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What the mothers did, I didn't know
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.
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Whatever else has been written, you have something to contribute based on your own perspective / analysis.
Your points of disagreement, to begin with, maybe? That's sometimes the tiny wisp that begins a massive endeavour -- like the small spiral that begins the yellow brick road...
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I enjoy your writing about these movies a lot!
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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."
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I think it will be! And it was in sufficiently nice shape for a used book that the clerk initially charged me the cover price before seeing the correct one penciled inside.
I enjoy your writing about these movies a lot!
Thank you! That matters.
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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.
Both excellent reasons! Besides which, you'll have your own take, which is generally fascinating and beautifully expressed, so you should indeed write about what you want to write about. And not talk about Freud all the time. (Unless you should want to.)
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*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.
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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.
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Well, if that's part of the Other, it's useful!
Whatever else has been written, you have something to contribute based on your own perspective / analysis.
Thank you. I hope so. The last essay in the book is Angela Martin's "'Gilda Didn't Do Any of Those Things You've Been Losing Sleep Over!': The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs," which I enjoyed immensely because its whole thesis is that not every female character in noir is a femme fatale, specifically examining the heroines of Laura (1944) and Gilda (1946) as popularly characterized femmes fatales that are no such thing, but also I feel I have nothing to write about now, because Martin noticed this situation in 1998 and the fact that I discovered it independently is irrelevant. I knew I couldn't have been the first person. It just took me until now to find the book and way too many critics of the last twenty years plainly haven't seen it either. I mean, I'm not going to stop writing. But I think if I had actually been in this field in any formal sense, I would have been expected to know from the start.
[edit] I am sorry to be so downbeat when you leave encouraging remarks about me and film writing. I had a traumatic experience of grad school (medical crash + bad advisor + department that took student drop-out as a sign of doing it right = me leaving with no PhD, no self-esteem, and life-altering health issues to this day) and even a dozen years later I have serious impostor syndrome and general gun-shyness. I do appreciate the support.
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They are! Like, I bounced off the application of a symbolic grid to Mildred Pierce (1945) and I disagree with the essay actually entitled "Women in Film Noir" because it is exactly the sort of dualism I think gets overstated most of the time and at the moment I am coping slightly with the fact that the last essay in the book is the sort of thing about non-fatale women in noir I was starting to think I might write, but the essay on Bound (1996)—which I never did get around to writing about—is terrific and I clearly need to read more Richard Dyer, because his analysis of Gilda (1946) is the sort of thing I would like to be able to write. I have not yet read, but am looking forward to the essay on Cat People (1942).
Besides which, you'll have your own take, which is generally fascinating and beautifully expressed, so you should indeed write about what you want to write about. And not talk about Freud all the time. (Unless you should want to.)
Thank you. I appreciate it. I am still going to try.
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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.
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There's nothing more galling than some damn person who swiped your idea years ago! ;-)
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Nothing is completely original. Very few things are redundant. Context matters, and that is ever-changing. Art is worth making.
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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.
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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.
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I'm sorry that a thing that should (in some alternate reality) have been about intellectual joy (though I mean has it ever actually been that? probably not) was a catastrophic trauma. That's an awful way to be wounded.
Just -- being a sort of shadow academic -- I don't have better language for saying "I value this work you're doing, and I think a larger audience of knowledgeable people would value it and engage in interesting discourse with you about it."
So, you know, that. But I don't actually mean that I think you should want academia itself. You've found a cool model in Patreon.
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Thank you. I loved what I did. It made me happy. I was told by my advisor that many people love things they aren't good at. I am not sure that holds the record for unforgivable things that have been said to me, but I think it's got to be up there.
Just -- being a sort of shadow academic -- I don't have better language for saying "I value this work you're doing, and I think a larger audience of knowledgeable people would value it and engage in interesting discourse with you about it.
I appreciate it. I would like to be able to make that happen, since my Patreon audience is forty-one paying customers and I assume about another dozen people read the posts on Dreamwidth as they go by. I'm just trying to explain that a bomb went off in my head and I'm sorry you got shrapnel; it's not a good return for support.