03:47). The camera cuts from an ethereal high-angle to a low-angle that captures an eerily lit hospital room, and a crashing table of medical supplies that she has knocked over and is emitting sparks (1:03:48). Her blood-curdling screams roar atop menacingly buzzing white noise, and the camera – held shakily – chases Monroe out of the operation room, and down empty hospital corridors (some shrouded in darkness, and others splashed in clinical fluorescent lightning) (1:03:50-1:04:00). In just a few minutes, Blonde (clumsily) jolts from a pleasing cinematic style to a horrific cinematic style, yanking its spectator from a sensation of enchantment to a sensation of terror (and guilt, for daring to feel a positive emotion).

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The quote from Blonde’s director – in particular the lines, “…[t]hat we could have saved her somehow. And maybe the flipside of that is a punishment fantasy, or a sexual fantasy,” – is dialogic with the final line of the passage quoted from Warner: “…that true crime series…deploy this sensationalistic style in a way that conjures another salacious tradition: urban legends.” What is appealing about urban legends and true crime stories alike, is that they are fixed, closed and resolved, meaning, that both have set events, exist outside of the observer’s own real-life, and have an ending (even if the crime case has not yet been solved, we and the storytellers can draw our own endings). Urban legends are moments of teaching, as I have posited that true crime media can also act as. In a diabolic sense, victims of true crime emerge as a sort of paragon that the consumers of their traumatic stories can differentiate themselves from: I am not like so-and-so because I carry pepper spray, or I do not get drunk around strangers. The female observer of Blonde, like another unenviable story about a woman’s tragic biography and death, can – at least superficially – point at Dominik’s Monroe and assure herself that if she behaves differently, her own life and death will be in her hands.

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Works Cited

Blonde. Directed by Andrew Dominik, performances by Ana de Armas, Caspar Philipson, David Warshofsky, and Lily Fisher, Netflix, 2022.

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“blonde makes a spectacle out of marilyn monroe's suffering (blonde 2022 review).” YouTube, uploaded by ModernGurlz, 4 Oct. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9yJQB2M_HY.

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Dargis, Manohla. “‘Blonde’ Review: Exploiting Marilyn Monroe for Old Times’ Sake.” The New York Times, 28 Sept. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/movies/blonde-review-marilyn-monroe.html. Accessed 14 May 2023.

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Walters, Elizabeth. “Netflix Originals: The Evolution of True Crime Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 88, vol. 88, no. 88, 2021, pp. 25-37, https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8803. Accessed 13 May 2023.

White describes the formal relations of a “lesbian minor cinema” (410) as so: “relatively impoverished relations of production, spare formal language and thematic concern with the liminal sexual and gender identities of their young female protagonists,…and suggest the appellation ‘minor cinema’(411).” In My So-Called Life’s “Betrayal” and Euphoria’s “Pilot”, the “friendships” between Angela and Rayanne, and Rue and Jules, are “queer” (Nguyen, 14) in two meanings of the term: relating to homo- as opposed to hetero- feelings of attraction, desire and kinship, and unspecified, unfixable into categories, and shifting. White provides context on the historic parameters on “lesbian” (410) works of “cinema” – or more commonly, as consequence of their subject and/or source being sapphic, and therefore, “major” (410) means of production and distribution being inaccessible to the work’s creator(s), alternative audiovisual forms. Because of the nature of community kinship, and particularly, of such found within a “minor” community marginalized firstly, in society (for reasons of both, oversexualization and non-normativity) and secondly, within the queer community, White holds each “lesbian” cinematic text enters into relationship with the “lesbian…cinema” (410) body.

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Neither “Betrayal” nor “Pilot” can claim “minor” (410) parentage nor home, the former, being created by Winnie Holzman and airing on the network ABC, and the latter, by Sam Levinson and airing on the network HBO. Even with respect to this fact, in “Betrayal” as in “Pilot” the relationships between Angela and Rayanne and Rue and Jules reflect the narrative and visual themes of “lesbian minor cinema”, in dialogue with Nguyen’s understanding of the term “minor” (12) as an “object” (12) that is known to, and beheld by, those within a particular marginalized community, without being so by those outside of it. The politics of sexuality depicted in “Betrayal” and “Pilot” are different as a result of the twenty years in between the airing of the two shows: in My So-Called Life, the sexuality and physical intimacies of high school girls and boys are more juvenile, “innocent”, underdeveloped, compared to the precocious, “mature”, explicit sexual subjectivities and lives of the teenagers of Euphoria. If the “major” can be conceptualized as heterosexual sexuality within which My So-Called Life and Euphoria recreate the “minor” (Nguyen, 13) experience of girl homosexuality and friendships between girls, and homosexual girls, those “majors” are very much dissimilar discourses – in the former, physical and sexual intimacy are understood as meaningful and ultimate, and in the latter, such are viewed more as a game, with rules, strategies, winners, losers.

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The plot of “Betrayal” focuses on Angela’s displacement of her desires for and imaginations of a committed emotional and physical relationship with Jordan onto Cory, and Rayanne’s temporary achievement of “being” Angela by having sex (while under the influence of alcohol) with Jordan, followed by intense regret and disappointment in herself. While a “straight”, or “major” (Nguyen, 13), reading of “Betrayal” illustrates how Holzman explores the internal contradictions problematizing the clarity of what adolescent girls want, a reading of the text through a sapphic lens would reveal the true, unspoken and perhaps unknown to the girls’ themselves, nature of the episode’s plot. Angela’s and Rayanne’s mapping of homoerotic if not homosexual desires for the other, as well as desires to be the other, onto intimacy with Cory and Jordan, respectively. Nate Jacobs’ father whom the plot of “Pilot” tracks Jules engaging in graphically violent sex acts with, like Jordan or Cory is a body onto which in this case conscious fantasies of the achievement of the norms of heterosexuality and a future of female chrononormativity expected of (/enforced upon and putting up internal checks for) teenage girls are projected by the character.

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Though Rue and Jules are able to communicate to each other more clearly their same-sex desires and make them into a reality, as by the end of “Pilot” the two are spending the night in the latter’s bed, Levinson shows that the more explicitly erotic aspect of their friendship/intimate physical and emotional relationship is but one more factor that complicates the girls’ discernibility and determination of their relationships to one another and to sexuality. Like that of Angela and Rayanne, in reaffirmation of the thesis of “lesbian minor cinema” (410), the sapphic girl relationship is manifested as changing, unfixed, ambiguous, fleeting, not-to-be “happ[ily close] end[ed]” (411). The depiction of Angela and Rayanne and Rue and Jules’ relationships is representative of Nguyen’s notion of the “minor object” (13) as that which exists as hidden within, and refusing to make itself known to, the “major” (White, 410) “archive” (Nguyen, 15) so as to not be misinterpreted, misappropriated or otherwise obfuscated of truth, and stay as a safe space for sapphic girls and women to mediate their selves through, time and again.

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As White outlines as the formal dimensions generic of “lesbian” (412) cinema, as reflective of the subjectivity of discerning one’s feelings, as a sapphic girl, for another girl, especially a girl whom one has been friends with for a long time, is a new friend or even is an adversary, distance, closeness, isolation and mutuality motivate the formal decisions of depictions of “relationships” in “Betrayal” and “Pilot”. Looking and being looked at, or looking at the one that one has feelings – of friendship, of attraction, of desire (either or both to be, or to have for one’s own), of lust, of love – for looking at someone else, and touching and being touched by, or watching the one that one has feelings for being touched by someone else, inform how shots are styled. Choppy shots between one and another (Angela and Rayanne, Rayanne and Jordan, Angela and Jordan, Angela and Cory), or languid shots between the one and the other (Rue and Jules, Jules and Nate) capture the feeling of (sapphic) girls’ “deterritorializ[ation]” (White, 411) in terms of their knowability of themselves, and of those around them. (Because of the times’ dominant attitudes regarding sexuality, “Betrayal” operates more on relationalities of looking, and “Pilot”, of touching. As with shot durations, My-So Called Life’s general form appeals to “major cinema” logics – hence the faster paced shot-reverse-shots – while Euphoria’s, to a “minor” (as in, alternative or underground) aesthetics).

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Works Cited

Backman-Rogers, Anna. “Chapter 5: Marie Antoinette (2006).” Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure, edited by Anna Backman-Rogers, Berghahn Books, 2018, pp. 115-138.

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Brooklyn. Directed by John Crowley, performances by Saoirse Ronan, 20th Century Studios, Lionsgate Films, and Mongrel Media, 2015.

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Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition, edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 803-816.

As I have touched on earlier bell hooks develops out Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the “I” and the “Other” in the discourse of sociology. The structure of consumption that Lacan speaks about casually, hooks re-narrativizes as a structure of violence.

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Munoz’s revisitation of identification and dis-identification reminds me of Kristeva’s framework of the abject. Kristeva offers an alternative ontological outlook to that of classical Western thought: rather than either/or, the theorist offers and/also. The abject is a space where one confronts that which is perfectly Other to their “I” and can choose to comprehend the Other. In classical Western thought, upon entering the abject, one is told to reject it. The perfect Other is consumed vis-à-vis its displacement into the logical category of “Other” (separate from I). Kristeva suggests, to prevent causing physical, social and/or psychological violence to the Other, that the Other be logically mediated when confronting that which is abject. “I” can take in the Other as another dimension of itself.

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In any case, the Other is as compellingly an attractive figure as it is a repulsive (as in repulsion as it is taken in physics) figure. “I” cannot psychologically ignore the Other. Bringing in the Other as an “also” dimension of one’s “I” I think hooks and Munoz would recommend.

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Building onto my consideration of Kristeva’s concept of the abject in relation to Munoz, visceral horror is a very powerful peril and weapon. *A feeling of abjection surfaces when we are confronted with on the one hand, something that we perceive as incompatible with ourselves and how we understand humanness and humanity. The feeling of abjectness arises on the other hand, when we see aspects of humanness and particularly, aspects of human biology, that are warped or otherwise perverted from how we conceptualize them. A dead body, for example, causes a feeling of abjectness because it is a distorted image of a breathing human body.

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Linda Williams considers Kristeva’s “abject” as it relates to film studies. She analyses why the “body horror” genre is dominated by excessive (even pornographically excessive) violence wrought upon the female body. Williams then grapples with why so many female-identifying spectators derive pleasure from observing the enacting of such violence.

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Susan Stryker’s proposal to put the study of transgenderism in the philosophical terms of Frankenstein’s monster’s constructed-ness engages with the idea of abstraction as identification and self-making. The subconscious reclamation of the violent and the abject that occurs in the psyches of many female-identifying spectators of body horror films touches Stryker’s suggested reclamation of monstrosity as an ocular perspective for trans-identifying individuals to understand their internal and external selves.

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Cited Works

Disidentifications by José Esteban Muñoz

Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva

"Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" by Linda Williams

When Monsters Speak by Susan Stryker

It Happened One Night documents the unforeseen journey of spoiled heiress to the Andrews’ fortune Ellie Andrews and a humble and hard-working yet hardened and cynical news reporter Peter Warne en route to New York City. Because of an out-of-the-blue fascination with Ellie – who has escaped her millionaire father’s clutches by diving off of his boat headed away from her new husband King Westley – Peter offers to help she and Westley reunite. As a quintessential (the prototypical according to Thomas Schatz (152)) screwball comedy, the out-of-touch with reality Ellie and the incapable of dreaming Peter discover that they love one another at the end of the second act. Italo-American Frank Capra’s film ends with Ellie’s father learning from her “disappearance” that her safety and their relationship is more important than his control of her decisions, encouraging Ellie to admit that she loves Peter not Westley, forcing Peter to admit that he loves Ellie because of who she is, and arranging for Peter to pick Ellie up in a getaway car at her and Westley’s wedding.

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Taking into account his identification as firstly an American (Cavarello, Hollywood’s Italian American Filmmakers 11) and Jonathan J. Cavallero’s analysis that a feature of Capra’s ideology as a director was the valuing of working hard, living humbly and being selfless (“Frank Capra's 1920s Immigrant Trilogy” 46-48), It Happened One Night can be read as a love letter to Hollywood and America, and a class critique of America’s elite. The glamorous classical Hollywood filmic style of Capra’s feature works to strengthen the star images of its male and female leads, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Through story and choice of the screwball romantic comedy genre the director criticizes the egocentric characters and ungrounded lifestyles of America’s wealthiest social tier.

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Richard Dyer reveals that a culture’s “stars” are reflective of or dialogic with said culture from which they were made in (2). A “star” is a constructed persona made for an actor or actress to perform as in the public space/for the public (Dyer 2). While Clark Gable or Claudette Colbert’s star persona may be true to some aspects of their real personality, history and life, the “star” is associated with some aspects of a national culture that the persona’s creators (Hollywood studios in the classical Hollywood studio system) want them to represent first and foremost (2-4). To honour Gable’s iconic star persona – which Capra reaffirms in It Happened One Night’s story – the director uses classical Hollywood’s traditional filmic techniques: delicate make-up and styling that enhance Gable’s features, three-point-lightning and steady use of close-up shots.

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Unlike Gable’s Peter, Colbert’s Ellie is – on the surface – incompatible with the class ideology of the Italian-born, American-immigrant director. The glamorous make-up and styling, lightning and cinematography heiress Ellie is shot in (such elements outlined above in regards to Gable’s Peter) reproduce one half of Colbert’s star image – naivete, innocence, preciousness and perfection. The other half of Colbert’s “star” revealing itself as the film’s plot progresses and Ellie evolves. Ellie Andrews undergoes a transformation from her initial heiress characterization as she and Peter encounter issues and obstacles en route from Miami to New York; in the losing of her selfish and ungrounded attributes, Capra expresses opposition to the egocentric and ungrounded ways of America’s richest.

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On the second train to New York City (after she has lost her luggage and missed the first train because of a personal errand) she wills to buy a box of chocolate; Peter disallows her from doing so, because the four-dollar sweets would bankrupt her. Capra juxtaposes this act of mindlessness and gluttony with a later scene. When an immigrant woman from Italy in America because of a work opportunity faints and her son informs Peter of her poor health and their extreme poverty, Ellie gives all of the money the reporter is carrying on him to the little family. The director turns Ellie Andrews into a much more developed, matured and responsible character with two other transformative instances. By accepting the carrots Peter has found for them from the wilderness as the couple’s main food source as they near the end of their journey, she is taught the values of compromise and gratefulness. In using the sight of her exposed thigh on the side of the road to hail a ride that will take the pair into New York, the heiress learns the necessity of using one’s wits, skills and resources when in a trying situation.

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In his definition of the term, Thomas Schatz explains the significance of genre selection in regards to the messaging of a film – “genre exists as a sort of tacit ‘contract’ between filmmakers and audience, [and] the genre film is an actual event that honors such a contract (691).” A key clause of the classical screwball comedy is the leading couple are opposite characters, coming from opposite worlds and that this absolute oppositeness causes conflicts between the two. As the couple solve problems and clear obstacles that neither would be able to maneuver as equally well on their own using some combination of their individual skillsets over the course of the film, each party comes to recognize as valuable and adopts for themselves different aspects of the other. The screwball pairing are not simply a romantic coupling by the comedy’s conclusion, but they have each outgrown (certain of) their initial undesirable behaviours and ways of thinking.

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While Ellie is the character whom Capra criticizes the utter out-of-touchness of the American elite through as the foil to Peter’s hard-working, resourceful and finding the greatest pleasure in the simple things in life (love,  nature, a job well done, etc.), she is not the figure the director holds responsible for the presence of such in the country. Capra critiques the rise of (an immigrant) man to a socioeconomic position of enormous wealth and power on the principle that a normative consequence of occupying such a position is the lack of time available for acting as a good father and family man. Through Ellie’s dialogue explaining her destructive actions as a retaliation against his forms of control and his spectrum of cruel acts (including slapping her and disallowing her agency) the director arraigns foreign-born Alexander Andrews’ punishment of his daughter’s rebellious behaviours.

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Gable’s Peter is not just the foil lover in his screwball coupling with Ellie, but the foil man to her father: where the former has thusly prioritized making money above genuine bonding with his daughter and uses bribery to manipulate situations, the latter is not motivated by monetary gain and is tethered to the issues and trials of the real world. Ellie possesses all of the morals that constitute a good citizen and the skills needed for surviving in the real world, but until she “jumped off” of her father’s “boat” and encountered such real world issues, the aforementioned laid buried. Thusly the film’s title has dual meanings: Ellie and Peter are thrown together the night they get down from the train to New York City, and Ellie’s transformation from an unruly and unaware daddy’s girl to an enlightened and capable young woman.

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Works Cited

Cavallero, Jonathan J. “Frank Capra's 1920s Immigrant Trilogy: Immigration, Assimilation, and the American Dream.” MELUS, vol. 29, no. 2, 2004, pp. 27-53.

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Cavallero, Jonathan J. Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers: Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino. University of Illinois Press, 2011.

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Dyer, Richard. Heavenly bodies: film stars and society. Routledge, 2004.

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Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres. Random House, 1981.

“Are you for real…I feel like maybe I just made you up, (0:13-0:24)” queries Sadie Sink in “All Too Well”, the short film accompanying Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) [Taylor’s Version] [From The Vault]”. Interweaving “Her” (played by Sink) and “Hi[s]” (played by Dylan O’Brien) accounts of a “twin flame” (11:46) relationship ended by misreading and miscommunication, the short film directed by Swift unfolds across nine acts: the introduction, “An Upstate Escape”, “The First Crack in the Glass”, “Are You Real?”, “The Breaking Point”, “The Reeling”, “The Remembering” and “Thirteen Years Gone”. Bordwell, et al. separate the elements of “classical narration” (24) in cinema as contributive to one of three objectives: to be “more or less self-conscious: that is, to a greater or lesser degree display[ing] its recognition that it is presenting information, (24)”, to be “more or less knowledgeable, (24)”, or to be “more or less communicative, (24)”.

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To reach a logical understanding of why O’Brien’s character acted as he did, and how Sink’s character (mis)recognized the signs her partner gave as she did, the theories of ethical and moral philosophy at play in the functioning of “Her” and “Hi[s]” relationship will firstly, be examined. Then, the individual, (Noddings 74-79) philosophical conceptualizations of “love” (Illouz 177) motivating and informing each’s actions and reactions in the relationship will be deconstructed. Finally, in the “The Breaking Point” and “The Remembering” in which “Her” and “Him” respectively, reminisce on key moments of the relationship effecting their decisions about its survivability and finality, Bal and Bryson’s diachronic consequences of memory (177-182) will be applied to rationalize “Thirteen Years Gone”. To achieve the emotional and structural ends Bordwell, et al. ascribe them, Swift utilizes the classical narrative cinematic techniques of limited point-of-view, non-diegetic musical scoring and subjective flashbacks to represent the dual sides of the “love affair[‘s]” (12:18-12:19) trajectory.

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Restrictive (Bordwell, et al. 30) and restricted (32) narration make the framework of representation in “All Too Well: The Short Film”. From the first to the last shot (before the end credits) the film takes place across a span of temporality from an early, happy point in “Her” and “Hi[s]” relationship to the ambiguous and open-ended event that causes (Ullmann-Margalit 160-161) her to terminate it. Through her process of moving beyond it and his missing it. Ending on “Her, later on”, Sink’s character thirteen years older, played by Taylor Swift, at a book signing for her book All Too Well that recounts the course of the relationship – from her perspective – and her life after him. The signing he watches from behind the book store’s window wearing her, “…old scarf from that very first week.

‘Cause it reminds [him] of innocence. And it smells like [her] (10:24-10:32),” outside in the cold unbeknownst to her.

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“Caring” is a foundation for virtue and virtuous action (Noddings 79). “Caring” as an anterior to virtue is relational, Noddings stakes, to the possibility of one’s caring being reciprocated (81) or replenished by the “cared-for”, (81) as well as to the potentiality of a bidirectionally fulfilling “caring” relationship to grow, or intensify in “caring” (81). Moments of early intimacy, affection and connection shared during the “An Upstate Escape” period would function as an invitation for “Her” and “Him” alike to give more to and invest more into the relationship of “caring”. As times of slow dancing in his kitchen, playing games while sharing meals, holding hands in bed, kissing all around his and her homes, holding onto each other and gazing at the other with love in their eyes during the “Are You Real?” period would nurture the “caring” relationship. Noddings grounds “natural caring” (75) as the human call to meet as “one-caring” (76) another who is approaching them as one requiring caring, (75) and formulates “ethical caring” (75) as the obligation one has to oneself, and to the other, (81) to provide “caring” as they know it, if they want their conceptualization of their “ideal self" (78) to remain unblemished (95).

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The primary variable on one’s “ethic[s] of caring” (80) is the reserve of past experiences of being “cared” for, (74-76) as Noddings conceives of caring, the “one-caring” (76) conceives of “caring”, or the “one-caring” has been taught what “care” (76-90) is or looks like. The three sequences composing “The First Crack in the Glass” that she understands (Bordwell et al. 30-31) as him refusing to announce them as a couple to his friends, giving back her car keys and speaking angrily to someone on the phone, and finally, a fight over that signalled by the aforementioned. He was aware of as respectively: an accident, a pause to work an issue with someone else out with them and a minor fight between lovers. Noddings describes how “one-caring” might, if she feels her caring for the “cared-for” is depleting her ability to care for herself, or, in the (perceived) absence of the variable of replenishment or growth, turn from the “cared-for” (92-93). If the “one-caring” casts off the “cared-for” for reasons irrelevant to the “ethic of caring” her “ideal self” has been blemished (84); since caring is an ethic of relationality, if she has done so because her-caring could not be sustained, her “ideal self” is still blemished, but it is rational to Noddings (95-96).

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Like the perspective the vignettes of the relationship are shown through, (Bordwell, et al. 30-32) and like the truth of “Her” and “Hi[s]” remembrances, (Bal and Bryson 177-178) the reasons motivating the actions, absence of actions and the fallouts from either are not made known to the spectator; to decode the latter, constructing how each of the pair see “love” would be helpful.

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As an outcome of eleventh to eighteenth century “modernization”, May asserts that the “object of love” in the idea of “love” came to, “[become] embodie[d of] the greatest good…worthy of the…love that was formerly…for God (12).” And, in the process of “modernization” occurring from the eighteenth century into our present time, “the lover…bec[ame] authentic through love. In love he becomes…a self. He…finds himself (12).” The first time the audience is extended objective access to “Hi[s]” perception of the course of the relationship – through flashbacks after the fallout of “The Breaking Point” and “The Reeling” – it is evidenced that O Brien’s character’s framework of “love” aligns with May’s. He reminisces on all the ways she could create for him a feeling of  “ontological rootedness” (6): smiling on the drive upstate; running through the forest; kissing him by the water; holding his outstretched hand on their trip and in bed; dancing by the fireplace; playing cards; making love; trying not to cry in the kitchen; checking up on him when he is upset; turning away when she is upset. If “love” is the source of “ontological rootedness…[the] sense of grounding in the world [from] finding a living relationship to what we take to be the [root] of our being, (6-9)” we must not mutilate “ontological rootedness” (6) to naturalize the “loved” as, “totally at one’s disposal, as…enclosed within one’s world,…as an instrument of total [possession] (8).” Rather, “love” requires the “one-loving” to meet the “loved” with both submission and possession (8).

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Submission to the fact that the “loved”,  “is a radically distinct [force] from [them]. [That t]o feel rooted is to experience a relation to a ground… insurmountably independent of [one] if it is to be a place in which [they] might anchor [one’s] being (10; emphasis added).” Possession, not as ownership, or the utilization of one to fulfill the other’s needs and demands, (9-11) but of granting the other her, “sovereign independence that is crucial to [her] capacity to root us (8),” – possession as, “the assimilation of another[’s]…presence through attending to her and what she demands of you…[The] ‘tak[ing] in’ [of] another…only in surrendering to her (8).” Through May’s ideal of love, what could be (mis)read as an absence of “caring” therefore, could be/is the manifestation of that desire (/duty) to meet the “one-loved” as one that is submitted to, as well as one that is being “[in] possession (8)”.

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If the object of “modern love” involves the self, the “narrativisation of the self”, (181) and the wholeness the “one-loved” can offer the “lover”,  May’s philosophy understands the terrain of “love” as a “novel” (Illouz 180), and Illouz’s, as a “marketplace” (182-184). Illouz’s philosophy is negativist: “love” as it can exist in in the present day, is inseparable from the sociological demands of modernization (and the establishment of capitalist market forces) (178-184): it is but a game played with an economy of sexual partners (181-184). To increased “vulnerability” of the self’s grounding in the world (May 9-10) brought about by technologies of modernization (Illouz 179), industries began to sell the “fantasy” of love (178-180) – the ideal of love (177-180) as well as the “dreaminess” of the lover and of the (future) object of love (178-182). As will be shortly taken up, the action that is the titular “Breaking Point” that alters the future of “Her” and “Hi[s]” relationship is ambiguous; in contrast to “Hi[s]” coming as “one-loving” as May does, and “choos[ing]” (Ullmann-Margalit 166) according to that Ullmann-Margalit considers “optimistic idealism” (161), she “chooses” according to “rational choice” (157) and approaches “loving” as if love was Illouz’s “liquid love” (183).

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Where May defends “love” as the singular “idol” (3) of “modernity” (Illouz 178) capable of giving individuals achievement of the “good life” (177), and where Noddings argues a turn away from human beings and to “objects” (Noddings 84) as the “cared-for” (76) in caring relations disfigures one’s “ideal self” (84), Illouz takes a polemical perspective. Where May argues “love” (1) can be salvaged as still belonging to Aristotle’s “good life” (Illouz 177) through the absenting of “divinisation” (2) from “lov[ing]” (13) the “one-loved”, Illouz suggests the “loved-one” if the “one-loving” wants to achieve “Eudaimonia” in modernity should be thought, or one’s intellect (Illouz 184-186). The potential conditions of “love” for the modern woman or man May offers if they take on his image of love, “as long as…[a home for his or her life and being] is satisfied, [love] won’t have any further conditions: it will, from that point on, be unconditional, (7)” Illouz opposes as an example of the thought activity philosophers carry out. A projection of a material concept into an ideal Aristotelian imagination (180-184) of “life” (177).

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Beginning “The Breaking Point” is “Her” approaching him saddened and quiet, as “one-caring”: Swift’s camera focuses exclusively on her face as she adversarially interprets that which the spectator cannot see. Atop the non-diegetic lyrics, “And maybe we got lost in translation. Maybe I asked for too much. But maybe this thing was a masterpiece ‘til you tore it all up, (7:55-8:06)” she screams words that the audience is intended not the be able to make out – his response, of what little of him is in shot, appears passive. Ullmann-Margalit theorizes “big decisions”, (158) – decisions which are transformative of one’s selfhood, (158) cannot be taken back, (158) are made in “full awareness (158; emphasis added)”, and where the option not chosen lingers as a “shadow” of what could-have-been (158) – in relation to the logics of practical reasoning and rational choice. Because “opting” is transformative of the “core” of an opter, (160-168) to act with practical reasoning (164-168) he or she will want to acquire the maximum amount of information about both alternatives (165-168).

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Following the “Breaking Point” encounter, the audience is told (Bordwell, et al. 29-30) she is remembering (31-32): his dropping her hand; his tossing the car keys “at” her; their arguing in the kitchen; and, as returned to through her memory, his absence at her 21st birthday party. “Opting”, (159) choosing one option versus another in a “big decision” can no longer be considered so when its clause of the opter’s awareness that they are making a choice between equally “viable alternatives” (159) is absent – at least to the opter that is “making” the decision (159). What Swift frames through the restriction of the narration (Bordwell at al. 30-32) – the closing of knowledges to two point-of-views (30) that the audience is shifted back and forth from (30-32) – as Sink “opting” to abandon the relationship, is in the reality of hers a moment of “converting” (Ullmann-Margalit 161). Not having two “viable alternatives” to choose from, and therefore going down the road of the only option that appears before her (162). The reality, or the truth, of “big decisions” is subjective to the one making them, as it is to the ones observing, or affected by, the decision of the opter (159-162): what O’Brien’s character perceived as Sink’s character “opting” to work on or give up on the relationship, she perceived as having no choice (159-164) but to leave. Because she had rationalized the thought that it was by then, over for him.

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Because it is impossible to reconcile the interiority of the “opter” with that of the person they will have become because of the opting, it is up to the opter’s self to rationally predict how successful their future self will interpret the choice made (160-168) – a value indeterminable by the future self’s happiness as their “post-opting” self (168). After the “Breaking Point” the spectator is kept from witnessing outside of “Her” reaction to “Hi[s]” words/absence of words, to confront this moment of disjunction between being in and out of the relationship, Swift scopes her processes of rationalization of his in/actions through her understanding of “love”. “You kept me like a secret. But I kept you like an oath, (7:04-7:09)” narrates Sink’s character as she “decodes” memories of their shared intimacy. Regarding the loss of the past and her fall into the future, she speaks through Swift’s singing voice, “‘Cause there we are again when I loved you so. Back before you lost the one real thing you’ve ever known. It was rare, I was there (10:44-10:56).”

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Ullmann-Margalit states, the size of the “opting” and the transformation of the opter’s core self produce a gap in the opter’s understanding of themselves and their decisions (166-169): a gap in which the shadow of the choice not made occupies, (158-160) and that must always be contended with (158-161) in opposition to the choice made. How Sink’s character rationalizes any insecurity that her choosing could have been “opting” as opposed to a point of conversion Swift explains through dialogue between scenes and pieces of the song (Bordwell, et al. 29-35). “You said if we had been closer in age maybe it would have been fine. And that made me want to die. The idea you had of me, who was she? A never-needy, ever-lovely jewel whose shine reflects on you, (8:46-9:03)” accompanies her rationalizing moments of his absence, his not doing, his not seeing. The non-diegetic message and the shots of her searching for answers after the fact connect back to the lyrics, “And I was thinkin’ on the drive down. “Any time now he’s gonna say its love.” You never called it what it was. ‘Til we were dead and gone and buried, (3:04-3:13)” that accompany shots of her attempting to do the same during “The First Crack in the Glass”. Swift’s usage of separate points-of-view that recount the two experiences and memories of the same relationship – how the director plays with classical narration’s self-consciousness, knowability and communicativeness – is laid bare in how later moments of reflection align with certain images from earlier in the film.

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Bal and Bryson’s diagram on the temporal effects on meaning (of an artwork) can be applicable to “Her” rationalization of her choice in the years following (what she perceived as) the termination of the relationship, and “His” misunderstanding of her “converting” (Ullmann-Margalit 162). The original meaning of an event (or “sign” (Bal & Bryson 177)) is split into the “enunciated” and the “enunciation”: what is the intended meaning of an action is the “enunciated”, and the interpretation of another’s action or an event is the “enunciation” of that original action or event (179). “Sign[s]” (177) are not fixed: the nature of their meaning is what Derrida terms, “perpetuum mobile, (177)” – that “enunciated” meaning can and does transform depending on who is “decoding” the “enunciated”, and when the decoding is occurring (177). Through “The Remembering” he combs through his memory, (Bordwell, et al. 30-32) incapable of recognizing where and how she could have concluded that their relationship should be over.

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Whether conscientious or psychological, a consequence of “converting” is the repositioning of one’s past life in a, “negative light; evaluate[d] as [wrong or bad] (162),” and a transformation of one’s self into her accordingly oppositional to the self that she had been before the “conversion” (162). Of the effect reminiscence has on an original “enunciated”, the first “enunciation” or later “enunciations” down the line of temporality, Bal and Bryson explicate:

Each new factor that is added will, it may be hoped, [clarify the enunciated]. But what is also revealed by such supplementa[l enunciations] is…the uncurtability of the list [of possible enunciateds], the impossibility of its closure. “Context” [of the enunciated] can always be extended; it is subject to the same process[es]…at work in the [formation of the enunciated that its] “context”  is supposed to delimit and control. (177)

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Relying on her intellect as the singular “idol” (May 4) one can submit (7) themselves to and know for certainty by “possessing” (13). In the face of the “fantasy” of love modernity has sold as a possibility (Illouz 178-182) to “vulnerab[le]” (May 9) young women like her (Illouz 179-181). From “Her” in “The Reeling” to “Her, later on” in “Thirteen Years Gone”, (Bordwell, et al. 29-36) Sink’s character reaffirms the rationalization that everything she thought she had had with her “twin flame” was a lie. And somewhere, she becomes the celebrated author at the book signing of All Too Well.

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Primary Source

Swift, Taylor. “Taylor Swift - All Too Well: The Short Film.” YouTube, uploaded by Taylor Swift, www.youtube.com/watch?v=tollGa3S0o8.

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Works Cited

Bal, Mieke, and Norman Bryson. “Semiotics and Art History.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 2, 1991, pp. 174-208.

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Bordwell, David, et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. Routledge, 1998.

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Illouz, Eva. “Is love still a part of the good life?” The Good Life Beyond Growth: New Perspectives, edited by Hartmut Rosa and Christoph Henning, Routledge, 2018, pp. 177-187.

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May, Simon. Love: a History. Yale University Press, 2011.

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Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics & Moral Education. University of California Press, 2013.

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Ullmann-Margalit, Edna. “Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, vol. 58, no. 1, 2006, pp. 157-172.

A shy and studious sixteen-year-old blonde girl tiptoes around her empty, unilluminated house, searching for whatever unseen and abjectly disturbing presence is ringing her doorbell and digging around her kitchen (Kusama, 19:53-22:49). Behind her back: her confident and flirtatious best friend, sixteen-year-old, brunette “Jennifer”, covered in dried blood, redder blood dripping from her mouth – but smiling (19:54-23:21). ““Needy” Lesnicki” watches, breathless, in horror as “Jennifer Check” picks through her refrigerator, rips a rotisserie chicken apart then chokes on the meat, and projectile vomits a black, thorny substance (23:22-24:16).

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Written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama, Jennifer’s Body confronts what Lerum and Dworkin organize as the construction of recognizable “victims” in the U.S.’ carceral discourses and “virgins” in dominant, patriarchal and anti-sex work feminist ideologies alike (323-328). “Victims” in binary opposition to “criminals”, and “virgins” in binary opposition to “sluts” and “whores” (323-328). Such binaries, which displace the absence, in theory and praxis, of the patriarchal carceral state’s responsibility to protecting all women and girls’ bodies from sexual violence (327-331). Through a queer girl cinematic practice (White, 411-425) and a “feminist porn” approach to representing girls’ sex, sexual subjectivity and sexualization, (Penley et. al, 9-16) Cody and Kusama communicate the isolated, confusing and violent, and also embodied, therapeutic and erotic experience of queer girlhood. Recognition of queerness, conceptualization and navigation of female-female and female-male platonic, romantic and sexual relationships, and radically counter-hegemonic processes of healing from sexual violence, are examined through the foil characters of “slut” “Jennifer” and “virgin” “Needy” (Lerum & Dworkin, 320).

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Mann interrogates how working class Latina sixteen- to eighteen-year old girls’ constructions of their sexual subjectivities – their understandings of themselves as (non-) objects versus (non-) agents of sexuality – as minor female bodies at the intersectional marginalizations of race, class and gender, (331-338) fold into Bay-Cheng’s theorization of the “virgin-slut continuum” (331-333). While “Needy” and “Jen” are white, the former situates the girls’ hometown of “Devil’s Kettle” as a predominantly working class area of which’s attributes are embodied synecdochally by the dive bar “Melody Lane”, (Kusama, 9:51-11:34) a key space to the text’s narrative (11:37-19:30). Cohen provides the context to understand the rationality behind precariously economically situated teen girls internalizing the import of cleaving to heterosexuality (438-453) at least in material practice – socioeconomic opportunity and the future of such is possible to “Jen” through transactional physical relationships with boys and men, and to “Needy” through the institution of heterosexual, heteronormative marriage with “Chip”.

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Kusama and Cody contrast “Jennifer’s” “plasticized” (Lorde, 4) or performance of heterosexuality, with the “unrealized potential[ity]”, (White, 411) the displaced or “deterritorialize[d]” nature, (412) of her and “Needy’s” homosexual feelings of romance and lust on the floor of “Melody Lane”. A multiplicity of overtly sexual, some pornographic verbal and physical exchanges (10:12-15:55) are a direct foil to the web of homoerotic-platonic gazes, affirmations and touches that stresses the unrequited, and the not-quite-realized (14:06-18:55).

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Mann locates three key concepts mapping teen girls’ sexuality in the neoliberalist period pedagogically passed on through scripts of heterosexuality and the female body’s sexualization (331-338). First, the fundamentality of “choice”, (331-332) second, the rationalization of victimhood as an issue for, and consequence of, the self, (334-337) and third, the entrance into, and development of, sexual subjectivity through the logics of heterosexual male partners (335-337). Kusama and Cody juxtapose the material female-male relationships of “Jennifer” and “Needy” against the girls’ rich yet liminal friendship. The former, relationalities governed by the, “misnam[ing of the erotic] by men and used against women. [The erotic] made into the confused, the plasticized…, the pornographic, (Lorde, 4)” and the latter, a potentiality and futurity in which the girls’ “erotic” (3-10) could flourish, but, must be held in a state of “becoming” (White, 424).

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Oppositional to Bay-Cheng’s axiom that minor girls’ reproductions of the ““overtly sexual, and…sexualized”” (Lerum and Dworkin, 323) that ““conform to…the female body as a dehumanized…object for consumption”” (323) victimize “non-agentic” (327) girls into such, the filmmakers foreground that those “state sanctioned agents” (327) which rationalize “Jennifer’s” body as an object of (heterosexual) sex and disable her believability as a victim of sexual violence threaten to identically victimize “Needy”. Relational to her choices and her absence of choices, within, (Kusama, 45:48-1:14:14) and outside of, (43:54-1:19:13) her “respectable” (Mann, 332) – projected into the future, monogamous, heterosexual, heteronormative and “defined by love” – (337) relationship with “Chip”.

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Transposing hegemonic practices of looking based in psychoanalytic theory, (Mulvey, 803-804) and developing out of art historical topographies of man as maker and woman as subject, (815-816) Mulvey assigns heterosexual, heteronormative gender perspectives to the camera used in, and the subjects captured by, the dominant tradition of Hollywood filmmaking (806-812). Created to uphold and reproduce the white, cis-heterosexist patriarchal ideals of the cinematic theory and praxis of classical Hollywood and such’s nationalist, capitalist, and morally conservative logics, (803-806) a product of major American narrative cinema has its camera adopt the successfully socialized heterosexual man’s epistemology of looking (803-810). Actors are represented for (preordained male) spectators to identify with heroized imaginings of themselves and actresses are represented as bodies for consumption and (erotic) pleasure (806-816).

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Across the three explicit scenes of “Jennifer” initiating foreplay, then transforming into her supernatural form and cannibalizing her victims’ bodies, her body is represented as physiologically dangerous, (54:21-54:43) her nakedness is concealed from the shot, (36:26-37:06) and shots visually emphasize the monstrousness of her demon form (1:24:00-1:24:22). As “Needy” has sex for the first time with “Chip”, her body, embodying her relationality to heterosexuality and contrasting with “Jennifer’s” body’s signification, is distilled into the image of her increasingly distraught and panicking face (53:50-55:13).

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Penley et. al contest the anti-sex work feminist ideology that, “explicit sexual representations are nothing but gender oppression, (13)” and therefore, that, “pornography’s portrayal of explicit sex acts is a form of absolute discipline and subjugation for women. (13)” To counter, they propose “feminist [approaches to] porn” (9) as a practice of, “unsettle[ing hegemonic] definitions of sex, and expand[ing] the language of sex as an erotic activity, an expression of identity, a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and…a [potential] new politics (10).” The theorists foreground the generic thematic and formal elements of “feminist porn” and their political dimensions (9-15). The former, “[consideration of] concepts of desire, agency, power, beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult, [such as] pleasure within and across inequality, in the face of injustice, and against the limits of gender hierarchy and…heteronormativity (9).” The latter, “adapt[ation of] different strategies for subverting dominant pornographic norms and tropes. Some reject nearly all elements of a typical adult film, from structure to aesthetics, while others tweak the standard formula to reposition and prioritize female sex-ual agency (16).”

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In the singular scene of explicitly homosexual physical intimacy and contact between “Jen” and “Needy” (58:03-1:00:05) Cody and Kusama disturb and disrupt hegemonic pedagogies informing minor and female sexual subjectivities (Berlant, 381-390) as well as normative, or un-“contradict-tory”, (Penley et. al, 15) representations of female homosexuality in counter-hegemonic images of the hegemonically oversexualized subjectivity. The filmmakers do so to tear down restrictions on, and fantasize about, possible liberatory, if “dark”, sapphic selfhoods (15) that connect with, and engage with the desires of, the queer girl community (White, 411-415). In transformation of dominant (conceived by, and created for, heterosexual men) practices of pornography and pornographic spectatorship, the filmmakers centre kissing as the represented intimate act, having the camera locate the girls’ lips (Kusama, 58:29-59:48) as the primary “erotic” (Lorde, 3) area.

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Between “Jennifer’s” hyper- feminine and sexualized performative subjectivity and dominating and aggressive sexuality, (Lerum & Dworkin, 322-325) and “Needy’s” reflective, imaginative interiority and cautious or static outer self and latent but developing sexuality, (White, 411-415) a plurality of sapphic identifications present themselves. Kusama and Cody complicate – or richen – the “eroticism” (Lorde, 5) of the semiotic interplay between the girls’ subjectivities by having “Jennifer” favour the submissive (“bottom”) sapphic sexual role, and “Needy”, gravitate towards the “top” sexual role.

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Lerum and Dworkin polemicize the parameters of Bay-Cheng’s “neoliberal agency” (Mann, 332) by querying its logics of binary oppositions – even as it expands the binary of the “virgin/whore dichotomy” (319-324). Binaries between agents and victims (Lerum & Dworkin, 320-322); true sexual agency and enforced, internalized or performative sexuality (320-324); and criminals; not confined to perpetrators of sexual violence, but broadened to implicate women (and girls) that promote or encourage fetishistic, anti-feminist sexual subjectivity; and victims (322-326). Lerum and Dworkin’s raised polemic is dialogic with Berlant’s rupturing theorization of the “little girl” in the U.S.’ “national culture” (Berlant, 380-390) which, in turn, is that theory in praxis in representation in the sacrifice of “Jennifer’s” body to “Satan” by the male members of the rock band “Low Shoulder” – Cody’s allegory of gang rape (Kusama, 1:00:25-1:05:55).

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Berlant deconstructs how the severance of minor girls from any representation of sex acts; and therefore knowledges about sex necessary for autonomous entrance into the “adult” terrain; (Berlant, 381-390) works to systematically enable the sexual violence of “minor” girls by the “adult” men (and women) that proselytize their concealment from “live” sex (388-390). The paradoxical (mis)treatment of the conceptual “little girl”, as well as of individual real minor girls, (389-390) by the “adult” agents of U.S. white, cis-heterosexist patriarchy (388-390) reaffirms Lerum and Dworkin’s thesis that the construction of binary oppositions and the moral significance assigned to each term as a reflection of girls themselves is in theory and praxis a reproduction of “slut-shaming” and “victim-blaming” (Lerum & Dworkin, 327). For such true agents determine when, and by reason of what, a “virgin” or a “slut” is so, and when “agency” and “victimhood” are dependent upon white, cis-heterosexist patriarchy to be formulated.

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In “Jen’s” weaponized seduction then consumption of heterosexual boys, Cody and Kusama demonstrate one, that  ““performances…[of] female sexual power and appetite: women commanding sexual attention, demanding sexual pleasure, and pursuing sexual fun”, (323)” can be(come) agentic and act as empowering of (even minor) female selfhoods. Two, how such performances are and can (322-325) be utilized by women and girls not just to achieve the resource of power – symbolized as supernatural “Jennifer’s” biological life-force – (Kusama, 1:10:15-1:13:00) but to – figuratively, as opposed to literally – strike back against representations of parts of Lerum and Dworkin’s, “state sanctioned agents…which enforce [white, cis-heterosexist patriarchy] (327).”

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Disrupting Bay-Cheng’s axiom that, “girls and women carry out a simple internalization, (326)” of “inherently disempowering” (326, emphasis mine) “cultural iconography” (326), Lerum and Dworkin reason representations provide an opportunity for girls and women to, “[enable] or shift...[understandings of] cultural forms, desired social practices, and enacted social practices (326).” Therefore, “Jen’s” cannibalism of boys as physiological and psychical – or supernatural – “cure” (Kusama, 1:07:45-107:56) to how she was changed physically, psychologically and in the “virgin”/“slut” binarization of “national culture” (Berlant, 380), symptomatic of her “sacrifice to Satan”, could function as a space of sexual violence victims’ fantasies of revenge and justice. If the “darker shades” of such (Penley et. al, 15).

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Jennifer’s Body’s absence of investment in the police and the courts as institutions of justice dialogues with, rather than Others, victims the national criminal and legal systems meet as “criminal[s]” (Lerum & Dworkin, 321) and therefore process accounts of sexual violence through a (“male and White supremac[ist]” (327)) logics of unbelievability. As “Jen’s” catalyzing alternative justice, as well as “Needy’s” ultimate act of alternative justice in the final sequence of the film, (1:32:23-1:34:30) articulate opposition to the anti-sex work and carceral feminism perspective represented by Bay-Cheng in Lerum and Dworkin, Cody and Kusama polemicize constructs of ideal victimhood and carceral, nationalist answers to systematic sexual violence against minor girls. 

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“Anita “Needy” Lesnicki” institutionalized at “Leech Lake Correctional Facility” in punishment for stabbing sixteen-year-old cheerleader “Jennifer Check” through the heart on the justification that the act would kill the demon occupying her best friend’s body, (Kusama, 1:27:42-1:29:00) escapes (1:29:51-1:31:58). Clips of “Low Shoulder” (1:32:24-1:33:07) signify their achievement of becoming, “rich and awesome…like that guy from [popular 2000s rock band] Maroon 5, (1:00:18-1:00:22)” upon the sacrifice of the body of “Jennifer from Devil’s Kettle” (1:01:00-1:01:02). Until the door to their hotel room rings (1:33:09). Police’s crime scene photographs document the conditions of the band members’ deaths; (1:33:16-1:34:16) a hallway security camera tracks, then cuts out on, “Needy” (1:34:18-1:34:28). Having killed every member of “Low Shoulder” by inflicting matching injuries to those inflicted on her best friend’s body, with an identical knife to the one that they used for the ritual (1:01:30-1:02:52).

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References

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Berlant, L. (1995). Live Sex Acts (parental advisory: Explicit material). Feminist Studies, 21(2), 379-404. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178273

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Cohen, C. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics? GLQ, 3(4), 437-465. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437

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Kusama, K. (Director). (2008). Jennifer’s body [Film]. 20th Century Studios.

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Lerum, K., & Dworkin, S. L. (2015). Sexual agency is not a problem of neoliberalism: Feminism, sexual justice, & the carceral turn. Sex Roles, 73(1), 319-331. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-015-0525-6

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Lorde, Audre. (1978). Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Out &Out Books.

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Mann, E. (2016). Latina girls, sexual agency, and the contradictions of neoliberalism. Sex Res Sox Policy, 13(1), 330-340. http://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-014-0161-x

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Mulvey, L. (1985). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In G. Mast & M. Cohen (Eds.), Film theory and criticism: Introductory readings, third edition (pp. 803-816). Oxford University Press.

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Penley et. al. (2013). Introduction: The politics of producing pleasure. In M. Miller-Young, C. Penley, C. P. Shimizu & T. Taormino (Eds.), The feminist porn book: The politics of producing pleasure (pp. 9-20). Feminist Press.

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White, P. (2008). Lesbian minor cinema. Screen, 49(4), 410-425. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjn057

White describes the formal relations of a “lesbian minor cinema” (410) as so: “relatively impoverished relations of production, spare formal language and thematic concern with the liminal sexual and gender identities of their young female protagonists,…and suggest the appellation ‘minor cinema’(411).” In My So-Called Life’s “Betrayal” and Euphoria’s “Pilot”, the “friendships” between Angela and Rayanne, and Rue and Jules, are “queer” (Nguyen, 14) in two meanings of the term: relating to homo- as opposed to hetero- feelings of attraction, desire and kinship, and unspecified, unfixable into categories, and shifting. White provides context on the historic parameters on “lesbian” (410) works of “cinema” – or more commonly, as consequence of their subject and/or source being sapphic, and therefore, “major” (410) means of production and distribution being inaccessible to the work’s creator(s), alternative audiovisual forms. Because of the nature of community kinship, and particularly, of such found within a “minor” community marginalized firstly, in society (for reasons of both, oversexualization and non-normativity) and secondly, within the queer community, White holds each “lesbian” cinematic text enters into relationship with the “lesbian…cinema” (410) body.

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Neither “Betrayal” nor “Pilot” can claim “minor” (410) parentage nor home, the former, being created by Winnie Holzman and airing on the network ABC, and the latter, by Sam Levinson and airing on the network HBO. Even with respect to this fact, in “Betrayal” as in “Pilot” the relationships between Angela and Rayanne and Rue and Jules reflect the narrative and visual themes of “lesbian minor cinema”, in dialogue with Nguyen’s understanding of the term “minor” (12) as an “object” (12) that is known to, and beheld by, those within a particular marginalized community, without being so by those outside of it. The politics of sexuality depicted in “Betrayal” and “Pilot” are different as a result of the twenty years in between the airing of the two shows: in My So-Called Life, the sexuality and physical intimacies of high school girls and boys are more juvenile, “innocent”, underdeveloped, compared to the precocious, “mature”, explicit sexual subjectivities and lives of the teenagers of Euphoria. If the “major” can be conceptualized as heterosexual sexuality within which My So-Called Life and Euphoria recreate the “minor” (Nguyen, 13) experience of girl homosexuality and friendships between girls, and homosexual girls, those “majors” are very much dissimilar discourses – in the former, physical and sexual intimacy are understood as meaningful and ultimate, and in the latter, such are viewed more as a game, with rules, strategies, winners, losers.

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The plot of “Betrayal” focuses on Angela’s displacement of her desires for and imaginations of a committed emotional and physical relationship with Jordan onto Cory, and Rayanne’s temporary achievement of “being” Angela by having sex (while under the influence of alcohol) with Jordan, followed by intense regret and disappointment in herself. While a “straight”, or “major” (Nguyen, 13), reading of “Betrayal” illustrates how Holzman explores the internal contradictions problematizing the clarity of what adolescent girls want, a reading of the text through a sapphic lens would reveal the true, unspoken and perhaps unknown to the girls’ themselves, nature of the episode’s plot. Angela’s and Rayanne’s mapping of homoerotic if not homosexual desires for the other, as well as desires to be the other, onto intimacy with Cory and Jordan, respectively. Nate Jacobs’ father whom the plot of “Pilot” tracks Jules engaging in graphically violent sex acts with, like Jordan or Cory is a body onto which in this case conscious fantasies of the achievement of the norms of heterosexuality and a future of female chrononormativity expected of (/enforced upon and putting up internal checks for) teenage girls are projected by the character.

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Though Rue and Jules are able to communicate to each other more clearly their same-sex desires and make them into a reality, as by the end of “Pilot” the two are spending the night in the latter’s bed, Levinson shows that the more explicitly erotic aspect of their friendship/intimate physical and emotional relationship is but one more factor that complicates the girls’ discernibility and determination of their relationships to one another and to sexuality. Like that of Angela and Rayanne, in reaffirmation of the thesis of “lesbian minor cinema” (410), the sapphic girl relationship is manifested as changing, unfixed, ambiguous, fleeting, not-to-be “happ[ily close] end[ed]” (411). The depiction of Angela and Rayanne and Rue and Jules’ relationships is representative of Nguyen’s notion of the “minor object” (13) as that which exists as hidden within, and refusing to make itself known to, the “major” (White, 410) “archive” (Nguyen, 15) so as to not be misinterpreted, misappropriated or otherwise obfuscated of truth, and stay as a safe space for sapphic girls and women to mediate their selves through, time and again.

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As White outlines as the formal dimensions generic of “lesbian” (412) cinema, as reflective of the subjectivity of discerning one’s feelings, as a sapphic girl, for another girl, especially a girl whom one has been friends with for a long time, is a new friend or even is an adversary, distance, closeness, isolation and mutuality motivate the formal decisions of depictions of “relationships” in “Betrayal” and “Pilot”. Looking and being looked at, or looking at the one that one has feelings – of friendship, of attraction, of desire (either or both to be, or to have for one’s own), of lust, of love – for looking at someone else, and touching and being touched by, or watching the one that one has feelings for being touched by someone else, inform how shots are styled. Choppy shots between one and another (Angela and Rayanne, Rayanne and Jordan, Angela and Jordan, Angela and Cory), or languid shots between the one and the other (Rue and Jules, Jules and Nate) capture the feeling of (sapphic) girls’ “deterritorializ[ation]” (White, 411) in terms of their knowability of themselves, and of those around them. (Because of the times’ dominant attitudes regarding sexuality, “Betrayal” operates more on relationalities of looking, and “Pilot”, of touching. As with shot durations, My-So Called Life’s general form appeals to “major cinema” logics – hence the faster paced shot-reverse-shots – while Euphoria’s, to a “minor” (as in, alternative or underground) aesthetics).

If I were to state the term “groupie”, what would take shape in your mind; a racialized woman who seeks momentary sexual intimacy with an athletic celebrity or platinum artist as is the contemporary dominant conceptualization? A woman in sex work or that practices an active or stringless sexual life who seeks the same from rock bands, as was such in last half of the 20th century (Karbownik, 2021: 53)? A young “woman” who obsessively consumes the products of a supernova-sized pop group, and follows like a puppy dog, their every movement whether with their eyes (as was more common) or with their bodies, as was such at the time the term was emergent in the mid-to-late 20th century (Des Barres, 1:16:24-3:24:34)?

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Historically, as a teenage girl who felt embodied and empowered by the figure of the “groupie”, she has been that whom I have on the one hand, held intimate, close to my heart, and on the other, elevated onto a pedestal. That this is not an alternative but an oppositional understanding, I recognize from nearly over a decade of embodied knowledge, and my antecedent five years of critical multi-discursive research into works depicting “groupies” – whether produced by identifying “groupies”, sources claiming to be objective, or ideological, oppositional voices, and whether revealing, deliberately misrepresentational, or somewhere in between. Wiissa’s “Midnight Ramblers” is aligned with such foundational works of what could be presented as the canon of “groupie” texts, including key primary sources, I’m with the Band (Pamela Des Barres, 1987), Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies (Des Barres, 2007), Faithfull: An Autobiography (Marianne Faithfull, 1994), Elvis and Me: The True Story of the Love Between Priscilla Presley and the King of Rock N' Roll (Priscilla Presley, 1986) and Dirty Rocker Boys (Bobbie Brown, 2011).

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Through the utilization of the generic conventions of narrative and categorical documentary – the former’s natural formation of a narrative from the information provided by its subjects, in this case, self-identifying “groupies”, and the latter’s form of loosely structured personal interviews and on the ground coverage – “Midnight Ramblers” presents a counter-hegemonic image of “groupies”. Firstly, by presenting the authentic (not a priori or ipso facto misogynist, anti-feminist or anti-woman) realities of being a “groupie”, and secondly, how girls’ and young women’s participation in and contributions to the dominant, historicized “rock culture” (Coates, 2019: 40) enabled its reinvention and prosperity.

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Rosalind Galt explores the opportunities an aesthetics of “pretty”, defined by visual excess – layered textures of vibrancy, intensity, lushness, swirliness, softness, shininess, and similar optical organizations that disturb Western masculinity, could offer those kept out of dominant, elitist, Western, cinematic traditions (6-29). Dialogic with popular music scholar Norma Coates’ topography of “rock culture” (40), Galt unfurls the relationship between valuable visual language in cinematic practice – an internally contradictory system of shifting ideals that has at its core, the rawness/purity of translating reality into film stock – and those styles of visual communication which betray, extend beyond the boundaries or signal an absence of quality (1-25).

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“Midnight Ramblers” reproduces the analog structure of a scrapbook – placing vignettes of individual or a nexus of “groupies’” participating in bedroom culture, in the public sphere at events and as recognized and celebrated creatives in their own rights. Across chronological and montage sequences alike, the physical spaces of the shots are manipulated or controlled, if not designed, by the various teenage girls and young women, with each individuated allocation of shots reflecting a specificated interpretation of the “prett[y]” (Galt, 2019: 2). “Suzy Stardust”, the first of three “groupies” who narrates the structure of the lifestyle of one subcategory of “groupie” of which she is a synecdoche, occupies a frame overcrowded with photographs, prints and fabrics (0:30-1:05). The setting of “Jani Lucid’s” outdoor interview is framed so as to make grasses, forests and skies appear as a watercolour painting (3:12-4:02). “Miss Suki’s” trademark mis-en-scene is luscious in its chiaroscuro lightning and morphing shapes (6:22-6:24). 5:00-5:50, the montage sequence I will soon conduct a closer reading of on the terrains of both narrative and style, is a lightning storm of striking magentas, lavenders and indigos washing over and through a reel of shots of fluttering and intertwining bodies. Altogether, as one constituent work, Wiissa’s short film offers one manifestation of the multiplicities of potential “pretty” (Galt, 2019: 7) cinematic landscapes.

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Berlant’s “Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material)” is a polemic against the dominant ideology on the issues of sexual acts, public displays of sexuality and sexual acts and the sanctity of private, domestic, heterosexual sex in the American context, and how it is passed down pedagogically (Berlant, 1995). The feminist theorist criticizes one, the discursive and in the ideal; made to be thought of as normative; circumstances, physical, isolation of teenage girls from the first two aforementioned “worlds” by individuals, collectives and systems that have investment in such, whether that is personal, political, ideological or (as it is systemically) economic (381-383). Secondly – as it occurs for the purposes of denying the female gender the ability to develop and engage in a self-created sexual subjectivity as autonomously as is viable (as their non-autonomous sexualization is embedded into and present everywhere in modernity) – the conflation of all (but in particular, young) women with girls, or, female bodies that are in the legal discourse, incapable of consenting to sex acts, is under siege (388-399).

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Pamela Des Barres’ 1987 memoir I’m with the Band, comprising diary entries from her days as a “groupie” from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, is, in the history of my research into dominant, alternative and “groupies’” own conceptualizations of the figure and her temporal transformations, that single text most consulted to examine the topic (often, fortunately, paired with or contrasted against a comparable text(s) from a different period or location). As the writer, lyricist and former performer canonizes her – at times domestic and at others, working, and at times public sphere, and at others, private – quotidian through writings and interviews of her own and of other contemporary “groupies” across the text’s third to sixth chapters, a historically-embedded snapshot of the “groupie” term, figure and fall from grace can be produced. At the emergence of Coates’ “rock culture” (40) in 1966 in California, the corollary formation of a conceptualization of a young female fan that pursues kinship and intimacy with rock artists as (private) individuals, that develops a bidirectional relationality of inspiration and production with them, as reflective of equivalent admiration of their work as expressed in other ways by male fans, occurs on the foundations of respect and appreciation (Des Barres, 1:16:24-4:30:58). In 1969, however, when consulted for Hopkins, Burks and Nelson’s ethnographical Rolling Stone article, “Groupies and Other Girls”, Miss Mercy, a member of the iconic “Girls Together Outrageously (GTOs)” “groupie” collective, performance troupe and band founded by Des Barres, vocalizes the GTOs disjunction from that subcategory of young females that share sexual intimacy with rock stars for the clout of such an interaction (5:52:57-5:54:24).

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Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000), a filmic reconstruction of the director’s time as a teen rock journalist from the early-to-mid 1970s, is a popular cultural text often the key if not singular reference point for a conceptualization of “groupies”; in this historicized and culturally specific context; for those outside of popular music scholarship (Karbownik, 2021: 51-52). Kate Hudson’s sixteen-year-old “Penny Lane” is the matriarch of the “Band-Aides” (to which Fairuza Balk’s “Sapphire”, Anna Paquin’s “Polexia Aphrodisia” and Bijou Phillips’ “Estrella Star” belong): a “groupie” collective modeled off the kin relationalities shared between Des Barres’ GTOs, and between the GTOs and the rock group members with whom they formed bonds (Crowe, 2000). The “Band-Aides” – like Miss Mercy in 1969, then Des Barres herself throughout the 1970s (Des Barres, 6:36:54-7:37:39) – disidentify from the dominant conceptualization of the “groupie” figure (in the rock culture context of the film’s 1973 setting, and the American national context of the early 1970s resultant of Hopkins, Burks and Nelson’s “Groupies and Other Girls”) on philosophical, ethical and political grounds: “We are not groupies…Groupies sleep with rockstars ‘cause they want to be near someone famous. We’re here because of the music, we are Band-Aides…We inspire the music,” (19:25-19:44).

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In a piece of ground-breaking theory in popular music scholarship that I locate in my body of research as the foundational secondary source on top of which (in addition to several invaluable primary sources) a field of “groupie studies” should be developed, Coates maps the historicized topos of rock culture: dichotomized into active, producer, masculine, valuable, respected, and passive, consumer, feminine, superfluous, disrespected (30-47). The feminist pop culture theorist deconstructs how the survival of the rock culture’s excessively sexual and hedonistic hegemonic masculinity; exampled in Des Barres’ text by the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, and in Crowe’s Russell Hammond of Stillwater; necessitates the existence, investment, labour and capital of the culture’s subordinated, Othered, and abstracted into non-existence, “inauthentic” (young, immature, unknowledgeable) female consumer (Coates, 2019: 30-47). Larsen interrogates through the critical literary analysis of five primary sources of the “groupie” canon (documenting a collective time span of the mid-1950s to the early-2010s), the spaces and positions accessible for female versus male bodies to take up in the arena of rock culture, narrativizing the linearly, increasingly sacrificial image of the “groupie” as a weapon in:

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exclude(ing) women from creative production, the…identity draws…on gender identity… (and) the dichotomy between work and non-work….(Women’s) social identity is…a ‘marketplace role’…according to the producer–consumer dualism…This patriarchy of rock music (is)…held in place by three…interrelated forces and their attendant institutions and practices: hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and homosociality…As this discussion…suggests, there is little or no place for women in rock music—in positions of power, in the constructions of sexualities, (neither) through friendships and collaborations. (pp. 399-402)

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I turn now to evaluate how the first of “Midnight Ramblers” four montage sequences which embody through kin communicative/representational forms and rhetorical strategies as those selected by the significant primary and secondary sources thusly cited that explore objectively and therefore complexly the intricacies of “groupies’” real lives,  contributes to such a body of work. “Lula Costa”, one of the youngest “groupies” “documented” (like Almost Famous, Wiisa’s work is a recreation of the historically-situated “rock culture” Coates foregrounds as that from which each subsequent, adaptive iteration of “rock culture” can be traced (31)), provides the spoken aural track overlaying the mixed-spatial and cyclically-chronological sequence (Dazed, 5:00-5:50). “I met these girls…their clothes are so amazing, it’s all glittery and colorful…And now I’m hanging out with them, it’s the best. They’re bringing me everywhere, and they know everyone. It’s been a lot of fun,” (5:02-5:20) she orates, “A groupie is someone who loves the music, someone who is there because they can really relate to the music. It’s not someone who just sleeps with a guy because he’s in a band…I don’t know, music is…it’s the only way that I have to survive,” (5:25-5:48).

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Cross-cut editing between one of the short film’s two key structural themes – expectational versus disruptive; of the dominant image of “groupies” by their opponents in “rock culture” (Coates, 2019: 44-46); practices reaffirmed differently by individual “groupies’” – communicates the dimensionality of the subjects’ complex figures and uneasily reducible pursuits. Formally organized comparisons and contrasts between the girls and young women, hypnotized by music, in motion, (5:02-5:05, 5:45-5:47) their joyousness in each other’s company, (5:12-5:14, 5:27-5:31, 5:38-5:39) their creative productions, (5:05-5:08) and their relationships with male musicians, (5:34-5:38) evidences an authentic narrative reflective of the documentary’s disclosed article of interest.

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To counter the polemic that teenage girls in the mid-20th century were vulnerable, simple pawns to the economies and marketplaces of shifting or emergent industries (romantic, fashion, lifestyle, etc.) targeting that demographic’s investment and purchasing, Schrum demonstrates how in fact, the American teen girl collective influenced such industries’ production, interests and objectives (18-21).  Through a montage of active, dynamic, even frenetic shots, “Midnight Ramblers” evidences its “groupies” – like Pamela Des Barres’ “GTOs” and “Penny Lane’s” “Band-Aides” – shaping, both through their own lifestyles, movements, appearances and ideas, and through their advice on the issues of music, images, costuming, performance and touring, the artists possessing their admiration (Dazed, 5:00-5:50).

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Fluid transitions and visual contrasts between firstly, filled versus airy shots externalize one organizing theme – that of individuality, to foreground the dimensional personhood of each “groupie”, versus collectivity, to illustrate the intimate kinship bonds between “groupies” and the centrality of female interdependence to the historicized lifestyle of “groupies” (Des Barres, 1:16:24-3:24:34). Secondly, between warm and soft (5:06-5:08, 5:10-5:26) versus cool and sharp shots (5:03-5:05, 5:27-5:29) to express that second organizing theme – the duality of the concurrency of one, agentic performances of hegemonic womanhood and femininity and two, liberatory transgressions of contemporary boundaries of non-pathological bodily choices. Refocusing the analysis into the framework of Galt’s “pretty” aesthetics (6-7) – glowing, golden-lit images of a solo “Lula” in a white fur cap and gemstone eye makeup (5:23-5:25) or “Suzy” in her signature scarves and feathered jacket (5:08-5:10) contrast the older “Mandy May” wrapped around her romantic male partner in dramatically lit – in spotlights and shadows vs. moonlight and blush pink – (5:34-5:38) frames. Interspersed in between such individuated shots, however, are close-up captures of “Suzy”, “Mandy” and “Mimi Fox” dancing in a singular rhythm as illuminated by red, pink and blue three point lighting (5:29-5:31), then the same harmonious trio and “Lula” exchanging interiorities and bonding through joy as a similar, collective, unitary body in chiaroscuro bronzes and shadows (5:39-5:40).

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I leapt over the course of my eleventh year, biologically, from a yet “developed” female body to a body that possessed those attributes judged sexually arousing in the discourse of hegemonic femininity, and psychologically, from not yet debilitating bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorders to such diagnoses constantly rearing their angry heads on both my body and the bodies of those closest to me. Having internalized Berlant’s “little girl” ideology and praxis, (388-390) while concurrently, being sexualized for my body, that I was a girl with my body, that my awareness of my autonomous sexual subjectivity had a high probability of infancy, and that the violation of my innocence was an erotic taboo, had I found myself in endangering circumstances, my course through life would have been irreconcilable with its reality.

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After turning thirteen in the temporal context, I had begun supporting a diversity of rock groups twofold: the first, as “teenybopper”, (Coates, 2019: 31) a consumer of my idolized groups’ art and merchandising in the private, bedroom culture; the second, as “groupie”, (46) following them during tour periods, building relationalities of kinship, and inspiring art through not just my presence or bodily labour, but interchanges of the mind. Like “Penny Lane” and the “Band-Aides”, like Des Barres and the “GTOs”, living as a “groupie” offered one, a cultural discourse and space that pulled me in to a community of similarly identifying societal outcasts and revolutionaries, and inspired in me the impulse to produce reflective and dialogic literary and poetic texts. Secondly, to at first, consensually (agentically) observe displays not of sex acts, but of sexuality vis-à-vis hegemonic rock showmanship performance in the public arena of the concert venue, and then, to autonomously define a sexual subjectivity in relation to that which the aforementioned stimulated, and enter consensually and pleasurably into the “private” (Berlant, 1995: 401) space of heterosexual sex acts, prevented myself from experiencing such traumatizing sexual circumstances young females are discursively, set up to.

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In On Living with Television televisual theorist Amy Holdsworth outlines an ontological theoretical foundation which interweaves the realm of television shows, temporality and the project of understanding one’s life in relationality to the media one not passively consumes, but internalizes as reflective of a piece of their self at one point in time (3-7). Translated into the audiovisual language of Holdsworth’s text, this project is repositioned as the formation of an “auto/biography” (6-7) from an archive of treasures; rephrased in yet another, third way, in the language of the discourse within which the scholar’s issues of life-writing and knowledge preservation are more debated, this project could be understood as the canonization of one’s own mythology.

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I foreground the project of producing a montage of televisual sequences, or a reel from a film camera, or a scrapbook of photographs and loose objects to embed this piece of cinema, popular music and gender theory, of which’s scope has, for the most part, been culturally specific and bounded in historicity (in its focus on the sociocultural phases that could be situated as causing or resultant of Coates’ late-mid-century moment) in universality. I first discovered Wiissa’s “Midnight Ramblers” in the summer preceding my sixteenth birthday; a puncture in the cyclical temporality of my “queer[ed]” (Holdsworth, 2021: 11) adolescence and early adulthood, that was one of many precipices between my insecure, nebulous, under-construction self-identity and the future – an equally unfixed and unpredictable concept that I had not in years, understood my being alive to be compatible with. Norma Coates’ historicized conclusions on the patriarchal sustenance of “rock masculinity”; (31) a performative as opposed to a biological gendered term, as Larsen later identifies when studying female creative producers that do, versus do not, adopt such an affect in order to acquire cultural respectability; are not oppositional to my embodied knowledges: however, that does not essentialize the direction of rock’s future.

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Bibliography

Berlant, L. (1995), Live Sex Acts (Parental  Advisory:  Explicit  Material). Feminist Studies, 21(2), 379-404. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178273

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Coates, N. (2019), From the Vaults: Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques: Girls and Women and Rock Culture in the 1960s and early 1970s. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 31(3), 29-48. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313005

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Crowe, C. (Director). (2000). Almost famous [Film]. DreamWorks Pictures.

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Dazed. (2016, Mar. 29). ‘Midnight Ramblers’ - A film by Wiissa [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NBptPuYdK8

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Des Barres, P. (2011). I’m With the Band (P. Des Barres & D. Navarro, Narr.) [Audiobook]. Audible.

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Holdsworth, A. (2021). Introduction. In A. Holdsworth (Eds.), On  Living  with  Television (pp. 1-13). Duke University Press.

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Karbownik, K. (2021). Speculation over the Love for Rock Music: Media Constructions of Groupies Between the 1960s and 1970s. Studia de Cultura, 13(2), 47-56. https://doi.org/10.24917/20837275.13.2.4

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Larsen, G. (2017), It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World: Music Groupies and the Othering of Women in the World of Rock. Organization, 24(3), 397-417. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084166890

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Rosalind, G. (2009), Pretty: Film Theory, Aesthetics, and the History of the Troublesome Image. Camera Obscura, 24(2), 1-41. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2009-001

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Schrum, K. (2004). Emergence of Teenage Girls. In K. Schrum (Eds.), Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920-45 (pp. 11-22). Palgrave Macmillan.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman : with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects Wollstonecraft criticizes the domestic and pedagogical systems educating “ladies” of the 18th century as well as the contemporary social structure and hegemonic ideology that limit their opportunities to marriage (Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-3). The philosopher holds accountable for “rich” women's occupation with “inspir[ing]” “that kind of love” that is “pity['s]...sister” and “spread[ing] corruption” by upholding “barren amusement”, contemporary patriarchal conceptions of the female sex's “faculties” and men's forcing through policy and theory, and drawing through “condescending” “love” (Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-4). While Wollstonecraft accounts how a woman’s choices to better her situation are wrapped up in “marriage” to a man, she interprets a woman’s making herself “alluring” as the opposite of being “str[ong]” in “mind and body”; she finds feminine and disrespectable acts of “pleasure” like “dress[ing]”, “paint[ing]” and “nickname[ing]…creatures”, similarly, a “weakness” (Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-4). As a polemic to these two arguments, court ladies’ usage of “elegance” to “rise up” if survive in the economic and political system of pre-Revolution 18th century France as retold in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette does demonstrate mental and physical strength, just as their “[un]dignif[ied]” pursuits provide “value” to their “character[s]” (Coppola, 2006; Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-3).

Marie Antoinette is a 21st century text: my aim is not to counter Wollstonecraft’s arguments by suggesting the historical court ladies of King Louis XV then King Louis XVI of France sought “ambition” or “virtue”, but to do so by examining the filmic court ladies’ appeals to “notions of beauty” as (“laudable”) “ambition”, and “child[ish]” occupations as of “virtue” (Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-3).

In the foreground of (different sections of) Coppola’s film are three women’s maintaining their physiological lives and social positions at the court of King Louis XV through the careful usage of practices termed by Wollstonecraft, “soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste” (Coppola, 2006; Wollstonecraft, 1833: 2). The philosopher presents such “[non-]masculine” and “[non-]respectable” practices as oppositional to “strength…of mind and body”, but I argue Dauphine Marie Antoinette’s (attempted) seduction and nurturing of Dauphin Louis to certify her place by birthing an heir, the Duchess of Polignac’s establishing relationships with influencers in French and international courts to strengthen her place, and Madame du Barry’s “pleasur[ing]” King Louis to acquire the status of his principal mistress, disprove such (Coppola, 2006; Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-4). Wollstonecraft elides the interpretation that women’s conscientious use of “allure”, “elegance” and “docility” as in the Dauphine, Duchess and Madame’s intelligent interactions with, and providing their bodies in a sexual and otherwise sense for, powerful men and women, is a manifestation of that “masculine”, “respectable” “facult[y]” (Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-4). In her call for “ladies’” to “obtain” a “dignif[ied]…character”, she discounts as not a “laudable” or “respectable” “ambition” (Wollstonecraft, 1833: 2-3) their bettering or maintaining their situations, or daily survival; in any temporal or spatial context wherein one does not hold recognized citizenship or personhood or have in practice the rights owed to a citizen, I counter, survival is a respectable ambition.

The second assertion Wollstonecraft makes I aim to problematize is that “ladies’” pursuing “weak” occupations, sources of “false refinement, immorality, and vanity”, in the vein of “dress[ing]” and “paint[ing]” does not distract from “nobler passions”, but makes less virtuous the “human character” (Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-3). Through visual representation and/or dialogue, it is told that Antoinette, Polastron (the Duchess) and du Barry, women from lowly regarded land, family and past profession, respectively, entered into an antagonistic and precarious socioeconomic and domestic situation; hostile treatment from majority members of court, caused each woman’s “character” to “corrupt”, become “inferior” (Coppola, 2006; Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-3). Paradoxical to Wollstonecraft’s claim, through participation in and pursuit of “amusement” – she contends weaken “true dignity and human happiness” – including dancing, playing with garments, accessories and hairstyles, gossiping, flirting, gambling and lounging, the Dauphine, Duchess and Madame’s “human character[s]” return more closely to their state before court (a state represented on-screen for Antoinette, and through characters’ dialogue for the other two) (Coppola, 2006; Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-3). The friendship, community, purpose and motivation achieved only through such “[un-] dignify[ing]” practices enables the three ladies to redevelop their “character”; what as argued, “ma[k]e[s them] ridiculous and useless”, is that which not recovers their “virtue[s]” but expands upon them, as they cultivate greater kindness, selflessness, capability and even, intelligence (Coppola, 2006; Wollstonecraft, 1833: 2-4). 

Marie Antoinette, the Duchess of Polignac and Madame du Barry are not infallible in “virtue”; however, contrary to Wollstonecraft’s arguments, their precise affectations are a demonstration of mental and physical strength, and from taking part in “barren amusement”, their “character[s]” are expanded as from “pleasure”, growth can transpire (Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-3). The court “ladies’” I have focused on also display the “masculine” and “respectable” “faculties” the philosopher calls for women to display to disprove the sex’s “inferiority” – they “take care of…babes”, pursue knowledge and partake in such “dignif[ied]” duties of the “middle class” like tending to land and making food, showing that “virtue” is not incompatible with “corruption” (Coppola, 2006; Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-4). Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman puts forth a historical argument using the contemporary patriarchy’s language to disrupt sociopolitical and pedagogical structures and ideology denying women’s opportunity to and compatibility with education and autonomy; while she distances/detaches herself from “ladies”, their “ambition[s]” and “virtue”, modernity is a comfortable place for criticism (Coppola, 2006; Wollstonecraft, 1833: 1-3). 

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Works Cited

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Marie Antoinette. Directed by Sofia Coppola, performances by Kirsten Dunst, Rose Byrne, and Asia Argento, Columbia Pictures, 2006.

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Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman : with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. New York, A.J. Matsell, 1833.

Berlant, in “Live  Sex  Acts  (Parental  Advisory:  Explicit  Material)”, situates the imagined figure of the “little girl” at the centre of “adult” America’s tensions over the issue of sexuality: the Parents Music Resource Centre, representative of the “national” voice, holds responsible “good” parents for the protection of the “little girl” from deviant, pathological or “public” acts of sex(uality) (Berlant, 1995: 381-397). On the value of the imagined “little girl” to the U. S. A.’s (hegemonic) national stance on and policing of sex and sexuality, Berlant hints at the paradox of the “little girl” figure’s purity and need for isolation from the “adult” world of sex acts and knowledges, and her potential for sex and sexuality, and the sexualization of her purity and this to-be-had-sex-with potentiality (Berlant, 1995: 388-390). Schrum contends since the emergence of a specific demographic of “teen girls” in the early-to-mid 20th century (in the context of the U. S.), culture consciously created for adolescent girls has centralized heterosexual marriage and adult domesticity and attached physical and internal desirability to men and boys to girls’ social value (Schrum, 2004: 16-18).

 

The narrative of Jules Vaughn and Cal Jacobs in Season 1 of Euphoria links into the “national” but unrecognized (/denied) tension between an “adult” (heterosexual) attraction to teenage girls and calls to disconnect teenage girls’ from sex and sexuality, including agentic desires for and explorations of such (Berlant, 1995: 388-390). From 31:14 to 34:45 of “Pilot”, wherein seventeen year-old girl, Jules, and middle-aged, husband and father of three, Cal, have “consensual” “sex” in a motel room, the camera provides alternatingly, the (as Berlant would argue) “national” pornographic image of “teen [/little] girls” and, the traumatic experience(/ing) of (heterosexual) “sex” that endangers real teen girls (“Pilot” 31:14-34:45). The present-day perpetuation of the national culture Schrum describes and traces, of femininity, (compulsory) heterosexuality and threading the needle between chastity/purity and sexuality/sexual appeal, bearing upon – and to an extent, at the mercy of – teen girls in the early-to-mid 20th century (Schrum, 2004: 16-20) is studied and problematized through the mis-en-scene and dichotomy of seen and unseen (“Pilot” 31:14-34:45).

 

Berlant objects to the rigidly defined and intensely guarded spaces of the “private” and the “public”, arguing that such significant decisions – ideological, moral and often legal – of what ought to be placed into one or the other creates a nation of absolute “good” and “bad”, a society of “good” people that do good and therefore must be virtuous (those with “dead citizenship”) (Berlant, 1995: 379-383). The scholar questions if “parents” (all adults possessing “dead citizenship”) confine real teen girls that cannot consent legally to sex acts to the “private”/”dead” domestic space of the heterosexual family, then how are they to transition into the “adult” domain of sexuality once they can in the legal sense, “consent” to sex acts, with all of the necessary knowledge to be there (Berlant, 1995: 381-390)? The lighting in the scene where Cal has extremely violent and painful, “agentically consented” to sex with Jules is very low, with bright lightbulbs in the motel room, its bathroom and closet giving bursts of light and casting shadows that fill the room, darkening it further – the space is eerie, reminiscent of the mis-en-scene generic to the horror genre (“Pilot” 31:14-34:45).

 

The scene at subject oscillates throughout between reproducing the pornographic “male gaze” – Cal’s, the “bad” adult’s, the “adult” “pervert[’s]” – perspective and focusing on Jules’ experience of the “sex” act, her interiority, feelings and pain – a potential representative of real “little girl[s’]” first coming into contact, physical, visual or in any other way pedagogical, with sex (“Pilot” 31:14-34:26). The former creates a hegemonic image of teenage girls fetishized but unrecognized; as such would be a paradox incompatible with the “dead”/proselytized “little girl” protectionist ideology; by national culture, and the latter evidences the consequences of teenage girls’ formal separation from knowledge about sexuality, as they live in a nation that sexualizes them and their being the imaginary “little girl” (Berlant, 1995: 381-390).

 

In the scene of analysis, conceptions of the “public” and the “private” spaces, societies, rules, codes, practices and relationships in America are at an intense tension, both the “private”/“dead” and “public”/“live” heightened to clearly demonstrate how men that appear in public as “good” “parents” (Berlant’s meaning of the term) can and do work around the “protection” of the imagined “little girl” (Berlant, 1995: 381-383). Jules and Cal engage in “sex” in a motel (“Pilot” 31:14-34:45), “private”, as they are alone, but “public”, as it is not their owned, secured, protected space (Berlant, 1995: 381-383). Jules returns Cal’s wedding ring to atop his cell phone, through which she comes face to face with the lock screen image of his wife and children (“Pilot” 34:27-34:45) – an uncomfortable reminder of his hidden, buried “private”/“dead”/“good”/“father” self (Berlant, 1995: 379-399). This occurs just after he has forcibly penetrated the girl’s mouth with his finger, forcibly ripped into her fishnet tights and forcibly taken anal sex with her (“Pilot” 32:43-34:10) – acts which, if he is a “good” “parent” in national mythology, should have been irreconcilable with his self (Berlant, 1995: 382-399).

 

The whole scene at subject, from 31:14 to 34:45, lays bare the possible harm the “protection” of imaginary “little girls” cause causes, and then, the second, secret, morally “wrong” face of that cause, its subsequent, enabled abuse of real teen girls (Berlant, 1995: 388-390). The very real pain of real teenage girls and the absences of critical knowledges about sexuality including issues of consent, agency and communication in their understandings of sex, sexuality and their location in the “adult” (as in, sexual) world that are in part – the other part, the agentic “bad” action of the “adult” – the causation of that pain can and do result from the imaginary “little girl[‘s]” “protection” (Berlant, 1995: 381-390).

 

Schrum characterizes the literature presented to teenage girls as advice on how to be “successful” as a to-be woman – or socially valuable as a female – in the 20th century as focused on messages of, “improving appearance, dress, posture, figure…and relationships”, consciously setting up the centrality of beauty cultures and femininity, and male attraction, in the views of readers (Schrum, 2004: 16-18). Teen girls’ understandings of themselves from the moment they were solidified as a demographic to be interpellated ideologies to, programmed into a particular subject, contributing profit to social, economic and cultural industries, have been enmeshed in the (re)affirmation of their goodness by men, whether virtue is a matter of sexuality or chastity (Schrum, 2004: 14-18).

 

From 31:19 to 32:00 Jules is filmed in a close-up, low-angle shot looking up at Cal whose face and majority of his body are just out of shot, giving him the mystery of absence, of shadowiness, the sense of looming and threat, the potentiality of danger (“Pilot” 31:19-32:00). His essentially disembodied voice – a stranger’s voice, a strange, unknowable voice – prods into Jules’ sartorial and cosmetic choices (“Pilot” 31:37-31:58), an exchange of dialogue that links the forthcoming “sex” that the two will have to her beauty: Jules is in control of her appearance, she, through her “sexy” style, “asks for” men’s sexual advances, she is the one in power.

 

Schrum complicates the thinking that teen girls in the 20th century were a submissive, passive demographic that fell victim to economic industries and the ideological messaging they weaponized to generate profit by arguing teen girls sought out and played a role in shaping the economies they consumed, however, she holds that such industries greatly influenced their self-conception (Schrum, 2004: 16-21). Jules’ fashion, makeup and hair – her “look” – is a significant vehicle through which she communicates her self-conception and that which she associates inextricably with her self, and her value as a to-be woman (“Pilot” 21:07-21:44); her “look”, presents the teenage girl as the hegemonic, pornographic image of a “teenage girl”, a “little girl” who must be protected, but her need to be protected is erotic (Berlant, 1995: 388-390). The literature (in the contemporary context, expanded to include different medias including social media) and capitalist cultural industries targeting/made for teen girls has told her, as Schrum examines of that of the early-to-mid 20th century, to reproduce a dominant ideal of to-be womanhood (Schrum, 2004: 16-18) – in the early 21st century, a docile and innocent, yet objectifying, sexualized, pornographic appearance.

 

From 31:14 to 34:45 of Euphoria’s “Pilot”, Berlant’s “little girl” (Berlant, 1995: 381) in Jules Vaughn, who, in the “good”, recognized face of American national culture/mythology is hidden away from the impurity of sex(uality) by “good parents”, experiences – not for the first time – the “wrong”, ignored/buried face of her conceptualization in such a culture/mythology. Through intensely sharp contrasts between symbols of the “private”/“parent” and the “public”/“adult” (Berlant, 1995: 388-399) including the tension of the motel room as a space that is a home and out in public, and the gap between Jules’ perceptibility, “public”-ness and Cal’s absence from sight, “private”-ness (“Pilot” 31:14-34:45), the motel scene acknowledges how “good fathers” can also and are enabled to be “bad perverts” (Berlant, 1995: 388-399). The duality of perspectives through which the agentically consented to “sex acts” (Schrum, 2004: 17-18) are captured creates a dialogue between the “accepted”, glossy, sexualized image of teenage – still, imagined in the hegemonic, protectionist viewpoint, “little” – girls, and the traumatizing realities of (a significant number of) teenage girls’ early experiences of sex and sexuality. The relationship of teen girls to what Schrum analyzes as the foundations of “advice literature” and product advertisements created for them since their emergence as a socioeconomic group, the centrality of representing corporeally and internally the hegemonic, heterosexual ideal of a woman-to-be (Schrum, 2004: 16-19), is reflected on and problematized through Jules’ self-sexualization and choice to meet Cal (“Pilot” 31:14-33:03).

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Works Cited

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Berlant, L. (1995). Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material). Feminist studies, 21(2), 379-404. doi.org/10.2307/3178273

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“Pilot.” Euphoria, created by Sam Levinson, performances by Hunter Schafer and Eric Dane, season 1, episode 1, HBO, 2019. Crave, www.crave.ca/en/tv-shows/euphoria/pilot-s1e1.

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Schrum, K. (2004). Some wore bobby sox : the emergence of teenage girls' culture, 1920-1945. Palgrave Macmillan.

Jessica Ringrose interrogates the connections of girlhood to sexuality: reframing the ‘sexualisation discourse’ as a project aiming to control girls that contains racist and classist ideologies; demonstrating how the method sex is taught to girls in schools is structured according to anti-sex ideology; and laying bare that the sexualisation discourse and anti-sex education for girls do not work to protect girls from nor arm girls against, sexual exploitation (Ringrose, 2013: 42-43). The scholar advances that media representations and societal occurrences inform one another in a circuit loop of inspiration (Ringrose, 2013: 12-13) (and therefore, to testify the three points she produces on the postfeminist movement to end the sexualisation of girls, I will provide one example per point, from an apt television show, Skins (2007-11), that reflects or is in dialogue with that analysis. Skins was a British show documenting the transgressive bodily and often sexual practices of fourteen to eighteen year old girls (and boys) in Bristol in the U.K.: it depicted girls’ relationship to their sexuality and to sex (Elsley & Brittain, 2007-2013), and it received both praise from some audiences, and outrage from others’, the latter group’s issue with the show, often being the sexualisation of its female characters. The ‘sexualisation discourse’s’ positioning of white, middle class girls as needing to be saved but working class and of colour girls not being included in that perspective is evident in how Minnie and Liv’s bodily practices are framed; the issues and gaps in the U.K.’s (anti-) sexual education curriculum and girls’ consequential understandings of sex and sexuality, are represented through how Michelle conceives of sex, and behaves during/in sexual practices and relationships; and the potential negative effect of the ‘sexualisation discourse’ and (anti-) sex education as well as their not teaching girls’ how to better prevent their sexual exploitation, is explored through Effy’s generally exploitative sexual relationships (Elsley & Brittain, 2007-2013)

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Ringrose outlines the discussion held across the English-speaking West around the appropriate relationship of girls to sex, their sexuality and their sexualisation, that is occurring in published works, the news and government reports and policy (Ringrose, 2013: 43-44). The scholar isolates from such discussion, the ‘sexualisation discourse (or agenda)’: in the postfeminist world, one in which ideologies and practices of sexual liberation have gone too far, girls have become sexualised – their sexuality is all around them, thrust upon them, and they are pushed towards sex (Ringrose, 2013: 44-47). She locates the aim of the ‘sexualisation agenda’: in censuring all forms of girls’ adjacency to sexuality, the agenda denounces transgressive – framed as inappropriate – girl bodily behaviours, and in doing so, calls for girls to be confined to “traditional femininity” – innocence, purity, chastity (Ringrose, 2013: 47-50). Ringrose focuses in on the girls that are the subject of the agenda’s concerns, exposing that the goal of the ‘sexualisation discourse’ is to detach white, middle class girls from sexuality; not to disempower all girls’ sexual exploitation, the discourse works to pathologize and moralize girls’ sexuality, to re-establish “order” – traditional white, middle class femininity – in girlhood (Ringrose, 2013: 50-51). How the bodily and sexual practices of Minnie, a white, upper-middle class girl, and Liv, a biracial, working class girl, from Skins are framed within the show demonstrate the racist and classist ideology of the ‘sexualisation agenda’: though both ‘self-sexualise’ (Ringrose, 2013: 54) themselves and participate in ‘age-inappropriate’ sexual practices, Minnie’s are presented as a form of her being in crisis – that she needs to be saved from them – while Liv’s, are presented as an extension of her being biracial and working class – that it is natural for her to be engaged in them (Elsley & Brittain, 2007-2013).

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The scholar then details how the ‘sexualisation discourse’ influences how girls are taught about ‘appropriate sexual behaviours’ in schools: dominantly the agenda; of which, its core ideology is girls should be separated from sexuality and sex; is held by government and scholastic policy makers, and therefore, sexual education for girls, is riddled with issues and gaps (Ringrose, 2013: 51-52). As a synecdoche of girls’ sexual education curricula across the English-speaking West, Ringrose interrogates the U.K.’s “sex and relationship education (SRE)” noting firstly, that it does not allocate space for the gendered complexities of sexual and romantic partnerships including topics like consent, power and autonomy (Ringrose, 2013: 52). Then, she goes over the information that is taught to girls (and boys): sexual anatomy, penetrative vaginal sex, contraceptives and sexual diseases, presented in a protectionist approach that stresses the risks of sexual acts and that they should be abstained from for as long as possible (Ringrose, 2013: 52-53). Significantly, the curriculum, structured to cover concerns of health and reproduction, touches on male sexual desire in the topic of male orgasm but both female desire and female orgasm are absent from the teaching, a gap representative of the ‘sexualisation agenda’s’ mission to dislocate girls’ sexuality from girls (Ringrose, 2013: 53-54). The sexual education Michelle like all of the girls in Skins was taught at school was SRE, but it is in her thinking about sexual relationships that the curriculum’s ideology has been the most internalized: she is not able to recognize that her relationship with ‘boyfriend’ Tony is suffused with power imbalances, she conceives of her sex acts as transgressive and must be kept secret (as they are deviant), and what she believes is the ‘goal’ of a penetrative sexual act, is for the boy to orgasm (Elsley & Brittain, 2007-2013).

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While it asserts its objective is saving girls from sexual exploitation, the ‘sexualisation discourse’ like (anti-)sexual education taught to girls in schools, does not have as its focus the sexual objectification of and the taking of non/sexual agency from girls but rather, girls participation in transgressive sexual practices (Ringrose, 2013: 55-56). The ‘sexualisation agenda’ and girls’ sexual education take as their cause, the confining of all – white, middle class – girls, a priori their consent, to a non-sexual or pre-sexual space: they are not concerned with protecting girls non/sexual autonomy and thus, they do not help girls to navigate sex, their sexuality or their sexualisation (Ringrose, 2013: 55-56). Ringrose foregrounds the knowledges that can be taught; but are significantly, neglected by a majority of ‘sexualisation agenda’ and (anti-)sexual education advocates; to girls (and boys) to better enable them to prevent their sexual exploitation – adding gender equality into Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning(-like) programs, presenting sexual and sexist bullying and violence against girls as a ‘whole school’ concern and entering discussions of gender objectification and pornography into SRE (/equivalent programs) (Ringrose, 2013: 54-55). How the ‘sexualisation discourse’ and girls (anti-)sexual education’s call for girls to be protected from sexual exploitation but their not giving girls the tools to protect themselves, and their side-by-side order for girls to be restricted from agentic sex and sexuality, can and do work counter-intentionally to encourage girls to participate in ‘age-inappropriate’ sexual practices that can be sexually exploitative (that they do not recognize as such), is demonstrated in Skins’ Effy (Elsley & Brittain, 2007-2013). Effy’s perceiving the ‘sexualisation agenda’s’/SRE’s attempts to take her sexuality from her impels her to participate in transgressive sexual practices often and self-sexualise herself; despite being agentic, evident in both her on-screen sexual practices and how those off-screen are alluded to Effy, in many of her sexual partnerships, is being taken advantage of as she has not be taught an understanding of what sexual exploitation is – an issue which carries into the sexual partnerships she has as a woman (Elsley & Brittain, 2007-2013).

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Sources:

Elsley, B. & Brittain, J. (Executive Producers). (2007-2011). Skins [TV series]. Company Pictures; Storm Dog Films; E4.

 

Ringrose, J. (2013). Sexy girls? The middle class postfeminist panic over girls’ ‘sexualisation’ and the protectionist discourses of sex education. In J. Ringrose (Eds.), Postfeminist education?: girls and the sexual politics of schooling (pp. 42-56). Routledge, doi:10.4324/9780203106822.

Federico Fellini is perhaps the most polarizing auteur included within the Italian neorealist canon; certain critiques venerate his transformations of the genre within his earliest films, while other critiques discount his earliest films’ as neorealist works because of his transformations of the genre. Like André Bazin, I associate with the former opinion. Echoing what Catherine O’Rawe expresses in “Italian neorealism and the ‘woman’s film’: Selznick, De Sica and Stazione Termini” (512), as well as in collaboration with Treveri-Gennari et. al. in “In Search of Italian Cinema Audiences in the 1940s and 1950s: Gender, genre and national identity” (546), the representations of women and the considerations of women audiences across the Italian neorealist canon were severely lacking. Fellini’s contributions to the body of Italian neorealism, are outliers in regards to these commonalities (/conventions).

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Complexly developed women play prominent roles in each of the sixth and half works he directed during the recognized period of Italian neorealism. After viewing Nights of Cabiria, I began my research by growing familiar with his history of portraying women and gender in film. Before exploring the director’s then body of work, I consulted “Lottiamo Ancora: Reviewing One Hundred and Fifty Years of Italian Feminism” by Miguel Malagreca to gain an understanding of women’s status, position and treatment in Italy in the postwar and economic miracle periods, as well as historian Paul Ginsborg’s A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988, to develop a broader knowledge about the nation during those periods. I observed a pattern across Fellini’s early films: the female lead(s) in them, embodied or refracted some particular attribute of Italy’s development out of Fascism and into the modern (/developed) international world. Knowing this pattern, I studied how Cabiria as well as in certain cases, the other women of Nights of Cabiria, represented the Italy of 1956-1958.

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To connect Fellini’s explorations of what Italy was like through the character, actions and experiences of Cabiria to feminist theory, I chose to research the specific history of Italian feminist thinking. Adriana Cavarero and Luisa Muraro, two of the founders of modern feminist theory in Italy, proposed that because Enlightenment theories of equality were structured around male thinking, the very concept of “equality” was gendered male (Dell’Abate-Çelebi 20). Cavarero and Muraro argued that the world, like equality, is gendered male, and therefore the feminist cause should not have as its objective to achieve “equality” for women in the (gendered male) “world”, but to construct a gendered female world (21). The gendered female world and the gendered male world can exist at the same time, but they are foundationally different.

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Muraro and Cavarero advocated that how thinking is learned in the gendered female world should not be how thinking is learned in the gendered male world (21). They suggested that every woman should learn about, and her place in, the world, from a woman; they termed this practice, a woman’s becoming herself with the help of a knowledgeable woman, affidimento (21-22). Naturally, the concept of “woman” in the gendered female world must be detached from the gendered male world’s concept of “woman”. What woman is, Muraro and Cavarero termed the “symbolic placement” (collazione simbolica) of woman (21). Learning – particularly what woman is – from a woman, the feminist scholars termed the “symbolic order of the mother” (L’ordinane simbolica della madre) (21).

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The concept of “woman” in Nights of Cabiria is not the gendered male world’s “woman”, but the gendered female world’s “woman”; the women in the film do not fit into the definitions of the male world’s “woman”, how they are women, can only be understood as the female world’s “woman”. As “woman” in Nights of Cabiria is not thought of in the thinking of the gendered male world, “Italy” in Nights of Cabiria is not thought of in the thinking of the Italian Fascist or postwar worlds. The Italy presented in Fellini’s film is Italy thought of in the thinking of the Italian mid-economic miracle world.

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A third early Italian feminist scholar, Rosi Braidotti, offered what the concept of “woman” could be in the gendered female world. She proposed that woman could be conceived of as “nomadism” (Braidotti 24).  Braidotti described nomadism as the “transition between places, experiences, roles and languages” (24-25). The concept of woman she argued, should be thought of as specificity, multiplicity and complexity (25). “Woman”, like nomadism, should be “relinquished [from] all ideas…[of] fixity” (25). Cabiria, the main character of Nights of Cabiria, as well as the film’s cast of secondary female characters, Wanda, Jessy and the group of prostitutes working under Amleto (of the three women, one is Marisa and one is Matilda), fit Braidotti’s suggestion for the concept of “woman” in the gendered female world.

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Muraro and Cavarero’s idea that there is a difference between the gendered male and gendered female worlds, is the idea of “sexual difference” (pensiero della differenza sessuale), and it is the foundation of Italian feminist theory (Dell’Abate-Çelebi 20-21). In addition to the gendered female world’s presence in Fellini’s film, the director captures the presence of the Italian mid-economic miracle world. By the mid-to-late 1950s, when Nights of Cabiria was produced and released, the concept of Italy was changed and changing. No longer was “Italy”, constructed from the thinking of the Fascist or postwar Italian worlds. Like the gendered male and gendered female worlds have separate concepts of “woman”, the Fascist and postwar Italian worlds and the mid-economic miracle Italian world have separate concepts of “Italy”. In the thinking of the mid-economic miracle Italian world, the concept of “Italy” was made up of specific concepts of religion, politics, culture and gender.

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Like “woman” as “nomadism” in the gendered female world (as Braidotti suggests), “Italy” could be conceived of as “nomadism” in the mid-economic miracle Italian world. “Religion”, “politics” and “culture” (as well as “gender”); the four concepts that make up “Italy” (/the concept of any nation); in the thinking of the mid-economic miracle Italian world, align with the formation of Braidotti’s concept of “nomadism”. The scholar emphasizes that nomadism is plurality, heterogeneity and dynamism; three ways she describes the concept, can relate to how religion, politics and culture (in addition to gender) were, to the mid-economic miracle Italian world: “a complex interplay of constructed social and symbolic forces”, “a surface of intensities and a field [of] interact[ivity]” and “[the] threshold of transformations” (25).

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Nomadism and “woman” being linked, has roots in the proto-feminist activity occurring in Italy during the mid-to-late 1950s: though Cavarero and Muraro’s theories had not been presented until the 1980s, and Braidotti’s, the 1990s, how the mid-economic miracle Italian world thought of gender, reflects the latter scholar’s ideas. Early Italian women’s rights advocates rallied for political figures to invest more attention in women’s placement in society from the late 1940s, into the late 1960s, and starting in the mid-1950s legal recognitions of ‘families’ (what in the eye of the law constituted a ‘family’) began to change due to the organized protests of these proto-feminists (Malagreca 78). As a result of these fights for progress, in mid-economic miracle Italy (the shortened, “mid-economic miracle Italian world”) “woman” was at the same time, a domestic and a political concept (78-79). Like the changed and changing state of female subjectivity in the mid-to-late 1950s, religion was experiencing a shake up. On one hand, the influence of Catholicism was central to and governed many aspects of everyday life in Italy (79), but on the other hand, a culture of consumerism, based on the ‘developed West’s’, was growing as an influence on the Italian populace (78). The values and way of life of Catholicism, and the values and way of life of this imported phenomenon largely brushed up against one another; from 1956 to 1958, the status of religion was not fixed, but rather in the process of transition.

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In politics, the 1950s saw the establishment of the Christian Democratic Party (DC) in Italy as well as its rivalry with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), with the later, breaking up into different, disagreeing parties, beginning in 1956 (Ginsborg 204). In the last half of the decade, the splintering of the PCI lead to the gradual erosion of communist ideology’s popularity in Italy. Rising as communism fell, was capitalism (212). Under the DC, industrialization and international trade began to pick up – by the mid-to-late 1950s, mass manufacturing and mass markets, national and international, in many industrial sectors, had resulted in a boom in prosperity (212-213). As capitalism overtook communism in the nation, modernity overtook tradition. The combination of Italy’s prosperity from production, forming international trade relations and participation in inter- national and continental organizations, entered Italy onto the ‘modern world’ stage as well as opened it up to ‘modern world’ influences (213). The national identity shifted to reflect the nation’s economic progress, and within the nation, this identity went hand and hand with a revolutionary culture (Torriglia 118). “Italy” was Westernized: the culture of this “Italy” was a national adoption of the West’s culture (152). Though pre-modern Western influence Italian culture was kept alive by protestors of Italy’s cosmopolitanizing, Westernized Italian culture became the dominant national culture (152). 

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Therefore, the thesis for my analysis of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, is that the director presents a reflection of the “nomadism” of gender, religion, politics and culture in mid-economic miracle Italy (or, the concepts of gender, religion, politics and culture in the mid-economic miracle Italian world). As discussed, the film’s female characters are “women”, according to the gendered female world’s concept of “woman” (as Braidotti suggests, “nomadism”), and at the same time, represent what “woman” was understood to mean in the mid-to-late 1950s in Italy (also, “nomadism”). Cabiria, Wanda, Jessie and Amleto’s prostitutes have at once, fashioned their own approaches to occupying “woman” (all six are a “woman”, but their own concept of “woman”), and at the same time, embody the changes that were occurring at the time to the concept of “woman” in Italy, at large. Each of these women are women that toggle between being a domestic woman and a political woman; similar to how gender(/female subjectivity) is presented as plurality in Fellini’s film, religion is presented as the tension between religion’s (Catholicism’s) presence and religion’s (Catholicism’s presence’s) absence, politics is represented as the dichotomy between the hegemony of capitalist ideology and the antihegemony of communist ideology and culture is presented as dominated by Western influence, but not absent of historical (or traditional) Italian culture’s presence.

 

Federico Fellini is a male director, and therefore the self-making of Cabiria, Wanda, Jessie and the prostitutes that work under Amleto, could be argued as concepts of “woman” created by the gendered male world. As will be discernible as I examine the women that each of these female characters are however, it will be evident that these concepts of woman, are those developed and disseminated by the early women’s rights advocates in Italy, from the late-1940s, into the years that the auteur made Nights of Cabiria. What is “woman” in the film, was conceived by the gendered female world, and as presented in my discussion of gender (/female subjectivity) in mid-economic miracle Italy, adopted into the gendered male world’s; what is taken as ‘the world’; concept of “woman” as well.

Cabiria, nor any of the secondary female characters, represent the traditional and reinforced concept of “woman” in past Italian worlds: they are comprised of a balance of domestic qualities, and political qualities, aligning with the “woman” put forth by proto-feminists, and worked into universal society throughout the 1950s. Domestic, as apart of the gendered female world’s “woman”, is chosen domesticity, the autonomous decision to operate in the private sphere (in the home, as part of a family), distinguishing its and mid-economic miracle Italy’s “woman”, from past gendered male/Italian worlds. Political, as apart of the gendered female world’s “woman”, is chosen participation in the workings of the public sphere, self-determined contributing to and engaging with aspects of life outside of the home, as an individual.

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To demonstrate how Cabiria, Wanda, Jessie and the prostitutes employed by Amleto, embody this form of woman as plurality, I will conduct a break-down of their characters. Cabiria has an occupation, sex work, which she uses to take care of herself financially. She is an independent agent in the world, in that there is no one inhibiting her autonomy and mobility. As Cabiria’s life is based in the political, her self is a reflection of the political as well. Her personality is ambitious, strong-willed, forceful and resilient, characteristics that are closely associated with life outside of the private sphere. Though she embodies the political, she aspires for domesticity. She vocalizes on numerous occasions the desire to be married, and leave behind the working life she leads. Becoming a wife, could be argued as Cabiria’s main motivation throughout Fellini’s film. When she believes that there is a chance for her to be wed, taken care of, and able to do house- and family- related work, she willingly ignores red flags of and does not thoroughly get to know, the men she dates. Wanda is also employed, in sex work as well, and is likewise, financially independent. Unlike Cabiria, she is content with her position as a working woman. When Cabiria is engaged near the end of the film, she continuously reassures Wanda that sometime in the future, she too, will be married, but at no point has Wanda expressed a want for that kind of life. A partner, children and domestic work, are not shown to be aspirations of hers. Though Wanda is not interested in a life of starting and taking care of a family, in her current life, she acts as a parent-like figure to Cabiria. She looks out for her naïve and often child-like friend’s wellbeing, monitors her safety, provides advice on how she should protect herself, accompanies her to many places so to keep an eye on her and when it is called for, reprimands her.

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The three prostitutes that are employed by Amleto – Marisa, Matilda and an unnamed woman – work, like Cabiria and Wanda, in sex work. Though they are not self-employed, they are still making their own ways in the world. I have yet to explore the very political nature of sex work, as in, it is a matter that exists in the public sphere, and has attached to it, a lot of public debate/concern. Any woman making her income from profiting off of her body, has a lifestyle that regardless of how progressive a society, is tied to social discourse. Fellini’s linking these female characters to prostitution, thrusts them into the world of the political. Synchronous to their occupation connecting them to the public sphere, each of these women’s selves, seem to be made up of attributes associated with the private sphere. Marisa is private, quiet and contemplative; Matilda is supportive, warm and neighbourly; and the unnamed woman, seen only in company with Matilda, is peaceful and amicable.

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Unlike any of the aforementioned women that are primarily situated in the public sphere due to their socioeconomic positions, Jessie has the opportunity to choose which sphere she occupies, whenever she wants, because her wealth buys this ability. Most of the time, she selects the private sphere to inhabit: being a partner, being in the home and domiciliary activities with her partner, is the kind of life she is most contented with. A housewife, is the role she aims to have.  Cabiria’s, Wanda’s and the prostitutes working for Amleto’s, self-makings are interrelated with their lower placements in society; Jessie’s, who belongs to a class with much privilege, is free of these same conditions. Therefore Jessie’s self, is truly self made, and her self, embodies the political. Though she values a life of domesticity, her personality is fierce, tough, independent and unafraid – attributes associated with being in the world. This is evident in when she suspects her partner is not being faithful to her, she is willing to abandon that domestic situation, and find one better, elsewhere. Her political personality is likewise evident, in when that partner, a powerful, influential and older man, attacks her physically and verbally, she fights back with equal force.

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How Fellini demonstrates the nomadism of the realities of religion, politics and culture in mid-economic miracle Italy, connects to the plurality of the female characters I have explored as well as the dynamism of a handful of lesser focused on female characters. To begin, religion as interplay and interactivity, the tension between its presence and absence, is foremostly depicted in relation to Cabiria’s fluctuating belief and disbelief in Catholicism. A key factor in the precarity of religion in mid-economic miracle Italy, was the power of the culture of Western consumerism, and this force of influence, is intertwined with the non-fixedness of Cabiria’s valuing of Catholicism.

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Cabiria’s nature is skeptical of religion, and supportive of imported consumerism, and her faith in either, is dependant upon whether she perceives the other, has failed her. To exemplify how Fellini represents the dynamic between these two conflicting forces of influence, I will briefly analyse two sets of scenes, one from the end of the film’s second act, and one from the mid-point of its third. Disillusioned with the promises of the latter, Cabiria turns to the former, enlisting Wanda, Matilda and the third and unnamed prostitute employed by Amleto to accompany her to a worship ceremony for the Virgin Mary. Ignoring the transformative momentum she felt at the time of the worship, after awhile and no prosperous changes have occurred in her life, she curses the falsehood of religion. Interestingly, Wanda, Matilda and the unnamed prostitute vocalize that they are exclusively praying to the saint so that she will bring them monetary gain – in contrast to Cabiria’s claim that she is seeking more multidisciplinary fulfillment – and after they similarly, do not receive any ‘blessings’, they do not have any sort of adverse reaction.

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The second time Fellini portrays the contrast and interrelation of Catholicism’s presence and the force threatening to cause its absence, is after Cabiria has been chewed up and spit out by a symbol of American-style consumerist culture – a magic show. ‘The Wizard’ invites her up on stage, puts her in a trance, and makes a parodic spectacle of her apathy for life, and potent desire for love, for the morbid amusement of a dangerous audience. Betrayed by The Wizard who promised she was in safe hands, and traumatized by the experience, Cabiria seeks out the guidance of a Brother Giovanni. She waits at the door of his clergy house all day, but the religious figure does not appear to aid her, and she leaves, once more let down by the promised miracles of religion.

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Politics as nomadism, and culture as nomadism, are presented through similar approaches; I will first unpack how Fellini communicates the former factor of mid-economic miracle Italy, through four of the women of Nights of Cabiria – Jessie, Cabiria, Wanda, and a briefly featured character, Bomba. Jessie is a primary figure embodying the capitalist dream: on an artificial level, she owns many expensive possessions implying an access to wealth, but more significantly, she occupies a privileged position in the social system, granting her freedom. She is not tied to anything inhibiting her autonomy – she has the ability to preserve her wellbeing which, as a woman, enables her to protect herself against the violence of a male partner, who is also a benefactor. Cabiria signifies the ideation of the capitalist dream by the working class: she covets the sort of luxury Jessie possesses, relishing playing the part of the privileged woman when her (Jessie’s) partner invites her (Cabiria) to. Cabiria expresses jealousy of and desire for, the lifestyles of upper-class women, going so far as inhabiting upper-class spaces and simulating wealth through appearances as a way to ‘achieve’ this aspiration. When she believes she will become closer to this identity in truth, through the “resources” of her “fiancé”, it is arguably, the happiest we see her throughout the film.

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Balancing the heterogeneity of approaches to the issue of capitalism versus communism, Wanda, is representation of the working class who perceive the capitalist structure as unbalanced. Unlike Cabiria, her friend sees through capitalism, recognizing it as a system that allocates capital to a few, and forces a majority of people, to labour all their lives without achieving anything close to that prosperity. Nonetheless, she is aware that she lives under capitalism, and therefore, would rather be one of the privileged, than one of the underprivileged. Fellini explores the full scope of the state of political ideologies in mid-economic miracle Italy, by representing the surviving presence of communism, in one case, through the homeless woman, Bomba. Bomba is not an embodiment of communism, per say, but rather a character through which the director refracts the presence of communism in the mid-to-late 1950s (in Italy). Bomba lives on the fringes of society, rejected from dominant society, in an underground cave. She is given resources at night from one man, of which is a risk and must be done covertly; without this, the days of her life, would be numbered.  

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Similar to the tension between capitalism and communism, but slightly more evenly matched in power, was the tension between Western-influenced Italian culture, and national, or established/‘traditional’, Italian culture, in mid-economic miracle Italy. Each (except one) of the focused on female characters of Nights of Cabiria, occupy a particular relationality to both of these cultures, as they were at odds with one another. Jessie, exists wholly in ‘Westernized Italy’ (the opposite of what I will call, ‘localized Italy’): she inhabits a refurbished urban area, her clothing and appearance are based off of 1930s Hollywood starlets, and from the date her partner had planned for them to go on, it is evident she lives a modern cosmopolitan life. To better pin the locations of the positions of the four other women, it would be helpful to present a female character(s) that is an emblem of localized Italy. Though rarely seen, the women belonging to the liturgical procession provide this point of reference for localized Italy: they take being a good Catholic as their first priority, uphold centuries old traditions, follow the orders of religious leaders and deny themselves all that is more than basic materials.

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Like Cabiria oscillates between participating in consumerism and investing in religion, it could be said that she toggles between Westernized Italy and localized Italy. By nature, she values wealth and material objects; she enjoys modern and imported advancements, from media to businesses to transportation; and she has a proclivity to occupy ‘Westernized Italy’ spaces. Anytime Cabiria becomes discontented with this life of hers, she dips into pursuing its antithesis: a lover steals her purse, she considers asceticism; she is despondent about her future, she turns to spirituality; she feels like a disappointment, she seeks out confession. If Cabiria swings between the two Italian cultures, Wanda is on the border between them. Like her close friend, she aspires for material wealth, but where the two contrast, is that she does not fashion her life around coming into proximity with those that live like Jessie. For her occupation she inhabits some of those same spaces, but otherwise, she maintains a humble existence. While her heart yearns for more, her mind is grounded in practical, not overly ambitious thinking, and her body, in unpretentious, working-class spaces. She even seems to place genuine value in religion!

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The last two characters that possess a relationality to Westernized Italy and localized Italy, that is not an extreme, are Matilda and the unnamed prostitute also working under Amleto. On one hand, these women are like Cabiria, in that they covet wealth, their appearances resemble glamour and they seek out upper class environments. In other regards, they are similar to Wanda, they ultimately accept their position in life, are critical of Cabiria’s inability to do the same and do not disavow religion. Differentiating Matilda and the anonymous prostitute from both, Cabiria and Wanda, is that the former have emptiness in place of where the latter have conviction. Their inhabiting a ‘Westernized Italy’ identity does not feel genuine, but nor does their inhabiting a ‘localized Italy’ identity. On a surface observation, it seems that they engage in both cultures almost equally, but upon a more critical inspection, they do not reveal to be apart of either.

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Italy – its contemporary realities of gender, religion, politics and culture – as nomadism is not a representation presented exclusively in this one work ‘belonging’ to the canon of Italian neorealism – Italy depicted as plurality, heterogeneity and/or dynamism is not all too rare within the historic collection of works. Unlike in Nights of Cabiria however, most of these representations depict an Italy that is emblematic of the objectives and principles of neorealism laid out by Cesare Zavattini in his group of essays on the genre (as collected in “A Thesis on Neo-Realism” (68-69, 72)). A “nomadic Italy”, an Italy unfixed or in motion, presented in these films, is unfixed or in motion to emphasize an issue or a condition affecting the nation; this “nomadism” is meant to signify a particular political message.

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Female subjectivity is explored as a complex, multilayered and at times contradictory, concept in Ossessione (1943, dir. Visconti), through the dominant yet domestic Giovanna, and the Madonna-like sex worker Anita: the latter’s abandonment by protagonist Gino, and the former’s mothering his child, and then dying, representing the precarious position of Fascist rule in the nation. The state of religion in early-1940s Italy is depicted as unfixed; on one hand perseverant, able to survive amidst its persecution, and on the other hand, disappearing, losing to another force of influence; in Rome, Open City (1945, dir. Rossellini), to signify the destruction of Italian heritage, by the occupation of Germany, and moreover, Mussolini’s rule. Conflict between political ideologies is at the centre of La terra trema (1948, dir. Visconti) – the communist-like system native to Acitrezza, and practiced by the Valastros and the village’s fishermen, rubs up against the capitalism of the wholesalers; this heterogenous political landscape, provides unambiguous critique of the exploitation of the working and lower classes. Finally, Italy as a place comprised of multiple cultural bubbles, and subsequently having more than one cultural identity, is portrayed in Terminal Station (1953, dir. De Sica), with the wealthy and international world in which Mary, Giovanni and Mary’s sister and nephew inhabit, existing synchronously, with the recovering or struggling and local world most of the trains’ passengers do – De Sica’s cut of the film, juxtaposing the two, to portray the disparity between them.

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Fellini’s nomadism in Nights of Cabiria, is not loaded with meaning intertwined with (‘pure’) neorealism’s ideology: Italy is nomadic in the film, because Italy was nomadic. While these films discussed and those of its ilk, employ nomadism in the service of presenting Italy as a particular nation, the “Italy” at the core of neorealism’s philosophy, the controversial director’s nomadism is transparent, is objective – the thorough exploration of the nation’s current state. It is true that the early works of Federico Fellini deviate from the genre’s established/guiding rules, but arguably, his pursuit of representing not just the women leading but every attribute of his films – including Nights of Cabiria – in relation to the raw reality of Italy during the moments in time in which the works were produced, is ultimately, the purest of neorealist aims.  

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Bibliography:

Braidotti, Rosie. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Chichester, Columbia University Press, 2011.

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Dell’Abate-Çelebi, Barbara. “Italian Feminist Thought at The Periphery of The Empire.” Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2010, pp. 17-35.

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Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988. Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

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La terra trema. Directed by Luchino Visconti, performances by Antonio Arcidiacono and Raimondo Valastro, Compagnia Edizioni Internazionali Artistiche Distribuzione, 1948.

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Malagreca, Miguel. “Lottiamo Ancora: Reviewing One Hundred and Fifty Years of Italian Feminism.” Journal of International Women's Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, 2006, pp. 69-89.

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Nights of Cabiria. Directed by Frederico Fellini, performances by Giulietta Masina, Franca Marzi and Dorian Gray, Paramount Pictures, 1958.

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O’Rawe, Catherine. “Italian neorealism and the ‘woman’s film’: Selznick, De Sica and Stazione Termini.” Screen, vol. 61, no. 4, 2020, pp. 505-524.

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Ossessione. Directed by Luchino Visconti, performances by Clara Calamai, Massimo Girotti and Dhia Cristiani, Industrie Cinematografiche Italiane, 1943.

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Rome, Open City. Directed by Roberto Rossellini, Minerva Films, 1945.

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Terminal Station. Directed by Vittorio De Sica, performances by Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift, Selznick Releasing Organization, 1953.

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Torriglia, Anna M. Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2002.

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Trevari-Gennari et al. “In Search of Italian Cinema Audiences in the 1940s and 1950s: Gender, genre and national identity.” Participations: International Journal of Audience Research, vol. 8, no.2, 2011, pp. 539-553.

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Zavattini, Cesare. “A Thesis on Neo-Realism.” Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism, edited by David Overbey, Archon Books, 1979, pp. 67-79.

Tout Va Bien (1972, dir. Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard) is, in Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni’s terms, a resistant film: in both its narrative and style, it seeks to challenge “prevailing ideology” (815). One stylistic technique it employs to achieve this end, is the characters’ direct address to the audience – in doing this, the film’s immersion is broken, and the audience is forced to interact with the characters’ face to face. The disturbance of the audience’s expectations and their personal engagement, is Brechtian: Gorin and Godard want the audience to be taken outside of the illusion of the film, and think about the matter in the film, rather than get lost in the film’s artifice. The ideology of Tout Va Bien is anti-capitalist: we, are being asked to reflect on the oppression of capitalism on the proletariat (shown, through the experiences of the sausage factory workers), and its negative impact on the bourgeoise (the experiences of the female reporter and the male director).

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Characters delivering dialogue in direct address occurs routinely in Gorin and Godard’s film – in certain cases, the audience is an unseen interlocuter, in others, we are a representational figure, and in even others, we are a stand in for another character. The first two cases serve the purpose of connecting the viewer to the film’s material; we become, a particular player in the structure of the capitalist system. Embedding the viewer a priori our consent, into the politics, disallows us the opportunity to disconnect from the thinking through of capitalism’s impact. The third case acts more as self-reflexivity, for the sake of self-reflexivity; however, that does not reduce its ideological meaning. Rather then characters’ address one another while in conversation, they sometimes address us: sight is a large theme in the film, as both the act of looking and the act of seeing, relate to ideas of observance, knowledge and power. Having the characters look at us instead of each other, reinforces the significance of sight; the characters turned away from us, and so obscuring their faces as they speak, provides the same function. Gorin and Godard emphasize looking and seeing as well, in the long pans moving through the spaces of the sausage factory twice, and the grocery store in the final scene, which regulate and control the audience’s access to the various events occurring within the spaces.

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Moonrise Kingdom (2012, dir. Wes Anderson) is, in Comolli and Narboni’s terms, a formally resistant film: in its style, it departs from classical filmic ideology, yet in its narrative, it upholds this ideology. The film’s style, aligns with art filmic ideology: the uses of self-reflexivity point to the film’s status as a creative work, and to Anderson as the creator of the work. Self-reflexivity in Anderson’s film, is a stylistic feature – the auteur possesses a specific and individualized approach to film style, and techniques that break diegesis, are apart of this approach. Diegetic ruptures, such as direct address and extradiegetic incorporations, also work to bring the audience further into the world of the text. When the characters acknowledge the audience, it is as if we are there, engaging with them, or, in certain instances, it is as if we are one of the characters in the film, and the direct address is what that character is looking at.

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In Moonrise Kingdom there are primarily two forms of direct address: the narrator giving information about the past or the future, and either Sam or Suzy looking. The first form is often accompanied with shots of maps illustrating the history of and occurrences to New Penzance. Maps help curate the vintage style of the film, a signature across the auteur’s oeuvre, but additionally, they pull the viewer into the location of the story. In many cases, when Sam or Suzy address the audience, within the filmic world, they are in fact, looking at one another. This form of direct address, slots the viewer into the perspective of either Sam or Suzy. It, functions similarly to the shots containing the letters the two children have sent to each other: to enmesh the audience, with the film’s young protagonists. This effect, linking the viewer to the characters in the film through direct address and articles belonging to their possession, is an established technique of Anderson’s.

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To illustrate the function of Gorin and Godard’s use of direct address versus Anderson’s, I will take as a case study, from each film, one representational instance of the technique’s use. From 42:15 to 42:38 of Tout Va Bien Genevieve, a woman working on the factory’s assembly line, delivers a speech on how all of the assembly line workers have unionized, and will refuse to surrender the fight for better treatment, even if increased wages are offered. She addresses the speech to “Mr. Boss Man”; a name for the Factory Manager but at the same time, the archetype of a capitalist oppressor; and delivers it in direct address. In this moment, the audience takes up the role of this particular character in the film, as well as this general character in the operation of capitalism. The labourer, Genevieve, is doing the looking and we, are the one being watched; as Mr. Boss Man, we are forced to think about the subjectivity of that role, and the reasons as to why, Genevieve might be speaking those words to us.

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From 41:18 to 41:20 one zoom-in grows closer to Sam’s face, and from 41:21-41:24 the same occurs to Suzy; from 41:25 a close-up captures Sam’s face, and from 41:28 to 41:33 an identical shot set-up captures Suzy’s. From the two shots of Moonrise Kingdom preceding 41:18, it is established that the two kids are standing on opposite rock formations flanking an inlet, facing one another. The four shots described above have Sam, then Suzy, then Sam, then Suzy, in direct address. On-screen they are looking at the audience, but in the filmic world, they are looking at each other. Anderson intertwines the viewer with Suzy, then Sam, then Suzy, then Sam: we are the young girl, then the boy, and back and forth once more. The director yanks the viewer through the screen, and into the bodies of his pre-teen protagonists. Our eyes are their eyes; the zoom-in mimics the focus of their gazes, and the close-ups demonstrate that their eyes, are locked onto the other’s. We are pulled into the filmic world itself; the emotions possessed by each character, and the heightened tension that exists between them, are felt, physically, by the viewer, because we are there with them.

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Works Cited:

Anderson, Wes, director. Moonrise Kingdom. Focus Features, 2012. 

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Gorin, Jean-Pierre and Godard, Jean-Luc, directors. Tout va Bien. Gaumont, 1972.

The female body and art are synonymous in my eyes, each, the embodiment of beauty, strength and power. The representation of women across multifarious art forms – painting, sculpture, literature, cinema, theatre and music – has been a familiar phenomenon for decades, with the matter’s study equally prominent and diverse.

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The artists at the helm of this representation, the care with which they handle their subject(s) and the responsibility and respect they maintain for women in the process of their artistic rendering, are concomitantly manifold. At the helm of Euphoria (2019) is showrunner Sam Levinson, whose portrayal (writing, directing and filming) of three of the television show’s (teenage) female characters – Jules, Maddie and Cassie – have been criticized by queer, female viewers as exploitative and/or gratuitously dark. Textually, in the contents of their respective, core storylines and optically, in how their bodies are presented by the camera, Jules, Maddie and Cassie are abused for their eroticism (the sexual pleasure they can provide), while ultimately, denied any agency for themselves. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s definition of the “erotic” and how she explains it can be a form of agency reclaimed for women, I will demonstrate how the representation of Jules, Maddie and Cassie in Euphoria, is a prime example of the pornographic exploitation of women’s bodies for male gratification, and the parallel serial denial of a woman’s access to the power of the “erotic” she possesses within herself.

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In her 1978 “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic As Power”, Audre Lorde reflects upon how the female body is exploited and shamed, repressed and punished, used for its eroticism and denied the right to its own eroticism. She defines the erotic as, “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic or intellectual (7)”, and advocates that as the “creative energy empowered” within every woman, its “knowledge and use” ought to be reclaimed (5-6). The central conflict within each of the aforementioned Euphoria characters’ storylines, is purposed with working to obstruct or inhibit her ability to discover or benefit from the erotic; what could be interpreted as the innermost life-force of humanity. Each of the core conflicts affecting the young women’s lives (the narratives that play out) throughout the show are weaponized against, and succeed in preventing (ultimately, by the show’s end) them from knowing and using this empowered life-force.

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Jules’ has her self-taken naked photos (“nudes”) held as blackmail to force her into lying about a crime committed by Nate, Euphoria’s antagonist; Maddie is in a relationship with Nate, who physically and sexually (ie. non-consensual rough sex) abuses her; and Cassie is serially reduced to her body, guilted into sexual acts she is not comfortable with, then shamed for being sexual, including by her partner McKay. Lorde describes the misuse of the erotic – an act she discusses as intrinsic in and naturalized by, patriarchal societies – as, “To share each other…is different from using another…as we would use a kleenex…And use without consent of the used is abuse. (8)” Jules, Maddie and Cassie are each used for their bodies; harvested for their giving of sexual release; and then expelled either physically or emotionally, immediately or eventually; disposed of, now that they have served their purpose, like a kleenex; by each of the men causing or contributive to, their conflicts.

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In “Pilot”, Jules has sex with Nate’s father in a motel; the camera focusing on her backside, before a long take displaying her head, shoulders and upper torso – her body moving up and down on the bed as he thrusts into her, and she screams in pain, tears in her eyes (33:12-33:43); and minutes after he’s finished, she is expected to leave. In “Made You Look”, Maddie and Nate are having sex – the camera capturing all of her body, including her crotch, as she is on her hands and knees; her body lurching forwards as he thrusts into her and her mouth agape (37:41-37:46) – and after he ejaculates, he informs her that their interaction has been satisfactory (that ‘it is over now’). In “The Next Episode”, McKay orders Cassie for sex, pins her down, grips her waist so hard she bleeds and penetrates her from behind, the camera focusing in on her face and breasts for an excruciating, long take as her body moves up and down on the bed, and her expression hardens into one paralyzed by fear (25:15-25:24) – after, he refuses to speak to her.

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The young women are guilted, pressured and/or shamed by the men who reduce them, and the patriarchal society Lorde recounts that conditions them to perceive themselves as needing (psychologically, socially, culturally) to be reduced, into accepting the “pornographic”. They are disallowed from seeking more than the “resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial” that accompanies pornographic use (9), by the men who entrapped them into it.  

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Synchronous to them being used for the pornographic (exploited for male gratification), for their autonomous attempts at reclaiming the erotic physically, Jules, Maddie and Cassie are respectively, guilted, manipulated and villainized. Jules taking nudes, Maddie seeking out sex and Cassie having different sexual partners – individual pursuits of reclaiming their body’s physical eroticism – are punished; thus, with this first form of the erotic being denied, they are discouraged from knowing or using its supplemental forms (emotional, psychic or intellectual).

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Audre Lorde expounds how a reclamation of the eroticism harnessed within every woman, is a method through which transcendence not solely of a patriarchal society, but the poverties of life, can be worked towards. Art, in all of its forms, is a microcosmic examination of life, and Euphoria, I believe would be a valuable accompaniment to Lorde’s text – the visual representation of the obstacles working against the erotic’s reclamation, serving to highlight the significance of accomplishing such an ideal, especially for young women.

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Sources:

Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Trumansburg, 1978. ProQuest, myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fbooks%2Fuses-erotic-as-power%2Fdocview%2F2138587327%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D14771.

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“Made You Look.” Euphoria, created by Sam Levinson, season 1, episode 3, A24, 2019.

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“Pilot.” Euphoria, created by Sam Levinson, season 1, episode 1, A24, 2019.

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“The Next Episode.” Euphoria, created by Sam Levinson, season 1, episode 6, A24, 2019.

In the conclusion of his essay, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”, David Bordwell foregrounds the significance of classic cinema’s adoption of art cinema’s attributes, declaring, “if Hollywood is adopting traits of the art cinema, that process must be seen as not simple copying but complex transformation. (Bordwell 780)” Over the last five years in Hollywood, accompanying the increasing appreciation of deviations from the predictability of classic cinema by mainstream audiences, a movement has emerged wherein filmmakers adapt an array of stylistic features associated with the art film. The Assistant (2019) directed by Kitty Green, could be counted into this novel canon of films – the hybrids of classic cinema’s formal structure and art cinema’s stylistic elements, that are aiming to achieve the intellectual and philosophical reflectivity the art cinema is occupied with.

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The Assistant documents the daily routine of a young woman working as the personal assistant to a prodigious chairman of a film production company – the lens through which the world is viewed is restricted to her perspective, and the camera follows her exclusively as she attempts to complete the tasks demanded of her successfully. Her unflinching resolution to performing her responsibilities and surviving the day without emotional and psychological collapse is the first strand of narrative, and her mounting suspicions that the chairman is the perpetrator of successive sexual assaults – as well as the resultant want to disrupt his pattern of abuse – is the second strand. The structure of the film could be argued as episodic as Jane navigates through disparate tasks, but I would propose that it utilizes the classical technique of ‘parallelism’ to build a structure organized according to “several lines of action which are not causally related, but are similar in some significant way (Bordwell et al. 176)”. The Assistant employs a highly subjective viewpoint which maps out a visual landscape emulating the art film’s realism and ambiguity to restrict the knowledge and experience of reality to Jane’s, but, the overarching structure of the plot is classical, working to reveal the unseen and only hinted at story by presenting events which are not all causally connected, but each illustrate either the chairman’s misbehavior or the company’s unwillingness to acknowledge it. 

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To introduce the formal structure of The Assistant, I will gesture to a quote by early film writer David Hulfish, defining the purpose of a classical Hollywood film, “there must be an end to be attained, a thought to be given, a truth to be set forth, a story to be told, and the story must be told by a skillful and systematic arrangement…of the means at hand subject to the author’s use. (174)” The Assistant’s plot does not unfold linearly, its momentum is not in successive progression – Jane executes menial tasks, from retrieving the chairman’s clients to filing his bank statements to cleaning up his office after meetings and in this regard, art cinema is evoked. The plot appears to be ‘real’; ‘dead time’ is not whittled down so as to create a succession of high points, but rather the plot is largely made up of intervals which would traditionally be cut in a classic film. However, there is a sinister vein to a multitude of the tasks she completes – most of the actions (or re-actions to the chairman’s actions) she makes imply the chairman’s assault of women, from transporting a young female from a meeting to a hotel, to processing an unidentified payment, to picking up an earring beneath his couch. The realistic routine of the first narrative strand connects to the second strand as Jane discovers with each responsibility, clues to her boss’ carefully classified behaviour; what appear to be ‘loosely strung together’ actions, are individual sub-narratives independently revealing his predation.

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Unlike classic cinema, the “growing complexity (177)” of comprehending each of the sub-narratives as they accumulate over the course of the film is not remedied by their being presented clearly – it is intentional, that the viewer struggles with decoding/grasping the subtext of them all. Unlike classic cinema, there is no redundancy; instead, as Bordwell notes on his essay deconstructing the features of art cinema, The Assistant, “reasserts that ambiguity is the dominant principle of intelligibility, that we are to watch….for the tale (and) the telling (780)”. That this predation is happening is equally significant to realize as that this predation is deliberately being concealed and the viewer can only become knowledgeable of it through close, critical examination.

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These individual sub-narratives – accompanying a young female newcomer to her hotel suite, ignoring an expense with no associated commodity, finding unknown women’s accessories in his office – connect to others’ – him being absent for hours at the aforementioned hotel; arranging for women to travel to visit him and stocks of pills; retrieving used syringes after a meeting with a woman. Through the paralleling of disparate tasks and the similar implications they point to, a web of causes; specific acts of predatory behaviour and sexual assault; and their effects; the systematic abuse of women whether a new, unqualified assistant, an actress or his children’s nanny; is developed. Upon the surface the formal structure of the plot appears as a “broken teleology…, an itinerary, (a)…survey of the film’s world (Bordwell 776)”, but it is ultimately, a construction of individual links of the chairman’s criminal behaviour (actions that function as causes) and serial revelations that the chairman is accomplishing ordered assaults of women without consequence (outcomes or ‘effects’ of the causes).

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The links of causes (predatory actions) and their effects (‘condoned’ [overlooked to the point of acceptance] assaults of women) that build the formal structure, diversify from traditional classic cinema approaches to presentation – the viewer has to construct the web ourselves. Each sub-narrative, though similar to one or more of the others in a significant way, is not the same. To construct the web, the viewer has to interpret previous information in relation to newly given information; while each piece of information is important (each task and its subtext) and connects to a different piece of information (another task and its subtext) in classic film form, there is no time for either, the new nor the previous, to be isolated. Thus, the links of causes, their effects, and the web made out of the individual links of causes and effects, must be carved out manually. Through the film’s denial of conspicuous presentation, the message; that varying kinds of assaults committed by powerful men are omnipresent; and the vision; that it requires acute, analytical investigation to discern that reality; the ‘author’ (Green) sought to communicate, are foregrounded.  

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Since the perspective of The Assistant is severely confined to the information Jane possesses, the lens through which she perceives reality and the events she experiences, the film forces the viewer into a state of ambiguity or obscurity, a condition of uncertainty. This state of uncertain observance is demanded by the opening sequence. A temporally long, longshot captures a young woman entering an unknown vehicle; as the driver drives off, the camera lingers on the residential building she has emerged from. The camera tracks the car as it faces the skyline of New York City, then it cuts to a languid shot of the woman resting against a headrest in the backseat – who is this woman, where is she going and why in the dark? Two shots – a straight-on long shot and a low-angled medium shot – elucidate that she is heading into Manhattan, but the close-up of her face beneath the cityscape’s gleam in the window and the successive frantically cut tracking shots of corporate buildings, reveal little else. The car disappears around a corner out of the camera’s sight, until it (the car) halts temporarily in front of a modernistic set of doors and windows, and she exits. Who she is, where she is and what she is doing has not been told, nor will they be.

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Places, identities and actions are rarely unambiguous (for example, Jane’s name, the company she works for and the title of her role are all undisclosed in the text). The viewer learns about what is being presented to the extent that Jane gains knowledge about such; hence, why the opening sequence is thoroughly unexplained – she already possesses all of the answers to the queries it asks; – for instance, the reality of who each of the characters are and what they do, is confined to how she herself engages with them over the course of the day. Therefore, the focus of the film is not on what we learn visually or aurally, but what we figure out mentally. The Assistant’s formal structure is not purposed with revealing its links of causes and their effects; the second strand of the narrative (the assault story) lies beneath the first (the responsibilities plot), and the viewer relies on Jane’s analyses of the latter for the former to be revealed. Representing the chairman’s actions explicitly would not accomplish the objective of the film – to communicate the insidiousness of powerful men in Hollywood’s behaviour and the lengths at which their companies’ will go to to hide their actions, through the extremely limited field of knowledge of an ordinary (not belonging to the boss’ trusted ‘inner circle’) personal assistant.

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The key element which is not ambiguous, and that which sharpens the formal structure of The Assistant into classic cinema’s, is Jane herself. Borrowing the terminology of a 1913 cinematic guidebook, Jane’s ambitiousness to persevere through the day and her motivation to affect (deconstruct, prevent or interrupt) the system of sexual assault, are the “steam of the dramatic engine (Bordwell et al. 180)” building the overarching structure. The causes are the chairman’s predatory actions, and the effects are the repeated violations of different women’s unconditional (genuine, not affected by exterior conditions like occupational opportunities) consent, but Jane is the agent through which the former is discerned and the latter is deduced. As the causes and effects are intelligible only through Jane’s analyses, the film’s causality – that which connects the causes to the effects, the discerned predation to the deduced violations – could be understood as Jane. Jane is not a ‘psychologically motivated character pursuing a goal’ within a formal structure, her pursuing her goals (succeeding in/surviving her responsibilities, challenging the chairman’s systematic abuse) according to her psychological motivations (bettering her career opportunities, protecting his current and future victims), builds the formal structure (examining her day’s tasks, reveals the individual links of causes, their effects, and the web made up of them).

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Belonging to Jane’s subjectivity severely limits our access to knowledge, but it does not affect our ability to process the meager information we are provided. At the beginning of the film, as evidenced by the opening sequence, the viewer is in a state of uncertainty, but as we reside with Jane over the course of the plot’s events, seeing and thinking as her, how we think about what we see allows us to link individual narratives to others’ and build the web of what is occurring in reality. This approach to representing actions could be described as a “unified system (5)” of “bounded alternatives (5)”: what we see does not enable the viewer to know (as in traditional classic cinema), but as we (Jane) think(s) about what we see, we come to that same knowledge through a different course – a unified way of seeing, that presents information through a bounded alternative. This ‘bounded alternative’ adheres to its own, adapted principles of the classic film’s categorizable stylistic decorum, proportion, formal harmony, respect for tradition, mimesis, self-effacing craftsmanship and control of the viewer’s response (3-4).

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The guiding principle of The Assistant’s representation of actions is the synthesis of the two spectrums of art cinema’s representation of its actions (or re-actions more aptly, as the former’s ‘actions’ are also mostly) that David Bordwell defines – “documentary factuality (Bordwell 777)” and “psychological subjectivity (777)”. Filtered through Jane’s psychological subjectivity, reality is presented with documentary factuality, in structures which honour the aforementioned principles of classic film style. Violations of classic cinema’s conceptions of reality’s representation are the consequential results of experiencing reality through her, but that experience of reality is ordered and regulated. Close-ups on objects (point of view shots) or Jane’s face will customarily be accompanied by a following medium shot to portray more comprehensively the event that is occurring, and this pattern of an obscure shot followed by an explanatory shot, creates a proportion of subjectivity and clarity. In between patterns like this, there are long still and tracking shots of/through the company’s office spaces either as Jane moves through them or is stationary, and medium-long shots to present characters’ reactions in comparison/contrast with Jane’s. All four types of shots described adhere to the rules of decorum – they do not trespass beyond expectancy, or ‘normalcy’. The less ‘expected/normal’ setup of shot within the film – medium-long/long shots shot through doors – is itself, formatted to appear straightforward (so as to follow decorum).

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 Reconfiguring a quote by Bordwell on how the art film’s style operates, Jane’s representation of reality has “certain gaps and problems. But these…deviations are placed, resituated as (her) realism (779)” Birds-eye, sharply angled or from-behind views are how Jane is perceiving a situation. Muffled over-the-phone audio, unintelligibly quiet dialogue, speaking which’s speaker is not present and overlapping voices are similarly, how she is processing sounds. The representation of The Assistant, is a mimesis of Jane’s reality.

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Ensuring precise comprehension of the events on-screen is not the purpose of the film’s representation, therefore its spatial and temporal continuity from shot to shot, or from scene to scene, is not necessarily consistent. Non-continuity editing and abrupt cuts between straight-on and angled (as in, subjects being shot from the side or at a diagonal, not the camera at an angle) shots are commonplace. As the viewer knows, sees and thinks like Jane, we also do what Jane does – as she navigates her day, we are given access to the visuals literally at her hand and the sounds which surround her; the ambiguousness of space and time are subordinate to how Jane navigates through space and the time it takes to do so, more or less. Ellipses occur when Jane has already done a specific action once (ex. going down in the elevator, driving to the Mark hotel, walking to the company’s second building) and therefore it can be spared to show it (or its directional inverse) again (as Jane’s perspective, we can imagine doing it and forgetting about it).

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As discussed in the introduction, The Assistant resembles a novel canon of films which hybridize the classic and art films, and a categorizable feature – a ‘tradition’ – of that canon is an increased degree of representational (or what Bordwell refers to as ‘formal’) disharmony. The visual and aural disharmonies outlined thus far develop into an intelligible system of disharmonious images and sounds which is itself, harmonious. One example of a disharmonious attribute becoming part of a harmonious system, is the jarringly loud noises of the office’s operation – doors slamming, photocopies printing, paper jamming – which become predictable and rhythmic, almost musical. An autonomous kind of formal harmony; one which, to a viewer who is familiar with the works of the classic film/art film hybrid canon is not caught off guard by; is evident. These films aim to “pose problems for the spectator (778)” with their representations of reality, to emulate the “disorientat(ion),…shock, confus(ion) or confront(ation)” experienced by their perspective lenses – Jane’s, in this case – but once a viewer has become ‘fluent’ in this reworked formal harmony, viewing is no longer ‘problematic’. The prolonged periods of silence during a long take for instance, becomes one part of a balanced system of long, quiet, still scenes, and subsequent short, noisy, eruptive scenes.

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As Bordwell explains of the art film’s representation of events, in The Assistant, “the puzzle is one of plot: who is telling this story? how is this story being told? why is this story being told this way? (778-779)” Jane is telling this story (story, as Bordwell uses it to mean ‘account’, not the definition of ‘story’ which is differentiated from ‘plot’); it is being told through her subjective perspective; and it is being told this way, to emphasize the simultaneous omnipresence and invisibility of the chairman’s systematic sexual violations of women, and to foreground the production company’s naturalized procedures of concealment which allow for that paradox to exist. One element of the film’s representation which highlights this message is the respective temperaments of the women and the men portrayed: the former, each act as if they are to a degree lifeless (with the new, unqualified assistant at the closest end of the spectrum and the tanned, blonde actress at the furthest), while each of the latter, act as if they are to a degree aggressive (with the production assistant who invites Jane for drinks at the closest end and the chairman at the furthest). The settings depicted – the assistants’ cramped, suffocating office, the production executives’ mazelike office, and the chairman’s familial, welcoming office (all of which are in a lifeless, unfeeling palette of greys and muted, unsaturated shades) – demonstrate this objective as well.

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However, despite its largely art cinema style, the film is concerned with grounding its representation in coherence, thus it, as Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson word of classic cinema’s representation, “unif(ies its) extensive series of disparate spatial and temporal elements in the plot in such a way that the spectator could grasp the…events (Bordwell et al. 175)” In moments where the author (director, Green) is seeking to present information pertaining to the story (the systematic sexual assaults and their concealment) patently to Jane and to the viewer, this preserving of classic cinema’s coherence, shifts into the exact replication of classic cinema’s representation. In the climax of the film for (an ultimate) example, when Jane approaches the company’s human resources manager to report her suspicions about the chairman’s predatory behaviour, this classic cinema mode of representation comes to the fore. 

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The space of the human resources manager’s office is displayed unambiguously, with one half of the space occupied by the manager, and the other half by Jane. The manager invites Jane to strip away excess clothing, before beckoning her to present her anxieties. In a continuous pattern of static, medium shots edited together by conventional cuts in shot-reverse-shot format, the two discourse about the arrival of the new, young, unqualified assistant. Spatiality and temporality remain consistent, as Jane attempts to voice her awareness of the chairman’s systematic sexual assaults. This is the most vocal Jane is about her disturbance and reciprocally, this is the most palpable the company’s disregard for the chairman’s behaviours is. The manager intentionally misunderstands and distorts her observations, reframing the conversation to paint Jane as a liar, and the company as be the body needing protection. The film presents information clearly: the assaults are occurring, and nothing will be done to stop them.

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While The Assistant crafts its own reworking of the ‘classical stylistic norm’, it does not violate this reworked classical stylistic norm. The film’s style is not self-reflexive – it does not signal to its own artifice to emphasize its existence as a form; it’s divergence from the ‘classical stylistic norm’ is to bound the perspective to Jane and offer authorial commentary on what it means to be the personal assistant to a chairman abusing his power to assault women (and it not being acknowledged). One attribute which clues to this point – that the representation of The Assistant is not meant to be self-reflexive, but to anchor the perspective to Jane/the lens of a personal assistant in her situation – is the costumes of the female characters the chairman assaults. The author could have exaggerated the outfits (extremely revealing or totally covered up) each of the women; the blonde actress, the new assistant, the nanny and the red-headed actress; were wearing to achieve self-reflexivity, perspective and commentary, but she does not, opting to have them each wear an outfit which falls between the spectrum, and preserve self-effacing style to the detriment of her message being enhanced. In the terms of David Bordwell, the style is governed clearly by the intertwinement of “realistic motivation (Bordwell 777)”, “character’s vision (777)” and “life’s untidiness (777)”, and the intentional “uncertainties which persist (777)” are the “obvious uncertainties (777)” associated with her (low-ranking) position at the company and (non-‘trusted insider’) relationship with her boss.

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If the ‘disequilibrium’ (adapted in this film as the web of parallel chains of causes and their effects) is Jane’s analyses of and discovering the truths about, her re-actions (her tasks linked) to her boss’ actions – and the initial equilibrium is taken to be her not yet arriving at those conclusions – then the new equilibrium would be what she intends to do about the reality she has become aware of. The Assistant engages with three of the tenets David Bordwell proposes as belonging to the art film – “pronounc(ement of) judgement on ‘modern life’ (Bordwell 776)”, “social situations impinging upon the…sensitive individual (776)” and “that life is more complex than art (779)” – but Jane is not goalless, passive nor helpless like the characters the aforementioned tenets are respectively, conventionally associated with. She seeks to dismantle (one of) Hollywood’s systems of sexual abuse, she becomes involved in the fight against such a socially-normalized phenomenon and her internal and external criticisms of true-to-life scenarios of predation demonstrate how art can challenge reality. While it could be argued that the new equilibrium is simply the return of the initial equilibrium – that Jane will not do anything further about the knowledge she has gained, but rather will accept it as standard and not something she can substantially affect – her disappearing from the camera’s sight as she walks in the opposite direction of the company’s buildings as the final scene, signifies a changed state of affairs – her leaving (spatially and formally) the company.

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To strengthen this final action as a new equilibrium, it should be positioned within the events which lead up to it. The final sequence of the film depicts Jane alone in a nauseatingly lit deli seated between two poles of a window frame; in a straight-on, medium length shot, she calls her father. The camera is still for an uncomfortably lengthy period of time as her father praises her for bravely persevering in her role despite its hardships, and her expression morphs from fatigued to grateful to regretful. The camera closes in to Jane’s face as a burden of guilt wearies her expression. Then, following her gaze, the view shifts abruptly to the chairman’s office where, through his window’s blinds, the outline of a woman raising herself up and down atop a man is intelligible. The camera returns to Jane in close-up – definitive evidence of her boss’ predatory behaviour registers in her eyes and she heaves a deep sigh, her final act of connection-making. Though Jane’s exiting the deli and her disappearing from the camera’s eye as she walks away from it – in the opposite direction of the building she works in – could be viewed as “open (780)” or “arbitrary (780)” to suggest that “life lacks the neatness of art (780)”, the symbolism of her leaving as her final act in juxtaposition with her first act being ‘going’ is significant. As well, up until this point (through the initial equilibrium and disequilibrium) her movement has been primarily controlled by the production company; one of her few autonomous movements being walking away from the company’s buildings, and it being her final action, signifies that she is at last, taking back her agency, and quitting.

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The Assistant, authored by Kitty Green, is a film which’s structure ultimately adheres to the principles guiding classic film’s structure, but which reorders its causes and effects into a web made up of different chains of causes and effects, layers this web beneath the surface of the plot, and introduces its new equilibrium through symbolism not explicit commentary. The tool of ‘parallelism’, presenting disparate events that are similar in some significant way, documents the various suspicious behaviours of a film production company’s secretive chairman to force the viewer to draw connections between them, and discover the truths about his exploits. The representation of events is delivered through the dual perspectives of ‘documentary factuality’ and ‘psychological subjectivity’ – through the lens of the film’s main character, Jane (who is unnamed within the text), the viewer is given access to a limited yet accurately-relayed amount of visual and aural information. From the tasks we watch her complete, the reality of his serial, systematically-organized sexual assaults of (four, we can infer as occurring on the one day the film takes place over), and overall predatory behaviour towards, women, are revealed; as Jane connects the subtexts of her various tasks, the different forms of his abuse are detectable.

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The film’s style works to restrict the awareness of the reality of the chairman’s actions to Jane’s – a melding of realism and ambiguity (accurate re-presentations of an obscured point of view) governs how the plot is communicated. Through the presentation of the film’s world in this style, the reality of the intentional concealing of the chairman’s actions by the company’s ‘in the know’ employees (trusted production executives and a human resources team) is articulated. The techniques contributing to this style closely resemble art cinema’s, but through a self-curated form of order and type of regulation, the representation of the world still acquiesces to the tenets of classic cinema’s approach to representation. This representation in collaboration with the film’s structure presents the author’s contribution to a prominent societal discussion – the issue of naturalized sexual abuse in Hollywood’s, and other production sites’, film (/entertainment) industry. Powerful men like the chairman are able to exert their power to obtain sex; the corporations they operate work to protect this information from being known; women are mandated to ‘pay the price’ for career opportunities; and young, female personal assistants are kept ignorant, impelled to discover the truth themselves.

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Works Cited:

Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”. Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed., edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 774-782.

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Bordwell, David, et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960.  London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

In the early neorealist works of Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini there exists a palpable dualism between the polarities of hegemonic-patriarchal womanhood – the dichotomy between “Madonna” and “whore”. Visconti and Rossellini appear to adhere to this framework’s conception of womanhood – the tension between Lucia’s ‘whore’ and Mara’s ‘Madonna’ in the former’s La terra trema (1948) and the conflict between Eva’s ‘Madonna’ and ‘whore’ selves in the latter’s Germania anno zero (1948), as cases. Beneath the artificial demarcations of what makes a “good” woman and a “bad” woman (having or seeking sexual engagement vs. undertaking the responsibility of the family’s wellbeing), lies a polemical deconstruction of this framework – Lucia and Mara are both attempting to survive their dire economic circumstance as Eva is searching for how optimally she can support her household.

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The objective of neorealist filmmaking to act as a “synecdoche for the radical attack on social injustice” – a “revolutionary art…(of) those who suffer and hope” (Leavitt 26) – is the true framework upon which Visconti and Rossellini’s representations of women are constructed. Informing their depictions of female characters is the condemnation of societal forces and structures which order the nation’s body into victimization – thus, the women within their neorealist oeuvres can be interpreted in the context of the forms of oppression which threaten their survivals and wellbeing, and consequently govern the decisions they make. Through this lens of representation-as-social critique, I wish to revisit the characters of Giovanna in 1943’s ‘Ossessione’ and Marina in 1945’s ‘Roma città aperta’, each of whom have an established dominant reading as antagonists to the moral causes (Gino’s redemption and the Resistance members’ triumph) and ideologies (freedom from fascism [Fabri 19] and the rebirth of Italy [Gelley 27]) of their respective films.

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A dominant textual interpretation of Giovanna and Marina would suggest wealth-driven, morally compromised and manipulative young women, and a dominant analytical interpretation would position the former as the embodiment of a fascist present (Fabri 19) and the latter as fascism’s corruption of Italy (Marcus 38), when they are the victims of fascist-patriarchal tyranny purely attempting to survive. Remaining with the dominant reading of Giovanna, she is characterized as a paradigmatic ‘femme fatale’: she weaponizes her sexuality to persuade Gino to murder her husband; she is guiltless after the crime is committed, taking pleasure in the fortunes of her store; and she ensnares Gino by becoming pregnant.

 

If Visconti’s self-identified approach to filmmaking as “anthropomorphic” is applied to Ossessione, the depiction of her as a ‘femme fatale’ is artificial (Visconti 84). The ‘reality’ of Giovanna is of an abused young woman seeking safety from her abuser and convincing a man she has authentic (as opposed to those feigned for Giuseppe) amorous emotions for, to aid in the separation of her from him. Under Mussolini’s rule, women were allocated the solitary role of caretaker – optimally, they would be a wife and a mother – with no opportunity to pursue any of their individual ambitions (Gigliola 69-71) nor defend themselves against their male authority figures’ violence (Gallucci 126). This fascist-patriarchal state was interlocked with a national social order ruled by the principles of Catholic ideology – she was confined to a position of subordination, by an abusive man, and could not part from that man, or become victim to further social marginalization and isolation (Cronin 204). Therefore, the actions of Giovanna must be read in relation to the extremely narrow set of possibilities she had for obtaining safety from Giuseppe – which, should she have not gained, could have, as is strongly alluded to by his manically aggressive threats and motions, resulted in her death.

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As her attraction to (evolving into a dependence upon) Gino is genuine and her ‘manipulation’ is the request for assistance in evading her abuser, Giovanna’s pregnancy when viewed through the lens of anthropomorphism is the natural product of her and Gino’s intercourse. Layering atop Visconti’s framework of refracting societal structures of injustice, her falling pregnant and there being no alternative courses for her to pursue than birthing the child and becoming a mother is in dialogue with the fascist-patriarchy. Like her ‘leaving’ Giuseppe physically as Gino had initially suggested not guaranteeing her safety but rather increasing her chances of acuter suffering (in the case she was found and made to return home), when interpreted through an anthropomorphic and “radical attack” lens Giovanna’s pregnancy is a site of fascism’s oppression, not a symbol of it (Fabri 15). Applying the lens of neorealism as a cinema of “revolution” for subjects that “suffer and hope”, Giovanna’s gaining control of the store should too be regarded without villainous connotations. As a member of the working class oppressed by the store-owner (Giuseppe) and exploited for her labour, her emancipation and taking back of the products and fruits of her labour, are not achievements that she should be maligned for.  Moreover, she does not (in the pejorative sense of the expression) take personal advantage of the store, but opens it up to the Italian people as a space for community and a source of joy.

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An identical lens through which Giovanna can be reinterpreted as a victim of Italian fascist-patriarchy can be applied to Roma città aperta’s Marina, for although within the body of the text she is allied to the Nazis, this alliance must be evaluated in the context of the oppressive forces restricting her autonomy. While under fascist rule it was enforced that women occupy the position of wife and mother, the entrenchment in poverty a majority of the nation’s women suffered as a result of the war, necessitated independent inclusion in the workforce (De Grand 959). Marina is employed in sex work, and though the visual signifiers attached to her (her headboard, vanity, makeup, shiny, curled hair and chic dresses) do denote glamour (Marcus 38), at no point does Rossellini depict Marina’s life in sex work as glamorous. During the confrontation between Marina and Manfredi in her bedroom, Rossellini articulates explicitly the accumulation of sufferings she is subject to as a poor woman forced into the body economy – clients are abusive, she lives in shame and fear and she has become mistrusting of goodness.

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A scene evidencing neorealism’s objective of “radical(ly) attack(ing) social injustice”, Marina’s dialogue executes a critique of the scarce and insufficient opportunities available for women under fascism, with marriage/motherhood and (legal) employment incapable of offering survival, and sex work, demanding a loss of bodily autonomy. Adjacent to Marina’s sex work is her drug dependence – the cyclical relationship between the former and the latter, further ratifying how ‘unglamorous’ the occupation (and in extension her life) is. In applying Visconti’s ‘anthropomorphic filmmaking’ practice to the representation of the young woman, her reliance upon the pleasure of drugs and upon pleasures altogether expresses a raw, human need to experience a quantity of joy in a life so thoroughly permeated by suffering and the loss of hope.

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Rossellini’s positioning of the character within Italy’s fascist-patriarchal society – at the intersection of economic, gender and sexual victimization – thus, enables a reading of her not as a symbol of fascist corruption, but of the impossibility fascism made survival if one did not surrender to the occupying forces. Marina’s initial decision to co-operate with the Nazis reflects the extreme precarity of her position in life due to the intersecting social injustices working against her, and her maintaining that co-operation can be interpreted as the human need to retain access to sources of joy (hers, being drugs) when one’s life is largely devoid of such. Her allegiance can be read less symbolically as well and still defy the dominant readings of her: she does not severe allegiance to Ingrid and the Nazis, because she does not want to die. Marina’s betrayal is the reason Manfredi and Francesco are found out, leading to their deaths; but, when contextualized in the threat to her life posed by the Nazis if she hid the Resistance members, and after applying the lens of Visconti’s anthropomorphism, her betrayal becomes an understandable act of an individual fighting to protect her own life. Ultimately, Marina had no choice but to reveal the Resistance members or be subject to her own torture and murder as punishment, and in an ideological sense, her ultimate impact on the film – causing Manfredi and Francesco’s deaths – proposes that Italy cannot be reborn from (as the men believed), but must learn to grow out of its fascist self (as she could have, had she not died).

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Like Giovanna’s, Marina’s actions – though within the text and through a dominant reading, betray the protagonists’ moral cause and contradict the ideological message of the story – are not weaponized to present her as a “bad” woman, but instead, as a poor, young woman who hopes for a better life and suffers from an enmeshment of social injustices, and thus, is forced to make certain choices within a minute and inflexible range of possibilities. As she declares in the confrontation with Manfredi, “I’ve had lovers, it’s true. What was I supposed to do? How do you think I bought that furniture? These clothes?...I did what any girl would do. That’s life.” Her and Giovanna are not “Madonnas” nor “whores” – they are human.

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Bibliography:

Cronin, Virginia Lee. Silence Is Golden: Older Women's Voices and The Analysis Of Meaning Among Survivor's Of Domestic Violence. 2013. Syracuse University, PhD dissertation.

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De Grand, Alexander. “Women under Italian Fascism.” The Historical Journal, vol. 19, no. 4, Dec. 1976, pp. 947-968. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2638244.

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Fabbri, Lorenzo. “Queer neorealism: Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione and the Cinema conspiracy against fascism.” Screen, vol. 60, no. 1, Spring 2019, pp. 1-24. Screen, doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjy062.

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Galluci, Carole C. “Alba de Céspedes’s There’s No Turning Back: Challenging the New Woman’s Future.” Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, edited by Robin Pickering-Iazzi. University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp. 200-220.

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Gelley, Ora. Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism: Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s Italy. Routledge, 2012.

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Gori, Gigliola. Italian fascism and the female body: sport, submissive women and strong mothers. Routledge, 2004.

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Leavitt, Charles L., IV. Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History. University of Toronto Press, 2020.

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Marcus, Millicent Joy. “Rossellini’s Open City: The founding.” Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, edited by Joseph R. Millichap and Millicent Joy Marcus. Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 33-51.

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Visconti, Luchino. “Anthropomorphic Cinema.” Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism, edited by David Overby. Talisman Books, 1978, pp. 83-85.

Humanity is flawed: people are a combination of characteristics, not fine-tuned archetypes solely possessing attributes which enable them to be categorized into any one depiction – good or evil, virtuous or immoral, praiseworthy or condemnable – and yet before the Hollywood Renaissance, in classic Hollywood, characters on-screen were forced into such restrictive limitations. With the abolishment of the Hays Code in the late-1960s and the generational shift in film audiences and then filmmakers, this established presentation of people, changed to one much more nuanced: for the first time in decades, characters were allowed to be flawed and as the floodgates of youth opened up and into Hollywood, the screen was shocked with complexity. The disintegration of the Hays Code, additionally enabled film messages to be synchronically nuanced, meaning the representation of these flawed characters did not necessarily need to be their complete condemnation and ultimate punishment; characters which would once require the treatment of villains, could be treated less divisively. The films of the Hollywood Renaissance were therefore fraught, with complex, flawed main characters that in the period preceding, could not have fathomably been delegated as the viewers’ point of view through which the filmic world was presented: Easy Rider, The Heartbreak Kid, Chinatown and Taxi Driver, being a selection of works among them. Through the adept handling of techniques, alignment and allegiance – a positioning alongside the flawed main character and the support of or agreement with the flawed main character, respectively – each film presents a representation of the story, that puts forth a message which is not wholly, or at all, held by the character themselves. The shifting alignment and dynamic allegiance, of the audience with Easy Rider’s Wyatt and Billy, The Heartbreak Kid’s Lenny, Chinatown’s Jake Gittes and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, encourages them to interpret the characters’ not as entirely, or in most of the cases at all, “good characters”, but rather deeply flawed characters, whose actions are not intended to be applauded.

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The alignment of Easy Rider is never completely stable: though Wyatt and Billy are the two main characters, the perspective of its representation vacillates notably, between them and George Hanson at the end of the second act, and them and Karen and Mary at the end of the third; raising George’s and the prostitutes’ understandings of the world, against theirs. Though the perspective always returns to either Wyatt or Billy, perceiving reality through someone else’s eyes – particularly George, and Karen and Mary, characters who are grounded in reality; the former in a realistic optimism and the latter an objective realism – the nescience of their impossible, rather delusional, aspirations is foregrounded. Wyatt and Billy seek to achieve absolute disconnection from an America they perceive as still not the utopian ambitions they have for it, until the nation transforms into it, yet their search for this freedom is fundamentally, unobtainable, and rather than flee the nation until it becomes what they want it to be, it would be much more rational if they stayed, and worked to transform it. The ideology of the counterculture’s revolution to change America being essentially, the outlet for privileged, free-spirited youths to rebel against the older generations and pursue an escapism from the harsh realities(/responsibilities) of life, is obviously not neither Wyatt or Billy’s – they are the embodiment of this pursuit – but the breaks in allegiance from them, communicate such.

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In addition to the misalignments and breaks in allegiance demonstrating the naivety/ignorance of the main characters, when the alignment is still with them, the audience’s allegiance to them is not definitive, as both are not the most moral people: Wyatt is pretentious and haughty, seeing himself as superior, while Billy is aggressive and delusional, of dangerous irrationality. Wyatt, nicknamed ‘Captain America’, is presented as contemplative and philosophical, but because of these traits he perceives himself as of higher intellect and character to almost everyone he interacts with; Billy on the other hand, has a short temper and is easily agitated, which often results in his being destructive or violent, to the spaces and people he interacts with. Peter Lev highlights the two’s problematics, “They buy cocaine in Mexico, sell it in Los Angeles, and set off on their ‘bikes’ for Mardi Gras in New Orleans”, and, “...as Wyatt, Billy, and George sleep, they are attacked by vigilantes with clubs. George is killed, his head beaten in. Billy and Wyatt continue on to New Orleans, visiting a high-class bordello in George’s honor. They stroll around Mardi Gras with two prostitutes, and all four take LSD in a cemetery.” (Lev 4)

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The alignment in The Heartbreak Kid is for the most part, steadfastly with Lenny, however beyond the first handful of scenes, the audience’s allegiance has been thoroughly detached, and will persist as such, relocating onto almost anyone but him throughout the story: notably, first onto Lila, who he marries in the beginning, then onto Kelly’s, who he marries at the end, dad. Lenny’s point of view is how the world is presented (rarely if ever are events shown that he is not present for) and in the beginning, it is possible to have an allegiance with this perspective, but after his prejudicial judgments about and rageful outbursts at, Lila, which build as the film progresses, it is intended that there should no longer be a sense of allegiance with him. The characterization of Lila does not make her a character we can align with, for she is presented as ‘grotesquely’ awkward, annoying and embarrassing (a spectacle, not a person), but her innocent, warmhearted nature juxtaposed against Lenny’s conniving and cruel, compel the viewer to advocate for her wellbeing and condemn his callous mistreatment. Maya Montañez Smukler outlines the basis for the break in allegiance with Lenny, “Lenny, who  is socially  ambitious  and  emotionally  shallow,  leaves  his  bride  only  days  into  the  couple’s honeymoon”, and how such a break preserves, through to the conclusion, “He has experienced no self-discovery during this process, which  is  surprising  and  therefore  pathetic,  and  has  not  endeared himself to the audience” (Smukler 51-54).

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Since we are in a position of aversion to Lenny when he meets Kelly, it is predisposed that there will not be an allegiance with this relationship, and director Elaine May, refuses to enable any allegiance to develop, as it (the relationship) develops: Lenny, never becomes a human character capable of connecting with, and Kelly is presented hollowly, as an archetype – the seductress. At no point are we truly encouraged to support either Lenny (a fool, incapable of self-awareness) or Kelly (a beauty, void of any non-shallow, non-archetypal attribute), nor root for their relationship’s success – the couple together, being a clumsy, unsympathetic pairing – thus, when Kelly’s father, emerges as a critique of each individually, and as a couple, we have an allegiance. Ultimately, The Heartbreak Kid, communicates a disbelief in the idea of love, and the goodness of people, with Kelly’s father, Mr. Corcoran, acting as the mouthpiece through which the audience is supposed to grasp this message: Lenny and Kelly are underdeveloped individuals whose egos prevent them from recognizing how incompatible and ruinous they are for the other.

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Similar to in The Heartbreak Kid, Chinatown defines its alignment palpably with the main character of Jake Gittes, but unlike in the prior film, Jake is not presented as a completely unsympathetic character – our allegiance is always partly with him, even when he is being remarkably inaccurate in his information analysis and, committing horrid acts of violence. As an adaptation of film noir, despite alignments being tethered to the detective, restricted to his point of view and therefore his knowledge and processing of the clues needing solving, it is an expectation that reading be done beneath what is strictly being presented; while alignments are technically, Jake’s as the story unfolds, theoretically, we should be objectively viewing the story. An alignment objective to the events of the story alters the straightforward allegiance to the detective presented – instead of accepting or ‘siding’ with Jake’s interpretation of the events, the audience should be decoding them themselves, and in doing so noticing the errors/inaccuracies in his interpretation, makes him a further flawed character – he is biased, close-minded and inadept. Jonathan Kirshner highlights clues which when recognized, cause a slight fracture in allegiance to Jake’s thinking, “…a series of shattered eyes presented to us throughout the film: the pocket watch crushed under Mulwray’s tire, the dead  eye  of  Jake’s  luncheon  fish,  the  lens  punched  out  of  his  sunglasses,  the kicked-out taillight of Evelyn’s car,…the one cracked lens of Cross’s incriminating bifocals, and the intimate flaw Gittes notices in Evelyn…which she calls ‘a sort of birthmark.’” (Kirshner, “White Knights in Existential” 179-180)

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In the dichotomy between audience alignment with Jake and his subjective interpretation, and an objective alignment and consequent ‘accurate’ interpretation, there lies Chinatown’s statement: Jake’s inability to have the accurate interpretation we can by reading through his, demonstrates how Chinatown is a world of not-knowing/delusion – when you’re in it, you can’t understand it. The dominant character audience sympathies/support move to, when Jake is not being fully deserving of them is Evelyn Mulwray: when Jake is witless about information within the investigations, Evelyn is knowledge, and when he is abusive, whether against her or exhibiting any violence, she is (as well as a victim) collected and supportive – making us ‘side’ with her. These last two points – Jake being a ‘flawed’ person that ‘doesn’t know’ and Evelyn being a, as is discovered, ‘good’ person that ‘does know’ – added to the context of her death in the end and his returning to a sort of detective work declares Chinatown’s ultimate message: you cannot be good nor have knowledge and survive, in Chinatown – the powers in charge there won’t allow it.

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Such powers which control Chinatown (or, more broadly Los Angeles, and even more broadly, America, which the cities represent) are the wealthy elite of society involved corruptly in politics and business: in Taxi Driver, like in Chinatown, corrupt leaders in politics and business are the antagonizing forces, in which the character we are aligned with, Travis Bickle seeks revenge. Travis’ core ambition is to ‘clean up’ his world which he perceives as fraught with evil – filth, crime and depravity – caused by the greed and ego of the government, and the crudeness and baseness of the impoverished which populate it, manifesting in his course to kill the senator Palantine, as well as the pimps and clients taking advantage of the child prostitute Iris. Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson detail how from the alignment with Travis such groups (the uncaring government vs. the perverse impoverished) are represented, “The presidential candidate (Palantine), in his scenes with the lonely cabbie, is a vague, tissue-paper figure in the background, playing it safe.”, vs., “ … a snarling, aggressive (lower-class) guy…overreacts wildly to Travis’ attempt at a joke with a ferocious ‘Are you going to break my chops?...If you are, you can take it on the arches right now.’” (Farber and Patterson par. 12-18)

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The world of Taxi Driver; New York City at night; and the perspective through which everything is presented, is governed by Travis’ unstable mental state: at the film’s beginning, there can be allegiance with him for his behavior is sound, his personality, approachable even charming, but as it progresses, as he falls deeper into his psychosis, it becomes impossible for there to be so. By the time the story shifts from his want to act out his hatred of the government and perverse impoverished to his planning of such acts, director Martin Scorsese has dislocated any allegiance to the character: from his buying illegal weaponry, he is presented as deranged and unhinged, his actions motivated by a crazed/delusional goal, increasing in insanity as the narrative builds. Where at the beginning we are encouraged to perceive Travis and his condition with sympathy and pity as we observe his awkward but well-meaning navigation through life coping with his disorder, by the third act if not earlier, we are absolutely made not just to condemn him, but to fear him – he and his actions transform from that of a moral antihero to a fully-fledged villain. Taxi Driver functions predominantly, as a dichotomy between alignment and allegiance – we cannot escape Travis and yet our inability to synthesize with him, puts the audience in a position of entrapment: a position which explores the experience of being affected by a psychotic disorder and the gradation towards it, capturing the causes which contribute to a psychotic break.

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As illustrated by the shifting alignments and dynamic allegiances in the relationship between a main character(s) and an audience, in the Hollywood Renaissance films, Easy Rider, The Heartbreak Kid, Chinatown and Taxi Driver, the characterization and representation of figures during the period, strongly diverge from the moral bifurcations established and upheld in the classic era. The fresh, young generation which developed the contemporary film language and constructed its novel traditions, grew up during the preceding age of austerely architected figures and such, in coalescence with the revolutionary progressions weakening the tension (the importance of differentiating) between “good” and “bad” in America during the Sixties, caused the explosion of the ‘antihero’. A significant aspect of the generation building and consuming the Hollywood Renaissance, was the aspiration to tear down the restrictive demarcations between what made a moral person and what made an immoral person, and the consequent course upon which each was entitled to go – thus, the preoccupation with experimenting with such variable concepts, was popular! An important factor to consider when examining the meanings of different alignments and allegiances, as well as the alignments and allegiances themselves, is the intrinsic subjectivity of the film medium and the multitudinous nature of film analysis: what a filmmaker might intend to indicate as a certain flaw or not a flaw in a character, could interpreted as either by any audience. Since flaws are determined in divergence from a conception of “goodness/ morality”, what is the composition of that conception, how the flaw diverges from it and the gravity of that divergence, are impacted by the differences in individual witnessing it – values, beliefs, prejudices engage with the concept of “flaw”, thus it is rare how a character is ‘flawed’ to one, will be how they are to another. These analyses of Easy Rider, The Heartbreak Kid, Chinatown and Taxi Driver, for example, were impacted by a composition of “goodness/ morality” determined by the principles of fourth wave feminism, while the filmmakers would not have been (intentionally) capable of developing according to such; flaws are subjective, but nonetheless, flawed characters are revolutionary.

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Bibliography:

Farber, Manny and Patricia Patterson. 1976. “The Power & the Gory.” Film Comment (May-June).

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Hess, John. 1975. “Godfather II: A Deal Coppola Couldn’t Refuse.” Jump Cut no. 7: 1, 10–11.

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Hoberman, J. 2019. “The Spirit of ’76: Travis, Rocky, and Jimmy Carter.”  In When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited, edited by Jonathan Kirshner and John Lewis, 149–163. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 2006. “Golden Door, Silver Screen.” In Roots, Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America, 72–129. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Kael, Pauline. 1967. “The Frightening Power of ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’” The New Yorker.

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Kirshner, Jonathan. 2012. “Privacy, Paranoia, Delusion, and Betrayal.” In Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America, 132–165. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Kirshner, Jonathan. 2012. “White Knights in Existential Despair.” In Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America, 166–188. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Klinger, Barbara. 1997. “The Road to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in Easy Rider.” In The Road Movie Book, edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 179–203. New York: Routledge.

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Lev, Peter. 2000 “Hippie Generation.” In American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions, 3–21. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Montañez Smukler, Maya. 2019. “Hollywood Can’t Wait: Elaine May and the Delusions of 1970s American Cinema.” In ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May, edited by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum, 41–62. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Thomson, David. 2019. “The Parallax View: Why Trust Anyone?” In When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited, edited by Jonathan Kirshner and John Lewis, 101–114. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

 

The Sixties: a decade of Flower Power, free love, fighting The Man and the Youthquake, as cultural nostalgia and idealist reminiscence would understandably, encourage one to believe. Upon modern retrospection, an accumulative summation of such a period of history in the West, amounts, as symbolized by its material objects, to photographs of Vietnam War protests, surrealist psychedelic artwork, songs asking to “Give Peace A Chance”, anti-structuralist academic theory, floral short-hemmed shift dresses, abstract society-critical literature, and the legislation of the Civil Rights Act. As one begins to peer just beneath this surface of optimistic innovation and the promise of revolution however, the (metaphoric) skeletons of unforeseen political assassinations, deceitful government scandals, devastating civil and international warfare, mass-scale environmental degradation, rampant inflation and its widening of socioeconomic gaps…such romantic memory is poisoned, by the era’s complex reality (Funkhouser pp. 64-65).

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For those contemporary, Americans belonging to the termination of the 60s, and laborious trudge, weighted by the collective trauma of such tragedies and atrocities, into the 1970s, the immediacy of social, political and economic unrest, and the apparent disappearance, of that idealistic hope with which we attribute to its lead-up, were inescapable (Grant pp. 1-2). Bruce J. Schulman, identifying 1968 as the precipice upon which disillusionment in America began to fester, notes of this time, “The Sixties appeared as a historical divide, a decade of turmoil with the future hanging in the balance. But (1968), and its climactic twelve months, have been recalled, as ‘the Year the Dream Died’ - the year, when for so many, the dream of a nobler, optimistic America died, and the reality of a skeptical conservative America began to fill the void” (Schulman p. 2).

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The rapid succession, of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the volatile outcomes of the Columbia University protests, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, the violent outcomes of the Democratic National Convention, and the election of pro-government-violence, Richard Nixon, produced an overwhelming surge of hopelessness and alienation, which would intensify, in the utopia-illusion shattering years, which followed (pp. 2-3, 7, 12). In 1969, Arlo Guthrie, a youthful prophet of the counterculture; a folk poet, who sang of anti-war, anti-Nixon and anti-nuclear-power; transposed his darkly ironic experience, of being denied the draft to fight, in Vietnam, on account of his depositing of litter, on private property (and, the consequent arrest and criminal charges, it led to), from an autobiographical talking-blues song, to a feature film, directed by Arthur Penn (Lev p. 12). The following year, 1970, Barbara Loden, an actress, director and writer, whose career in acting, beginning during the unchecked misogyny of the mid-1950s, was largely limited, to exploitations of her physical attributes by male directors and producers (sometimes, as orchestrated by either of her husbands), auteured an independent picture, of a society-fatigued woman, whose course is upended, by an abusive crook (Phillips par. 21-23).

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Alice’s Restaurant (1969) and Wanda (1970), respectively, siphon directly, from the omnipresent disillusionment of peoples on the margins of mainstream American society (the politically titled, ‘Silent Majority’), neglected by its authorities and oppressed by its systems, searching for a realizable alternative, to the corrupt and unjust, structure of a nation, they desperately sought to abandon. While Alice’s Restaurant and Wanda, present totally disparate insights into the turmoil of disenfranchised Americans at the dovetail of the 1960s, one, a disappointed reflection on the ultimate, meaninglessness, of the counterculture’s campaigning for change, and the other, a cautionary tale about disobeying the enforced although corrupt, U.S.A structure of living, they equally, declare a confrontation with America - a nation made up of, wounding systems.

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Alice’s Restaurant is perhaps the more palpable interrogation of the nation’s, senselessly unjust operation, and the institutions which participate in such’s execution, as adapted from its source material. Police officers and military administrators, eager to inflict disproportionate punishment upon its citizens, are arraigned; emphasized, both in parody, as in the crime (of litter) scene inspection and Arlo and his accomplice’s temporary imprisonment, and the unending phases of combat-eligibility inspection, respectively, and, in earnest, as in the pervasive minority-profiling and civil brutality, and violation of basic, privacies (during the inspection). The unlawfulness of the U.S.A.’s military body and in topical extension, of the Vietnam War, lies at the center of the film’s contention: the inscription office Arlo is assigned to, is a fascist labyrinth, and within it, occurs the doubly effective, as a resolution to a conflict (excusing him from enlistment), and a reflexive statement (illustrating the psychopathy of the war), stylistic ‘Kill, Kill’ (as shouted by him and the military psychiatrist) scene.

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Further criticisms of the American war-apparatus and the blindly-patriotic national populace which nourished it, are intrinsic in the cast of Alice’s Restaurant: radical leftist countercultural youths, congregated at a socialist, self-sufficient church-commune, living in opposition to the aforementioned, fostering a community of sharing, collaboration and support, whose harmony is paralleled to religion. While such a subject focus could facilely fall into simply, cliché commentary, the amity of the makeshift family, headed by the titular Alice, a chef, and her husband, Ray, a ‘businessman’, is not as unblemished as it should be, observed by Philip French of the protagonist, “Yet Arlo doesn’t exactly belong to the world of Ray and Alice. He casts a benevolent eye on the establishment of their little community, yet while joining in their self-conscious rituals and celebrations he does so with an obvious detachment” (French p. 1). Alice’s Restaurant is alas, a disheartened recollection of the ineffectiveness of the 1960s counterculture, from the perspective, cognizant of its eventual failure: tensions begin to frequent, between the physical and aggressive (‘masculine’) natures of Ray and Shelley (a ‘recovering’ heroin addict), and those creative and passive, (‘feminine’) of Alice and Arlo.

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A flux of conflicts, predominantly centering, the triatic relationship of Alice, Ray and Shelley, grow increasingly volatile, as Ray’s character becomes corrupted, by his seduction of the power afforded to him as the ruler of the community (or, ‘state’), in a critical exemplar, of how (what Ray perceives as) totalitarian authority, vitiates one’s morality and humanity, until they devolve into poisoned states. In manifest allegory, the three characters form a nuclear family unit - Alice, as an overprotective mother, Ray as a disappointed then jealous and abusive (to both Shelley and Alice), father, and Shelley as the deeply ill son, who ‘acts out’ on account of his unsound condition -; a phenomenon, customary of the commune-as-household tradition, as Robert C. Cottrell notes, “They adopted shifting familial and child-rearing patterns” (Cottrell p. 232).

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As a result of the disorderly and potentially dangerous, environment of the ‘household’, quantities of the pacifist community depart the formerly idyllic church, until it is a whisper, of its original haven; Alice’s restaurant, suffering a similar fate when, as the consequence of Ray’s exploitation of it (as an enterprise, producing capital) and, Alice’s labor, she becomes fatigued with her dream, and essentially abandons, the passion project. It is through this depressing, fatalistic cessation of such virtuous, fulfilling creations, in which director, Arthur Penn, and screenwriter, Venable Herndon, construct their challenging of the “American Dream”: Ray’s selfish ambition, his need for greedy, excess expansion (he plans to sell the church, to purchase mass amounts of farmland up north), that which will never be satisfied with ‘enough’, elicits the worst of humanity and causes needless destruction.

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Alice’s Restaurant attempts to end with the return of that sacred revelry, as Alice and Ray renew their vows grandly, before the caucus of their remnant children, but, this act of celebration is hollow; a final, desperate effort to reclaim the ‘revolutionary’ of the couple - to prove that they are still, protesting the contrived, corrupt ‘American’, system of life that they indeed, are gradually assuming, demonstrating the futility, of that ambitious, unobtainable objective. In light of the impotence of Alice and Ray’s aim to elude the nation’s imposed ideals and its accompanying course of life (the American ‘identity’), nihilism is cast upon the countercultural youths who are contemporarily trying, steadfast in their beliefs that they will succeed, to accomplish and maintain the feat - if revolutionaries of the former generation inevitably become one with the ‘system’, what portends that Arlo and his peers will not, one day, too? What appears to be the superficial ‘purposelessness’ - the evasion of the U.S.A.’s forced, standard purposes (conventional goals and living, traditional beliefs and ideas) in pursuit of oppositional alternatives - by the characters of Alice’s Restaurant, is merely the object through which its own, purposelessness, is presented.

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Lily Van Den Bergh writes of Alice’s Restaurant, “All (Arthur’s Penn’s) characters just act, participate in life, without being able to stand back and judge” (Bergh p. 3) and arguably, a similar gross naivete could be leveled at the Americans attempting to fight to transform the ingrained, almost foundational, doctrines of American society; but, if one did not want to follow such a doctrine, were there any tertiary alternatives?

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The United States of America, portrayed in Wanda, true to the reality of the nation, is hostile, disinterested, and uncaring of its people; employment is universally scarce, capital is demanded, to acquire the most basic of survival needs, and assistance from the government nor any of its associated institutions, is obsolete. The relative inhospitality, of the U.S. for anyone who is on the suffering end of its cruel, unmitigated capitalism’s social order, is exemplified, in the desolation and withering of each of the locations the film captures, from arid, rural towns to eerily abandoned stopover cities to empty swaths of literally, lifeless plains. The fruits beared from the economy of industry - material goods, commercial offerings, advertised services, modern luxuries - like clothing, alcohol, cars, hotels, restaurants, movie theatres and tourist attractions, are framed as temporary, mindless distractions of pleasure and excitement, which force one to forget their complete subordination to the financial system, in which they are trapped.

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Wanda explores the opportunities available, for individuals who, as outlined in the inquiry above, refuse to be complacent to the command of dominant, established American society, but equally, are not fooled by misgivings, about the possibility that it can be reconstructed: disappearance from (as undertaken by the protagonist, Wanda) and manipulation of (as by the antagonist, Mr. Dennis), being the two options, offered up by the narrative.

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Through the respective characters of Wanda and Mr. (Norman) Dennis, Barbara Loden, explores to the proverbial brink, the extremities to which one must go, in order to escape, at least in some capacity, the constraints of the U.S.’ (advertised) mobilizing structures (structures, which cause movement in the social order), especially, for individuals who begin, at the bottom of that order. Wanda, in avoiding the expectations thrust upon Americans, ‘disappearing from the system’, must exist in absolute, isolation, with no possessions, purposes, goals, relationships nor directions in life, and in Mr. Dennis, being forced to resort to criminal activity, ‘playing dirty’ or ‘manipulating the system’, his morality is surrendered and survival (his being alive), constantly at stake. To exist outside of America’s quite objectively, corrupt structures, is to concede one’s freedom both, in the senses of being able to fulfill oneself, to do that which one would like to do; Wanda must, have nothing, Dennis must, commit crime; and, in having opportunities to progress or advance in, or merely, move throughout, life (not the social order, one’s own life).

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Within the two options viable, for evading America’s systems (disappearance and manipulation), there exists an even greater number of limitations dependent on one’s place in the social order, which determine an individual’s ability to achieve either: Wanda, as a woman and in relative poverty, has access to an incredibly limited range, and at a point in the film, is no longer able to achieve the former and must, assume the latter. Wanda being a woman, offers a gendered understanding of an American citizen’s relation to its structures and, any subsequent attempts of escape: Loden, inserts the dangers of disappearance, for women - how the wandering intrinsic to it, can lead to life-threatening situations; Wanda’s change from it to crime, being mandated not by herself, but by Mr. Dennis, who abuses her desolation, by giving her a ‘purpose’, but one that is potentially fatal. As Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin note, “Wanda is an invisible woman” (López and Martin p. 45), a sacrifice necessary for escaping America by disappearance, and it is this nothingness of Wanda’s existence, which Dennis provides a possible, escape from - seemingly, allowing her to both elude America, and move throughout life; however, she goes from avoiding the system (aversion), to participating in its manipulation (antagonism), and both, the dangers of this antagonism (legal punishment), and the dangers coming, from it (Mr. Dennis’ abuse), jeopardize her safety.

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Shifting to an allegorical rather than literal, reading of the film as a criticism of the United States and its operation: Mr. Dennis is a personification of the nation, in all of the insensitivity, cruelty, selfishness and corruption, associated with, and exhibited by, each; his criminality even, working to strengthen the allegory, for although it is not advertised, manipulation or, ‘playing dirty’, is the central principle in, such operation. Throughout the film, he inflicts mental, emotional and physical abuse on Wanda, viewing her as inferior and disgusting - “If you don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You may as well be dead. You’re not even a citizen of the United States” -, while, simultaneously exploiting her, to advance his own personal gain (using her to achieve stolen capital), in a relationship analogous, to how the nation’s wealthy, exploit and demonize, those below them (especially, the working class). Dennis’ entitlement to money and likewise, resistance to obtaining a standard, everyday job (assumed, to be in a blue collar, or similarly [comparatively] low-paying, field as hinted by his father, who, prompts the suggestion), embody the obsession of the United States with vast amounts of wealth, typically accompanied by a disinterest in working hard - the struggle through pain and difficulty, that comes with exerting the necessary efforts - to amass such.

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Wanda (the character), is tasked with fighting an additional American system, one most repressive, significant and foundational, to the nation’s establishment and operation: the patriarchy. It is worthy to note, that the film, belongs to the ‘road movie’ genre - a tradition, that had contemporarily, and still, has historically, been associated with men, and masculine pursuits and worldviews; thus, Wanda’s (the film) co-opting, speaks directly to gendered representation - specifically, how does the ‘road’ as a metaphor for, or instrument of achieving, freedom, fundamental, to traditional, masculine-driven narratives, translate into a female-driven context.

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Simply, it does not, but rather, the road functions as the medium through which Wanda is removed from one situation, governed by patriarchal control, that of her rural, conservative small-town, which demands she fulfill her prescribed role of doting and affectionate, mother and housewife, and, entered into another, that of Mr. Dennis’ chronic use, both, for his personal capital gain and, as a sexual object, and abuse, such as his demanding she heed his orders, restricting her freedoms, and manipulating her apparent, lack of agency. Wanda’s agency, or rather, what can be understood to be her hesitancy to assert her agency, is exploited constantly, almost, by every man in the film: her husband, when arguing in court for a divorce, and custody of their children; Dennis, in his coercion of her to be an accomplice in each of his crimes; the soldier, at the end of the film, who sexually assaults her; Wanda’s passivity, her nature of listening and adhering to, the commands of others, is weaponized against her, to be taken advantage of, by male forces. Fjoralba Miraka concludes, “This problem (the impossibility for Wanda to achieve freedom, independence nor autonomy, from the domination and rule of men, throughout all, of the narrative) with no name is never uttered; yet the viewer infers that it is the problem of (America’s ingrained) patriarchal social structures which define and confine the woman’s experience, and leave no available alternative options for her.”

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In my critical considerations of Alice’s Restaurant and Wanda, thus far, it would seem as though the two anti-American-establishment films contrast one another, diametrically, most prominent perhaps, in their contrasting responses to their disaffections with the country: Arlo, in Alice’s Restaurant wields the ambition to change the corruption he disagrees with, while Wanda, in Wanda, has let it overpower her, surrendering instead, to apathy. Arlo wants to do everything he can to cease the causes of his disillusionment and Wanda, nothing, - a dichotomy of motivation, which extends to their polar opposite visual sensibilities; Alice’s Restaurant, is sensorily full (ie. its hyper, loud tone), alive, stylistically (ie. its flourishing mis-en-scene), and Wanda, sensorily empty (static, quiet tone), and dead, stylistically (hollow mis-en-scene). Even the action at the core of each film’s plot, “crime”, is split into eager, active crime - Arlo willingly, nee, excitedly, displaces the garbage from Alice’s Thanksgiving onto (unknown to him) private property -, and hesitant, passive crime - Wanda’s accomplice to, and eventual participation in, Mr. Dennis’ illegal activities is coerced; she is forced into it against her will.

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However, underneath all of their apparent dissimilarities both films, ultimately, provide a challenging, of the United States’, established nation, from the perspective of a woman, who has been used, tormented and at once, stripped of her autonomy and self-agency, by men who have been granted ‘superiority’ by, and the male-governed systems of rule which control, it. Traditional, arguably archaic, ‘norms’ and ‘roles’, carved out by America’s staunchly, revered patriarchy, as acceptable for and thus, ceaselessly thrust upon, women, are omnipresent in Alice’s Restaurant and Wanda, either as boxing-in agents, which confine the unmitigated, free-will, of Alice and Wanda, or, as looming threats, for what the women could, become reduced into, in the case that the narrative (standing in, for all-powerful male authorities) wills them to be. The forced attribution of gentleness and selflessness to the female gender, is wielded by Ray, as he prompts Alice, to dedicate overwhelming amounts of her time, to ensure the wellbeing of the commune’s inhabitants, assuming, that she has no personal (autonomous) disinterest in doing so, and likewise, Mr. Dennis weaponizes, that of gracefulness and beauty, to degrade and belittle, Wanda, in his berating of her not, ‘fulfilling’, his standards of image and etiquette. A massive, topic of contention in both films, is motherhood: the responsibility, thrust upon each of the women, metaphorically for Alice, and literally, for Wanda, is approached from exactly opposite viewpoints - the former, is desperate to have it, and the latter, is fleeing of it - and yet, they are equally criticized for each of their handlings: Alice, and her overprotection, blamed for Shelley’s death, and Wanda, and her abandonment, judged, as a sign of her bad character.

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Alice and Wanda are used as literal, objects by, at the immediate disposals of, their male partners (Alice’s, husband and Wanda’s, captor), able to be employed whenever, and in any capacity, to serve purposes beneficial to the men; as both partners are attempting to elude America, Ray and Mr. Dennis are also, aiming to evade their own lives, Ray, searching for an alternative, and Dennis, running away, and the women, are implemented within such impossible goals, to elicit results, that ‘move’ them ‘closer’. In moments just anticipating the films’ finales, Alice and Wanda, each, experience traumatic, emotional breakdowns, from the accumulation of abuses that they have suffered, at the hands of male authorities, that have thusly, been orchestrating (or, attempting to), all of their actions, and consistently, violating their autonomies: Alice, after Ray announces his plans to sell the church, and Wanda, as the soldier is sexually assaulting her. Making up the conclusions of Alice’s Restaurant and, Wanda, are sequences of their titular women, silently staring into the abyss, reflecting on their lives, and the structures of life, in America, which have enabled such series of actions to unfold: having been all used up, having had everything taken from them, by the male powers and forces, established by the nation as able to do so, with negligible concern, they are left entirely, empty.

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Bibliography:

Bergh, Lily V. D. “Alice’s Restaurant.” Sight and Sound, vol. 38, no. 2, 1969, www.proquest.com/docview/1305507707?accountid=14771&pq-origsite=primo&imgSeq=1. Accessed 13 Oct. 2021.

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Cottrell, Robert C. Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘N’ Roll: The Rise of America’s 1960s Counterculture. E-book, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

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French, Philip. “Alice’s Restaurant.” Sight and Sound, vol. 39, no. 1, 1969, www.proquest.com/docview/1305517206?accountid=14771&imgSeq=1&pq-origsite=primo. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.

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Funkhouser, G. R. “The Issues of the Sixties: An Exploratory Study in the Dynamics of Public Opinion.” The Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1, 1973, www-jstor-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/2747815?seq=4#metadata_info_tab_contents. Accessed 10 Oct. 2021.

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Grant, B. K. “Introduction: Movies and the 1960s.” American Cinema of the 1960s, edited by Barry Keith Grant, E-book, Rutgers University Press, 2008, 2-11.

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Lev, Peter. American Films of the 70s. E-book, University of Texas Press, 2000.

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López, Christina A. and Martin, Adrian. “Nothing of the Sort: Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970).” Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema, vol. 4, no. 8, 2015, core.ac.uk/download/pdf/83007414.pdf. Accessed 14 Oct. 2021.

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Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. E-book, The Free Press, 2001.

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Miraka, Fjoralba. “Gender, Genre, and Class Politics In Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970).” MAI Feminism, 23 May 2019, maifeminism.com/gender-genre-and-class-politics-in-barbara-lodens-wanda-1970/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2021.

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Phillips, McCandlish. “Barbara Loden Speaks Of the World of ‘Wanda’.” The New York Times, 11 Mar. 1971, p. 32, www.nytimes.com/1971/03/11/archives/barbara-loden-speaks-of-the-world-of-wanda.html.

 

Ballet is an art unparalleled in its intricacy. Each movement made is as precise, with just the right amount of tension and strength to artfully articulate an exact emotion, as it is effortless, in gratitude to the exemplary skills of master performers. 2010’s Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, is a harrowing glimpse into this absurdly elegant art form through the doe eyes of Nina Sayers, the recent recipient of the “Swan Queen”; a role comprised of the frigid White and sinful Black Swans; in her ballet company’s macabre retelling of “Swan Lake”. Sayers is maddened with desire to perform both characters faultlessly to such an echelon that she abandons her sanity, as explored by the plot - with repeated depictions of Nina practicing the role’s routines and her delusional belief that all others’ actions bear upon her success -, as well as illustrated by the story - with an abundance of suspiciously surreal scenes and her canonically warped perception of day-to-day events.

Temporal Frequency

Black Swan communicates the concept of Nina’s unchecked immersion into her role as the Swan Queen by implementing the idea of an “evil twin”: the maliciously menacing polar opposite; that only appears as a reflection in mirrors; to her sheepish, submissive self. The leader of the ballet company, Thomas, presents Nina with an ultimatum: tap into the carnal lust necessary to perform the seductive Black Swan, or forfeit the role of the Swan Queen entirely. Nina; as the result of her mother’s inflicted infantilization; is akin to that of a little girl, who’s abhorrence to sex, appetite for affirmation and absent independence, deny her the ability to entertain the sinful notions Thomas requests. Instead, such primal, adult urges manifest into the creation of her evil twin; an entity which emerges more frequently as the film progresses to illustrate her deepening submersion into the part of the Black Swan. The most critical appearance of the evil twin comes towards the climax, when Nina is practicing for the final time before her anxiously-awaited debut performance. The twin is shown abruptly halting their movement, while Nina steadily maintains hers: thereby insinuating that the entity has finally become something entirely independent (1:19:26). In this scene is Nina - the delicately docile White Swan, and the Black Swan - a distinctly different, devious being. 

Patterns of Development

Once Thomas bestows upon Nina the role of the Swan Queen, it immediately becomes her sole source of motivation, with every subsequent decision she chooses to make completely dependant upon the implications it will have on her performance as either the White or Black Swan. The lens Nina observes the world through morphs, as her hyper-fixation on perfection hastens her descent into madness: resulting in a viewpoint which contextualizes the actions of all others’ as somehow related to her own success, at the role she is steadily devoting alarming amounts of time to. Nina refuses to acknowledge that some of the behaviours of her peers; namely Lily - a fellow dancer; are genuinely unmotivated by the outcome of her debut performance. Lily is intriguingly employed throughout the film, as half of the time she exists on-screen as the well-meaning, though slightly confrontational, newcomer to the ballet company, she in all actuality is. For the remainder of the film however, she serves a purpose similar to that of Nina’s “evil twin”: the manifestation of the to-be Swan Queen’s carnal lusts and devilish urges. This all begins when Nina enviously observes Lily from afar, discovering that the newcomer’s dancing exudes the temptation and sexuality, Thomas has been demanding from her own portrayal of the Black Swan (29:09). From then on, she becomes the manifestation of everything sinful and nefarious Nina suppresses inside herself, with the real, tangible Lily being misdiagnosed with wanting to steal the role of the Swan Queen from her, in the process. 

Hierarchy of Knowledge

Though Aronofsky’s film is grounded in our reality, a plethora of the imagery is absurd and surrealistic. This, like all of the other elements touched upon in this analysis, is to highlight Nina’s obsession with her role, and to document the progression of her madness. What’s interesting about the abnormal imagery, is that both the audience and Nina herself are befuddled by it - neither party have the proper information necessary of rationalizing why the on-screen phenomenon is occurring. Arguably, the phenomenon most critical to the plot, is Nina seemingly sprouting feathers from her back. Repeated as a motif throughout the film, is a collection of bloody claw-marks on Nina’s back that she has no knowledge of receiving. As her debut performance as the Swan Queen draws nigh, tiny black feathers mysteriously begin to peek through the claw-marks (1:24:44). Nina is rightfully horrified by this phenomenon, especially since she has no idea as to how they got there and to who - or what - is causing them. Unfortunately, not the origin nor the source of the claw-marks and tiny feathers are discovered by Nina, though the audience does luckily receive some semblance of an explanation. As she dances the part of the Black Swan - immediately after stabbing Lily at the height of the film’s climax - her arms and shoulders morph into a grand set of black wings (1:36:33). This phenomenon symbolizes Nina’s complete transformation into the Black Swan; carnal lusts, devilish urges and all; so by an extension, the claw-marks and tiny feathers represent different phases of the gradual process.

Restricted Narration

Black Swan is told exclusively through the perception of Nina, which - when discussing the accuracy and legitimacy of on-screen events - is a crutch to the audience, for her mental state is skewed, thereby making her unable of observing experiences authentically and without delusion. Nina’s accounts of her day-to-day activities are vastly different than what the other characters describe the exact same activities to be, thus proving - within the film’s canon - that her narration is irrefutably untrustworthy. This accuracy infringement is particularly disorienting when experiences with Lily are portrayed, as half the time the Lily involved in the given interaction is the true, tangible one, and in the remaining half, she is the imaginary manifestation of Nina’s suppressed lusts. When watching the film’s climax, the disconnect between Nina’s perceived reality and her actual reality is so incredibly impactful. In a blazing fit of blinding rage, Nina; in full White Swan regalia; stabs Lily’s diaphragm with a mirror fragment (1:33:43). Upon returning to her dressing room after an abysmal performance in the first act, the White Swan notices a rich pool of blood quickly collecting by her own diaphragm and the supposedly deceased body nowhere to be found (1:39:23). This is when it is shockingly revealed to the audience that Nina had, in reality, not stabbed Lily, but herself instead, despite us seeing such an act take place just moments before.

As illustrated by Nina Sayers in Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’, an obsession with perfection may cause a promising performer to fall victim to excessive practicing, the misconception that their peers are out to get them, surrealistic illusions and the misinterpretation of everyday events. The film lends insight into the dangers of hyper-focusing upon one’s own success like Nina does with her role as the Swan Queen, as well as discusses the risks posed by self-employed pressures for faultlessness, similar to the ones Nina places upon herself in regards to the White and Black Swan parts. Her descent into madness is surprisingly reminiscent of the art form itself, with ballet too, going to great lengths to achieve absurd echelons of gracefulness. Each movement made is as wince-inducing; with unfathomable amounts of tension and strength demanded to effortlessly portray a precise emotion; as it is strenuous; with master performers, like Nina, allocating absurd amounts of time to merely maintain their skills. Ballet - as reflected in Nina Sayers - is an art unparalleled in its unrealistic expectations. 

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Sources:

Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, performances by Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis,  

theatrical cut, Cross Creek Picture, 2010. 

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Lambert, Chris. “The giant explanation of Black Swan.” Colossus, 21 Apr. 2019,  

www.filmcolossus.com/black-swan-movie-explained/. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.  

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Macauley, Alistair. “The Many Faces of ‘Black Swan,’ Deconstructed.” The New York Times, 9  

Feb. 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/arts/dance/10swan.html. Accessed 12 Mar.  

2020.  

 

A demure Hollywood stuntman props idly atop a luxury car lent to him by his well-meaning agent: the trunk - full of marked money, property of an elite Los Angeleno crime boss whose: accomplice not-so-coincidentally happens to be laying deceased at his feet. The blood-soaked figure in question, is Ryan Gosling’s mononymous “Driver”, and the opposite party - who, at the moment is losing copious amounts of blood with no aid in sight - is Albert Brook’s “Rose”, the pair of which, are embroiled in the pulse-quickening climax of Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 unapologetic thriller mixed, romantic tragedy, “Drive.” Just like the film’s inability to coincide cleanly within a sole genre, its technicoloured storylines and characters are equally unable to ascribe to any one identity, with these vast, intra-personal/intra-elemental multiplicities made apparent, by a series of narrative and stylistic features aptly employed to heighten the conflicts between dichotomies.

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Stylistic Function

Drive is the cinematic equivalent of being injected with adrenaline while simultaneously being administered morphine: its narrative is drenched in suspense and tension, while its visuals are lucidly bathed in ultraviolet electronica, with no better example of this permeating phenomenon, being the film’s soundtrack. Sonically, the soundtrack is irrefutably 80s-inspired - with lush synthesizers dominating the melodies - but, when the scintillating technics of the tracks are dialed back, the lyrics are overwhelmingly thematic and contextual to the given scene and character in focus. The most eye-widening example of this stark contrast, between hypnotic visuals/melodies, and gut-punching plotline/lyrics, is the scene in which Driver dons a silicone mask and calmly drives to Nino’s; the crime boss’; faux pizzeria, turned prostitution lounge, with the unwavering intention of killing him (1:24:43). The core sentiment of the song; Riz Ortolani’s operatic “Oh My Love”; overlaid atop the scene is rebirth, which, when contextualized, insinuates that Driver’s newly realized capacity for murder, will soon establish itself as a defining element of both his person and his story arc - his own rebirth, so to speak.

 

Juxtaposition

While it is extremely disconcerting to think of the paternal stunt-man able to calm his lady love’s child, as equally capable of cold-bloodedly killing a man within close-range, the film does indeed acclimatize its audience to the protagonist’s unnerving eagerness towards brutality, through things like fashion - a visual aid not just devoted to him. For the three central characters with the most observable moral compasses, Driver, the female lead Irene, and Irene’s lover Standard, there exists a dichotomy between their costume choices: one variety is simplistic, emblematic of the ordinarily mundane aspects of their lives, while the other, is so transparently and meticulously tailored to whatever their doings outside the realm of normalcy are. The most prolific example of this approach to ensemble, is our protagonist’s vintage athletic jacket adorned with the image of a scorpion, worn anytime he acts as an accessory to, or primary perpetrator of, a crime - it is absurdly flashy to foil his otherwise unnoticeable appearance, and additionally, it symbolizes his complete transformation into the sneaky, murderous alter ego he reserves for illegal affairs (1:30:00).

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Drive’s emotionally complex antagonists; California mob members Rose and Nino; boast appearances that too, address and illustrate some kind of contrast however, in this case the juxtaposition prevails between the two men: Rose dresses formally as his intellect is to account for his success as a criminal, whereas Nino is styled flamboyantly, to signify how his confidence is why he profits so, from the practice.

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Narrative Function

Refn additionally employs the element of setting, to communicate certain themes to the audience, as evident by the fact that where the characters are shot most frequently, is telling of what dynamic they lend to the plot and what their importance is to the overall story. For instance, Driver’s cars are not his own like his actions aren’t self-motivated, Irene’s apartment is endearing as she is a source of comfort, Nino’s pizzeria is a deception because he seldom honours his promises, Shannon’s auto shop is run-down as his efforts rarely reap rewards, and so on and so forth.

 

Unity

While Drive is flooded with intricate editing techniques; in gratitude to the masterful mind of Matthew Newman; inarguably the most effective, is the impactful inclusion of slow-motion when in scenes of immense importance, such as those which radically alter the course of the plot or perhaps mark a momentous change in a character’s motivations/foreseeable future. The film’s climax is skillfully drawn out, with the inciting incident objectively being the showdown between Driver and one of Nino’s accomplices in an elevator: as the protagonist curiously observes the stranger, he notices a concealed gun in his suit pocket and instinctively pushes Irene; who had also entered the elevator; behind him, passionately kissing her once she is safely concealed by his body (1:11:14). This sudden movement is slowed to an exhaustive halt and the lights dim around the tragically forbidden couple, alerting the audience that this sequence of events is absolutely revolutionary to the plot - which, an astute viewer would have already realized. In order to protect his love from the lethal assailant just inches to their right, Driver will have to unleash his full physical prowess, regardless of how violent or brutal the consequences, thereby irrevocably obliterating her idea of him, and thus, making this the couple’s final moment together; their farewell.

 

Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” is a hypnotically synthesized dreamscape comprised of craftily conceived sets, to which deeply complex characters clad in theme-richening ensembles go about their inconceivably eventful lives, in ways which all seem to converge in transcendental moments, made all the more breathtaking when slowed down to lucid lengths. It is a paradigm-filled powerhouse, whose very aesthetic contrasts its content; its central characters possess unpredictable multiplicities which mark their arcs as distinctly theirs, and allow them to boast specific storylines while simultaneously forming dynamics, so saturated in dichotomy, the only element which unifies them is how they are edited. As brightened by both narrative and stylistic techniques, Drive is comprised of an iridescent cast and sombre plot that seemingly move towards and against one another like watercolours, while still maintaining their individual lustres like acrylic paints: a juxtaposing masterpiece of violence and love; villainy and heroism.

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Sources:

Drive. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, performances by Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, 

theatrical cut, Bold Films, 2011.  

 

Khairy, Wael. “Film Analysis: ‘Drive’.” The Cinephile Fix, 17 Apr. 2012, 

cinephilefix.com/2012/04/17/987/. Accessed 3 Mar. 2020.  

 

Philosophy NSFW. “The movie ‘Drive’ [2011] as a metaphor for our psychological drives.” 

Medium, 4 Apr. 2016, www.medium.com/@Philosophy_NSFW/the-movie-drive-2011-as-a-metaphor-for-our-psychological-drives-cc868fbfb3cb. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020.  

 

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