Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
Erotic, Silent, Dead: The
concept of women in the
films of Stanley Kubrick
By Sabine Planka
Keywords: Stanley Kubrick,
women, gender roles, A
Clockwork Orange, The Shining,
Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut,
Introductory remarks
on Stanley Kubrick
Films and images which have a lasting effect
on the viewer, remaining engraved in his or her
memory, raising but never answering questions,
and sowing the seeds of doubt, but also of hope.
This is certainly a possible description for the
cinema of director Stanley Kubrick. Though he
only made thirteen films in his lifetime, these
films have had a considerable influence on sub-
52 | film international issue 58-59
Below Shelly Duvall in The Shining (1980)
sequent generations, be it because of the cho-
sen themes, the novel techniques, or the fact
that Kubrick devised a new approach to every
genre he used.
Stanley Kubrick can be described as a genius,
as a pedantic genius who fastidiously choreo-
graphed every scene, and sometimes demanded
up to 95 repetitions of single takes which would
last only a few seconds in the final version of
the film. It is not difficult to imagine that this
drove his actors to the brink of insanity, and
increased production costs many times over.
The films which eventually emerged, how-
ever, are distinguished by
• great sophistication in terms of both
technique and content,
• images of virtually unparalleled intensity,
• and the fact that they never take an
explicit stance on the chosen theme, but
leave the viewer perplexed and full of
questions.
Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
Kubrick’s films provide food for thought; they
point out conflicts and problems, highlight sen-
sitive issues with regard to society and social
conditions, and denounce. Kubrick, however,
always adroitly avoids taking sides, or taking a
stance. He presents, reveals and confronts.
The image of women
in Kubrick’s films
Both Kubrick’s characters in general and, in par-
ticular, the image of women which he repeat-
edly presents in his films, must be considered
in the light of this background information.
The characters presented to us as viewers
seldom inspire our sympathy; quite the con-
trary: we often feel repelled by the protagonists,
who, incidentally, are virtually always men.
Kubrick shows the viewer how men fail in a
world which they themselves have constructed
and in which they hold sway. However differ-
ent they may appear, the fates they succumb
to are strikingly similar, and become more so
the further the film genres drift apart: they all
fall victim to their obsessions, their appetites,
their thirst for power. We might mention, for
example, Barry Lyndon (Barry Lyndon [1975]), Bill
Harford (Eyes Wide Shut [1999]), or the politicians
from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor-
rying and Love the Bomb (1964). We witness their
self-inflicted failure with horror, and follow
their deeds, which claim not only strangers but
also their own family members as victims – for
example in The Shining (1980).
A similar picture emerges when it comes
to the women Kubrick presents in his films.
However different the women may seem at
first glance – we will see a few examples of this
shortly – they too all have similarities:
• they are victims in a world that is made,
ruled and dominated by men;
• they are often reduced to their sexuality,
presented as seductresses and – literally –
as fair game;
• and again and again they are linked with
violence, whether it be in war, in mar-
riage, on the street – women are always
surrounded by violence, usually male-
authored, and succumb or are in danger
of succumbing to it.
In the context of violence, always captured on
film in its most extreme brutality, it is strik-
ing that women are, in sharp contrast, nearly
always depicted as delicate, graceful figures.
As a viewer, one often feels – in spite of one-
self – the urge to intervene, to give a warning, to
protest at the filmic deployment of the female
body; and yet one is as helpless to change the
events on the screen as the women themselves,
who are unable to defend themselves against
the circumstances in which they are trapped.
The ‘deployment’ of
women in Kubrick’s films
To give a more nuanced presentation of the image
of women in the following discussion, I would like
to restrict myself to four of Kubrick’s films:
1. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
2. The Shining
3. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
4. Eyes Wide Shut
A Clockwork Orange
Taking a chronological approach, I will begin
with Kubrick’s work of 1971, A Clockwork Orange.
Its title points to the symbiosis between nature
and technology, a symbiosis which, according
to Donna Haraway’s essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’,
crosses boundaries and produces a cyborg.1
This concept, incidentally, includes the man
in the wheelchair often appearing in Kubrick’s
films, this being a man who is dependent on a
machine, who cannot live without his machine.
This defines the key question of this film, as
well as others: to what extent is it possible and
permissible to manipulate a person’s nature
without damaging his or her individuality and
personality? Or to put it differently: what power
is the state permitted to exert over the individ-
ual, and how much is it allowed to invade the
individual’s private sphere in order to protect
society? And when is a society worth protect-
ing?
Kubrick constructs the film around these
questions, yet once again offers no opinion
and leaves it up to the viewer to answer the
questions. Alex is the protagonist of a plot
constructed of two parts mirroring each other;
in the first part he is the perpetrator, leading
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Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
his gang of droogs and inciting them to new
crimes. The victims include a homeless man
and various women, who are reduced to their
physicality and thus objectified, serving purely
for sexual gratification.
Even in the opening sequence of the film we
see women becoming objects: in the Korova
Milk Bar, where Alex and his droogs are intro-
duced to the viewer, the tables and milk dis-
pensers are objectified female bodies made of
white plastic, with colourful wigs, whose artifi-
cial poses recall the bold Pop Art works of Andy
Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein.
The women in the bar are stiff, trapped in
immobility, and are as unable to defend them-
selves against abuse as Alex’s subsequent
female victims. ‘[In the bar, women] really have
become things, women, who can only be prey in
the outside world.’2
The first plot development is a fight over a girl
between the droogs and the Billy Boys, another
gang in this dystopian society. The fight ends
in a ferocious brawl. Here, too, women are not
women and individuals, but sexual objects of
men’s obscene lust and sexual gratification.
Pierre Bourdieu’s opinion that ‘the sexual act
is itself conceived in terms of the principle of
male primacy’ is illustrated very clearly here.
‘To possess sexually […] is to dominate in the
sense of subjecting to one’s power, but also to
54 | film international issue 58-59
Figure 1: Korova Milk Bar.
deceive, mislead, or, as we say, “to have”’ (Bor-
dieu 2001: 18, 19).3
After this fight Alex and his droogs attack a
writer, Mr Alexander, and his wife, raping the
wife in front of the writer, then carry on and
arrive at the house of the Cat Lady, a woman
who shares her house with cats and porno-
graphic art.
Unlike the previous women, who present
themselves both to the viewer and to men
as submissive and servile, the Cat Lady does
not seem to be one of those gullible creatures
who see a relationship with a man as the only
content of their lives. She lives alone, prac-
tises yoga, and seems to regard the world with
a suitable degree of scepticism. At least this is
the impression she gives the viewer when she
refuses to open the door to Alex and his droogs,
who pretend to have had a car accident. But
Alex gets in through the window and an inter-
esting fight between the two of them ensues,
ending with the Cat Lady’s death and Alex’s
arrest by the police.
This fight is not just man against woman; the
most notable aspect is the weapons they both
use. Alex’s predilection for Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony, which will be heard again and again
in the film, is reduced to absurdity here: the Cat
Lady seizes a bust of Beethoven to defend her-
self against Alex, who is attacking her with her
oversized sculpture of a phallus. Violence and
Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
sexuality are united here, and manifest them-
selves in extremely violent form.
Alex and the Cat Lady insist on their taste in
art, refuse to have ‘their’ art defiled, and try to
prevent their opponent from sullying their own
preferred art forms. It is not surprising, then,
that this results in an attack on the personality,
the personal taste, and the personal preferences
of the opponent, and that the struggle starts to
take on the character of psychological warfare.
It is a struggle between classical art and Pop
Art, linked with the struggle between man and
woman, which has negative consequences for
both sides – and it shows that neither classical
art nor Pop Art seems to have justification for
existing in this society, and that art, like women,
is functionalized. Women who have the courage
to rebel against male caprice and violence and
defend themselves come to regret their cour-
age and often pay for it, like the Cat Lady, with
their lives. She dies, and Alex, abandoned to the
approaching police by his cowardly droogs, is
accused of murder and put in prison.
In prison, he volunteers for the so-called
Ludovico programme, intended to turn crimi-
nals back into respectable members of society.
The programme, its name another reference
to Ludwig van Beethoven, is anything but
humane: Alex is shown endless scenes of vio-
lence, accompanied by Beethoven’s Ninth, while
taking medicine which induces nausea. View-
Figure 2: Alex vs. woman on the stage.
ing these scenes, one is instantly reminded of
Pavlov’s dog, conditioned to drool as soon as the
bell rang, without even seeing or smelling the
food.
When the conditioning is finished the suc-
cess of the therapy is demonstrated in front of
an audience, with Alex confronting violence in
various theatrically staged situations. Alongside
physical violence, which he can now neither
carry out nor defend himself against – this
eliminates human self-determination, bringing
up one of the key questions of the film – Alex is
confronted with a woman. Prior to his therapy,
he would have seen her as an object, an outlet
for his aggression, or as an instrument for his
sexual gratification. Now Alex cannot touch the
woman without being overcome by a terrible,
nearly irresistible nausea.
Aesthetically, the woman presented to the
viewer by Kubrick, and confronted by Alex,
corresponds to the typical image of women
deployed repeatedly by Kubrick in his films. She
also bears a striking resemblance to the plastic
dolls in the Korova Milk Bar, as she wears a wig
and strikes artificial poses, emphasizing the
impression of a theatrical performance. Artifi-
cial, cold blue light, and graceful, slow move-
ments accentuate the staged depiction of the
situation, and place the woman in the spotlight
of desire, of sexual gratification, showing that
women are not just deployed to satisfy men’s
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Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
desires, but also to serve the voyeurism of the
viewer – this, however, opens up an inexhaust-
ible line of argument which would overstretch
the limits of this analysis.
Here, too, she is deployed as a victim, but
one who suddenly rises to power since Alex is
unable to act out his former predilections. What
was once a source of pleasure now defeats him.
This marks the turning point of the film and
the transition to the second part: from now on
Alex is no longer a perpetrator, but a victim,
and can no longer carry out violence, but nor
can he defend himself against attacks. As a
result, Alex’s former victims, whom he encoun-
ters again in the mirror narrative of the second
part, take their revenge on him. Furthermore,
a debate about human self-determination and
the power of the state flares up, fuelled by the
media, the final result being that Alex’s condi-
tioning is reversed and he becomes his ‘old self’
again, as he stresses at the end of the film.
These words are given visual emphasis by
Alex, who can now indulge his lust and desire
again and has sex with a woman, surrounded
by spectators in Baroque clothing – an allusion
to Kubrick’s next film Barry Lyndon.
In contrast to the first part of the film, women
do not feature in the second part, which shows
Alex as a victim of society; apart from Alex’s
mother, they do not appear. One could even go
so far as to offer the interpretation that Alex, in
his helplessness and passivity, plays the female
role, representing the women who were unable to
avoid the role of victim in the first part of the film.
In the second part of the film Alex behaves like
the women in the first part: he pleads, and begs
to be spared, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. He
now experiences first-hand the violence which he
inflicted on his victims before his therapy.4
The film A Clockwork Orange shows women as
the victims of brutal male violence; either they
cannot resist it, or they resist and their cour-
age costs them their lives. At the same time it is
noticeable that women are turned into victims,
then go on to inflict mental suffering on other
victims, generally their men, as happens here
in the confrontation between Alex and the
‘dancer’.
The women are victimized by men, are shown
as having no will, or as losing the fight against
men, as being at men’s disposal; while men
see them as purely sexual beings – according
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to Simone de Beauvoir: ‘And she is simply what
man decrees; thus she is called “the sex”, by
which is meant that she appears essentially to
the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex –
absolute sex, no less’ (1997: 16).
It is thus men’s drives which bring about
women’s downfall, but which at the same time
keep manoeuvring men into dangerous situ-
ations5 – according to Laura Mulvey: ‘[Their]
erotic drives lead them into compromised situ-
ations. The power to subject another person to
the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristi-
cally is turned on to the woman as the object of
both’ (2011: 15).6
Both these things apply to Alex, who wishes to
force women into submission, and thus also sub-
jugates them to his gaze and therefore his power.
At the same time Kubrick manages to sub-
jugate women to the gaze of the viewer, since
the camera takes the point of view of one of the
intra-diegetic victims – Mr Alexander – who is
condemned to watch by Alex.
[Kubrick’s] skilful use of identification pro-
cesses and liberal use of subjective camera
from the point of view of the male protagonist
draw the spectators deeply into his position,
making them share his uneasy gaze. The
audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situ-
ation within the screen scene and diegesis
which parodies his own in cinema. (Mulvey
2011: 15)7
The women are either available to Alex as objects
to satisfy his lust, or they are deployed as poten-
tial victims in the context of state-sponsored
experiments, and thus also reduced to the status
of an object. This has not only been described by
Laura Mulvey,8 but also pointed out by Simone
de Beauvoir, when she constructs woman as ‘the
other’ from the point of view of and as the coun-
terpart of man: ‘[She] stands before man not as
a subject but as an object paradoxically endued
with subjectivity; she takes herself simultane-
ously as self and as other’ (1997: 727).
The Shining
In the majority of his films, Stanley Kubrick
depicted women as victims and decorative
accessories, exposed to men and their whims.
Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
The Shining is something of an exception, in that
two images of women are presented here.
This film also – like A Clockwork Orange before
it – probes boundaries: what happens when
people are left completely to themselves, with
no direct human contact with the outside
world? How do the relationships between these
people change? When does a person become
insane, and how does he or she deal with
insanity?
One of the women, Wendy, is present
throughout the film, and undergoes a transfor-
mation paralleling that of the protagonist, her
husband Jack. Her transformation also culmi-
nates in madness and hallucinations – so she is
not just hysterical, as the viewer may have sus-
pected for a long time – and yet she manages
to flee with her son Danny, thus breaking away
from her husband and, at the same time, from
the ‘all-powerful’ hotel.
The other woman to be seen in the film cor-
responds to the cliché of the sexually available
woman, always ready and willing to fulfil the
man’s desire, even encouraging him, through her
body language, to approach and possess her.
A short outline of the plot clarifies the posi-
tion of the two women. Wendy is the wife of
Jack, who takes a job as caretaker of the Over-
look Hotel in the mountains during its winter
closure. He is supposed to look after the hotel
during this period so that it can be reopened in
the spring. At the same time he plans to devote
himself to his writing and finish his novel. But
the job is ill-omened, and Kubrick hints from
the beginning that the family as such will not
survive the film. The hotel manager recounts
how the former caretaker Grady murdered his
family, the reason being so-called cabin fever,
caused by isolation and a lack of contact with
the outside world.
These events will be repeated: armed with
an axe, Jack will search for his wife and his son
Danny, and will try to kill them. Danny will have
to resort to a trick to outwit his father, leaving
him to freeze to death in the snow while the
boy flees with his mother.
All the protagonists increasingly come under
the influence of the house as the plot pro-
gresses. The father, previously full of enthusi-
asm at the prospect of being able to work on his
novel alongside the caretaker job, in this remote
location, deteriorates visibly. Caught in the spell
of the hotel, Jack has hallucinations; different
time periods are increasingly intermingled, the
past becomes the present, and the power of the
hotel becomes overwhelming. Jack’s physical
deterioration is reflected not only in his increas-
ingly lethargic/apathetic behaviour, but also in
changes in clothing: his clothes become more
and more colourless, until, after his death, he
unexpectedly reappears, beaming, in a black
and white photo dated 4 July 1921. The hotel
has triumphed over Jack and has well and truly
caught him in its spell for ever.
Things are different with Wendy. Initially
reduced to the role of mother and housewife
(Nelson 1984: 296) – clearly revealed at the
beginning of the film, where Wendy sits in the
kitchen with Danny – she is at pains to make
life in the hotel as comfortable as possible for
her family. As her husband’s condition dete-
riorates, she takes over more and more of his
caretaker job, which he is no longer capable of
carrying out. She looks after the heating sys-
tem, checks pipes, and maintains radio contact
with the outside world. And yet the hotel also
takes its toll on her: in her case the power of
the hotel is manifested in increasingly ‘Indian’
clothing, reflecting the history of the hotel,
which was built on an Indian burial site. This
opens another gateway for the irruption of the
fantastic; like the allusion to cabin fever and
Wendy’s earlier allusion to the Donner Party,
who perished in the mountains, this constantly
points to death, which lurks in the hotel. Along-
side these three elements, hinting at the events
which are to come, there is a fourth element
pointing to death: Danny’s ability to foresee
future events – he constantly sees streams of
red blood spilling out of a lift. All in all, the fam-
ily’s stay in the hotel is ill-starred.
The changes in Jack do not escape Wendy’s
attention, and when Danny appears in the hotel
hall, injured, she thinks that Jack is the culprit.
Like the Cat Lady, she defends herself: using a
baseball bat, she keeps Jack at a distance then
eventually knocks him down and locks him
into the pantry. A highly symbolic act in two
respects, firstly because baseball is, alongside
football, one of the Americans’ favourite sports,
secondly because the bat can be interpreted
as a phallus-like object, especially in the way
Wendy holds it in front of her. The phallus
which robs Jack of his masculine power in the
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house and – at least for a short while – puts him
in a passive position.9
Wendy defends herself and is briefly suc-
cessful, like the Cat Lady. And yet she differs
from her in one essential, but simple point: she
survives Jack’s madness, his violence, and his
delusional idea of killing her and Danny to keep
them with him in the hotel forever.
The other woman who seems to have sprung
from the hotel (or Jack’s imagination – we do
not know) is a woman of the type we have
frequently encountered already: graceful,
lascivious and willing to give herself to the
protagonist. As viewers, we are reminded of the
theatrical performance in A Clockwork Orange,
serving solely to exhibit the protagonist and to
show him his own misfortune.
Jack’s fantasy seems to be coming true:
the vision before him is not Wendy, with her
constant nagging (as he sees it), but a silent
creature who is willing to give herself to him.
The price, however, is high: the mirror reveals
to Jack that what he is holding in his arms is a
decaying corpse.
Interestingly, the construction of the corpse is
an exact reversal of Elisabeth Bronfen’s posi-
tion: ‘For if any discussion of death involves
masking the inevitability of human decompo-
sition, it does so by having recourse to beauty.
We invest in images of wholeness, purity and
the immaculate owing to our fear of dissolution
and decay’ (1992: 62).
58 | film international issue 58-59
Figure 3: Jack in the forbidden room, number 237.
Here the mirror seems to reveal the truth and
the depths of Jack’s psyche, which he has so far
been unable or unwilling to admit to himself.
It is the mirror which first shows Jack in his
entirety, and can thus be understood, borrow-
ing the terms of structural psychoanalysis, ‘as a
model for a theory of the subject which local-
izes the ego outside itself, in the externalized
body image’.10 At this moment Jack ‘recognizes’
himself in his entirety in the mirror, with all the
black depths of his psyche which he has hith-
erto succeeded in blocking out.
The beauty in his arms turns into a decaying
corpse smeared with excrement, who rises from
the bath and lies in Jack’s arms. Never have
life and death been closer than in this scene.11
A picture of horror, and surely not the fantasy
which Jack, in his greed, will have envisioned.
This also reveals the secret of the forbidden
room 237: it contains lust, temptation and
death. And in this respect it also echoes the typ-
ical horror motif of the gaze at the victim: Jack
becomes a monster simply through the gaze
at the picture presented to him – the naked
woman coming out of the bath (see Seeßlen
and Jung 2006: 39).
Here Jack himself becomes the victim of his
lust and his fantasy, and takes out his anger
over the thwarting of his desire on his wife and
son, who are planning their escape from the
hotel. At the same time, the destructive instinct
has gained the upper hand over Eros – but this
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cannot be discussed in any more detail here
(see Freud 1989: 17).
What is typical of the horror film, here, is
the man’s revenge on the women who have
rejected him (see Seeßlen and Jung 2006: 39).
Now that the unknown beauty has metamor-
phosed into a walking corpse, and Wendy (in
Jack’s eyes) into a ‘nagging pest’ who wants to
leave the hotel – something Jack cannot allow
to happen – the logic of the plot and the genre
dictate that Jack must want to take revenge and
restore his honour.
Jack responds to the fact that he has, in the
course of the action, lost his power over both
his wife and the woman in room 237, with a
burst of violence intended to re-establish his
authority. But Kubrick’s law, according to which
men are always the losers in their self-created
universe, means that he is doomed to failure.
Full Metal Jacket
The image of women offered to the viewer in
the film Full Metal Jacket, dramaturgically con-
structed in two parts, appears indirectly in the
first part through the words of the soldiers and
the instructor – and yet it is very much present.
The action of the first half of the film plays
out entirely in a hermetically sealed – and
thus, typically for Kubrick, isolated – space, the
training camp on Parris Island. There are no
women; Kubrick shows us a world full of men
who have lost their own individuality and are
being drilled into fighting machines. To reach
this end, all means are justified: uniformity
is achieved by the same haircut, obedience is
brought about by the psychological violence of
the drill instructor, Sergeant Hartmann (played,
incidentally, by the real Marine drill instruc-
tor R. Lee Ermey, whom Kubrick spontaneously
cast in this role). Virtually no sense of commu-
nity develops among the comrades-in-arms,
the only communal action is the hate-inspired
beating inflicted on an unathletic soldier who
later – as a kind of exploding fighting machine –
shoots his drill instructor and then himself.
Optically, there is no place for women in the
first part of the film – and yet they are there,
and not only in the words of the drill instructor
and the soldiers. Drill instructor Hartman not
only refers to his soldiers as ‘ladies’ in one roll
call, but also refers to their weapons as women.
Tonight, you pukes will sleep with your rifles!
You will give your rifle a girl’s name! Because
this is the only pussy you people are going to
get! Your days of finger-banging old Mary Jane
Rottencrotch through her pretty pink panties
are over! You’re married to this piece… this
weapon of iron and wood! And you will be
faithful!12
The weapon becomes a woman. A clever move
on Kubrick’s part, as it foreshadows the second
part of the film, which shows the Vietnam War
in the real world outside the training camp in
all its brutality, and in which a female sniper – a
Vietnamese girl – mercilessly takes aim at the
seasoned soldiers, and shoots them one by one,
killing or wounding them.
The rifle as woman takes on a double connotation:
• on the one hand, it remains a dangerous
weapon,
• on the other hand it becomes sexually
charged and stylized as men’s con-
stant, willing companion. ‘The sex act
is replaced [in this respect] by a sexual
charging of the act of killing’13 – carried
out with the sexualized weapon.
Drill instructor Hartman’s efforts are aimed at
diverting the
libido of his protégés from women to the sex-
ualized weapon: they have to take their rifles
to bed with them […] and give them women’s
names […]. In parallel, sex with women is
given negative connotations with the lyrics
of the songs which the soldiers have to sing
while marching, for example, ‘I don’t know
but I’ve been told, / Eskimo pussy is mighty
cold. […] I don’t want no teenage queen, / I
just want my M-14.’ Another strategic move
of Hartman’s is to have the recruits jog along,
singing together, as usual, but this time in
their underwear; they have to repeatedly grab
their crotch and intone: ‘This is my rifle, this
is my gun. / This is for fighting, this is for fun.’
The intention is not only to equate sex with
violence, but to have the recruits understand
their own bodies as weapons, so that they can
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no longer express their sexuality with any-
thing but acts of violence.14
The second part of the film plays out in the
real world of war and depicts the lives of the
soldiers in combat after the completion of their
training. Here Kubrick shows us what becomes
of this combination of weapon and woman
which has been held up to the men as an ideal.
In addition to the only woman to appear
here as a prostitute, offered to the soldiers by
her pimp, and thus again reduced to the status
of object, serving solely for sexual gratifica-
tion, the men are confronted with a sniper who
kills them one by one. The presumed sniper
turns out to be the combination of weapon
and woman which Kubrick had idealized for
the soldiers in the first part of the film. Except
that this time, the encounter is not erotically
exciting and sexually stimulating, but deadly.
‘The projections of the sexual and ethnic Other
coincide in the image of the female sniper,
culminating in a personification of the foreign-
land-as-woman, [i.e.] as a [foreign] place where
the American soldier has to prove his masculin-
ity.’15
Kubrick makes the sniper not just a woman,
but a Lolita-like, sexualized nymphet, combined
with the sexually-charged, deadly weapon.
Kubrick constructed his film in such a way
that the ‘soldierly man’ created in the first part
of the film, whose deconstruction began even
here, is carried on in the second part of the
film: ‘On Parris Island it became clear how the
boundaries of the “soldierly body” were drawn;
in Vietnam we see who has to pay the price for
this drawing of boundaries.’16
The confrontation with the armed woman
plunges the men into conflicts which they
initially seem ill-equipped to deal with in the
group. Shot and severely wounded, the girl begs
the soldiers to put an end to her misery, which,
after a lengthy hesitation, they do. But at what
price? Is it a victory of man over woman? Are
they overcoming their own fears? Are they dis-
engaging their consciences, or even crossing a
final threshold of compassion?
Kubrick breaks with typical film conventions
and does not show the viewer the dead girl.
This means that the men cannot define their
role as soldiers by means of the dead body. The
dead girl simply disappears, without drawing a
60 | film international issue 58-59
boundary between the living and the dead, in
such a way that masculinity is again called into
question.
The film ends with images of the soldiers
marching in step, holding their rifles in front
of them, phallus-like, and singing the Mickey
Mouse song. A retrograde step for civilization in
every respect, degraded to childish behaviour
and the acting out of primitive drives and feel-
ings.
It may be noted at this point that the women
in Kubrick’s films are increasingly objectified
and linked with violence until finally, in this
film, as part of their process of ‘disembodi-
ment’, they lose their status as subjects, and
are accorded the status of object.17 They merge
with the weapon itself and become the always-
available object par excellence. This status as
object can be equated with sexuality which is
linked with violence – or to borrow the words of
Tania Modleski: ‘In fantasies of war, sexuality is
manifested in violence’ (Modleski 1991, cited in
Greiner 1998: 171).
Eyes Wide Shut
Eyes Wide Shut, a film also constructed in two
parts, takes a less cautious approach to women
than the films discussed so far. No doubt this is
partly to do with the literary work on which it is
based, Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story (Traumno-
velle, 1925), which blurs the boundary between
reality and dream. This is therefore about a
dream, a notion which gives the whole film a
special status.18
This film also features two types of women,
who can be linked with the previous female
roles. On the one hand there are the women
who seduce, who serve the men sexually, and
satisfy their appetites and lusts. On the other
hand there are women who oppose the male-
constructed and male-controlled system.
The central event of the plot, which revolves
around the doctor Bill Harford, is a sex orgy. The
sexual fantasies of his wife Alice, revealing the
suppressed sexual desire existing alongside the
love which he had thought to be secure, trigger
a maelstrom of jealousy and lust in Bill, plung-
ing him into a nocturnal odyssey which takes
up the first part of the film. Meanwhile Alice
Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
carries on with ‘her’ life, little suspecting what
her confession has triggered.
Love and desire are united in Alice, and the
fantasy she reveals turns the previously predict-
able wife into an uncertain factor in Bill’s world,
a world which he had thought of as secure. His
world order is called into question by his wife’s
confession; it is she who causes Bill’s social as
well as sexual powerlessness, and calls into
question his role as a man.
Bill’s dream-like nocturnal odyssey is based
on this confession, and is shaped by his con-
frontation with sexual temptations which
exacerbate his obsessions and his ever-increas-
ing emotional turmoil. Men’s instability is
made very plain here: dreams and fantasies
are enough to trigger crises, and to destabilize
the male system. We encountered something
similar in Full Metal Jacket: the man who is able
to withstand the pressure to a certain point and
then, for trivial reasons, becomes an exploding
machine and turns ‘his’ woman, his weapon,
against the representative of power, his drill
instructor, and then against himself.
Under the influence of his wife’s fantasies,
Bill becomes entangled in his dreams and his
fear of losing control over his life and his drives.
The nocturnal orgy thus marks the climax
of Bill’s odyssey, though its purpose remains
unclear: is it a real component of a world which
will remain closed to the protagonist – thus
indicating a social loss of power – because he is
not one of the chosen participants? Or was it a
performance put on just for Bill, to bring home
to him his powerlessness and his ignorance?
Figure 4: Start of the orgy
However one may answer this question, this
is obviously a place where women have to play
the roles that men have envisaged for them
– which, incidentally, ties in again with Bour-
dieu’s concept of a society dominated by male
control. The following picture expresses this
most clearly.
Characterized by monotony and unifor-
mity, these gracefully depicted, almost other-
worldly women – to be found again and again
in Kubrick’s films – follow a ritual choreogra-
phy and the rhythm set by the ‘leader’ of the
orgy. The stick functions as a male instru-
ment of power, in the same way that the bone
from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) turns into a
tool of domination, and the rifle in Full Metal
Jacket serves men. The axe in The Shining is also
used by the man to compensate for his loss of
control. Women have to be controlled, and all
means to this end are justified.
The submissive, ‘obedient’ behaviour of the
women in Eyes Wide Shut continues as they fol-
low the command to choose men from among
the spectators and thus begin the orgy.
The depiction of this situation recalls the
scene shown earlier from A Clockwork Orange:
here too, women are embedded in a theatri-
cal situation, the artificial lighting casts an
almost supernatural light on the women. The
music, with its sacred-religious overtones, adds
to this situation, and emphasizes their almost
mechanical physicality, which is definitely the
centre of attention. It is interesting to note that
Kubrick chose models to play the women in this
scene, thus creating an almost unattainable
www.filmint.nu | 61
Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
image of femininity. Physical perfection thus
turns out to be a construct embedded in Bill’s
nocturnal odyssey, which seems to have ema-
nated from a dream itself.
The women’s individuality is unimportant:
wearing masks, their job is to satisfy men’s
drives and fulfil their wishes, in the system they
have created. The film positively relishes the
voyeuristic gaze of both the viewer within the
film and the viewer outside it: the women are
the centre of attention; the action is focused
on their status as objects. Women only become
objects under the gaze of others, or rather of
men.19
But this also recalls the scene shown from The
Shining, given that it is once again unclothed
women who are able to fulfil the desires of the –
still – clothed men.
The orgy that follows this scene has nothing
to do with feelings, but only with the satisfac-
tion of drives and the exercise of power and
control, coupled with a considerable dose of
voyeurism. Men and women look on, almost
bored, as other couples have sex; everything
seems artificial and constructed and yet men
always have control over what is happening. It
is a men’s system, in which women’s job is to
obey. Thus women are only accorded the role
of decorative, functional accessories: they are
attractive to look at, and have desirable bodies,
but under their masks, which direct attention to
their willing bodies, they remain silent, with no
will of their own, serve the men without hesita-
tion, and do anything they are ordered to do.
They are even prepared to sacrifice themselves
and die for the men.
But even in this context there is one woman
who dares to rebel against the system. Bill is
unmasked and exposed in front of all those
involved in the orgy. But a masked, unknown
woman sacrifices herself for him, puts herself
and her body on display, and thus seems to be
trying to carry out an act of ‘disembodiment’
such as we have already seen in Full Metal Jacket.
Here too, a woman presents herself as a
‘saviour’, opposing the power of men; in this
she resembles the Cat Lady and Wendy, each
of whom resists her personal adversary in her
own way. With varying degrees of success: the
Cat Lady’s courage costs her her life, Wendy
manages to flee, but is plagued by hallucina-
tions, and Bill’s masked saviour, who turns
62 | film international issue 58-59
against the system constructed and upheld by
men, and sacrifices herself in contravention of
the rules, also faces an uncertain fate.
The situation seems just as staged as the
whole orgy. Bill, as the only person without a
mask, has completely lost control. He is floating
in a void, his world has fallen apart completely,
while others have taken control of him. Bour-
dieu describes this type of man, who has lost
control and power over his life – and not only
that: his masculinity, which is supposed to con-
stitute his power, is no longer confirmed here
by other men. Normally, as Bourdieu explains,
women are associated with the private sphere,
while men operate in the public sphere (see
Bourdieu 2001: 31, 49, 51, 57); it is only here that
he becomes a real man. ‘A “real” man is some-
one who feels the need to rise to the challenge
of the opportunities available to him to increase
his honour by pursuing glory and distinction in
the public sphere’ (Bourdieu 2001: 51). Confir-
mation of this can only come from other real
men (51–52).
It is therefore not surprising that Bill, who
is, in public, a highly-regarded doctor, called
and consulted at all hours of the day and night,
and invited to the parties of his patients, must
therefore fail in this private space, and is not
able – indeed, not permitted – to receive any
acknowledgement. He has to fail here, so that
he can then be built up again in the private
sphere – and thus in the second part of the film
– by his wife, who stays outside power games
and therefore in the private sphere (Bourdieu
2001: 78–80).
The second part of the film, in contrast to the
first, takes place mainly during the day – a fur-
ther indication of the dream-like nature of Bill’s
nocturnal odyssey which he can escape during
the day, since he can, in a psychological sense,
control his drives (see Freud 1989). The women
who have rebelled against the male system are
now controlled again – for the benefit of men.
The daughter of the costume shop owner, who
rebelled against her father sexually in the first
part, is now ‘sold’ by him, the prostitute whom
Bill visited has disappeared, and the masked
woman seems to be dead, so she has also been
silenced. Women, the feminine, sexuality itself
is not only linked with violence and death, but
is also subordinated to men’s power and con-
trol.
Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
Those controlling the orgy exploit their power
to the full to make sure Bill is aware of his loss
of control. His loss of power is complete when
he finds his mask on the pillow next to his
sleeping wife.
Bill’s world is in pieces, and he confesses his
nocturnal excursion to Alice. Her reaction is
not what the viewer might expect in the light
of the female roles presented to us, and yet it
fits in with the masquerades which Kubrick
keeps showing us: it is Alice who tries to put
Bill’s world back together again, something he
is barely capable of himself. The heart-to-heart
talk is held in a toy shop, but does not bring
about the solution which they both desperately
need. Wishes, desires and clarity are all sup-
pressed in order to restore the image of the
happy family – at any price.
Alice grants Bill this wish: she takes the
initiative – this is what makes her so remark-
able – and takes on the leadership role in the
marriage for a time: she describes the events
as an adventure, a dream, which they have suc-
cessfully overcome, and offers Bill the chance to
regain control over his own world – his family.
Alice thus differs to some extent from
Kubrick’s previous women: she is able to restore
the man’s world, even if the only role assigned
to her in this world is that of the housewife –
which she seems to want to keep whatever the
price. Alice is contrasted with Bill: the more Bill
loses control, the more Alice gains ‘power’, until
she is ultimately in a position to restore Bill’s
world. In doing so she resumes her own ‘old’
role in this framework, that of an object next to
the man who has regained his old position of
dominance.
Kubrick’s women in the
context of the gender
discourse and society
Stanley Kubrick presents women to the viewer
in their status as objects, which has various
constituent elements. In the first instance it
is the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer which
reduces the female body to its status as object
and takes pleasure in its aesthetically portrayed
physicality. But it is also the gaze of the direc-
tor himself, portraying women as objects, using
the camera to draw attention to them, and
capturing them on film with the camera lens.
And thirdly, women are at the same time incor-
porated as objects into the narrative, with its
male-dominated concept of society.
This triple gaze has already been pointed
out in Mulvey’s writings on film: ‘Traditionally,
the woman displayed has functioned on two
levels: as erotic object for the characters within
the screen story, and as erotic object for the
spectator within the auditorium’ (Mulvey 2011:
11). According to Mulvey, the two levels can be
united in the man, with whom the viewer – who
is construed as masculine – can identify.
What emerges is that women increasingly
become objects – and above all objects of vio-
lence – in the course of Kubrick’s films, until
they merge with these objects and become
deadly weapons, machines, always available
and willing to serve men.20 In the last film,
Eyes Wide Shut, this mechanization of women
is overcome; instead, in a masculine fantasy,
woman has now assumed both the role which
men want her to take, that of willing sexual
playmate, and that of the woman who saves the
man’s social existence and forgives him.
At the same time, there is the fact that the
man sees himself as the subject, ruling on his
own: ‘He is very well pleased to remain the sov-
ereign subject, the absolute superior, the essen-
tial being; he refuses to accept his companion
as an equal in any concrete way’ (Beauvoir 1997:
726; see also Mulvey 2011: 12 [the man as ‘the
representative of power’]).
It comes as no surprise then, that Kubrick has
rebellious women, or those revolting against
the social system constructed by men, silenced
in his films. Kubrick thus shows us not just
blueprints for society, but blueprints for the
relationship between men and women, which
are constituted as men’s fantasies of their ideal
woman. Against the backdrop of these con-
structions of women, however, the men are
also shown as victims of themselves, defeated
by their self-created standards, dreams and
desires.
Perhaps one can even go so far as to say that
Kubrick plays with society’s ideas about men
and women. There is no denying the fact that
he always counterposes and contrasts men
and women, and points to the existing conflicts
between the sexes, and their differing ideas and
concepts of life. On the contrary: if one looks
at Bill and Alice, they seem to be happy in their
respective roles within the system, as long as
www.filmint.nu | 63
Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
The people shown within the films behave rather like rats
in a laboratory…
the system shows no cracks and can continue
to exist without attracting blame.
Yet Kubrick keeps coming back to these pain-
ful issues and shows what happens when the
cracks break open and the conflicts previously
concealed under the surface are exposed to the
light of day.
Both sexes find themselves vulnerable to
processes which they are not equipped to deal
with, and within which they must come to new
arrangements – or try with all their might to
continue to perform the roles prescribed by
society.
Conclusion
Stanley Kubrick confronts us as viewers with a
veritable human zoo. He throws the actors into
an experimental set-up, and leaves people to
their own devices in a hostile environment. It is
up to them to work out how to deal with them-
selves and their lives under hostile conditions,
or at least conditions which are unfavourable to
humans. Help is seldom at hand, and they are
frequently subjected to threats and attacks on
their lives.
Kubrick probes the limits of human life: what
is a person able and permitted to do in society if
s/he wants to lead a self-determined life? When
is it permissible to give help? Can one leave
people to deal with their desires and appetites
on their own? Or do we need a (state) authority
to protect people from themselves? And how
much would an authority of this kind be per-
mitted to invade people’s privacy?
Kubrick does not answer the questions, he
leaves it up to the viewer to form a judgement
about the scenarios shown. The result – the fact
that the viewer often assumes – indeed, has to
assume – the position of voyeur in this process
– is something Kubrick takes in his stride, in the
same neutral manner in which he created his
films.
The people shown within the films behave
rather like rats in a laboratory, imprisoned in
claustrophobic conditions and trapped in an
experimental set-up which they cannot escape.
Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was not
64 | film international issue 58-59
part of this analysis, but is definitely worth
quoting at this point: the little spaceship in the
endless expanse of the universe – and human
beings right in the middle of it, with no way out.
These people, no longer finding any ori-
entation in the systems they are faced with,
become so unpredictable in their actions that
the observing viewer never knows what will
happen next. Human beings are the object of
observation, and are confronted, by way of an
experiment, with their appetites and desires,
but also with dangers.
This is also the context in which Kubrick
locates the feminine in his films. Women
are instrumentalized, made into victims and
objects, and reduced to their sexuality. The goal:
to satisfy the appetites and desires of men – as
the references to Laura Mulvey have shown.
And if a woman, as object of desire, refuses
to satisfy these lusts, she is cold-bloodedly
removed.
Women are thus surrounded by violence;
indeed they positively seem to trigger it – and
all that without suspecting a thing. They barely
realize what is happening to them; on the con-
trary, they declare themselves satisfied with the
roles which are assigned to them. The theatri-
cally staged scenes make it particularly clear
that women are pawns in a game set up by
men.
And as is often the case in a game, so it is
here: women, as pawns, become stumbling
blocks and bring about men’s downfall. Men
become victims of their obsessions, their
drives – whether it be taking pleasure in acts of
violence (A Clockwork Orange), violence used to
restore their own authority and thus power (The
Shining), pleasure in killing in war (Full Metal
Jacket) or the satisfaction of sexual lust (Eyes
Wide Shut). Men must fail; they are rejected by
the women whom they desire and wish to pos-
sess and left to fend for themselves, and they
realize their own insufficiencies.
For Kubrick’s men, women are objects of
desire, they can trigger the downfall which the
men have chosen for themselves (A Clockwork
Orange). Increasingly, however, they put up a
fight (The Shining and Full Metal Jacket) and ulti-
Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead

Haraway, Donna (1991), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto:

mately they have developed to a point where
Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
they are able to restore a man’s system (Eyes
in the Late Twentieth Century’, Simians,
Wide Shut).
Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,
In Kubrick’s films the game only ever involves
London/New York: Routledge, pp. 149–81
men who are in control of the system, or men
and women. A woman on her own is never per- Kroll, Renate (ed.) (2002a), Metzler Lexikon
mitted to explore and try out an experimental Gender Studies – Geschlechterforschung: Ansätze
set-up designed especially for her. – Personen – Grundbegriffe, Stuttgart/Weimar:
But that would probably not fit into Kubrick’s Metzler.
image of a world made and dominated by men,
Kroll, Renate (2002b), ‘Spiegel/
a world which he denounces, and in which
Spiegelstadium’, Metzler Lexikon Gender
women are granted the role of victim, or in any
Studies – Geschlechterforschung: Ansätze –
case a background role…
Personen – Grundbegriffe, Stuttgart/Weimar:
Metzler, p. 374.
Contributor’s details
Lacan, Jaques (2002), ‘The Mirror Stage as
Sabine Planka studied German Studies,
Formative of the I Function – as Revealed in
Comparative Studies and Art History at the
Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits: A
University of Siegen. She wrote her MA thesis
Selection (trans. Bruce Fink; in collaboration
about James Bond title sequences and her
with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg), New
Ph.D. dissertation about oracles and the
York/London: W.W. Norton & Company, pp.
techniques of fortune tellers in film. She
3–9.
currently works at the University of Siegen.
Modleski, Tania (1991), Feminism Without
Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’
References
Age, London: Routledge.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1997), The Second Sex
Mulvey, Laura (2011), ‘Visual Pleasure and
(trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley), London:
Narrative Cinema’, Screen, http://www.screen.
Vintage Books.
oxfordjournals.org. Accessed 10 August 2011.
Bourdieu, Pierre (2001), Masculine Domination
Nelson, Thomas Allen (1984), Stanley Kubrick,
(trans. Richard Nice), Stanford, CA: Stanford
Munich: Heyne.
University Press.
Seeßlen, Georg and Jung, Fernand (2006),
Bronfen, Elisabeth (1992), Over her dead body:
Horror: Geschichte und Mythologie des
Death, femininity and the aesthetic, Manchester:
Horrorfilms, Marburg: Schüren.
Manchester University Press.
Seeßlen, Georg and Jung, Fernand (1999),
Burgess, Anthony (1996), A Clockwork Orange
Stanley Kubrick und seine Filme, Marburg:
(intro. Blake Morrison), London/New York, et
Schüren.
al.: Penguin, p. viii.
Freud, Sigmund (1989), ‘Dream-Interpretation
as an Illustration’, in James Strachey (ed. and
(Endnotes)
trans.), An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (intro.
Peter Gay), New York/London: W.W. Norton & 1 ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid
Company, pp. 38–46. of machine and organism, a creature of
social reality as well as a creature of fiction’
Freud, Sigmund (1999), The Interpretation of
(Haraway 1991: 149). ‘Late twentieth-century
Dreams (trans. Joyce Crick; intro. Ritchie
machines have made thoroughly ambiguous
Robertson), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
the difference between natural and artificial,
Greiner, Wilhelm (1998), Kino macht Körper: mind and body, self-developing and
Konstruktionen von Körperlichkeit im neueren externally designed, and many other
Hollywood-Film, Alfeld/Leine: Coppi-Verlag. distinctions that used to apply to organisms
and machines’ (152).

www.filmint.nu | 65
Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead
2 ‘[In der Bar] ist [die Frau] wirklich Ding
geworden, die Frau, die in der Welt draußen
nur Beute sein kann’ (Seeßlen and Jung 1999:
191).
3 In the following Bourdieu explains, that
‘[m]ale pleasure is, in part, enjoyment of
female pleasure, of the power to give
pleasure’ (20).
4 There are hints of this even in the first part
of the film: Alex’s name can be seen as a
short form of either Alexander or Alexandra,
especially as Alexandra is also a typical
Russian name and Burgess uses Russian in
the novel as the basis for the Nadsat
language, which contains many Russian
loanwords (see Burgess 1996: viii).
5 Here we can allow ourselves a brief glance
forward to Eyes Wide Shut, since it is Bill who
is eventually broken by his drives and
appetites, and begs his wife for mercy.
6 Although Mulvey is referring to heroes
presented by Alfred Hitchcock in his movies
– ‘His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic
order and the law’ – working for example as
a policeman (2011: 15).
7 Mulvey is actually referring to Hitchcock’s
way of integrating the spectators into his
movies, but his name can readily be replaced
by Stanley Kubrick’s. The process is similar.
8 ‘Woman then stands in patriarchal culture
as signifier for the male other, bound by a
symbolic order in which man can live out his
phantasies and obsessions through linguistic
command by imposing them on the silent
image of woman still tied to her place as
bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning’
(Mulvey 2011: 7). Women can clearly be
interpreted here as heteronomous objects;
they can hardly, if at all, escape the role
allocated to them.
9 See Bourdieu 2001: 19ff. According to
Bourdieu: ‘If the sexual relation appears as a
social relation of domination, this is because
it is constructed through the fundamental
principle of division between the active male
and the passive female and because this
principle creates, organizes, expresses and
directs desire – male desire as the desire for
66 | film international issue 58-59
possession, eroticized domination, and
female desire as the desire for masculine
domination, as eroticized subordination or
even, in the limiting case, as the eroticized
recognition of domination’ (21). The roles are
briefly reversed in The Shining: Wendy
exercises power which she does not want to
have. She seems desperate and cries, her
behaviour can thus be interpreted as the
desire for a strong man who fills the
traditional male role and guides her. At the
same time, Jack has to experience first-hand
what it is like to have his power taken away
from him by a woman, one who seems
extremely unstable. Under no circumstances
can he allow himself to be ‘emasculated’ and
disempowered by her.
10 ‘[A]ls Modell für eine Subjekttheorie, die
das Ich außerhalb seiner selbst, im
externalisierten Körper-Bild lokalisiert’
(‘Spiegel/Spiegelstadium’, in Kroll 2002b:
374). Jacques Lacan in particular, in his essay
‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I
Function – as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience’, addressed the role of the mirror
in the process of perceiving one’s own ego.
Through the fact that the child recognizes
itself in the mirror, it constitutes itself as a
subject, and situates itself in relation to the
world around it. ‘It is this moment that
decisively tips the whole of human
knowledge [savoir] into being mediated by
the other’s desire, constitutes its objects in
an abstract equivalence due to competition
from other people, and turns the I into an
apparatus to which every instinctual
pressure constitutes a danger, even if it
corresponds to a natural maturation process’
(Lacan 2002: 7).
11 Due to constraints of time and space, it is
unfortunately not possible to enlarge on the
close interlinking of the two drives Eros and
the death instinct. Both drives are well
established in the theory of drives, and thus
connected to the id. According to Freud there
are only these two instincts. ‘The aim of [the
Eros] is to establish ever greater unities and
to preserve them thus – in short, to bind
together’ (1989: 18). ‘[The] aim of the
[destructive instinct] is, on the contrary, to
Articles Erotic, Silent, Dead

undo connections and so to destroy things. of war to free himself from any femininity’
In the case of the destructive instinct we may [‘die Kriegserfahrung [nutzt], um sich von
suppose that its final aim is to lead what is jeder Weiblichkeit zu lösen’] (Greiner 1998:
living into an inorganic state. For this reason 163), and to banish it from his life, so that he
we also call it the death instinct’ (18). can become a ‘soldierly man’ (174ff.). It thus
seems utterly logical that women’s subject
12 Full Metal Jacket, 00:09:36 – 00:10:10.
status is taken away from them.
13 ‘[A]n die Stelle des Sexualaktes tritt
18 The psychological aspect of the dream
[insofern] eine sexuelle Aufladung des
cannot be analyzed at this point. A reference
Tötungsaktes.’ (See Greiner 1998: 174.)
to Freud’s Dream Interpretation must suffice.
14 ‘Libido seiner Schützlinge von der Frau auf For further information see Freud’s ‘Dream-
die sexualisierte Waffe: Sie müssen ihre Interpretation as an Illustration’ (Freud 1989:
Gewehre mit ins Bett nehmen […] und ihnen 38–46) and also The Interpretation of Dreams
Frauennamen geben […]. Parallel dazu wird (Freud 1999).
Sex mit Frauen negativ konnotiert durch
19 The house of the orgy can be incorporated
Liedtexte, die die Soldaten beim Marschieren
into this nocturnal, dream-like context as a
singen müssen, zum Beispiel: “I don’t know
place that can be understood in
but I’ve been told, / Eskimo pussy is mighty
psychological terms as id, as a place where
cold. […] I don’t want no teenage queen, / I
the drives gain the upper hand and are
just want my M-14.” Ein anderer Schachzug
enjoyed without inhibitions. It is fitting that
Hartmans besteht darin, daß die Rekruten,
Bill seeks out the place of libido and self-
wie so oft, gemeinsam singend im Trab
indulgence at night, when the ego can no
laufen – diesmal aber in Unterwäsche; sie
longer play an intermediary, regulating role
müssen sich dabei wiederholt an die
between the superego and the id. For more
Genitalien greifen und immer intonieren:
on this see Freud 1989.
“This is my rifle, this is my gun. / This is for
fighting, this is for fun.” Nicht nur soll Sex 20 Moreover, Elisabeth Bronfen explains the
mit Gewalt gleichgesetzt werden, die connection between femininity, sexuality
Rekruten sollen vielmehr auch den eigenen and death by describing the present of life
Körper als Waffe begreifen, so daß sich ihre made by the mother as a present of death
Sexualität nur noch in Gewaltakten äußern (see Bronfen 1992; esp. p. 66).
kann.’ (See Greiner 1998: 176–77.)
15 ‘Im Bild der Scharfschützin fallen die
Projektionen des sexuell und des ethnisch
Anderen zusammen und kulminieren in
einer Verkörperung des fremden-Landes-als-
Frau, [also] als [fremder] Ort, wo der
amerikanische Soldat seine Männlichkeit
beweisen muß.’ (See Greiner 1998: 181.)
16 ‘Auf Parris Island wurde deutlich, wie die
Grenzen des ‘soldatischen Körpers’ gezogen
werden; in Vietnam sieht man, auf wessen
Kosten diese Grenzziehung geht.’ (See
Greiner 1998: 181.)
17 That women in war films are accorded the
status of object per se, since they can be
dangerous to the man, the soldier, as
subjects, is also shown in Platoon (1986),
where the protagonist ‘uses the experience

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