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

[moon_custafer]

Nothing is more dated than a discredited psychological theory. There are a few SFF stories that would way more enjoyable if they didn’t include a bit in which someone, desperately casting about for a Natural Explanation for Events, invokes brainwashing, mass hysteria*, or neurosis.

*Even if they bring it up so the narrative can later prove them wrong, I still have to go through the “seriously, you think it’s more likely that you and fifty other people simultaneously had the same hallucination?!**” reaction.

**Like, I’m willing to call shenanigans in cases where one person reports a thing, and later others, who demonstrably had the opportunity to read/hear the original report, claim it also happened to them, in suspiciously identical wording. Sorry, this is getting off-topic.

[sovay]

Like, I’m willing to call shenanigans in cases where one person reports a thing, and later others, who demonstrably had the opportunity to read/hear the original report, claim it also happened to them, in suspiciously identical wording. Sorry, this is getting off-topic.

I'm not policing your topicality. My problem with the phrase "mass hysteria" is that I always hear it spoken by Robert Preston in "Ya Got Trouble," followed immediately by the line "Friends, the idle brain is the Devil's playground!" meaning that I have never been able to take it seriously as a sociological phenomenon as opposed to part of a catchy hard-sell scam.

[moon_custafer]

I suspect part of my brain hears it as Bill Murray saying “cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.”