What the mothers did, I didn't know

[sovay]

I almost did not purchase the revised and expanded edition of E. Ann Kaplan's Women in Film Noir (1978/1998) despite the fact that at this point I have kind of a moral obligation to read it because I opened first to an essay about lesbianism in The Haunting (1963) that was full of Freud and then an essay about Double Indemnity (1944) that was also full of Freud and the prospect of having to fling around serious consideration of Oedipal drama and castration anxiety in order to continue writing about film noir made me think maybe I should just take up stamp collecting instead, but then I found Richard Dyer's "Postscript: Women and Queers in Film Noir" which begins "Gilda seems unusual among films noirs for having as its hero an ordinary guy who also has a homosexual relationship" and closes "I'm inclined to believe that most culture works to hold the line of sexual differentiation, but not film noir, or at any rate, not always definitely" and I decided the book was worth its used trade paperback price, because that I can get behind. Kaplan's "The Place of Women in Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia" also looks good; she reads it as genre-savvy meta on the normal roles of women in film noir, for which I will forgive some overstatement and some points of interpretation on which I flatly disagree. The book's appendix is extremely valuable: a list of "Films with a central involvement of women," broken down into "Films involving women writers (but not central female characters)," "Films involving women writers or producers, and central female characters," and "Films involving central female characters (but not women writers)." It's not complete—I've seen examples not listed in all three categories—but it means people have been paying attention to this question for at least the last twenty years and maybe the last forty and really the last thing the field needs is me writing about these movies, but I happen to enjoy it. Also I don't talk about Freud all the time, so there's that.

Comments

[sovay]

The Haunting is film noir?

It's not! It's not at all! It's a black-and-white film with expressive cinematography shot several years after the end of the original noir cycle and it's thematically and tonally different no matter what. (I'm not saying you couldn't have a ghost noir, but I am saying The Haunting isn't it.) The essay doesn't even frame it with examples of lesbian representation in noir; it's linked to Rebecca (1940) and The Uninvited (1944), both squarely Gothics with optional haunting. I think it's included on general grounds of feminist film theory, but since the rest of the book is noir, eh. Plus Freud. I do like the line "in The Haunting we never see the ghost but we do see the lesbian."

[negothick]

Of course it's not film noir--nor is Rebecca or The Uninvited. But it's lucky that essay was published after Shirley Jackson died, or it would have killed her. In her final year, she called down curses (literally) on the author of a literary reference book who in a brief summary of Jackson's oeuvre, spent most of the words on an analysis of lesbianism, especially in The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson denied--but a Freudian would have loved the vehemence of her denial.

[sovay]

But it's lucky that essay was published after Shirley Jackson died, or it would have killed her. In her final year, she called down curses (literally) on the author of a literary reference book who in a brief summary of Jackson's oeuvre, spent most of the words on an analysis of lesbianism, especially in The Haunting of Hill House.

I suspect she would have been angrier with Nelson Gidding and Robert Wise, because whatever Jackson may or may not have put into the book, the lesbianism in the film of The Haunting is not debatable. I just object to it being discussed in terms of repression and identification and psychoanalytic readings of homosexuality, which badly obscure for me the actually decent point that Eleanor's experience of the haunting runs in parallel with her feelings toward Theo and Dr. Markway such that her final status at the end of the film can be read as a queer one, crossing her over into the Gothic position not of the girl who meets the house, but the housekeeper-companion-possessing-spirit (Mrs. Danvers, Mary Meredith etc.) who is part of the house and part of its queer female history. That hadn't occurred to me, because I had seen the house as entirely alternative to human relationships whatever their orientation, but Patricia White—the essay is "Female Spectator, Lesbian Spectre: The Haunting" if you're interested in finding it yourself—makes a plausible argument by comparison to the Gothic/ghost films previously mentioned. I just don't think you need twenty pages of Freud to say that, even in 1998! But this comes back to my feeling that trying to turn any of my film writing into articles or books is doomed, both because I would have to engage with this kind of scholarship and because I don't know from the relevant theory and then when I read it I think so much of it is beside the point. And I still do not know that I am saying anything that was not already said.

[alexxkay]

And I still do not know that I am saying anything that was not already said.

Nothing is completely original. Very few things are redundant. Context matters, and that is ever-changing. Art is worth making.

[sovay]

Context matters, and that is ever-changing. Art is worth making.

I think art is always worth making, but I feel much more confident on this ground with fiction and poetry. If I am saying nothing of new substance about film, I am not sure it matters how originally I say it.

[alexxkay]

Hypothetically, in the realm of Science, things of substance only need be discovered once. (Practically, of course, they must be verified more often.)

In the realm of Culture, a thing which has only been discovered once is almost by definition of little importance. It is the accumulation of many voices in concert that make -- and remake -- Culture.