Screening the Dark Side

of Love
Screening the Dark Side
of Love
From Euro-Horror to
American Cinema

EDITED BY
K AREN A. RITZENHOFF AND K AREN RANDELL
SCREENING THE DARK SIDE OF LOVE
Copyright © Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-34154-8
All rights reserved.
Image rights: Lara Ostertag and Simon Paterson
(title photograph with Victoria Brant)
Excerpts from Ian Olney’s forthcoming book on Euro-Horror
(ISBN: 0–253–00648–1) are reprinted with permission of
Indiana University Press (pp.165–177 and 195–204).
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-34440-6 ISBN 978-1-137-09663-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137096630
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Screening the dark side of love : from Euro-horror to American cinema /
edited by Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell.
p. cm.
Most essays in this collection were presented at a 2010 biennial
conference, Film and History, held in Milwaukee, where “Love” was
the main theme.
ISBN 978–0–230–34154–8 (alk. paper)
1. Love in motion pictures—Congresses. 2. Women in motion
pictures—Congresses. 3. Sex in motion pictures—Congresses.
4. Sex role in motion pictures—Congresses. 5. Violence in
motion pictures—Congresses. I. Ritzenhoff, Karen A. II. Randell, Karen.
PN1995.9.L6S38 2012
791.43⬘6543—dc23 2012013044
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 For Michael, Jan, Dom, and Lea who show me the light side of love
(Karen A. Ritzenhoff)
For my daughter Vicky, who has taught me how to truly love and be loved
(Karen Randell)
Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell
Acknowledgments xxiii

1 The Whip and the Body: Sex, Violence, and Performative

Spectatorship in Euro-Horror S&M Cinema 1
Ian Olney
2 Re-imagining Censorship as “Reel” Mutilation: Why Not
Release a G-Rated Version of David Cronenberg’s Crash? 19
Janet S. Robinson
3 Antichrist: Lost Children, Love, and
the Fear of Excess 33
Terrie Waddell
4 Black Bucks and Don Juans: In the Cut’s
Seductive Mythologies of Race and Sex 47
Tiel Lundy
5 Mad Love: The Anxiety of Difference in the
Films of Lon Chaney Sr. 69
Karen Randell
6 Love, Crime, and Agatha Christie 83
Mark Aldridge
7 Monstrous Love: Oppression, Intimacy, and
Transformation in Mary Reilly (1996) 95
Cynthia J. Miller
viii Contents

8 Self-Mutilation and Dark Love in

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) and
Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) 109
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
9 Female Pleasure and Performance:
Masochism in Belle de Jour and Histoire d’O 131
Samm Deighan
10 “What’s in the Basket?”: Sexualized and Sexualizing
Violence in Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case 145
Lisa Cunningham
11 Blood and Bravado: Violence, Sex, and Spain in
Pedro Almodóvar’s film Matador 159
Meggie Morris
12 The Backhand of Backlash: Troubling
the Gender Politics of Domestic Violence Scenes
in Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys 169
Jenise Hudson
13 Fatal Attraction Redux? The Gender, Racial, and
Class Politics of Obsessed 181
Suzanne Leonard and Bailey Ray
14 The Idea of Love in the TV Serial Drama
In Treatment 197
Christine Lang
15 Fucking Machines: High-Tech Bodies
in Pornography 211
Sarah Schaschek

Bibliography 225
List of Contributors 237
Index 241
Illustrations

4.1 City graffiti. 49

4.2 “It started to snow . . .” 54
4.3 Frannie awakes as the legs are severed. 56
4.4 Cornelius’s face is veiled in shadow. 59
4.5 Cornelius’s bruised face. 60
4.6 Cornelius’s rage turns to violence. 60
4.7 Frannie is forced onto the bed. 61
8.1 Erika stabs herself with a kitchen knife in the final
scene of the film. She refuses to perform. 110
8.2 Nina bleeds from a self-inflicted wound at the end
of her performance. 110
8.3 The black swan has grown wings in her own
imagination that burst out of her upper torso. 111
8.4 Nina’s mother undresses her in front of a mirror
when she comes home. 112
8.5 Nina passionately kisses the artistic director
Thomas Leroy after she has transformed herself
into the black swan. 113
8.6 The mother cuts Nina’s fingernails
in the bathroom. 113
8.7 The music student Walter reads a letter
from his piano teacher instructing him
to perform sadistic acts of punishment. 115
x Illustr ations

8.8 Erika watches porn; she is surrounded

by disapproving men. 116
8.9 Erika harms herself in the bathroom.
“Coming, Mama.” 117
8.10 The elderly mother controls every aspect
of her daughter’s life. 118
8.11 Nina tries to strangle her alter ego. 122
8.12 Nina (this time in the costume of the white swan)
kills her black swan alter ego Lily with the pointed
shard from a broken mirror, shattering her identity. 123
Preface
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
and Karen Randell

While explicit depictions of sex in any medium challenge traditional

social mores, film uniquely allows viewers to voyeuristically participate
and derive pleasure from the desire, pain, and excitement featured on
screen. We have increasingly become a voyeuristic society, honing our
skills in theaters by watching televisions, and now through sitting in front
of our computer screens. We are fascinated by sex, and mesmerized by it
once it enters the realm of the moving image. Throughout the history of
film, sex has been censored, banned, protested, and condemned, and yet
we are bombarded by sexual imagery every day.
—Museum of Sex, NYC, Sex and the Moving Image, 2012

Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema is a

collection of essays that engage with film and television texts where notions
of sexual pleasure/displeasure, power/powerlessness, form the central focus
of the narrative. Obsession, passion, fixation, perversion, jealousy, deviance,
pain, desire, madness—the “dark side of love” is a dangerous alternative
notion to the softness, enchantment, and heartache of romantic love. Love
is at the center of every page of this book, but romantic love is low on the
agenda of the films and television programs discussed here; rather it is the
notion of transgression, violence, eroticism, power, and play that makes up
the dark themes of love explored in this collection. In many of the chapters,
sexual attraction gives rise to oppressive power roles based on gender and on
the female’s individual identity, which is split between erotic expectations
and personal aspirations. Dark love is also the realm where gender transgres-
sions are imagined and practiced. Tensions arise between the roles we are all
expected to play in a relationship as well as in society at large. How do we see
ourselves? This is one of the reasons we chose the mirror image of a young
woman, reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), for the front
xii Preface

cover of this book. Her quizzical stare and the touch of her hand, to her
reflection, suggests a search for herself, of wanting to know; she is leaning in
as if to find the answers in her “other” image.
Thus Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-Horror to American
Cinema engages with this notion of the screened other, and as Linda Williams
points out, screening sexuality both “reveals and conceals” the sexual act and
the sexual self (2008). Several of the authors look at nonconformist “dark”
types of “love making”: sadism in horror film (Ian Olney), pornography
(Sarah Schaschek), or those scenes from independent filmmakers such as
David Cronenberg (Janet S. Robinson) or Lars von Trier (Terrie Waddell)
that were either edited out due to censorship before the release or cut to secure
a more marketable rating. The collection also asks questions of screened sexu-
ality in the twenty-first century: is it transgressive and violent behavior when
husband and wife in Cronenberg’s film Crash (1996) have anal sex, or is this
no longer stigmatized in the mainstream or considered potentially criminal
sodomy? Is the real sexual revolution not the invention of the pill in the early
1960s, which allowed women to have multiple intimate partners without
risking pregnancy, but a less obvious sexual revolution that has taken place
in the bedroom between consenting adults (Turner 2010)? Did the sexual
revolution take place as subsequent generations removed taboos regarding the
stigmatization of the body and removed their socially and culturally imposed
significance? This collection celebrates and challenges these representations
that are possible within the cinematic space.
One of the many questions raised by our contributors is how women
either object, consent, or are coerced to follow the dark side of love and how
sex signifies an act of love that elicits enjoyment or pain, or both, when sex
is commonly paired with violence in film (Ritzenhoff 2010, 2012). Why
do audiences worldwide take pleasure in watching women being violated to
gratify male desire? Why is sexual violence against women, children, and
men still considered entertaining and profitable? Linda Williams has argued
that “sex is rarely just repressed or liberated; it is just as often incited and
stimulated and nowhere more so than the media. Perversions are ‘implanted’
by the very same discourses that may seek to control them” (2008, 13). The
explorations in this book point to this ambivalent relationship to sex—par-
ticularly regarding women—taken by the media. While many mainstream
movies are displays of excessive rites of masculinity and the lengthy depic-
tion of male crisis, this book attracts attention to the fact that women are
rarely seen in cinematic roles where anybody pays attention to their pleasure
in sex or their physical needs (Cavanah and Venning 2010).
The recent American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
by director David Fincher is an example of this new focus. The film features
many explicit scenes of physical abuse, torture, violence against women and
 Preface xiii

men, mutilation, rape, pornography, and sex, with ample female frontal
nudity (King and Smith 2012). Contrary to the original movie poster in the
United States where a close-up of Lisbeth Salander’s head in profile is super-
imposed with Blomkvist’s figure, the poster for Fincher’s film in Sweden told
a different story. When the American adaptation was released for Swedish
audiences, the actor Daniel Craig (as Mikael Blomkvist) is shown embrac-
ing “the Girl” (Rooney Mara) with a protective hug, while she stands bare
chested in front of him, wearing only a tight-fitting pair of jeans, unbuttoned
on top. Not only does the poster suggest female frontal nudity and have an
aura of sexual temptation, but the male arm around Salander’s shoulders is
a stereotypical gesture of male dominance in a romantic relationship. Given
the fact that “the Girl” is depicted, especially in the first book, as being
autonomous and refusing male protection, this poster seems to undermine
one of the key messages of the original novel as well as Swedish film adapta-
tions. Audiences in Sweden found the marketing message of the American
poster offensive, as it feeds off mainstream stock images of heterosexual
romance. In addition to the embrace, Mara’s pierced nipples can be seen. In
some of the posters, the date of the release on December 23, 2011, is super-
imposed on the actress’s bare chest. The unbuttoned jeans clearly signify
more than a professional work relationship.
One key scene shows an act of revenge abuse in which Salander enters the
apartment of her legal guardian, Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen),
and rapes him anally with a sex toy after he has been stripped naked on
the floor and tied to his bed; she uses new tools of punishment (a Taser,
surveillance video cameras, tattoo equipment). The question is whether
these visual depictions of inflicted pain, even though they take place in the
guardian’s bedroom, can be described as an example of representing the
dark side of love or not. Moreover, the fact that anal sex is “normalized” by
being shown in a mainstream movie that is geared to a large global audience
indicates the naturalization of sexual practices that were deemed criminal
several decades ago.
The fact that desire, violence, and love are present in many recent movies
is apparent in the latest films by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar (The
Skin I Live In, 2011); Canadian director David Cronenberg (A Dangerous
Method, 2011); Danish director Lars von Trier (Melancholia, 2011); and
the different film adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s international hit trilogy,
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Swedish and American directors. This
collection and its representations of dark and dangerous love is published
as an increase in mainstream entertainment films that graphically depict
sexual violence against women continue to gain rave reviews from critics.1
For instance, the road trip movie Jolene (2008), which shows the period of
a young woman’s life between the ages of 15 to 25, during which she gets
xiv Preface

married three times to three very different kinds of men. All her relation-
ships end tragically. Even in the twenty-first century, marriage is depicted as
being her only option to avoid poverty and homelessness, and each one ends
in destruction, pulling her male partners into desolation as well.
Yet Jolene (Jessica Chastain) walks away from intense abuse and violence
seemingly intact. This film presents a tamer Hollywood version of The Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo because it is filled with clichés and predictable gender
roles. Jolene is seduced by the slick uncle of her first teenage husband, then
abused by a lesbian ward in an insane asylum; she escapes the institution
with her female lover and meets the subsequent male catastrophe, a heroin
dealer who owns a tattoo shop. The next destination on her road trip is Las
Vegas, where she first makes a living as a pole dancer and then hooks up
with a wealthy mafia boss whose assassination ends her luxurious lifestyle.
Her only creative gratification is her expression as an artist, which she strug-
gles to practice and is allowed to develop merely as an aside after her prin-
cipal sexual role has been fulfilled in each relationship. Her final stop is the
dysfunctional and abusive marriage to a bigoted, rich psychopath. Similar
to Lisbeth Salander, she experiences different state institutions and criminal
activities but walks away unscathed. The message of Jolene seems to be that
no matter how badly women are treated, they will recover and survive; the
possession of her beauty and her sexuality are a means of redemption for the
men who desire her. Such films depicting the dark side of love often seem to
suggest that violence against women can be overcome.
Another recent film that explores this dark theme but offers resolution
is David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011), which established the
correlation between pain and pleasure and continues the Freudian obses-
sion with castration anxiety and penis envy. In this particular film, the
female protagonist is “cured” from her hysterical psychosis by being hit
in the bedroom, and she completes her “healing” process once she no
longer seeks spanking from her psychotherapist and lover Carl Jung. In
the end, she becomes herself a doctor of psychoanalysis, marries a “kind”
Russian husband, and is pregnant with a baby girl. The film suggests
that her desire for violence ceases once she has experienced her fantasy of
submission to a male, domineering, fatherlike figure: this acting out
of childhood trauma reminds her of being punished as a child, eliciting
sexual stimulation that she used to feel ashamed of. Her cure is living
through the memory, being able to talk about it in therapy, and the essen-
tialist notion of motherhood; it feels like a retrograde move for the expres-
sion of female sexuality.
One of the most provocative films of 2011 is Pedro Almodóvar’s The
Skin I Live In, which constructs an appalling tale of gender transformations.
It features Antonio Banderas in the role of an erotically obsessed plastic
 Preface xv

surgeon who overcomes the grief of his wife’s suicide by artificially creating a
remake of her, altering the sex and skin of a young man. Aided by his former
surgical team, the doctor performs a sex change and then keeps the vic-
tim captive, observing her every move on different video screens, monitored
also by his housekeeper. Apart from the violence of repeatedly performing
nonconsensual surgery, there is a whole other level of violence, particularly
toward women, including those artificially produced, who are habitually
subjected to it. The surgically constructed and reassigned sex is repeatedly
abused because the artificial woman is raped not only by her captor but
also by a house invader. Almodóvar represents the frequent rape scenes in
great detail. The backstory for the drama is the fact that the former young
man was the rapist of the surgeon’s mentally unstable daughter who then
committed suicide (like her mother had done earlier). This seems to suggest
that only death can allow women to avoid violence, either by killing them-
selves or by assassinating their abusers. In the twisted logic of Almodóvar’s
film, the transsexual character seems to encourage a heterosexual romantic
relationship with the physician and seemingly desires vaginal intercourse.
It is only later in the film when the relationship is further explained that
this form of intimacy becomes grotesque, because the doctor surgically con-
structed the orifice that he now invades.
This twist of the film’s narrative is astonishing. It pushes the exploration
of sexual activity in cinema to an extreme because Almodóvar also shows
in great detail what the victim of the sex change operation needs to do to
maintain her newly built vagina. Even though documentaries such as Gwen
Haworth’s 2007 autobiographical film She’s a Girl I Knew explain in empa-
thetic detail some of the same issues of male-to-female transsexuality and the
physical changes that occur, the Almodóvar movie version seems exploitative
and bizarre in comparison. He transposes this topic on gender, sexual identity,
and pleasure to excess because it is only when the transsexual character kills
his captor that true liberty can be achieved. The role of the transsexual is not
played by the same actor (as was “Bree” by Felicity Huffman in TransAmerica)
but by two actors, a man and a woman: Vera Cruz as “Elena” plays the trans-
formed character of “Vicente” (Jan Cornet). Almodóvar’s film demonstrates
the way that current directors are engaging with a changing landscape of
sexual heteronormativity as well as gender and sexuality by imagining ever
more grotesque variations of the theme on the dark side of love.
Almodóvar’s film demonstrates, however, the fact that gender roles are
increasingly ambiguous and are in constant flux. Even the physical appear-
ance of women changes as body culture and body chiseling in Western
societies are turning into a mainstream pastime. As women of all ages are
streaming into the gyms, and as new places for yoga, pilates, zumba, step,
and spin open up across the United States and Europe, it raises the question
xvi Preface

of whether women are more in touch with their body and their body image
in 2012 than ever before. Have gender roles between couples in modern soci-
ety changed in the advent of women entering the workforce and attempting
to break the glass ceiling of formerly male-dominated jobs? How could this
have affected the way humans interact, especially in the bedroom? This col-
lection engages with these issues but also with a phenomenon that is other-
wise underrepresented on screen: the fact that women actively seek sexual
pleasure from their bodies both with and without partners—but that ulti-
mately they fail. Directors Michael Haneke and Darren Aronofsky’s films
particularly problematize this issue with their inclusion of women punishing
themselves by cutting their genitals and abdomen while discovering their
own sexuality (see Karen A. Ritzenhoff, chapter 8), suggesting that for some
filmmakers, women’s attitudes toward their vaginas and indeed their sexual
desires are still colonized by male expectations.
The topic, Screening the Dark Side of Love, was met with an enthusiastic
response when the call for papers went out as part of the 2010 biennial
Film & History conference in Milwaukee where “love” was the main theme.
Most essays in this collection have been presented at that gathering; some
were co-opted from other sessions because they fit our special focus well. In
this collection we provide a broad spectrum of films that span European,
Asian, and American mainstream, independent, art, and experimental
cinema across different time periods. Some of the essays engage with his-
torical material (Karen Randell, Cynthia Miller, and Mark Aldridge), and
some classics such as Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1968) are combined with
more contemporary themes of transgender issues, surfacing in the work of
European cinema such as Almodóvar’s latest 2011 release (Samm Deighan,
Tiel Lundy, Suzanne Leonard and Bailey Ray, and Lisa Cunningham).
In chapter 1, “The Whip and the Body: Sex, Violence, and Performative
Spectatorship in Euro-Horror S&M Cinema,” Ian Olney argues that two
Euro-horror S&M movies, Mario Bava’s La frusta e il corpo (The Whip and
the Body, 1963), an example of straight S&M horror, and Jess Franco’s
Sadomania: Hölle der Lust (Sadomania, 1981), an example of queer S&M
horror, both “challenge established modes of sex and gender representation,
exhibiting bodies that subvert or defy traditional categories of sex and gen-
der.” The narrative structures, he argues, allow for multiple viewer positions
in ways that mainstream film prevents. The ability to “try on” different
subjective positions renders these Euro-horror S&M films playful and thus
exposes what Olney suggests is a “bright side” to the dark side of love.
Janet S. Robinson’s discussion of Crash (1996) in chapter 2, “Re-imagining
Censorship as ‘Reel’ Mutilation: Why Not Release a G-Rated Version of
David Cronenberg’s Crash?” focuses on the ways in which censorship codes
struggle with the notion of transgressive sexual practice. Her chapter seeks
 Preface xvii

to examine what the critical and social response to the release of Crash can
tell us about the consequences of censorship. Much of the criticism focuses
on female desire and “specifically female desire for transgressive sex,” and
Robinson argues that the censorship of these scenes erases transgressive
female desire from the mainstream. Similarly, in chapter 3, “Antichrist: Lost
Children, Love, and the Fear of Excess,” female transgression is explored
by Terrie Waddell in her analysis of Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist (2009),
which depicts the complicated relationship between husband and wife, who
are also male doctor and female patient. Waddell argues that the narrative of
female angst and inwardly turned grief is colored by her own subjective posi-
tion as an Australian and the lost child narrative that endures within that
culture. In Antichrist, love is associated with loss and guilt that results in self-
harm and mutilation in an attempt to work through the pain of separation
of the lost child. Waddell argues that this disturbing film is imbued with
von Trier’s own depression that found a cathartic release in unraveling the
complex psychological distress of She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whose char-
acter is trapped by a “retarding force that has no reality beyond her psyche.”
In chapter 4, “Black Bucks and Don Juans: In the Cut’s Seductive
Mythologies of Race and Sex,” Tiel Lundy argues that while In the Cut
provides a fascinating investigation and deconstruction of the subjectivity
of women and the influential role of the Hollywood romance genre, it fails
to negotiate the “mythic topos” that “grew out of the American South’s
post–Civil War racial anxieties,” instead presenting black male sexuality as
violent and dangerous to white women, echoing the problematic depictions
in The Birth of a Nation (Griffith 1915) nearly 100 years ago. In the Cut,
Lundy argues, “demands greater scrutiny of the complex relation it bears
to its racialized mythmaking past and the legacy it inspires.” Historical
precedents are also discussed in Karen Randell’s analysis of the monstrous
performances of Lon Chaney Sr., in chapter 5, “Mad Love: The Anxiety
of Difference in the Films of Lon Chaney Sr.” Here the dark side of love is
inflected by physical disability and the cultural expectations of those living
with difference and their (non)engagement in sexual activity and relation-
ships. Randell explores Chaney’s performance in relation to his 1920s films
and their propinquity to the aftermath of the First World War. Randell
argues that the sexual activity of the disabled and “deformed” was a con-
temporary anxiety made more complex by the presence of so many veteran
“heroes” returning from war and that the notion of disability and the “mon-
strous” was prevalent (a theme picked up again in chapter 7).
Mark Aldridge discusses the ambivalent relationship to love and sexual
activity by Agatha Christie and the ways in which adaptations of her work
rely on narratives of love (gone bad) to drive the plot. In chapter 6, “Love,
Crime, and Agatha Christie,” Aldridge argues that throughout the history
xviii Preface

of her film and television adaptations, the dark side of love has been used
as a “key theme and motivator” in ways that Christie did not imagine in
her original published mysteries. Aldridge analyzes key films and television
series to develop his argument that the dark side of love is used as much as
a marketing tool for Christie’s screened work as it is a plot development. In
chapter 7, “Monstrous Love: Oppression, Intimacy, and Transformation in
Mary Reilly (1996),” Cynthia Miller explores, like Randell, “monstrous love”
in the shape of Mr. Hyde. Drawing on ideas from gothic horror, she sees
the narrative use of passion, intimacy, devotion, and sacrifice as being inex-
tricably linked to the notion of the monster. Placing her analysis within a
cultural critique of Victorian society, Miller sees the intense story contained
within a veneer of propriety, keeping passions, terrors, ambitions, and curi-
osities submerged.
Karen A. Ritzenhoff analyzes issues of self-harm and repressed sexuality
in chapter 8, “Self-Mutilation and Dark Love in Darren Aronofsky’s Black
Swan (2010) and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001).” Here both
characters exhibit masochist tendencies and “explore the carnal and destruc-
tive power of sexuality” in the pursuit of their sexual being. Hence, the
dark side of love is equivalent to a repressed, nonconformist sexuality that is
deemed fatal to the woman when released. Similarly, in chapter 9, “Female
Pleasure and Performance: Masochism in Belle de Jour (1967) and Histoire
d’O” (1970), Samm Deighan explores the representation of female desire in
these two European films, which she describes as free-for-all eroticism and
exploitation cinema. These films, she argues, still have much to say about
gender politics, not least of all to assess whether the representation of female
desire has evolved in the 30 years since their release. And as Ritzenhoff
finds in her analysis of The Piano Teacher, such notions of sadomasochism
allow sexual expression, but this choice is problematized by other patriarchal
forces within the societal structure. Likewise, Deighan asks of her focus
films, “Is there a way to interpret female pleasure independent of male desire
within the context of these films?”
In chapter 10, “‘What’s In the Basket?’: Sexualized and Sexualizing
Violence in Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case,” Lisa Cunningham discusses
Henenlotter’s construction of gender performance in Basket Case, which cre-
ates its main characters—Belial and Duane Bradleys—as separated, origi-
nally conjoined twins who “represent half of a single cohesive male-sexed
psyche.” The film, Cunningham argues, explores the dark side of sibling
love, where what is often considered a natural bond between twins becomes
psychotic, resulting in a monstrous and violent sexuality. Meggie Morris
discusses the dark themes of masculine sexuality in chapter 11, “Blood and
Bravado: Violence, Sex, and Spain in Pedro Almodóvar’s film Matador
(1986),” where her argument focuses on the ways in which Almodóvar’s film
 Preface xix

both embrace traditional Spanish culture, such as the bullfight, while draw-
ing out the potential to explore gender roles, sexuality, and performance. Her
analysis draws on the sexual parallels between a former celebrity bullfighter-
turned-instructor Diego Montes (Nacho Martinez) and the defense lawyer
Maria Cardenal (Assumpta Serna). The film engages with the dark theme of
obsession and the relationship between sex and death, and Almodóvar plays
with the notion of pursuer (bullfighter) and pursued (bull) in his gender
battle which ends in the ultimate sexual climax.
Bringing the dark side of love and violence closer to home, Jenise Hudson
discusses the ambivalent oeuvre by black American director Tyler Perry who
contrasts the female desire of strong, professional black women with the
violent response of their male black partners in chapter 12, “The Backhand
of Backlash: Troubling the Gender Politics of Domestic Violence Scenes
in Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys.” Here Hudson endeavors to expose
the high stakes of the film’s misogynist narratives on black female viewers
and explores the “couch chauvinism” that she sees in “ostensible narratives
of wholesome, (hetero)normative family values.” She argues that insidious
domestic violence as seen in Family needs to be exposed and discussed to
enable “urgently needed conversations between African American men and
women on how to constructively deal with each other.”
Suzanne Leonard and Bailey Ray explore the racial, class, and gender
politics in Obsessed (2009), directed by Steve Shill, a remake of the classic
horror film about marital infidelity, Fatal Attraction (1987). They describe
in chapter 13, “Fatal Attraction Redux? The Gender, Racial, and Class
Politics in Obsessed,” how the paradigms of the conflict are shifted when the
man who is pursued is not Caucasian but African-American. Derek Charles
(Idris Elba) is a successful businessman in a private investment firm in Los
Angeles, happily married to his former office assistant Sharon (Beyoncé
Knowles), who is also black. In this filmic version, coined by Leonard and
Ray as a “yuppie horror film” because the economic context is affluent and
luxurious, a white female, Lisa (Ali Larter), is preying on her black boss. She
is a new temporary assistant and poses a threat not only to Derek’s profes-
sional and family life but also to his status as a black male among his white
peers. Leonard and Ray locate this film within “an American subgenre we
are calling the envying woman thriller.” They analyze that Lisa is the arche-
type of a jealous and lethal home invader who threatens the equilibrium of
the domestic space, which “confirms that it is both the figurative and the
literal home that is under attack when the envying woman wants in.”
Christine Lang tackles an unusual transnational media phenomenon in
chapter 14 to display psychological conflict surrounding love by concen-
trating on talking heads in “The Idea of Love in the TV Serial Drama In
Treatment.” She analyzes “the structure and aesthetic means” of the TV
xx Preface

series and points to its movielike presentation as a “new genre of extremely

long auteur film.” A compelling reason for this label is the fact that this
American television series, which was adapted from a precursor in Israel, is
consumed in Europe via DVD box sets, making its viewing “similar to that
of the movies.” Lang focuses on one of the segments in which a patient’s
transference to her psychotherapist is answered by countertransference. Dr.
Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) manages to contain his feelings for his female
patient and ultimately allows the therapy to be a success, even though the
viewers are not rewarded with a classic happy ending.
Sarah Schaschek engages with a different variation of looking at sex and
desire, namely by watching the mechanical display of so-called “fucking
machines” that are exclusively accessible via websites. She concludes our
volume on Screening the Dark Side of Love in chapter 15 and discusses the
“High-Tech Bodies in Pornography.” Schaschek suggests that serial pre-
sentations of pornographic images emphasize the way in which repetitious
movement on screen makes the sex look “cold,” “dead,” or “robotic,” in other
words, how they allude to the body as a machine. The sex machines offer
not only voyeuristic pleasure for male spectators but also opportunities for
female consumers of pornography; the author argues that these films can be
read as “techno-erotic relation,” in which the woman is not simply moved
by the machine but in which she herself uses the machine in order to seek
pleasure. This chapter is a fitting end to our collection because it highlights
female desire when the filmic apparatus thus functions as a lively partner.
These 15 chapters illuminate and question the ideas and notions of rep-
resentations of transgressive sexuality and troubled love. They seek to offer
different perspectives on the interdependence between popular culture,
film, and the dark side of love.

Note
1. See David Edelstein’s report on the best films of 2011 on NPR where he
mentions Jessica Chastain as one of the most promising female actresses.
Edelstein claims that Jolene is a “must-see” and one of the best films with
Chastain in the lead role; http://www.npr.org/2011/12/22/143731952/flicks-
picked-redux-edelsteins-2011-top-10-films (accessed February 18, 2012).

Works Cited
Cavanah, Claire, and Rachel Venning. 2010. Morgasm: Babeland’s Guide to Mind-
Blowing Sex. New York: Avery Books.
King, Donna, and Carrie Lee Smith, eds. 2012. Men Who Hate Women and the
Women Who Kick Their Asses: Feminist Perspectives on Stieg Larsson’s Millennium
Trilogy. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
 Preface xxi

Museum of Sex, Manhattan. 2012. Program notes for the museum film exhibit on
Sex and the Moving Image.
Ritzenhoff, Karen A. 2012. “Lisbeth Salander as the ‘Final Girl’ in the Swedish ‘Girl
Who’ Films.” In Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Kick Their Asses:
Feminist Perspectives on Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, ed. Donna King and
Carrie Lee Smith. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
———. 2010. Screen Nightmares: Video, Fernsehen und Gewalt im Film. Marburg:
Schüren Verlag.
Ritzenhoff, Karen A., and Katherine A. Hermes. 2009. Sex and Sexuality in a
Feminist World. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Turner, Christopher. 2011. Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual
Revolution Came to America. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Williams, Linda. 2008. Screening Sex. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Films
Antichrist. Directed by Lars von Trier. Denmark, 2009.
Belle de Jour. Directed by Luis Buñuel. France, 1968.
Birth of a Nation, The. Directed by D. W. Griffith. USA, 1915.
Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. USA, 2010.
Crash. Directed by David Cronenberg. UK, 1996.
Dangerous Method, A. Directed by David Cronenberg. UK, 2011.
Fatal Attraction. Directed by Adrian Lyne. USA, 1987.
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The. Directed by David Fincher. USA, 2011.
Ides of March. Directed by George Clooney. USA, 2011.
Jane Eyre. Directed by Cary Fukunaga. USA, 2010.
Jolene. Directed by Dan Ireland. USA, 2008.
Melancholia. Directed by Lars von Trier. Denmark, 2011.
Notes on a Scandal. Directed by Richard Eyre. UK, 2006.
Obsessed. Directed by Steve Shill. USA, 2009.
Sadomania. Directed by Jesús Franco. West Germany, 1981.
She’s a Girl I Knew. Directed by Gwen Haworth. USA, 2007.
Skin I Live In, The. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Spain, 2011.
TransAmerica. Directed by Duncan Tucker. USA, 2005
Venus, Priests and Superman. Directed by Deborah Monuteaux. USA, 2007.
Whip and the Body, The. Directed by Mario Bava. Italy, 1963.
Acknowledgments

Karen A. Ritzenhoff: I would like to thank the following friends, col-

leagues, and family members for their help and support of this project, both
morally and intellectually. Stuart Barnett sparked many ideas and supplied
me with reading materials. Chez Liley passionately discussed the topics in
this book with wit and depth while allowing me to laugh and keep jolly
despite the dark content. Elizabeth Eden was a treasure trove of background
information on ob-gyn issues and women’s health. Bonnie Baldwin is a
constant source of loving support. My new friends Aline Libassi, Geraldine
Marcenyak, Heather Coon, and Jennifer Osborne need to be mentioned
because they keep me on track.
Many thanks also to my dear and amazing colleagues Kathy Hermes,
Cindy White, Fiona Pearson, Joan Walden, Jose del Ama, Glynis Fitzgerald,
Jakub Kazecki, Matthew Ciscel, Candace Barrington, Gil Gigliotti, Paloma
Lapuerta, Laura Tordenti, Anne Alling, Tom Mione, Lillian Barubi, Angela
Krewani, Michael Griffin, Frederick Wasser, and our terrific and resource-
ful indexer Alexandra Maravel. Kerstin Stutterheim helped me coin the
arguments by making me go back to the films and look even closer. Angelica
Karlsson is an invaluable source of inspiration when it comes to new media,
journalism, and women’s rights. My family friends Melora and Michel
Mennesson helped with background on psychoanalysis and sent the latest
publication of the Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution
Came to America for Christmas, embracing my research interests. My lovely
friends Irmi Dumschott, Laura Carey, Kikka Pohjavare, Lu Nijdam, Kim
Lasky, Véronique Zanetti, and Doreen Hampton; the terrific and spunky
Doris Honig Guenter as well as her husband Ray; and my beloved col-
lege roommate Jane Greenberg have all helped to keep me sane. Peter Aziz
made me explain the rationale for this volume. Many thanks to my parents,
Birgit and Eckhart Franz, who did not complain about yet another book on
sex and sexuality, torture, mutilation, and film. My partner in crime and
coeditor, Karen Randell, is a constant source of inspiration, guidance, and
mentorship. What luck that our paths crossed almost ten years ago when
Tony Steyger introduced us to each other during a conference.
xxiv Acknowledgments

My children Jan-Philipp, Dominik, and Lea-Karoline have endured my

long stretches of computer time in the dining room and kept smiling, even
when the bookshelves literally started to collapse around us. To them and
my husband Michael I dedicate this book and to the gift of experiencing the
light side of love.
Karen Randell: I would like to acknowledge the Faculty of Creative
Industries at Southampton Solent University for its research support—in
particular, the dean, Professor Rod Pilling, and my head of school, Paul
Marchbank, thank you.
Very warmhearted thanks to my friends and colleagues in the Screen
Research Cluster at SSU for their continued encouragement, constructive
feedback, and good humor: Mark Aldridge, Jackie Furby, Claire Hines,
Donna Peberdy, and Mark de Valk. Particular thanks go to Darren Kerr
for our conversations about “tops and bottoms,” and to Tony Steyger for
introducing me to the wonderful Karen Ritzenhoff at the Film & History
conference in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2004. Karen has been a superb col-
league and generous friend; she makes me think, she makes me laugh, and
she makes my heart sing.
Thank you to all my students and colleagues in the UK, Australia, the
United States, and New Zealand who have heard me discuss Lon Chaney
over and over again. . . . I appreciate you sharing my passion for a most bril-
liant performer. And thank you Mike Hammond for introducing Chaney’s
work to me during my PhD—how didn’t I know?
Finally—thank you to my family for their continued support: always
love, always loud, and always on my side.
Chapter 1

The Whip and the

Body: Sex, Violence,
and Performative
Spectatorship in
Euro-Horror
1
S&M
Cinema
Ian Olney

In the annals of cinema devoted to the dark side of love, Euro-horror

S&M films occupy an important, if critically underappreciated, place. These
movies, which emerged from Continental Europe in astonishing numbers
between the 1960s and the 1980s, inject sadomasochism into horror, blend-
ing sex and violence in an unsettling fashion rarely seen in Anglo-American
genre cinema. Although they take a variety of forms—including the kinky
gothic melodrama, the Nazi sexploitation movie, the women-in-prison pic-
ture, the “nunsploitation” film, and the direct adaptation of works by the
Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch—they all focus on the
same basic scenario: the story of a Sadean figure (sometimes male, sometimes
female; sometimes straight, sometimes queer) who forces an (often captive,
occasionally willing) individual or group of individuals to participate in
his or her violent sexual fantasies. Euro-horror S&M cinema was widely
screened in its heyday—including in the United States, where it played on
double bills with other exploitation fare at drive-ins and grind house the-
aters; more recently, it has found a new generation of fans on DVD and
Blu-ray. Despite its cult popularity, however, it has received relatively little
2 Ian Olney

attention to date in the field of film studies. This is unfortunate because,

unlike other, more conventional types of horror, it does not simply traffic
in revolting bodies; it also produces something that film scholars have often
sought in the genre: bodies in revolt.
In this chapter, I will demonstrate how two Euro-horror S&M movies—
one, Mario Bava’s La frusta e il corpo (The Whip and the Body, 1963), an
example of straight S&M horror; the other, Jess Franco’s Sadomania: Hölle
der Lust (Sadomania, 1981), an example of queer S&M horror—challenge
established modes of sex and gender representation, exhibiting bodies that
subvert or defy traditional categories of sex and gender. Moreover, I will
show how, through their treatment of sex and gender, they invite the specta-
tor to adopt multiple viewing positions and experiment with a range of dif-
ferent subjectivities in a manner generally proscribed by mainstream cinema
and the dominant social order. By reveling in sex and gender fragmentation
at the level of representation, they afford us the opportunity to approach
film spectatorship as a form of play or performance in which we are free to
“try on” and “act out” different sex and gender roles. In this way, I argue,
the Euro-horror S&M film reveals a bright side to the dark side of love in
cinema. Its distinctive conflation of sex and violence, unsettling as it is,
enables a powerful critique of the notion of “fixed” or “authentic” sex and
gender identities that unfolds not just on the screen, but potentially in the
audience as well.
In its radical capacity to destabilize sex and gender norms, Mario Bava’s
The Whip and the Body resembles straight S&M porn. It has often been
assumed by critics that straight S&M porn movies—especially those that
seem to eroticize the violent subjugation of women at the hands of men—
simply reflect the fundamentally sadistic and misogynistic nature of patri-
archal power and pleasure. In her writing on sex in cinema, Linda Williams
argues that this is not the case, even with regard to “male-on-female” S&M;
instead, in the straight sadomasochistic scenario, “violence is depicted not
as actual coercion but as a highly ritualized game in which the participants
consent to play predetermined roles of dominance and submission” (1989,
18). For this reason, “it is not easy to assign fixed gender roles [in straight
S&M]” (Williams 2008, 220); indeed, straight S&M “bring[s] focus to
abruptly shifting sexual roles understood as roles and to sex understood as
a scene of erotic possibilities tinged with threats of violence more than as a
straightforward event” (Williams 2008, 235). Thus, in straight S&M porn,
sex can “no longer be reduced to the simple positions of penetrator and
penetrated or to clear outcomes of climactic fulfillment” (Williams 2008,
235); instead, the emphasis is on role-playing and on the elaboration of
fantasy itself. And, as Williams notes, “fantasy is not about a subject who
pursues and then gets, or does not get, the object” (2008, 235), but rather
 The Whip and the Body 3

“about desire’s setting, about being caught up ‘in the sequence of images’
with no fixed position in them” (2008, 235). While Williams cautions
that straight S&M is porn, “not a form that, even at its most aesthetic and
playful, challenges male dominance” (1989, 225), she nevertheless specu-
lates that

[t]he rise of sadomasochism in the full variety of its forms may very well
indicate some partial yet important challenges to patriarchal power and plea-
sure in the genre of film pornography. S/M’s emphasis on oscillating posi-
tions over strict sexual identities and its extension of sexual norms to include
sadomasochistic play and fantasy suggest a rising regime of relative differ-
entiations over absolute difference. Some of the apocalyptic force of much
sadomasochistic pornography undoubtedly derives from these challenges to
phallic laws that stand for strict dichotomization. (1989, 226)

Seen from this perspective, straight S&M porn reveals the “unavoidable role
of power in sex, gender, and sexual representations” (Williams 1989, 228)
while at the same time demonstrating that, although it is perhaps unavoid-
able in such representations, power is transferable and can be appropriated
in ways that undermine the patriarchal dichotomization and hierarchization
of sex and gender identities on screen.
As we shall see in a moment, The Whip and the Body also deconstructs
sex and gender roles at the level of representation; this is not the only way
in which Bava’s film is similar to straight S&M porn, however. Williams
writes that straight S&M porn movies give viewers the unique opportunity
to performatively explore different sex and gender identities in a fashion
generally proscribed by mainstream cinema and the dominant social order.
Because it “keeps in play the oscillation between active and passive and male
and female subject positions, rather than fixing one pole or the other as the
essence of the viewer’s experience” (Williams 1989, 217), it lends itself to
what Steven Shaviro calls “the destruction of identification and objectifi-
cation, to the undermining of subjective stability, and to an affirmation
of the multiple techniques that denaturalize (or de-Cartesianize) cinematic
perception” (1993, 42). As such, it can be “enjoyed by male and female spec-
tators alike who, for very different reasons owing to their different gendered
identifications and object choices, find both power and pleasure in identi-
fying not only with a sadist’s control but also with a masochist’s abandon”
(Williams 1989, 216–217). Straight S&M porn movies therefore offer “one
important way in which groups and individuals whose desires patriarchy has
not recognized as legitimate can explore the mysterious conjunction of power
and pleasure in intersubjective sexual relations” (Williams 1989, 217–218).
An analysis of The Whip and the Body reveals that it, too, works not only
4 Ian Olney

to subvert conventional depictions of sex and gender roles on the screen but
also to foster sex and gender role-playing in the audience.
Bava’s film stars Christopher Lee as Kurt Menliff, a sadistic aristocrat
who returns to his family’s ancestral home after a period of banishment to
reclaim his patrimony as the eldest son of the ailing Count Menliff (Gustavo
de Nardo) and to prevent his younger brother, Christian (Tony Kendall),
from marrying Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), Kurt’s former lover. The sudden
reappearance of Kurt, who was exiled by the count years earlier, throws the
Menliff household into turmoil. He terrorizes his family from the moment
he arrives, badgering his dying father to write him back into his will and
tempting the masochistic Nevenka to resume their violent love affair. Kurt’s
reign of terror is brought to a shockingly abrupt conclusion, however, when
he is murdered one night by an unseen assailant. Each member of the family
is a suspect in his death, since they all had ample motive; however, questions
of guilt and innocence are soon forgotten as strange lights start to appear at
night in the windows of the mausoleum where Kurt’s body is interred and
Nevenka begins to have visions of a ghostly Kurt entering her chambers to
whip her as she lies in bed—visions that are seemingly proven real when
muddy boot prints are found on the floor of her room in the morning.
Finally, a desperate Christian, believing that his older brother has indeed
returned from the grave to torment them, opens Kurt’s coffin and burns the
remains he finds there along with the infamous whip. As he is returning to
the house, however, he notices a figure dressed in Kurt’s clothes walking
ahead of him. Christian confronts this mysterious person, only to find to
his astonishment and horror that it is Nevenka. Fleeing from Christian,
she locks herself in a cell inside the mausoleum, where she speaks to Kurt
as if he were alive, leading Christian and the audience to understand that
she murdered Kurt in an outburst of passion and then, regretting her act,
“absorbed” his personality and began to carry on a double life as “Kurt” and
“Nevenka.” As Christian watches helplessly, Nevenka embraces an invisible
Kurt and cries, “I love you, Kurt, only you!” before stabbing herself to death
with a dagger. In the final moments of the film, we cut to a shot of Kurt’s
corpse, still burning in the coffin, and—as the film’s lush orchestral score
swells—slowly zoom in to a close-up of his whip, which twists like a living
thing as it is consumed by the flames.
The Whip and the Body aims to be radically destabilizing in its represen-
tation of sex and gender. Take, for example, a remarkable scene near the
beginning of the film in which Kurt seeks out Nevenka, who, disturbed
by his sudden reappearance, has ridden a horse down to the rocky coastline
below the Menliff castle. We fade in on a shot of waves lapping at the beach
as Carlo Rustichelli’s feverishly romantic score plays. The camera pans left
to reveal Nevenka sitting on a stone, lost in reverie as she idly traces figures
 The Whip and the Body 5

in the sand with her riding crop. Suddenly she jumps in surprise, and we cut
to a close-up of the crop, which has been caught under a heavy black boot.
The camera tilts up the length of the owner’s body to reveal a grim-faced
Kurt. Nevenka rises unsteadily. “Are you afraid of me?” Kurt asks her, his
voice dripping with sarcasm. “You were fond of me once.” “Yes, once,” she
replies. After a moment of charged silence, they kiss passionately. Nevenka
breaks away almost immediately, however, her face twisting. She grabs her
riding crop and strikes at Kurt, who tears it away from her. Crop in hand,
he advances toward her; she backs away, falling prostrate over a boulder.
We cut to an imposing, low-angle point-of-view shot of Kurt, who towers
over us, a strange combination of anger, frustration, hesitancy, and desire
contorting his features. He begins to whip Nevenka savagely with the crop.
“You haven’t changed, I see,” he grates between strokes of the lash. “You
always loved violence.” She looks up at him, a mixture of pain and desire on
her face; he kneels, tossing aside the whip, and they embrace. We cut to a
close-up of the discarded riding crop lying in the sand. The camera tilts up
and pans left to reveal Nevenka’s neglected horse grazing on the beach in the
distance. The screen fades to black.
On the surface, it might seem that this scene—and much of the rest
of Bava’s film—merely serves to reflect the sadistic imperatives of patri-
archal power and pleasure through the symbolic deployment of “male-
on-female” sadomasochistic imagery. If we scratch a little deeper, however,
it becomes clear that it actually works to deconstruct the widespread notion
that “male-on-female” sadomasochism invariably victimizes and objectifies
the masochistic “bottom,” who is supposedly stripped of her agency and
made a plaything by the sadistic “top.” Significantly, the scene described
above shows that Nevenka is the instigator—if not the agent—of the vio-
lence presented: Kurt whips her not because he wants to, necessarily, but
rather because she demands it. Nevenka insists upon the pleasure of her
own punishment and deliberately provokes him into providing it for her.
In fact, she refuses to submit fully to his embrace until he first satisfies her
masochistic desires. When the camera finally cuts away from the lovers to
the close-up of the riding crop and then swivels to capture the distant, freely
grazing horse, we are given to understand that any use-value the whip might
have had as an equestrian tool—and any symbolic value it might have had
as a sign of phallic authority—has been effectively displaced by its utility as
a sex toy and its legibility as a sign of Nevenka’s power over Kurt. The scene
demonstrates, in short, that it is Nevenka and not Kurt who has been, is,
and will always be in control in their relationship.
And the rest of the film bears out this notion. When Nevenka mur-
ders Kurt in his bedroom on the evening following their secret reunion,
her power over him is made explicit, as Troy Howarth suggests: “Effectively
6 Ian Olney

turning the tables on her dominating lover, Nevenka uses the knife, the
symbol of Kurt’s destructive sexuality, as a means of stifling his libido. In
taking control of the phallic blade, Nevenka usurps Kurt’s role as a sexual
predator” (2002, 93). Moreover, when we later learn that it is the force of
Nevenka’s masochistic desires that resurrects Kurt after his death, we realize
that the scenes in which his whip-wielding ghost apparently terrorizes her
actually represent her own intensely gratifying sexual fantasies—a fact that
seems obvious in retrospect not only because of Bava’s bold, expressionistic
use of color and sound in these scenes, but also because of Daliah Lavi’s
performance, which makes it clear that Nevenka’s reaction to the whippings
(in reality a form of autoerotic self-flagellation) is “positively orgasmic”
(Howarth 2002, 92). Finally, when Nevenka kills both “Kurt” and herself
at the film’s conclusion, she demonstrates not only her power over Kurt in
life and in death (as well as her determination to carry on their relationship
with or without him), but also her unwillingness to commit to a conven-
tional sexual relationship with her husband-to-be, Christian—a point that
is utterly lost on Christian, who obtusely speculates after her death: “Yes,
perhaps she was possessed. She was convinced that Kurt was alive. She killed
herself thinking that she was killing him. Let’s hope she’s free of him for-
ever.” In short, by disrupting “popular conceptions that [the bottom] is pas-
sive, subjugated, and exploited” (Ross 2000, 272) and by showing that “the
top’s own sexual needs/desires are dependent on the pleasure experienced by
the bottom, and may even be sacrificed in the process of pleasure giving”
(Ross 2000, 272), The Whip and the Body does a surprisingly good job of
suggesting that, in Linda Williams’s words,

Under a patriarchal double standard that has rigorously separated the sexu-
ally passive “good” girl from the sexually active “bad” girl, masochistic role-
playing offers a way out of this dichotomy by combining the good girl with
the bad: the passive “good” girl can prove to her witnesses (the super-ego who
is her torturer) that she does not will the pleasure that she receives. Yet the
sexually active “bad” girl enjoys this pleasure and has knowingly arranged to
endure the pain that earns it. (2004, 709)

In this way, I would argue, Bava’s film, like straight S&M porn, “recognizes
the role of power in the woman’s often circuitous route to pleasure, and in that
recognition . . . may even represent for women a new consciousness about the
unavoidable role of power in sex, gender, and sexual representations and of the
importance of not viewing this power as fixed” (Williams 1989, 228).
In addition, it is important to point out that The Whip and the Body not
only deconstructs conventional sex and gender roles at the level of represen-
tation, but it also prompts the performative exploration of unconventional
 The Whip and the Body 7

sexual identities at the level of spectatorship. Such spectatorship-as-perfor-

mance is made possible by the way in which Bava uses mise-en-scène, edit-
ing, and sound to deny us a stable viewing position from which to experience
the film. This strategy is on vivid display in one of several scenes detailing
Kurt’s apparent return from the grave after his death at Nevenka’s hands.
On the evening following his funeral, she stands alone in her darkened bed-
room, dressed in a nightgown and caressing herself slowly, seemingly in a
trance. At first, Bava presents her in an ostensibly straightforward medium
shot, facing us, as her hands roam absently over her breasts and throat—an
erotic object for the viewer’s gaze. Almost immediately, though, the camera
pulls back to reveal that she is actually situated in front of a mirror, facing
away from us, absorbed in her own reflection. This is a destabilizing move,
robbing us, as it does, of the illusion that we occupy a privileged position as
spectators (that her performance is for our benefit alone), while at the same
time affirming her subjectivity and her ownership of her image. Bava then
complicates matters further by having Kurt’s face suddenly appear behind
Nevenka’s in the glass, as if summoned by the power of her masturbatory
reverie. This initiates a dizzying chain of gazes in which, thanks to the
placement of the camera and the mirror, we watch Kurt watch Nevenka
watching herself, then meet one another’s looks while at the same time seem-
ing to return ours. The effect is to profoundly confuse the issue of who is
watching whom and to raise the question of which vantage point the viewer
is “supposed” to adopt.
Judging from what follows, the answer is neither and both. Startled by
the unexpected appearance of Kurt’s reflection in the mirror, Nevenka slowly
turns around to the plangent sounds of Rustichelli’s ubiquitous score, a mix-
ture of fear and desire on her face. Bava then initiates a shot/reverse-shot
sequence that shuttles the viewer back and forth between the two characters’
perspectives for the remainder of the scene. First, we share Nevenka’s point
of view in a series of vertiginous close-ups of Kurt as he circles her, gradually
closing in. Next, after Nevenka is driven by Kurt to her bed, we adopt his
perspective as he brutally flogs her bare back. And the viewpoint contin-
ues to oscillate, keeping time with the rhythmic lashes of Kurt’s whip: one
moment Kurt looms over us, whip raised, grinning sadistically; the next, we
watch Nevenka writhe in pleasure and in pain under our lashes. Finally, in a
remarkable close-up shot taken from Nevenka’s vantage point, Kurt moves in
for a passionate kiss—his face getting steadily nearer and larger, alternately
lost in shadow and illuminated by washes of blue, green, and red lighting, his
mouth opening in expectation until it seems as though he is about to swallow
us whole—before the image becomes blurry and fades to black.
The blocking, camera work, editing, lighting, and sound work together in
this scene to emphasize the instability both of routine viewing positions and of
8 Ian Olney

conventional sex and gender roles. Far from insisting that the spectator adopt
Kurt’s sadistic gaze (and endorse the patriarchal imperatives it might be said
to represent), Bava “keeps in play the oscillation between active and passive
and male and female subject positions” (Williams 1989, 217). He encourages
us to play the role of sadist and masochist, opening up a range of possibilities
for viewer identification and prompting a recognition of the fluid nature of
sexuality. To borrow a phrase from Rhona J. Berenstein, he invites “specta-
torship-as-drag.” Berenstein writes that horror cinema sometimes “open[s] a
space for an attraction to figures that revel in sex and gender fragmentation . . .
posit[ing] something more than the conventional sex-role and gender options
available to men and women” (1994, 261) in Western culture. Viewers who
identify with these ambiguously sexed or gendered figures adopt fluctuating
subject positions, engaging in “roles similar to those appropriated by actors in
the performance of drag” (Berenstein 1994, 232). This mode of spectatorship,
she suggests, allows them to “identify with and desire against everyday modes
of behavior and to play with the masks that Western culture asks us to treat
as core identities” (1994, 262). This is precisely what The Whip and the Body
permits. It does not merely seek to display alternative sex and gender identities;
it also seeks to involve us in the production of these identities. As one fan puts
it in a review of the film posted at Classic-Horror.com,

The sheer eroticism of The Whip and the Body is elusive and difficult to prop-
erly describe in words. The entanglement of pain and pleasure, color and
darkness, desire and loathing, ghostly apparitions and insane hallucinations
is so intense that not one of those elements is truly distinct from the other.
They all rush together in Bava’s melting pot, where he creates a potent for-
mula for raw sensuality that emanates from the screen and infects the audi-
ence. (Yapp 2007, par. 8)

Ultimately, it is by “infecting” the audience in this fashion that The Whip and
the Body offers “one important way in which groups and individuals whose
desires patriarchy has not recognized as legitimate can explore the mysteri-
ous conjunction of power and pleasure in intersubjective sexual relations”
(Williams 1989, 217–218). If we “surrender to and revel in cinematic fascina-
tion” (Shaviro 1993, 64) of the sort engendered by the scene described above,
we embrace a mode of spectatorship in which “all fixed points of reference and
self-reference, all lines of perspective, and all possibilities of stabilizing identifi-
cation and objectification are banished” (Shaviro 1993, 53)—a mode in which
we are free to experience “a more fluid and malleable range of social and sexual
identities than [we] would in [our] everyday lives” (Berenstein 1994, 233).
My discussion of Euro-horror S&M cinema has, to this point, focused
on the straight sadomasochistic scenario; it is important to note, however,
that queer S&M—particularly lesbian S&M—is regularly featured in these
 The Whip and the Body 9

films as well. Accordingly, I would now like to turn to an examination of

how one specific type of queer Euro-horror S&M—the women-in-prison
film—can be said, because of its central investment in lesbian S&M imag-
ery, to create what Alexander Doty refers to as a “queer zone” (2000, 9): a
“[space] between the norms that regulate gender and sexuality” (Ross 2000,
271) opened up by “the theatrical agency of queer performativity, the campy
dramatization of leathered queerness” (Ross 2000, 271). The images asso-
ciated with lesbian S&M—“the whips, chains, handcuffs, needles, razors,
and other instruments; the bodies bound, gagged, tied, and suspended; the
humiliating postures of the submissives; the military garb” (Hart 1996,
49)—have often been read negatively by straight and queer critics alike as
“a copy, an iconic representation” (Hart 1996, 49) of the oppressive power
structures informing the dominant heteronormative order. However, as
Lynda Hart writes, while “the erotic interplay of lesbian s/m as resignifica-
tions . . . are no doubt enabled by certain heterosexual or homosexual mod-
els . . . [they are] at the same time dissonant displacements of them” (1996,
49–50). In fact, lesbian S&M explores “the naturalized status of feminin-
ity (and masculinity) in ways that disrupt the power of heterosexualizing
law” (Ross 2000, 271). At the same time, it fosters what Brett Farmer calls
“identificatory performativity” (Farmer 2000, 29), allowing spectators the
opportunity to experiment with sexual identities in a fashion generally pro-
scribed by mainstream cinema and the dominant social order. My argument
will be that Euro-horror women-in-prison movies like Sadomania also work
to queer sex and gender at the level of representation and at the level of
reception, invoking “those complex circumstances in texts, spectators, and
production that resist easy categorization, but that definitely escape or defy
the heteronormative” (Doty 2000, 7).
At first glance, it might be difficult to see just how these films chal-
lenge heteronormativity. As Judith Mayne has observed, the women-in-
prison movie—which originated in Hollywood during the studio era with
social problem pictures like Ladies of the Big House (1931), Caged (1950), and
House of Women (1962)—can actually seem to confirm homophobic ste-
reotypes of lesbianism. The narrative formula typical of the genre involves
a young woman who is convicted of a crime (justly or not) and is sent to a
women’s prison, where she bonds with the other inmates—including “cer-
tain types . . . almost always present: a butch lesbian, an older mother-figure,
a mentally disturbed woman, several prostitutes” (Mayne 2000, 115)—and
clashes with the abusive guards and warden. In the end, as Judith Mayne
writes,

the heroine has learned bitter lessons about life; she is no longer innocent. She
leaves the prison but is destined for a life of crime (especially if she committed
no crime to begin with); or is determined to get her sisters out of jail; or has
10 Ian Olney

learned her lesson and is determined to become a good, normal woman. Often
as she leaves the jail another young, innocent victim arrives. (2000, 116)

The problem with this formula, from the standpoint of queer theory, is that it
implicitly “connects criminality and lesbianism, to the extent that the women
in prison are made to seem more susceptible to lesbianism” (Mayne 2000,
128). This is bad enough; even worse, for many critics, are later European
women-in-prison films, which introduce much more graphic scenes of sex
and violence into the genre, transforming social problem cinema into erot-
icized horror. If Hollywood women-in-prison films “merely [hint] at the
unhealthy atmosphere and the links between sadism, dehumanisation and
power” (Tohill and Tombs 1995, 115), Euro-horror women-in-prison movies
offer “pretty much a catalogue of depravity” (Tohill and Tombs 1995, 117),
representing the women’s prison as “a dehumanising hellhole, governed by
perverts, lesbians and slimeballs” (Tohill and Tombs 1995, 109). The equa-
tion of lesbians with “perverts” and “slimeballs,” and lesbian S&M with
corruption and “depravity,” seems explicit here. One might be forgiven for
dismissing it—and its American forerunner—as homophobic garbage that
works to perpetuate the reactionary ideology informing many of the images
of queerness found in horror cinema.
This would be a mistake, however. We need to recognize the ideological
gaps, contradictions, and ambiguities inherent in the women-in-prison film,
as well as the ability of viewers to resist or recast the “dominant” or intended
meaning of these movies. As Mayne points out, while there is much to
deplore in the women-in-prison film—“in the sense that scenes of rape and
torture are staples of the genre, and no matter how campy the films are, they
still play on the helplessness and victimization of women” (2000, 115)—
there is also much to appreciate “in the sense that these films offer spectacles
of female bonding, female rage, and female communities, with strong doses
of camp and irony” (2000, 115). The same could be said of Euro-horror
women-in-prison movies. In the first place, like earlier Hollywood women-
in-prison films, they offer “images of women who are socially transgressive
and active sexually and who must be chained and punished for violating
patriarchal law and social order [that] can, for the female spectator, be quite
inspiring at certain moments” (Zalcock 2001, 34). As Bev Zalcock notes,
images of women who are “caged and chained, menacing and monstrous,
husband killers, dykes, violent, rowdy and sexually active” (2001, 32) might
seem to promise “a wet dream for a male spectator but they . . . also always
[represent] his worst nightmare, the castrating female” (2001, 32). At the
same time, these images hint at the intriguing possibility of a nurturing,
queer sisterhood of women that might exist as a refuge from the inequities
of a male-dominated, heterocentric world. It is also important to recognize
 The Whip and the Body 11

that, like the Hollywood women-in-prison movie, the Euro-horror women-

in-prison film undercuts and even subverts its own heteronormative tenden-
cies with camp and irony, distancing viewers from the story and revealing
its own representations of gender and sex to be fictive constructions rather
than any sort of reality.
Finally, Mayne finds the women-in-prison film compelling because it
“does not just portray the ‘objectification’ of the female body as it has been
theorized in feminist film studies . . . [but also is] predicated on the possibil-
ity that women observe other women” (2000, 117):

Sometimes the notion of patriarchal authority is rendered oxymoronic in

the women-in-prison film, for frequently the bastions of male superiority in
the films are buffoons who are unable to shoot straight, for example, and espe-
cially whose sexual desire for the inmates renders them foolish and vulnerable.
Indeed, what is quite striking about the women-in-prison genre is how marginal
male figures really are to so many of the plots, and how thoroughly surveillance
involves women watching other women, women objectifying other women.
And the women-in-prison genre is one of the few established genres where
lesbianism is not an afterthought or an anomaly. (2000, 117–118)

This holds equally true for Euro-horror women-in-prison movies, which not
only privilege the lesbian gaze but also invite viewers to adopt it themselves.
These films effectively seek to queer the act of spectatorship by “expos[ing]
the naturalized status of femininity (and masculinity) in ways that dis-
rupt the power of heterosexualizing law” (Ross 2000, 271) and “open[ing]
up spaces between the norms that regulate gender and sexuality” (Ross
2000, 271).
This is certainly the case in Jess Franco’s celebrated Euro-horror women-
in-prison film Sadomania. It tells the story of a young, newly married couple,
Olga (Uta Koepke) and Michael (Ángel Caballero), who are driving along
the Spanish coast on their honeymoon when they decide to pull over to the
side of the road for a “quickie”—despite the prominence of a nearby sign
reading, “White Hacienda. Rehabilitation Center for Delinquent Women.
No Trespassing.” Their lovemaking is soon interrupted by a coterie of top-
less, rifle-toting women who take them captive and escort them to the office
of the White Hacienda’s sadistic bisexual warden, Magda (Ajita Wilson).
Magda summarily declares that while Michael is free to go, Olga must
remain at the prison until she serves out a sentence of indeterminate length
as punishment for her encroachment onto its grounds. Once admitted into
the White Hacienda, Olga undergoes the requisite abuse at the hands of
Magda and the guards—whose favorite game is to set prisoners loose in the
surrounding swamp and then hunt them with guns—and bonds with her
fellow inmates, most of whom are “confirmed lesbians” and unapologetically
12 Ian Olney

queer. She soon learns that the prison serves as a front for a white slave ring
run by gay slave trader Lucas (played by Franco himself) and supported by
Magda and Governor Mendoza (Antonio Mayans), a corrupt local official.
When one of Olga’s cellmates, Tara (Ursula Buchfellner), is sold to Lucas by
the governor’s wife because “it gives her a thrill,” Olga formulates an escape
plan with the help of her husband, who has been able to make contact with
her from the outside. Together they succeed in freeing the rest of the female
prisoners and capturing Magda, whom they force to enter the swamp sur-
rounding the White Hacienda. The film ends with the striking image of a
nude and defiant Magda wading out into the treacherous, alligator-filled
waters.
Sadomania creates an unrepentantly queer economy of pleasure via its
depiction of the lesbian S&M underworld of the White Hacienda. The sub-
versive nature of the prison is made abundantly clear in the opening scenes
of the film when Olga and Michael are arrested essentially for attempting
to commit a heterosexual act on its grounds. Such heteronormativity is not
permitted in this queer zone, as Magda’s imperious response to Michael’s
protests in the face of his wife’s sentencing makes clear: “Silence! . . . I’m
not talking to you. . . . The Hacienda Blanca is a prison. [But] [i]t’s not
for you men. It’s a women’s camp. . . . I’m afraid the honeymoon is over.”
It is even implied that Olga’s incarceration will put her heterosexuality at
risk—and that this might not be such a bad thing, as Magda offhandedly
suggests: “Who knows, Olga, you might like it here.” Indeed, it is not long
before she finds her sexual identity being tested. One of her cellmates, nick-
named “Coñito” (Andrea Guzon), propositions her after a long, hot after-
noon working in the prison quarry: “What you need is a wet tongue on
your body—that’ll cool you off!” “That’s all you lesbians think about, isn’t
it?” Olga snaps back. “Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it,” Coñito replies
mildly.
Later in the film, Coñito mocks Olga’s heterocentric assumptions when
Olga expresses her concern over Tara’s forced visit to Mendoza’s mansion
for a session of kinky sex with the governor and his wife: “I’m just think-
ing of what they’re doing to Tara. It must be horrible.” “Are you kidding?”
Coñito replies incredulously, “She’s being wined and dined by the governor
and eaten by his lovely wife!” Gradually, Olga’s immersion in this environ-
ment breaks down her socially ingrained resistance to the notion of sexual
exploration. When she finally surrenders to Coñito’s advances, Franco adds
a delicious note of irony to the eroticism of their sexual encounter by cutting
away from their passionate lovemaking to a haggard Michael voicing his
worst fears about his new wife’s fate in the prison to a sympathetic listener:
“I only hope they haven’t killed her.” The irony of his heterocentric assump-
tions is compounded in a subsequent scene in which he attempts to infiltrate
 The Whip and the Body 13

the White Hacienda and rescue Olga, only to be captured by Magda, who
ridicules his melodramatic straightness: “Well. What a surprise. The hero
returns to rescue the princess from the evil dragon.” In the context of
Franco’s queer S&M film, the prison’s sadistic warden is not the villain but
rather a transgressive heroine who, as played by black transsexual adult film
star Ajita Wilson, literally embodies “a challenge to easy notions of binarity,
putting into question the categories of ‘female’ and ‘male,’ whether they are
considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural” (Garber 1992,
10), while standing as the symbol of an alternative culture predicated on a
recognition of the fluid nature of sex and gender identity.
Michael, on the other hand, emerges as a clueless agent of the dominant,
heteronormative social order. Given that Franco cast himself in the part of
the movie’s gay slave trader—who in one scene is shown being happily bug-
gered by a brawny, mustachioed black man (Ajita Wilson, in male drag)—it
is not difficult to guess where his sympathies lie. And even though the film
seems to end conventionally, with the defeat of Magda at the hands of Olga
and Michael, it is telling that the formerly square, straight couple invites
Coñito to accompany them on their future travels; their new three-way rela-
tionship testifies to the transformative potential of the queer zone to which
they have been exposed. It is also significant that the last thing we see in the
movie is the imperious and impenitent Magda slogging determinedly into
the swamp, wearing nothing but a pair of leather chaps—a potent reminder
and reaffirmation of the enduring power of unreformed queerness.
Franco is not content with merely representing the queer economy of
pleasure over which Magda presides in Sadomania, however; he also encour-
ages the audience to share in it by queering the act of spectatorship itself—by
destabilizing the heteronormative male gaze and introducing ways of seeing
that run counter to it. This process is apparent, for instance, in the scene
in which Tara is brought to Governor Mendoza’s mansion and is forced to
participate in sex games devised by him and his wife, Loba (Gina Janssen).
On a narrative level, this scene is fascinating because although it quickly
becomes clear that the couple’s intention is to use Tara as a means of spicing
up their own sex life—Mendoza is impotent and hopes to achieve a state of
arousal with Tara so that he can make love with his wife and satisfy her wish
for a child—her presence in their bedroom has the exact opposite effect. The
governor is unable to perform and leaves the two women alone together: “I
can’t do it! I can’t do it!” he sobs to Loba as he withdraws; “It’s no good—
you can give her a lot more pleasure than I can!” This indeed turns out to be
the case, as is amply demonstrated by what follows. What makes this scene
especially memorable, however, is how Franco shoots and edits it. In the first
place, he assiduously avoids cultivating the kind of objectifying gaze associ-
ated with mainstream, heterosexual porn.
14 Ian Olney

This is especially true at the beginning and end of the scene, when Tara
and Loba are having sex. Rather than fetishizing their lovemaking with
leering close-ups, he films it obliquely—in reflections in mirrors with seg-
mented glass, pulling in and out of focus—making it difficult for the viewer
to see exactly what is going on, though the soundtrack leaves no doubt that
the women are enjoying one another. At the same time, he privileges a queer
gaze through the editing of the scene, which utilizes eye-line match cuts to
link desiring female subjects with the female objects of their desire. Refusing
to allow us to impose our own look, Franco instead invites us to see through
their eyes, to share their look. In this way, the scene not only furthers the
film’s running narrative motif of heterosexual coitus interruptus (the only
time we see an act of heterosexual intercourse consummated is when Magda
forces herself on a captive Michael in order to publicly humiliate him); it also
contributes to a sustained effort on the part of the director to disrupt the
heteronormative male gaze using purely cinematic devices. As Becki L. Ross
suggests, by celebrating “the theatrical agency of queer performativity, the
campy dramatization of leathered queerness” (2000, 271), Sadomania suc-
ceeds in “open[ing] up spaces between the norms that regulate gender and
sexuality” (2000, 271) and in giving viewers the chance to explore alterna-
tive sexual roles and gender identities.
It is important to emphasize, once again, that The Whip and the Body and
Sadomania are not unique in their treatment of sex and gender. The Whip and
the Body was one of many kinky gothic melodramas made on the European
Continent in the 1960s; others, such as Riccardo Freda’s L’orribile segreto
del Dr. Hichcock (The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, 1962); Antonio Margheriti’s
La vergine di Norimberga (The Virgin of Nuremberg, 1963); and Massimo
Pupillo’s Il boia scarlatto (Bloody Pit of Horror, 1965), do just as much to
destabilize sex and gender norms. The same could be said of the many wom-
en-in-prison films that emerged from Continental Europe around the same
time as Sadomania: Jess Franco’s own Frauengefängnis (Barbed Wire Dolls,
1976); Bruno Mattei’s Emanuelle fuga dall’ inferno (Women’s Prison Massacre,
1983); and Michele Massimo Tarantini’s Femmine in fuga (Women in Fury,
1985), for example. And these are just two forms of the Euro-horror S&M
film prevalent between the 1960s and the 1980s. Others included the Nazi
sexploitation movie, the “nunsploitation” film, and the direct adaptation of
works by the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, as men-
tioned earlier. In all, hundreds of Euro-horror S&M films were released
during this period, and many of them invite performative spectatorship
through their deconstruction of conventional sex and gender categories, just
as The Whip and the Body and Sadomania do.
This chapter has drawn attention to an overlooked but rich vein of hor-
ror cinema that remains to be mined by film scholars. The time could not
be riper for an assessment of Euro-horror S&M, given that its distinctive
 The Whip and the Body 15

blend of sex and violence has increasingly found its way into world cinema
over the past decade, not only in contemporary European horror movies like
Calvaire (2004) and Srpski film (A Serbian Film, 2010), but also in recent
European art house films such as La pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001) and
Antichrist (2009); American “torture porn” franchises like Saw (2004–2010)
and Hostel (2005–2011); “Asian extreme” films such as Koroshiya 1 (Ichi the
Killer, 2001) and Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu (Tokyo Gore Police, 2008); and inde-
pendent horror movies like The Bunny Game (2010) and Little Deaths (2011).
It has even begun to infiltrate mainstream American media, as pop cul-
ture artifacts as various as the opening credits sequence of David Fincher’s
remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011); Ryan Murphy and Brad
Falchuk’s cable television series, American Horror Story (2011–2012); and
music videos for songs by recording artists such as Christina Aguilera (“Not
Myself Tonight,” 2010), Kanye West (“Monster,” 2011), and Rihanna
(“S&M,” 2011) make clear. Perhaps cultivating a new sensitivity to the dark
side of love in Euro-horror S&M cinema will reveal to us the bodies in revolt
being produced not only in this obscure corner of the horror genre, but also
right under our very noses.

Acknowledgments
My thanks to Karen Randell and Karen A. Ritzenhoff for their percep-
tive and conscientious editing, which made for a better-written and more
tightly focused chapter. I would also like to express my gratitude for the
incisive feedback and enthusiastic support I received from attendees at the
2010 joint conference sponsored by Film & History and the Literature/Film
Association, where I presented an early version of this chapter as part of a
panel on the “Dark Side of Love” in film.

Note
1. This essay is a lightly reworked excerpt from a chapter on the Euro-horror
S&M film in my book, Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in
Contemporary American Culture (2012). Readers interested in further analy-
sis of Euro-horror S&M cinema—and additional discussion of Euro-horror
cinema in general—may want to begin there. This chapter is reprinted with
permission of Indiana University Press.

Works Cited
Berenstein, Rhona J. 1994. “Spectatorship-as-Drag: The Act of Viewing and Classic
Horror Cinema.” In Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 231–269.
16 Ian Olney

Doty, Alexander. 2000. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. New York:
Routledge.
Farmer, Brett. 2000. Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Garber, Marjorie. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety.
London: Routledge.
Hart, Lynda. 1996. “Doing It Anyway: Lesbian Sado-Masochism and Performance.”
In Elin Diamond (ed.), Performance and Cultural Politics. London: Routledge.
48–61.
Howarth, Troy. 2002. The Haunted World of Mario Bava. Godalming: FAB Press.
Mayne, Judith. 2000. Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Olney, Ian. 2012. Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary
American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ross, Becki L. 2000. “‘It’s Merely Designed for Sexual Arousal’: Interrogating
the Indefensibility of Lesbian Smut.” In Drucilla Cornell (ed.), Feminism and
Pornography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 264–317.
Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Tohill, Cathal, and Pete Tombs. 1995. Immoral Tales: European Sex and Horror
Movies, 1956–1984. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.”
Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2008. Screening Sex. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Yapp, Nate. 2007. Review of The Whip and the Body. Classic-Horror.com, http://clas-
sic-horror.com/reviews/whip_and_the_body_1963 (accessed June 29, 2009).
Zalcock, Bev. 2001. Renegade Sisters: Girl Gangs on Film. New and updated ed.
London: Creation.

Televised
American Horror Story (series). Created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. FX.
2011–2012.

Webcast
“Monster” (music video). Directed by Jake Nava. Kanyewest.com. 2011.
“Not Myself Tonight” (music video). Directed by Hype Williams. VEVO. 2010.
“S&M” (music video). Directed by Melina Matsoukas. VEVO. 2011.

Filmed
Antichrist. Directed by Lars von Trier. Denmark/Germany/France/Sweden/Italy/
Poland, 2009.
 The Whip and the Body 17

Barbed Wire Dolls (Frauengefängnis). Directed by Jess Franco. Switzerland, 1976.

Bloody Pit of Horror (Il boia scarlatto). Directed by Massimo Pupillo. Italy/USA,
1965.
Bunny Game, The. Directed by Adam Rehmeier. USA, 2010.
Caged. Directed by John Cromwell. USA, 1950.
Calvaire. Directed by Fabrice Du Welz. Belgium/France/Luxembourg, 2004.
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The. Directed by David Ficher. USA/Sweden/UK/
Germany, 2011.
Horrible Dr. Hichcock, The (L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock). Directed by Riccardo
Freda. Italy, 1962.
Hostel (series). Created by Eli Roth. USA, 2005–2011.
House of Women. Directed by Walter Doniger. USA, 1962.
Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1). Directed by Takashi Miike. Japan, 2001.
Ladies of the Big House. Directed by Marion Gering. USA, 1931.
Little Deaths. Directed by Sean Hogan and Andrew Parkinson. UK, 2011.
Piano Teacher, The (La Pianiste). Directed by Michael Haneke. Austria/France/
Germany, 2001.
Sadomania (Sadomania: Hölle der Lust). Directed by Jess Franco. Spain/West
Germany, 1981.
Saw (series). Created by Leigh Whannell and James Wan. USA, 2004–2010.
Serbian Film, A (Srpski film). Directed by Srđan Spasojević. Serbia, 2010.
Tokyo Gore Police (Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu). Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura. USA/
Japan, 2008.
Virgin of Nuremberg, The (La vergine di Norimberga). Directed by Antonio
Margheriti. Italy, 1963.
Whip and the Body, The (La frusta e il corpo). Directed by Mario Bava. Italy/France,
1963.
Women in Fury (Femmine in fuga). Directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini. Italy/
Brazil, 1985.
Women’s Prison Massacre (Emanuelle fuga dall’ inferno). Directed by Bruno Mattei.
Italy/France, 1983.
Chapter 2

Re-imagining
Censorship as “Reel”
Mutilation: Why not
Release a G-Rated
Version of David
Cronenberg’s Crash ?
Janet S. Robinson

David Cronenberg’s film Crash1 won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes
in 1996 while simultaneously garnering implacable rancor and a vigor-
ous censorship campaign against it in both the United Kingdom and the
United States. The maelstrom is well-documented in Martin Barker and
Julian Petley’s book, The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film
Reception (2001), which analyzes the complexities of the immediate response
to the film in the UK. In addition, due to its graphic sexual content, Fine
Line Cinema, a subsidiary of Ted Turner’s empire, stalled the US distribu-
tion of the film, deeming the film dangerous to the public, which reveals
compelling interstices between public politics and film criticism. This chap-
ter seeks to examine what this response can tell us about the consequences
of censorship.
In Cronenberg’s telling of the censorship story, Turner was “morally out-
raged” by the film and tried to stop its release. Although the film was even-
tually released with an NC-17 rating in theaters, Cronenberg, in an effort
to recoup lost revenue from the notoriously limited distribution of NC-17
films, reluctantly cut an R-rated version to be released by Blockbuster on
20 Janet S. Robinson

VHS. Thus, this chapter will explore how censorship forces alterations
based on notions of “morality” rather than on artistic expression. In the case
of Crash, the editing of the sex scenes changes the narrative of the film as a
whole. Editing in the R-rated version problematizes the original intention of
the film through the erasure of female desire and specifically female desire
for transgressive sex that includes, among other things, rough sex, bodily
injury, and multiple partners, but it is a desire that represents love, albeit the
dark side of love.
Cronenberg commented that the R-rated version “doesn’t make any
sense to me,” and “if you want an R-rating, you have to consider that a five-
year-old can see it.”2 The DVD includes both versions and asks the viewer
to choose between the two: the NC-17 theatrical release or the R-rated ver-
sion that had been created for VHS. This somewhat unique situation begs
the question: Why have both versions on the DVD?3 What was cut from the
NC-17 version in order to give the film an R rating? Would anyone actually
watch the R-rated version? When comparing the two, it is clear that a sex
scene between the main characters has been cut in its entirety for the R-rated
version. This edit has serious implications; it changes the meaning of the
film. And it points to a larger trend in film censorship: cutting artistically
motivated scenes for the sake of suppressing “morally offensive” material.
Cronenberg, a Canadian filmmaker known for his over-the-top horror
and science fiction genre films including Scanners (1979), The Brood (1980),
and Videodrome (1982), entered into more mainstream filmmaking in the
1980s, directing The Dead Zone (1983), The Fly (1986), and Dead Ringers
(1988). The narrative of Crash centers on the relationship of a married cou-
ple, James (James Spader) and Catherine Ballard (Deborah Kara Unger),
who seek sexual gratification by talking about their extramarital sexual
activities with other people during their own lovemaking. After James is in
a head-on car crash with the Remingtons, which kills Helen Remington’s
(Holly Hunter) husband, the couple follow Helen into a subculture popu-
lated by people who seek sexual release through crashing cars, specifically
in the reenactments of celebrity car accidents including James Dean, John
F. Kennedy, and Jayne Mansfield. The film tracks James and Catherine’s
journey as they too begin to experience sexual arousal from witnessing car
crashes and the visceral spectacle of the metal and steel of the car crashing
into the flesh of the body. In Crash, Cronenberg explores the postmodern
and disturbing world of technology and the potential effects that extreme
interaction with humans brings.
At first the film’s narrative doesn’t appear gratuitously transgressive
because it hones in on a married couple looking to spice up their sexual life
by participating in sex with multiple partners. The film soon begins to take a
turn toward the bizarre as it enters into a world where injured body parts are
 Re-Imagining Censorship 21

eroticized and characters masturbate to a crash dummies video. With this in

mind, it may seem absurd to read Crash as a love story.4 Clearly, Cronenberg
departs from the formulaic expressions of romantic love. Instead he opts for
a husband who is willing to run his wife off the highway in order to help her
fulfill her fantasy of dying in her car on the road. Although Hollywood cin-
ema offers many depictions of aberrant male sexuality, Catherine’s sexuality
is not so easy to define: she is not the “virgin,” the “whore,” or the “mother,”
and viewers may find it difficult to identify with her “othered ” desire. Read
within the context of the film, Catherine’s transgressive desire can be inter-
preted as a representation of the darker side of love.
The film may not be a love story in the conventional sense, but that does
not disavow the love expressed between James and Catherine. From this
perspective, the complications of arousal, and even the idea of love, must
be unpacked in order to uncover the nature of why this cinematic repre-
sentation is both sexy and disturbing, and why it was considered danger-
ous to the public and worthy of a relentless censorship campaign. Crash’s
final scene does not offer the love-story cliché of the happily-ever-after; it
offers something darker, but nevertheless something authentic. James facili-
tates Catherine’s fantasy of ecstasy through a car crash death by driving her
speedster off the highway. He pulls over and runs to her body, which has
been thrown from the car. When he sees that she is still alive, he realizes he
has been unsuccessful. As he takes her from behind, he whispers lovingly
into her ear, “Maybe the next one, darling . . . maybe the next one.” The
image of their writhing bodies on the grassy area under the overpass lingers,
as the camera pulls away and cuts to the end credits, as a profound moment
of cinematic love.
Undeniably, the history of mainstream cinema reveals that American
audiences have always felt more comfortable with formulaic story lines and
conventional representations of sex. Crash departs from mainstream cinema
because it does not provide a clear narrative. According to a study of Britain’s
censorship of the film by Martin Barker and his colleagues, this “refusal
to provide a traditional narrative seems to have provoked viewers, whether
towards favoring the film, being bored by it, or hating it” (2001, 5). The
characters in Crash do not respond to the world around them in norma-
tive ways; they are anesthetized, walking like zombies through their ultra-
modern lives. In order to feel anything at all, they raise the stakes beyond
logical extremes in all things physical. They find pleasure in car crashes, in
atypical sex (anal sex, homosexual sex, sex after injury, and sex with physi-
cal scars), and in the unexpected transformation and mutilation of the flesh
caused by both. The film disrupts our typical fear of car accidents and death
and literally exemplifies how our sex drive and our death drive intersect.5
Even J. G. Ballard himself, a strong proponent of the film of his novel,
22 Janet S. Robinson

stated, “Crash is not a conventional film, there are no conventions Crash is

relying on” (2001, 5). What the censors did not take into consideration is
that sex is an integral part of Crash’s narrative, not a titillating digression or
departure. Cronenberg corroborates this idea: “In Crash, very often the sex
scenes are absolutely the plot and the character development. You can’t take
them out” (1996, xvi); therefore, when sex is the essence of the story, censors
altering an NC-17 rating to an R rating risk reducing the representation of
human sexuality to an oversimplified notion of human behavior.
As is typical of censorship in the UK and the United States, the outrage
toward the film is aroused mainly by the depiction of sexuality rather than
violence. Perhaps the cause of the response is Cronenberg’s disinterest in rep-
resentations of Hollywood sex or the sex of pornography; rather, he explores
the complications of arousal that neither form of cinema ordinarily takes
into account. Cronenberg’s famously odd sensibility depicts the car crash
as the ultimate aphrodisiac. In scene after scene, we watch the characters
take part in sexual acts before, during, and after watching or participating
in car crashes. Although this may seem to be an atypical response to an
auto accident, we can readily connect this type of pleasure to the voyeuristic
pleasures of cinema.
“Reports and debates” on the film published in Screen (1998) offer an
analysis of Cronenberg’s film as a postmodern vision that comments on
the relationship between humans and technology. The film’s mise-en-scène
paints a bleak picture of our technologically dependent world; the camera
pans the city landscape showing a man-made world inhabited by highway
overpasses, deserted warehouses, dark alleys, and ubiquitous parking lots.
The characters within the frame are much like the steel and concrete that
surrounds them: they are empty, cold, disconnected, and unfulfilled. The
sexual narrative begins with a series of sex scenes with little dialogue. In
these opening scenes, the unnatural objects (an airplane, a metal desk, a steel
balcony railing) are as much a part of the sexual experience as the natural
bodies that desire escape from this anesthetized existence.
In Crash, Cronenberg exposes us to a world that most of us did not even
know existed.6 The fear of death by car crash is not new, nor is the thematic
link between sex and death.7 Here, the characters interchange the pleasure
of orgasm’s “little death”8 with the prospect of “real death”; in fact, in Crash
the characters seek ultimate ecstasy through experiencing both simultane-
ously. Thus the tension between the fear and desire that violence and sex
elicit in the physical body determines the guilty pleasures of Crash. Linda
Williams argues that eroticism is born out of the tension between desire and
fear (1999, 257), and as soon as what we fear becomes familiar, we no longer
fear it. Thus, we are aroused by the prospect of the unknown, the unknow-
able, and that which we have never seen before.
 Re-Imagining Censorship 23

Looking closely at the censored scene sheds light on what is supposedly

dangerous about this film. The censored scene begins with a nod to Alfred
Hitchock’s attention to voyeurism as the camera floats across the balcony
and through the sliding glass doors into the privacy of the Jameses’ bed-
room. Lasting nearly four minutes, the scene shows Catherine and James
having sex while Catherine voices her fantasy of imagining James having
anal sex with their new friend, Vaughan (Elias Koteas). The actors are naked
and are presumably having anal sex, but despite some critic complaints, the
scene is clearly not pornography. There are no close-ups of penetration and
the film represents simulated sex not real sex. What is unusual about the
scene, though, is that Catherine does almost all the talking. Not only does
this offer a brief escape from the primarily male-centered9 sex of the rest of
the film, but it also reveals a side of Catherine’s sexuality that informs her
actions for the remainder of the film.
For the censors, the threat of female sexuality has always trumped the
representation of sexual violence against women. The R-rated version of
Crash supports this notion. Yet what can we surmise from the almost total
avoidance in scholarly articles of the issues of censorship and specifically
censorship of representations of female sexuality?10 Although there are no
definitive answers to our questions about what turns us on when watching
sex, we can point to ways in which the film turns us on because Cronenberg
likes not just to represent mutually pleasureable sex, but to “show the
unshowable, speak the unspeakable.” This “showing” and “speaking” is at
the core of the pleasure of pornography’s “frenzy of the visible”11 and the
voyeuristic pleasure that Crash’s sex scenes, whether subversive or transgres-
sive, offer to its audiences.
In the bedroom scene, Catherine speaks the “unspeakable” when she sug-
gests that her husband wants to have sex with Vaughan. While they enjoy
anal sex, Catherine does all the speaking:

Would you like to sodomize him? Would you like to put your penis right into
his anus, thrust it up his anus? Tell me. Describe it to me. Tell me what you
would do. . . . Describe how you’d reach over and unzip his greasy jeans, then
take out his penis. Would you kiss it or suck it right away? Which hand would
you hold it in? Have you ever sucked a penis? Have you ever tasted semen?

Ultimately, there are many reasons why this scene would arouse an audience,
especially a female audience. Catherine controls the scene both aurally and
visually; the camera floats along her body, holding for moments on close-
ups of her face. Yet heterosexual desire is not erased, because James’s body is
also revealed. She gets off on his physical attention to her anus and also on
listening to herself “speak the unspeakable” to and about her husband—the
24 Janet S. Robinson

idea that she would condone his engagement in the very same sexual activity
with another man. She is not threatened by Vaughan; she orgasms to the
sound of his name and the idea of her husband doing to Vaughan what he’s
doing to her. From this perspective, I heartily disagree with Barbara Creed’s
assessment that Catherine “is not aroused by Vaughan’s violence” (1993,
178). Not only would I argue that Catherine is aroused by his violence but
that the fear of bodily harm is the very catalyst for her arousal.
Catherine gets off on her own voice, speaking the “unspeakable” about
her husband, and I would argue that it’s possible the scene was cut for what
we hear instead of what we see, that female language is transgressive and
thus more dangerous than the image of heterosexual sex. One way in which
the film turns us on is in Cronenberg’s flirtation with the unrepresentable,
which is at the core of the pleasure of cinema. Yet Crash never hints at the
logistics of actual or real sex as pornography does; in fact, in a later scene,
James’s bizarre sex with Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) by sexually penetrat-
ing a large improperly stitched wound on the back of her thigh, an injury
caused by a previous car crash, is a physical impossibility. Perhaps, predict-
ably, this scene does not get cut in its entirety for the censors.
Cronenberg chimed into the debate by asserting that “Crash is not porn,
in the sense that it was not designed to sexually arouse people. If it does
arouse people, then I consider that a bonus. I’m quite happy that this film
is going out an NC-17 rating. Some films are just for grownups” (quoted in
Shapiro, 47). Here, censorship, at its core, may be more about the threat of the
representation of active female sexuality than “morally offensive” material.
Catherine’s voice controls and drives the eroticism of the narrative aspects
of the scene. The apparent threat of the transgressive nature of their sex,
anal sex and figurative ménage à trois, should not be read through a moral
lens, one that desires to erase the complications of sexual desire in marriage.
Instead, this scene should be distinguished as crucial to Catherine’s and
James’s character development; it establishes both Catherine’s and James’s
desire for Vaughan and illustrates their mutual satisfaction represented by
simultaneous orgasms.
Yet the scene cannot be reduced to the representation of shared pleasure;
the nature of their eroticism arouses because the spectator is unfamiliar with
this type of sex, where eroticism lies within language rather than image, and
in turn, the scene works to simultaneously arouse and unsettle the viewer.
As spectators, we are aroused by the fear of our own response, and our voy-
euristic pleasure is rooted in the ability to unmask, to see what is hidden
and hear what silenced. Although we find pleasure in listening to Catherine
and watching the married couple in bed, we also understand that some-
how this unusual scene prefigures the inevitable threat of looming catas-
trophe. Regardless of the risk, or because of the risk, we continue to watch.
 Re-Imagining Censorship 25

Our fascination with James and Catherine’s alternative sex life, conflating
sex, fear, and violence, fulfills our desire to see those typically hidden asso-
ciations. Similarly, Vaughan responds to photos of celebrity car crashes: “It’s
all very satisfying and I’m not sure why.”
Although many critics have examined the voyeuristic aspects of the film,
none have discussed how the characters’ desire is also fueled by fear in the
film. Cronenberg doesn’t hint at this idea, but he does employ a direct hit
through his comparison of cars crashing into each other as a metaphor for
the sexual struggles of its characters. Borrowing again from Williams, this
scene represents the “tension between desire and the fear that inhibits but
also eroticizes it” (1999, 255). The fear that the scene evokes is only height-
ened for the spectator in his or her own voyeuristic pleasure of watching
the fear, the crash, the sex, and the inevitable catastrophe safely from their
seats in the theater or their couch in their living room. Indeed, the hor-
ror genre has always provided the pleasure paradox, where we find pleasure
in the repulsive. To see the connections between desire and fear, we can
look at the horror film genre to see that voyeuristic pleasure can be derived
from all sorts of fear-based images, both psychological (being chased and
caught) and visceral (being physically stabbed, tortured, or killed). The
comparison between the two genres is instructive. Carol Clover’s thorough
research on the visual bodily violence of the horror genre mirrors the visu-
als of the pornography genre’s desire to open “the fleshy secrets of normally
hidden things” (2001, 190). As the spectator, then, our voyeuristic pleasure
is rooted in the ability to unmask, to see what we can’t normally see, and we
don’t necessarily care if that’s violence or sex. We are turned on by the fear
of our own response to what we might see; we want the “unshowable” to be
shown front and center.
In Crash, the characters become spectators of their own lives; they derive
voyeuristic pleasure from watching each other have sex and observing the
repercussions of the violence that a speeding automobile can cause when
unnaturally forced to stop short. The voyeurism is not limited to the sight
of the inevitably mutilated human bodies that rest lifelessly in the mangled
steel and leather of the vehicle, but also in the vehicle itself. The fetishization
of the car is realized as the characters and spectators cringe at the sight of the
replica of James Dean’s Porche 550 Spyder race car or the simulated image
of the hard top of a Jayne Mansfield 1966 Buick Electra 225 sheered com-
pletely off, blonde wig stuck in the windshield, and the family Chihuahua
thrown from the car to its death. Murray Forman observes how cars are
“mobile signifiers” of autonomy and power and inscribed gender identity;
“cars in films and films about cars thus enter into a wider economy of semi-
otic and symbolic value, circulating images that merge with broader social
systems of meaning” (2001, 111). In this sense, the thematic of cars fetishized
26 Janet S. Robinson

as overdetermined symbols of masculinity in primarily American cinema

becomes realized; a man’s car read as a representation of his phallic power
is no longer merely subtext. Vaughan’s Lincoln becomes an extension of his
body including his penis, and in the same way, Catherine’s sports car is an
extension of her body, and James’s maroon sedan is an extension of his. The
personification of the auto bodies as referenced in the screenplay informs
this reading. After Vaughan plunges to his fiery death as his Lincoln flies
over an airport ramp onto a shuttle full of people, James’s “eyes are wide:
not with horror, but with excitement” (Cronenberg 1996, 61). Soon after-
ward, James rejects his sedan for Vaughan’s partly restored “battle-scarred”
Lincoln, which has been brought “back to swaying, bellowing life” (61).
Cronenberg’s nod to Hitchcock’s voyeuristic lens is furthered in the “car
wash” scene that evokes Rear Window. Like Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) in Rear
Window, James suffers from an injured leg from a car accident. Like Jeffries,
James sits on his balcony looking out through binoculars. Unlike Jeffries,
who derives voyeuristic pleasure from watching people across a courtyard in
the privacy of their apartments, James spends his time watching cars mov-
ing on a highway. Visually, James and Jeffries may be similarly compared
to the spectator in the audience, both tied to their chairs, both in control
of the gaze.12 Not by coincidence, James, a film director, can be linked to
Jeffries the photojournalist.13 However, in Crash, it’s not the female body
that’s fetishized; rather it’s the automobile.14
The car wash scene was only minimally cut for the R-rated version on the
DVD and is considered by many to be a representation of sadism, rape, or
rough sex. The scene locates the characters squarely in the enclosed space of
Vaughan’s battered 1963 Lincoln, invoking the site of JFK’s death. The car
wash scene emphasizes the fetishization of Vaughan’s 1963 Lincoln by relish-
ing in the soaps, suds, and water that caress the car’s body. Simultaneously,
inside the car, the camera closes in on James’s hand fixing the view of the
mirror to get exactly the right angle so that he can self-deliver the perfect
type of pleasure by looking through the rearview mirror to gaze at his wife
having sex with Vaughn. The car wash scene’s reflexive employment of on-
screen voyeurism enhances the tension between the spectators’ own pleasure
in watching the sex going on in the back seat and James’s anxious pleasure
in looking through the rearview mirror to gaze.
Perhaps this scene was not cut because it follows our accepted notions
of the representation of sexuality in cinema. Spectators are accustomed
to watching sex in which the male controls the action. In this example,
Vaughan controls Catherine’s body throughout the scene; he puts her in
a position against the door, pulls her onto her back, and grabs her around
the throat. To be clear, I am not condoning Vaughn’s violence. What I am
doing, though, is looking at the scene within the context of the film and
 Re-Imagining Censorship 27

arguing that without the bedroom scene before it, the viewer is incapable of
understanding Catherine’s desire. In her influential article “Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey articulates, using Rear Window as
an example, how traditional cinematic representations of female sexuality
fetishize the female body, rendering it static. In Hollywood cinema, the static
(female) body retards the narrative. Significantly, without the knowledge of
the earlier bedroom scene, the representation of the active male (Vaughan),
the passive female (Catherine), and the pleasure-in-looking male (James) fit
the oversimplified dynamics between men and women that Mulvey reveals
as problematic in mainstream cinema.
Yet, with the knowledge of the bedroom scene, the meaning changes,
especially in our understanding of Catherine’s desires. We know that
Catherine is an active participant; she has fantasized about Vaughan, and
she is the one who instigates the sex by revealing her breast to him at the
outset of the scene. Without the precursor of the bedroom scene, Catherine’s
action is perceived as nonaction. She appears disconnected, as if she were
unaware of what is happening and seemingly surrenders to Vaughan. His
aggressive sexual actions (pushing, pulling, choking) are therefore perceived
as sexual violence instead of sexual fantasy. In the NC-17 version, the camera
offers two close-ups of Vaughan thrusting his fingers into Catherine’s mani-
cured vagina; the R-rated version cuts this and focuses on the violence from
the waist up. With the knowledge of the bedroom scene, we can surmise
that Vaughan’s hands replace his badly scarred penis perhaps for Catherine’s
pleasure and not his own. The R-rated version edits both scenes, erasing
any interpretations of desire. The scene ends when the car wash concludes
and when Catherine wipes viscous fluid mixed with blood15 from her hand
onto the back of James’s beat-up leather driver’s seat. We might not want to
admit that we find the bedroom scene and the car wash scene erotic, but
that’s beside the point. The R-rated editing oversimplifies and reduces the
relationships between the characters so substantially that the film ceases
to make sense. Catherine is aroused by Vaughan’s violence, and the fear of
bodily harm and what his body and/or his car will do to her body is the very
catalyst for her arousal. We know this because in the bedroom scene we are
privy to her fantasies about Vaughan’s damaged body: his physical scars, his
injured penis, and his salty semen.
With the bedroom scene intact, Catherine becomes an active participant
in her own ménage-à-trois fantasy. As I stated earlier, bodies of cars and
people are interchangeable throughout the film; in one case specifically,
James identifies Vaughan as the perpetrator of a hit and run that leaves a large
gash in the side of Catherine’s car: “One of your suitors. It’s Vaughan.” The
damage caused by Vaughan to her car is identified in sexual terms, as “court-
ing,” and reflects the earlier damage done to her body in the car wash scene.
28 Janet S. Robinson

In fact, in the scene directly following the car wash scene, we find Catherine
naked on their bed in their bedroom. Visible bruises clearly cover her body.
James slowly places his hand lightly over each bruise matching his fingers to
the very place where Vaughan’s fingers have left their mark on Catherine’s
body. Though the typical response to bruises covering the body of a lover
would be deep concern or even horror, James’s response offers a wholly dif-
ferent interpretation. James places his hand in Vaughan’s handprint with a
gentle sensuality in a way that makes each movement of his hand seem like
sexual foreplay rather than posttraumatic distress.
The emphasis in this scene evokes the film’s thematic of the human body
merging with technology. The steel machinations of the nonliving auto-
mobile come to virtual life as they rev and screech seemingly on their own.
Cronenberg’s analogy can be read in this scene as James’s desire to become
one with Catherine’s body, her body a displacement of Vaughan and his
1963 Lincoln. The bruises then become symbolic of the damage done to the
cars that the characters purposely attempt to destroy for their own sexual
satisfaction. My point here is that Vaughan and Catherine’s rough sex in
the car should not be read as undesirable. Their desire is further illustrated
in Catherine’s disappointment at the end of the film when she remains
unsuccessful in her goal to find simultaneous ecstasy and death after James
purposely runs her off the highway in Vaughan’s Lincoln.
It is because of this problematization of sex and violence, both revealed
in the NC-17 version and concealed in the R-rated version, that the film
as a whole can be read, as Roberta Jill Craven asserts, as having the ability
to evoke a “swell of humanity” (2000, 192). The characters’ humanity is
understood through their sexual interactions in and out of cars and in the
actual crashes that force some feeling from the dehumanized bodies that
walk through the film. The sex scenes show this feeling through orgasmic
release just as the car crash sequences evoke a comparable feeling though the
climax of the crash itself. Outside of the sex and the car crashes, the charac-
ters feel nothing; they are as mechanized as the cars they drive. As Vaughan
explains, “a car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event—a lib-
eration of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who have died
with an intensity impossible in any other form.”
Cronenberg uncovers how desire contradicts itself, and in turn, he com-
plicates our own cinematic expectations of voyeuristic pleasure that can
be derived from explicit simulated sex and violence. How else can we rec-
oncile Catherine’s impossible desire for simultaneous pleasure and pain,
connection and disconnection, ecstasy and death? Early in the film, Vaughan
confesses that his project is not about “the reshaping of the human body
by modern technology” because that is a “crude sci-fi concept that floats
 Re-Imagining Censorship 29

on the surface and doesn’t threaten anybody.” This line of dialogue gives
us insight, perhaps, into Cronenberg’s real project: he desires to threaten
everybody. He made this film for adults, not children, a distinction that has
never registered with the MPAA. Crash should be read as a film that not
only comments on the human body’s connection to modern technology but
is also a commentary on cinematic sex in its unrelenting attempt to disrupt
the mainstream’s inoffensive representation of sex, defined by Cronenberg
as “lyrical little interludes . . . [that] can be cut out and not change the plot
or the characters one iota” (1996). The implications, then, are significant;
censorship of the film for “morally offensive” material misleads an audience,
encouraging them to watch a film that, through misguided editing based
on puritanical values about sexuality, denies female desire. Ironically, the
R-rated version is more offensive than the NC-17 version because the sexual
ellipses violently mutilate the film’s glimpse of humanity.
In contrast to his earlier film Videodrome (1983), Cronenberg’s dark vision
here is not the fear of humans literally merging sexually with machines.
Rather, the world he envisions in Crash is a place in which we cannot tell
the difference between the two; the fetishization of the car becomes danger-
ously real. We do not have to have serial anal sex or crash our cars to feel the
anonymity of our continuing autoerotic sexual relationship with technology
via TV, computer, or phone screen. Making sense of images, especially those
that create a visceral response, is even more difficult in today’s digital age;
more than a decade after the release of the film, we live in a world where
social media have replaced authentic interaction, cybersex can replace actual
sex, and sexting is a form of disembodied sexual banter literally outside of
space and time. Cronenberg asks us to consider the effect of the dehuman-
izing trajectory of our relationship with technology. When James repositions
the rearview mirror to get the view he desires, he nondiegetically prefigures
the double-rated DVD that allows spectators to click either on the R-rated or
the NC-17 version of the film in order to gain the illusory mastery of a film
director; using the most current technology, spectators choose exactly what
image they want to watch. Ultimately, Cronenberg’s Crash offers a cinematic
representation of sexuality that censors should not fear; on the contrary, they
should regale this film for uncovering the dark side of love, a place in which
female desire and the complexities of sexual intimacy exist.

Notes
1. Often confused with Paul Haggis’s film with the same title, which did win
the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2006.
2. See Brian Johnson’s article “Waiting for Crash: Is Ted Turner Playing Film
Censor?” in Maclean’s, November 11, 1996, 72.
30 Janet S. Robinson

3. At the time of writing this article, this is still the only version of the DVD
available.
4. See Bonnie Sherr Klein’s documentary film Not a Love Story: A Film About
Pornography, 1982, for a look at the feminist distaste for pornography
because of its objectification of women and privileging of hardcore sex
over eroticism. Linda Williams criticizes Crash in her book Hard Core
for conflating the symbolic meaning of the phallus with the actual penis,
265–266.
5. See Shohini Chaudhuri’s “Witnessing Death: Ballard and Cronenberg’s Crash,”
for a more comprehensive analysis of the application of Sigmund Freud, Jaques
Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and Giles Deleuze’s theories to the film.
6. In fact, many of my students are more shocked by the idea that a sado-
masochistic subculture, perhaps like the one represented in the film, might
actually exist than they are by the “so-called” morally offensive images of
the characters having sex after being in a car crash.
7. See Melissa Iocco’s “Addiction to Affliction” discussing the connection
between death and the feminine in gothic literature and film, specifically
addressing issues in Crash.
8. See André Bazin’s 1967–1971 What Is Cinema?
9. Arguably, the majority of all sex scenes in both Hollywood cinema and the
pornography industry are male centered.
10. See Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy. Six years before the film was released,
Showalter discusses the problem for feminists in addressing a sexual politics
that includes female sexual pleasure, 36–37.
11. See Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” 1989.
12. See Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
13. See Fred Botting and Scott Wilson’s discussion of how the act of taking
photographs works in the film: “The photograph functions as a scar in time,
freezing the moment when the mortal becomes Other, ” 190.
14. See Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive to see how the fetishization of
the automobile continues to be a Hollywood moneymaker.
15. See Karen Beckman’s article “Film Falls Apart: Crash, Semen, and Pop” for
a lengthy discussion of Vaughan’s flaccid penis and the ubiquity of semen in
Ballard’s book.

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Botting, Fred, and Scott Wilson. 1998. “Automatic Lover.” Reports and Debates.
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 Re-Imagining Censorship 31

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Iocco, Melissa. 2001. “Addicted to Affliction: Masculinity and Perversity in Crash
and Fight Club.” Gothic Studies, 9(1): 46–56.
Johnson, Brian D. 1996. “Waiting for Crash: Is Ted Turner Playing Film Censor?”
Maclean’s, November 11, p. 72.
Mulvey, Laura. 2011. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Timothy
Corrigan, Patricia White, and Meta Mazaj (eds.), Critical Visions in Film Theory:
Classic and Contemporary Readings. New York: Bedford-St. Martin’s. 725–738.
Shapiro, Marc. 1997. “Collision Course.” Rev. of Crash, director David Cronenberg.
Starlog, April, pp. 44–47.
Showalter, Elaine. 1990. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle.
New York: Penguin.
Sinclair, Ian. 1999. Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-Mortem on J. G. Ballard’s
“Trajectory of Fate.” London: British Film Institute.
Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible.”
Berkley: University of California Press.
———. 2008. Screening Sex. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 2011. “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal
Melodrama.” In Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, and Meta Mazaj (eds.),
Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. New York:
Bedford-St. Martin’s. 713–724.

Filmed
Crash. Directed by David Cronenberg. USA, 1996.
Drive. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. USA, 2011.
Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography. Directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein. USA,
1982.
Rear Window. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA, 1955.
Chapter 3

Antichrist : Lost
Children, Love, and
the Fear of Excess
Terrie Waddell

I don’t think women or their sexuality is evil, but it is frightening.

—Lars von Trier

Antichrist () by Danish director Lars von Trier is emotionally

exhausting. Apart from feeling somewhat depleted, my experience of the film
was coloured by two distinct yet interlocking aspects of what I’ll call the lost
child. The first relates to the struggle of negotiating and transcending cul-
turally inscribed forms of femininity that inhibit female agency. Not only
does Antichrist’s central protagonist internalize traditionally accepted gender
boundaries, but she psychologically regresses, locking herself into a childlike
state and lashing out when confronted with the spectre of a more fully realized
self. The second response stems from the enduring lost child scenarios of my
country, Australia, where the synthesis of love, pain, and violence that accom-
panies the death of innocents/innocence is clearly one of the most revisited
traumas since European settlement. This chapter will argue that the over-
arching concept of the lost child complex reverberates through both Antichrist
and the Australian cultural landscape. In this conflation, the lost child might
be metaphorically understood as an internal ghost with its own autonomy,
unable to transcend the sense of threat that drives its power to haunt.
A fusion of inner purging and emotional gluttony, Antichrist unfolds in
four chapters (“Grief,” “Pain,” “Despair,” and “The Three Beggars”), with the
initial focus on a child’s death and the grieving parents, symbolically named
She and He (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe). She is caught by a
34 Terrie Waddell

disabling grief that her therapist husband (unethically) attempts to treat by

encouraging her to confront the place she most fears, their isolated coun-
try cabin “Eden” with its overtones of paradise and original sin/corrupted
innocence. The lost infant becomes a barely veiled symbol for Gainsbourg’s
flailing character as she is drawn into an inner/outer wilderness of dissipat-
ing physical, emotional, and sexual boundaries—an arena for the struggle
between mythos and reason, a conscious/unconscious liminality, and a state
of attempted transcendence where she must be bled, cut, and purged to feel
and acknowledge the severed (lost) child as an aspect of her fracturing iden-
tity. This scrambling for selfhood is crafted through the depiction of inner
world discomforts (phobias, cravings, anxieties, and complexes) set against
the rawness of nature to accentuate a sense of primal authenticity, disorien-
tation, and a shedding of cultural restraints.

Trier and the Lost Child Complex

Trier has openly acknowledged Antichrist as the product of a disabling depres-
sion, and the filmmaking process as a way of fighting back (Schepelern,
2009). As he confessed to one of his former actors, Knud Romer, “Antichrist
is the one that came closest to a scream. It came at a time in my life when
I was feeling really bad. Inspiration is found in your own fear, your own
emotions” (2009). Elaborating on this climb from a lost phase, Trier claims
to have befriended his demons by projecting and amplifying their capac-
ity to disrupt his life: “Maybe that’s the advantage of making films: that
the demons which are so painful when you meet them, get a different role.
They become your friends . . . your playmates” (Romer, 2009). According to
Magdalena Zolkas, Trier was influenced by cognitive-behavior therapy, as
well as Jungian analysis (2011, 80). This offers some insight into Antichrist’s
fusion of Freudian/Jungian clichés (psychoanalysis and analytical psychol-
ogy respectively, the later developed from the former). The She/He character
names, for instance, hint at the syzygy, a term bracketing the contrasex-
ual dynamics of the psyche as pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung
configured it—the anima (feminine, soul) and animus (masculine, spirit)
archetypes, briefly understood as collectively unconscious patterns/ener-
gies influencing behavior (Jung 1966a, 345). These motifs are now largely
theorized as coexisting qualities that transcend gender (Hillman, 1985;
Rowland, 2002; Wehr, 1987), yet despite attempts to redeem Jung’s essen-
tialist aligning of the anima with fantasy or actual women, the archetype is
still often projected as a female character. This anima/female yoking is true,
I feel, of Antichrist as well, although Trier also suggests that the (patholo-
gized) syzygy is at play as a form of anima/animus conflict in the individual
 Antichrist 35

psychic lives of She and He, but this aspect of the film, too intricate to can-
vas here, is best left to another discussion.
The notion of lostness that seemingly generated and guided the making
of Antichrist, along with the She character’s primary personification as the
disoriented anima/soul/puella (eternal girl), connects the text to the cultural
complex of the lost child, a potent psychological legacy of Australia’s colo-
nial past. It seems fitting to view this overarching sense of lostness through
a predominantly Jungian (and post-Jungian) frame given the overtly psycho-
dynamic and mythopoetic approach of the film. In analytical psychology,
the complex is theorized as a mesh of archetypal and deeply personal mate-
rial operating to varying degrees of discomfort against the subject’s will. In
referring to this aspect of the psyche as an “autonomous being,” Jung hints at
the capacity of the complex to dominate behavior like an independent force,
operating externally (1966b, 187). Antichrist’s female protagonist often
claims to feel controlled by mysterious forces beyond her control. When
reading this through the concept of the autonomous complex, it becomes
clear that her struggle to disentangle and integrate aspects of her personal-
ity involves experiencing the complex as both an external and an internal
energy that she feels powerless to repel.
Analyst John Weir Perry’s division of the complex into two interlaced
components, the affect-ego and the affect-object, is a helpful way to interpret
Gainsbourg’s character trajectory (1970). The affect-ego refers to the ego’s
identification with the complex, in this case the lost child. She therefore imag-
ines herself as defenseless, unanchored, unable to escape, and childlike. This
state is given a literal representation in her child, Nick. The complex also
unconsciously attaches itself to external objects, endowing them with both
a sense of potential and threat. In this instance, nature becomes the affect-
object. On one level she associates it with a very gendered sense of potential
self-expression, but to keep the lost child in place, she confines it in a destruc-
tive form. In other words, the untamed experience of female embodiment she
unconsciously seeks must be rendered evil or the lost child complex will lose its
grip. Similarly, He, who adopts a paternalistic, father-knows-best approach in
his effort to shift her childlike helplessness, is identified as the devil. “Nature,”
she says, “is Satan’s church.” He then can also be thought of, although to
a lesser degree than nature, as an affect-object that effectively defends the
affect-ego (lost child) state. This duel function allows the complex to main-
tain its grip, and as Thomas Singer notes (fittingly for Antichrist), “Neither
party in this unholy pair usually fares very well” (Singer and Kimbles 2004b,
186). As we’ll see, the distress of the film isn’t reserved for the blood-curdling
climax but filters through the female protagonist’s struggle to be released from
a retarding force that has no reality beyond her psyche.
36 Terrie Waddell

When viewing the complex in a collective sense, Jung generally referred

to shadow territory, understood as everything that individual personal and
collective consciousness disavows and reallocates or projects onto an other:
“Projections,” he wrote in relation to how the shadow is often experienced,
can “change the world into a replica of one’s unknown face” (1969, 9).
Singer and Samuel Kimbles, in their work on cultural complexes, extend
this broadly articulated concept, arguing that the various cultural antago-
nisms at play on a local and global scale can be attributed to archetypal and
cultural material that becomes fused through internalized trauma (2004a,
2004b; Singer 2007). This deeply imbedded aspect of the cultural complex
is able to irrationally resurface, “capturing” both entire communities and
their constituents. The complex is therefore played out symbiotically, rein-
forced through a synthesis of cultural and personal energies. For example,
not only do we witness the lost child in various art and media forms, but
also in individual behaviors and attitudes colored by a fixation on youth
and alienation, most likely the product of early trauma, in Australia’s case,
the emotional wound of a violent colonial/penal past. This complex, also
at work in Antichrist, can be read as a product of, and a text bound by,
the trauma of psychic disorientation where the ego is for a time felt as
unanchored—lost to more dominant forces.
The film’s central themes are relatively predictable given Trier’s prior focus
on stolen innocence as the consequence of sadistic misfortune and abuse vis-
ited upon masochistically inclined female characters (suggestive of a culturally
disavowed anima) who struggle with intimacy, connectedness, and the mean-
ing of love (Breaking the Waves, 1996; Dancer in the Dark, 2000; Dogville,
2003; The Idiots, 1998; Europa [Zentropa], 1991; and to some extent The
Kingdom, 1994, with its spectral lost-child-in-limbo). They can also be viewed
as critiques on patriarchy, eruptions of female subjugation, and retribution.
The intensity of these motifs escalates in Antichrist. The way the text conjures
the suffering woman-as-lost-child relies on Trier’s acutely honed techniques of
enfolding the spectator into the emotion and feeling of the imagery.

I do try to make my films affect the audience’s emotions. But I do so by

creating as expressive an image as I can for myself. So I’d claim—even if it’s
a bit of a lie—that I don’t keep the audience in mind when I make my films.
Mainly, I satisfy myself with the images I make. At the same time, I can’t
deny that they’re made with the intention of having an effect. . . . If you sit
in the cinema weeping, it’s a pale imitation of a similar emotion you’ve had
in real life. Film is a second-rate medium that way, because it will always be
living on borrowed emotions from real life. (Romer, 2009)

It is an unsurprising approach given the film’s credited dedication to

director Andre Tarkovsky, who like Tim Burton, as Helena Bassil-Morozow
 Antichrist 37

argues, actively sets out to “‘portray’ a feeling, an emotion, an unconscious

dream-like state” (2009, 18).
In Jung’s formulation, “emotions are the activity of the unconscious”
(Perry 1970, 1) so that the ego is a “recipient” of these outpourings, while
“feeling is a function of consciousness, and—to the degree to which it is dif-
ferentiated—has the quality of choice and intentionality in its judgements
and value” (Perry 1970, 2). Trier allows for emotion and feeling through the
strategy of haptic visuality: an attempt to provoke, through imagery, a sense
of physical contact/proximity often coupled with a desire to feel so that, as
Laura Marks writes, “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch”
(2000, 162). Marks adapted the phrase from Alois Riegl, who sought to dif-
ferentiate between the more physiologically toned haptic (to touch or fasten
onto) and optical image. According to her modification of Riegl’s analysis:

While optical perception privileges the representational power of the image,

haptic perception privileges the material presence of the image. Drawing
from other forms of sense experience, primarily touch and kinaesthetics,
haptic visuality involves the body more than is the case with optic visuality.
Touch is a sense located on the surface of the body: thinking of cinema as
haptic is only a step toward considering the ways cinema appeals to the body
as a whole. (2000, 163)

While Marks refers more to experimental cinema, stipulating that the haptic
image “forces the viewer to contemplate the image itself instead of being
pulled into the narrative” (163), I would argue that in certain segments of
Antichrist (and his recent Melancholia, 2011), Trier forces a simultaneous
relationship between the unfolding story and the sensuality of his imagery,
provoking an empathetic connection between the sensory world of the char-
acter She and the audience. This technique encourages the feeling of, and
emotions associated with, being lost in the wilderness where one is physi-
cally aroused and caught by the environment. In an extension of this, Trier
uses haptic visuality to (predominantly) highlight the affect-object aspect of
her relationship with nature. Antichrist rids us of the mythical harmony of
this (woman/nature) relationship by endowing it with a liminality that holds
the threat of dissolution and potential for rebirth. As mentioned above, the
wooded environment becomes a manifestation of the complex, so that nature
and her nature are collapsed into a force that she feels simultaneously subject
to and in attempted transition from.

The Nature of Evil

There’s a famous Australian painting by celebrated Heidelberg school artist
Frederick McCubbin of a young girl alone in bushland (Lost, aka The Lost
38 Terrie Waddell

Child, 1886). This blurred little figure, an alien presence, caught in the mid-
dle of towering trees and overgrown shrubbery, seems resigned to, and even
enchanted by, this form of imprisonment. The idea of being overwhelmed
by nature in this work, an early marker of Australia’s cultural fixation with
lost child themes, seems replicated in a key sequence of Antichrist where
the grassland surrounding Eden climactically swallows Gainsbourg’s frail,
almost pubescent-looking body. It is the most explicit attempt throughout
the film to bind She to nature’s death-rebirth cycle. This fantasy, stimu-
lated by her submission to his guided visualization, takes place during
the couple’s train trip to their Eden retreat. It is clearly a preview to their
consequent descent into the unconscious that Trier seems to construct as
a Jungian-toned site of potential healing and a Freudian id or refuse for
inhibited material, instincts, and drives (Freud, 1923/1961), where true to
Robin Wood’s influential work on the horror genre we will witness a “return
of the repressed” (1986).
After relaxing her into the exercise, He asks her to imagine calmly walk-
ing through the surrounding woodland entrance to Eden. At this point
the imagery becomes surreal as it tries to capture her fantasy. She makes
her ghostly self the subject of what seems like a slow-motion artwork. A
faceless, white, and luminous figure dressed in a childlike floral-patterned
dress, she is dwarfed by the menacing, downward-sloping landscape. As she
crosses a small bridge in a symbolic negotiation of the demarcating point
between the upper and underworld, we sense that she is entering a hell-
ish domain—“Darkness comes early down here,” she says of her descent.
This possible allusion to the Styx, an ancient waterway of Greek mythol-
ogy where tricksters ferried the souls of the dead, feeds into other stories
of lost children, as Peter Pierce notes in his study of Australian lost child
narratives (1999). As she heads downward to the cabin/abyss/underworld,
He instructs her to lie on the ground. In this shot she comes into defined
focus, no longer a tiny figure on the landscape. “Will you do what I ask
you?” he says as she allows herself to be cradled by the lush grass; “I want you
to melt into the green. Don’t fight it; just turn green.” As he says this, her
body dissolves into the forest floor. We are led into feeling this dissolution
through the haptic imagery—flooded with a sense of physical proximity to
the environment. Her dissolve into the soil, and earlier crossing of the “Styx”
is a form of transition associated with mythic psychopomps: guides to the
underworld, or in Jungian thinking, personifications of movement from one
psychic state to another via a realization of emerging unconscious processes.
The visualization becomes a positive embrace of the transition from child to
another phase of being within nature’s death-rebirth cycle. In returning to
her former ego-hijacked state, the complex once again twists the concept of
Eden and its woodland surrounds. As the pathology intensifies, the idea of
 Antichrist 39

capitulating to nature initially becomes anathema to her, for to embrace it

(and its perceived emancipatory qualities) implies dissolution of the (inner)
lost child—a release, I would argue, she craves.
Her self-loathing and masochism in the face of potential female embodi-
ment is accented when He discovers her doctoral research on witchcraft and
brutal images of witch trials in the cabin’s attic. He subsequently interro-
gates her willingness to associate with the persecution of fifteenth-century
women and validate their alleged wickedness as a mirror of her own (and
female) “nature,” a state of being regulated by destructive impulses. In the
fantasy scene following her misreading of treatises on witches, she mastur-
bates furiously. The couple then copulate against the lower trunk of a large
gnarled tree. As he slaps her in mock acquiescence to her desire for punish-
ment, the brooding imagery of their contorted naked bodies resembles the
sadomasochistic etchings in the attic. To further accentuate this fusion, her
Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches, Heinrich Institoris 1486) ref-
erence to an instance of witchcraft—“the sisters from Ratisbon could start
a hailstorm”—is accented with a cutaway shot of Hans Baldung’s woodcut,
The Witches’ Sabbath (1510). When the camera returns to the couple, it pulls
back from their writhing bodies to expose the roots of the tree now inter-
twined with bare, lifeless female arms and hands. The sequence evokes both
female persecution and the notion of irrational and mythic evil as a way of
drawing her into an experience of being overwhelmed by the natural world
and her own unthinkable “becoming.” The pathologized woman-out-of-
bounds cliché is therefore mobilized to expose an internalization/twisting
of misogyny and the fear/mistrust/frustration of her desire for unbridled
embodiment. What happens, Antichrist seems to ask, if women surrender to
that which is only artificially contained—a physical and emotional leakage,
almost exclusively represented in culture as madness, maenadism, or evil?
What if one ceases to monitor the body? What is the burden of surrendering
to, and basking in, an unconstrained sense of female agency—and how does
that compare to the burden of containing it? The emotion that underlies
these questions makes Antichrist a demanding viewing experience.

Lost in the Woods

Filmed in rural German North Rhine–Westphalia, Rhein-Sieg-Kreis, and
Wuppertal, one is reminded of the Grimm brothers’ fables, for as Pierce
argues, “the forests in which children were lost were perilous places, not
because of any natural threats that they posed, but for the malevolent peo-
ple who lived within them, better to prey on the young” (1999, xv). Trier,
though, seems to be more seduced by the fairy tale/film associations between
“the woods” and the unconscious: dream spaces, prisms of the unknown,
40 Terrie Waddell

dangerous cathartic liminal stretches where obstacles must be negotiated

before escape or metaphorical transformation is possible. It is here that She
becomes most submissive to her patronizing husband until the last violent
scenes of the film, where she exorcises her vengeful impulses in a rush of
sadistic torture that seemingly frees her from the restraints of the lost child,
but at the same time conjures into being her self-proclaimed evil nature.
When in the mode of helpless child, before her thwarted transition,
She becomes toddlerlike, often lost for language, driven by panic attacks,
screaming/crying fits, and a need for immediate gratification from her
husband/carer. She behaves as if she has no free will but is controlled, or
rather manipulated, by forces too powerful to repel—her husband and the
affect-object-endowed natural, uncivilized world that inhibits her develop-
ment. The following therapy exercise on their arrival at Eden best captures
this sense of helplessness. After a night sleeping, exhausted from her walk
through the forest to the cabin where she imagines the soles of her feet burn-
ing and pierced by thorns, she wakes to find him arranging large rocks in
a stepping-stone formation. To combat her fear of bodily contact with the
earth, he encourages her to walk from one rock to the other, using each as a
safe place to rest between the beginning and end of the route.
He piggybacks her to the first starting stone, and from there she hauls
herself along the ground, clutching him for support in her attempt to com-
plete the mini obstacle course. “Keep breathing, I’ve got you,” he says. As
she lurches onto the last stone, “You did it, you learned something,” he
tells her as if she’s an infant taking her first steps. She then weeps with the
effort. Seeing a small chick fall from a tree and a predatory bird sweep it
up and begin to pluck its tiny body as if to reinforce nature’s cruelty and
the untimely death of her own child, she collapses into her husband’s arms
and continues crying into the night. The perverse relationship She has with
nature allows the woodland surrounding Eden to become not only a compo-
nent of the complex, but another character in the narrative. This suggested
anthropomorphism resonates in Australian stories and reportage of lost chil-
dren who found themselves consumed by a familiar/unfamiliar (uncanny)
womb that nourished and destroyed. In a brief shift from Antichrist, I now
want to address this connection that colored my viewing of the film so that
the experience, as Trier intended, involved “living on borrowed emotions
from real life.”

Australian/Antichrist Lost Child Parallels

Narrative repetition in journalism, screen fiction, and the creative arts fos-
ters a sense of displacement, innocence, and environmental vulnerability.
Unlike the projected evil affect-object that nature becomes in Antichrist,
 Antichrist 41

the Australian environment (or colloquially, “the bush”) has proven itself to
be treacherous. Fire and floods have always had devastating consequences,
causing mass evacuation, death, and the destruction of heritage towns, sub-
urbs, and the inner city. Mothers with children huddled in dams, paddocks,
or threatened houses while husbands, partners, or relatives fight the flames
and floods that force residents to abandon their homes are now part of per-
sonal and media stories. There is a feeling of being collectively held through
these traumas. History has forced us to accept our susceptibility to the envi-
ronment. As with Antichrist, this acknowledgement of vulnerability to outer
forces reflects a vulnerability to the inner force of the complex. It is therefore
easy to draw associations with Gainsbourg’s displaced child, wary of, called
to, and identifying with nature: the malevolent parent that holds one in
a state of immaturity, in contrast to the more nurturing and popularized
female Earth goddess, Gaia, of Greek myth.
As I have discussed elsewhere (Waddell, 2012), Australia’s lost child
theme is a source of ongoing fascination, creativity, and cultural shame:
the stolen generations (indigenous children removed from their families by
government organizations), mistreated child migrants from the UK sent
to Australia from 1920 to 1967, and the many institutionalized children
abused by religious and nonsectarian carers since white settlement in 1788
(Dow and Phillips, 2009). Perhaps the most recognized lost child amalga-
mation of journalism, court reportage, magazine spreads, literature, televi-
sion, and cinema was missing infant Azaria Chamberlain. Taken from her
camping tent at Uluru (Ayres Rock) by a dingo in 1980, the body was never
recovered. Despite an overwhelming lack of substantial primary evidence,
her mother “Lindy” was imprisoned for the child’s murder in 1982, but the
sentence was remitted four years later (Chamberlain-Creighton, 2011). After
three coronial inquests, a trial, two appeals, and a royal commission that all
proved inconclusive, the Chamberlains called for the Northern Territory
to hold a fourth coronial inquest on the thirtieth anniversary of the baby’s
disappearance. As well as an ongoing appeal to justice, the seemingly never-
ending story of Azaria exemplifies Australia’s fascination with the abandon-
ment, abduction, mysterious disappearance, and longed for reconciliation
with the lost child, a now culturally commodified expression of the collec-
tive complex.
As a British colony, Australia’s disparate indigenous communities were
subject to UK authorities seeking to populate the more lush outskirts of the
country with convicts and settlers. Both Aboriginal and European migrants
were subject to the trauma of lostness via attempted genocide and separa-
tion from the British/European “parent.” As Pierce argues in relation to the
anxieties attached to lost child narratives, “the figure of the lost child may
stand for the adult emigrant to Australia, disoriented and vulnerable, and far
42 Terrie Waddell

from all that was consoling and familiar in Britain and Ireland” (1999, 6).
He notes the kinds of stories preserving this sense of woundedness, abuse,
loss, and abandonment, over time shifted from outback to urban settings.
The traumas and complexes attached to these actual and fictional children
were just as potent to the national psyche whether they took place in the
bush or in the chaos of the inner city and suburbia.
While the Australian stories provide tangible images, or projections, of
the complex in actual or fictionalized children, we see the clearest manifes-
tation of the lost child (as an image of the affect-ego state) in the prologue
to Antichrist. In this introductory sequence, He and She are locked in erotic
shower sex, responding to each other with the kind of mutual sensuality
lacking in the rest of the film. The primal scene is played out when Nick
unlatches his cot door, totters across the playroom, and gazes at his parents,
who are oblivious to his presence. Unfazed, he turns back toward his room,
climbs onto a table, pushes aside the three small symbolically labeled statu-
ettes (Pain, Grief, and Despair), and hovers at the frame of an open window.
Nick seems drawn to the sensual beauty of the world beyond his small room
as he gazes at the falling snow like the lost Australian children who became
mesmerized by the bush as if wanting to be cradled by an awe-inspiring
Gaia. As he loses his balance, falling many flights below into the snow on
the pavement, the couple climax. For both the child and the parents, it is
a euphoric, little death moment. Imagery of Nick’s frail body consumed
by a soft cushion of snow will be replicated in the scene mentioned earlier
where She sinks into lush grassland. Arguably these sequences are the most
haptically visual of Antichrist (see Stavning Thomsen, 2009). Both refer-
ence the lost child, the corporeal ecstasy of falling into the abyss, and the
eternal return to the earth. The pathology of nature is absent in these epi-
sodes. Arguably the complex more firmly takes root in the dual aspect so far
discussed after Nick’s death, but there is evidence that it was active before
this event in a less tenacious form.
Trier prefaces the most controversial scene, where She takes scissors to her
clitoris, with a distorted flashback to the action of the prologue. Here she
either imagines or recalls (it is not clear) witnessing her child’s potential fall,
but, too consumed with desire, she sacrifices him for the need to orgasm.
Adding to her guilt is our knowledge of the way she either consciously or
unconsciously (another tricky point) once mutilated the child by forcing
him to wear shoes on opposite feet, despite his cries of pain. Her husband
reveals photographs of Nick confirming this. In the prologue, the child’s
shoes are placed beneath his cot in the same back-to-front position, suggest-
ing that she continued this pattern until his death, and that the imbalance
and the fall may have been attributed to his twisted little feet. One way
of interpreting this is to view Nick as the personification of the lost child.
 Antichrist 43

Two possibilities for her behavior arise from this identification: either she
mirrors her feelings of torture in the toddler’s suffering, or, in needing to
disentangle herself from the complex, gradually works toward extinguishing
its external image.
The entire scene is filmed in slow motion accompanied by the aria “Lascia
Ch’io Pianga” from Handel’s Rinaldo (act 2, 1711). Sung in the opera by
heroine Almirena while imprisoned in the Saracen king’s enchanted palace
garden, and thus separated from her lover Rinaldo, the lyrics in translation
read, “Let me weep for my black fate and let me yearn for liberty. May sor-
row break these bonds of torment alone for pity’s sake” (Shaw 1989, 42).
This sense of fate, capture, and longing for release parallels the unfolding
of Gainsbourg’s unanchored character, imprisoned by the complex. Use
of the aria in pop culture also hints at the unfolding narrative: opera/pop
diva Sarah Brightman’s version appears in the album Eden (referencing the
secluded cabin and original sin), and another recording accents the postcas-
tration episode in Farinelli (Gérard Corbiau, 1994), based on Italian castrato
Carlo Maria Broschi (1705–1782), a noteworthy allusion given Antichrist’s
clitordectomy episode.
This confronting sadomasochistic sequence is the culmination of out-
bursts where She tries to escape her grief through compulsive sexual stimula-
tion, a form of forgetting, intimacy, and respite from childlike helplessness,
and in this reading, an attempt to tap into a sense of female embodiment
denied her by the complex. More extreme forms of self-punishment and
torture replace this frenetic impulse to simultaneously connect and release.
The actors’ bodies are shot in such a way that they appear gaunt, almost
emaciated in their sexual contortions, as if to accentuate a need for nourish-
ment and an unfulfilled wanting. She emerges succubus-like in her crav-
ing for arousal and the ecstatic liberation it promises but never delivers. If
this abandon is a means of transcending the childlike state and confirm-
ing the force of an adult female sexuality, then the genital mutilation to
come (battering her husband’s penis with a log of wood before pressuring
blood to spurt as if to ejaculate through violent mock masturbation, and
later severing her clitoris) suggests a form of release from that which inhib-
its her “becoming” (He), a punishment/sacrifice for prioritizing desire over
maternal care, and an attempt to control a body that she sees as externally
manipulated. The violence therefore calms the demands and excesses of her
“nature,” presumed to be out of bounds physically, emotionally and psycho-
logically. In effect she is ridding herself of the evil of female embodiment and
maintaining her girlish affect-ego attachment. She is forever the lost child
who doesn’t know how to get back and only goes deeper and deeper into a
forest/unconscious-abyss reminiscent of Grimm’s original darker, presani-
tized fairy tales.
44 Terrie Waddell

Conclusion
This analysis of Antichrist has argued that the female protagonist’s need for
self-actualization is frustrated by a lost child complex. It becomes the psycho-
logical stumbling block that inhibits her ability to mature and move beyond
the confinement of an imaged lost and evil nature—a prison reflected in
her uncomfortable relationship with a landscape that she charges with deep-
ening her vulnerability and sin. There is something of the “black fate” of
captivity that “Lascia Ch’io Pianga” evokes throughout the film. The jour-
ney to Eden is reminiscent of earlier narratives of colonial anxiety, where
lost children or characters, symbolizing the collective lost child complex,
are captivated by, and fearful of, a familiar/unfamiliar environment. Going
back to the bosom of the primal can be both comforting and a distress-
ing site of dissolution and rebirth. As well as evoking what I see as one
of the cultural dilemmas of my country, Antichrist is also an allegory for
Trier’s intimate understanding of feeling lost to forces that seem external and
beyond control. To retweak the epigraph—I don’t think the unconscious is
malevolent, but it can be frightening.

Works Cited
Bassil-Morozow, Helena. 2010. Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd. London:
Routledge.
Chamberlain-Creighton, Lindy. 2010. http://www.lindychamberlain.com/content/
bio (accessed January 10, 2011).
Dow, Coral, and Janet Phillips. 2009. “‘Forgotten Australians’ and ‘Lost Innocents’:
Child Migrants in Institutional Care in Australia.” Parliamentary Library,
November 11, 2009. http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/childmigrants.
htm (accessed February 6, 2012).
Freud, Sigmund. 1923/1961. The Ego and the Id and Other Works. In The Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 19. Translated by James Strachey, in collaboration with
A. Freud, assisted by A. Strachey and A. Tyson. London: Hogarth Press.
Hillman, James. 1985. Anima: Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Dallas: Spring
Publications.
Institoris, Heinrich. 1970. Malleus Maleficarum. Translated by Montague Summers.
New York: B. Blom.
Jung, Carl G. 1969. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. In Collected
Works Volume 9. Edited by H. Read, M. Fordham, and G. Adler. Translated by
R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1966a. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. In Collected Works, vol.
8. Edited by H. Read, M. Fordham, and G. Adler. Translated by R. F. C. Hull.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1966b. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. In Collected Works, vol. 7. Edited
by H. Read, M. Fordham, and G. Adler. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
 Antichrist 45

Marks, Laura. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and
the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Perry, John Weir. 1970. “Emotions and Object Relations.” Journal of Analytical
Psychology, 15(1): 1–12.
Pierce, Peter. 1999. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Romer, Knud. 2009. “A Hearse Heading Home.” May 15, 2009. www.antichrist-
themovie.com/?cat=8language=da (accessed January 17, 2012).
Rowland, Susan. 2002. Jung: A Feminist Revision. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Schepelern, Peter. 2009. “Interview with Lars Von Trier.” Zentropa, EKKO, May
14, 2009. www.antichristthemovie.com/?cat=8&language=da (accessed January
17, 2012).
Shaw, Timothy Alan (trans.). 1989. Rinaldo: Opera in Three Acts [Libretto]. Italy:
Nuova Era Records.
Singer, Thomas. 2007. “Unconscious Forces Shaping International Conflicts:
Archetypal Defenses of the Group Spirit from Revolutionary America to
Confrontation in the Middle East.” Psychotherapy and Politics International, 5(1):
45–61.
Singer, Thomas, and Samuel L. Kimbles. 2004a. The Cultural Complex: Contemporary
Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society. London: Routledge.
———. 2004b. “The Emerging Theory of Cultural Complexes.” In Joseph Cambray
and Linda Carter (eds.), Analytical Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives in
Jungian Analysis. London: Routledge.
Thomsen, Stavning. 2009. “Antichrist–Chaos Reigns: The Event of Violence
and the Haptic Image . . . von Trier’s Film.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 1.
doi:10.3402/jac.v1i0.3668
Waddell, Terrie. 2012. “The Rapture of ‘Girlshine’: Land, Sacrifice, and Disavowal
in Australian Cinema.” In Craig San Roque, Amanda Dowd, and David Tacey
(eds.), Placing Psyche: Exploring Cultural Complexes in Australia. New Orleans:
Spring Publications. 75–91.
Wehr, Demaris. 1987. Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Wood, Robin. 2002. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s.” In Mark
Jancovich (ed.), Horror: The Horror Film Reader. London: Routledge. 25–32.
Zolkas, Magdalena. 2011. “Violent Affects: Nature and the Feminine in Lars von
Trier’s Antichrist.” Parrhesia, 13:177–189.

Filmed
Antichrist. Directed by Lars von Trier. Denmark, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy,
Poland, 2009.
Breaking the Waves. Directed by Lars von Trier. Spain, Denmark, Sweden, France,
Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, 1996.
Dancer in the Dark. Directed by Lars von Trier. Spain, Argentina, Denmark,
Germany, Netherlands, Italy, USA, UK, France, Sweden, Finland, Iceland,
Norway, 2000.
46 Terrie Waddell

Dogville. Directed by Lars von Trier. Denmark, Sweden, UK, France, Germany,
Netherlands, Norway, Finland, 2003.
Europa [Zentropa]. Directed by Lars von Trier. Spain, Denmark, Sweden, France,
Germany, Switzerland, 1991.
Farinelli. Directed by Gérard Corbiau. France, Italy, Belgium, 1994.
Idiots, The. Directed by Lars von Trier. Spain, Denmark, Sweden, France,
Netherlands, Italy, 1998.
Kingdom, The. Directed by Lars von Trier. [Miniseries also released as film.]
Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, 1994.
Melancholia. Directed by Lars von Trier. Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany,
2011.
Chapter 4

Black Bucks and

Don Juans: In the
Cut’s Seductive
Mythologies of
Race and Sex
Tiel Lundy

American films do not merely feature this or that debased black image or
this or that glorified white hero in isolation, but rather they correlate these
images in a larger scheme of semiotic valuation. (1994, 4)
—James Snead

Jane Campion is a female director who explores the “dark side of love”
by audaciously mixing love, sex, and violence in her work to demonstrate
how the primal responses of sex and fear are never far apart. Steeped in what
Campion has characterized as the “gothic” tradition of romance, her female
protagonists are sexually excited by the threat and even enactment of vio-
lence.1 Campion’s body of work, which includes such films as The Portrait of
a Lady (1996), The Piano (1993), and her 2003 film In the Cut (adapted from
Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel by the same name), illustrates her abiding inter-
est in the complex tapestry of fictions, fantasies, and mythologies that shape
the cultural and individual imaginations. Campion, in ironic postmodern
fashion, exposes and dismantles cinema’s mythologies. More specifically,
In the Cut, like its cinematic predecessors, participates in a storytelling tradi-
tion of romantic love in which women especially, she claims, are so deeply
invested. I will argue here that while In the Cut investigates and deconstructs
48 Tiel Lundy

the influential role of the Hollywood romance genre, it fails to account suf-
ficiently for a number of other important narratives that inform it, most
notably the history of nineteenth-century American race relations and the
cinematic legacy it spawned. I will trace a particular mythic topos that grew
out of the American South’s post–Civil War racial anxieties: namely, the
representation of black male sexual violence enacted against white women.
In the Cut demands greater scrutiny for the complex relation it bears to its
racialized mythmaking past and the legacy it inspires.
Campion’s relationship with mainstream filmmaking has long been one
held in tension; the filmmaker likes to work within the conventions of clas-
sical Hollywood cinema even as she turns them inside out. Reshaping these
aesthetic and narrative conventions, Campion repeatedly calls attention to
and exposes the filmmaking apparatus. Stylistically jarring, metacinematic
sequences that feature self-conscious cinematography, antiquated aspect
ratios, nostalgic sepia-toned images, and anachronistic mise-en-scène are
standard elements in her repertoire. John Carlos Rowe identifies Campion’s
metacinematic moments as serving a “Brechtian” role in alienating the
viewer and short-circuiting any possibility of “nostalgic identification”
(2000, 193). Kathleen McHugh situates this reflexivity vis-à-vis Campion’s
feminist filmmaking agenda, explaining that

[Campion] uses formal means of narration to insert meta-narrative commen-

tary, evident both in her selection of diegetic and nondiegetic music and in
the form of surreal or darkly comic visual puns that both resonate with and
complicate the voice(s) of her character-narrators. The “female narration”
in Campion’s films emerges from these interactions between the character-
narrators and the film’s formal narration and meta-narrative strategies that
are then critically comprehended and vested in the name and persona of “Jane
Campion.” (2007, 52–53)

These self-reflexive scenes, then, underscore not only the degree to which
our culture’s stories, myths, and fantasies are the product of mainstream
cinema but also the extent to which Hollywood reinforces gendered versions
of the stories.
Campion references the Hollywood mythmaking machine in In the Cut’s
unnerving opening credit sequence. Canted shallow-focus images of the
city’s graffiti and trash heaps are frequently shot through chain-link fences,
vertical bars, and other obstructions (figure 4.1). Accompanying these unset-
tling visual images is a nondiegetic off-key version of Doris Day’s song “Que
sera, sera.” The eerie and ironic version of the melody inevitably evokes the
memory of Day’s singing it in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 version of The Man
Who Knew Too Much. Day’s on-screen roles (Jo McKenna in Hitchcock’s
 Black Bucks and Don Juans 49

Figure 4.1 City graffiti.

film and Jan Morrow in the 1959 romantic comedy Pillow Talk) and
her public persona (cute, sunny—appropriate for one named “Day”)
are clearly at odds with the song’s perverse register in In the Cut. As Sue
Thornham has suggested, In the Cut’s opening might also be read as an
ironic counterpoint to the opening credit sequence from the HBO series
Sex and the City (Thornham, 2007; Star, 1998–2004). At the height of its
popularity, when Campion’s film was released, Sex and the City depicted a
high-fashion version of New York scrubbed clean of garbage, graffiti, and
crime, a place where female fantasies about love, career, and friendship
might abound.
But if audiences identified with fashion maven Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah
Jessica Parker) and the vagaries of her love life, such identification is prob-
lematized in Campion’s film, for protagonist Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan) is
a tightly wound bundle of contradictory urges and impulses. An intense,
highly interiorized woman whose seeming frigidity belies a reckless sexual
curiosity, Frannie challenges popular ideas about the stereotypical English
teacher even as she confirms them. In many ways, Frannie looks the part:
Meg Ryan’s normally bouncy curls are tamed into a long, lank bob, her
earth-toned daytime clothes hang shapelessly from her frame, and she walks
slightly splay-footed in her flat sandals. In spite of the desexualized nature
of her appearance, though, Frannie enjoys a vivid interior erotic life that
is mediated through the spoken and written word. Displaying the English
teacher’s fondness for language, Frannie embraces the lyric and the lewd
with equal ardor. Evoking Isabel Archer’s collection of words in The Portrait
of a Lady (Campion, 1996), Frannie pins on her vanity the poetic blurbs
50 Tiel Lundy

she encounters throughout the day: “I want to do with you what spring
does to the cherry trees,” reads one tract written in Frannie’s graceful script.
But her collection is hardly limited to such sublimated eroticism; for
instance, as part of her compendium of street slang, she has included the
word “Virginia,” which she explains to Pauline is slang for vagina.
Campion’s investigation into the stereotype of the bookish English
teacher is part of her larger project of highlighting the ways that cinema
structures and mediates our vision of the world. In an early scene, Frannie
agrees to a meeting with a student—confoundingly enough—in a seedy
New York bar called the Blue Turtle. Frannie excuses herself to go find the
restroom, the camera tracking her journey through dimly lit passages and
down into the basement. Claustrophobic framing and out-of-focus camera
work occlude our vision of the space until Frannie stumbles upon a woman
with long blue fingernails giving a man oral sex. Frannie doesn’t run away
but rather stays to watch, subjective shots providing the details of her inter-
ested eye: the man’s erect penis, the woman’s engaged mouth, and her long
nails. While the man’s face remains half shrouded by low-key side lighting,
the camera focuses on the three of spades tattoo on the inside of his wrist, a
detail that will prove to have narrative significance. By aligning the viewer
with Frannie’s point of view here, the scene functions as a rejoinder to a long
cinematic tradition that has privileged the male gaze; the cinematography
inverts the scopophilic relations, assigning agency to Frannie’s (female) gaze
as it objectifies the male body.2 We might also read the scene’s visual wor-
ship of the erect penis as evocative of the mainstream porn film, only this
time it is the woman who possesses the power to look.
What Frannie does not know yet is that her urge to look will complicate
her role in an investigation of an at-large serial killer. When the head of
one of the victims, Angela Sands (Heather Litteer), is found in the garden
beneath her Manhattan apartment, Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) comes
to her apartment to interview her. Frannie is wary and checks his credentials
with NYPD before admitting him into her apartment. Malloy’s business
card reveals his first name to be Giovanni, a clever allusion to Don Juan,
the mythic womanizing figure who took many forms but is perhaps best
known from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni.3 Malloy’s first name takes on
added significance when Frannie notes a three of spades tattoo on his wrist,
leading her to believe that he is the man she saw at the Blue Turtle; indeed,
Detective Malloy does seem to be an uncommonly brazen lover, seducing
women into giving him blow jobs in bar basements. This small narrative
detail about Malloy’s first name might easily be overlooked or its signifi-
cance discounted, but I think it is worth pausing to think about, particularly
as Campion makes a point of renaming the character, who is “James” in
Moore’s novel. As the title of this chapter hints, the Don Juan myth figures
 Black Bucks and Don Juans 51

prominently in my reading of In the Cut, at least at the level of allusion, for

it points to Campion’s interest in the seductive quality of the romance myth
and the women who succumb to it.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, her suspicions about this audacious
lover, bluestocking Frannie is attracted to the blue-collar Malloy.4 So when
he asks her out for a drink, Frannie accepts. The date, however, is a ter-
rible failure. Malloy’s partner, Detective Ritchie Rodriguez (Nick Damici),
shows up at the bar, and the two men greet each other with a man-love
ritual that includes a farcical slow-dance (“If loving you is wrong, I don’t
want to be right,” Rodriguez coos to Malloy) and misogynistic humor about
what they look for in a woman (Rodriguez: “All you need are two tits, a
hole and a heartbeat.” Malloy: “You don’t even need the tits.” Rodriguez:
“You don’t even need the heartbeat”). The narrative explains Rodriguez’s
misogyny as part of his symbolic castration at the hands of his wife and the
police department; accused of trying to kill his wife in a domestic alterca-
tion, he has been officially relieved of his service revolver and now carries
only a toy water pistol. Malloy explains that Rodriguez has been given the
choice of either taking modified duty or “put[ting] his balls in a drawer” and
becoming a “house mouse,” a cop relegated to desk work. Later scenes that
take place in the police headquarters further explain the men’s chauvinism
and homophobia as part and parcel of the male-dominated culture of law
enforcement.
And yet Campion is leveling a broader criticism that goes beyond the
culture of law enforcement, implicating men in general. That is to say,
Malloy and Rodriguez’s vicious banter about necrophilic pleasures points
to the film’s central conceit about the dangers of phallic sexuality.5 Men
constitute a very real threat in this depiction of New York City, with women
walking briskly at night while obsessed lovers stalk or, worse, kill them. In
the conventions of the thriller, we are invited to see Malloy as just one of a
number of possible suspects in the recent killings. There is Cornelius Webb
(Sharieff Pugh), a physically powerful, muscle-shirted African-American
student of Frannie’s who has been the primary source of slang words for her
dictionary and whose term paper is a vindication of serial killer John Wayne
Gacy. Another suspect in the narrative is John Graham (Kevin Bacon), a
two-time fling of Frannie’s whose stalker tendencies and manic, hyperki-
netic attentions make even Kevin Bacon appear on screen as a plausible
murder suspect.
But in danger there lies pleasure. The nexus of violence and sex is the
erotic thriller’s stock-in-trade convention, and, as Linda Ruth Williams con-
tends, the genre links “the violently sexual with the sexually violent” (2005,
83).6 In an ostensible effort to help Frannie remember certain key aspects
of an earlier mugging, Malloy stages a reenactment of the attack; acting as
52 Tiel Lundy

the mugger, he stands behind Frannie in a mock-strangling posture, run-

ning his hands gently over her body. The seduction moves to the bedroom,
where Malloy carefully lays his gun down on the dresser—thus introducing
the instrument of violence into the domestic space of sex—and proceeds to
pleasure Frannie in bed with the skills he acquired as a young man under the
tutelage of an older and more experienced woman.
That Malloy is uncommonly good at performing cunnilingus still fails to
explain adequately why Frannie continues to sleep with a man she suspects
is a serial killer. Indeed, a survey of Campion’s other films—nearly all of
which feature an eroticism predicated on fear—suggests that it is precisely
the threatening potential that Malloy represents that makes him appealing
to Frannie. With a shocking vulgarity and directness that violates the usual
terms of a first date, Malloy whispers to Frannie, “I could be whatever you
want me to be. You want me to romance you, take you to a classy restaurant,
no problem. You want me to, uh, be your best friend and fuck you, treat you
good, lick your pussy. No problem.” His assurance that “the only thing [he]
won’t do” to Frannie is beat her up points to Campion’s abiding interest in
what she insists is the relationship between female masochism and romance.
In this sense, Cut bears a striking resemblance to The Portrait of a Lady and
The Piano; Isabel (Nicole Kidman), Ada (Holly Hunter), and Frannie all
demonstrate a predilection for risky, self-destructive behavior that is tied
to their ideas about love and courtship. Campion concedes that she herself
is guilty of an emotional masochism, an impulse she links to our culture’s
stories: “It’s inherent in the myths of romance and love we live with—if you
haven’t got a man loving you or you’re not in a relationship it’s as if you’re not
alive, as if what happens to you has no value” (Francke 2003, 19). As I will
argue, this is a distinguishing mark of Campion’s filmmaking in which she
uses film’s formal elements to demonstrate how cinema has helped create the
myths that render women vulnerable to their own destructive yearnings.
As a filmmaker interested in cinema’s role as a creator and purveyor of
fantasies, Campion investigates the influential role of the “woman’s film,”
a Hollywood genre that reached the height of its popularity with female
audiences of the 1930s and 1940s.7 Mary Ann Doane observes that the
genre typically deals with subjects identified as “female”: domestic life,
family, marriage, and romance (1987, 3). Dana Polan describes the genre’s
iconography as

a cinema of soft-focus, of visual blurs (as in the rain on the window), of soft
wafts of light swirling down through obscurity and creating delicate patterns
of glowing well-being, of an airy goldness that suffuses the image. Much of
the appeal of romantic imagery . . . comes from the ways it takes the edges off
 Black Bucks and Don Juans 53

a hard, harsh world and substitutes a dreamy haziness in which longings and
the imagining that things could be different can take flight. (2001, 30–31)

Many of Campion’s films explore and subvert the conventions of the woman’s
film in order to engage in a feminist critique of the Hollywood norm and
patriarchal narratives of female desire. For instance, Campion has rewritten
Henry James’s Victorian heroine Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady) as a
character with erotic desires and a vividly sensual inner life, prompting one
reviewer to call the film adaptation “a Freudian fever-dream” (Maslin 1996,
C3). And even though The Piano’s haunting soundtrack, narrative of forbid-
den love, and sublime cinematography evokes a fairly traditional woman’s
film sensibility, Ada is a notable excursion from the norm in her sexual appe-
tite (Polan 2001, 4).8 Indeed, while Campion’s films deploy many of the
conventions of the romance, they often take a cynical view, none so much as
In the Cut, the goal of which, explains Campion, was “to explore the falsity
of modern romantic illusions.” “This is the dream,” she says, that “you’ll
meet your man and he’ll complete your life. . . . Instead of just doing the
really loving thing and seeing just who they really are. So they’re always per-
forming against the myth of romance” (Urban interview, 2003).9
Even as Campion indicates her distrust of the romance myth, she
acknowledges its widespread persistence and narrative power. Frannie’s half-
sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives her a belated birthday present: a
charm bracelet, which she explains is a “courtship fantasy.” Frannie gently
fingers the charms, pausing on the tiny pram containing an even tinier baby.
“You should have a baby. And a man, too,” Pauline tells her. In a later scene,
the women talk about their memories of their libertine father and his mul-
tiple marriages. At this point, Frannie tells the tale of how her mother and
their father met. In fairy-tale fashion, Campion visually and verbally spins
the story of their enchanted engagement, using a rich sepia film stock and
fin de siècle costuming to suggest an earlier, even mythic time and place.
Frannie’s father, young and “very handsome,” gets down on bended knee
to propose to her mother. And “at that precise moment,” Frannie says, “it
started to snow” (figure 4.2). “Very romantic. I don’t quite believe it,” says
Pauline. And of course, neither do we.
Pauline’s two-part judgment suggests that romantic, enticing tales are
exactly that because they defy plausibility. But in spite of the impulse to
reject these romantic tales as unbelievable, Frannie’s words indicate that
they nonetheless continue to be told, heard, and on some level believed: “It’s
my mother’s story. That’s the way she always told it.” These stories, then,
passed on from mother to daughter, sister to sister, become reified in their
retelling. Interestingly, the scene parallels Malloy and Rodriguez’s parodic
54 Tiel Lundy

Figure 4.2 “It started to snow . . .”

dance in the bar. Both scenes incorporate homoerotic elements (although the
half sisters’ dance is arguably more taboo for its incestuous qualities). More
importantly, though, the two scenes underscore what Campion sees as the
gendered nature of fantasies about love and sex; while Frannie and Pauline
dream of a fairy-tale romance that includes the proposal, marriage, and fam-
ily, Malloy and Rodriguez fantasize about totally inert (dead) lovers.
Even as the skating sequence necessitates a cynical reading of the romance
myth, the scene as a whole takes a sympathetic view of Frannie and Pauline’s
reluctant investment in it. Intercut with the skating sequence are shots of
the sisters dancing to the Temptations’ song “Just My Imagination,” a song
Frannie claims as her song. As the title suggests, love and romance may
reside primarily in the individual and cultural imagination, but they are no
less persuasive for it. The song’s allusion to the visual nature of fantasy—“A
cozy little home out in the country with two children, maybe three. / I tell
you, I can visualize it all”10 —also highlights that film, as both an auditory
and visual medium, is thus uniquely qualified to insinuate itself into the
imagination. The choice of this song and its place within the diegesis once
again brings up Campion’s thematic hobbyhorse: that is, the ways in which
 Black Bucks and Don Juans 55

women, especially, are culturally conditioned and thus vulnerable to the

romance fantasies they harbor and replay in their heads. The scene con-
cludes with Pauline lamenting that while their father may have been married
several times, he never married her mother. “I want to get married. Just for
my mom. Is a husband too much to ask for? . . . Even Angela Sands had a
fiancé.” As Frannie points out, though, “he probably cut her head off,” a
comment that suggests at least two things: one, that the romance narrative
gains power by residing in women’s heads, and two, that women who believe
in it might just be in mortal danger.11
If Frannie’s terse comment does not point forcefully enough to the dan-
gers of romance, the erratic narrative and visual shift to the next scene surely
will. Forgoing an establishing shot, the sequence opens with the black-and-
white video camera footage of a blood-covered laundry room as the detectives
and medical examiners document the latest crime scene, pulling a severed
hand, with an engagement ring, out of a washing machine that spills over
with blood. Though this forensic crime scene could not be more different in
tone from the skating sequences, it comments inversely on them, the black-
and-white video ironically echoing the sepia-toned skating sequences. One
documentary style, the other fairy-tale style, the two are mutually inform-
ing moments in Campion’s film, and these reflexive moments gesture not
only toward Campion’s other films but also toward cinema more broadly.
The film’s most emphatic challenge to the romance myth comes in a
perverse iteration of the skating sequence. As the body count rises, includ-
ing the murder of Pauline—like the others, she’s been decapitated, or
“disarticulated”—Frannie becomes more and more convinced that Malloy
may be the killer. Frannie drinks herself into a stupor and passes out on her
kitchen floor. Mixing a comedically fast version of the Partridge Family’s
1970s hit song “I Think I Love You” with an old-timey melodrama piano
tune, the scene intercuts shots of Frannie on the floor and the dream of her
mother and father’s courtship. As the skating couple clowns around on the
ice, the young woman falls down, legs stretched out straight in front of her.
The scene is simultaneously campy and horrifying as the young man loses
control and skates across her legs, neatly severing them into bloody stumps;
he then circles back and appears ready to do the same to her head when
Frannie suddenly awakens (figure 4.3). Just as it neatly severs the young
woman’s legs, so too does the scene dismember the romance myth itself,
illustrating the razor-thin line that divides fantasy and nightmare.
The scene’s reflexive, even obtrusively stylized cinematography and mise-
en-scène implicate cinema in the creation and perpetuation of these dark
fantasies.12 Thus, these metacinematic gestures reinforce the film’s cinematic
constructedness; they are self-referential moments in a film that investigates
the camera’s role in reproducing romantic—and violent—mythologies.
56 Tiel Lundy

Figure 4.3 Frannie awakes as the legs are severed.

Significantly, Campion rewrites the nihilistic and violent ending of Moore’s

novel. Running away from Malloy, whom she mistakenly believes to be the
killer, Frannie runs right into the arms of Malloy’s partner, Rodriguez, who
drives her out to a favorite fishing spot of his, the large red lighthouse that
recalls Frannie’s classroom lesson on Virginia Woolf. Performing a premur-
der ritual that includes wine, dancing, and the music of Dusty Springfield’s
hit song “The Look of Love,” Rodriguez asks Frannie, “You ever been in love?
All women want love, right?” The film reaches its climax with Rodriguez’s
marriage proposal accompanied by a diamond ring proffered on the end of
a phallic knife. While Moore’s novel ends with the implied slow death of
Frannie as Rodriguez cuts her up, one piece at a time, Campion’s Frannie
manages to escape by shooting the killer. In this noteworthy rewriting of the
novel’s conclusion, the film makes Frannie the agent of her own escape. She
is hardly the passive female victim waiting for the male character to come
rescue her; in fact, Malloy remains handcuffed to Frannie’s radiator—the
result of Frannie’s assumption of the dominatrix role—and is powerless to
do anything. Campion says that she changed Moore’s ending because it was
“much too dark for the film. It’s almost too much for many readers, even”
(Urban interview, 2003). To be sure, the nihilism of Moore’s novel would
have been a tough sell for audiences, but the significance of Campion’s femi-
nist revision exceeds commercial concerns, for in making Frannie her own
savior, Campion rewrites a long-standing narrative tradition that not only
endorses but eroticizes female passivity and male heroism.
Thus far I have attempted to demonstrate how In the Cut uses film’s
aesthetic codes in the service of interrogating and deconstructing cinema’s
role as a powerful purveyor of the romance myth. However, I will go on
 Black Bucks and Don Juans 57

to argue that unlike the romantic narrative codes, the film’s racial codes
are not subject to the same self-reflexive awareness and interrogation and
that mythologies of romance and race become entangled in one another.
Consider, for instance, how the character of Rodriguez is, like his part-
ner Giovanni Malloy, allusive of the Don Juan figure. He is the “San Juan
Man of the Year” (emphasis mine), and, in a scene at police headquarters,
Rodriguez strums a guitar, as if ready to deliver a serenade. If Malloy’s Irish-
Italian heritage is mostly elided, more is made of Rodriguez’s Latino ethnic-
ity; for example, Malloy mentions his partner’s “Hispanic Society Trophy.”
Yoking Rodriguez’s Latino ethnicity to his (faux) romantic gestures, the
film thus invokes a stereotype about the hot-blooded Latin lover. Arguably,
this stereotype functions in an ironic fashion (as I said, Rodriguez is a sym-
bolically castrated “house mouse”) similar to the film’s deconstruction of
the romance myth. But the film also trades in stereotypes about sexually
aggressive black men, and it does not show the same critical awareness and
reflexivity.
The implications for this representational difference are profound, for
rather than heightening her audience’s awareness of how cinema constructs
and perpetuates a myth, Campion is (probably unwittingly) reifying it.
American mythologies of race and sex that have their roots in the nineteenth
century have been uncannily persistent, in large part because of cinema’s role
in perpetuating them. I will demonstrate that Campion has supplanted the
mythology of romantic love with the Old South “romance” of black male
sexual violence against white women, a mythology that found fertile ground
in the social conditions of the American South’s post-Emancipation period.
With Emancipation came vigilante and state-sanctioned violence against
black men accused of having illicit sexual relations with white women.13
Moreover, such accusations were almost unheard of prior to Emancipation,
when black male powers were considered contained by the institution of
slavery. As Frederick Douglass famously wrote, “The crime to which the
Negro is now said to be so generally and specially addicted . . . is one of
which he has been heretofore, seldom accused or supposed to be guilty”
(1892, 473–474); similarly, Ida B. Wells stated that the “world knows that
the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the
white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once
charged with being a bestial one” (1892, 5). Putatively justified as protecting
the sanctity of Southern white womanhood, aggressive policing of inter-
racial unions was more likely motivated by the desire to maintain “racial
purity” and avert miscegenation.
How society responded to miscegenation fears differed in the periods
from before and after the war. While antebellum America reacted by using
the minstrel tradition to render the black male body comically different
58 Tiel Lundy

and clownishly impotent, Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction society

responded in a quite different fashion, depicting the black male as over-
masculinized and hypersexualized, thereby dehumanizing him (Williams
2001). Depictions of “[e]xcessive, hypermasculine corporeality disqualified
him from manhood,” writes Linda Williams, “reducing him to the status of
beast” (2001, 104). Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansmen exploited the
figure, arousing fears about miscegenation and the perception of the dangers
of increasing black male agency. D. W. Griffith would pick up this anxious
thread and capitalize on the incendiary potential of depicting black-white
sexual relations on screen. Infamous is The Birth of a Nation’s (1915) scene
in which Gus (Walter Long) pursues Flora (Mae Marsh), who, it is implied,
evades “a fate worse than death” only by throwing herself off a cliff (a choice
that, as Williams observes wryly, might seem “a trifle premature” [2001, 123]).
Similarly, Elsie Stoneman, played by Lillian Gish, must repeatedly repulse the
sexual overtures of the rapacious “mulatto,” Silas Lynch (George Siegmann).
While this narrative topos can be found in fictional, dramatic, jour-
nalistic, and cinematic representations, the medium of film is especially
well suited to creating a racialized moral-aesthetic equation. Richard Dyer
notes, for instance, how Griffith’s film techniques—for instance, lighting
that includes front, back, and fill lighting as well as special makeup that
illuminates the female star—emphasized Lillian Gish’s fair beauty, inviting
viewers to ascribe a moral value to the white glow that emanated from her.14
Where Dyer analyzes “whiteness” on screen, Manthia Diawara focuses on
the racial use-value of “blackness,” observing the concatenation of black,
male, physical deformity, and bestiality in depictions that include Gus in
The Birth of a Nation and Mister (Danny Glover) in The Color Purple (1985).
“[A]s if to emphasise his inhumanity or bestial nature,” writes Diawara,
close-ups make Gus’s nose and eyes appear deformed, while the use of a tele-
photo lens exaggerates Mister’s features (1988, 774). To cite a more recent
example, Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film Traffic features a scene in which a
black drug dealer (Vonte Sweet) has sex with Caroline (Erika Christensen),
the drug-addicted and incapacitated teenage daughter of the white drug czar
(Michael Douglas).15 Not unlike The Birth of a Nation and The Color Purple,
the mise-en-scène underscores Caroline’s frail fairness against the dealer’s
muscular blackness.
I cite these cinematic examples as evidence of the highly conventional-
ized use to which the black male body has been put; it is a symbolic body
that has, over time, come to operate within a signifying and narrative system
that equates it to hyperphysical, overmasculinized bestial sexuality. Donald
Bogle has termed this well-worn topos the “black buck” figure. Black bucks,
he writes, are “big, baadddd [sic] niggers, oversexed and savage, violent
and frenzied as they lust for white flesh” (1993, 13). A deeply rooted ele-
ment in the American storytelling tradition, the “black buck” stereotype
 Black Bucks and Don Juans 59

has demonstrated persistence and longevity. Indeed, though we might be

tempted to see these two racialized signifying systems—white, female,
glowing, pure; black, male, physically deformed, bestial—as relics of our
cinematic past, examples from contemporary cinema continue to emerge,
for, as Linda Williams declares, “[Thomas] Dixon’s predatory beast is for-
ever baring his fangs and claws” (2001, 104).
In the Cut deploys many of these conventionalized aesthetics of racial rep-
resentation. Awakened by the sound of the front door buzzer, Frannie stum-
bles down the stairs to find Cornelius on his way up to visit her. Wearing
only one shoe, the other left behind to hold the door open, Frannie calls
to mind a tragic Cinderella, yet another reference to the romance myth.16
A tightly framed and slightly out-of-focus handheld tracking shot follows
Cornelius through the apartment building’s metal grate security door as he
moves toward the stairs; with the camera trailing close behind, the viewer’s
point of view feels predatory and thus complicit in stalking Frannie. Low-
key lighting only partially reveals Cornelius’s face, leaving the right side
veiled in shadow (figure 4.4).
If the scene’s lighting of Cornelius alludes to his “shadowy” moral charac-
ter and intentions, then Meg Ryan’s face is, by contrast, more evenly lit, her
bereft, tear-soaked face revealed for all its patent grief. Following Frannie up
the stairs to her apartment, Cornelius impulsively grabs her right ankle, trip-
ping her and making her fall down on the stairs. “You got a petal,” he says,
and gently peels the flower petal off her leg. As Frannie’s open-mouthed
expression registers her shock and fear, it quickly changes to a look of
pity and concern as she notes that the right side of Cornelius’s face is bat-
tered, his eye nearly swollen shut—a detail previously hidden by the lighting
(figure 4.5).

Figure 4.4 Cornelius’s face is veiled in shadow.

60 Tiel Lundy

Figure 4.5 Cornelius’s bruised face.

Responding to Frannie’s insistent queries about who is responsible for

the beating, Cornelius’s reply is ambiguous: “Fuck that man! . . . that cop.”
“Which cop? Malloy?” Frannie prompts but without confirmation. In a
confused mixture of pity and desire, Frannie holds Cornelius’s battered—
and yes, “monstrous”—face in her hands and moves to kiss him, only to
pull back and retreat up the stairs with Cornelius in tow. Once inside the
apartment, Cornelius starts to kiss Frannie, who kisses back and moves her
hips with desire. But when Frannie stops Cornelius (“I don’t want to do
this”), he lashes out verbally, the force of his angry words almost knocking
her backwards onto the bed (figure 4.6).

Figure 4.6 Cornelius’s rage turns to violence.

 Black Bucks and Don Juans 61

Cornelius’s rage then becomes physical, and the camera conveys his
charge with a fast track forward as he grabs Frannie by the neck with one
hand, pushes her down on the bed, and straddles her. Her arms pinned down
at the wrist, Frannie is entirely helpless. “Let me go,” she says more than once
(figure 4.7). Cornelius is scared off by the arrival of Rodriguez, who stands
below Frannie’s apartment throwing pebbles at the window. Still, the threat
of rape seems clear, especially given the way the film has already established
the dangers of phallic sexuality.
The scene is intended to function within noir-thriller conventions as a
kind of narrative feint, leading us to wonder if Cornelius, whom Frannie
has just admitted to her apartment, might be the murderer. He is, after all,
writing his term paper about the notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
Cornelius’s sympathy for Gacy, and the fact that his term paper is written in
blood (a plot detail the film never really explains) associates him with sexual
pathology and violence. The film further teases viewers into believing that
Cornelius might be the killer because the detective Rodriguez, though hardly
an appealing figure, is associated with what represents the institutionalized
authority of the law. Still, this important narrative turn remains unknown
until the end of the film, and thus we are encouraged to believe, for a time
anyway, that the threat lies within Frannie’s apartment, even if it is revealed
later that the real threat is just outside the apartment on the sidewalk below.
Whether or not Cornelius is the murderer is ultimately immaterial, for the
characterization remains troubling for its depiction of black male sexuality
as pathological, predatory, and bestial.

Figure 4.7 Frannie is forced onto the bed.

62 Tiel Lundy

By contrast, Moore’s novel does not construe the encounter as a potential

rape (although it does fetishize the black male body, treating in some detail
the specifics of Cornelius’s uncircumcised penis). As in the film, Frannie
is receptive to Cornelius’s “brazen” touch, but as the first-person narrator,
she articulates her own simultaneous desire for and fear of losing control:
“I’d kissed him on the mouth, put my tongue in his mouth, and I knew
that I did not know how to stop it. I had forgotten how to stop it. Because
it is something that women know how to do. Oh, I don’t mean how to
stop Cornelius, I mean how to stop myself” (1995, 162–163). If anything,
Moore’s characterization of Frannie allots her the greater measure of control
as the teacher and the older, more experienced of the two, a power differen-
tial Cornelius concedes when he says, “I knew you’d fuck me up,” and then
repeats the accusation several times—“You going to fuck me up?” “You be
looking to fuck with me since day one” “You done fucking with me?” (1995,
163–164). Although Frannie considers the possibility that Cornelius, angry
and humiliated, might hurt her as he forcefully holds her head down at the
level of his groin, in fact he lets go and prepares to leave. At no point (in the
book) does he throw her down on the bed and straddle her.
Given the stubborn persistence and perniciousness of these racialized ste-
reotypes, one might wonder at black actors’ motivations for taking on such
roles, monetary exigencies notwithstanding. As Bogle argues, early genera-
tions of black actors found ways to resist the demeaning and one-dimensional
characterizations through their dynamic performances. Hattie McDaniel
gives the character of Mammy dignity; she looks Scarlet right in the eye
and defies her. However, unlike Hattie McDaniel, whose feisty portrayal
of Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939) reveals the actress’s power and
authority in spite of the demeaning stereotype, actor Sharieff Pugh is pow-
erless to resist the characterization of Cornelius as the “brutal black buck”
because the script severely limits him in this crucial scene. Asked which
cop beat him, Cornelius only shakes his head mutely, “disarticulated” by
the script. Similarly, when he has the opportunity to make Frannie account
for her part in the sexually charged relationship, he merely says, “You don’t
know me, man.” Indeed, viewers do not know him and therefore have little
recourse to a counternarrative.
What viewers must rely on then, consciously or unconsciously, are the
cinematic racial codes conventionalized almost a century ago. Christian
Metz has argued that in negotiating narrative challenges, early films such
as The Birth of a Nation standardized signifying practices that continue to
have cinematic and extracinematic influence.17 With its access to powerful
visual, aural, and narrative elements, film remains the most persuasive sto-
rytelling medium available to us, and as such, it bears a special responsibil-
ity for its stories. Just as Hollywood has seduced viewers with tales of love
and romance, so too can it render us vulnerable to its mythologies of race.
 Black Bucks and Don Juans 63

In the Cut, which simultaneously recapitulates and forgets its place in the
matrix of racialized representations, is proof that the grammar and rhetoric
of early cinema continue to exert their influence over contemporary film-
making. To be clear, I am not charging Campion with racism (although she
has had to contend with accusations of cultural imperialism).18 Rather, my
point is that in her engagement with the history of cinematic storytelling,
she has deconstructed romantic myths only to reify mythologies of race. Yes,
love has its dark side, but it takes on a new complexion altogether when it
consorts with racial stereotypes.

Notes
1. George and Ada, in The Piano, have what Campion calls a “very harsh and
extreme [romance], a gothic exploration of the romantic impulse” (origi-
nally cited in Lurie 2000, 92).
2. I am, of course, relying on Laura Mulvey’s theorization of the gaze in her
1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” A sample of literature
on the topic also includes the following: Mary Ann Doane (1999), Karen
Hollinger (1998), bell hooks (1999), E. Ann Kaplan (1983), D. N. Rodowick
(1991), and Linda Williams (1984).
3. The Don Juan figure has roots that go back several centuries, including
Molière’s seventeenth-century play, Byron’s 1821 epic poem, and, perhaps
best known, Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni.
4. I am borrowing Linda Ruth Williams’s language here in denoting Frannie
and Malloy as “bluestocking” and “blue-collar” respectively.
5. Writing about Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, John Carlos Rowe contends
that although Campion criticizes Victorian phallic sexuality as oppressive,
she is “unwilling to fully endorse a radical lesbian-feminist position” (2000,
199). Lurie sees homosocial erotics in Portrait’s opening credit sequence
(2000, 86); furthermore, she identifies Isabel and Mme Merle’s attraction
as an “eroticized mother-daughter-type” relationship (93). In the Cut also
illustrates female homosocial and homoerotic relations as an alternative to
the perils of heterosexual love. For more on the dangers of phallic sexuality
in Campion’s work, see also Lundy (2009, 215).
6. Williams is speaking specifically about the films of Brian DePalma, whom
she calls “Hitchcock’s most celebrated son” (82).
7. See Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s
(1987); Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in
Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (1987).
8. Like Isabel in Portrait, Ada in The Piano challenges assumptions about
female sexuality, for she, not her husband, is the sexual aggressor. Another
thing the two films share in common is the work of cinematographer Stuart
Dryburgh.
9. The most conventional of Campion’s films, Bright Star, which came out
in 2009 after a six-year hiatus, is also the most unapologetically romantic.
Given In the Cut’s poor reception and Campion’s own admission that she
64 Tiel Lundy

was uncomfortable with the violent nihilism of Moore’s adapted text, it is

tempting to see Bright Star as the filmmaker’s retreat back into the comforts
of the period romance. In her interview with Guy Lodge for In Contention,
Campion says that In the Cut “[was] very much Nicole’s passion. I’m not
at all like Frannie [the film’s protagonist], I’m not a self-sacrificer. Keats
is much more my core, my home zone. I like the demonic too—but that
tenderness in Bright Star is more where I’m at these days.”
10. “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me),” The Temptations, 1971.
11. Campion’s more recent films continue with this theme of female masochism
and violent sexual desire. The Piano’s Ada loses a finger to her cuckolded
husband’s failed attempt to at once symbolically silence and castrate her,
while Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady, subjects herself to the emo-
tional and physical torment of her husband (John Malkovich), prompting
Diane Sadoff to comment on how the film’s “slasher-style” cinematography
focuses on Isabel’s “violated, morselized body” (1998, 290).
12. Commenting on these metacinematic moments, Nancy Bentley writes that
“the history of film offers Campion a long menu of choices for presenting
female desire as troubled, fraught, even pathological. But by presenting such
disparate styles in such rapid succession, the cinematic allusions also draw
attention to the fact that female sexuality is mediated, that it is visible on the
screen only through time-bound conventions of representation” (1997, 177).
13. Of course it was common knowledge that in the days preceding Emancipation
white masters routinely raped their black female slaves. For a full-length
study of nineteenth-century white–black sexual relations see Hodes (1997).
14. This association with whiteness goes far back, at least as far as classical Greek
art which put greater light on female figures. Film simply used the photo-
graphic technology to literally light the female star. In “The Whiteness of
Film Noir,” Eric Lott analyzes film noir’s “fairly insistent thematizing of
spiritual and cinematic darkness by way of bodies (1997, 542). See Dyer’s
description of how Griffith used early film techniques to render on screen
the “whiteness of white people” (1998, 158).
15. The sequence opens with Caroline walking purposefully through an all-
black neighborhood on the way to her dealer’s apartment. As the only white-
skinned person on a street populated with many black-skinned people who
stop to stare at her, the point is clear: Caroline is in the “wrong” part of
town. It is worth mentioning that more recent narratives, like Traffic, revise
the topos of black male–white female sexuality in terms of geography; no
longer a Southern plantation phenomenon, representations of the sexually
aggressive black man have since been relocated to the inner city. Traffic,
though it performs a fair amount of border crossing, situates Caroline’s
“fall” in a drug-infested corner of Washington D.C.; and In the Cut is set
in a Manhattan inhabited by strip clubs, pool halls, and dark alleys. Of the
scene between Caroline and the drug dealer, Roth has this to say: “This par-
ticular sexual encounter, the naked black male body with the naked white
female body is presented as an absolute violation, both narratively and visu-
ally” (par. 33). See also Deborah Shaw’s “‘You Are Alright, But . . .’: Individual
 Black Bucks and Don Juans 65

and Collective Representations of Mexicans, Latinos, Anglo-Americans and

African Americans in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic” (2005).
16. In her comparative analysis of In the Cut and Sex and the City, Sue Thornham
identifies Carrie’s pink tulle skirt as a Cinderella motif.
17. Christian Metz (1992). The problem, as Snead articulates it, is that “espe-
cially in film, stereotypes and codes insulate themselves from historical
change, or actual counter-examples in the real world. Caricatures breed more
caricatures, or metamorphose into others, but remain in place” (1994, 3).
18. Campion’s depiction of the Maori in The Piano aroused the ire of critics and
academics. See Mark A. Reid (2000), Leonie Pihama (1994), and Lynda
Dyson (1995).

Works Cited
Bentley, Nancy. 1997. “‘Conscious Observation of a Lovely Woman’: Jane Campion’s
Portrait in Film.” Henry James Review, 18(2): 174–179.
Bogle, Donald. 1993. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive
History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Continuum.
Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen (eds.). 2004. Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. 168–178.
Diawara, Manthia. 1988/2009. “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification
and Resistance.” In Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and
Criticism, 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dixon, Thomas. 1905. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.
New York: Grosset and Dunlap.
Doane, Mary Ann. 1987. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 1999. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” In Sue
Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Washington Square: New York
University Press. 131–145.
Douglass, Frederick. 1892/1955. “Introduction to the Reason Why the Colored
American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.” In Philip S.
Foner (ed.), The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. New York: International
Publishers.
Dyer, Richard. 1998. Stars. New ed. London: British Film Institute.
Dyson, Lynda. 1995. “The Return of the Repressed? Whiteness, Femininity and
Colonialism in The Piano.” Screen, 36(3): 267–276.
Francke, Lizzie. 2003. “Jane Campion: Dangerous Liaisons.” Sight and Sound,
13(11): 19.
Gledhill, Christine. 1987. Introduction. Home Is Where The Heart Is: Studies in
Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: British Film Institute.
Hodes, Martha. 1997. White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century
South. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hollinger, Karen. 1998. “Theorising Mainstream Female Spectatorship: The Case
of Popular Lesbian Film.” Cinema Journal, 37(2): 3–17.
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hooks, bell. 1999. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” In Sue
Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Washington Square: New York
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James, Henry. 1908. The Portrait of a Lady. Edited by D. Robert Bamberg. Norton
Critical Edition. New York: Norton.
Kaplan, E. Ann. 1983. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. London:
Routledge.
Lodge, Guy. 2009. Interview. InContention.com. December 17.
Lott, Eric. 1997. “The Whiteness of Film Noir.” American Literary History, 9(3):
542–566.
Lundy, Tiel. 2009. “Mired in Desire: Jane Campion’s Portrait of Erotics.” Journal of
Adaptation in Film and Performance, 2(3): 211–222.
Lurie, Susan. 2000. “A Twentieth-Century Portrait: Jane Campion’s American
Girl.” In John Kucich and Diane F. Sadoff (eds.), Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern
Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. 83–100.
Maslin, Janet. 1996. “Henry James, Not Too Literally.” Review. New York Times,
December 27, C3.
McHugh, Kathleen. 2007. Jane Campion. Contemporary Film Directors series.
Edited by James Naremore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Metz, Christian. 1992. “Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema.” In Film
Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Moore, Susanna. 1995. In the Cut. New York: Knopf.
Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Sue Thornham
(ed.), Feminist Film Theory. New York: New York University Press. 58–69.
Pihama, Leonie. 1994. “Are Films Dangerous? A Maori Woman’s Perspective on
The Piano.” Hecate, 20(2): 239–242.
Polan, Dana. 2001. Jane Campion. London: British Film Institute.
Reid, Mark A. 2000. “A Few Black Keys and Maori Tattoos: Re-Reading Jane
Campion’s The Piano in PostNegritude Time.” Quarterly Review of Film and
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Rodowick, D. N. 1991. The Difficulty of Difference. London: Routledge.
Roth, Elaine. 2006. “Black and White Masculinity in Three Steven Soderbergh
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Rowe, John Carlos. 2000. “For Mature Audiences: Sex, Gender and Recent Film
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Stage and Screen. New York: Palgrave.
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Shaw, Deborah. 2005. “‘You Are Alright, But . . .’: Individual and Collective
Representations of Mexicans, Latinos, Anglo-Americans and African
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 Black Bucks and Don Juans 67

Thornham, Sue. 2007. “‘Starting to Feel Like a Chick’: Re-visioning Romance in In

the Cut.” Feminist Media Studies, 7(1): 33–46.
Urban, Andrew L. 2003. Interview. Urban Cinephile, November 13.
Wella, Ida B. 1892. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Reprinted in Ida
B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings. Salem, NH: Ayer.
Williams, Linda. 2001. Playing the Race Card: Melodrama of Black and White from
Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1984. “When the Woman Looks.” In Mary Ann Doane (ed.), Revision:
Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. Frederick, MD: University Publications of
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Williams, Linda Ruth. 2005. The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Filmed
The Birth of a Nation. Directed by D. W. Griffith. USA, 1915.
Bright Star. Directed by Jane Campion. UK, 2009.
The Color Purple. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA, 1985.
D. W. Griffith: Father of Film. Directed by Kevin Brownlow. USA, 1992.
Gone with the Wind. Directed by Victor Fleming. USA, 1939.
In the Cut. Directed by Jane Campion. USA, 2003.
Man Who Knew Too Much, The. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA, 1956.
Piano, The. Directed by Jane Campion. Australia, 1993.
Pillow Talk. Directed by Michael Gordon. USA, 1959.
Portrait of a Lady, The. Directed by Jane Campion. UK, 1996.

Televised
Sex and The City. Directed by Darren Star. HBO. 1998–2004.

Recorded Music
“I Think I Love You.” The Partridge Family. 1970.
“Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me).” The Temptations. 1971.
“Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).” Jay Livingston and Ray Evans.
1956.
Chapter 5

Mad Love: The Anxiety

of Difference in
the Films of Lon
Chaney Sr.
Karen Randell

And for the mangled years the city shall pay me with the pleasures of Nero
and the treasures of Caeser [sic].
—Blizzard, The Penalty, 1920

This chapter will focus on two films from Lon Chaney’s career, The
Penalty (Wallace Worsley, 1920) and The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian,
1925), to illustrate the ways in which Chaney’s “transformative masculinity,”1
displayed throughout his film career in the 1920s, allow for a neurotic rep-
etition of the disfigured or deformed male body to be visualized on screen.
Lon Chaney’s active performance of disability gives his characters a power
over the body that is often perceived by the able bodied as impossible.
However, these characters do not succeed in getting their woman, and all
must ultimately die in horrific or tragic circumstances because of their per-
ceived transgressive sexuality and their refusal to accept the passive norma-
tive position of the disfigured and disabled man. In the films that I consider
here, and in his entire oeuvre, Chaney’s characters are unable to articulate
their love for the women that they desire in socially accepted terms. His
performed bodies fail to articulate their tender feelings; rather they act
as a symptom of his characters’ sexual frustration. These characters are
doubly disabled in terms of bodily function and emotional expression. Here
in Chaney’s films, the dark side of love is illustrated through damaged bodies
that contain damaged psyches, a problematic notion in a postwar decade.
70 Karen Randell

It is possible to see this repeated motif of the deformed and disfigured

man in Chaney’s films as a deferred or latent representation of the disabled
veteran: the image of the veteran is a recovered “referentiality” within the text
(Elsaesser 2001, 195). Chaney constantly reinvents deformity over and over
again, ensuring that the damaged male body is repeatedly visible on screen at
a time when this visible difference is apparent in postwar society both in the
United States and across Europe but practically invisible in terms of veteran
disability on the Hollywood screen.2 Europe, and its legacy of “horror,” is
transported via European locations, such as Paris (Phantom of the Opera; The
Hunchback of Notre Dame [1923]) in Chaney’s films. These projected loca-
tions reinforce the notion of the European as “other,” as a place of dislocation
and trauma (already apparent in horror and gothic literature), and relocate
disability, deformity, and disfigurement back to its original geographical
source. There is, in psychoanalytical terms, a return to the site of trauma; the
damaged male body is placed back into its place/space of creation. So these
films are “trauma narratives” in the sense that they engage with a prevailing
anxiety within postwar society (the damaged veteran) but are unable to, in
Thomas Elsaesser’s terminology, “represent the unrepresentable” (the horror
and consequences of war) in narrative terms (2001, 195).3 The absence of the
traumatic event in the film texts under discussion in this chapter is marked
not only by a displacement within genre but also within the performance
of a generic horror convention, the monster. Chaney’s monsters, however,
always demand pathos, requiring the audience to sympathize with the char-
acter, not just shrink back in horror.
Steve Neale points out that the influence of the circus, fairground, and
freak show are heavily apparent in the work of Browning and Chaney, which
is hardly surprising considering that this is their theatrical background
(2000, 95). These influences enable “difference” to be put into the narrative
as spectacle. However, the “freakish” body, a staple of carnival and the cir-
cus, is redisplayed in Chaney’s films with pathos in The Phantom and with
gruesome fascination for dismemberment in The Penalty. The overt refer-
ence here is to the freak show and the already existing discourse, as Gaylyn
Studlar has suggested, around the damaged body as “other,” moving the
damaged body into a fantasy narrative that both fascinates and repulses the
viewer (1996, 199). In the films under discussion here, the damaged body
and the anxiety that this somatic image causes to the civilian population is
displaced into the safe space of another (fantasy) space, namely the horror
genre and cinematic space. The use of the “freak” or monster to inhabit this
displacement of the reformation of the now deformed “normal” body is a
trope that allows for the time frame of the war to be renegotiated. The car-
nivalesque allows for a return to a past time, before the war, and an engage-
ment with the sinister and the grotesque.
 Mad Love 71

The Penalty: Doctors, Redemption,

and the Spectacular Amputee
The Penalty is an unlikely and excessive tale of revenge and redemption. Here
disability literally takes center stage as Chaney, playing the disabled Blizzard,
performs athletic stunts with his legs bent double and strapped to his waist. It
is the disability of this character that provides the scenario for all that happens
in the film; disability drives and motivates the action. Blizzard is imbued with
a menacing violent nature and extreme sexual prowess. The excesses within
Chaney’s performance take the character into the realms of the freak show as
in scene after scene the abilities of this “disabled” man are displayed.
The opening of the film shows a young teenage boy lying on the street, “a
victim of the city traffic.” At the hospital his legs are mistakenly amputated
below the knee by a trainee doctor, Dr. Ferris (Charles Clary), when in fact
the boy had suffered a concussion. The doctor in charge agrees to cover
up Ferris’s mistake, but his exclamation, “Good God! You should not have
amputated. You’ve mangled this poor child for life,” is overheard by the boy;
an iris-in on the startled look of the boy as he hears this exchange presents
the audience with his horrified realization. Alienated from his family by the
injury—an intertitle reads, “My father . . . detested little boys with their legs
chipped [sic] off . . . so at 15 I hobbled out of his life”—he grows up on the
Barbary Coast to become the criminal “King Blizzard” of the San Francisco
underworld. Within this characterization, the trope of disability is used to
connote evil, and as Paul. K. Longmore suggests, this is a tradition that
predates film and can be seen in the plays of Shakespeare or the literature of
Robert Louis Stevenson or Herman Melville:4

Disability has often been used as a melodramatic device not only in popular
entertainment, but in literature as well. Among the most persistent is the asso-
ciation of disability with malevolence. Deformity of body symbolizes defor-
mity of soul. Physical handicaps are made the emblems of evil. (2001, 2–3)

The stigma of disability is evoked here through the monstrous behavior

of Blizzard. He is a man that we know was not disabled from birth but
through the fault of other men. Blizzard is represented here, then, as a mal-
adjusted amputee who cannot accept the fate that has befallen him. David
Skal has noted that there is a link between a performance of disability
here in this film and the disabled veterans present in society after the First
World War:

[T]hough its theme was veiled, The Penalty also spoke suggestively of the
impotent rage of maimed war veterans who were being assimilated back into
society in unprecedented numbers. (2001, 65)
72 Karen Randell

The reference of the disabled veteran is, I argue, a permanent trace within
the performance of Chaney. However, his active engagement with the pos-
sibilities of the deformed body and his clear potent energy would seem to
suggest a less victimized position than the one that Skal offers. I will return
to this idea later in the chapter.
After the first hospital scene, the film takes a more bizarre twist. The
story resumes 27 years after the operation when Blizzard is planning an
ambitious plot to cause anarchy in the city, when immigrants that he has
helped to bring into the country will start riots and fires around the city and
loot the prosperous companies and stores. However, Blizzard has an even
more ambitious, personal plan. He plots revenge on the doctor who maimed
him by befriending his artist daughter, Barbara (Claire Adams), who is using
Blizzard as a sculpture model. In a fantastic plot twist, Blizzard plans to have
the legs of her fiancé, Dr. Wilmott Allen (Kenneth Halen), grafted onto his
own stumps by Barbara’s father. To this end Blizzard has had an operating
theater constructed in the cellar of his house.
For his plan to take over San Francisco, Blizzard has “gathered up his dance
hall girls” and “put them to work in his house making hats—thousands of
hats.” This secret sweatshop is never clearly explained until near the end
of the film when, in a vision he has of overpowering San Francisco, we
see “thousands of foreigners” wearing these hats in their acts of rioting
and looting.5 The police are aware of Blizzard’s underworld activities and
send a female detective, Rose (Ethel Grey Terry), to infiltrate the sweat-
shop and warn them of Blizzard’s actions. Eventually she falls in love with
Blizzard and they marry, but not before he has threatened Barbara’s life and
Dr. Ferris tricks him into an operation to “restore his legs.” While under
anesthetic, Ferris relieves the pressure in Blizzard’s head that a car accident
caused years before, and Blizzard comes around a restored and rational man.
Rose and Blizzard’s happiness, however, is short-lived, as his old underworld
colleagues are afraid that he will snitch on them. He is shot through the win-
dow as he plays the piano for Rose. As he dies, he exclaims, “Fate chained me
to evil—for that I must pay the penalty.”6
This extraordinary and unlikely story line is not surprisingly commented
on in the reviews in Variety and this comment in the New York Times:

The Penalty is an altogether incredible melodrama that, by its excesses, mocks

even the friendliest spectator’s love of life as it is often fictitiously created on
the screen.

However, the point is not that the story line is too fantastic but that Lon
Chaney will be able to “undoubtedly win the active interest, and even the
regard of many.” This Chaney does by not passively playing the character
 Mad Love 73

of a double amputee in a wheelchair but rather by playing a character who

walks on his stumps that are encased in leather cups and straps and who uses
a pair of cutoff crutches for stability. The leather casing that enables Blizzard
to walk is a double device here because it also serves as a base for Chaney
to kneel on: his legs are bent up behind him and strapped to his waist by
a leather harness. Wide-legged trousers and a voluminous jacket were con-
structed to hide this deceit. Thus the image of the disabled man here is one
of athletic stature, however diminutive. The first shot of the adult Blizzard
is in a dark and shadowy street where he walks along on his stumps using
the cutoff crutches as he speaks with a corrupt policeman. There can be no
misunderstanding, then, of Blizzard’s disability as he is compared in this
scene to the able-bodied full-height male.
However, his stature is continually raised by either having those around
him seated or by placing Chaney on surfaces that align him with the faces
of those he speaks with. An early example of this is in the sweatshop. The
women are seen sitting around a long trestle table, each with a hat in front
of her that she is stitching. Chaney as Blizzard climbs onto the table, a move
that highlights the agility of both actor and character. He walks along the
tabletop inspecting the work of the girls and occasionally pushing at a hat
with one of his crutches. This raised image of him within a sea of female
faces produces a performance space that is more akin to the dance hall or
fashion show than a horror-thriller. The possibility of reading this as a femi-
nized position, however, is disavowed by Blizzard’s violent behavior toward
one of the girls who has not worked hard enough. He stares down into her
face as he chastises her, the editing producing a shot/reverse shot argument
that highlights her fear and his rage. He picks up the offending hat and hits
her about the face with it; then he grabs the front of her hair and pushes her
away from him, almost at arm’s length, as he continues to shout. He then
pulls her head down onto the table and brandishes his crutch at her face.
At no time does Chaney wobble or seem in danger of falling from the
table. It is a convincing and harrowing violent performance that leaves the
girls (and the audience) in no doubt of his physical strength and menacing
potential.
It is tempting to read this scene in terms of a violent sexual act that
is perpetrated on this woman, particularly if we consider the “castration”
image of the amputee and the plot of the film that is in search of the restored
“whole” man. The phallic significance of the crutch and the close proxim-
ity of the woman to Blizzard’s genitals provide an opportunity for reading
this as a metaphor for oral sex that is either standing in for his frustrated
impotence or as a bypass for the censors. However, the next scene cuts to a
doorway where Blizzard is seen peering through a gap in a door at a woman
lounging on a bed in the corner of a room. He opens the door by a specially
74 Karen Randell

designed low handle; it is clear that this is a purposely designed boudoir for
his lovers. An intertitle announces that this is “Blizzard’s favorite place for
the moment.”
Blizzard and the woman are soon seen in a passionate embrace, and the
camera lingers as they kiss. The overt reference here to Blizzard’s sexual
behavior suggests that he is neither frustrated nor impotent nor that the
woman is coerced (although the suggestion that she is paid for her services
rests within the mise-en-scène of the boudoir). The “normality” with which
this sexual exchange is conducted—there is no violence and no disgust
expressed on the part of the woman—suggests that, although he is a violent
threat to women, he is also “normally” sexually active. He does not need to
compensate for his impotence with violent or fetishistic behavior.
This image of Blizzard as a sexual threat is made in the next scene where
Rose is being warned by her chief detective that this is a risky job that she
undertakes: “A woman who enters his den risks more than death.” Blizzard
is perceived as having violent sexual prowess, and risking “more than death”
plays into the fear of rape and the myth of difference which, as Longmore
acknowledges, is a classic stereotypical representation: there always being an
“undertone of sexual danger” when the disabled man is in close proximity
to a woman, “we are never quite sure what he might do to her” (2001, 11).
However, what is significant is the perceived risk of violent sexual behav-
ior, not impotence. Joanna Bourke has argued that in the 1920s, those dis-
abled from birth were considered to “possess too much sexuality” but to be
unsuitable for marriage, which was “repugnant to many able-bodied com-
mentators,” whereas those injured during the war, the “war mutilated,” were
considered to be “real men” (1996, 73). This is particularly illuminating here,
as Blizzard is portrayed as being unsuitable material for marriage until, at the
end of the film, he is rendered passive by the operation to his head, which
returns him to the man that he once was. As an active agent of disability, his
behavior is viewed as pathological, whereas once he is passive, it is not.
Another example of his athleticism and perceived menace is featured in
a scene at Blizzard’s house. While he has been at Barbara Ferris’s studio
posing for her sculpture of “Satan—after the fall” (another explicit refer-
ence to the trope of disability and evil), undercover detective Rose has been
looking through his house for clues of his “takeover” plan. She discovers a
lever by the fireplaces that opens the hearth and exposes a stairway and a
fireman’s pole. Having gone down into the secret room, she finds the operat-
ing theater. When Blizzard returns to his house, he finds that drawers have
been disturbed, and he finds a hairpin that he knows belongs to Rose, her
femininity undermining her position as unseen detective. He walks over to
the fireplace and knows that it has been opened. Now, with a sudden move-
ment, Chaney/Blizzard leaps to the side of the fireplace and starts to climb
 Mad Love 75

the wall, using shelving to heave himself upward. Once at the top of the
wall, he looks through the secret window that looks down on the women
in the workshop below; he sees that Rose is there and calls to her to come
to him. This climb is an amazing display of strength from Chaney, not
only because is he heaving himself upward using just his arms, but unlike
Blizzard, he is also lifting a body weight that contains his whole legs; and as
if to prove a point, we then see Chaney/Blizzard lower himself to the floor
again, showing the same exceptional skill of maneuver and strength.
In his biography of Chaney, Michael Blake makes it clear that “all of
Chaney’s scenes were filmed without the use of trick angles or photography”
(1990, 80). It is important therefore to remember that Chaney is actually
performing these stunts himself, which resulted in permanent damage.7
In so doing, there is a refusal to portray the disabled man as passive. It is
a deceit because the audience knows that he is indeed able bodied; how-
ever, the publicity around details of the costume and the bodily damage
that occurs to Chaney from the performance serves to blur the distinction
between character and actor.
The penultimate scene of the film serves to unmask this deceit and
expose the means of Chaney’s performance as disabled, and it also questions
the image of the enraged amputee. Blizzard has been anesthetized believing
that Dr. Ferris will perform a lower-leg graft. However, instead the doctor
relieves the pressure from Blizzard’s brain, thus returning him to a rational
state. When Blizzard comes around, he says, “I have woken from a terrible
dream. I was a devil—I did things that I shudder to think of.” This state-
ment suggests that it was the contusion all along that has created Blizzard’s
violent and criminal behavior. His rage at being mistakenly amputated has
gone, even though he is still disabled and the evidence of this lies on the floor
in front of Blizzard’s bed, and in full view of the audience. The same leather
harness that Chaney has used to hide his able body from the audience is now
seen as proof of the absence of Blizzard’s legs. The artifice is exposed so that
the audience can wonder at Chaney’s skill. Blizzard is now helpless in bed,
a bandage covering his head and his nature restored to that of the passive
amputee. The performance of disability as active is undermined here by the
narrative need to restore order and place the amputee in a controlled space.
Only now will he gain access to normative sexual experience by marrying
Rose, short-lived as that will be.
Joanna Bourke’s work has established that during the First World War,
there was some concern expressed by doctors at the front about the rate of
amputation. Dr. Doyan of the French Medical Service stated that “[s]ome
doctors were thrilled in anticipation of cutting off legs and arms upon
the stricken field, amidst a hail of shrapnel and machine gun bullets. . . .
[I]ndeed, in the early years of the war, surgeons may have been showing
76 Karen Randell

more enthusiasm for amputation than was strictly necessary” (1996, 33).
There is an engagement here, in a film made just two years after the end of
a war with an excessive fascination for amputation, that arguably mimics
the excesses of the doctors that operated during the war. Not only is there a
reference within this film to the thousands of war wounded that came back
from the front but also to the medical practices that subsequently saved and
maimed them.
Similarly in The Phantom of the Opera, the damaged body is offered as
“spectacle” and presents a displayed excess that both exhibits the body as
fascinatingly grotesque and portrays the damaged male body as a site for
sympathetic response. Here Chaney’s display of disfigurement engages
with the prevailing discourses present in society after the war concerning
men with facial injuries. The film is set in Paris at the opera house where
a ghostly apparition haunts the halls and stairways and sits in a box dur-
ing the performances. Carlotta, the principal soprano, is threatened by “the
Phantom,” as he has become known, and has been warned to give up her lead
role as Marguerite in the company’s performance of Faust for the chorus girl,
Christine (Mary Philbin). She refuses, and chaos reigns on the opening night
as the Phantom releases the central chandelier, which sends the audience run-
ning from the theater. The masked Phantom visits Christine and takes her to
his underground home where she removes his mask and faints at the sight of
his disfigured face. Meanwhile, her fiancé, Raoul (Norman Kerry), and the
secret chief of police (Arthur Edmund Carewe) are in pursuit of Christine.
Eventually the Phantom is chased out onto the streets of Paris and beaten to
death by a mob. Christine and Raoul are reunited and married.
Lon Chaney does not appear in the film until one-third into the nar-
rative. His presence as a star is clearly demarcated in the opening credits,
Chaney’s name appearing first “as the Phantom,” as it does on the poster,
but the audience must wait in anticipation for his on-screen appearance.
The Phantom is seen, however, as a shadow crossing the balconies and cor-
ridors of the theater. Gaylyn Studlar has remarked that this was a “studio
exploitation,” an expectation within the construction of the character and
the marketing of the image that the “viewers of Chaney’s films in the 1920s
anticipated the actor’s specialisation in representing the physically grotesque
much as they later anticipated the appearance of stars who sang or danced
in talkies” (1996, 238). However, the Phantom’s physical appearance is
described in detail during the second scene through the use of intertitles as
the prop maker, Buquet (Gibson Gowland), explains to the young dancers
what he has seen in the past.8

He is a grey shadow . . . his face is like leprous parchment, yellow skin strung
tight over protruding bones . . . his nose—there is no nose.
 Mad Love 77

Like a master of ceremonies at the freak show, Buquet announces and antici-
pates the arrival of the Phantom by his visceral descriptions and melodra-
matic manner. His speech to the dancers is given an uncanny edge by his
constant play with the prosthetic head that rests in his lap, further drawing
attention to the artifice of created disfigurement. This verbal detail of the
Phantom’s appearance thus creates suspense for the audience who are wait-
ing to see how Chaney will achieve the Phantom persona.
His first appearance to Christina is one in which this long wait seems
to be at an end. When Christina has walked through the mirror door and
entered Erik’s underground world, we see a white opera-gloved hand enter
the frame (left) very slowly and reach toward her shoulder. The camera is
positioned in front of Christina and we see her happy smile as she feels the
touch; her expression is curious as she turns to face her benefactor. The cam-
era now moves to Erik’s point of view so that we witness her reaction before
we see the Phantom’s face. She gasps and shrinks against the wall, her hand
rising up to her face. Her shocked expression leads us to believe that we will
now see “the monster,” but we do not. We see the masked man, and he asks
her and the audience to “look not upon my mask—rather remember my
devotion.” A point-of-view shot shows his fading masked image as Christina
faints. The audience must wait before they can witness the horror of his face
beneath the mask.
The suspense caused by the delayed disclosure, the awaited display, of
the Phantom’s physical appearance (and Chaney’s) creates a metanarrative
around the “horror” of the disfigured face. The narrative becomes subordi-
nate to the image. The moment in which Erik’s disfigured face is displayed
to the audience is a moment of direct address and shock for the audience.
Erik is at the theater organ playing for Christina and enraptured by his
own music. A point-of-view shot enables us to see the back of the Phantom
swaying to the rhythm of his playing, as Christina does. The next shot cuts
to an extreme close-up of his masked face and his smile as he is cheered by
the music; as the camera pans out, we see Christina’s fingers enter the frame
above Erik’s shoulder and then move out again. There is a repeat of these
three shots, and the hand moves into the frame closer each time. Again
the camera closes in on the face of Erik and then cuts to a medium shot of
Christina and the Phantom in close proximity, her hand nearly resting on
his shoulder. A very quick edit takes us back to the close-up of the masked
Erik, and this time the hand enters the frame quickly and lifts the mask
off Erik’s face just below the mouth. There is a swift extreme close-up as
the Phantom opens his mouth and silently screams into the camera lens.
His skeletal face is made all the more horrific by his clearly terrified stare
from his sunken eyes and his open mouth with the broken and discolored
teeth. Christina reveals the Phantom’s identity and the real face of Erik not
78 Karen Randell

to herself but to the audience. It is only after the audience has gasped (and
there is evidence to suggest that they did) that Erik turns, and the next shot
reveals the horrified face of Christina as she covers her eyes with her hands,
an act of agency for those women in the audience who cannot bear to look
any longer.9
Variety’s review of the film stated that “the kick of the picture is the
unmasking” and that it creates “a wallop that can’t miss its objective.” The
makeup and horrific (and horrified) stare of the Phantom is a gratuitous
device through which Chaney communicates with his audience. It is the
performance of disfigurement that connotes his star status. The Phantom’s
scream at his unmasking is not at Christina but at the audience. Chaney’s
direct address “directly solicits spectator attention” and does, as Tom
Gunning suggests of spectacle in early film, incite “visual curiosity” and
supplies “pleasure through an exciting spectacle, a unique event” (1990, 58).
However, Erik’s own horror at his unmasking and the horror that he sees
displayed in the face of Christina allows for a feeling of sympathy toward the
horrific monster. Chaney’s performance as the disfigured “monster” pivots
on the notion of pathos rather than horror.
The Phantom’s mutilated face is never explained in the film (nor in the
original novel), but its postwar production and exhibition places it within
the context of injury and reconstructive surgery after World War I. In The
Phantom of the Opera, the possibilities of reconstructive surgery that were
apparent in the veteran hospitals are explored through the theatrical aes-
thetic and the exposed face. The disfigured faces of veterans who had under-
gone reconstructive surgery are certainly comparable to the misshapen face
that Chaney’s makeup produces both with and without the mask. These
men were often pilots who had bailed out on fire and landed in the sea,
burn victims from tank explosions, and men affected by poisonous gas.
The technological advances that created the new weapons for war were
developing alongside the advancing technology in medicine, photography,
and communication. Modern technological advances in medicine facilitated
the repair, remodeling, and healing of the human body in revolutionary
ways; skin grafting, (fairly) sanitized amputation, and anesthetic meant that
many men survived massive injuries that would have killed them in earlier
wars. Cinema, too, enabled the body to be visually represented in ways that
had never before existed, through movement, through makeup and disguise,
and through performance.
The propinquity of those maimed by the war to Chaney’s characters sug-
gests for horror writer David Skal that the Phantom’s hideous appearance
“could pluck at the culture’s rawest nerves, unbridled by rationale,” because
there is no explanation in the film for his deformity (2001, 67). Therefore
 Mad Love 79

the audience must make of it what they will. Skal suggests that Chaney
serves as a link “between popular culture and modernist developments in the
arts and science. Chaney’s plastic experiments on his own body shadowed
the concurrent efforts of cubist, Dadaist, and emerging Surrealist painters to
stretch the human form into increasingly bizarre configurations” (2001, 70).
This link between the artistic, deformity, and performance is pertinent. It
suggests that spectacle is the link between the medical and the performative,
prosthetic experiments and between the actual (the maimed) and artifice.
The medical world infiltrates these narratives. However, modern advances
in medicine are reinscribed here not as miraculous but as horrific.
Through the performance of Chaney and the (incoherent) narratives of
his films, the notion of a stable male body is brought into question; through
this cinematic displacement, the deformed body, the body less able, the ref-
erenced damaged body of the soldier becomes a paradoxical one. The body
that was once fit, tough, hard, and potent in its initial inscription becomes
threatening after its reentry into the safe civilian world or peacetime soci-
ety as the disabled, disfigured male body. Chaney’s performance of active
monstrous deformity disavows the notion of passivity and presents both an
active whole masculine potency and a threatening monstrous pathology. I
have read the deformed body here, exhibited with such excess in Chaney’s
films, as a hysterical symptom of the anxieties pertaining to the visibility of
disability in society after the First World War. The grotesque body provides
a hysterical screen that conceals not only the anxieties of the maimed man
but also of those that have to look on.
In her work on disability and the First World War, Joanna Bourke has
noted, “[P]opular myth has it that women were particularly fond of fall-
ing in love with the wounded (1996, 38).” This myth is played out and
disavowed in the films of Lon Chaney—neither Erik nor Blizzard gets
their girl. Bourke states that “in the case of people disabled from birth,
the chief metaphor was passivity, and this childlike, ‘innate’ detachment was
encouraged in institutions caring for them” (1996, 38). Erik conforms to
this passive state, rendered childlike and sexually inactive by deformity and
unable to articulate his love for Christine in active, positive terms. However,
Blizzard turns his inactivity due to his disability into psychosis; his sexual-
ity molds the horrifying ways in which he decides to pursue and woo his
girl, and his active agency drives the narrative. In these films, the anxieties
around disability pivot on the potential for an achievable love life for these
characters. The tragedy and the horror are evident in their refusal to accept a
passive position. This is achieved in no small way by the performance of Lon
Chaney, whose characters’ hearts reside in romantic love but whose cultural
conditions push them to the dark side.
80 Karen Randell

Notes
1. I borrow this term from Gaylyn Studlar (1996, 4).
2. There is much research to be done for the contemporary moment in terms of
the representation in Hollywood cinema of veteran disability after serving
in Iraq (2003–2011) and Afghanistan (2001–present). Again fantasy and
horror genre films take up the thematic—Avatar (Cameron, 2009); Saw
(Wan, 2004); and Hostel (Roth, 2005).
3. See Karen Randell, “Masking the Horror of Trauma: the hysterical body
of Lon Chaney” for further discussion of the displacement of the disabled
veteran in Chaney’s The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927).
4. For instance, Richard III, Long John Silver, or Captain Ahab.
5. There is evidence within the film of the growing public anxiety concerning
the rise of underworld crime, and its link with the rise in immigrants, which
is later taken up in the gangster films of the late 1920s and 1930s.
6. This concurs with Longmore’s argument that in film and literature, “for
monstrous and criminal disabled characters, the final and only possible solu-
tion is death. In most cases it is a fitting and just punishment” (2001, 5).
7. He damaged his back and knees during the filming of The Penalty, wearing
the harness for longer than the on-set doctors suggested. During the filming
of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923, he damaged his back permanently
from wearing the hunchback prosthesis.
8. This is an ironic twist in this narrator, as he specializes in artifice the same
way Chaney does.
9. “In the theatre last night a woman behind us stifled a scream when this
happened.” New York Times, September 7, 1925.

Works Cited
Blake, Michael. 1990. Lon Chaney: The Man behind the Thousand Faces. Boston:
Vestal.
Bourke, Joanna. 1996. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great
War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Burtchaell, Sir Charles. 1915/1996. “Translation of Criticism by Dr. Doyan of the
French Army Medical Service, July 1915: The Distribution of the Wounded.”
Quoted in Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the
Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 33.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2001. “Postmodernism as Mourning Work.” Screen, 42(2):
193–201.
Gunning, Tom. 1990. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator
and the Avant-Garde.” In Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame,
Narrative. London: BFI.
Longmore, Paul K. 2001. “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People.” In
Anthony Enns and Christopher R. Smit (eds.), Screening Disability. Lanham,
MD: University Press of America.
Neale, Steve. 2000. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge.
 Mad Love 81

“Penalty, The.” 1920. New York Times, November 15 (BFI Archive).

“Phantom of the Opera, The.” 1925. New York Times, September 7 (BFI Archive).
“Phantom of the Opera, The.” 1925. Variety, September 9 (BFI Archive).
Randell, Karen. 2003. “Masking the Horror of Trauma: the hysterical body of Lon
Chaney” Screen 44 (2): 216–221.
Skal, David J. 2001. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. London: Faber
and Faber.
Studlar, Gaylyn. 1996. This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz
Age. New York: Columbia University Press.

Filmed
Avatar. Directed by James Cameron. USA, 2009.
Hostel. Directed by Eli Roth. USA, 2005.
Hunchback of Notre Dame, The. Directed by Wallace Worsley. USA, 1923.
Penalty, The. Directed by Wallace Worsley. USA, 1925.
Phantom of the Opera, The. Directed by Rupert Julian. USA, 1925.
Saw. James Wan. USA, 2004.
Unknown, The. Directed by Tod Browning. USA, 1927.
Chapter 6

Love, Crime, and

Agatha Christie
Mark Aldridge

With her small cast of characters, clear plotting, and largely self-
contained narratives, the stories of Agatha Christie lend themselves well to
adaptation for the screen. However, the transition is not always straight-
forward, with characterization in particular being affected by the differing
requirements of a film or television audience compared with the reader of
a novel or short story. The gentle iconography of sleepy English villages or
exotic foreign locales contrasts with the underlying darkness, and even cyni-
cism, that motivates so many of the characters. In Agatha Christie’s works,
love is rarely straightforward. It is usually subversive in some manner; love is
hidden for money, murder, revenge, or another key element of her mystery
formula. Using case studies ranging from elaborate Hollywood adaptations
to British-produced television series, this chapter is an examination of how
these adaptations use the dark side of love as a key theme and motivator,
which is placed more centrally on screen than in the original published
mysteries.
Throughout her career, Christie retained a keen mind for logical but sur-
prising solutions to each of the distinctive puzzles that she would present to
her readers. However, when adapted for film, the emphasis was often moved
away from the central mystery and toward character-based drama, with love
and relationships at the fore. Although Christie wrote a handful of romance
novels, her mysteries are rarely occupied with the minutiae or complexities
of the human character. This observation should not be inferred as a criti-
cism but as an explanation for the focus of Christie’s work. Patricia Maida
and Nicholas Spornick have referred to Christie’s love of what they call “the
puzzle game.” They say that “Christie distances the reader from the garish
84 Mark Aldridge

effects of murder by focusing instead on ‘whodunit’ and engaging the reader

in the pursuit of the murderer” (1982, 68). Maida and Spornick explore this
in relation to violence, but their point equally applies to her use of charac-
ters, all of whom are present to serve a purpose within the puzzle rather than
to provide particular depth of characterization or some comment on society.
They are archetypes in the most useful sense, providing clear motivations
and situational backgrounds for the sleuthing reader. Christie took more
interest in cultivating strong and distinctive central premises, within which
she placed the characters that were necessary for the mystery to work. For
example, Ten Little Niggers (1939) is entirely concerned with the isolation of
ten strangers in a scenario where they are being killed, one by one, by a per-
son or persons unknown, while the premise of Murder on the Orient Express
(1934) is self-evident.
Christie’s occasional forays into character-led story lines were less keenly
received than her straightforward mysteries. For many years she wrote
romances under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, with limited success;
the stories are serviceable examples of their genre, but unremarkable. In
1958, her original play Verdict premiered at the Strand Theatre in London,
and while it is usually placed within the traditional Christie canon, it too
was a foray into character-based drama rather than a puzzle for the audience
to solve. In contrast to the traditional murder mystery The Mousetrap, which
had opened in 1952, Verdict did not present its audience with a mystery.
The play revolves around the human drama of a murder that is prominently
committed on stage, early in the play’s running time. The plot then explores
the murderer’s attempts to avoid being caught, potentially implicating inno-
cent victims in the crime. Such a premise is certainly unusual and reminis-
cent of the later television series Columbo (NBC, 1968–2003), but audiences
and critics were unimpressed. As the official Agatha Christie website puts it,
“This play was not well received by audiences who felt cheated by having a
murder without a mystery” (2009, AgathaChristie.com Book Club, Verdict).
Similarly, Peter Haining has observed that “without the surprise finale it
stood no chance with audiences” (1990, 33). While The Mousetrap is still
successfully running in the West End some 60 years later, Verdict lasted for
only 250 performances.
Characterization did not need to come at the direct expense of the mys-
tery in order for Christie’s works to be effective, however. When the myster-
ies are adapted for the big screen, there is indeed a change of focus toward the
characters, but the mysteries themselves often remain intact. It is merely the
prominence of the characters’ relationships, especially romantic ones, and
especially the problematic elements, that makes for a different tone in the
movie adaptation. On a practical level, what works in print does not always
work on screen, a problem that is hardly distinctive to Christie. For example,
 L ove , Crime , and Agatha Christie 85

Christie often used illustrations, such as detailed floor plans, or indicated

the specific placement of objects or disguises by characters. These are less
effective on screen, and so the key character motivators of love, revenge,
and treachery (sometimes separate, often entwined) resultantly increase in
prominence.
Therefore, it is not simply alterations for visual impact or narrative clarity
that are imposed in the transition to the big screen. Consistently, otherwise
faithful films engage with the plot in an entirely different way from Christie’s
original presentation. Characters and characterization are brought to the fore,
with sensationalism often added to the mix. The most famous and critically
lauded of all Christie adaptations, Murder on the Orient Express (Lumet,
1974), demonstrates a focus on character backgrounds, perhaps foreshadow-
ing the mystery’s famous denouement a little heavily so as to add emotional
depth. The prelude of the film highlights the narrative’s background, as it
tells the story of a kidnapped baby, whose death would ultimately provide
motivation for the unusual murder aboard the train. This will prove to be
a crucial character point, and it is clearly emphasized here, but in the novel
it is not even mentioned until much later in the book, and it is not revealed
to be relevant until nearly the end. Indeed, the novel’s straightforward use
of a thinly veiled adaptation of the infamous kidnapping and murder of the
Lindbergh baby (1932) is essentially used as shorthand to allow the reader
to understand that there was a widespread impact of the child’s murder.
Details of the baby’s kidnapping and death are few and far between in the
novel; but Christie’s readers understand her intent, and they understand that
the widespread hatred of the victim, Ratchett (Richard Widmark), was fully
justified in order to allow for the spectacular and original denouement to
make logical sense. In the book, the incident is offered as a simple motiva-
tion for why any of the given passengers would have a motive for murder.
However, in the film, the placement of a dramatized précis of the Anderson
baby story before the opening credits already demonstrates that the death
is seen as the driving force for the entire story. This emphasizes the emo-
tive issue of revenge from the very beginning, rather than Christie’s origi-
nal emphasis on the puzzle of the conflicting witness statements and the
unusual manner of the stab wounds.
Ratchett’s own crimes are unequivocally demonstrated as so despicable
that his murder would be seen by many as justifiable. Therefore, for the
audience, it is important for the mystery to be both solved (in order to be a
satisfying puzzle) but not result in excessive punishment of the guilty party.
In this adaptation, allowing the guilty parties to evade justice is presented as
an adequate solution for all involved. The detective, Poirot (Albert Finney),
presents the true solution of the mystery before admitting that there is an
argument for an alternative series of events that he knows to be incorrect,
86 Mark Aldridge

which presents itself as morally preferable, as it allows the blame to be placed

on an unknown intruder. All are satisfied, even Poirot.
In contrast, the 2010 television adaptation, part of the Poirot series
adapted for British commercial broadcaster ITV, presents considerable
moral wrangling at the story’s conclusion. The indignation of Poirot (David
Suchet) when he is placed in such a complex moral predicament by the per-
petrators is powerfully conveyed as he shouts at the perpetrators, condemn-
ing them for what they have done—but more so for the position they have
put him in. The power of this sequence lies in its further context, specifically
the fact that Suchet has played the part since the program began in 1989,
portraying Poirot as a reserved character, precise and unemotional. The sud-
den fury therefore comes as a shock to the audience, indicating the extent to
which this one case has affected him. When Poirot eventually chooses not to
reveal the truth to the waiting police, he clutches a rosary and angrily storms
away from the train.
His emotional response can only have real resonance in the television
series, where the audience has had over 20 years with the character and
actor and are fully aware of the importance of the truth to him whatever
the implications. In contrast, the 1974 film uses Poirot as simply another
character, with an audience inevitably having a much more casual relation-
ship with him. He is introduced after the mystery’s backstory is established;
he provides the resolution and drives much of the investigation, but those
watching actually know little about him. Instead, the audience is aligned
with the passengers, all of whom had been affected by Ratchett’s actions,
and feels sympathy for them when the motive and reality of the murder is
revealed. Finney’s Poirot blusters his annoyance but easily concedes that he
cannot criticize their actions too harshly. In contrast, in the 2010 televi-
sion adaptation, where the audience has seen David Suchet’s Poirot tackle
decades of murder, it is understood that he cannot dismiss such a brutal
crime so readily.
The 1974 Murder on the Orient Express was the only film adaptation that
Christie ever expressed a liking for, despite Albert Finney’s unusual perfor-
mance as Hercule Poirot having only superficial similarities to the character
as written. Christie was often dissatisfied with filmic attempts to modernize
her stories, especially the use of sex, or even more the focus toward comedy,
as with the four 1960s Miss Marple films starring Margaret Rutherford.
For example, contemporary reports indicate that she was unhappy with the
addition of a sex scene and some brief nudity to the film version of her
thriller Endless Night (Gilliat, 1972), based on her stand-alone thriller pub-
lished in 1967, which featured no such scenes.
Endless Night is one of the clearer expressions of the dark side of love by
Christie. It is a strong example of an adaptation that does not fundamentally
alter the mystery or puzzle of the original story, but it does add particular
 L ove , Crime , and Agatha Christie 87

prominence to the central relationship, this time in terms of its publicity

rather than its content. A classic latter-day Christie, it is an unusually struc-
tured book that doesn’t even permit the reader any insight into what the
mystery actually is for the most part. Instead, a blossoming romance is con-
trasted with something odd going on with the purchase of a luxury house
in an area called Gipsy’s Acre. Resultantly, the film is a curious mixture of
genres, simultaneously pitching itself as a romance and a (potentially) super-
natural thriller, which made for an unusual approach to publicity.
The trailer opens with a shot of the rolling hills of Gipsy’s Acre (“a quiet
place in the country, no hint of anything sinister” as the narrator force-
fully tells the audience) in Southern England, where the two lead characters,
Michael (Hywel Bennett) and Ellie (Hayley Mills), first meet and fall in
love. Seconds later, we see them embrace, while sweeping romantic strings
underscore the narrator telling us that the film concerns “a beautiful girl,
a summer romance.” Compared with the various UK editions of the book
seen in the 1960s and 1970s, which featured stylized depictions of mur-
dered birds on the covers, the film is clearly establishing itself somewhat
differently, publicizing itself as a romance first and foremost. When it does
divert from this, explaining that there is also a mystery, it does so crudely
and briefly, using electronic musical stabs that accompany a series of heavily
tinted zooms into a faceless shot of Ellie while the narrator obliquely refer-
ences the “terrifying secret of Endless Night.” This element is then completely
discarded as the narrator insists, “And yet, curiously, it is a love story,” as the
lead couple kiss once more and Michael himself proclaims, “This really is a
love story,” as if to reinforce the point.1
The film, then, is unusually positioned in terms of genre. It most explic-
itly emphasizes the “summer romance, beautiful girl” element, even when
it is clear that there is some sort of mystery to be solved. In both book and
film forms, Endless Night uses love as part of the crime itself, but in terms of
Christie’s original stories, the depth of this exploration is unusual. It is even-
tually revealed that love and betrayal are cornerstones of Michael’s long-held
malicious plan to deceive his wealthy wife, and it comes as a shock. However,
Christie uses love as a useful plot device to explain character motivation, but
declines to explore it beyond the requirements of the plot’s central mystery.
For the film, the romance is the core of the story, the final revelation of
Michael’s true motives merely being an additional twist.
Like Endless Night, a devious relationship forms the backbone of Death
on the Nile (Guillerman, 1978), one of the most famous Christie films,
released only four years after the success of Murder on the Orient Express.
In most respects, the adaptation of the 1937 book is a straightforward one,
but of importance to this exploration of the links between love and crime is
the initial setting up of the story and characters. While both film and book
open with the story of a young woman whose fiancé is stolen by her best
88 Mark Aldridge

friend, Christie frames this with Poirot’s observations, he being present when
the betrayal is made clear on the couple’s Egyptian honeymoon. In the film,
however, the audience spends more than 15 minutes in the company of the
couple before we are even introduced to the Belgian sleuth, played by Peter
Ustinov. Poirot’s actual role is almost arbitrary. He will provide the resolu-
tion to the plot, but it is the honeymooning couple who provide the focus of
the story for most of the film, as Poirot merely serves to provide some asides
and, eventually, a solution. Romantic music, exotic locations, and the choice
of attractive actors only serve to initially set this out as a flawed love story,
rather than a mystery. While this will later be usurped by the murder named
in the title, the romance is not just a plot device; it is the principal emphasis
of the film.
This is an example of less fundamental, but still important, tinkering
with Christie’s formula. However, Christie wasn’t immune to changing her
works herself in order to make them more in line with the expectations of
film and theater. She certainly understood that the dense plots that excited
her readership could bore a theatre audience, who actively have to spend
time with characters. One of her most complex, and yet entirely logical,
puzzles that she had to translate for a theatergoing audience was her 1925
short story Witness for the Prosecution, which Billy Wilder would later adapt
for the screen in 1957.2 For the stage, Christie had intensified the theme of
love and betrayal that was implicit in her original short story, once more
using the theme of love and, in this case, marriage as a technical device.
Indeed, the very title indicates the central issue of the plot. On trial for
murder, Leonard Vole (played by Tyrone Power in the film) discovers that
his wife (called Romaine in the short story and play, but renamed Christine
in the film and played by Marlene Dietrich) is to stand as a witness for his
prosecution. Testifying against your husband was not permissible in the UK
at the time, and how Mrs. Vole can do this is a crucial part of the film’s
puzzle, as she claims never to have been married to Leonard.
The background to their relationship was mentioned only in passing in
the original short story, but Wilder’s film explores it in full detail, with the
addition of a lengthy flashback to their first meeting in wartime Germany.
While visually impressive, this sequence serves to rob Christie’s story of
some of its mystery, as it solidifies particular elements of the couple’s rela-
tionship that had previously been rather oblique to an audience unsure of
who to trust. Presuming that we can take the flashback literally, and that it
is not a “cheat” in the way employed by Stage Fright (Hitchcock, 1950),3 we
witness the characters fall in love in a seemingly genuine and passionate way,
and bear witness to the extent to which Christine takes a shine to Leonard.
She does not see him as a way to escape Germany, but seems genuinely smit-
ten once he manages to meet her in private. The mystery of the background
 L ove , Crime , and Agatha Christie 89

to their relationship is crucial to the rest of the film, and revealing it in this
way establishes too rapidly that Christine genuinely loves Leonard, which
denies the audience a considerable element of speculation and mystery.
In Christie’s own play and short story, the couple are not seen to converse
with each other until the trial is over.4 In narrative terms, this is because we
join events once Leonard meets his solicitor at the time of his arrest. The only
time the couple are in the same room is when Mrs. Vole takes to the wit-
ness stand, precluding any dialogue between them. Indeed, in this section of
the short story, Christie actually dispenses with dialogue completely, simply
summarizing the developments. This decision by Christie means that the
reader or audience cannot properly assess which side of the story we should
believe, or who is trustworthy. In terms of Mrs. Vole’s motivation, the pos-
sibility that she used Leonard as a way to leave war-torn Germany while still
loving another man is much more likely when we have not been privy to the
circumstance of their meeting, where we see that Christine was anything
but a cold and calculating seductress. Seeing the characters interacting when
alone is more satisfying for the audience in terms of character, but it lessens
the impact and role of the mystery. The puzzle relies on layers of deception
being slowly uncovered, with the truth of the matter remaining a mystery
until the closing moments. The scenario relies on misplaced trust between
the Voles, leading to the downfall of both. Without love as a motivating fac-
tor for at least one of them, such a situation would never have been reached.
In fact, their relationship is signaled as a key element of the film in pub-
licity for the feature. The trailer shows the couple embracing, and claims
that “the setting is London; the story, two people in love,” as the narrator
puts it.5 Although it goes on to somewhat hyperbolically claim that the film
is “the stunning climax of half a century of motion picture suspense,” the
trailer is remarkably vague in its description of what this suspense might
entail. Emily French (Norma Varden), the unfortunate murder victim, is
neither seen nor mentioned. Instead, we see Leonard Vole in the dock as the
narrator simply points out that there is “a murder and a trial.” The specifics
of the crime are unimportant, and it is the relationship and love story that
are emphasized. So it is that the crime itself is ignored in favor of shots of
Christine, while highlighting her apparent betrayal. The trailer emphasizes
that Leonard is “in love with a woman who holds his life in her beautiful
hands,” voiced over a clip of the couple embracing after Vole’s acquittal, a
considerable spoiler. Following this, the scene where solicitor Sir Wilfred
(Charles Laughton) interrogates Christine, demanding to know if she loves
her husband, is shown to prospective audiences.
The showcasing of such a scene indicates the particular emphasis of this
adaptation. In Christie’s original book and play, the question posed to the
reader is simply, is Mrs. Vole betraying her husband? until the plot twist on
90 Mark Aldridge

the final page reveals that she had colluded with him throughout. In the
film, there is the additional question, why would she do such a thing? a per-
spective that asks the audience to consider issues of empathy, where the links
between love, motivation, and crime are once more exposed. Essentially,
Christine is shown to be a woman who would do anything for her husband,
so blinded is she by her love. Certainly the complex nature of their rela-
tionship is not presented as a dramatic device to solve the puzzle, but as a
way of engaging audience sympathies with a character who, were Mrs. Vole
not present as an apparently calculating and vindictive character, would be
immediately recognizable as the perpetrator of the murder.
Without the distraction of Mrs. Vole, those familiar with Christie’s oeu-
vre would have no difficulty in identifying Leonard as the killer, not least
for the simple reason that no other practical candidate is available. There is
no logical motive for Christine to kill, as it would neither give her back her
husband nor pass on any wealth to her directly (not to mention her clear
indifference toward the dead woman, whom she never met), whether one
wishes to frame her as a jealous wife or a scheming manipulator. The only
character aside from Leonard who interacts with the late Miss French is her
elderly deaf maid who is presented as comic relief, a foil for Sir Wilfred to
ridicule in the courtroom, even if she does ultimately outwit him. However,
it is Dietrich’s commanding presence as Christine that dominates the film,
and her sexuality is used as a core part of the disarmingly stoic and calculat-
ing character. While the woman in the story and play is deliberately kept
aloof and detached to make the final twist all the more shocking, Christine
is something of a femme fatale on the posters for the film. Although the
short story collection Witness for the Prosecution depicted a smartly dressed
woman standing defiant in the dock on its cover, the film’s posters made no
mention of the court setting, with each instead depicting the Voles in mid-
embrace, as seen in the flashback. In some posters, Leonard is also shown
running toward the cameras, as if trying to elude police capture, a situation
that is an invention of the artist. In the film, Leonard is arrested in Sir
Wilfred’s office and willingly goes with the police.
The emotive question of loyalty is crucial to this particular puzzle. In the
short story, not only do the central couple act together to ensure Leonard’s
acquittal, but they remain together at the end, having defeated the justice
system. In the film, the tables are turned, and love is highlighted as the
motivation not just for the deception of the judge and jury but the final
deception of Christine, as Leonard leaves her once acquitted. Love then pro-
vides the motivation for the final crime, as Christine exerts her revenge on
the man who had used her. Their relationship was a complicated one that
required complete trust for the scheme to work, making the final betrayal all
the more shocking for both Christine and the audience.
 L ove , Crime , and Agatha Christie 91

Although this is an example of Christie’s subversive approach to love,

that is not to say that it is always used as the motivation for crime. Several
of the film adaptations of one of Christie’s most famous stories utilize a plot
point that is almost a reversal of this theme in fact. Originally published in
1939, Ten Little Niggers concerns a group of strangers stranded on an island
of the south Devon coast with a murderer in their midst. It has spawned sev-
eral adaptations, filmed as And Then There Were None or Ten Little Indians,
each of which substantially changes the story’s ending, due to the original’s
rather downbeat conclusion.
Earl F. Bargainnier refers to the story as “the ultimate in whodunits” (1980,
111), pointing out that the book requires an epilogue (and, indeed, a post-
script) in order to provide a resolution because of the narrative inconvenience
of every character on the island ending up dead. It is not surprising, then,
that Christie elected to tweak this ending for her stage adaptation, allowing
two characters to survive, and even find love, something that Sarah Street
says leaves “the viewer with a sense of relief” (2008, 109). Street is discussing
Christie films in the context of heritage cinema, and from this perspective
the narrative change certainly provides the audience with a more comfortable
vision of the “gentle art of murder,” to quote the title of Bargainnier’s book,
rather than the mercenary resolution of the original novel.
However, as the final part of a mystery, the survival of the characters
is less satisfying. The premise is that each person on the island has gone
unpunished for a serious crime, and the indisputable guilt of each of the par-
ties on the island is an intrinsic part of the puzzle. If the murderer is revealed
to have made errors in his judgment, then this undermines the motivation
that forms the plot of the entire film. The point is that each of those present
on the island truly had committed a crime for which they had gone unpun-
ished. The apparent coincidence that the two innocent parties are also those
that survive and fall in love is illogical, but Christie understood that gen-
eral audiences demand different resolutions than devoted readers. As such,
Christie borrows from romantic melodramas of the day in providing what
is ultimately a clumsy and unintentionally amusing denouement. As Street
puts it, the films “substituted a lighter touch that was contrary to the spirit
of the novel” (2008, 109).
Although the insertion of a love interest between the two survivors is
largely a filmic invention, Christie did indicate this romance in her stage
adaptation. However, in her script it is a cursory addition, amounting to just
four lines of dialogue after the villain of the piece has died. Just a few min-
utes after the surviving woman, Vera, has tried to shoot the surviving man,
Lombard, all is forgiven. Lombard quickly identifies Vera as the object of
his affections as he tries to woo her with some casual sexism. Referring back
to her attempts to shoot him, he remarks, “Thank goodness women can’t
92 Mark Aldridge

shoot straight,” places his head in a noose, and kisses her. Drawing on this
change for the stage, the acclaimed René Clair adaptation of And Then There
Were None (1945) similarly ends with an embrace between the two survi-
vors, while the 1965 version (Ten Little Indians, directed by George Pollock)
includes the kiss between them in what Peter Haining calls “the first love
scene in a Christie movie” (1990, 44). The 1975 Peter Collinson–directed
film of the story (Ten Little Indians)6 was produced by Harry Alan Towers,
who had also produced the previous two movies, and largely used the previ-
ous script. Consequently, it once more indicated a relationship between the
final two, this time set up earlier in the film rather than mainly being dealt
with in the final scene.
The romance is so casually introduced that it is almost as if Christie
doesn’t know what to do with these characters once the puzzle has been
solved. Even if she does, she certainly has little interest in it. With eight
murders during the course of the play, Christie identified a need to make the
story finish on a valedictory note rather than embracing the emotional fallout
of the horrific circumstances that the characters had gone through over the
course of the previous two days. With this, we can see that Christie is com-
plicit in this change of focus toward characters and relationships that would
become commonplace in screen adaptations of her work. Consequently, it
would be unfair to view these additional elements of romance as a bastard-
ization of her stories, unless one is particularly fervent about fidelity to the
originals. Given the frequency with which Christie rewrote and adapted her
own stories in both prose and script form, it is clear that she was not a person
to be concerned with such an issue.
Such changes illustrate that Christie was acutely aware that character-
ization and plotting needed to be medium specific. Television adaptations,
plays, films, and prose all required a different emphasis. In line with this,
one-off TV movie adaptations of Christie’s works tend to conform to the
standard movie model, emphasizing characters and, resultantly, relation-
ships, with adaptations such as Sparkling Cyanide (ITV, 2003) and The Man
in the Brown Suit (CBS, 1989) emphasizing romantic elements of the plot.
However, once mysteries are placed within an ongoing series, such as Poirot
(ITV, 1989– ), Miss Marple (BBC, 1984–1992), and Partners in Crime (ITV,
1983), the adaptations take on a different temperament. With the presence
of an ongoing character or characters and an established style of produc-
tion, these stories rely less on characterization to hold the viewer’s attention,
instead reverting to Christie’s own preference in the original prose for a
focus on the central puzzle of the story, with the mystery at the fore.
The continuation of television series based on Christie’s works show that
her puzzles still attract an audience. However, the lack of big-screen adapta-
tions in the last two decades may indicate that the more romantic image of
murder and mystery that Christie films were so famous for from the 1950s
 L ove , Crime , and Agatha Christie 93

until the early 1980s is no longer as appealing as it once was. It is a tribute to

Christie that her mysteries can operate both as character pieces and puzzles,
with the emphasis dependent on medium and context. Whatever changes
are made, the central puzzles of Christie’s stories tend to remain present and
correct. Even beyond more general issues of characterization, the frequent
changes made to Christie’s original stories for screen adaptations indicate
the extent to which, whatever the emphasis of a given adaptation, the mys-
tery is still a strong focus, around which characters can be merely cursory
technical devices or offer a whole new emphasis. It is generally the focus
rather than the content of adaptations that alters according to medium and
producer aims, indicating why there is such a variety of adaptations. The
clearest conclusion that can be reached from this is that, however they may
be presented, Christie’s mysteries have endured.

Notes
1. Specifically, this refers to the British trailer for Endless Night, 1972 (present
on Region One DVD).
2. The short story was originally published in 1925 as Traitor Hands in the peri-
odical Flynn’s Weekly before being renamed The Witness for the Prosecution
and included in Christie’s 1933 short story collection The Hound of Death,
which was only published in the UK. It was later released in a collection
under its own title in the United States in 1948.
3. Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (UK, 1950) infamously features a flash-
back that is later revealed to be untrue. Coincidentally, the film also starred
Marlene Dietrich.
4. Indeed, in the short story, they never speak to each other. In the play there
is a brief dialogue between them after the verdict has been reached.
5. This trailer, presented on the Region One DVD, is one of at least two. The
other is a lengthy address to the audience from Charles Laughton, per-
haps foreshadowing Hitchcock’s similar addressing of the audience while
obliquely referring to the mystery and thrills to come in his trailer for
Psycho.
6. This film also appears under the title of And Then There Were None. For
consistency’s sake, I use the release year and title used by Scott Palmer in
The Films of Agatha Christie (Batsford Books, 1993).

Works Cited
Bargainnier, Earl F. 1980. The Gentle Art of Murder. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green University Popular Press.
Christie, Agatha. 1972. Curtain. London: Collins Crime Club.
———. 1937. Death on the Nile. London: Collins Crime Club.
———. 1967. Endless Night. London: Collins Crime Club.
———. 1969. Hallowe’en Party. London: Collins Crime Club.
94 Mark Aldridge

———. 1933. The Hound of Death. London: Odhams Press.

———. 1954. The Mousetrap. London: Samuel French.
———. 1934. Murder on the Orient Express. London: Collins Crime.
———. 1939. Ten Little Niggers. London: Collins Crime Club.
———. 1925. “Traitor Hands.” In Flynn’s Weekly, vol. 4, no. 2.
———. 1958. Verdict. London: Samuel French.
———. 1948. Witness for the Prosecution [US short story collection]. New York:
Dodd, Mead.
———. 1954. Witness for the Prosecution [Play]. In Famous Plays of 1954. London:
Victor Gollancz.
Haining, Peter. 1990. Murder in Four Acts. London: Virgin Books.
http://www.agathachristie.com/forum/book-club/plays/verdict (Agatha Christie
official website, accessed January 23, 2012).
Lutkus, Alan. 2002. “Agatha Christie.” In Vicki K. Janiok (ed.), Modern British
Women Writers. London: Greenwood Press.
Maida, Patricia D., and Nicholas D. Spornick. 1982. Murder She Wrote. Bowling
Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press.
Palmer, Scott. 1993. The Films of Agatha Christie. London: Batsford Books.
Street, Sarah. 2008. “Heritage Crime: The Case of Agatha Christie.” In Robert
Shail (ed.), Seventies British Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Televised
Columbo. 1968–2003. Directed by various. NBC/ABC.
The Cover Girl Murders. 1993. Directed by James A. Contner. USA Network.
Doctor Who. 1963–present. Directed by various. BBC.
The Man in the Brown Suit. 1989. Directed by Alan Grint. CBS.
Marple. 2004–present. Directed by various. ITV.
Miss Marple. 1984–1992. Directed by various. BBC.
Partners in Crime. 1983–1984. Directed by various. ITV.
Poirot. 1989–present. Directed by various. ITV.
Sparkling Cyanide. 2003. Directed by Tristram Powell. ITV.

Filmed
And Then There Were None. Directed by René Clair. USA, 1945.
Death on the Nile. Directed by John Guillermin. UK, 1978.
Endless Night. Directed by Sidney Gilliat. UK, 1972.
Murder on the Orient Express. Directed by Sidney Lumet. UK, 1974.
Stage Fright. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. UK, 1950.
Ten Little Indians. Directed by George Pollock. UK, 1965.
Ten Little Indians. Directed by Peter Collinson. France/Spain/W. Germany/Italy,
1975.
Witness for the Prosecution. Directed by Billy Wilder. USA, 1957.
Chapter 7

Monstrous Love:
Oppression, Intimacy,
and Transformation
in Mary Reilly (1996)
Cynthia J. Miller

In polite Victorian society, there were things that were not to be seen,
nor felt, nor even thought, and the growing trend toward “indulgences”
was met with fear and sharp critique. The era was marked by the increas-
ingly complex collision of society and the individual, with the mechanisms
of iconic Victorian social control aggressively defending public veneers of
propriety, keeping passions, terrors, ambitions, and curiosities submerged.
In Stephen Frears’s 1996 film Mary Reilly, love, in its many guises, brings
these interiors to the forefront—from the silent secrets of the individual,
to the festering wounds of society—creating a narrative that confronts the
human condition in ways that Victorian society neither could, nor would,
allow. This chapter will explore the film’s depictions of “monstrous love,” as
throughout the narrative, passion, intimacy, devotion, and sacrifice are inex-
tricably interwoven with the Gothic Horrific. Through the revision of this
classic tale, love and longing are, in fact, evoked, experienced, and expressed
most fully through their association with the monster.
Screenwriter Christopher Hampton adapted Valerie Martin’s 1990 ren-
dition of the classic Jekyll and Hyde tale for Frears’s production, asking
audiences to reconsider the origins of the horrific, and making visible the
nature of the Victorian monster as it is experienced by the shy housemaid of
the story’s title. In so doing, the film, even more distinctly than its source
novel, captures the tension of the Victorian era as statuses, passions, egos,
96 Cynthia J. Miller

and knowledge begin to escape from their tight-lidded social box. The story
is an old one, dating back to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and its retellings are many begin-
ning in the following year, when Thomas Russell Sullivan adapted the tale
for the stage, as a vehicle for the popular actor Richard Mansfield. This,
rather than the original novella, became the blueprint for most of the subse-
quent cinematic adaptations, with its creation of a more linear narrative and
the addition of a token love interest for Jekyll. More than a dozen adapta-
tions were made before 1920, most lost in the ensuing years. More familiar
motion picture renditions include a silent adaptation in 1920 (directed by
John S. Robertson, and starring John Barrymore)1 and later sound versions
starring Frederick March (1931) and Spencer Tracy (1941).2 Following the
narrative path mapped by Sullivan’s stage play, each of the stories explores
the duality of humankind, and its potential for good and evil, through the
twinned characters of Jekyll and Hyde.
In Mary Reilly, however, new pairings—love and lust, devotion and
obsession, passion and violence—form a complex constellation of emotions
and events that call into question the boundaries and understandings of
good and evil that informed Stevenson’s original work. The relationship
between the doctor and his demure servant is barely articulated in the world
of the narrative. It is intermittent, chaste, and unacknowledged, more fully
realized in the characters’ minds than in the Victorian circumstances in
which they live. Hyde’s relationship with Reilly, however, is visceral—pas-
sionate, sensual, selfish, and overpowering—his hedonistic admixture of
desire, need, and resentment threatens to consume her, even as it tears at
the carefully crafted fabric of Victorian existence; and in a world where class
and caste confine both body and mind, these relationships blur the lines
of propriety and are, simultaneously and irresistibly, both good and evil.
The more clearly the love between Jekyll/Hyde and Reilly transgresses those
boundaries and understandings (both existential and cultural), the more it
emphasizes their existence and social force.

The Making of a Monster

The backdrop for this dark tale of love and destruction is the city, Victorian
London, swathed in a thick, gray sfumato of fog and chimney smoke. The
world outside the walls of Jekyll’s house is a blighted network of damp cob-
blestone streets and alleyways by which the poorhouses, whorehouses, asy-
lums, and factories are mapped. A victim of all-too-rapid industrialization
in the century before, the city is itself seen as a “‘monster,’ a huge ‘growth,’
a confusing profusion” (Gilbert 2004, 112). Its overcrowded tenements are
plagued with filth and disease, and the conditions of its factories drain the
 Monstrous Love 97

life from those who toil in them, widening the gap between those who have
and those who have not—a class divide that is pronounced and unques-
tioned. But the streets are a place of anonymity and shadow where trans-
actions are uncertain, where strange faces move among the familiar, the
lower classes collide with the wealthy, and drunken and diseased bodies
press against the healthy.
As both author and victim of this oppression of soul and body, the arche-
typal Victorian is earnest, morally austere, and “possessed by the belief
that it [is] his duty to work toward the alleviation of the endless human
misery and suffering” (Marcus 2009, 2). Discipline, containment, and self-
regulation are expected amidst the blurring of boundaries and the decline
of privacy, and “character”—here understood as the mastery of passions,
patience and resolution, and controlled energy focused on work—are all cul-
tivated and admired (Houghton 1957, 198). The acquisition of knowledge,
particularly in the emerging area of science, with its investigations of the
workings and maladies of body, character, and mind, is promoted and com-
modified in literature such as On the Improvement of Society by the Diffusion
of Knowledge (1833), which advocates that “an increase of knowledge would
be productive of an increase in moral order and an improvement in moral
conduct” (Rauch 2001, 3). The advancement of knowledge offers power,
hope, improvement of condition, and relief of body, mind, and spirit, to
commoner and privileged alike.
Written into this newly emerging culture of knowledge, Henry Jekyll
is a man of science. He is a professional man and a philanthropist, whose
personal weaknesses and social circumstances lead him, in each of the tale’s
retellings, to release his inner demons and give them form in the character of
Edward Hyde. The result, of course, is death and destruction. In Stevenson’s
novella, Hyde embodies the hypocrisy inherent in the doctor’s life, the sen-
timents and desires that give the lie to Jekyll’s self-righteous, and clearly
class-based, self-image. Even in the privacy of his own mind, the doctor
situates himself firmly within the Victorian archetype of benevolent civic
engagement. He is a doctor, after all, a member of the educated, the elite,
and an agent of those civilizing forces that advance and protect the welfare
of Victorian society, and when Jekyll compares his fulfillment of that duty
with the actions of his neighbors, he finds them lacking, noting his “active
goodwill” in contrast to “the lazy cruelty of their neglect” (58). In the figure
of Hyde, however, the doctor’s contempt for those he claims to serve is given
form, and for a while, the two physically coexist. Jekyll’s horrific alter ego
acts on his creator’s interior urges and yearnings, abusing and killing those
around him, while the exterior image of the doctor remains unsullied, until
the monster—like the physical manifestation of an addiction—grows so
powerful that he can no longer be controlled.
98 Cynthia J. Miller

In contrast to Jekyll’s physically pleasing, upstanding demeanor, Hyde’s

mere presence, as Abigail Burnham Bloom notes, is disturbing to those
around him: an evil that is felt, rather than seen; a monster, masquerading
as a human (2012, 45). Gordon Hirsch argues that this indefinable, visceral
impression is key to the creation of the monstrous: “The horror . . . resides
in a kind of absence or gap” (1988, 225). Hirsch suggests that

the key point is that the monstrous in [Stevenson’s book] by its very nature
resists detailed description. Because it is absent, it is both called forth in
an act of desire and viewed as monstrous when it appears. It is impressive
because not fully expressed.” (1988, 226; emphasis added)

Similarly, within the world of the narrative, Jekyll’s longtime friend, law-
yer Gabriel John Utterson, regards Hyde “with disgust, loathing, and fear,”
positing that it is not his appearance, his public surface, that is so troubling,
but again, his interior world: “Is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that
thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent?” (Stevenson
2002, 17). Clearly echoing the character’s thoughts, clergy of the day hailed
Stevenson’s novella as a parable of the grim consequences of a person’s suc-
cumbing to his or her baser nature.
Each successive adaptation of Stevenson’s tale explores the duality of
good and evil from its own perspective (inner versus outer worlds, spiritu-
ality versus animalistic urges, individual versus society, aberration versus
order) through themes of hypocrisy, lust, and pride. Yet, in all there is a con-
tinuing effort to locate the dark side of humanity, situating it either within
the individual, as a sickness or weakness of the flesh or spirit, or in society, as
a result of oppressive moral and class-based strictures that seek to eradicate
passions, discomforting emotions, and inconvenient truths.
In the cinematic adaptation of Mary Reilly, John Malkovich adds yet
another interpretation to the conjoined characters of Jekyll and Hyde, and
to the tortures and temptations of humanity. The relationship between the
doctor and the corporeal product of his inner demons is more complex,
even when Hyde is not struggling to emerge. From the film’s outset, Jekyll
is never at peace. In contrast to the working-class members of his house-
hold, particularly in contrast to Reilly’s quiet steadiness, he is unendingly
troubled. The staff’s occasional complaints over economics and physical
labor seem trivial and mundane by comparison, and their lives content, har-
boring neither the questions nor other discomforts of the mind that plague
their employer. This contemporary Jekyll is curious, introspective, emo-
tionally frail, and in his increasingly reclusive behavior, openly rejecting of
social demands and expectations. Malkovich’s doctor is well known to the
local madam (played by Glenn Close), who acts as a guardian for his alter
 Monstrous Love 99

ego’s passage in and out of society’s murky underside; he loses his temper in
front of his staff; and he is drawn—compulsively, irrevocably, and almost
innocently—to the intimate world of his servant, Mary Reilly. Trained pro-
fessionally to be a seeker of knowledge, he is captivated by her secrets and
complexities; haunted by secrets and complexities of his own, he cleaves to
her as a kindred spirit.

What the Invisible See

In crafting the literary version of Mary Reilly, Martin sought to recast the
story from the vantage point of invisibility—the household servant who
moves through the Victorian world unnoticed, cleaning away all signs of
physical and emotional life, from broken china to soiled bed sheets—not
only a woman, in an era where women’s voices were generally still, but a
member of the underclass, whose eyes see the smudges and fissures in the
surface of privileged lives. This is a distinctly female telling of the tale,
focused on lives carried out in traditionally feminine, domestic spaces—
the kitchen, the bedroom, the garden—a far different vantage point than
the story’s more masculine predecessors. Martin’s Reilly, and likewise,
Hampton’s, played by Julia Roberts, moves in and out of the worlds of pov-
erty and privilege—existentially a resident of one, while physically a resident
of the other—understanding, better than most, the circumstances that give
rise to the monster, after an early life filled with darkness and abuse. Reilly
uses the story of that understanding and the sharing of her unspoken past
to create intimacy with Jekyll. She narrates the grisly history of her scars
which are reminders of a nightmarish incident when her father locked her in
a small closet and then stuffed in a sack containing a large rat:

I screamed. I felt the first bite at my ankle and I screamed for all I was worth,
but after that I felt very little and only screamed because I could not stop
screaming.” (Martin, 1990, 6–7)

After a childhood terrorized by this type of drunken sadism, she instinctively

senses the danger—the carnal, barely restrained bloodlust—simmering just
under the carefully maintained Victorian surface of Jekyll’s household and is
drawn to its familiarity. In service since she was 12, she tells Annie (Bronagh
Gallagher) that Jekyll’s home is by far the best place she’s worked, but after
a moment’s reflection, she revises: “I feel safe here’s all.”
The barriers of class and notions of propriety fail to prevent Reilly and
Jekyll from each successive step down the path to discovery and disaster.
From the doctor’s first notice of her scars as she scrubs the city’s grime from
the front walk in the dim hours before dawn, the housemaid’s wounds serve
100 Cynthia J. Miller

as touchstones for the inexplicable affinity that forms between Reilly and her
employer, a man with whom, Victorian society dictates, she should hardly
share words, let alone emotion. She is the first person with whom he shares
news of his “breakthrough”—his hard-won success in transforming himself
into Edward Hyde—and becoming part of his inner world frees her to grant
him admission to hers. Distressed to find her conversing with Jekyll in his
bedroom, both senior members of the staff, the butler, Mr. Poole (George
Cole), and the cook, Mrs. Kent (Kathy Staff), remind Reilly of the impro-
priety, and consequences, of becoming too familiar with her employer, but
the bond between them has already formed.
As the doctor increasingly loses control of Hyde’s hedonistic rampages,
Reilly becomes his solace. Like Jekyll, she too has glimpsed the depths of
human capabilities, experienced the loss of control so uncharacteristic of
Victorian life, and attained a degree of awareness of the intimacy that is
bound up with pain. The literary Reilly writes in her journal:

And this is truly something I see in Master and why I think he mun see in
me, and why he has wanted to look into my history, because we are both souls
who knew this sadness and darkness inside and we have both of us learned to
wait. (Martin 1990, 36)

Waiting, for release from darkness and restraint, and the chance to feel life,
the doctor and the servant share an understanding of these quintessentially
Victorian longings in ways that Reilly cannot imagine. Throughout the
tale, both on page and screen, Reilly hints at her struggle to understand
the authenticity of passion and chaos that lie beneath polite “appearances,”
struggling to be unbound. In Martin’s literary telling, Reilly and Jekyll dis-
cuss the progress of her garden, which is a small plot in the household court-
yard. She asks the doctor why the destructive weeds seem so much stronger
than the plants she works to nurture. When Jekyll asks what she thinks,
Mary replies, “‘I have thought on it, sir. . . . And it seems, being wild, they
have a greater will to life’” (57). And in seeing this truth, Jekyll recognizes
that she has seen the truth of Hyde as well.
Through the character of Reilly and her devotion to Jekyll, her inabil-
ity to resist Hyde, and her ultimate awakening to the truth about them
both, Martin and Hampton revitalize Stevenson’s tale for their respective
audiences. Contemporary expectations are challenged by the introduction
of this previously “untold” story, and audiences are asked to reconsider the
construction and intent of the monstrous in the context of the housemaid’s
worldview. Readers and viewers, although fully aware of the transformation
of the Gentleman into the Monster, are drawn into the suspense and com-
pulsion of the narrative from Reilly’s previously unavailable vantage point.
 Monstrous Love 101

It is a classic tale made new, told from the perspective of the woman who
would nurture, love, and cause the demise of both the good and the evil
fostered by the new science.
In many ways, Reilly is the perfect docile body of the Victorian era. A
loyal and appreciative member of the staff of Jekyll’s household, she neither
questions her station in life nor openly critiques the values of her era; in fact,
she testifies to her satisfaction with her position in the face of her fellow
servants’ discontent. She is the Good Servant, proper, dutiful, and dedicated
to the seamless functioning of her employer’s house, silent in the face of criti-
cism and challenge, shouldering blame for problems not of her making, in
good working-class fashion. She is equally silent about her past, her desires,
and her emotions, which renders her inner world invisible even as she is ren-
dered invisible in the social world. Reilly’s only stated aspiration in the film
is to tend her herb garden on her afternoons off, a small site that allows her to
inscribe her own identity and creativity within her employer’s domain, a site
that attests to and insists on the persistence of humanity and “life” in Jekyll’s
sterile, dispassionate world. Beneath her propriety and silence, however, hide
intelligence and curiosity that fit uncomfortably with her internalization of
Victorian ways of being. Her ability to read captures the doctor’s attention,
as do her mysterious scars. The former marks her as a participant in the era’s
“march of intellect,” a post-Enlightenment shift toward the accumulation
of new knowledge;3 the latter mark her as a survivor of an earlier, unspoken
encounter with the monstrous. And just as the mysteries of the housemaid’s
past fascinate Jekyll, Reilly, for her part, finds the doctor and his alter ego as
compelling and disturbing as they find her.

“New Science”: Madness in a Bottle

Reilly has come from a past animated by monsters into a house dominated
by science. Jekyll, the benevolent master of the house, is becoming increas-
ingly absorbed in his work, spending longer and longer periods of time
locked away in his laboratory, where none may enter. Long, sideways looks
and guarded whispers among the staff signal their growing fear of Jekyll’s
obsession with his work, and their concern with their employer’s odd and
unexplained behavior mirrors Victorian society’s generalized mistrust of
science and its practitioners.
And indeed, the world of nineteenth-century science was one of conflicts
and complexities, with industrialized societies on the cusp of scientific and
medical revolution. While lauded by some, others alternately deemed this
“new” science futile, nihilistic, and vain, either the result of intellectual arro-
gance or madness (Schummer 2006). This tension, anticipation, and ambiv-
alence was apparent in much of the science fiction literature of Stevenson’s
102 Cynthia J. Miller

day, as novels and short stories served to expose assumptions and structure
perceptions, alternately calming and fulfilling societies fears about new sci-
entific knowledge (Levine 1981, 24; 1988, 13). Alchemists, in particular,
those scientists cloistered away in laboratories creating bottles of noxious
potions and elixirs, often appear in literature as the obsessed or maniacal
scientist, driven by the pursuit of goals that carry “suggestions of ideological
evil” (Haynes 1994, 3). And yet, as Alan Rauch notes, nineteenth-century
tales of the fantastic, written by authors such as Hoffman, Shelley, Poe,
and Villiers de L’Isle, are “chimerical,” transformed by science, even as they
incorporate it and create a new body of knowledge through their tales of
experimentation with humans and the nearly human (2001, 17).4
Thus, fictional literature of the day both reflected and participated in
the struggles as new ideologies and practices battled with old, and tradi-
tional understandings tied to alchemy and the occult grappled for influ-
ence and social power against new theories and methodologies. Throughout
Europe, scientists and physicians were experimenting on the living and the
dead alike, in the pursuit of new knowledge of patterns, structures, and
inner workings hidden beneath the surface of controlled Victorian bodies.
In discreet, out-of-the-way corners, private laboratories sprang up, places
where one could undertake those experiments found too gruesome or ill
advised by hospital officials. While powerful concoctions, bolts of electric-
ity, and vivisection were promoted, by scientists and charlatans alike, as
tools which offered remedies to the ills of urban life, many of these meth-
ods often killed, tortured, or created insanity in greater numbers than they
cured (Montillo, n.d.).
Jekyll is a man of this “new science,” one who comes to understandings
of the natural world as a result of observation, experimentation, and induc-
tive reasoning and one who, like his literary and cinematic predecessors,
desperately seeks freedom from the fetters and propriety of his Victorian
circumstances, which he pursues in his laboratory, in secret. Long before his
descent into the horrific, he is positioned closer to the monstrous, by virtue
of his occupation alone. As a man of science, he is stationed at the frontier
of knowledge. His duty: to press forward into the unknown, for the good of
society, translating and adapting that which is useful, eradicating or creat-
ing barriers against that which might do harm (Wiesenfeld, 2010). Jekyll
violates the scientist’s implicit social contract with society the moment he
begins to use knowledge to further his own self-interest. The injections he
gives himself, which allow Hyde to emerge, dissolve the boundaries that men
of science are trusted to tend. From there forward, the doctor is doomed.
His agonizing physical metamorphoses into his alter ego are underscored by
cries that only begin to hint at the tortures of his inner world.5 Like Jekyll’s
past, he descends into evil, aided by the very science society fears. Unlike
 Monstrous Love 103

his predecessors, however, Jekyll’s descent is not attributed to lust, or hypoc-

risy, or pride. He is not the mad scientist portrayed by Spencer Tracy or the
self-absorbed figure brought to life by Frederick March. Rather, his “sin” is
debilitating depression—a monster within, caused by conditions in society
without. It is in attempting to control his demons that Jekyll unleashes Hyde
on the world, in a sense giving society’s monster back.
Also unlike his cinematic predecessors, Malkovich’s Hyde is darkly attrac-
tive, perhaps more so than Jekyll, himself having more in common with a
dashing, aggressively arrogant intellectual than with a creature disfigured
by evil. The makeup used to create the tale’s monsters in the past is gone,
and Hampton’s writing lets Hyde’s inner monsters speak for themselves.
Unlike Stevenson’s original monster, which began as a diminished figure
who only grew stronger as the narrative progressed (because man is, in larger
percentage, good, the reader is told), Mary Reilly’s Hyde is strong, physically
commanding, and exudes an unfettered life force from his first appearance
on screen. The creation of this new, darkly erotic image for the doctor’s
monstrous alter ego intermingles Victorian social fears of both insanity and
sexuality. His long hair is ragged and unkempt, which is for many a symbol
of danger, emotion, magic, and insanity,6 and his gaze is wild and unflinch-
ing. He stands too close, forcing his way into private moments; his move-
ments are decisive, possessing whatever space he occupies.
He is brimming over with rage and passion and disregard, and lacks the
discipline, containment, and self-regulation required by the moral dictates
of the era (Gilbert 2004, 112). One moment he taunts the docile Reilly
for her weakness, the next he breathes her in, tasting her life force like an
addict, feeling its warmth course through his veins. Each time that Hyde
violates the physical and emotional boundaries between them, such as a
bawdy caress in Jekyll’s study, a stolen kiss in the alleyway, or a violently
erotic struggle in the laboratory, he becomes both lover and predator, ally
and foe. Throughout, he approaches her with a seductive charm that echoes
the brooding Byronic heroes written into the pages of countless gothic
novels—Lord Ruthven of The Vampyre (1819), Edmond Dantes in The
Count of Monte Cristo (1844), and Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights (1847),
among others—as well as reflecting more contemporary notions of the
monstrous, in the tradition of the cinematic gentleman monster, given form
by Boris Karloff in the 1930s.

Monstrous Love
In his exploration of love and the Gentleman Monster, Hampton draws on
grimly understated exchanges to convey the complexities and interdependen-
cies of Reilly, Jekyll, Hyde, and Victorian society as a whole. Mary Reilly’s
104 Cynthia J. Miller

relationships with Jekyll and Hyde are not those of redemption or terror, but
rather of intimacy and comprehension, where the monstrous is accepted, or
rejected, by degrees. On the surface, her relationship with Jekyll is a class-
based pairing of recipient and benefactor: a working-class woman who finds
favor with her employer. From the film’s outset, he employs her, recognizes
her intelligence and abilities, and takes her into his confidence, making her,
at times, his co-conspirator.7 He circumvents the standard household chain
of command to make her his agent as he sets the stage for Hyde, entrusting
her with messages for the scandalous madam Mrs. Farraday, and he even
relies on her for aid when his exploits as Hyde leave him injured and limp-
ing, bringing the pair into intimate physical contact. She lies on his behalf,
and he on hers. He is captivated by her reality in his privileged world of
facades.
With Hyde, her tenuous intertwining appears to be that of victim and
predator, but Reilly’s relationship with the monstrous is more complex. Hyde
exploits her vulnerabilities, yet he brings the same expansive passion into her
life that he brings into Jekyll’s, making his boldness, his heightened senses,
his intensity, available for her to claim as her own. Standing between Jekyll/
Hyde and the rest of the world, she speaks out, acts out, and takes risks on
their behalf. After bludgeoning the corrupt parliamentarian, Sir Danvers
Carew, Hyde feigns an erotic alleyway encounter with Reilly to evade the
police. Once out of danger, he kisses her deeply and bids her farewell. Far
from outraged or repulsed, she is left breathless and longing, and later lies to
the police to protect him.
From their first encounters, the three inner worlds—those of the doc-
tor, the servant, and the monster—exist in dynamic tension, each bleed-
ing longing, anger, fear, need, and love into the others. None end as they
began: Jekyll, the epitome of Victorian propriety, is increasingly unable to
control the manifestation of his inner demons; Hyde, whose appetites and
indulgences know no limits, destroys himself for the sake of love; and Reilly,
long isolated by her fears, turns her back on caste and class for the man
she loves. As Reilly begins to understand Hyde’s true nature, Jekyll tries to
explain:

“As strange as it may sound, Edward Hyde has liberated me. I no longer care
what the world may think of me. . . . It is marvelous how much he loves his
life.”

She questions, “And his victims, Sir? Do they not love theirs?” Jekyll begins
to tremble, finding it difficult to keep Hyde at bay. “Not as he does. Not so
ravenously,” this comment invoking, perhaps, the literary Reilly’s compre-
hension of the garden’s weeds. And then, in one of the film’s most intimate
 Monstrous Love 105

scenes, she moves to support the doctor’s faltering frame, and he takes her
hand and squeezes. Blood oozes forth. Jekyll gasps, “He is impatient.”
It is here, rather than in its portrayal of the monster itself, that the film
echoes the great horrors of Victorian literature—Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein,
Stoker’s Dracula, H. Rider Haggard’s She, H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau, and of
course the characters of Stevenson’s source novella—delivering an embodi-
ment of monstrosity that owes its existence to science, yet is only fully
apparent in contrast with intimacy. Mirroring the realities of the nineteenth
century—the mistrust of science, urban misery, a rigid class hierarchy, and
repression of women—these are monsters inseparable from the societies they
terrorize and instead are the products of personal demons and social ills.
Punctuated by potent imagery of the blood and slaughter of transforma-
tions from life into death, and man into monster, the film extends its explo-
rations beyond these themes, into the monstrosity of the everyday and the
more subtle transitions inherent in the experiences of intimacy and trauma,
dominance and submission, bondage and release. The main characters share
the powers to enact these changes, creating an equity that is present nei-
ther in society nor in earlier renditions of the Jekyll and Hyde tale. The
invisible is rendered visible and back again; the silent are moved to speak
and are then hushed; the subordinate is freed; the beating heart is stilled.
The horrors of the slaughterhouse where Reilly and Hyde fetch organs for
Jekyll’s experiments, or the crude, curious surgery performed at the hands of
his colleagues behind barely closed doors, are all of a piece with Jekyll’s tor-
turous physical transformations and Reilly’s equally painful transcendence
across boundaries of class and gender, as she becomes his confidant and
helpmate.
As a servant, a woman, and a member of the underclass, Reilly is, in
fact, invisible in “polite society,” and she is careful to remain so. Jekyll’s
attentions thrill her, yet rob her of the company of her peers, much as the
secret of his transformation into the libidinous Hyde has isolated him.
When her employer truly sees her and offers her favors, she quickly demurs:
“Oh, no sir, I wouldn’t want the other servants to think I was gettin’ above
myself.” Through Jekyll’s gaze, however, she becomes visible and is freed, in
part, from the constraints of her station as she is taken into his confidence.
Yet her gaze renders the doctor, in his torment, fear, and need, visible as
well; she knows him in ways that no other character in the film is allowed.
Through their respective attentions, kindness, and careful affection, secrets
are revealed and safeguarded. A powerful agent of negative transformation,
Hyde tears the flesh from the living, flaunting the era’s revulsion with things
visceral, leaving blood and entrails in his wake—interiors generally only
visible in hospitals and laboratories—as he eviscerates whores, smashes the
skull of Jekyll’s corrupt schoolmate with his own cane, and beheads the
106 Cynthia J. Miller

treacherous Mrs. Farraday. Reilly, as guardian of Victorian surfaces, renders

them invisible once again.

Transformation’s End
As the tale resolves, the housemaid does not save either the doctor or his
evil twin; there is no real redemption here, but through Mary Reilly’s love
for Jekyll, and his (and Hyde’s) for her, order is restored to the world of
the narrative. In the midst of a final, violent confrontation between Hyde
and Reilly, the pair make sustained and intimate eye contact. He traces the
outline of her face with the blade of a knife without looking away and whis-
pers, “What stops me from killing you?” The maid touches her hand to his
face, and the monster closes his eyes, nestles into her touch for a moment,
and leaves, observing, “I knew you’d be the death of us.” When he admin-
isters the antidote that returns Jekyll to their shared body, Mary tearfully
watches the final transformation. “He took pity on me,” she tells Jekyll.
Realizing that he’s been poisoned, the doctor replies, “It seems he took
pity on me, as well.” He explains: “It was the only way he could devise to
set you free.”
Misguided science, one of society’s greatest fears, unleashes a creature
of passion and violence from within Jekyll, but only through his growing
intimacy with Reilly is the true nature of monstrosity revealed: the vio-
lence of Victorian repression, of soul-scarring urban ills, and of rigid class
barriers is not lightly broken. And when the tale draws to a close, it is the
monster and his maker who suffer for the sake of the housemaid; both are
powerfully touched and destroyed by their love for her, raising questions,
perhaps, about whether Reilly’s innocence and devotion carries a tinge of
the “monstrous” for them as well. Likewise, Reilly’s love for Jekyll and Hyde
frees her to feel grief and forgiveness. In a final, bold gesture after witness-
ing Hyde’s transformation and Jekyll’s death, she lies down beside his body,
covering both of them with her cloak, symbolically defying the taboos of
class and caste that would prohibit it, affirming, “‘You said you no longer
care for the world’s opinion . . . nor will I’” (Martin 1990, 256). Reilly is, in
many senses, a victim, wounded physically, economically, socially, sexually,
and psychologically, bearing her scars, inside and out, but as the narrative
progresses, it becomes apparent that it is not Jekyll and Hyde who have
victimized her. The film’s indictment is not of the monsters within, but of
the monsters without. In this, Jekyll and Hyde are victims along with their
housemaid. Reilly’s real monsters, the horrors of her inner world, are the
monsters that love could not transform, those created by Victorian social
ills, rather than science.
 Monstrous Love 107

Notes
1. An earlier, but long-forgotten, silent version was produced in 1913 by
Universal Studios.
2. Foreign motion picture versions of the story include a one-reel film produced
in 1908 by the Selig Polyscope Company; a 1909 Danish version titled Den
Skaebnesvangre Opfindelse; the British-made The Duality of Man (1910); Der
Januskopf (The Head of Janus) (Germany), 1920, F. W. Murnau, adapted
by Hans Janowitz; El Hombre y la bestia (The Man and the Beast) (Spain),
1951, adapted and directed by Mario Soffici, Sono Films; Le Testament du
Docteur Cordelier (The Testament of Dr. Cordelier) (France), 1959, directed
and adapted by Jean Renoir, Consortium Pathe; and Dr. Jekyll and Sister
Hyde (Great Britain), 1971, Roy Ward Baker, adapted by Brian Clemens,
Hammer Films. Thanks to John C. Tibbetts for generously providing
production notes.
3. As Rauch (2001) notes, “Knowledge, particularly ‘useful’ knowledge, was
understood to add an attractive veneer onto even the most rough-hewn of
individuals” (2).
4. For more, see also Willis’s (2006) treatment of nineteenth-century science
fiction and cultures of science.
5. Twice during the film, the process of transformation is accompanied by the
cries of a baby that suggest birth.
6. For more on this, see Obeyesekere, 1984.
7. This is even more apparent in the literary version, where Jekyll actively con-
spires with Reilly to circumvent the watchful Mr. Poole.

Works Cited
Bloom, Abigail Burnham. 2010. The Literary Monster on Film. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Gilbert, Pamela K. 2004. Mapping the Victorian Social Body. New York: State
University of New York Press.
Haynes, Rosalynn D. 1994. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of Scientists in
Western Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hirsch, Gordon. 1988. “Frankenstein, Detective Fiction, and Jekyll and Hyde.” In
William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (eds.), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One
Hundred Years. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 223–246.
Houghton, Walter E. 1957. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Levine, George. 1988. Darwin and the Novelists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
———. 1981. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady
Chatterley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Marcus, Steven. 2009. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in
Mid-Nineteenth Century England. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
108 Cynthia J. Miller

Martin, Valerie. 1990. Mary Reilly. New York: Doubleday.

Montillo, Roseanne. n.d. The Lady and Her Monsters: The True Story of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein and the Mad Scientists Who Inspired Her. Unpublished manuscript.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1984. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and
Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rauch, Alan. 2001. Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of
Intellect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Roberts, Bette B. 1993. “The Strange Case of Mary Reilly.” Extrapolation, 34(1):
39–47.
Schummer, Joachim. 2006. “Historical Roots of the Mad Scientist: Chemists in
Nineteenth-century Literature.” Ambix, 53(2): 99–127.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. 2002. The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.
New York: Norton.
Wiesenfeld, Gerhard. 2010. “Dystopian Genesis: The Scientist’s Role in Society,
According to Jack Arnold.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film
and Television Studies, 40(1): 58–74.
Willis, Martin. 2006. Mesmerists, Monsters, & Machines: Science Fiction & the
Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century. Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press.

Filmed
Den Skaebnesvangre Opfindelse. Directed by August Blom. Denmark, 1909.
Der Januskopf. Directed by F. W. Murnau. Germany, 1920.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Directed by Otis Turner. USA, 1908.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Directed by Herbert Brenon and Carl Laemmle. USA,
1913.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Directed by John S. Robertson. USA, 1920.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian. USA, 1931.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Directed by Victor Fleming. USA, 1941.
Chapter 8

Self-Mutilation and
Dark Love in Darren
Aronofsky’s Black
Swan (2010) and
Michael Haneke’s The
Piano Teacher (2001)
Karen A. Ritzenhoff

This chapter addresses the dark side of female desire by comparing

Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) with Darren Aronofsky’s latest
release, Black Swan (2010). Both female film protagonists violently harm them-
selves in these narratives while exploring their sexual fantasies. In Haneke’s film
the outcome remains ambiguous: the pianist, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert),
walks out of the frame with a self-inflicted bleeding wound in her chest
(figure 8.1). Aronofsky depicts the female protagonist Nina Sayers (Natalie
Portman) as dying in the final scene, and the frame fades to white before the
credits start rolling. The melodramatic finale of the movie could also be seen
as a metaphor of transformation of the female virgin into a more mature sex-
ual being. In French, the window of time after an orgasm is called “the little
death” (le petit mort). As the film curator in the Museum of Sex in Manhattan
explains to accompany a video installation that depicts women postcoitus, this
time of relaxation is unique to desire.1 The ending of Black Swan could also
be read as an illustration of a little death after the orgasmic dance of the prima
ballerina has been completed. Nina whispers, “Perfect. It was perfect,” before
the lights take over and she fades. As seen in figure 8.2, Nina supposedly bleeds
110 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

Figure 8.1 Erika stabs herself with a kitchen knife in the final scene of the film. She refuses
to perform.

Figure 8.2 Nina bleeds from a self-inflicted wound at the end of her performance.

to death as a result of a wound in her abdomen that she caused by stabbing

herself with a mirror shard in her changing room before dancing the part of
the sensuous black swan.
This chapter looks at the topic of masochism and its depiction in film,
the trope of female desire gone awry and the representation of sexual vio-
lence directed against one’s own body. It will also discuss the metaphor of
 Self - Mutil ation and Dark L ove 111

the “wound” to describe contemporary society and the normalization of

violence and sexuality in popular culture. Carol Clover’s (2005) argument
about “the Final Girl” in horror film will be considered to illustrate that the
virtuousness of the female lead is turned against herself: rather than elimi-
nating the dark opponent (the serial killer, leatherface, chainsaw massacre
murderer) and unmanning “an oppressor whose masculinity was in ques-
tion to begin with” (2005, 81) as the sexually prudent last girl standing, the
female protagonist Nina directs the final blow against her own body. She is
her biggest enemy. In some way her femininity is in question, because she
is unable to form heterosexual, romantic relationships. This problem is so
unacceptable that she seemingly kills her “old” self in the end. Given the fact
that Aronofsky floods the film with fictitious images that the female pro-
tagonist sees (i.e., her legs are suddenly cracking, she sees membranes grow
between her toes, and ultimately her body is covered with black feathers as
she dances the rites of the black swan), it is also possible to read the ending
of the film as symbolic: it could be suggested that even though the persona
of the “White Swan” ends, the character has been transformed, as seen in
figure 8.3, into a more sexually conscious “black swan.” This would be a
more affirmative reading of the sexual politics of this modern fairy tale. It is
indeed the reversal of the Final Girl myth. Sexual purity and abstinence now
do not grant power, but being a virgin is framed as a potential problem.
When Nina is cast as the prima ballerina in the lead role of Swan
Lake, she is presented like a trophy by the artistic director Thomas Leroy
(Vincent Cassel) to an exclusive group of New York ballet supporters at an
elegant gala event. The prima ballerina who precedes her, Beth MacIntyre

Figure 8.3 The black swan has grown wings in her own imagination that burst out of her
upper torso.
112 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

(Winona Ryder), calls her “you fucking whore” when Nina is escorted home
by Thomas, suggesting that she got the part because she had an affair with
him. Thomas does show interest in Nina but does not sleep with her. He
takes her into his elegant apartment and asks her to take a seat next to him on
his couch. Thomas assures Nina that this kind of jealousy between dancers is
“typical.” Then he questions Nina about her sexual experience and explains
that he “thought it would be good to talk about the role. Ground us a little.
I don’t want there to be any boundaries between us.” When he interrogates
Nina as to whether she has had boyfriends, she becomes coy and replies, “a
few, but no one serious.” As a result Thomas exclaims, “You are not a virgin,
are you?” When Nina tells him no, he confirms, “So, there is nothing to
be embarrassed about.” After sipping on his drink, Thomas asks, “and you
enjoy making love?” Nina seems upset. “Oh, come on. Sex, do you enjoy it?”
When Nina laughs at him, he counters, “Well, we need to be able to talk
about this.” At this point Nina simply nods but does not reply. Thomas turns
more patronizing and treats her like a schoolgirl, clearly losing interest in her
as an erotic target. “I got a little homework assignment for you. Go home,
and touch yourself. Live a little.” Then he gets up from the couch, leaves her
behind, and tells her to get a cab home. When she arrives in her apartment
where she still lives a secluded life with her compulsive mother Erica (Barbara
Hershey), also a former prima ballerina, the mother treats her like a precious
object and displays sensuality toward her. She not only takes the pins out of
Nina’s hair but also starts to undress her (figure 8.4).
The mother tells Nina, “I wish I could have been there. I guess he wanted
you all to himself. I can’t blame him.” Clearly, the mother sees herself as
competing with the artistic director who is perceived as a potential romantic

Figure 8.4 Nina’s mother undresses her in front of a mirror when she comes home.
 Self - Mutil ation and Dark L ove 113

suitor. The mother in Black Swan is as much a catalyst for her gifted daugh-
ter’s psychotic behavior as the mother in The Piano Teacher.2 Once Nina
has succeeded in not only dancing the role but also transforming herself
into a black swan, literally growing black feathers that burst out of her skin,
she also overcomes any inhibitions and kisses Thomas passionately after the
performance behind the scenes (figure 8.5).
Ultimately, “living a little” leads to destructive behavior and violence.
There is a direct correlation between sexual discovery and pain. Even Erica
hurts Nina because she insists on still cutting her daughter’s fingernails once
she discovers scratch marks on her daughter’s back (figure 8.6).

Figure 8.5 Nina passionately kisses the artistic director Thomas Leroy after she has trans-
formed herself into the black swan.

Figure 8.6 The mother cuts Nina’s fingernails in the bathroom.

114 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

The fact that Nina starts to scratch and cut herself is paired with fantasy
images of physical decay. In a vision, Nina’s legs break, and her skin blisters
with bloody bumps and is covered by little dots that will later explode with
black feathers. Sexual desire is symbolized by these changes of the skin,
and the dots appear when Nina is aroused, especially in a scene where she
imagines making love to another dancer, her alter ego, Lily (Mila Kunis).
The female protagonists of Black Swan and The Piano Teacher explore the
carnal and destructive power of sexuality when they tease their male play-
mates with attempts of seduction. Yet ultimately they remain attracted to
the same sex. There are even allusions to incestuous relationships with their
own, overbearing birth mothers. In these fictive tales, the virtuous female is
no longer saved but sacrifices herself. She is not rewarded for her virtuosity
but is punished because she is technically still a virgin.
In The Piano Teacher, an adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel, the sado-
masochistic pianist will be raped by her student and later stabs herself in
the chest above the heart with a knife, causing a bleeding wound. In Black
Swan, the female lead kills herself with the shard of a broken mirror that
she pulls out of an open, bleeding, pulsating wound in her abdomen. Both
women are not engaged in normative heterosexual intercourse, and it seems
as if they ultimately punish themselves for not using their genitals in con-
ventional ways. In both cases, sexual activity is closely associated with dis-
gust, surprise, and repulsion, accompanied by abject fluids such as vomit
and blood.
Black Swan blatantly uses the metaphor of the “good/virtuous/white
swan” versus the “sexually devious/promiscuous/black swan.” To dance the
role of the black swan, the protagonist has to go on a sexual quest that
results in self-mutilation and symbolic deflowering, not with a phallus but a
sharp, pointed object that gets stuck in the opening it causes. She overcomes
her inhibitions by separating from her own self, splitting her identity. The
dark side of love is equivalent to a repressed, nonconformist sexuality that is
deemed fatal to the woman when released. Even though both films depict
“normative” society as corrupted, alienating, lonely, and void of meaning,
the virgin cannot continue living once she has chosen a different path for
herself. Erika Kohut and Nina Sayers cut themselves to symbolize deflower-
ing of their own bodies and use auto-violence not to cause pleasure but to
chastise themselves for not succeeding in sexual transgressions with a part-
ner. In that way, being a virgin for these protagonists is a curse, not a reward.
Erika and Nina do not conform to social expectations surrounding feminin-
ity such as performing domestic duties—those chores are delegated entirely
to their mothers, with whom they still live—or bearing children, but they
also remove themselves from being capable of forming meaningful relation-
ships. Rather than directing their wrath against a male opponent or monster
 Self - Mutil ation and Dark L ove 115

(as the Final Girl does) and thereby rescuing others, they direct their anger
against themselves. The sexual revolution that has allowed women to make
choices about their reproductive rights and partners has regressed for these
women into sexual abstinence, unleashing a repressed, dysfunctional, and
ultimately destructive sexual fantasy. It is as if Aronofsky and Haneke show
the path of the virtuous heroine after the end credits of the film have faded:
in a highly sexualized society, they are unable to function as virgins.
In The Piano Teacher, the male student. Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel).
who is the focus of ill-guided attraction, tells his teacher, Erika, that she is
sick and suggests therapy after reading her hand-written letter instructing
him to perform sadistic acts of punishment upon her (such as slapping and
hitting) and different variations of physical domination (figure 8.7).3
He also has to admire her hidden tools that she keeps in a box under her
bed. The student initially refuses to be drawn into her written demands for
a sickening and demeaning power play and abuse.4 A reoccurring theme in
Haneke’s films is the difference between imagined, televised, and advertised
violence and the actual violence directed against the body itself (Ritzenhoff
2009). As long as sexual acts are represented in pornographic title pages of
magazines and adult movies, the violence is made to seem socially accept-
able. Once the plea for mistreatment is fulfilled by the student, who invades
her personal space, her private home, and rapes her mercilessly on the floor

Figure 8.7 The music student Walter reads a letter from his piano teacher instructing him to
perform sadistic acts of punishment.
116 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

of the apartment’s corridor, in front of the mother’s bedroom where the

matriarch is held captive behind the locked door, the pianist is horrified by
her face being violated, her blood gushing from her nose and lip, and ulti-
mately her raped body. She requests that her hands be spared.
Even before the climactic final sequences, the female leads experiment
with hurting themselves. Although the pianist is being physically harmed by
her student toward the end of the film, she experiments with herself earlier
by cutting her own genitals with a razor blade, as I will discuss. It is not clear
whether this act of self-hatred is arousing to her or not. Haneke does not
seem to imply that she wants to cut her vagina so that no intercourse will be
possible but rather that this is an act of quiet defiance against her repressive
relationship with her mother. It is as if she is sexually confused: the imagined
violence exerted by a man during S&M foreplay preceding intercourse (as
she desires in her letter) is replaced by her own mutilation. It does not seem
to be a pleasurable exercise and bears no similarity to masturbation. There is
a definite tension between romantic love and pornography as well as trans-
gressional sexual practices in The Piano Teacher: Erika Kohut frequently
watches pornography (figure 8.8) that she checks out at a video store and
also tries to voyeuristically peak into cars as couples have sex in a drive-in
theater. It is as if she is gazing through a keyhole like a peeping tom.
One of the key scenes of Haneke’s film takes place in the bathroom when
Erika Kohut is alone, after having locked the door to prevent her elderly

Figure 8.8 Erika watches porn; she is surrounded by disapproving men.

 Self - Mutil ation and Dark L ove 117

mother (Annie Girardot) from entering. She is checking herself in the bath-
room mirror and looks at her genitals with a handheld mirror while she
performs the cutting. Kohut spreads her legs while sitting fully dressed on
the rim of a bathtub in the Vienna apartment; while she cuts her vagina, the
viewer’s access to this violent act is shielded by her leg (figure 8.9).
That the actual act of cutting is not shown on screen (because her geni-
tals are hidden behind her legs) is typical for Haneke’s directorial style, but
the effect, the blood running down the white bathtub in one thin streak,
is clearly visible. Erika exercises the self mutilation in a seemingly well-re-
hearsed manner during a four-minute continuous take that is self-contained.
The scene starts with her taking a razor blade from her leather purse on the
left of the frame. She approaches the cutting like a ceremony, as if following
a prerehearsed script. Each object (the blade, handheld mirror, hygienic pad,
and paper towel) is part of the painful ritual. Erika walks from the left side
of the little bathroom to the sink and then to the right side where the tub is
located. There she takes a small mirror and places it between her legs, watch-
ing her genitals while holding the mirror in her left hand. She cuts with her
right hand. There is not a single close-up of her face; in fact, only slight
sighing can be heard, and her facial expressions are hidden behind a lock of
hair. After the cutting, she rinses out the bathtub and takes a large hygienic
pad from a bag that is placed right next to the bathtub, suggesting that she

Figure 8.9 Erika harms herself in the bathroom. “Coming, Mama.”

118 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

does not use tampons for menstruation and may still be a virgin.5 Erika
continues the cleanup, and the blood runs down the drain. Even the razor
blade is wrapped in paper again and returned to the handbag she carries to
work, bringing closure to the scene because she returns to the exact location
in front of the purse, ending the scene on the same framing as it had started.
Then Erika brushes her hair in front of the larger bathroom mirror as if to
be a good girl before dinner, because her mother has called her to come eat.
The intrusion of the mother’s presence with a voice from off screen is similar
to Black Swan, where mother and daughter also live in close proximity and
the bathroom, not the bedroom, is a site of privacy. Neither protagonist,
although seemingly grown up and even approaching middle age,6 owns a
key to her room and has to barricade the door to prevent the mother from
entering.7 Erika’s mother is also used to checking her daughter’s bags when
she comes home at night. The Piano Teacher starts with an interrogation
by the mother who discovers that Erika has bought a dress. In reality, the
daughter was visiting porn stores, but she is able to hide her voyeuristic
activities from her intrusive mother (figure 8.10).
Another important formal cinematic element in the bathroom scene is
sound. Since Haneke rarely uses any extradiegetic music, natural sound
bears much importance in his films to construct meaning. The bathroom
is filled with the muffled noise of the television set that is constantly on
and watched by the mother in her free time. Once Erika opens the door,

Figure 8.10 The elderly mother controls every aspect of her daughter’s life.
 Self - Mutil ation and Dark L ove 119

the sound swells up, and she will ask her mother for permission to switch
the TV off. The camera’s point of view will gaze through the open door of
the dining room where the two women exchange polite conversation until
the mother notices blood running down her daughter’s leg. She claims that
looking at it is not “very appetizing.” The mother refers to the blood as a
sign of Erika’s menstrual period, whereas the source of the blood is actually
the wound caused by Erika’s cutting. Blood and desire have to remain hid-
den in the private sphere and are associated with shame and guilt. Jean Ma
interprets this dialogue between mother and daughter and clarifies that the
audience knows that Erika’s blood on her leg is not linked to menstruation:

At the same time, this juxtaposition of the shocking and banal refracts back
onto the female body in order to render it strange, uneasy, menaced. Their
exchange frames Erika’s auto-mutilation not as symptom of self-alienation
but rather as self-reference to the body, achieved by a violent mimicking of
the biological processes that mark sexual difference. Erika’s actions ultimately
construe femininity as a wound, a wound that appears as a natural condition
but whose origins in fact lie elsewhere. (Ma 2010, 523)

In the shot immediately following this scene, Haneke cuts to the public dis-
play of porn magazines in a store, depicting nude women in different sexual
poses. These magazines are accessible to the public but only legitimately to
an adult, mostly male, paying audience. Erika runs into one of her male,
teenage students in the porn store where she looks at recorded tapes. In
the subsequent piano lesson, she chastises him cruelly for being a “pig” and
threatens to tell his mother about the voyeuristic transgression. He apolo-
gizes to her as if she was a pars pro toto for all women who are depicted in
pornography in demeaning poses. Erika has no sexual interest in him and
coldly dismisses his feeble attempts to claim that he is sorry.8
In the first explicitly sexual encounter between the student Walter and
the piano teacher, she chooses a public space, the women’s bathroom, as the
site. Walter had followed her there, asking her to come out of the cubicle
where she went to the bathroom (Haneke lingers on the natural sound of
peeing) and then attempts to shower her with kisses. Instead of responding
to his impulsive passion, Erika asks not to be touched and starts instead to
masturbate him while demanding authoritatively that he neither move nor
talk. Each time he does, she either hurts him or stops her actions altogether.
She bites his genitals and this clearly evokes the association of castration
anxiety. Walter is uncomfortable, sexually frustrated, and confused. It is
suggested cynically by Walter after the bizarre encounter that she needs
more practice so as not to hurt him, falsely assuming that she is interested in
a normative, romantic relationship, despite the power differential between
120 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

teacher and student. He does not have an orgasm when she handles him,
but she forbids him to touch himself. This is only the prelude to even more
disturbing encounters where the viewer is coerced into watching intimate
moments as a voyeur, although body parts are never shown. Walter is clearly
upset by his inability to respond to her touch. “You should know what you
can and can’t do to a man,” he claims. But she clearly does not know. He
frames her “treatment” as humiliating. Erika Kohut does not know how to
perform sexual favors for a man without hurting him; neither does she know
how to please herself. She instead hurts herself with the cutting. The idea of
pleasure and physical sexuality are undermined and replaced by Erika’s voy-
euristic gazing at porn videos and trying to watch sexual behaviors of lovers.
She imagines intimacy but can only revert to violent mechanics of lovemak-
ing, not to the emotions. In this way, her virtuosity and sexual inexperience
come to haunt her as a virgin in middle age. What used to be desirable in
the context of horror films, namely purity, leads in Haneke’s film to the
reversal of the Final Girl myth. The self-directed violence creates an open
wound, once in the intimate area of the body and once above the heart. This
depicts repressed sexuality as a defect that cannot be released in transgres-
sional sexual practices (Walter refuses to play into her sexual fantasies) but
leads to self-abjection.

Mother-Daughter Relationships
There is a clear correlation between forbidden sexuality and the mother.
Erika will once try to kiss and cuddle up next to and then on top of her
mother whose bed she shares at night (on her absent father’s side of the mari-
tal bed), instead of sleeping in her bedroom. Erika states at the end of this
dysfunctional encounter that she has seen her mother’s pubic hair, thereby
sexualizing the speech as well as her actions toward her mother. Contrary to
her repeatedly dismissive and rejectful interactions with Walter, she initiates
the approach to her mother in bed, impulsively and clumsily. Erika infan-
tilizes herself. The mother reacts to her daughter’s transgressions much as
Walter, who claims that she repulses him; this is particularly the case after
she throws up in the aftermath of another failed sexual encounter: “Sorry,
you stink so much, no one will ever come close to you,” he tells her crudely.
It is as if he has started to consent to her sick games of abuse and subordina-
tion. When Walter eventually comes to sleep with her and enters her on the
floor, she begs him to stop, horrified at the actual invasion of her body. The
violence has moved from description and imagination to action; it has left
the domain of the handwritten letter with sadistic sexual demands and starts
to take on a life of its own. Erika’s vagina no longer has just a symbolic func-
tion but is now crudely violated. This violation occurs without any of the sex
 Self - Mutil ation and Dark L ove 121

toys or bondage paraphernalia Erika originally desired for this act of deflow-
ering. Walter warns her that “you have to give a little,” but she lies beneath
him like a log, unable to move, unable to respond to his attempts to caress
her, unable to object more heavily. He appeals to her, “Love me, please,” but
she is not touching him at all. After he leaves, she slowly crouches up, clearly
in pain, and opens the door to her mother’s bedroom by turning the key.
Part of her fantasy had been to leave her mother outside the room during
her sexual escapades. By turning the key, Erika allows her mother back into
her private sphere where she has now been victimized. This was exactly what
her mother had worried about when Erika brought Walter home for the first
time. Yet it is not Erika’s mother who commits physically violent transgres-
sions as Nina’s mother does when she hurts her daughter while cutting her
nails (see figure 8.6); rather, the violation is perpetrated by the male invader
into the shared female space of the apartment. Haneke had suggested in
the previous interactions between mother and daughter that their relation-
ship was deeply fraught and indeed reflected some of the sickening power
play that Erika was asking for in a relationship with her male student. In
the logic of the film, the physical violence that is exerted by the intruder
is a latent result of the psychological dysfunction and emotional stagna-
tion (“glaciation”—Vereisung—as Haneke describes interpersonal conflict
in several of his films) between mother and daughter. Rather than rescuing
Erika from her mother’s domineering presence, Walter pushes her deeper
into dependence. There is no reason for him to rescue the damsel in distress,
because she cannot satisfy him sexually.
Normalcy after the traumatic event is seemingly restored when Erika
is seen in the next shot, dressed in formal black and white clothes, getting
ready to perform at a piano concert. Her mother gets her ready as if she is a
child who needs supervision and accompanies her to the concert hall. But
Erika packs a large kitchen knife in her purse and stabs herself after Walter
passes her casually in the lobby. Instead of performing on stage, she walks
out of the hall, the blood slowly seeping through her white blouse before
she steps outside without a coat and disappears off frame into the cold eve-
ning. This escape from conflict, caused by repressed sexual desire and the
exaggerated expectations of an overbearing mother, bears similarity to the
narrative in Black Swan. In Aronofsky’s film, the protagonist is seemingly
surprised by self-inflicted violence. When Nina Sayers (Portman) discovers
that she has stabbed herself and is bleeding to death, she is astonished and
begins to sob and cry.
In one of the more explicitly sexual scenes, the protagonist comes back to
her small New York apartment after a night of partying. The mother, Erica
Sayers (Barbara Hershey), has been waiting and confronts her, asking about
her whereabouts. Nina rebuffs her by announcing that she has “fucked them
122 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

all” and gives the first names of two men. Again, the daughter does not have
a key to her bedroom and barricades the door with a dresser to be alone with
her female companion, Lily. “Don’t come in here,” she warns her mother.
She experiences an erotic fantasy with Lily whose naked back reveals the
tattooed two wings of a black swan, suggesting that she is the antithesis
of the white swan. Initially it seems ambiguous whether Lily is really in
the bedroom or Nina is experiencing another of her surrealist sexual fan-
tasies. Aronofsky suggests that Lily is indeed Nina’s alter ego, representing
the more mature sexual woman who is experienced, sensual, and seductive,
all the qualities Nina is supposed to acquire to dance the role of the black
swan convincingly on opening night. At one point Nina no longer looks into
Lily’s face but into her own while she experiences an orgasm, followed by
the “petit mort” (the little death). In that brief afterglow, Nina suddenly sees
her own face in lieu of Lily’s. The director might suggest that the discovery
of sexual pleasure is fraught. Another interpretation is that Nina turns into
her fantasy of a sexually active woman, Lily, when she allows herself to let
go of her sexual inhibitions. Sexual pleasure is not induced by intercourse
but by same-sex intimacy. However, Nina’s attitude toward the other side of
herself, her sexual side, is fraught with anger. “It is my turn,” she will exclaim
in another fantasy scene when faced with Lily, who seems to get ready for
the big scene of the black swan in her changing room. Lily tries to replace
Nina and take over the dancer’s role (figure 8.11). This is the turning point
of the entire film because Nina supposedly stabs her opponent to pave the
way for the second act of the big ballet’s opening night, where she now has
to perform as the black swan (figure 8.12). Once she stabs Lily, her eyes turn

Figure 8.11 Nina tries to strangle her alter ego.

 Self - Mutil ation and Dark L ove 123

Figure 8.12 Nina (this time in the costume of the white swan) kills her black swan alter ego
Lily with the pointed shard from a broken mirror, shattering her identity.

blood red and her face is grimaced by her anger. In several of the shots, Lily
turns into Nina, suggesting the confusion of identity: the white swan and
the black swan merge.
Through the metaphor of the black swan, the melodramatic story is
coined of the young, highly competitive ballet dancer in New York who has
missed puberty and its sexual revelations while diligently practicing in the
studio for her career. In this regard she is similar to the pianist in Michael
Haneke’s film, because both have to put their personal lives on hold to suc-
ceed as artists in solo careers. Both are directed by their overbearing moth-
ers who tightly control every move of their daughters to guarantee success.
Both characters lack a father figure and have a conflicted attitude toward
heterosexual sex and sensuality. While the piano teacher checks out porn
tapes in the video store and voyeuristically gazes at sexual activity through
car windows in drive-in movie theaters as if peeking through a keyhole, the
prima ballerina orchestrates her own fantastic encounters in her mind. The
sexual fantasy of both women is deemed nonconformist because it displays
elements of masochism. Once Nina reaches the top of her ambitions and is
cast as the prima ballerina in Swan Lake, this exact virtue of professional
discipline as a dancer and sexual abstinence, being still virtuous, comes
to haunt her. The lascivious choreographer Thomas gives her the task of
finding sexual pleasure to be able to more realistically depict the passionate
black swan, the dark side of love. Rather than going to a bar and picking
up a stranger, or even more conveniently starting an affair with the ballet
master himself, the prima ballerina engages in sexual fantasies that are ulti-
mately fatal.
124 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

Nina begins to harm herself, cutting, slicing, tearing off fingernails and
skin, violently altering her body, a process that also changes her mind. This
is a strong reference to the abject quality of femininity, linked to one of the
key ingredients of the horror film (Creed, 2005). At one point, her toes are
sutured together, similar to a swan’s foot. In addition, there are the two main,
above-mentioned scenes to mark sexual desire gone awry. Both entail that
Nina sees her sensual rival, Lily, as being her opponent as well as playmate.
Initially, she has a sexual fantasy in her bedroom where she is making love to
her while Lily kisses her genitals. The fact that Nina suddenly sees her own
face, making love to herself, suggests that she is actually not with a partner,
unable to experience pleasure with another person. It had been suggested by
the ballet master that she should start exploring her own sexuality, and ini-
tially Nina tries to masturbate, caught “in the act” by her mother who vio-
lates her personal space repeatedly. In the second scene at the theater, Nina
supposedly kills her rival just before going back on stage to dance the part
of the black swan; she will actually transform into the swan and grow first
black feathers, then wings. When returning to the changing room, Nina dis-
covers that there is no blood emanating from the bathroom where she had
shoved Lily’s dead body. Instead, she looks down on herself and watches a
gushing red hole in her stomach. Similar to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome
(1972) protagonist who discovers a large gushing wound in his abdomen
that looks like an open vagina, Nina’s “wound” could also be seen as the
orifice. By administering the fatal blow with the shard of a broken mirror
that she will pull out of the hole herself, she has metaphorically deflowered
herself to be able to dance the sexual death rite.

Precursors in Film History

When discussing these two films, two different filmic parallels come to
mind. One is Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), where the female lead is killed off
in the shower by a psychotic serial killer in the first segment of the movie
and the blood runs down the drain, mingling with a close-up of the dead
eye in a dissolve. This is a stylistic parallel to The Piano Teacher because
both scenes take place in the bathroom and both show blood draining off
into a hole. On a different level, the image of the overbearing mother figure,
of course, plays a large part in the Psycho narrative. The more vivid filmic
precedent can be found in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972).
There, one of three sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin), cuts her vagina with a
broken wine glass. Both acts of violence in these two anteceding films relate
to female desire. In Hitchcock, the protagonist is punished for desiring an
extramarital affair and running away with her boss’s money, which is ironi-
cally not the motive for the murder. In Bergman, the protagonist is cutting
 Self - Mutil ation and Dark L ove 125

herself, harming her genitals, which can then no longer be penetrated by a

male partner, her coldhearted husband, during intercourse. In Hitchcock
and Bergman, the female victim is clearly not a virgin. In Haneke, the act
of self-mutilation could very well be a self-induced deflowering. The scene
remains ambiguous as to what the driving force behind Erika’s cutting is.
The main difference between Bergman and Haneke/Aronofsky is that in
the latter the act of cutting is supposed to evoke lust. In Cries and Whispers,
the oldest sister Karin is the one who is most unhappily married to a much
older, rich, distant, and bigoted man. She clearly hates him. When she has
cut herself on a chair in front of her marital bed chamber, she licks her
lips. There is no visible blood and her white nightgown seems impeccable.
There are drops of perspiration on her forehead after the cuts have been
administered to her vagina with a glass shard. She enters the bedroom, sees
her husband, walks past him without talking, and lies down on her side of
the bed. Bergman cuts to a reaction shot by the husband who looks irritated
and seems to disapprove of her. When the camera cuts back to Karin in bed,
her hands are covered in blood, and she has spread her legs as if she was in
the act of giving birth. Then she covers her mouth with her blood and tastes
it. She grins triumphantly at her husband. Karin has altered her body and
created a wound that will prohibit her husband from sexual intercourse,
disabling her body. Contrary to the cutting scenes in The Piano Teacher and
Black Swan, her self-mutilation seems to provide her with jouissance, satis-
faction, and triumph over her abhorrent husband. The act of cutting is not
a self-imposed punishment for being sexually frigid but a means to ensure
sexual, marital abstinence. The next scene in Cries and Whispers switches to
Karin’s younger sister, Maria (Liv Ullmann), calling her name. “Don’t come
near me, I can’t stand anybody touching me,” Karin exclaims. The middle
sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), has just died of cancer, comforted by the
maid, Anna (Kari Sylwan), who has an affectionate, sensual, and protective
relationship with the suffering patient. She often allows Agnes to lie like a
nursing child on her bare chest in bed, evoking a lesbian relationship. This
ritual also has allusions to the affections between a mother and daughter.
Agnes has lost her own daughter to an illness, as the film suggests repeat-
edly; the maid prays in memory of the dead child each day in her bedroom,
where the empty crib still remains next to her bed.
Maria tries to kiss her older sister on the mouth and face as if she were her
lover, covering her with affection, and after initial resistance, Karin responds
reluctantly. She announces earlier, “I can’t. I can’t stand it. . . . I can’t breathe
any longer. All that guilt. Nein . . . leave me alone. Don’t touch me.” In
Bergman, women’s pleasure is unlived. Neither one of the three sisters has a
fulfilling sexual life, repressing their hidden emotions and concealing their
desires behind iron masks of disgust and despair. These Victorian women
126 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

are different from the pianist Erika and the ballet dancer Nina. Bergman’s
characters belong to the nineteenth century where women were locked into
roles and unhappy marriages, surrounded by lies, hatred, and boredom.
They are repulsed by the touch. The similarity between all the women in
the films is their desire to be caressed, but only Agnes, the dying sister, can
openly express her need, most explicitly in death. When she awakens after
being declared dead by the family doctor, she has tears in her eyes. She
begs her two sisters to come into her bedroom and comfort her so she can
leave in peace. Neither Maria nor Karin are willing to be close to their dead
sister. They shy away, disgusted, disturbed, and run away. The next day,
they are back in the elegant estate after the funeral, in their fine costumes
and masquerades, surrounded by their two malign, inept husbands. Anna,
the maid, is the only one who is willing to bid Agnes farewell, although in
an unusually intimate manner that suggests an erotic bond. The connec-
tion that the sisters have is different from the mother–daughter relationship
displayed in Haneke and Aronofsky’s films, but it also transgresses social
boundaries. In contrast to Erika and Nina, Bergman’s three sisters are filled
with shame and regret. They are locked into heterosexual relationships that
are unfulfilling, and they derive pleasure from hurting themselves and oth-
ers. In The Piano Teacher and Black Swan, the female protagonists are their
own worst enemies and remove themselves because they do not seem to fit
in a society that is filled with lies (similar to Bergman’s cosmos) and where
sexuality is regulated by their mothers. The black swan will have to dance
her role to please a paying audience and guarantee the fiscal success of the
ballet company and its elitist clientele—but her mother sits in the front row
and glances at her throughout the performance. The pianist refuses to play
for the public in the end. Her seclusion as an artist leads her to be incompe-
tent in her everyday life.

The Open Wound and Violence

To engage with the subject of the open wound addressed in the films by
Aronofsky and Haneke, the work of Mark Seltzer in True Crime (2007) is
helpful. Seltzer connects the desire of audiences to watch violence in the
mass media as indicative of modern society where voyeurism is part of every-
day communication patterns: “If the unobserved life, on this view, is not
worth living, then living one’s life cannot be separated from its media dou-
bling” (Seltzer 2007, 10). The author describes the role of the audience in
media representations of violence.

Hence, the spectacle of violent crime provides a point of attraction and iden-
tification, an intense individualization of these social conditions, albeit a
 Self - Mutil ation and Dark L ove 127

socialization via the media spectacle of wounding and victimization. To the

extent that action, like motive, must be attributed to individuals, these small
and intense melodramas of the wound acclimatize readers and viewers to take
these social conditions personally. These social conditions then, in turn, take
on the form of a pathological public sphere. (Seltzer 2007, 10)

As pointed out in Jean Ma’s text on The Piano Teacher, Haneke constructs
Erika’s actions as construing “femininity as a wound” (Ma 2010, 523).
There is indeed a “spectacle” of violence in both The Piano Teacher and
Black Swan. The difference from conventional horror movies, though, is the
fact that the female protagonist is not turned into a heroine at the end of the
films for remaining virtuous and eliminating her monstrous opponents, but
rather she becomes the victim of her own self-destruction and self-hatred.
No longer is the male opponent seen as the cause of evil, but the mother, and
by extension the virtuousness of the female lead is not rewarded but pun-
ished. Both Erika and Nina perform in the public sphere as artists, pushed
into leading roles as pianist and dancer by their critical, imposing, and
controlling mothers. Both young women go insane, caught between their
unfulfilled sexual desire and the expectations toward their talents, measured
by an unforgiving audience. Both manage to stay in the public sphere of
the filmic audience despite the fact of harming their bodies in the private
sphere. Violence on their terms is a spectacle, directed at their own body.
The spectacle of watching suffering is transferred from the stage (of the
recital hall or the theater) to the audience in front of the movie screen: the
viewers of these two movies engage in a voyeuristic journey in which they
witness self-mutilation as an aberration of the conventional horror movie
narrative as described by Clover. There is ultimately no male intervention
to avenge violence committed against the female body. The “wound” and
“victimization” are part of an intensely voyeuristic spectacle but are more
reflections of the sexual confusion of the female heroines than their virtuous
control over their own bodies. The other players in the film (mothers, lovers,
colleagues, students, teachers) have lost control over the women’s bodies, and
the genital area is stripped of its desirability. The two female protagonists in
Black Swan and The Piano Teacher are in charge of their own sexuality and
sex, but they fail instead of triumphing over this capacity to control. In this
way, both film directors show a regressive, dark side of love and sexuality,
an outgrowth of women’s liberation that has ultimately gotten out of con-
trol when women determine their own fate. However, if one embraces the
idea that Nina has found her sexual Other in the final scene of the film by
killing off her old self through the insertion of the shard, the film’s conclu-
sion would be less fatalistic. Nina could still be considered dead at the end,
but her new identity as the seductive black swan would have come to life.
128 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

It could be argued that her surrealistic visions of herself in the mirror and
the struggle with herself in her bedroom and the changing room would pre-
pare her for this transformation. This interpretation would actually suggest
that female desire could emerge once abstinence and virginity were recog-
nized by a woman as flawed and repressive.

Notes
1. The Museum of Sex in Manhattan features an exhibit on Sex and the Moving
Image. As part of the film display, a section is devoted to Beautiful Agony,
amateur videos about women who experience orgasm and the “little death”
that follows it. The accompanying program text spells out that “those short
films paired with audio are tremendously intimate, separating the essence of
an orgasm from a specific sex act.”
2. In both films, the mother figures have displaced their own desires to further
the artistic careers of their talented daughters. Nina’s mother used to be a
dancer herself and has constructed a life narrative that makes her daughter
indebted to her for sacrificing her life. This is a common trope in mother–
daughter relationships and maternal melodramas as E. Ann Kaplan has
studied (1992) as a topic of film history in her seminal book on Motherhood
and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. Heather
Addison et al. (2009) also addresses the complexity of changing mothering
roles in modern society in her coedited volume on Motherhood Misconceived:
Representing the Maternal in U.S. Films.
3. The student reads excerpts of the letter on camera and spells out the sexual
fantasies. “Then, gag me with some stockings I will have ready. Stuff them
in so hard that I’m incapable of making any sounds. Next, take off the
blindfold please, and sit on my face and punch me in the stomach to force
me to thrust my tongue in your behind. . . . For that is my dearest wish.
Hands and feet tied behind my back and locked up next door to my mother
out of her reach behind my bedroom door, till the next morning. . . . If you
catch me disobeying any of your orders, hit me, please, even with the back
of your hand on my face. Ask me why I don’t cry out for my mother or why
I don’t fight back. Above all, say things like that so that I realize just how
powerless I am.” Jean Ma (2010, 516) transcribes this monologue in her
article “Discordant Desires, Violent Refrains” in A Companion to Michael
Haneke.
4. Walter asks his teacher what the acts of violence would “open” for him.
Similar to the metaphor of the keyhole that Erika cannot cover to avoid her
mother’s intrusive gaze, the letter is regarded as an opening to her sexual
fantasy life. This could be seen as a metaphor for the “opening” of her sex-
ual desires that she wants to share with her student. Even though Walter is
appauled, he is also intrigued by her subordination to his gaze. She crouches
in front of him on the floor and shows him the toys she keeps in a box
under her bed as if to share her favorite stuffed animals with a playmate.
 Self - Mutil ation and Dark L ove 129

She displays ropes, chains, and even a black rubber hood, linking her fantasy
to S&M fetishized objects.
5. The fact that Erika uses large cotton liners and no tampons is possibly an
indication that she is still infantilized by her mother who controls her every
move. It does also suggest a certain youthfulness about her sexuality and a
possible insecurity toward her body. When cutting herself, she can indeed
control the flow of blood. However, when Walter comes to rape her, he first
hits her face and blood is gushing from her lip and her nose. The mother’s
control smothers Erika most of the time, and she can live her own sexual
desires only when watching porn outside the shared home. Despite the
matriarchal presence during the rape, Erika’s mother is unable protect her in
this physically violent scene. Whenever Erika leaves the house and returns,
her mother checks her bags. Erika is not horrified by blood or other fluids.
In fact, in the unrated director’s cut of the film, she is seen in a cabin at the
porn store she frequents, picking up a paper tissue that is soaked with semen.
She sniffs it and then presses it against her nose while she watches the sex
tapes on concurrent screens, inhaling the scent.
6. Isabelle Huppert was 36 years old when she played the role of Erika
Kohut.
7. Fatima Naqvi (2010) has written about the significance of keys and keyholes
in The Piano Teacher in conjunction to voyeurism and sexuality.
8. Erika rebukes her student harshly: “What for? Sorry isn’t enough if I don’t
know why. Are you sorry because you’re a pig, or because your friends are
pigs? Or because all women are bitches for making you a pig?”

Works Cited
Addison, Heather, Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly, and Elaine Roth. 2009. Motherhood
Misconceived: Representing the Maternal in U.S. Films. New York: State University
of New York Press.
Clover, Carol J. 2005. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” In Mark
Jancovich, (ed.), Horror: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge. 77–89.
Creed, Barbara. 2005. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary
Abjection.” In Mark Kancovich (ed.), Horror: The Film Reader. New York:
Routledge. 67–76.
Grundman, Roy. 2010. A Companion to Michael Haneke. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Kaplan, E. Ann. 1992. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular
Culture and Melodrama. London/New York: Routledge.
Ma, Jean. 2010. “Discordant Desires, Violent Refrains: La Pianiste (The Piano
Teacher).” In Roy Grundman (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke. Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell. 511–531.
Naqvi, Fatima. 2010. Trügerische Vertrautheit: Filme von Michael Haneke. Wien:
Synema.
Ritzenhoff, Karen A. 2009. “The Frozen Family: Emotional Dysfunction and
Consumer Society in Michael Haneke’s Films.” In Karen A. Ritzenhoff and
130 Karen A. Ritzenhoff

Katherine A. Hermes (eds.), Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World. Newcastle

upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 71–88.
———. 2010. Screen Nightmares: Video, Fernsehen und Gewalt im Film. Marburg:
Schüren Verlag.
Seltzer, Mark. 2007. True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York:
Routledge.
Warren, Charles. 2010. “The Unknown Piano Teacher.” In Roy Grundman (ed.), A
Companion to Michael Haneke. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 495–510.

Filmed
Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. USA, 2010.
Cries and Whispers. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Sweden, 1972.
Piano Teacher, The. Directed by Michael Haneke. France, 2001.
Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA, 1960.
Videodrome. Directed by David Cronenberg. Canada, 1972.
Chapter 9

Female Pleasure
and Performance:
Masochism in
Belle de Jour and
Histoire d’O
Samm Deighan

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by

imagination, as I try to do.
—Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin

The treatment was cruel but radical, and the main thing is that
I am cured.
—Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

One of the inherent pleasures of cinema is our ability to relate, mas-

ochistically, to the characters, argues Kaja Silverman (1980) in her study
“Masochism and Subjectivity.” This masochistic impulse will be discussed
in this chapter as it is particularly relevant in the erotica and exploitation
subgenres found in the underground cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Many
of these works are concerned with female pleasure as a performative act,
rather than as a means to achieve sexual gratification. The spectacle of
female sexuality can be found in the majority of exploitation films from
the period, but Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967) and Histoire d’O (Just
Jaeckin, 1975) serve as illustrative yet contradictory examples. While Belle
de Jour is representative of repressed internal desire and fantasy spilling into
132 Samm Deighan

day-to-day life, Histoire d’O focuses on the absolute surrender to sexuality

and the dissolution of identity as a result. Despite their differences, these
films have also a number of striking similarities. Both are from an era of
European filmmaking when directors were allowed and encouraged to push
the boundaries of sex, surrealism, and violence.1 Both films depict the secret
and subversive sexual lives of otherwise normal, young, attractive, middle-
class French women. Both are based on works of fiction, and both concern
the problem of female sexuality and pleasure amid representations of erotica
and highly sexualized female characters.
In Belle de Jour, the main character, Séverine (Catherine Deneuve), fre-
quently lapses into elaborate fantasies where she is tied up, humiliated, and
beaten, with scenes of implied rape or sexual assault. She is actually sexually
frigid, frequently refusing to touch her loving husband, Pierre (Jean Sorel),
who docilely sleeps in a separate bed across the room. Ultimately, she gives
in to her compulsions and begins work as a “flower of the day” or day-time
prostitute. This name, “Belle du Jour,” is given to her as a pseudonym by the
proprietress of a brothel. Though morally resistant to her newfound profes-
sion, she is able to find physical satisfaction. Buñuel includes a number of
scenes where Séverine lies on a bed in lingerie, tired, sweaty, and smiling, a
dreamy expression on her face.
In different ways, Histoire d’O is also concerned with the connection
between vision and pleasure. O (Corinne Cléry), the titular protagonist,
is a professional photographer. She has a healthy, if bohemian, sex life and
blossoming relationship with her lover, Rene (Udo Kier). She becomes so
enamored with him that she willingly submits to imprisonment in a cha-
teau, in the area of Roissy, that trains women to be sexual slaves. It is run
by Rene’s older step-brother Sir Stephen (Anthony Steel), who submits O
to bondage and sexual perversions, which led the film to receive a NC-17
rating for explicit sexuality. Like Séverine’s escape to freedom in an inter-
nal world, O willingly dons a slave collar and engages in highly theatrical
masochistic rituals, eventually abandoning all conventional romantic and
sexual relationships. Ultimately, she discovers sexual bliss with a female
partner, Jacqueline (Li Sellgren). For better or for worse, Séverine and O are
characters that cannot be satisfied within the bounds of normal romantic
or sexual relationships. Séverine is married to her perfect, loving husband,
whose career as a doctor affords her the luxury to spend her time shopping
in high-end clothing boutiques instead of working. O is financially inde-
pendent, has a flourishing career as a fashion photographer, and has a loving
boyfriend.2 Both women intentionally abandon their conventional lives in
favor of sexual exploration and potential personal liberation.
The sexualized gaze, made popular by Laura Mulvey in Visual and Other
Pleasures (1989) as well as Fetishism and Curiosity (1996) and expounded
 Female Pleasure and Performance 133

upon by later feminist critics, is doubly problematic for both of these films.
On the one hand, the main characters are women on overtly erotic journeys
of personal exploration that wander far afield of the beaten path, at least
in terms of normative heterosexual, bourgeois relationships. On the other
hand, both works are entrenched in the art house erotica genre, which bleeds
over into exploitation and soft-core pornography.
Is there a way to interpret female pleasure independent of male desire
within the context of these films? This question is further complicated in
this analysis by the fact that these are not straightforward heterosexual
erotica films. Most of the sexual acts that occur or are implied involve sado-
masochism, namely with a submissive female subject. The performative ele-
ments of masochism relate to desire primarily through fantasy and ritual,
which it is important to note originate from the masochist herself, rather
than the male aggressor. Vision and desire are equally important and draw
distinctive lines between sexual lust and romantic love. While many char-
acters strive to possess both women sexually throughout these films, roman-
tic love has a darker side and is indicative of emotional possession and the
subsumption of identity. Are the protagonists capable of representing their
own sexual identities, or are they, in Laura Mulvey’s words, simply blank
cyphers “bearing the burden of sexual objectification” (1989, 13)? While
the two women are undeniably objects of sexual objectification, they man-
age to subvert masculine control and bourgeois values with their sexually
masochistic performances. These experiences are dramatically life changing
for both women, and they each gain a degree of agency over their lives by
bringing their masochistic fantasies to life.
Both films represent strong foundational examples of erotically themed
art house cinema. While Buñuel’s Belle de Jour is an art film with an auteur
director and major stars, Histoire d’O is an influential exploitation film
from the heyday of soft- and hard-core pornography flooding conventional
theatrical markets in Europe and the United States. Buñuel’s impressive
filmic catalogue is well known by cinephiles. The Spanish director made
a name for himself with a series of French- and Spanish-language films
steeped in surrealism, erotica, and anti-Catholic and anti-bourgeois senti-
ments. He remains an influential director, primarily for experimental nar-
rative filmmakers like David Lynch. Just Jaeckin is primarily known for
the famous French erotic film, Emmanuelle (1974), which was one of the
first explicitly erotic works to be shown in a mainstream theater and helped
usher in an era of socially acceptable pornography and exploitation cinema
in Europe.3 He became known for a string of semisuccessful adaptations
of classic erotic novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1981) and Histoire d’O.
Though later adaptations of Histoire d’O exist, the first is the most faithful
to the novel.
134 Samm Deighan

The introduction of Séverine to a new professional life in a brothel is

somewhat constructed. Her colorful inner life bleeds into reality when she
hears of an acquaintance, Henriette, an unseen friend who has gone to work
in a whorehouse. Out loud, Séverine muses that “with a stranger it must be
horrible,” but gets a dreamy expression on her face. After attending a number
of unusual customers, she attracts the dangerous Marcel (Pierre Clémenti),
a young gangster who is instantly smitten with her and enthusiastically
participates in her fantasies. Marcel’s obsession with Séverine exceeds
the walls of the brothel, and things spin out of control. He pursues her,
declaring that he will have her at any cost. He discovers her address, insists
that she run away with him, and confronts Pierre as he returns home from
work. Marcel shoots Pierre before dying in a violent showdown with the
police. Pierre is left blind, mute, and paralyzed, and Séverine’s new occupa-
tion is his constant care. His friend Husson (Michel Piccoli), who has dis-
covered Séverine’s career as a prostitute, fully discloses her secret to Pierre.
Though Séverine fears for the future, she also fantasizes that Pierre will
return to full health and forgive her, and they will engage in a normative,
bourgeois marriage. Belle de Jour is intimately concerned with the links
between vision and desire, as well as morality and class. Séverine’s actively
sexual, perverse internal life contradicts her austere, virginal persona, where
she cannot stand to be viewed as a sexual being even by her husband. She
breaks the confines of class and bourgeois morals to act out her desires on a
costumed, conscripted stage, complete with the indignities and perversions
of a whorehouse.
While Séverine works in the brothel, O is subjected to violence in the
chateau or training house by patrons who are all wealthy, aristocratic men.
Histoire d’O immediately presents itself as a soft-core exploitation film;
women are naked, chained, or in elaborate costumes and are frequently
encouraged to bathe, dress, and caress one another. Though O is in training
to please Rene, she has very limited contact with him, sexually or otherwise.
Her body is available to all other men at the chateau, who at first torture
her but eventually also give her pleasure, all of this with her implicit con-
sent. When her training is complete, Rene relinquishes her to his mentor,
Sir Stephen, much to O’s disappointment. With time, she comes to respect
and love Sir Stephen, who has more aggressive and complex ways of punish-
ing and rewarding her. Eventually, he encourages O to seek out her own
slave and explore the limits of her desires, maintaining that she will be a
more rewarding conquest when she is a fully developed and sexually experi-
enced woman. She seduces the model Jacqueline that Rene has fallen in love
with and realizes that she enjoys her newfound sexual power. Though all of
her undertakings are allegedly to please a lover/master, there is little visual
evidence supporting this.
 Female Pleasure and Performance 135

Susan Sontag famously stated in Fascinating Fascism that sadomasochism

is sexual theater (1974, 103). This elaborate, detailed staging and rehearsal
of fantasy is an escape from the confining world of heteronormativity. Each
“scene” has a script, costume, set, and actors, inextricably binding sado-
masochism with vision and imagination, as well as fantasy and desire. Both
Séverine and O actively take part in this theater because it gives them a
level of agency and independence they could not otherwise achieve in regu-
lar, bourgeois life. Though sadomasochism has typically been considered
exploitative of women (and still is, considering the recent government crack-
downs on Internet pornography, including extreme, sadomasochist websites
like Insex.com), both characters seek it out willingly. Whether intentionally
or not, this pursuit transforms both women’s lives.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines masochism as “a sexual perver-
sion characterized by pleasure in being subjected to pain or humiliation” or
“pleasure in being abused or dominated” (1995, 317). While most people are
familiar with the term and loosely knowledgeable about its relationship to
other paraphilias, I am concerned with how that definition applies to Belle
de Jour and Histoire d’O. The relationship between masochist and aggressor
is of primary importance, particularly in regard to the dictionary definition
of the term. Initially, O is taught by her lover Rene to enjoy “pain and
humiliation” in order to prove her devotion and emphasize the absolute
nature of their romantic love. In most of Belle de Jour, Séverine seeks humilia-
tion and punishment only in her fantasies. Pierre, her husband, either orches-
trates or metes out her punishment directly, though she refuses physical
contact in their waking life. Both of these films address issues about love and
sex primarily through masochism and the relationship between the “slave”
and “master.”4
In his essay on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s seminal novel Venus in
Furs,5 Gilles Deleuze writes that though the master appears to be in con-
trol, it is really the masochist. “Likewise the masochistic hero appears to
be educated and fashioned by the authoritarian woman whereas basically it
is he who forms her, dresses her for the part and prompts the harsh words
she addresses to him. It is the victim who speaks through the mouth of his
torturer without sparing himself” (1989, 22). It is important to note that
Deleuze is referring to the relationship between a male slave and a female
master, while both Belle de Jour and Histoire d’O are concerned with female
slaves and male masters. Venus in Furs is the first recognized masochistic
novel and concerns the tempestuous relationship between Severin, whom
Belle de Jour’s Séverine is named for, and Wanda, his elaborately costumed
mistress. Though they have a sexual relationship, most of this is made up
of theatrical scenes where Wanda dominates, humiliates, and inflicts pain
on Severin until he eventually abandons her when she admits her desire to
136 Samm Deighan

submit to another man. The important difference between Venus in Furs

and these later films is the master–slave relationship. Where Severin and
Wanda are a unit, always together and bound up with Severin’s unspoken
rulebook for most of the novel, Séverine and O are separate from their mas-
ters/lovers and operate within their fantasies alone.
Séverine, in particular, lives mostly in a fantasy world. Her masochistic
daydreams break up the monotony of her bourgeois life until she discovers
the existence of Madame Anais’s (Geneviève Page) upscale brothel. These
fantasies are detailed, elaborate, and always commence with the jingling of a
bell. Events are usually begun by a crueler aspect of Pierre, though he typi-
cally abandons her to a fate of physical violence, humiliation, and sexual tor-
ture, occasionally taking part himself, but usually just watching. In her first
fantasy, which opens the film, the couple travels casually through the woods
in a carriage manned by two identically dressed drivers. Pierre sweetly tells
Séverine he loves her, but she pulls away with increasing coldness, saying,
“You are everything to me, but . . .” Pierre responds that he wants things to
be perfect. He says, “I didn’t mean to upset you, I care about you so much.”
Séverine responds, “What good is your care?” Though she apologizes, he
soon has the carriage stopped, and she is dragged out of it by all three men,
kicking and protesting. Her hands are bound and she is tied to a tree. Pierre
rips her red jacket down the back, also tearing her bra. He commands both
men to beat her with their horsewhips while he watches. Soon he stops them
and says farewell to the tearful Séverine, giving the men permission to rape
her. Her fantasy ends here, and the camera cuts back to her home life; she
is lying in bed in a nightgown, getting ready to go to sleep, and Pierre is
looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. She tells Pierre she was thinking
of them riding in a carriage, and he implies that he has heard this fantasy
before, though the full extent of his knowledge is unclear. He kisses her
goodnight, which she passionately returns, but when he attempts to climb
into her bed, she panics and turns him away.
This particular coach and footmen theme is not included in the original
Belle de Jour (1928) novel by Joseph Kessel but is instead found in Pierre
Louÿs’s La femme et le pantin (1898), which Buñuel used again in That
Obscure Object of Desire (1977), another film about a violent, repressed
romance. This link between masochism, fantasy, and dreams is of particular
importance in Belle de Jour. Deleuze explains that “[t]he masochist needs to
believe that he is dreaming even when he is not” (1989, 33). For Séverine, the
most important fantasies occur in this waking dream state, where she is able
to divorce herself from reality and pursue the sexual utopia she is unable to
approach in her bourgeois marriage. She refers to them as dreams at several
times in the film, though we witness that they occur in her waking state,
where she seems to briefly fade out of reality. This temporal break becomes
 Female Pleasure and Performance 137

associated with her daily “missing” or absent time, when she goes to the
brothel between the hours of two and five in the afternoon.
Séverine is successful, well liked, and constantly in demand from
Madame Anais’s customers. She also deals fearlessly and efficiently with the
most difficult patrons, such as the violent gangster Marcel and an Asian
man with a strange box that frightens the other girls. Despite this, she con-
tinues to have elaborate fantasies involving her husband, though these fanta-
sies are interrupted before sexual activity actually occurs. Deleuze theorizes
that this delay is a critical element of masochism. “The masochistic pro-
cess of disavowal is so extensive that it affects sexual pleasure itself; pleasure
is postponed for as long as possible and is thus disavowed. The masochist
is therefore able to deny the reality of pleasure at the very point of experienc-
ing it” (1989, 45). Though Séverine theoretically experiences pleasure, the
camera never witnesses it, and we are denied any sort of sexualized gaze or
voyeurism; the fantasy remains incomplete and unconsummated. While she
openly denies Pierre any conjugal privilege for most of the film, we can infer
that sexual experiences occur at the brothel. Thanks to Buñuel’s subversion
of such cinematic norms, we are permitted to see violent masochistic fan-
tasies unfold, but prevented from directly witnessing anything sexual other
than a few chaste kisses. After sadomasochistic scenes are initiated at the
brothel, the camera cuts away, only returning to show the room with clothes
askance or draped on furniture, Séverine’s hair mussed, and occasionally
two pairs of feet rubbing against each other in bed.
Séverine’s relationship with Marcel in particular confirms that there is
a sexual exchange. There is a postcoital scene where they sit in bed, naked,
and Séverine holds out a trembling hand to show Marcel. With a shy
smile she says, “Look at my hand; it’s shaking.” He leans and kisses her. At
the brothel, Séverine has established from the beginning that she likes to be
treated roughly. The only customer she refuses is a man who wishes to be
dominated. She flees the room, and another prostitute has to take her place.
Earlier, when Madame Anais is firm with her, shoving her and insisting she
attend to her first client, she immediately calms down and resigns herself to
stay. Marcel is the most violent client we witness at the brothel, but this only
increases his appeal for Séverine. She repeatedly takes him as her primary
customer, offering herself free of charge, and he becomes obsessed with her.
Though it would be easy to view their relationship as the ideal situation of
a sadist and a masochist coming together, this is an unfair simplification.
In his explanation of the relationship between Sade and Sacher-Masoch,
Deleuze theorizes that sadism and masochism are not complementary.
The masochist’s master is not and cannot be an actual sadist. “The sadist
and masochist might well be enacting separate dramas, each complete in
itself, with different sets of characters and no possibility of communication
138 Samm Deighan

between them, either from inside or from outside” (1989, 94). Marcel, in
a sense, is a living extension of Séverine’s fantasy. He is young and attrac-
tive, with plenty of money, but he is also dirty, has metallic false teeth, is a
criminal, and is socially inferior. Though Séverine enjoys their relationship,
frequently admitting that she likes him very much, her husband continues
to be the primary focus of her masochistic fantasies and romantic feelings.
Séverine is ultimately the orchestrator of these fantasies and, because her role
as a prostitute is essentially a financial exchange, has control over her posi-
tion as a masochistic sex object.
It is important to consider the element of fantasy intertwined in both of
these films—both sexual fantasy and the unspoken conception of another,
more theatrical reality. Deleuze explains the connection between masoch-
ism and escapism, illustrating that it is a mechanism for gaining power over
a world that makes us feel powerless.

But it seems clear that masochism is the deep structure of the futility of escap-
ing determinism and therefore at the same time represents the power of desire
to be free while acknowledging the necessity for submission. Perhaps therefore
in considering the pedagogy of this perversion in terms of its intransigent resis-
tance to the determined world we may permit ourselves some illusion of the
power of fantasy rooted in resistances that are always strategically relocating
themselves in contest with the field maneuvers of power. (1989, 72)

This “resistance to the determined world” is expressed in both films. Though

Séverine begins in a fantasy world of her own creating, she is eventually
drawn outward, away from fantasy and into reality, though it is a reality
of her own shaping. The dark sunglasses of hindered visual faculty that
reappear throughout the film eventually leave Séverine and move to her
husband, who is forced to wear dark glasses because he is actually blind.
Through her long journey of self-discovery and sexual experience, she moves
from girl to woman, finally suitable to be a wife and mother. In the begin-
ning of the film, Pierre coddles her, tucking her into bed, lying with her
until she falls asleep, and remarking that she will never grow up. By the
end of the film, both he and Séverine have been reborn in blood, via the
gunshots and Pierre’s paralyzing wounds. He must be fed and cared for by
Séverine, who has now rejected her masochistic fantasies and instead day-
dreams about Pierre’s reinstatement as her husband.
O is in a completely different situation. Because of the intense love she feels
for Rene, she agrees to enter a chateau where she will be trained to become a
sex slave. She goes there because Rene wishes it, agreeing to every humiliation
and violation, whether physical or sexual. The masochism in Histoire d’O is
public and communal, rather than the private, behind-closed-doors variety
 Female Pleasure and Performance 139

that Séverine enjoys in Belle de Jour. O undergoes a life of routine and ritual
in her trainings to become a slave. “The masochist is obsessed; ritualistic
activity is essential to him, since it epitomizes the world of fantasy” (Deleuze,
1989, 72). All aspects of day-to-day life are ritualized such as eating, dressing,
bathing, and even speaking. O must unlearn most of the socially constructed
habits that make her a polite young woman. She cannot cross her legs, she
must wear clothing that allows easy access to her breasts and genitalia, and
she cannot make eye contact with the men at the chateau or speak without
being spoken to first. She is also prepared for special rituals, usually intense
whipping sessions that are supposed to make her associate pleasure with pain.
The narration, which is done in voice-over for most of the film, explains
that O enjoys both the pain and the anticipation of pain. “O wondered why
there was so much sweetness mingled with her terror, or why her terror was
so delicious.” Her body is forfeit, but this is done out of her own conscious
choosing. She is not kept prisoner at the chateau and is repeatedly asked if
she will accept the rules, regulations, and rituals, or if she wants to go home.
O chooses to stay.
This leads her increasingly further away from her day-to-day life and into
the elaborate fantasy world that is introduced by Rene and developed by Sir
Stephen. She starts out as independent and conventional. From the moment
Pierre forces her to shed her underwear, symbolically shedding and cutting
away romantic and social conventions, she steps further and further into a
total dissolution of identity and social life that represents a sort of freedom
through ultimate liberation. Her initial reconditioning at the chateau and
later physical transformation through branding and corset training lead to
the final moments of the film, where O is costumed and masked, a symbolic
rejection of individual identity. She has transcended the bonds of woman-
hood and entered into a realm of myth, appearing, as the narrator states,
either as a wax sculpture or as a “creature from another world.” This rejec-
tion and subsequent rebirth have put her on equal footing with Sir Stephen,
who finally admits how much he loves her. This different, much more tri-
umphant ending than the novel closes the film with a shot of Sir Stephen’s
hand, which O has branded with an “O” to mark him as belonging to her.
Waiting is another important element of both masochism and eroticism
in Histoire d’O. Though it is an erotic film with some moments of soft-core
sex, the slave fantasy is only part of the equation. In Peter Cosgrove’s arti-
cle “Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze and the Subversive Masochism of the
Image, ” he states that “[d]isavowal, suspense, waiting, fetishism and fantasy
together make up the specific constellation of masochism” (1999, 409). As
with the temporal lapses in Belle de Jour, there are several scenes in the film
that involve O waiting for a ritual or major event to occur. In the first scene,
she waits in the taxi with Rene, unsure of where she is going. He makes her
140 Samm Deighan

remove her underwear and garter belt, giving commands instead of explana-
tions. At the chateau itself, she waits in the antechamber for what feels like
hours before she discovers where she is and what will happen to her there.
Before a special whipping ceremony, she is made to wait for an indetermi-
nate amount of time. The narrator states that “O lost all track of time. Day
was no longer day, nor was the night. The lights were never extinguished.”
Finally, when she is first left alone at the home of Sir Stephen, her new
master, the narrator explains that part of the pleasure and agony in waiting
is that she doesn’t know what will happen to her. She is afraid to find out,
but finds pleasure in anticipation. In her article on Simone de Beauvoir and
Catherine Breillat, Liz Constable explains this connection between waiting,
vision, and fantasy:

The image-making faculty, then, lies at the root of masochistic fantasy, set-
ting the scene for the climactic moment. Indeed all authorities insist that
masochism tends to prolong the moment of discharge as long as possible and
to dwell at the level of imagistic foreplay, even in this choice tending towards
perversion in terms of the theories of sexual orthodoxy for which ejaculation
is the goal of coitus. The fantastic dramas, the sets and props, the savoring of
the play of the imagination are all at least as important to the masochist as
the moment of orgasm. (2004, 681)

This delayed pleasure that O experiences comes after a sequence of anx-

ious waiting followed by pain and violence, which is equally relieving and
humiliating for her. Like Séverine, reality and fantasy collide together, pro-
ducing moments of extreme shame that seem to be at the root of O’s pleasure
and her liberation. After her time at the chateau, where she relearns social
behaviors for her role as slave, she emerges back into the world as a new,
theoretically more liberated woman. Her creative abilities as a photographer
flourish, and others remark that her work has a new vitality they have never
witnessed before. Men and beautiful women begin to flock to her, and she
herself appears sexier and more beautiful.
In both of these films, the female protagonists are inevitably defined
by their sexuality, both by the camera and the other characters, regardless
of gender. These somewhat shared universes are structured around sexual
desire and are motivated by an interest in pleasure and an unspoken com-
petition to be the most desirable. Séverine and O are, in their own spheres
of influence, the most attractive and sexually desirable, partly because of
some sort of elevated social status. In the brothel, Séverine is given a special,
more desired role because she is a novice, but also because of the beauty of
her expensively made clothes. “Class,” her first client observes, “is not some-
thing you can buy.” O is in a similar position when she visits the chateau
 Female Pleasure and Performance 141

to be made a slave. In some immeasurable way, she is not like the other
women, and men find her more desirable. She and Séverine share a combi-
nation of social class, inexperience, and beauty. Both characters are also in
the brothel/chateau because they want to be, not because life circumstances
or finances have driven them there.6 But what about female pleasure? What
do Séverine and O actually get from these experiences? Cosgrove illustrates
the primary issue with female pleasure in film. “Cinema’s clichés about inti-
macy are doubly alienating for women: they alienate through their focus
on women accommodating others’ sexual desires, acquiescing to the social
convention that they need to be sexy to please men, yet not have their own
sexual desires” (1999, 421). Both O and Séverine do receive pleasure and
have an abundance of their own sexual desires—it is this overwhelming
desire that spills out and consumes the narrative worlds of these films.
At first it is unclear if Séverine is a virgin or if her marriage has been
consummated by the start of the film. The terrified interactions she has
with her husband after a year of marriage don’t give a positive indication; it
seems unlikely with the pattern they have established of sleeping in separate
beds, her headaches and fatigue, and her aversion to being touched. Being at
Madame Anais’s brothel changes Séverine and opens up a new side of her.
For the first time, she is physically relaxed. She laughs, is sexual with her hus-
band, and allows herself to feel pleasure. Though her first client is not entirely
successful and it takes her a while to return, her second client marks a depar-
ture in the film, a place where fantasy and reality begin to intersect. This
second client is an Asian man, presumably Japanese since he bears a “Geisha
Club” credit card, who terrifies all the other girls. He opens a mysterious box
that gives off a strange buzzing sound and frightens everyone except Séverine.
Before they engage in sex, he stretches, flexing his muscles, and jingles bells
in his hands. The sound is similar to the jingling bells that usually herald
Séverine’s fantasies. She smiles and laughs, pulling him toward her. Later, she
meets with a wealthy duke who wants to take her to his country home for a
bizarre, necrophiliac ritual. Not only are the jingling bells present, but they
take a carriage ride similar to her first fantasy with Pierre.
Sexual desire is equally problematic in Histoire d’O. Though the O of
the novel feels a great deal of shame at various things throughout the book,
her cinematic counterpart is confident and proud. She claims to totally give
herself to her boyfriend, Rene, but upon entering the chateau, she actually
removes herself from him physically and gives herself to all others. Though
she says she is doing this to prove her devotion to Rene, there are several
scenes where she flirts with other men and gets noticeable sexual pleasure
from interactions with them, particularly illicit interactions. The narrator
explains that “O loved everything that came from her lover. It was her lover
that possessed her through these strangers to whom he had surrendered her.”
142 Samm Deighan

Her later surrender to Sir Stephen is also questionable. After only one din-
ner with Rene and him, she agrees to be equally “his,” meaning that she has
to listen and obey the way that she does with the increasingly absent Rene.
Stephen, unlike Rene, is more experienced and more observant. He senses
O’s desire and large sexual appetite immediately. He asks her, “Does he real-
ize you want every man who desires you?” This seems to excite Stephen,
rather than arousing conventional romantic emotions like jealousy.
Unlike Belle de Jour, Histoire d’O has long been considered an exploita-
tion film, a genre that has more in common with soft-core pornography
and less with the art house circuit. O willingly becomes a slave to please
her lover, lets a variety of men use her as they see fit, and also allows herself
to be discarded into the hands of another “owner.” O’s obvious pleasure is
problematic, especially in regard to her lesbian lover, Jacqueline. O intro-
duces her to Sir Stephen after the two women begin to spend a lot of time
together. He approves the union and convinces her to sexualize the rela-
tionship. This mutual attraction turns Jacqueline into an object of sexual-
ized gaze for both O and Sir Stephen, as well as Rene who is in love with
her. Peter Cosgrove states, “A long line of feminist psychoanalytic theory
has argued in effect that women do not gain access to ‘the gaze’ because
feminine sexuality has been constructed as lacking the phallus as signifier
of desire. Without it, women are all proximity and closeness. Lacking ‘lack,’
they lack a proper distance from the image” (1999, 412). O’s relationship
with Jacqueline is particularly difficult to navigate because of the “distance”
or “lack” that Cosgrove mentions. It is immediately clear that Jacqueline is
captivated by and possibly in love with O, and O admits to Sir Stephen that
she is attracted to Jacqueline. She only convinces the model to become her
lover after Sir Stephen orders her and then brings her to the social circle that
involves Rene and Sir Stephen. Jacqueline becomes obsessed with O and
intoxicated by the pleasure she receives from sexual encounters with another
woman. She also seems interested in O’s alternative lifestyle, which operates
outside normal social convention. Sir Stephen soon reveals his real motiva-
tion for encouraging O to pursue a relationship with her: Rene has decided
he is in love with Jacqueline, but she is refusing him. O’s participation is
the only way they can get Jacqueline to have sex with Rene and to enter the
chateau willingly.
Séverine and O reflect the opposite sides of the same masochistic coin.
Where Séverine operates in a private sphere, O’s is public, but both women
shatter social conventions. Séverine, with her secret trips to a local, up-
scale brothel, breaks out of her role as wife, potential mother, and bour-
geois woman. She frequently refuses a conventional sexual relationship with
her husband in pursuit of graphic, violent, and ritualistic fantasies. This
later turns into sexual encounters with other men, namely men outside the
 Female Pleasure and Performance 143

acceptable social circle for Séverine to travel in: a foreigner (the Asian with
the mystery box) and a young, dangerous gangster. These two illicit encoun-
ters turn out to be the most satisfying. O also rebels against social conven-
tion, abandoning her hip, self-sufficient, and sexually bohemian lifestyle
for a world of consensual sexual servitude, extreme ritualistic masochism,
and a complex system of personal ownership that is an utter rejection and
mockery of bourgeois family values. Cosgrove summarizes that “[m]asoch-
ism is a fantastic mockery that deflects the threats of a patriarchal culture
by investing pain with the erotic pleasure that punishment is intended to
deter” (1999, 434). While it has been validly argued that this type of art
house erotica only succeeds in prolonging antifeminist, sexually exploitative
views, it is hard to ignore the anarchistic, antibourgeois subtext of both
Belle de Jour and Histoire d’O. Though these films are more than 30 years
removed from contemporary cinema, they are still relevant to film studies
and gender politics.

Notes
1. There are increasingly more studies available on these obscure types of
films, usually known as Eurotrash or Eurocult. One of the first and best,
1994’s Immoral Tales by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs, focuses almost
exclusively on a selective handful of directors like Jess Franco, Jean Rollin,
and Walerian Borowczyk.
2. Interestingly, O’s public life and career as a fashion photographer mirror
the 1973 Italian film Baba Yaga. Based on a well-known fumetti, or adult
comic book, the film details the exploits of a beautiful young photographer,
Valentina, and her lesbian, sadomasochistic relationship with the mysteri-
ous Baba Yaga, who seems to be a witch.
3. Emmanuelle actually followed in the footsteps of two US films from 1972
to do with the same thing on this side of the Atlantic—the infamous Deep
Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1972).
4. Also known within the BDSM community by the more socially acceptable
terms “top” and “bottom.”
5. The term masochism was coined in 1890 by psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-
Ebbing from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s name.
6. For instance, these films are certainly a far cry from other works about
financially motivated female sex workers from the same time period like
Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) or Godard’s Two or Three Things
I Know about Her (1967).

Works Cited
Apter, Emily S. 1990. “The Story of I: Luce Irigaray’s Theoretical Masochism.”
NWSA Journal, 2(2): 186–198.
144 Samm Deighan

Constable, Liz. 2004. “Unbecoming Sexual Desires for Women Becoming Sexual
Subjects: Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Catherine Breillat (1999).” MLN,
119(4): 672–695.
Cosgrove, Peter. 1999. “Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive
Masochism of the Image.” ELH, 66(2): 405–437.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. 1989. Masochism: Coldness and
Cruelty & Venus in Furs. New York: Zone.
Forcer, Stephen. 2004. “Trust Me, I’m a Director: Sex, Sado-masochism and
Institutionalization in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour.” Studies in European Cinema,
1(1): 19–29.
Merriam-Webster. 1995. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary: Home and Office Edition.
Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster. 317.
Mulvey, Laura. 1996. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
———. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Silverman, Kaja. 1980. “Masochism and Subjectivity.” Framework, no. 12, 2–9.
Sontag, Susan. 1972. Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Random House.
Williams, Linda. 2001. “Cinema and the Sex Act.” Cineaste, 27(1): 20–25.
———. 1992. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
———. 1989. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley:
University of California Press.
———. 1996. “When the Woman Looks.” Reprinted in B. K. Grand (ed.), The
Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas
Press. 15–34.
———. 2001. “When Women Look: A Sequel.” Senses of Cinema: An Online
Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema, 15
(July–August).

Filmed
Baba Yaga. Directed by Corrado Farina. Italy and France, 1973.
Behind the Green Door. Directed by Artie Mitchell and Jim Mitchell. USA, 1972.
Belle de Jour. Directed by Luis Buñuel. France, 1967.
Deep Throat. Directed by Gerard Damiano. USA, 1972.
Emmanuelle. Directed by Just Jaeckin. France, 1974.
Histoire d’O. Directed by Just Jaeckin. France, 1975.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Directed by Chantal
Akerman. Belgium and France, 1975.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Directed by Just Jaeckin. France, 1981.
Romance. Directed by Catherine Breillat. France, 1999.
Two or Three Things I Know about Her. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. France,
1967.
Chapter 10

“What’s in the
Basket?”: Sexualized
and Sexualizing
Violence in Frank
Henenlotter’s
Basket Case
Lisa Cunningham

I knew, since the film was a revenge drama—or revenge melodrama—the

doctors were so evil, were so wrong, that the audience would be cheering
the killings, which they did. I wanted to remind them at the end that
they shouldn’t be cheering death and killings and the monster. This guy
is a monster; they’ve been murdering people! And here, they murdered a
good person, and I thought that was worth remembering. When Duane
and Belial died at the end, I wanted them to remember that they deserved
that punishment.
—Frank Henenlotter, on the protagonists of Basket Case

Frank Henenlotter’s first feature-length film, Basket Case (1982), is a

tonally somber example of the particular type of cult cinema that Henenlotter
would continue to make for the entirety of his career; Basket Case is, by far,
the most “classical” horror film in his directorial corpus. “Basket Case . . .
took four years to complete because Henenlotter and Ievins kept running
out of money, filming in 16 mm because they couldn’t afford to shoot in 35,”
according to Alan Jones of Cinefantastique (37). The low budget restricted
Henenlotter’s ability to independently create his visions, so he utilized the
146 Lisa Cunningham

already-present aesthetic of cheap, grimy, downtown New York. He was

nostalgically recreating the 42nd Street of his youth, the always-awake locus
of grind house and exploitation fare that introduced him to the filmic aes-
thetic that he would fetishize through his productions. This chapter will
discuss Henenlotter’s construction of gender performance in Basket Case by
creating his main characters, Belial and Duane Bradley, as two very differ-
ent halves of what was originally a single male body and by having them
each, essentially, represent half of a single cohesive male-sexed psyche. The
love between the brothers, and thus any love they attempt to share with oth-
ers, as they cannot do so independently of each other, is the dark side of what
would be considered a natural bond between twins. Because of their shared
psychosis and desperate efforts to reconstruct themselves as normatively
male, Duane and Belial expose the dark side of masculine performance,
particularly that of sexual violence. The recurring theme of violently resex-
ing male characters is also analyzed as the narrative of violence in place of
sex or affection is examined.
Henenlotter has, to date, directed six feature films: Basket Case (1982),
Brain Damage (1988), Basket Case 2 (1990), Frankenhooker (1990), Basket
Case 3 (1992), and Bad Biology (2008). His first film had, by far, the low-
est budget of any of these projects; all of his later projects, however, pur-
posely maintain the same gritty aesthetic of Basket Case. During the break
in directing from 1992 to 2008, he helped establish Something Weird Video,
an exploitation film publisher based in Seattle, Washington, that has an
extensive collection of rescued, restored, and hard-to-find exploitation and
grind house film fare. By funding his projects independently, Henenlotter
ensured both that his artistic aesthetic would remain the same and that he
would be free of the censorship and oversight that a large production house
would bring.
With this kind of complete artistic freedom to create, Henenlotter pro-
duced Basket Case, the most traditional slasher film he ever made as well as
his most straightforwardly violent and gory film; over the duration of the
piece, half of this damage is done to men and half to women, both sympa-
thetic and antagonistic characters, so that no women are considered safe
here. It is through the mechanism of this violence that Henenlotter chooses
to explore the central psychoanalytic question of his world: when a male
protagonist finds himself a part of a resexed body, is stereotypically mas-
culine violence (stabbing, rape, etc.) conspicuously absent from his avail-
able discourse? The term gender here is associated with the performatively
social and socially-coded “masculine” and “feminine” behaviors, and the
term sex with the genetic or physical demarcation of “maleness” or “female-
ness.” In other words, “male/female” will refer to a physical body with the
associated “parts”—specifically genitalia—and “masculine/feminine” to
 “ What ’s in the Basket?” 147

the performative identity of gender. In her seminal text Gender Trouble:

Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Dame Judith Butler identi-
fies gender as “a kind of persistent impersonation that passes for the real”
(xxviii), going on to examine the phenomenon of gender as both performa-
tive and completely culturally constructed as well as to identify the uses of
the terms gender and sex as they are introduced above. Butler’s treatment of
gender performance is intrinsically important to Basket Case’s narrative, as
there is one physically sexless character in the story.
In the film, Duane Bradley (Kevin van Hentenryck) and Belial were born
as a set of conjoined twins. In his disgust at the malformity of the latter (who
is a prosthetic piece, consisting of a head, two clawlike arms, and a bit of
extra flesh), their unnamed father (played by Richard Pierce) has them surgi-
cally separated in an at-home procedure conducted by a female veterinarian,
Dr. Judith Kutter (Diana Browne), and assisted by two family-practice doc-
tors, Drs. Julius Lifflander (Bill Freeman) and Harold Needleman (Lloyd
Pace). After it is complete, the young Duane sneaks out to the trash cans
to recover his brother, and the two immediately kill their father. The scars
that both of the boys carry from the surgery—Belial is flat where the cut
was made on his underside, and Duane, along his right side, has a long,
vertical, rounded diamond of scarred flesh, as though he were a burn vic-
tim—signify both the mental scars that they carry from the occurrence and
the constant physical reminder that they were once one. They can never be
completely whole on their own. Once the two reach maturity, they travel to
New York City in order to track down and murder the irresponsible medical
professionals who almost killed the monstrous half of the pair. Belial travels
in a basket and is carried through the city by the “normal” brother; this
both creates the double entendre of the title and constructs the basket as a
type of portable home. When it is threatened or breached (e.g., when Duane
opens it in the doctors’ offices or when a thief moves to open it), Belial
defensively attacks.
During their exploits, the twins meet two noteworthy women. Casey
(Beverly Bonner) is an African-American prostitute who lives in the run-
down Hotel Broslin, the cheap motel where Duane and Belial take up resi-
dence at the beginning of the film. She is supportive and welcoming, even
going so far as to warn Duane of a “keyhole peeker” that lives in the building
and telling him to hide anything that he may have of value. Belial, however,
sees her care and tenderness when handling his brother and is attracted to
it. He subverts the positive relationship that the voluptuous woman and his
brother share by sneaking into her room and groping her while she sleeps.
When she awakes and flees the room, screaming for help, he steals back to
his basket with his fetishized prize in tow: a pair of her underwear. This
pair of panties synecdochically represents her entire importance to the more
148 Lisa Cunningham

bestial brother. She exists only as a fetishized object in the same way that
her underwear does. Sharon (Terri Susan Smith) is Dr. Needleman’s recep-
tionist and the girl with whom Duane both goes on his first date and has
his first kiss; her relationship with the brothers is simultaneously the most
defining and the most troubling of the film. Eventually, Duane and Belial
kill the doctors, a few bystanders, and Sharon before falling, apparently to
their deaths, from a fire escape. Notably, this final image of their bodies
is subverted by Basket Case 2, in which it is revealed that they were sim-
ply wounded. The story of their psychosexual development, however, is the
main concern of the narrative.
When examining a character who is separated from his counterpart via a
removal from his side, the evoked narrative of the Eve figure here is unavoid-
able. As Eve was produced from the side of Adam, so Belial is produced from
the side of Duane. When the two are separated, it is by the introduction of
a brutal surgical tear, a cutting that leaves them with abdominal scars in
particularly suggestive oval shapes, that they are divided. This visual config-
uring of Belial as a historically significant mythic female figure and Duane
as the male counterpart reinforces the image of Belial’s resexedness, and it
is this image that fuels much of my reading of the physical manifestation
of their scars and scarred bodies. I call this particular body resexed because
Belial is not apparently totally human, physically; he (as only a head and
arms) never formed genitalia. This visual movement from the grotesquely
unified male body to the grotesquely separated—one male and one now
female—is an important moment in the film, as it explains the manner in
which the brothers go about killing their victims as well as the later scene
of sexual frustration in which Belial lashes out at and kills the previously
assumed Final Girl, Sharon. As the female lead of the film and the emo-
tional focus of the killer, Sharon embodies many of the denoted traits of
Carol J. Clover’s archetype of the Final Girl from her 1987 essay “Her Body,
Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” She is sexually unavailable (for a
host of reasons), as outlined in Clover’s argument, but she does not rise up
against the slasher or defend herself by appropriating the phallic weapon of
the killer. Final Girls also, by definition, typically survive their films, which
ultimately makes Belial, as a resexed character who does appropriate phallic
modes of killing (penetration, etc.), eligible for the role.
When Belial and Duane are first separated, the bloody gash that occurs,
visually suggestive of a menstruating vagina, is fitting as they reach matu-
rity in the narrative of violence at this moment of separation. It is when
they wake up from the surgery that they immediately build a contraption
of blades—both thin, flat, sharp blades and round ones, like those for a
large circular saw—attached to a wagon and use it to murder their father
in a way that, as he did to Belial, resexes him to female by rending his
 “ What ’s in the Basket?” 149

body vertically. Their violent entry into adolescence importantly happens

when Duane appears to be of appropriate age, approximately 12 years old.
This even more strongly suggests that the separating action is one that is
supposed to usher in normative adulthood, though it ultimately derails the
traditional and normative sexual narrative of adolescent development and
realigns the brothers’ discourse with a narrative of violence as physical and
social self-development.
Though Duane frequently calls Belial his brother and references him with
a masculine pronoun, there is no physical or genetic evidence presented that
Belial is, in fact, physically male. Instead, the gash (especially its bleeding)
and Belial’s lack of genitalia resex him as female, displaying the symbolic
menses and a lack of penetrating (or even inactive) phallus as visual represen-
tations of this occurrence. The violence in Basket Case is always penetrative,
standing in for the sexual incapability of the monster; he attempts to reclaim
some sense of masculine gender identity by reestablishing himself as male
through performing violence, and so the film privileges here a masculine
violence performed by a “female” body that operates in order to reclaim a
masculinity that cannot be claimed through heteronormative sexual activity.
Clover examines the archetypal slasher-film killer through the example of
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), claiming that “the notion of a killer pro-
pelled by psychosexual fury, more particularly of a male in gender distress,
has proved a durable one, and the progeny of Norman Bates stalk the genre
up to the present day” (Clover 1996, 75). This does, at first glance, seem to
typify the twins’ relationship—Belial being the silent, mentally domineering
“mother” to Duane’s more subdued but just as socially awkward Norman.
Upon closer examination of specifically their physical designs, however, the
differences become clearly manifest. They both identify as male, but more
significant than their socially determined sex status is the fact that both
are figured as physically altered rather than simply mentally deranged; the
gender distress of Belial is based on a totally valid anxiety of performance,
as he never developed a penis outside of the one that he and Duane once
shared. With no manhood, can Belial be defined as a man? These ques-
tions of gender anxiety, misidentification, and resexing (from male to female
with the removal of Belial from the penis that always technically belonged
to Duane) are raised consciously in Basket Case. This allows the reader to
participate in a discourse of gender identity, and ultimately it opens a new
discursive realm in which the privileging of masculine identity in a female
form (in Belial), who has fully appropriated phallic power at the expense of
more feminine characters around him, can raise questions on the availability
of gender- and sex-constructing rhetoric to a fluid sense of identity. Here, it
is the gender confusion and monstrousness of the body that distinguish the
protagonists from their surroundings.
150 Lisa Cunningham

Because the brothers are physically altered (mutated), they are not sim-
ply hypermasculine or hyperfeminine, but instead give a confused, liminal
gender performance that calls for a discussion of more fluid gender identifi-
cation than a simple binary system allows. Their motivations are often het-
eronormatively masculine in nature, such as kissing Sharon, killing Sharon
in a sexually suggestive manner, and molesting Casey, all representative
of phallic enforcement of specifically masculine desire, but they are both
conspicuously nonsexual in their everyday interactions. Belial, living in a
basket, has no real day-to-day interactions with anyone except Duane, natu-
rally restricting the possible sexuality of his performance. Duane’s body lan-
guage when he first meets Sharon in Needleman’s office is that of a child. He
is hunched over the basket, awkwardly folding in on himself and, between
his large hair and loose-fitting windbreaker, effectively making himself
appear as small as possible. This image of Duane as a childlike, unassuming,
submissive male constructs him as the mirror image/inversion of his brother
in terms of their gender performances. Through this mirroring, the same
psychological action that allows Duane to point to Belial and define himself
as “not” everything that his brother embodies, also allows for the defini-
tion of the audience as “not” either of those performances. Without a truly
sympathetic protagonist, the audience’s perspective cannot be embodied by
or found in any single locus of identity in the film, effectively ensuring that
the audience’s sense of self and of boundaries of that self is constantly off
balance.
In attempting to connect with someone outside of his biological other
half, Duane ends up making a date with Needleman’s receptionist, Sharon.
He is attracted to this woman because of her wholesome appearance. She is
blonde, kind, and personable, and they go on a date to sightsee in New York.
As Duane kisses her, Belial can feel it via a psychic connection between the
twins. He leaps from his basket and begins disassembling the room they
share, and it is not until he kills O’Donovan, another tenant who breaks
into the brothers’ room in order to steal what money they have, a full five
minutes and four seconds later, that the kiss ends. The only other kiss that
Duane shares with Sharon, importantly, is the last that they have. Later in
the film, Sharon comes to Duane’s hotel room and attempts to seduce him.
She is startled, however, by Belial skittering around the edges of the room, as
he is intentionally creating a diversion. Instead of comforting her when she
is near hysterical upon peripherally seeing Belial, Duane forcefully kisses her
in order to silence her screams. Belial again interrupts, this time by scream-
ing in protest, and Duane then holds her down on the bed when she tries to
run. He eventually shrouds her in a blanket and throws her from the room.
Both of these moments are illustrations of Duane/Belial as the reifica-
tion of Susan Bordo’s postulate in The Male Body: A New Look at Men in
 “ What ’s in the Basket?” 151

Public and in Private (2000) that men are presented with a “double bind”
of masculine performance, a double bind being “any situation in which a
person is subject to mutually incompatible instructions, in which they are
directed to fulfill two contradictory requirements at the same time” (242),
in which it is demanded that men perform as either “gentleman or beast”
rather than as a fully realized person or complex individual (229). This plays
out in the image of Duane/Belial in Basket Case, as Belial is given no choice
because he is physically monstrous and appears as a beast. Duane is even
physically submissive to Belial, heteronormatively playing the gentleman
to Sharon’s damsel. If seen as one unified male, Duane/Belial becomes a
physical manifestation of this double bind of masculinity, and their scars
a constant reminder of the social construct’s practical inescapability. Thus,
the reification of this image in a single body, one in which, because of its
physical grotesqueness, the dichotomy of this impossible self-relationship
could theoretically be housed, is an imperfect one. It is a flawed step toward
the evolution of maleness that Henenlotter explores in his later films. Basket
Case 2 (1990), for example, sees Belial meeting an unexplainably physically
similar female with whom he, again, with no biological explanation, begins
a family in Basket Case 3 (1992). This phenomenon is never explained in the
narrative, but the desire for that same normative nuclear family causes Duane
to suffer a psychotic break in Basket Case 2, which leads him to attempt reat-
taching himself to Belial by stitching their wounds back together.
In the two romantic scenes with Sharon in Basket Case, however, the
impossibility of real heteronormative male performance is made quite evi-
dent. There is no way that Duane or Belial could be expected to perform
normative masculine roles when they, as the audience is constantly visually
reminded, are two halves of an organically single being. The filmic medium
allows him to provide a hyperbolic representation of this phenomenon of
masculine performance as something that is not only psychologically con-
founding but also physically Othered, something that is unperformable
within the bounds of socially acceptable behavior and is thus quite literally
monstrous. It is the aesthetic of the exploitation film that allows Henenlotter
to explore this truth so fully.
When the brothers are born, their father remarks that he is unsure that
Belial is even human, a sentiment echoed by Dr. Kutter, and he protests a
kindly aunt’s suggestion that the future Belial be given a name by ranting:
“She tells me I’ll . . . need two names for it—one for the child and one
for the monster as if I had two sons instead of one freak. It killed its own
mother!” Even their father refers to them as a single being, and so his split-
ting of them is not an attempt to separate two distinct beings but to destroy
the monstrous part of Duane, to control and permanently repress his base
desires by quite literally removing them like a tumor. This ultimately fails
152 Lisa Cunningham

when Duane himself brings Belial back into the house, effectively bring-
ing about the return of his own repressed. Here it is more a return of the
oppressed, as Duane himself did not shun Belial. Instead, the grotesque-
rie was removed from him, making Belial’s moments of sexual failure with
Casey and Sharon necessary, as the repressed lacks a fullness of being that is
necessary for humanity and human connection.
After Duane ejects Sharon from his apartment, he dreams that he is
running naked on the streets of New York. This is the only scene of full
frontal nudity in the film, which neatly subverts the expectations of view-
ers, since the trash film usually understands that female nudity sells tickets,
even to the point of frequently double booking theaters alongside pornog-
raphy, as examined and discussed in Eric Schaefer’s mostly historical book
Bold! Daring! Shocking! True: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959
(1999). The first-person camera, presumably the viewpoint of Duane, runs
to Sharon’s bedside, where he throws aside her covers, gropes her breasts,
and then mounts her. Since this is all shot from a first-person camera per-
spective, it is when Duane wakes up in his own bed and finds that Belial
has gone that the viewer understands that it is Belial who ran, naked as
always, to Sharon and that the twins’ preestablished psychic bond is what
allows Duane to witness the journey. When Duane rushes to Sharon’s side,
he finds that his monstrous half has strangled her in the only nongory death
of the film. This is not to indicate that the scene is without blood, only that
the other, much more violent deaths were actions of penetration or tearing,
whereas this is merely manual strangulation.
What is bloody, however, is the girl’s crotch, and this moment is per-
haps one of the most affecting in the film. There is no evidence of the ori-
gin of the blood on the girl. Belial strangled her, and he is flat below his
chin, along the self-separating cut that was made in his youth. If he had a
penis with which to rape her, it would be simple to read that she had bled
from a penetrative act, but that is physically impossible. It is not her blood,
then, that wets her legs; it is instead that of Belial. Prior to the attack on
Sharon, Belial traveled along the streets of New York for the length of most
of the city, going all the way from 42nd Street, where the Hotel Broslin is
located, to downtown New York City, where Sharon earlier states that she
lives. Because of his physical build, Belial has dragged his base with the scar
that indicates where his bottom half should begin parallel along the ground
in every previous scene in which he moved around rooms of his own voli-
tion. He is physically incapable of removing his entire bottom half where the
scar from the brothers’ separation is located from the ground while moving.
For that distance, he would certainly sustain substantial cement-related
scraping/injury to himself. When he is in Sharon’s bed, he is shown rut-
ting his bloodied and mangled bottom half on her dead legs, attempting to
consummate an impossible sexual relationship begun by his brother.
 “ What ’s in the Basket?” 153

As an originally male character made female by the intercession of a “doc-

tor,” Belial thinks that he should, by the logic of his association with Duane
and the couple’s shared urges, be allowed to have sex from a dominant,
heteronormatively masculine position. He is, however, physically incapable
of normative sexual activity. As Freud described the object-cathexis in his
famous 1923 paper “The Ego and the Id”: “At the very beginning, all the
libido is accumulated in the id, while the ego . . . is still feeble. The id sends
part of this libido out into erotic object-cathexes, whereupon the ego, now
grown stronger, tries to get hold of this object-libido” (Freud 1995, 650).
This is precisely what Belial does. As he is incapable of separating himself
mentally from Duane and simultaneously desires the same maleness that
his brother possesses, their shared attraction to Sharon manifests in the less
socially developed brother as an object-fetish. Belial is incapable of separat-
ing the females (Casey included) for whom Duane felt affection from his
own less-developed psyche’s projection of the women as object-cathexes.
Given his already-demonstrated incredible physical strength—Belial
lifted a door off its hinges and threw it across an office earlier in the film—
this final attack on Sharon is the first moment that Belial is shown to be
physically incapable of something that he wishes to accomplish. Just as the
object cannot stand alone, cannot exist without a contrasting subject to cre-
ate it, so Belial cannot experience the fullness of masculine desire without
his entire self, without Duane. Instead, he is forced to bleed from his bottom
half, illustrating his femaleness through a scene of the menses. The best that
he can achieve is to strangle the girl, a conspicuously unpenetrative death,
and then smear the evidence of his female resexedness all over her bottom
half until Duane comes to clean up his mess.
This scene alone is the only real scene of (attempted) intercourse and
betrays the bestiality of it as it is seen by Duane and Belial. It does not even
require that the female participant be alive or willing, just that the sex act
be accomplished. When Duane drags his brother back to the hotel in a
fury, the viewer assumes that he is disgusted by Belial’s killing of Sharon.
He, however, culminates his rant in outrage that Belial attempted to have
sexual relations with a woman that he had claimed as his own, screaming,
“Just because you can’t doesn’t mean I shouldn’t! Is this what I have to worry
about every time I find a girl I like: you climbing on top of her?” (Basket
Case, 1982). Their relationship as two symbiotic halves of an interconnected
psyche here is clear, as Duane is both scolding his brother for a betrayal of
trust and scolding his own desires through the use of the rhetoric of “should”
as a moral imperative. His own inability to have this relationship remains
as pure as the maternal one he shared with his aunt, troubling him and lin-
guistically indicating that he believes that he should not have had a sexual
relationship with Sharon. It is his acting on his sexual impulses that first
154 Lisa Cunningham

connected Belial psychically to Sharon, and it is this action that damned her
to become a part of both of the brothers’ most base and impossible desires.
Sharon, as the romantic interest, has an understandably sexualized death.
The other characters who are killed, however, are executed either in a hyper-
masculine display of rage, for the female Dr. Kutter, or in their own dark
versions of Belial’s resexing for both male doctors, two male bystanders, and
the twins’ father. Both of the male doctors are dispatched swiftly. Lifflander
is murdered in his home in the opening scene of the film, recreating him
in a traditionally female horror film role by being stalked through his own
house by an as-yet-unknown assailant. Belial’s coup de grace in the killings
of these men is to tear them in two at the stomach, both signifying the
halving of Belial, who is similarly missing the lower half of his body, and
resexing these men in death: their ripped midsections visually represent the
vagina, a similar midbody tear. Their father is completely vertically bisected
by a contraption that the two build, composed of a giant circular saw and
every pointed tool that one might expect to find in a workshop. The obvious
marriage of phallic and yonic imagery here marks the brothers’ simultane-
ous entrance into adulthood, their first kill, with a marriage of the symbols
of the two sexes that they now embody. Belial and Duane themselves are
a representation of this phenomenon, cleft down the middle and bleeding
from that gash (both at the moment when the operation is performed and
again later, upon the assault of Sharon), and so recreate their torment, their
resexedness, upon the doctors who committed the same act on them. The
vaginomorphism—from vagino-, the medical prefix for “vaginal,” and -mor-
phism a medical suffix from the Latin metamorphosis, indicating the condi-
tion of having a specified form or state—is performed on the male victims
of the twins. Belial does this to turn them into females, to make them suffer
the same sexual reassignment he did in an attempt to make them experi-
ence the same pain he feels (notably, often the driving force behind a “rape-
revenge” narrative). The moments in which at least one of the twins bleeds
from his abdominal wound are moments that are traditionally associated
with bleeding as a part of normative sexual development (entrance into ado-
lescence, marked by some bodily function changes and the loss of virginity),
but they are specifically archetypal moments during which women bleed. It
is the final assault on Belial’s ability to be a man, the inability to perform
sexually with Sharon, that necessitates his final shift from any kind of nor-
mative psychosexual development to one that centers around violence as the
desired substitutive penetrative act.
Dr. Kutter, the most performatively masculine and dominant of the char-
acters, is also arguably the most domineering character in the entire film.
She is first introduced to the audience during a romantic dinner, wherein she
calls her much younger male companion only by emasculating pet names and
 “ What ’s in the Basket?” 155

is overtly sexually predatory. When Duane and Belial arrive in her office a
few days later, Duane reveals his identity and confronts her about her medi-
cal misconduct. Kutter defends her actions, insisting she performed admira-
bly and even asking, “I did it to make you normal, didn’t I?” (Basket Case,
1982). She assumes, at first, that Duane came to thank her for the surgery
that she performed, but this is symptomatic of a greater misunderstanding
of the situation; she does not see Belial as an individual and thus cannot
understand that she, rather than removing an inconvenient growth from
Duane’s side, performed an unintentional sexual reassignment surgery on
Belial. She doesn’t realize this, however, and so spends her final few minutes
in the film assuming her own graciousness in performing the “normalizing”
surgery which, even simply by dint of the massive scar it left, was still not
really normalizing.
Kutter is killed in the most overtly sexual murder of the doctors, one that
puts Belial in a distinctly sexually dominant position as he first attaches
his mouth to her neck and then shoves his fingers into her mouth. She is
eventually slain when the rape metaphor comes to its climax. Belial strangles
her from behind and penetrates her face with a drawerful of scalpels. She is
the person, as the surgeon who made the cuts, who kept Belial from ever
being able to experience normative sexual gratification. It is fitting, there-
fore, that her death be sexually charged as Belial’s quest to kill the trip-
tych that attempted to discard him is satisfied in killing her. When he later
attempts to find similar gratification outside of killing, he is twice thwarted,
both times by his physical malformation. He is not, for example, angered
by Duane’s kissing of Sharon when she is in the same room as Belial until
Duane begins to grope her, the same action at which he failed earlier in the
film with Casey. His incapacitation (in light of Duane’s capacity) is what
infuriates him more than anything else.
Much of Basket Case’s content fits Clover’s structure of the slasher film,
as she argues, “the killer is the psychotic product of a sick family but still
recognizably human; the victim is a beautiful, sexually active woman; the
location is not-home, at a Terrible Place; the weapon is something other than
a gun; the attack is registered from the victim’s point of view and comes
with sudden shockingness” (Clover 1996, 72). This film departs in small
but extremely significant ways from the archetypal construct set forth here.
The differences are threefold: the killer is only half human, as the physical
killer is the monstrous half of the dual being; the location is at the homes
of the victims, in their own city, and is a not-home only to the killers; and
the attacks are always viewed from the killer’s perspective. These structural
differences, taken as a whole, place Belial cinematically in the position of the
victim, making him a sympathetic killer in ways that Clover’s slasher films
do not. Perhaps most importantly divergent from Clover’s narrative format
156 Lisa Cunningham

is that the Final Girl, presumably Sharon, is killed. There is no Final Girl,
no survivor of the interests of Duane/Belial (including the pair themselves)
except for Casey, who is saved through the intercession of the other tenants
of the Hotel Broslin. Making the hotel a home space to these people, two
of whom are victims of Belial, places the brothers in a Terrible Place, one in
which they are the uninitiated participants and which inspires a reading of
the pair as both killer and Final Girl/victim.
The structure of Duane and Belial as the killer protagonist is not unpre-
cedented in horror film theory. As Clover argues about the now-traditional
slasher film genre,

Our primary and acknowledged identification may be with the victim, the
adumbration of our infantile fears and desires, our memory sense of ourselves
as tiny and vulnerable in the face of the enormous Other; but the Other is
also finally another part of ourself, the rejection of our repressed infantile
rage and desire . . . that we have had in the name of civilization to repudiate.
(Clover 1996, 71)

Belial is still “another part” of Duane in a quite obvious sense, interact-

ing with his mind and heavily influencing his behavior, which makes this
binary relationship quite literal. This allows for the filmic examination of
this relationship, of what happens if the Other is not thrust far enough away.
If Duane exists with Belial, whom he considers the Othered parts of his
personality, then he cannot truly despise these things and must learn to
accommodate their presence, allowing for their reintegration with his own
psyche. Belial’s temper tantrum at Duane’s kiss with Sharon is the perfect
visual representation of the repressed “infantile fears and desires” that he
embodies. Rather than being a nonsensical and monstrous representation of
all that is wrong with the protagonist and nothing good, he is given reason
to be frustrated: he lives in a basket, he is permitted no social interaction
(both by society at large and by his brother), and he cannot consummate a
normative sexual relationship. Reminiscent, then, of Leatherface’s infantile
discovery of sexuality when he holds his chainsaw against Stretch’s groin
and rejects violence in favor of this new pleasure in The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre 2 (Hooper 1986), Belial also discovers an impossible female/mas-
culine sexuality in this film. Sadly, however, he can only ever experience
this pleasure vicariously through his connection with Duane, and so, under-
standably frustrated by the eternal lack of gratification, he turns to violent
killing and lashing out in order to self-gratify. By allowing Belial to remain
close to him psychically, Duane allows him to experience a moment of
pleasure that he could never again have and so indirectly causes the death
of Sharon.
 “ What ’s in the Basket?” 157

By so frequently making sex a monstrous issue alongside gender,

Henenlotter foregrounds both the propensity of horror films to employ
visual reifications of the monstrous in mutated bodies and the extreme fre-
quency with which sexuality becomes monstrous in film, an almost constant
focus of the horror genre. In this spirit, Duane and Belial become respec-
tively impotent and resexed versions of the traditional slasher film killer,
communicating an unease with the generic traits of masculine and feminine
sexual expression in exploitation film. Patricia Erens’s essay entitled “The
Stepfather: Father as Monster in the Contemporary Horror Film” (1996)
examines issues with the portrayal of male and female power structures and
the construction of masculine and feminine gender roles and expectations.
While other horror films, according to her argument, take “a feminist posi-
tion, foregrounding patriarchal power but positing the maternal order in
opposition to the destructive elements of patriarchy,” Basket Case provides
this negative paternal rule without a realized opposition, without a single
successful matriarchal figure (Erens 1996, 354). As a reification of the sex-
ually abject in particular, however, Belial is a particularly and peculiarly
sympathetic example. His normative sexual failings such as the inability to
penetrate and to have successful heterosexual relationships, to reproduce, are
bemoaned in contemporary culture across popular and commercial forms of
media. The inability of genitalia to perform, for a male, is culturally recog-
nized as an ultimate measure of failure, and Belial’s incapacity for potency
creates the deviant sexuality of his violence, the dark side of love, the only
kind of love of which he is capable. The aesthetic removal of sex from gen-
der, as it is performed in this film, has a profound effect when associated
with a genre of film known for risk taking and edginess. The combination
of gender theory and exploitation film allows for the opening up of a new,
necessary discursive space through which particularly violent or explicit film
can directly and often viscerally or obscenely question the conflation, per-
formance, and portrayal of viewable sexual bodies alongside performative
identities of gendered selves in a way that mainstream film cannot and will
not access.

Works Cited
Bordo, Susan. 2000. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
London: Routledge.
Clover, Carol J. 1996. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” In Barry
Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin:
University of Texas Press. 66–116.
158 Lisa Cunningham

Erens, Patricia Brett. 1996. “The Stepfather: Father as Monster in the Contemporary
Horror Film.” In Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and
the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas Press. 352–363.
Freud, Sigmund. 1995. “The Ego and the Id.” In Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader.
New York: Norton. 628–660.
Jones, Alan. 1990. “Henenlotter Horrors!” Cinefantastique, 20(5): 36–37.
Schaefer, Eric. 1999. Bold! Daring! Shocking! True: A History of Exploitation Films,
1919–1959. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Filmed
Bad Biology. Directed by Frank Henenlotter. Bad Biology, 2008.
Basket Case. Directed by Frank Henenlotter. Basket Case Productions, 1982.
Basket Case 2. Directed by Frank Henenlotter. Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment,
1990.
Basket Case 3. Directed by Frank Henenlotter. Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment,
1992.
Brain Damage. Directed by Frank Henenlotter. Palisades Partners, 1988.
Frankenhooker. Directed by Frank Henenlotter. Levins-Henenlotter, 1990.
Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Shamley Productions, 1960.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Cannon Films, 1986.
C h a p t e r 11

Blood and Bravado:

Violence, Sex, and
Spain in Pedro
Almodóvar’s film
Matador
Meggie Morris

The films of Pedro Almodóvar, one of the most well-known filmmak-

ers from Spain, reveal in many ways a broad interest in different types of
human experiences and lifestyles. His works regularly invert traditional
gender and sexual roles in society and present stories of rebellious teenag-
ers, tortured lovers, desperate housewives, taboo romances, transgender
and transvestite characters, and dysfunctional families, to name a few. In
fact, most of Almodóvar’s films revolve around unorthodox human iden-
tities and behaviors, often portraying the dark side of sexual or romantic
relationships among his unusual characters and the scenarios of their lives.
Since Almodóvar’s beginnings as a filmmaker of the counterculture, punk-
inspired phenomenon known as the movida in Madrid during the late 1970s
and early 1980s, the Spanish director has continued to create films that
question the limits of genre conventions and cultural traditions in a highly
ironic and outlandish fashion. His most recent film, The Skin I Live In (La
piel que habito), first released in August 2011, continues Almodóvar’s cin-
ematic signature trends by focusing upon an obsessed plastic surgeon in love
with the memories of the past and the possibilities of molding the visual and
exterior human characteristics for the future.
While Almodóvar’s interests in subject matter can appear wide ranging,
when reviewing his catalogue of works there are certain recurring visual
160 Meggie Morris

and narrative techniques that highlight his personal preferences and stamp
each of his works, linking them together as distinctly Almodóvarian artistic
products. This stamp is usually characterized by a desire to push narrative
boundaries to points of excess, as seen in the noted “over-the-top” qualities
of his films. However, one of the most evident qualities of this individual
stamp is the specifically Spanish nature of these works, here meaning his
constant effort to center his films upon content that speaks to the general
situation of life in modern Spain, usually focusing on the lifestyles and
activities of post-Franco, democratic, middle-class existence in urban centers
such as Madrid and Barcelona. Thus, in his works, Almodóvar not only
explores unusual and unorthodox social phenomena within film genres that
are taken to their compositional extremes, challenging both conventional
social mores and methods of filmmaking, but he also employs these nar-
rative and visual features to comment upon the unique circumstances of
contemporary Spanish society. His films from the 1980s are especially illu-
minative of this practice, and one example in particular is especially apt
in its connection to the themes of this book. By centering his 1986 film
Matador on the activities of the Spanish bullfight, and the matador figure in
particular, Pedro Almodóvar invokes a traditional marker of Spanish culture
as the backdrop upon which meditations on modern Spanish national iden-
tity, gender roles, and sexual desire can develop. This chapter focuses on the
ways in which Almodóvar’s film draws attention to traditional Spanish social
and cultural practices, yet shows them in ways that undermine their tra-
ditional meanings, suggesting alternative readings for an updated Spanish
society that breaks the mold of previously accepted social and sexual behav-
ior and cultural identity. Additionally, this chapter will reveal how the film
not only suggests expanding the possibilities for the Spanish characters
regarding their gender identities and sexual interests, but also reflects the
complex ways that gender roles are performed and problematized within the
bullfight itself.
The bullfight, known as the corrida de toros in Spain, has come to repre-
sent an array of human emotions and social phenomena, allowing it to move
beyond its identity as a spectator sport in the minds of viewers. Although
the bullfight is a display of violent competition between a human figure,
the matador, and a bull, the toro, for physical and also psychological domi-
nance, through its utilization of performative movements and appeals to the
human senses and emotions it transcends the level of sport and entertain-
ment to serve as a symbolic, even argued as artistic, embodiment of social
conventions and human experiences. This is one reason why it has retained
its popularity throughout the early and more recent modern eras in Spain,
despite the fact that the bullfight is vehemently opposed by many in contem-
porary Spanish society, especially in the province of Catalonia. For example,
 Blood and Bravad o 161

in July 2010, in a landmark vote, the parliament of the Spanish province of

Catalonia voted to ban bullfighting throughout the entire province, sched-
uled to begin in January 2012. As this took effect on January 1, 2012, new
concerns over the possible negative economic repercussions of the ban on
bullfighting led to the continued debate over the cultural ramifications of
bullfighting in general throughout Spain, resulting in the designation of the
first six months of 2012 as a period of time to determine these economic
damages and reigniting the debate between both supporters and opponents
of the sport. The vote was originally responding to a petition brought to
Parliament with around 180,000 signatures protesting the bullfight as
a barbaric practice left over from more primitive times. One supporter of
the ban proclaimed it especially appropriate for Catalonia, whose capital is
Barcelona, citing the region’s closer affiliation with the more refined sensi-
bilities and practices of nearby France and the rest of Europe as opposed to
the more provincial and untamed nature of the cultural pastimes in Spain.1
As fascinating and problematic as statements and political activities such
as these are, for our purposes we will examine how concepts such as eroti-
cism, sex, and violence are represented in the bullfight, not only in the actual
spectator event but also in the underpinning ideological aspects and cul-
tural understandings of the sport. As sexual and erotic notions are acted out
metaphorically through the events within the arena, their appearances and
interpretations in this realm can reflect wider social conventions regarding
gender roles, sexual taboos, and sexual identification in Spain. In the film
Matador, I believe that Almodóvar calls attention to these conventions in
order to challenge their validity, utilizing the framework of the bullfight
as an artistic trope within which to explore the relationships between sex,
gender, violence and the social order of contemporary Spain. In doing this,
Almodóvar allows himself to pursue a wide array of creative whims while
touching upon a variety of issues and institutions from Spanish culture and
tradition, past and present, also adding narrative and visual elements that
reveal what he sees as the conservative, outdated pillars of predemocratic
Spain to be viewed against new, and more socially liberated, features of
contemporary Spanish society.
One of the most apparent ways that Almodóvar emphasizes the dominant
features of the bullfight, and subsequently subverts their usual meanings,
is through the actions and interactions of the film’s two main protagonists,
the former celebrity bullfighter-turned-instructor Diego Montes (played by
Nacho Martinez) and the defense lawyer Maria Cardenal (played by Assumpta
Serna). Throughout the film, it is also apparent that the prominent features
of the bullfight and typical personality traits and actions of the matador fig-
ure can be easily interpreted as symbolic stand-ins for more general social
mores, especially in the relationships and sexual dynamics between men and
162 Meggie Morris

women. The film’s main focus is upon the parallel desires and activities of
Diego and Maria, who are both obsessed with killing as a form of sexual sat-
isfaction and murder their sexual partners at the moment of climax. When
the two characters meet, they recognize their mutual obsessions and experi-
ence an uncontrollable attraction to each other, ultimately ending the story
with their simultaneous murder-suicide during a lunar eclipse.
Matador’s dependence upon the motif of the bullfight drives the nature
of the features of both the characters and the arc of the plot line, and is
immediately evident through one of the first scenes of the film, in which we
see Maria seduce an anonymous man off the street and lead him up to her
apartment while the voice-over of Diego teaching his students a bullfight-
ing lesson, appropriately entitled “The Art of Killing,” fills the soundtrack.
In this instance, Maria assumes the role of the matador, usually considered
an essentially masculine role that requires the frequent display of physical
virility and dominance, through movements of strength and agility com-
bined with expressive and sexually suggestive gestures. Although women do
participate as matadoras alongside men in bullfighting (indeed the history
of female bullfighters is not insubstantial and there are female students in
Diego’s class), the celebrity status that talented male bullfighters receive in
Spanish society combined with the aggressive motions that could be read
as evidence of physical and sexual prowess within the performance of the
matador has ensured the understanding of the matador figure as a symbol of
Spanish masculine sex appeal, physical strength, and overall bravado.
With this in mind, it is still unusual to see Maria embodying the sexual
confidence and physical dominance inherent in the role of the matador,
especially when considering the unassuming, disinterested, or passive roles
expected of women in sexual interactions in the traditionally conservative
Spanish society of the recent past. It is still surprising, though, when later
we see Diego also assume the role of the matador in his aggressive pur-
suit of Maria, acting as the physically superior competitor and also the one
who is able to keep his emotions most controlled in their engagements, for
although the matador indeed displays this erotic charge, it is always within
the contained arena of ritual and strictly choreographed pacing. Are we,
then, meant to see both Maria and Diego in the role of the matador? Since
both characters are shown as sexual predators and murderers in their indi-
vidual lives, embodying the intent and zeal of the ideal matador through
their desires and artful executions of their killings, it would seem that both
Diego and Maria hold claim to the position of dominance in their romantic
enterprises. If so, this differs greatly from the conventional gender roles in
Spain, with the man as the active controller and the woman as the pas-
sive receiver, especially in the religiously and socially conservative society
enforced under the Franco regime, which lasted from 1936 to 1975. Here,
 Blood and Bravad o 163

though, rather than simply inverting the traditional gender roles, Almodóvar
allows for the oscillation between roles of passivity and dominance, provid-
ing more freedom in the assumption of different positions within the sexual
encounters for men and women in contemporary Spain.
In later parts of the film, Maria and Diego continue to alternate between
roles of passivity and dominance, portraying both the parts of the matador
and the toro in their bullfighting-like relationship. In this way, they also
mimic the performance of the matador within the actual arena of the bull-
fight, since the figure of the matador must embrace both dominant and
passive actions throughout the choreography of the encounter with the bull;
this is often discussed in terms of embodying both feminine and mascu-
line qualities throughout the event, not only in the physical acts but also in
the aesthetic aspects, such as the costuming and visual styling.2 This is yet
another way that Almodóvar quotes from the bullfighting manual to por-
tray a sexually charged interaction between men and women whose implied
or symbolic meaning extends beyond the conventional notions of mascu-
line dominance and feminine passivity, allowing him to reveal the possible
sexual ambiguities within the structure of the bullfight itself as well as the
potential for different sexual dynamics within a modern Spanish romance.
Since in the bullfight the display of feminine qualities and greater gender
role ambiguity is part of the performance, it is a necessary feature leading
up to the moment of climax, the kill. It is not unusual, then, for Maria to
embody typically masculine behavior in order to achieve her ultimate goal,
whether that is sexual satisfaction or murder, or both. Within this narrative
framework, Almodóvar’s leading woman is allowed to pursue her pleasure,
even if that is murderous sex, without breaking with the conventions of
the thematic fabric of the bullfight, even though this varies greatly from
the normal accepted behavior for women and their sexual desire or activ-
ity within the realm of real life in the film. Through the application of the
bullfight model onto the lives of Diego and Maria, Almodóvar allows for an
expanded understanding of acceptable gender identities and sexual activities
that breaks with previous social strictures, especially for women, and pres-
ents their desires and choices as a natural, indeed almost inevitable, part of
their existence in this world.
The connection between sex and violence is a prominent theme through-
out Matador, with both protagonists engaging in murderous activities dur-
ing sexual acts, culminating in their mutual murder-suicide lovemaking at
the end of the film. The portrayal of violent sex is a bit different from what
might be expected, though, considering the fact that the violence is limited
to murders committed by Maria and Diego upon sexual partners unknow-
ing of and not participating in these violent preferences (with the exception
of the final scene). Certainly issues such as voyeurism, fetishism, sadism,
164 Meggie Morris

objects of desire, and the culpability of the viewer, among other conceptual
and theoretical issues regarding sex, are invoked throughout the film. For
instance, these issues are invoked through the presence of explicitly graphic
sexual scenes that display both violence and murder, the knowledge of these
acts by other characters, and the performative or visually dramatic nature of
these acts as carried out by the protagonists on screen. These issues within
the fabric of Almodóvar’s Matador have been taken up by Spanish film his-
torians such as Paul Julian Smith, who in turn references feminist and psy-
choanalytic theorists such as Linda Williams to address the pornographic
and problematic issues hinted at in the film.3 But rather than exploring the
fields of violent acts or violent-seeming acts during sex, or discussing ways
in which these acts are portrayed in film and art, I choose to focus here on
another reading of Almodóvar’s inclusion of these concepts and actions.
When considering Almodóvar’s interest in maintaining the thematic
framework of the bullfight narrative, the prominence of these violent sex-
ual encounters can be seen as a result of the undeniable desire to kill that
dominates the actions of the protagonists, one that happens to be most sat-
isfyingly achieved when combined with predatory sexual interactions. In
this way, Almodóvar pulls us back to the idea of the bullfight and thus to
a specifically Spanish aspect or reading of this subject matter. By making
the central driving emotion a desire to kill, rather than a desire for sex,
Almodóvar continues the parallel between a matador’s purpose of killing
and Maria and Diego’s need to kill. This purpose-like desire is still heav-
ily sexually charged, however, since, as in the bullfight, the murders are
committed in an atmosphere of extreme agitation and arousal combined
with implied or explicit erotic acts. Since the concept, let alone the practice,
of unorthodox or violent sexual acts was strictly taboo in Spanish society
under the Franco dictatorship, the film’s exploration of these areas in post-
Franco Spain automatically signals a break with the conservative past and
an embrace of socially liberal ideas. Yet Almodóvar chooses not to make the
negation of sexual taboos his sole focus in Matador, preferring to maintain
a broader thematic structure that does not center on these taboo practices
but rather on a popular pastime that has come to be identified strongly as
a Spanish cultural institution. It would seem, then, that due to the sexual
connotations of the bullfight, an event built around an “Art of Killing,” sex
also appears as a central part of the story in Matador, whose characters are
clearly driven by this desire to kill.
As we have seen, Almodóvar’s engagement with the theme of the bull-
fight reveals the complicated nature of the sport and its controversial place
within the culture of contemporary Spain. Within the film, many of the
complex features of the bullfight are repositioned to play an important role
in the lives of the characters, though here with ostracizing implications
 Blood and Bravad o 165

and fatal results. Upon observing the way the bullfight shapes the desires
and actions of the main characters in Almodóvar’s story, it is interesting
to consider some ideas put forth by authors writing about bullfighting and
its relationship with the spectators. For example, Timothy Mitchell (1991)
mentions the way the events of the bullfight are masked or hidden behind
a “smokescreen,” disguising, perhaps, some of the less spectacular elements
of the event or any individual weaknesses of the matadors, clouding them
behind ritualized activity and archetypal identity. According to Mitchell, if
the actions of the bullfight are obscured in the enactment and performance,
the true nature of the sport is revealed when it appears in other media, such
as in the literary and visual arts. With this in mind, by transposing the char-
acteristic features of the bullfight into a narrative film, Almodóvar reveals
some of the historical, cultural, and social referents that are present within
the structure of the bullfight and sheds light upon the problematic aspects
of the sport as well. In turn, these revelations can be seen as representa-
tive of the problematic aspects of traditional and more recent histories of
Spanish culture. Although this film isolates one prominent part of Spanish
cultural identity, it points to wider social and cultural implications within
Spanish society in the midst of transition and change. Thus, Almodóvar’s
utilization of the bullfight framework in his film is at once complex and
contradictory. As we have mentioned, many of the bullfighting elements
that appear within the lives and actions of the characters allow them to have
a more liberated existence, breaking away from the constricting conventions
of society that would inhibit their pursuit of self-satisfaction. However, at
the same time, the use of the bullfighting motif in general and the applica-
tion of specific features of the bullfight in particular within the lives of the
characters reveals the inherent problems of bullfighting as a framework or
referent for social behavior and interaction. Regardless of the pleasure and
fulfillment Diego and Maria experience from acting out the main parts of
the bullfight or maintaining the driving desires of the matador within the
experience of the bullfight, they cannot have it both ways; they must choose
between living in the real world or dying within the experience of enact-
ing the bullfight. In this way, a time-honored pastime in Spanish culture
cannot sustain the desires and needs of contemporary Spaniards, regardless
of its appeal. Once the smokescreen dissipates, the strict rules and rituals
of the bullfight as well as the archetypal identity of the matador hinders
the possibility for this cultural tradition to provide a viable way of life in
the politically and socially liberated society of Almodóvar’s modern, post-
Franco Spain of the 1980s.
In his film Matador, as in the majority of his works, Almodóvar employs
the creative strategy of cultural appropriation and redefinition through
his utilization of bullfighting as the framework within which traditionally
166 Meggie Morris

taboo or forbidden acts could take place. Although it can be challenging to

argue that Almodóvar’s portrayal of violent sexual desires and actions in the
film actually represents a more progressive social scenario, when examining
his use of bullfighting as the overarching structure for the narrative and
visual elements, the complexity of Almodóvar’s uncanny film is revealed.
Presented in what could be seen as a strange film that borrows from differ-
ent cinematic genres and attempts to address a wide array of social habits
and experiences, Almodóvar’s cinematic commentary upon the cultural tra-
ditions of Spain and their ability, or inability, to respond to the new features
of modern Spanish society is in fact quite striking. The dramatic transgres-
sions in the film regarding gender identity and equality, sexual practices and
desire, as well as the problematic aspects of bullfighting provide a compli-
cated interpretation of Spanish culture through the dark and devious sides
of love on screen.

Notes
1. For articles reporting on the recent bullfighting ban in Catalonia, see
“Entra en vigor la prohibición de las corridas de toros,” El Pais, January
2, 2012, http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cataluna/Entra/vigor/prohibicion/
corridas/toros/elpepiespcat/20120102elpcat_5/Tes; “Catalonia’s Bullfight
Ban Provokes Emotional Response,” BBC, July 28, 2010, http://www.bbc.
co.uk/news/world-europe-10798210; and “Catalonia Bans Bullfighting
in Landmark Spain Vote,” BBC, July 28, 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/
news/world-europe-10784611. See also the article by Lourdes López, “El
Parlament de Catalunya aprueba gracias al voto de CiU prohibir las cor-
ridas de toros a partir de 2012,” La Vanguardia, July 28, 2010, http://www.
lavanguardia.es/politica/noticias/20100728/53973561269/el-parlament-de-
catalunya-aprueba-prohibir-las-corridas-de-toros-a-partir-de-2012.html.
2. Timothy Mitchell discusses this gender role ambiguity in the bullfight in
terms of the “feminization” of the matador, and also explains that both men
and women are able to imagine themselves in the roles of both the matador
and/or the bull in different sexual metaphors of the bullfight. See Timothy
Mitchell, Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 155–156.
3. See Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
(New York: Verso, 2000), as well as Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power,
Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999).

Works Cited
Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
 Blood and Bravad o 167

Smith, Paul Julian. 2000. Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar. 2nd
ed. London and New York: Verso.
Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.”
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Filmed
Matador. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Spain, 1986.
Skin I Live In, The. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Spain, 2011.
Chapter 12

The Backhand of
Backlash: Troubling
the Gender Politics
of Domestic Violence
Scenes in Tyler
Perry’s The Family
that Preys
Jenise Hudson

To speak of “the dark side of love” in Perry’s 2008 film, The Family
that Preys, is to summon a destructive gender politics that promotes female
complicity with restrictive hegemonic standards and, at times, domestic vio-
lence. This essay endeavors to expose the high stakes of the film’s misogynist
narratives on black female viewers. By historicizing the discourse of black
male dominance in African-American secular and clerical communities,
this essay also aims to shed light on the insidious way in which Perry’s pro-
ductions couch chauvinism in ostensible narratives of wholesome, (hetero)
normative family values. Centered on an unscrupulous corporate finance
executive, Andrea (Sanaa Lathan), whose self-serving greed and lust lead
to the downward spiral of her marriage and high-profile career, Family
endorses a negative image of Andrea as the “typical” overly aggressive, male-
castrating, black career woman. Sporting her severely angled business suits
and Cruella Deville–like bob, Andrea registers as unlikable from early on in
the film when she demeans her mother and her husband, Chris (Rockmond
Dunbar). Viewers are urged to see Chris as the ultimate victim of his wife’s
170 Jenise Hudson

avaricious career ambition. Specifically, the film encourages viewers to

endorse Chris’s violent attack on Andrea during a disturbing diner scene
that reestablishes his dominance over her.
Few scenes illustrate the brutality of patriarchal reprisal against the profes-
sional black woman as vividly as the moment in Family when Chris backhands
his wife across the counter of her mother’s diner. For the purpose of critiqu-
ing the scene’s gender politics, I recount my first experience seeing the scene.
Walking into the sparsely populated theater, I sat on the row in front of four
black women ranging in age from mid-thirties to late fifties. As the opening
scenes began to unfold, I realized that I should never come to another Tyler
Perry movie by myself. Half the fun of these movies is the audience’s reaction,
I thought, alienated from what K B Saine refers to in his article “The Black
American’s Chitlin/Gospel/Urban Show: Tyler Perry and the Madea Plays” as
Perry’s audiences’ “frenetic call-and-response” (2005, 111).1
I found myself drifting in and out of interest at moments when the crowd’s
vocal participation usually would have prompted me to laugh in unison. Also,
I was unconvinced by Chris’s profound naïveté despite all the red-flag signals
that Andrea was cheating on him. Then it happened. One minute, I watched
as Andrea angrily revealed to Chris that the source of the $286,000 he had
taken from her private bank account was her boss, William Cartwright, with
whom she had been having a long-term affair. The next minute I watched
as Chris faked a turn away from her, built up some speed for the backhand
that came next, and collided with her face with such force that Andrea was
propelled across the serving counter onto the floor on the other side.
Up to that point, it seemed that the theater was silent; if the women
behind me commented before then, I don’t remember what they said. Yet
they cheered for the attack. “Yes! That’s right! That’s what she gets. He
should have yanked her ass before that!” Surreptitiously I peered through
the space between my seat and the next so I could look at the women. I
thought I might glean an expression that betrayed their underlying discom-
fort, but I saw no such signs. Disillusioned, I watched as Andrea lost not
only her husband, Chris, but her lover, William, her car, and her job, and
was forced, ultimately, to depend on Chris (by then her ex-husband) for
charity. One scene in the denouement shows Chris stopping by what appears
to be Andrea’s gloomy motel room to deliver money to her. As Chris pre-
pares to leave (presumably to his now-thriving construction business), he
kindly kisses the forehead of the child he has learned is not his own. I left
the theater riddled by questions about Perry’s creative direction of the scene.
Why had Chris’s achievement of professional success hinged on Andrea’s
comeuppance? Why had Perry choreographed the slap so forcefully?
The scene smacks (literally) of patriarchal dominance. Echoing the black
liberation theology of Perry’s largely Christian fan base with its reiteration
 The Backhand of Backlash 171

of the moral, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall,” the scene antici-
pates Chris’s subsequent rise to success on the heels of Andrea’s personal
and professional demise. The trenchant sexism of the scene correlates with
traditions of the black church, if black (fe)male theologians and scholars’
assertions of the deep-seated (hetero)sexism that permeates religious spaces
is any indicator. As theologians such as Demetrius K. Williams, Delores S.
Williams, Anthony B. Pinn, Jacquelyn Grant, and Kelley Brown Douglass
argue, African-American notions of black female subjugation are rooted in
histories of oppressive patriarchal modeling that black men have adopted to
assert their own masculinity.2
Consequently, the key effort among black women theologians has been
to interrogate these (hetero)sexist discourses. Grant lambasts male clergy
for their chauvinism in her iconic article, “Black Theology and the Black
Woman.” She fires, “It is often said that women are the ‘backbone’ of
the church . . . the telling portion of the word backbone is ‘back.’ It has become
apparent to me that most of the ministers who use this term have reference
to location rather than function. What they really mean is that women are in
the ‘background’ and should be kept there” (2003, 837). Grant’s insight into
the sexist infrastructure of the black church demystifies the apparatus that
makes it feasible for some black female audiences to find no fault in Chris’s
physical attack against Andrea in the climactic diner scene.3 In a cultural
environment where viewers are taught to excuse and overlook the institu-
tionalized “preying” on of black women’s time, efforts, and labor by clergy
and members of the church community, it becomes clear how they might be
blinded to the problematic gender politics of Perry’s film.
Marcia L. Dyson’s attention to the link that exists between (hetero)sexism
of black male church leaders and black males in popular or secular culture
also helps to illuminate the parallels that exist between the black macho nar-
rative of Chris’s attack and popularized pimp stereotypes of earlier decades.
Dyson writes, “Let’s face it: the bravado and machismo of many male min-
isters link them to their secular brethren. ‘You know all she needs is a good
[fuck]’ echoes not just on the streets, around the watercooler [sic] or in the
army barracks—it’s heard even in the pastor’s study’” (quoted in Neal 2005,
12). Perry’s portrayal of the attack taps into a sea of chauvinistic narratives
that historically have characterized the black woman—aka the domineer-
ing Sapphire or castrating and “angry” matriarch—as in need of masculine
discipline.4 The staged, super(hu)man administration of justice that Chris
deals Andrea invokes the chauvinist 1960s and 1970s discourse of the black
man keeping the black woman in line. It is reminiscent of a pimp slap that
viewers would have seen in a blaxploitation film like Dolemite (1975). Chris
smacks Andrea “so hard” as to invoke African-American discourses of signi-
fying and the dozens (“I’ll smack you so hard . . .”). Viewers are encouraged
172 Jenise Hudson

to see the smack operating as a long-overdue corrective action ostensibly

to remind Andrea that no matter how much she thinks herself the pants
wearer, Chris is the “real man” in the relationship.
In my conversations with colleagues, students, and family, I have been
somewhat startled to find that even as most will concede to the wrong-
ness (i.e., the potential legal ramifications) of Chris’s attack on Andrea, they
quickly assert their belief that Andrea “deserved” to be hit. For example,
when I spoke to my cousin, an attorney, about the film, he urged me to see
the scene differently. “J, I think that the slap just showed [Chris] waking up
to the fact that Andrea didn’t care about him.” Responding, I was wont to
ask, but if Chris was the one with the “wakeup call” that Andrea didn’t care
about him, then why didn’t he smack himself into wakefulness? Why did
Andrea have to bear the brunt of his realization?
Because Chris, who is a construction worker, is characterized as the loving
and devoted, albeit financially struggling, spouse, the film encourages view-
ers to categorize him as a “good black man.”5 As such, his outburst, allegedly,
is warranted. After all, how dare Andrea snag a “good black man” and fail to
appreciate him when there are so few “good black men” out there? The film’s
reification of long-standing narratives of black male scarcity detracts atten-
tion from the degree to which Chris’s attack on his wife should jeopardize
his “good black man” positionality. Viewers are guided to excuse his bad
behavior as an unforeseeable offshoot of Andrea’s hateful provocation. The
scene confirms Patricia Hill Collin’s assertion that in black communities the
tendency is to “reduce Black men’s abuse to individualistic, psychological
flaws” (2000, 171), and thus it speaks to the power of violently hegemonic,
sexist ideology to bury itself in morality. Viewers skeptically closely evaluate
the criteria that qualify Chris as a “good black man.” Too frequently discus-
sions of the diner scene give short shrift to the ways in which he violates
Andrea’s autonomy with his dishonesty. Consider his choice to withdraw
$286,000 of Andrea’s liquid savings unbeknownst to her. While the film
infantilizes Chris and cedes to him a “victim status [that] allows . . . [him]
to scapegoat black women and ignore suffering under patriarchy” (Ikard
2007, 4),6 it conveniently obfuscates Chris’s choice, essentially to steal from
Andrea’s bank account.
Chris’s act of retributive violence is framed as a physical and symbolic
strike against Andrea’s failure, as a wife, to honor the sanctity of her mar-
riage. But in truth, the attack is a physical reassertion of Chris’s power over
a woman whom he deems as wielding too much. Andrea’s career is the
underlying cause for Chris’s feelings of betrayal. The decades-long debate
on what constitutes a normal, healthy black family, in the wake of Patrick
Moynihan’s 1965 report, attests to the ongoing tensions felt by black men
and women belonging to households where the female parent has a more
 The Backhand of Backlash 173

lucrative career. According to the heterosexist rhetoric of Moynihan and

black male leaders of the Black Nationalist Movement, a man’s masculinity
hinges on his ability to dominate his household physically and financially.
Bebe Moore Campbell’s 1986 book, Successful Women, Angry Men, sheds
light on the domestic battles that frequently rage in homes where the wife’s
income eclipses her husband’s. In her updated forward to the book in 2000,
the late author reveals that her female interviewees commonly conveyed
experiences of “husband backlash” (24) from male spouses who resented
their wives for pursuing demanding careers that either eclipsed their (the
husbands’) financial contribution financially or reduced the amount of
time they (the wives) devoted to traditional domestic duties. Campbell
details the symptoms of this backlash that female interviewees encounter:

Backlash comes in escalating stages and takes many forms, but the most com-
mon include: belittling and sabotaging the wives’ business efforts, manipu-
lating wives into choosing between husbands’ demands and their own
professional goals; refusing to help with the household chores; withholding
affection or making inconsiderate sexual demands; becoming emotionally
and physically abusive; and having affairs with other women, particularly
those perceived to be more submissive and traditional than their professional
wives. (2000, 24)

Campbell’s discourse of husband backlash elucidates the male rage that

undergirds justifications of the smack scene that occur in Family as a sound
punishment for Andrea’s failure to stay in her proper domain. Campbell
asserts that backlash sentiments often are a rebellious response to what hus-
bands’ “perceive [as] a breach in the marriage contract” (2000, 24). “Many
[husbands] act out when they feel they’ve lost control over their wives; for
many, that control defines their masculinity” (2000, 24). Within Family,
an early conversation between Chris and his brother-in-law, Ben (played by
Perry himself), validates this assessment of male spousal career resentment.
In the scene, Chris complains to Ben that Andrea is “freaking out” about
money. Ben sarcastically infers that Andrea’s complaints are Chris’s just due
for allowing her to control the household purse strings. “You know she’s
freaking out, she’s making all the money,” he laughs. “That’s all about to
change,” Chris rebuts. Notably, Ben apparently represents the correct way
to run a household. He has a loving, yet dominant relationship with his
homemaker wife (played by Taraji P. Hinson). The harmony of his mar-
riage is constant throughout the film, presumably because he is the primary
breadwinner for his household.
Perry’s troubling treatment (i.e., both thematic and in terms of staging)
of the diner scene conflates issues of female desirability and male power to
174 Jenise Hudson

send two disturbing messages to black female viewers. On one hand, the
scene arguably suggests that in this world where women are reported to be
outpacing their male counterparts, completing college and advancing in the
corporate world in much larger numbers, the one way for a man ultimately
to maintain his manhood is to eclipse her with physical domination. Despite
the fact that Andrea never strikes Chris, Family attempts to convince viewers
that Chris’s natural response to Andrea’s verbal assault in the scene is a vio-
lently climactic attack. Is the intended message of the scene that a Sapphire
woman’s sharp tongue bruises a man’s pride as severely as a man’s hand (or
fist, foot, etc.) bruises a woman’s body? The film’s presumption of black
female language that rhetorically “draws blood” invokes Michelle Wallace’s
critical memoir, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978), where
Wallace recounts her adverse reaction to her aunts’ severing language.
Wallace writes, “By the time I was fifteen there was nothing I dreaded more
than being like the women in my family. . . . Their sharp tongues were able
to disassemble any human ego in five minutes flat” (1978, 89).
On the other hand, Perry’s framing of the scene echoes chauvinist fan-
tasies that claim a woman is less desirable if she is more socioeconomically
powerful than her partner. Along these lines, the scene’s visual rhetoric
reflects the shifting tides of gender debates in the post–civil rights era. By all
accounts, Andrea not only reflects the age-old stereotype of the “angry black
woman,” but the new-age, power-tripping black professional woman who,
in the words of Lance Sullivan (actor Morris Chestnut) in the film The Best
Man (1999), is like Jordan Armstrong (played by actress Nia Long), “one
step from being lesbian” by virtue of their professional acumen. The popu-
larity of these depictions, especially among Perry’s largely female audience,
exposes the contradictions that often are inherent to many black female
audience members’ patronage of Perry’s productions. Wallace’s desperation
to avoid the fate of “Aunt Jemimahood [or] Porgy-n’-Besshood” (1978, 90),
which she believed would be her fate as a consequence of cultural narratives
that confined black women to roles that were maternal, yet not marryable
(or nurturing, yet not nuptial), reflects the same anxieties of many SBWs
(here, the single black woman) that fill the seats of Perry’s plays and movies
in hopes of gleaning some tip for marital success. Her discussion of her fear,
even as a teenager, that she would never find a mate unless she complied
with patriarchal gender rules echoes the fears of many professional black
women of all ages:

Although [my stepfather] never managed to fully domesticate me, it was him
I finally listened to because he was saying essentially the same things I read in
the magazines, saw in the movies, gaped at on television. . . . Growing up in
Harlem, I listened to these messages no less intently than the little white girls
 The Backhand of Backlash 175

who grew up on Park Avenue, in Scarsdale, and on Long Island. In a way I

needed to hear them, to believe them, even more than they did. Their alter-
native was not eternal Aunt Jemimahood, Porgy-n’- Besshood. Mine was.
(1978, 89–90)

An engagement of the women’s reactions in the theater reveals that another

deterrent that likely prevents black female viewers from assuming an oppo-
sitional stance to the vilifying portrayal of a woman like Andrea is the fear
of being stigmatized as ultrafeminist, un-Christian, or perhaps unladylike
in any way that separates them from the compassion of men in their lives.7
Along these lines, the proliferation of “serious” news specials such as CNN’s
Black in America series and ABC’s Nightline 2009 special report, “Why Are
There So Many Single Black Females?” feeds these anxieties. As Patricia Hill
Collins notes in her book, Black Feminist Thought (2000), such women are
terrified of being labeled socially as too matriarchal and thus too undesir-
able a candidate for any eligible black man seeking a female partner (Collins
2000, 84, 165). Collins speaks to the damaging impact of these pathological
categorizations of black women on their psyches. “Many U.S. Black women
who find themselves maintaining families by themselves often feel that they
have done something wrong. If only they were not so strong, some reason,
they might have found a male partner” (2000, 84). While black women’s
complicity with these oppressive narratives is disturbing, the origins of their
compliance are traceable.
Family insidiously urges viewers away from progressive imaginings of the
professional black woman. Viewers are encouraged to align, instead, with
Robin Given’s character, Abigail, as the exemplar of what a black woman
should be, if she must work. However, Abigail’s marginal presence is not
sufficient to undo the damage caused by the film’s oppressive portrayal of
Andrea. To wit, Abigail only marginally challenges the discourse of patri-
archy. Her presence in the film merely symbolizes an idealized image of the
black professional woman who does not disrupt conventional nuclear family
household dynamics. Though she “can bring home the bacon [and] fry it up
in a pan,” Abigail’s characterization importantly drives home the message
that she never lets her spouse “forget [he’s her] man.” Givens’s character
embodies that component of “black patriarchy [which] is partly sustained
by unintentional black female complicity” (Ikard 2007, 5). Since Abigail
mobilizes no new conversations about the power dynamics of career women
with their male counterparts and spouses, she cannot help to elucidate or
undo what is done to a character like Andrea.
The film’s message of the happy ending that results from a woman keep-
ing her place, as well as the dastardly consequences that can result from
her stepping outside that line, rings loud and clear. Yet sublimating the
176 Jenise Hudson

political intonations of Chris’s retributive act of violence as solely a response

to Andrea’s infidelity punishes Andrea in a way that should be disconcert-
ing for women and men alike. Andrea is fated to rely on the charity of her
ex-husband, despite the fact that his fortune has been built on money that
belonged to her. And she is reduced to begging for mercy from Cartwright
in the company parking lot, even as he drives away from her kneeling there
without acknowledging their child and after telling her to “turn in her car.”
Viewers should question this ending as much as we question the climax, par-
ticularly in light of Andrea’s outstanding credentials. How is it that a woman
of her experience, who has graduated at the top of her class with her master’s
degree in finance and who consistently has brought profit to the Cartwright
company, is unable to land on her feet?
The irony of Perry’s chauvinistic message, in many ways, is that it oper-
ates against a key goal of the writer-director-producer: to mentally fortify,
affirm, and heal his viewers. Even as he has acknowledged that his work will
not win over all his critics, Perry insists that the benefit of his productions is
apparent in the faces of his audiences. “Look: I don’t expect everybody to get
it. It’d be foolish to expect that. But I can’t deny that when I’m standing on
that stage, looking at those faces, and seeing the tears, I’m seeing people get
help. I’m seeing couples arguing and by the end of the play, they’re holding
hands and they’re together” (Carter 2010, 48). Saine’s argument that Perry’s
productions evoke cathartic responses from audiences that are of a nature
paralleling gospel worship services creates space for this claim. Discursively,
however, the healing implications of this observation vacillate in the face of
Perry’s films and plays’ trenchantly chauvinist rhetoric.
Black female viewers’ health and wellness depends on pushing back
against images such as those presented in Family that suggest the wages of
their ambition should be death by abandon and/or loneliness. As Campbell’s
foreword to Successful Women imparts,

The solution to backlash isn’t for women to become less ambitious or success-
ful, but for them to claim their own power and honestly communicate their
needs to their husbands, believing those needs can be met, prepared to take
action if they are not. The friendship men and women need in their mar-
riages can only take place between two equally powerful beings. There can
be no friendship if, out of the same fear of abandonment, the woman allows
herself to be intimidated and the man allows himself to become a psychic
bully. (2000, 233)

Perry’s authority as an urban circuit and Hollywood powerbroker with the

power literally to write the story of black women into the narrative landscape
of contemporary theater and cinema suggests there is reason for hope, if
 The Backhand of Backlash 177

black (fe)male viewers of will only lobby for more compassionate and com-
plex depictions of themselves.8 Critical insights reveal the shortcomings of
this film as an allegory of what happens to the black man when he allows
himself to be “punked” by his bossy wife. Such narratives arguably suggest
that in the face of socially and politically inclusive progress, decidedly regres-
sive, constrictive systems of belief are being upheld in the black community
on threat of violence. Melodramatic moments such as the diner scene in
Family are insidious as they silence urgently needed conversations between
African-American men and women on how to deal constructively with each
other. In the spirit of black women’s survival, we must learn to oppose such
narratives and insist that new ones be created.

Notes
1. Saine claims, “What the audience expects from a gospel/urban musical, it
seems, is more aligned with church services and stand-up comedians and
improvisational sets, and the more frenetic call-and-response scenarios that
often evolve from such performances than from a ‘traditional’ straight play.
Perry’s gospel plays find obvious roots in the ‘chitlin circuit’ history” (111).
2. See Anthony B. Pinn’s book, The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era
(2002). Also see Kelly Brown Douglass’s book, Sexuality and the Black
Church (2006).
3. Delores Williams’s assertion in Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of
Womanist God-Talk that the impact of oppression is to cause black women
to internalize dominant value systems that prevent them from acquiring
a language of compassion for other females in certain situations adds to
Grant’s argument and goes a long way to explain how such indoctrinations
can prove detrimental to the spiritual wellness of such women (2007, 215).
4. Toni Cade Bambara, Trudier Harris, Michelle Wallace, bell hooks, and
Joan Morgan are just a few of the black feminist scholars whose work has
sought to interrogate these negative depictions of the black woman.
5. Patricia Hill Collins has historicized the creation of the archetype of the
“good black man” and delineated its formation through the musical tra-
ditions of blues, R & B, and hip-hip. According to Collins, singers from
Aretha Franklin to Queen Latifah and, specifically, Salt-n-Pepa have con-
tributed lyrically to contouring this definition of the twentieth-century
“good black man.” Salt-n-Pepa’s anthem “Whatta Man” on Very Necessary
(1993) identifies the qualities of a “mighty good man.” Recognizing that
“good men are hard to find,” the song aspires to “give respect to the men
who made a difference.” The list of qualities is clear. A good man is one who
makes a woman laugh, does not run around with other women, has a good
body, is a good lover, can hold a decent conversation, and “spends time with
his kids when he can.” He always has his woman’s “back” when she needs
him, and he’s “never disrespectful ’cause his momma taught him that” (165).
178 Jenise Hudson

Reaching back to the blues tradition, Collins asserts, “The blues tradition
provided the most consistent and long-standing text of Black women who
demand that Black men ‘change their ways.’ Both then and now, songs often
encourage Black men to define new types of relationships. . . . Within the
corpus of their works, some Black women hip-hop artists echo [this] chal-
lenge” (165). Collins’s definition, inasmuch as it outlines the desirable attri-
butes of the “good black man,” makes demands of such men that often are
overlooked conveniently by proponents of the caveat category “good enough
black man,” which seems to cater to the concept of a lowered standard for
acceptance that is based on “African-American women[’s] know[ledge] that
Black men are hard to find” (Collins 2000, 174).
6. See the Introduction to David Ikard’s book, Breaking the Silence: Toward a
Black Male Feminist Criticism (2007). While the Introduction is not tied to
Family, Ikard’s characterization of black male victim narratives fits squarely
with this analysis of Chris in the film.
7. Collins asserts in Black Feminist Thought, “As U.S. Black feminists point
out, many Black women reject feminism because they see it as being anti-
family and against black men. They do not want to give up men—they want
Black men to change” (Collins 2000, 165).
8. A look at the films Perry has produced reveals that in the last three years,
the director/producer’s works repeatedly have showcased negative images of
black career women with little reprieve. There has been Angela (played by
Tasha Smith) from the first Why Did I Get Married? (2007), the hairstylist
that can’t seem to find the balance between running her salon and emascu-
lating her employee-husband, as well as her friend Diane (played by Sharon
Leal), the workaholic whose career takes precedence over her roles as a wife
and mother. Without doubt, the most vilified wife in this suite of Perry’s
cutthroat career women is Andrea.

Works Cited
Campbell, Bebe Moore. 2000. Successful Women, Angry Men. New York: Berkeley
Books.
Carter, Kelley L. 2010. “Tyler Perry: Playing by His Own Rules.” CRISIS (Spring).
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge.
Douglass, Kelly Brown. 2003. “Homophobia and Heterosexism in the Black
Church and Community.” In Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (eds.), African
American Religious Thought: An Anthology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press.
Grant, Jacquelyn. 2003. “Black Theology and the Black Woman.” In Cornel West
and Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (eds.), African American Religious Thought: An Anthology.
Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
Ikard, David. 2007. Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Neal, Mark Anthony. 2005. New Black Man. New York: Routledge.
 The Backhand of Backlash 179

Pinn, Anthony B. 2002. The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Maryknoll,
New York: Orbis.
Saine, K B. 2005. “The Black American’s Chitlin/Gospel/Urban Show: Tyler
Perry and the Madea Plays.” Theatre Symposium, 13:105–115. ProQuest Direct
Complete, accessed January 31, 2011.
Wallace, Michelle. 1978. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York:
Dial Press.
Williams, Delores S. 2007. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-
Talk. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis.

Filmed
Best Man, The. Directed by Malcolm D. Lee. USA, 1999.
Dolemite. Directed by D’Urville Martin. USA, 1975.
The Family that Preys. Directed by Tyler Perry. USA, 2008
Chapter 13

Fatal Attraction
Redux? The Gender,
Racial, and Class
Politics of Obsessed
Suzanne Leonard and Bailey Ray

Featuring a psychotic female seductress with her sights set on

a married man, a likeable all-American family, and a clear demarcation
between good women and bad, Obsessed (2009) eagerly drew comparison
to the 1980s sensation Fatal Attraction (1987). Billed as an erotic thriller, a
genre that typically scripts characters as capitulating to the allure of danger-
ous sex, Obsessed nevertheless significantly and surprisingly departs from its
predecessor by crafting new racial, gender, and economic dynamics. Instead
of the overheated and breathless scenes of extramarital excess one finds in
Fatal Attraction, in Obsessed, a happy husband repeatedly rejects tempta-
tion in order to preserve domestic and marital stability. This chapter will
address the reasons for and consequences of this rejection in three parts: in
the first section, we examine how the racial and gendered politics of black
protagonist Derek Charles’s (Idris Elba) workplace both reinforces archaic
gender roles and casts Derek as an emasculated racial outsider who unchar-
acteristically resists the lure of infidelity. The second section focuses on how
Derek’s temporary assistant Lisa Sheridan (Ali Larter) uses her position as a
white woman to infiltrate Derek’s professional and personal life. Vacillating
between victim and predator, Lisa poses a distinct economic threat to
Derek: the loss of both his job and his domestic security. The third section
explores how the film exploits a model of postfeminist scarcity through the
characterization of Lisa. As a single woman, Lisa is motivated by a desire
182 S u z a n n e L e o n a r d a n d B a i l e y R ay

to interject herself into an already established domestic life, usurping the

role of the existing spouse and gaining access to the affective and material
rewards that Sharon’s (Beyoncé Knowles) upper-class life provides. Despite
these significantly altered racial and class dynamics, Obsessed concludes in a
manner similar to Fatal Attraction; both films culminate with the pummel-
ing of the wannabe home wrecker, a battle that ends with the wife as victor
and the other woman as a bloody corpse.

White Patriarchy and the Sexual Marketplace:

The Gage Bendix Office
Obsessed repeatedly frames family life as sacred but imperiled, a point con-
firmed initially by the film’s saccharine opening sequence, a visually orgi-
astic account of Derek and Sharon’s arrival at their capacious new home on
move-in day. After pulling into their driveway in an ostentatious silver SUV,
removing the “for sale” sign on the lawn, and with their adorable toddler
son conveniently sleeping in front of a burning fireplace, the couple track
each other through impossibly wide open archways, spotting each other
across the vast expanses of empty rooms. In a display best described as real
estate porn, Sharon caresses doorways and walls, Derek mimics a strong-
man pose, and the pair join hands to explore the upper floors. Though their
tour reveals the rickety, ominous attic that will later become the site of the
film’s climactic catfight, the tone at this point in the film is decidedly one
of privileged domestic luxury. The sequence culminates, predictably, with
a seduction proper when the couple finally makes love (off camera) on the
carpeted bedroom floor. That the film spends so much time in its exposition
establishing Derek’s economic prowess and linking it to his happy home life
underscores the threat that Lisa—whom he meets on the elevator on the way
to work that same morning—will pose.
The fictional Gage Bendix company, where Derek works, likewise func-
tions to illustrate Derek’s professional and financial success: the building
that houses the offices is sleek, modern, and situated in a posh section of Los
Angeles. Shots of downtown skyscrapers wrapped in glass mirror the upper
echelons of finance, reinforcing the prestige of Derek’s new position as vice
president of a privately owned investment firm, which the film underscores
through shots of him behind the wheel of a brand new Mercedes Benz, pull-
ing into a parking garage situated beneath several fountains. Inside the Gage
Bendix office, stark, fluorescent lighting gives the office a whitewashed,
expository feel, indicative perhaps of the racial whiteness that dominates
the firm in general. The black body of Derek Charles in turn stands in stark
contrast to the literal and figurative whiteness around him and serves to
depict Gage Bendix as a hub of “white business.”
 Fatal At tr action Redux? 183

The Gage Bendix office also pointedly illustrates the commoditization of

sex and the female body in high-powered workplaces, as evidenced initially
by the fact that there appear to be no women in executive roles. Rather,
women occupy secretarial or assistant positions to men—even the character
of Sharon Charles, now a stay-at-home mother, was once an office assis-
tant. During a morning meeting that commences Derek’s workday, CEO
Joe Gage (Bruce McGill) interrupts a business report given by Derek in
order to gaze at and remark upon Lisa’s legs as she walks by. The func-
tion of this particular scene is twofold: not only does it emphasize women
as objects of desire, but a racial divide between Derek and his white col-
leagues surfaces. White men are depicted as hypersexualized to the point
of extreme distraction (distraction from discussions concerning large sums
of money no less, indicating a conflation of women and finances), whereas
Derek, though he does occasionally acknowledge Lisa’s general appearance,
appears capable of focusing on work. With Lisa’s top half concealed by a
wall, Derek’s coworker Ben (Jerry O’Connell) speculates as to her identity.
Derek replies: “I think [italics ours] she’s the new temp.” Here Derek signals
a willed disinterest in Lisa, as he says he “thinks” it is her. Yet with a close
observation of their interactions in the preceding elevator scene, in which
Derek observes Lisa’s clothing and her legs in particular, the narrative makes
it clear that he does in fact know who she is. Ben’s follow-up comment, “You
mean new temp-tress,” speaks to the power of the white male gaze in the
corporate workspace.
In large part, the chauvinistic tone of Gage Bendix is set by CEO Joe
Gage, whose tendency to dispense misogynistic one-liners to the young
men in the office paints him as an older patriarchal sage, content to oversee
his office in the style of a 1950s gentlemen’s club. “Always nice to have a
pretty lady around the office, isn’t it boys?” he remarks. “Derek married
the last eye candy we had around the office and took her off the market.”
As Joe insinuates, the circumstances of the Charles marriage would seem
to reinforce the film’s retrograde libidinal economy, whereby men not
only have romantic relationships with their secretaries but also sometimes
marry them. Joe’s quote also highlights the office’s status as a sexual mar-
ketplace: he encourages the perception of women as commodities, referring
to Derek’s wife as “eye candy” that Derek metaphorically “bought” through
marriage. Sharon is thus remembered and referenced by Gage Bendix
employees primarily for her appearance; she is spectacle, even in memory,
and little more. Interestingly, the only male who outwardly acknowledges
work performance in women is Derek: in bed with Sharon, he comments
that Lisa “did a better job than Patrick,” his current assistant, referring to
her ability to learn on the job, perform well, and cater to Derek’s needs and
preferences.
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Another scene that reinforces both patriarchy and the delineation

between black and white masculinity in the film comes at the end of the
diegetic workday, when Ben offers Derek the opportunity to accompany
him to a Lakers game. Ben encourages Derek to tell Sharon that he had to
work late, to which Derek responds that he would rather “stay married.”
Ben’s response is telling, as he calls Derek a “coward” for not lying to his
wife. Here the terms of masculinity are clearly established: a man who would
rather go home to his wife than out with other men is weak. This dynamic
also informs the men’s response to Derek’s behavior at a company retreat
at a posh hotel resort, when Derek’s coworkers encourage him to have a
lap dance. While the concept of a company retreat itself touches upon the
conflation of “work and play” in the corporate imaginary, and whereas Ben,
Joe Gage, and another executive eagerly express their desire to procure the
services of a hired woman, Derek points out that as a married man he does
not have to pay for sexual favors. On the one hand, Derek’s response could
be read as equally chauvinistic, for he might have advocated for the virtues
of monogamous relationships as opposed to defining marriage based on the
free exchange of sexual acts. Yet the fact remains that Derek does preach
committed relationships over the commoditization of sex and the female
body. Similar to other moments in the film, Derek’s promarriage ethos is
interpreted as a sign of male weakness. Joe Gage comments, “I don’t blame
him; he’s scared of Sharon,” implying that Derek’s fear of his wife’s potential
reaction is the primary impetus for his fidelity.
While myriad scenes in Obsessed underline the extent to which corporate
institutions invite and implement the sexual marketplace in the workplace,
nowhere is this invitation more apparent than at the Gage Bendix Christmas
party. The office enforces a “no-spouse” policy (a literal rejection of the
family unit) and thereby promotes interoffice sexual encounters. As Derek
haltingly explains to Lisa, the company feels “that you are not going to kick
back and let loose if your spouse is there . . . part of the reason they are
having the party, right?” Notably, Derek appears to be the only employee
not actively looking forward to the event, suggesting that his attendance is
obligatory in order to maintain his social/professional capital. Running into
Lisa at a nearby bar before the party, where he has gone to have a sandwich,
she plies him with alcohol, herself adopting a competitive attitude akin to
that of his male colleagues. “Make it filthy,” she says, while ordering a dirty
martini and goading a reluctant Derek to drink one himself. Later, at the
party, he at first refuses a shot of hard liquor. Yet, when Lisa calls him a cow-
ard, he is led to accept the challenge and the alcohol. Here, Lisa aligns with
Derek’s colleagues, who taunt him in exactly this same way. Collectively,
these instances showcase how white characters “other” Derek on the basis of
his attempts at sexual and other forms of restraint.
 Fatal At tr action Redux? 185

As a white woman (and a pale, blonde one at that), Lisa is situated above
Derek on a racial hierarchy, if not a gender hierarchy, and Derek’s race
clearly functions as a novelty to her. At the Christmas party, Lisa watches
intently across the room as he dances drunkenly, and the soundtrack to this
scene—“Play That Funky Music (White Boy)”—invokes antiquated racial
stereotypes of African-Americans as “soulful” in contrast to whites, further
emphasizing the racial divides in the office. Later that evening, Lisa follows
him into the bathroom, where she pushes him into a stall, groping him and
gyrating against him. He protests the entire time, staying only long enough
to outlast the inebriated coworker who enters the room directly afterward.
Of particular note is the fact that Derek momentarily tolerates Lisa’s aggres-
sive presence in the stall while this coworker is washing his hands—Derek’s
fear of being discovered signaling his anxieties surrounding the racial and
gender-based implications of being in such close proximity, and in a work
space, with a woman who is not his wife. Derek likewise exerts a herculean
effort not to let anything untoward happen while they are trapped in the
stall. While it is clear that he is physically much stronger than Lisa and
could roughly shove her away, he instead attempts the nearly impossible,
straining to avoid her sexual advances and resist physically hurting her while
remaining undetected.
As soon as his coworker leaves, Derek beats a path to the door. His hazy
drive home includes the specter of a police car behind him, representing
one of the few moments in the film when the racial dynamics of Derek’s
position are given explicit articulation, since the film depicts a black man,
questionably under the influence of alcohol, driving in the headlights of an
approaching L.A. Police Department vehicle. The car ultimately passes, but
Derek does commit another crime that evening when he gets into bed and
lies to his groggy wife, telling her that nothing interesting happened at the
party, a lie that later tests his marriage.
As the Christmas party sequence illustrates, Derek’s masculinity is called
into question when his views or actions are not congruent with those of his
white cohorts, and he is led on a course of poor and potentially destruc-
tive decisions by the all-consuming whiteness that frames the film’s narra-
tive. The unspoken but glaring racial divide between Derek and the white
men in his office (who, the film implies, would have happily complied with
Lisa’s aggressive sexual overtures), and Lisa herself, in turn challenge the
concept of “absolute patriarchy,” which as Jane Gaines has explained “one
sidedly portrayed the oppression of women through an analogy with slav-
ery” (1999, 295) and hence disregarded how race functions to disempower
racial minorities, particularly black men and black women. In essence,
Gaines’s argument reflects the implied race/gender distinctions of Obsessed:
patriarchy is not straightforwardly male, because race is integrated into the
186 S u z a n n e L e o n a r d a n d B a i l e y R ay

hierarchy as well—patriarchy in the film is more “white” than it is “male.”

As this adjusted hierarchy suggests, Derek is not only othered on the basis of
his race but on the basis of his ethos and actions as well. This othering
continues thanks to the actions of Lisa, the predatory white woman, whose
behavior we will continue to examine.

Predatory White Womanhood Meets Yuppie Horror

Derek’s workplace implicitly emasculates him, a dynamic in which Lisa,
paradoxically, also participates. During the Christmas party scene, Lisa
lures Derek under a mistletoe (the implication being that they must kiss).
She remarks, “If you don’t [kiss me], then people are really going to think
that something is going on.” Though he does not kiss her, Lisa manipu-
lates Derek’s actions by insinuating the threat of accusation; regardless of
whether or not he actually kisses her, Derek’s behavior is likely to be scruti-
nized. Here, as in the rest of the film, Lisa comfortably inhabits the roles of
both victim and perpetrator: in response to Derek’s threat, later in the film,
to expose her actions to the company executives, she says, “If I go in there
and tell them anything, it’ll be the truth. Is that what you want?” Whereas
the truth as the audience knows it is that Lisa is the perpetrator, preying
on Derek and attempting to dismantle his success and his family’s security,
society’s understanding of black men through cinema history espouses a
different truth: black men are predatory, dangerous, and hypersexual—three
things that serve by contrast to reinforce Lisa’s vulnerable white woman-
hood. This is the agency through which Lisa demonstrates her sense of enti-
tlement as a white woman, using deeply ingrained racial stereotypes to her
advantage. As one film critic has commented, “black audiences know better
than anyone that [Lisa’s] right. Derek, as the firm’s only black employee,
would be little match for a fragile, weeping Ali Larter” (Brown, 2009).
Lisa’s relentless pursuit of Derek can be read as a discursive reversal: the
symbolic threat to white womanhood that the black male body has histori-
cally posed is attributed to Lisa as opposed to Derek. The dynamic whereby
a malevolent and rapacious back male presence will often serve to under-
score and (even produce) the vulnerability of the virginal white female has
organized American film since its foundations, with D. W. Griffith’s Birth
of a Nation (1915) repeatedly referenced as an iconic example. While these
stereotypes have shown remarkable resiliency throughout the twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries, Obsessed, in contrast, places the heft of this ste-
reotype onto a white woman—a decision that is rather striking for a film
that makes no overt mention of race . Instead, it is Lisa who threatens and
menaces Derek and his family, including sexually assaulting him in a hotel
room after drugging him. Exhibiting the traits commonly assigned to the
 Fatal At tr action Redux? 187

predatory black male, Lisa is unable to control her attraction to Derek and
uses her position in the racial hierarchy as her assumed entitlement to his
body. The assault scene is nevertheless shadowy and blurred, presumably
so that audiences will not know what exactly happens and identify with
Derek’s disorientation. Derek’s vulnerability and innocence are thus repeat-
edly underscored by Lisa’s increasingly predatory actions. As Ben comments
to Derek early in the film, “All I’m saying is that a lot of these single gals
see the workplace as their hunting ground, and I think this one has you in
her crosshairs.” On the one hand, this statement could refer to the fact that
workplaces are often the site where couples connect, and indeed where Derek
met Sharon. The accusation Ben levels, however, is clearly more insidious,
for it repositions Lisa as the predator, aligning her singlehood with despera-
tion, and Derek her natural prey.
Though Ben points to Lisa’s singlehood as the source of the danger she
poses, her whiteness at least initially serves to inoculate her from suspicion.
Lisa serves efficiently as Derek’s temporary assistant: she is able to gain
access to his personal information via phone tapping (she regularly listens
in on Derek’s calls to his wife), searches his computer, and snoops around
his office all apparently without arousing alarm. She likewise gains access
to his life through her relationship with Derek’s regular assistant Patrick
(Matthew Humphreys), who divulges personal information about Derek to
her. (When Patrick catches the stomach flu and is out of the office for sev-
eral days, it in effect paves the way for Lisa’s entry into Derek’s life.) While
one might wonder at Patrick’s willingness to divulge specifics to a temp who
will presumably only be replacing him for a day or two, Lisa’s race and youth
help to establish her as a nonthreatening entity, serving as another manifes-
tation of the agency of white womanhood. 1
That Lisa uses her whiteness strategically also speaks directly to the his-
torical implications of black men in relation to white women. Particularly
during the antebellum and Jim Crow eras in the American south, for a
black man to even look at a white woman was to commit a form of rape
against her. As a result, black men have long been disciplined by white patri-
archy to control their own “dangerous” gazes, a history that may inform
Derek’s resistance to Lisa’s advances. In several instances, Lisa inserts herself
into Derek’s gaze by positioning herself in front of the blinds of his office
window. In one scene, as he moves the blinds aside, she steps immediately
into view, asking, “You need me?” Here, the abruptness of her appearance
in the frame reinforces the jarring quality of being caught looking. The
window blinds in the office likewise suggest an atmosphere of voyeurism:
those within offices can usually observe those in the halls without the expo-
sure of being in plain view, much like the executive meeting room affords a
clear view of Lisa’s legs as she walks by. Yet Derek’s eyes rarely seek Lisa out,
188 S u z a n n e L e o n a r d a n d B a i l e y R ay

and the way he gazes from partial concealment suggests a discomfort with
the power of his own gaze. Similarly, Lisa’s frequent readjustment of her
skirt highlights the way that Derek takes note of her conventionally attrac-
tive form yet resists making her the subject of his look. More often than not
he stumbles into glancing at her accidentally: where he may intend to look at
the notepad on her lap to assure that she is taking notes, instead he is given
a view of her thigh. Derek’s habit of averting his eyes when Lisa is near sug-
gests his apprehension at gazing upon a white woman who is not his wife,
and also his status as a subject whose gaze has been disciplined to such an
extreme that he is capable of self-policing without conscious intent.
This history of racialized difference subtends these filmic representations,
and contributes as well to Derek’s seemingly intuitive knowledge that Lisa
poses a threat not merely to his marriage, but perhaps more immediately to
his job. This danger is laid bare (literally) in the days following the disas-
trous Christmas party when Lisa accosts him in the parking garage as he is
attempting to leave work. Lisa brazenly gets into Derek’s car and rips open a
trench coat to reveal herself clad only in a black bra and panties. Frantically
attempting to cover her back up, Derek reminds her, “There’s nothing going
on here. I wouldn’t jeopardize my job, for Christ’s sake. I work here.” Derek’s
understanding that Lisa’s unwelcome advances endanger his job security is
further borne out by the fact that Lisa routinely disrupts Derek’s ability to
continue working effectively, and it is perhaps no coincidence that her sub-
sequent transgressions all occur in the workplace milieu. She drugs him and
assaults him in a hotel room during a corporate retreat (which in turn causes
him to oversleep and be late for a mandatory meeting); she calls him out
of said meeting pretending to be his wife (during which time she reminds
him, “You said you would never jeopardize your job. That’s why I quit, so
we could be together”); and she attempts suicide in his hotel room, an act
that causes his suddenly squeamish boss to temporarily remove him from
a lucrative account on which he has been working. Given these examples,
Obsessed could rightfully be designated a yuppie horror film, a term Barry
Keith Grant usefully coined in 1996 to refer to a group of cinematic texts
that, he argued, registered the “anxieties of an affluent culture” (1996, 4)
and collectively posited that “to be broke is more frightening than being
undead or mutilated” (1996, 10). The horror in such texts is the threat of
financial insolvency, a view promoted by Obsessed since it reinforces the idea
that Lisa’s overtures could seriously imperil Derek’s financial status. Derek’s
repeated references to his job as the reason for not pursuing Lisa further in
turn comply with the film’s fetishistic view of the “good life” and underscore
the risk Lisa poses to Derek’s financial future.
Perhaps the strongest confirmation that Obsessed is a yuppie horror film
occurs following Lisa’s attempted suicide in Derek’s hotel room, an act that
 Fatal At tr action Redux? 189

serves to announce her presence to the two constituencies Derek most wants
to shield from this knowledge: his employers and his wife. After questioning
him about the events, Detective Monica Reese (Christine Lahti) asks Derek,
“Do you still want to stick to your story?” patently assuming that he is try-
ing to conceal a relationship with Lisa from his wife, who by this time has
arrived at the hospital. Despite the fact that Derek does not corroborate Lisa’s
version of the evening’s events and offers a convincing counterargument, it
appears early on that Lisa’s “truth” will prevail because, pitted against a sick,
white Lisa, the black Derek looks guilty. After Derek admonishes Reese for
believing Lisa’s fictional side of the story, she replies knowingly, “What mat-
ters is that she believes it.”
Here, the lines of gender and race get conflated, since Derek’s guilt is also
implicitly based on the assumption that as an attractive, heterosexual male,
he and Lisa must be having an affair. And Reese asks, “So you are saying
that she made the whole thing up in her head, with no help from you?” The
fact that Derek’s story is likely not to be believed by either his wife or his
employers is confirmed by an earlier conversation he has with his friend and
colleague Ben concerning Lisa’s inappropriate behavior:

BEN: So what are you going to do?

DEREK: Report it to human resources.
BEN: You’re going to get her fired?
DEREK: I don’t have a choice.
BEN: Let’s just be careful about this. What if she makes trouble and says that
you came on to her?
DEREK: Well, wait . . .
BEN: We’re talking history of behavior here, Derek. When’s the last time you had
a female assistant at your desk? People are going to wonder. [Italics ours].

Two lines are of particular interest in this passage, the first being Derek’s
claim that he does not have a choice. Though in the context of the conversa-
tion he is referring to both his duty to his wife and the security of his posi-
tion within the company, the line could be read in the historical context of
the control of the black male gaze by white patriarchy, which would require
Derek to confirm his innocence. Though Ben goes on to imply that the
behavioral history in question is Derek’s penchant for “dating down” with
his assistants, Ben in effect challenges the believability of Derek’s accusations
if he were to bring Lisa’s various transgressions to light, the implication being
that Derek’s previous history with respect to women would cast his protes-
tations in doubt. Again, the film situates the underlying narrative within a
broader, raced context, underlining how current sexual politics puts men like
Derek in an impossible position: if Lisa says he came on to her, what recourse
would he, a black man who already married one of his assistants, have?
190 S u z a n n e L e o n a r d a n d B a i l e y R ay

Even his boss Joe Gage disbelieves Derek’s version of events, warning
Derek that the firm risks being sued for sexual harassment, though, as
Derek rightly points out, he is the one being harassed. In this respect, the
film complies with a backlash sensibility instantiated in the 1990s by films
like Disclosure (1994)—a film that, like Fatal Attraction, also stars Michael
Douglas—which posited that men are disenfranchised and made vulner-
able by the gains women have made with respect to workplace harassment
policies, gains which are then manipulated by diabolical women. Derek is
especially imperiled, the film implies, by a current sexual climate that would
be likely to unfairly privilege women’s cries of sexual impropriety over men’s,
which points out how his maleness and his race both serve to disenfran-
chise him. This sense of powerlessness is further reinforced by contemporary
gender politics; as we discuss in the following section, Derek is ultimately
ineffectual when it comes to the task of stopping Lisa. Instead of being the
sole defender and protector of his family, this task falls to his more than
capable African-American wife.

Obsessed as an Envying Woman Thriller

As we have been arguing, Derek’s racial otherness separates him from his
white male counterparts and from Lisa, and renders him vulnerable to Lisa’s
attempts to use her racial power to personally and professionally derail him.
While, for the reasons articulated earlier, Derek actively discourages Lisa’s
unfounded attraction, the film does offer one scene by way of explanation
for her focus on him: a brief lunchroom conversation where Lisa appears to
be mourning a breakup. Believing himself to be only innocently consoling
her, Derek assures her of her essential desirability and comments, “If I were
single . . .” Though Derek’s comment hardly implies a wish to be with Lisa
instead of Sharon, Lisa apparently construes it in that way. In turn, the film
uses this flimsy conceit as a way to set up a rivalry between the women over
Derek, a structure that locates the film within an American film subgenre
we are calling the “envying woman thriller.”
In the envying woman thriller, female psychosis is motivated by a single
woman’s desire to interject herself into the life of an already established cou-
ple or family. This desire leads her to terrorize the family in question, with
the delusional idea that she will eventually replace the wife (or girlfriend)
and gain access to all that the original woman has, specifically a loving
partnership, which may also include an adorable child (or children), and a
comfortably expensive home. Fatal Attraction serves as a foundational film
in this category, thanks to Alex Forrest’s (Glenn Close) relentless attempts
to inject herself into her lover Dan Gallagher’s (Michael Douglas) life—and
literally take his wife’s place by killing her. This structure also organizes
 Fatal At tr action Redux? 191

films such as Single White Female (1992), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
(1992), The Crush (1993), Swimfan (2002), and Playing House (2011).2
Films in this category are subtended by the sentiment that the envying
woman’s life is incomplete thanks to her singlehood, and they ideologically
endorse the view held by the envying woman, namely that this void could
be filled if only she had access to the sort of romantic partnership her female
rival does. Such representations possess an investment in postfeminist econ-
omies of scarcity, whereby the envying woman reinforces and gives open
articulation to the idea that good men are in short supply, such as when
Lisa comments to Derek, “I am beginning to think all the good ones are
taken.” Notably, this line repeats, almost verbatim, Alex’s lament during
the weekend she spends with Dan: “Why is it that all the interesting guys
are always married?”
The single woman’s attempt to replace the woman whose life she cov-
ets also confirms the subgenre’s investment in postfeminist logics of female
competition, whereby the only way for the envying woman to achieve hap-
piness is to inflict misery and pain on another woman. Such antagonisms
emphasize female rivalry, and as Bonnie Dow has argued, “women’s enemy
in postfeminist popular culture so often became not men, but other women”
(2006, 122). This antagonism is, perhaps not surprisingly, established early
on in Obsessed: before Derek has reason to be suspicious of his new temp,
his wife is. Given their premarital history, Sharon has forbidden Derek to
have another female assistant, a position that may have fueled Joe’s intima-
tion that Sharon keeps her husband on a short leash. Yet a surprise visit to
the Gage Bendix office seemingly validates Sharon’s position, for she imme-
diately notices Lisa’s beauty and the familiar way in which Lisa deals with
Derek. In turn, Sharon is visibly irked: her body language is cold, and she
resists turning around to face Lisa or make eye contact with her for more
than a few moments. Not only is Lisa’s attractiveness coded as an affront to
Sharon, but it is implied that her whiteness compounds the threat, calling
on the stereotypical perception that black women resent white women’s sup-
posed allure to black men. Comments such as “It’s a good thing you won’t
be here too long; my husband can be very demanding” on Sharon’s part,
and her intentionally calling Lisa by the wrong name, help to codify the
catfight ethos that comes to dominate the film’s final sequences. Lisa also
perceives this rivalry and comments to Derek, following Sharon’s visit: “I’m
jealous. She has everything . . . perfect husband, perfect child, perfect mar-
riage.” Relatedly, as Lisa gets more delusional, the dividing lines between the
women get more visibly drawn, and Lisa tells multiple constituencies that
Derek is planning to divorce Sharon in order to be with her.
While Lisa’s desire for Sharon’s life is then established as a given in the
film, it merits noticing that the life Lisa envies is one of privileged domestic
192 S u z a n n e L e o n a r d a n d B a i l e y R ay

luxury predicated on antiquated gender models. Though seemingly unem-

barrassed by its 1950s vision which promotes staid roles such as the male
breadwinner and female homemaker, Obsessed reveals the seeds of discon-
tent in such an arrangement when Sharon expresses her desire to go back
to school to get her degree. Derek rejects the idea, countering that there
is no economic reason for her to work since he makes plenty. When Lisa’s
existence is revealed, Sharon asks, “Is this about me wanting to go back
to school?” a question that has the sneakily treacherous effect of punish-
ing Sharon for even this small attempt at rebellion. Of course, because the
statement comes from Sharon and is not true since Derek never actually
has an affair, the film refuses complicity for advancing such egregious and
regressive views of female accomplishment. Yet this question nevertheless
underpins the film’s very real investment in keeping gender roles staid, and
reaffirms the oddly unstable economic exchanges on which this supposedly
loving marriage is predicated: her love for his money.
Though the film strains to suggest otherwise, the terms of precisely such
an exchange are directly in evidence in the terms of the couple’s reconcilia-
tion. After Sharon learns of Lisa’s existence and attempted suicide in Derek’s
hotel room, she banishes Derek from the family home. A montage of Derek
in a hotel room and playing with his son in outdoor spaces reiterates his
exclusion not merely from Sharon but from the house, a point underscored
by multiple shots of him standing outside the front door. When the couple
does reconcile after months apart, Sharon hands Derek a box with house
keys in it and asks him for keys in return: those to his new Mercedes Benz,
an exchange confirmed via a shot of her driving both of them home in
the new car. In this way, the film betrays its classist logic and unwittingly
reveals the imbrication of its vision of marital stability with an economy of
conspicuous consumption. As Eva Illouz reminds us, “Acts of oblique con-
sumption fetishize romance, denying its economic underpinnings and the
social relations that have produced it” (1997, 39). While this scene intends
to reaffirm the Charles marriage in time for another assault on it, the film
premises the terms of this reconciliation on access to consumer goods. This
sequence thereby obliquely suggests that what the envying woman covets is
not only emotional but also economic in nature.
The crassness of this exchange and the truths it reveals about the eco-
nomics of marriage become eclipsed, however, by what comes next in the
film: Derek and Sharon’s discovery that while they were enjoying a recon-
ciliation dinner, Lisa has infiltrated their home and absconded with Kyle,
the couple’s young son. Another significant hallmark of the envying woman
thriller, the home invasion speaks to the lonely woman’s desire for access to
domesticity, a space from which she has been explicitly barred. Notably, Lisa
never appears in a house or apartment, a decision that speaks to the film’s
 Fatal At tr action Redux? 193

investment in positing the single woman as one who, because she lacks a
romantic partner, hence effectively has no “home.” Lisa’s infiltration into
the Charles home confirms her craving for the experience of familial domes-
ticity, as do the actions she takes within it: she cradles Kyle in his nursery,
a scene that in some ways replicates Fatal Attraction’s famous kidnapping
sequence, where Alex takes Dan and Beth’s (Anne Archer) daughter to
a deserted amusement park. In both, the lonely woman pretends to be a
mother, and in doing so, terrorizes the rightful mother through the child’s
temporary absence, though in each case the child is ultimately returned. In
Obsessed, Derek finds Kyle, sporting a red lipstick kiss on his forehead, in
his car, which is parked in the driveway. These events also confirm Lisa and
Sharon’s status as the film’s true enemies, and Obsessed posits the kidnap-
ping of a child as the ultimate violation, a crime that it answers in much the
same way as its predecessor did. After finding their bedroom ransacked and
a family picture with her image excised from it, Sharon calls Lisa and says,
“You come into my house. You touch my child. You think you’re crazy. I’ll
show you crazy; just try me, bitch.” Beth makes a similar threat to Alex over
the phone, and both women make good on their verbal bravado since, in the
closing of each film, the wives literally kill the intruder/other woman who
unlawfully enters their home.
Obsessed likewise demonstrates a painstaking attention to the notion of
“home security,” featuring multiple close-up shots of the security system
the couple buys subsequent to Lisa’s invasion, as well as depicting a night-
time sequence when Derek believes he has heard something outside, which
turns out to be a sprinkler system. He nevertheless methodically checks on
his wife and child to ensure that they are safe, and he appears reassured to
see a police cruiser casing their street. The film’s veritable obsession with
the vulnerability of the home again points to its status as a yuppie horror
and confirms that it is both the figurative and the literal home that is under
attack when the envying woman wants in. Obsessed recognizes the instabil-
ity of both economic and domestic systems charged with the responsibility
of home protection, and the film’s release in the spring of 2009 corresponds
quite eerily, in fact, with the housing market collapse/mortgage crisis in
the United States, when many citizens found the terms of their mortgages
unsustainable and home foreclosures became a national epidemic. While the
Charles family’s financial woes relate rather singularly to Lisa’s interference,
it seems particularly fitting nonetheless that this period saw the dramatic
undermining of long-cherished associations between home ownership and
financial security.
Indeed, despite the elaborate security system the family buys, simple
human error undoes them. Sharon forgets to turn on the system when she
leaves the house, which allows a spying Lisa to come in, finger Derek’s
194 S u z a n n e L e o n a r d a n d B a i l e y R ay

clothing, and change into one of his T-shirts, in expectation that she is
poised to share a romantic interlude with Derek. When Sharon returns and
is attacked by Lisa, she says, “Didn’t I tell you not to come into my house?”
a comment that again points to the importance of the house as the symbolic
fortress upon which the mythology of the American family rests. As much as
the film tries to shore up the ability of the rightful family to protect itself, it
nevertheless exposes the shaky foundations of such dependency. In Obsessed,
the attic speaks to this instability, a construction hazard that gives the film’s
final sequence a decidedly gothic feel and points to the dark forces that
fuel both women’s fury and anger. Following a protracted fight sequence,
Lisa ultimately falls through the floor of the attic, and she attempts to
take Sharon with her, a metaphorical comment perhaps on how the rage
of the intruder sullies all. Lisa does not die from the fall, however, but from
the impact of the chandelier that eventually crushes her, a fitting image
perhaps for the fact that the house itself squelches her unruly desires. (While
all the envying woman thrillers resort to devices in their final scenes to oblit-
erate the murderous other woman, perhaps the most dramatic articulation
of the importance of ridding the house of the female intruder occurs in
The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, where the envying nanny is literally thrown
out the window of the family home.)
By the film’s end, it is clear that in spite of Lisa’s efforts, the family unit
will remain intact, and neither her attractiveness nor her white privilege
grant her right or access to it. Yet the film’s painstaking effort to ensure this
eventuality is decidedly unsettling. Though in accordance with genre con-
ventions Lisa must be defeated, the reconstitution of the couple occurs not
inside the house but on its front lawn. While a battered and shaky Sharon
walks across the yard to meet her distraught husband, Lisa remains dead
inside the house that she has, twice now, helped to ransack. Much as in Fatal
Attraction, the family is reconstituted in blood, and female warfare results in
the vigilant policing of barriers drawn on the basis of class, race, and marital
status. Disappointingly in concert with an era in American history where
wealth and class division get increasingly extreme, this cultural paradigm
reaffirms that there is simply not enough room in the house to accommo-
date all those who metaphorically want in.

Notes
1. This racial dynamic also informs the narrative of The Hand that Rocks the
Cradle (1992), whereby a white family who is eventually terrorized by a pale
blonde woman initially believes themselves to be endangered by the atten-
tions of a mentally challenged African-American handyman.
 Fatal At tr action Redux? 195

2. The position of the single woman desperate for coupledom has also been
parodied in romantic comedies such as Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Bridget
Jones’s Diary (2001), and Something Borrowed (2010), all of which make
direct reference to Fatal Attraction.

Works Cited
Brown, Stacia. 2009. “Obsessed Wants to Run Smash into You (and Nearly Misses).”
http://www.postbourgie.com/2009/04/27/obsessed-wants-to-run-smash-into-
you-and-nearly-misses (accessed December 2011).
Dow, Bonnie J. 2006. “The Traffic in Men and the Fatal Attraction of Postfeminist
Masculinity.” Women’s Studies in Communication, 29(1): 113–131.
Gaines, Jane. 1999. “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in
Feminist Film Theory.” In Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader.
New York: New York University Press. 293–306.
Grant, Barry Keith. 1996. “Rich and Strange: The Yuppie Horror Film.” Journal of
Film and Video, 48(1–2): 4–16.
Illouz, Eva. 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Contradictions of
Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Filmed
Bridget Jones’s Diary. Directed by Sharon Maguire. UK, 2001.
Crush, The. Directed by Alan Shapiro. USA, 1993.
Disclosure. Directed by Barry Levinson. USA, 1994.
Fatal Attraction. Directed by Adrian Lyne. USA, 1987.
Hand that Rocks the Cradle, The. Directed by Curtis Hanson. USA, 1992.
Obsessed. Directed by Steve Shill. USA, 2009.
Playing House. Directed by Tom Vaughan. USA, 2010.
Single White Female. Directed by Barbet Schroeder. USA, 1992.
Sleepless in Seattle. Directed by Nora Ephron, USA, 1993.
Something Borrowed. Directed by Luke Greenfield. USA, 2011.
Swimfan. Directed by John Polson. USA, 2002.
Chap ter 14

The Idea of Love in

the TV Serial Drama
In Treatment
Christine Lang

I felt from the beginning that mental problems can be very universal,
which is why we deal with archetypical problems.
—Hagai Levi, creator of BeTipul1

As the history of film and film theory has repeatedly shown, the rela-
tionship between cinema and psychoanalysis is a fruitful one. However, the
Israeli TV serial drama BeTipul (2005–2008)2 and its American adaptation
In Treatment (2008–2010) are the first TV series to be entirely restricted to
the conversation between therapist and patient.3 This chapter will discuss
how the narrative of In Treatment focuses on the patient–doctor relationship
as a forbidden trope and on how the therapist, Dr. Paul Weston (played by
Gabriel Byrne), is caught up in conflicts as a result of his incipient transfer-
ence love. He feels something for his patient, but he knows that he shouldn’t.
This “dark” love story constitutes the linchpin and principal subject of the
first season of In Treatment.
At first this essay gives a definition of a TV serial drama as an auteur
film; then it outlines the story lines of In Treatment. The essay examines
In Treatment from a specific perspective, with an eye to its structure and
its filmic and aesthetic means and with special attention to its dramaturgy
and the communicative constellation of its narrative. The last two sections
of the essay address the subject of transference love and how it is represented
in In Treatment.
198 Christine Lang

Auteur Series
Like the Israeli original series BeTipul, the first season of In Treatment, which
is the primary focus of this essay, was broadcast five times a week, with a
single episode each day from Monday through Friday. This schedule was
modeled on the rhythm of a psychotherapist’s appointments and meant that
on any given weekday, one could see the therapeutic session of the patient
who had his/her appointment on that day.4 Thus, one could either watch all
of the episodes in sequence, one after the other, as if the series were a feature
film with an ensemble of principal characters, or else one could follow indi-
vidual characters by watching the show on particular weekdays only, in what
might be described as a “vertical” approach. The reception of American
television series in Europe primarily takes place via DVD box sets. This
means that for European audiences, the medium of television is experienced
as similar to that of the movies. In this respect, the auteur series that hearken
back to the nineteenth-century novel (including The Wire, The Sopranos,
Deadwood, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and many more) appear to be a new
genre of extremely long auteur film.5

Story Lines
The principal character of In Treatment is the psychotherapist Dr. Paul
Weston, who is 53 (in the first season). Other characters are his family, his
patients, and his supervisor Gina, who is played by Dianne Wiest. Each
individual episode focuses on a single patient, including Paul himself as a
patient on Friday.
Monday’s patient is Laura, played by Melissa George, an attractive
30-year-old nurse. She is one of the series’ most important characters and
provokes the narrative’s central conflict, which provides the entire first sea-
son with its central dramatic tension. Tuesday’s patient is Alex, played by
Blair Underwood, a navy soldier traumatized by an experience as a bomber
pilot in the Iraq War. Due to a misunderstanding, he caused an accident
that resulted in the deaths of 16 Iraqi children.6 Alex says that he does
not feel guilty, but his body language says otherwise. Alex and Laura are
the only two patients who interact during the season and whose narrative
threads thus come into contact with each other. Laura tries to make Paul,
her therapist, jealous by having an affair with Alex. In addition, Alex’s story
throws Paul into a profound crisis. Because of the failure of Alex’s therapy,
which is later made clear by his suicide, Paul begins to have doubts about his
work and about psychotherapy in general, and implicitly this touches off a
critical reflection on the ignorance of psychoanalysis with respect to cultural
differences.
 The Idea of Love 199

Wednesday’s session belongs to Sophie, played by Mia Wasikowska, a

successful, up-and-coming 16-year-old gymnast. Sophie had attempted to
take her own life, probably because she was sexually abused by her trainer,
and in the course of her therapy she learns to forgive her parents and hence
take responsibility for herself. This narrative thread is as isolated as the one
that unfolds on Thursday, when a married couple comes to Paul’s office for
their session. Jake and Amy, played by Embeth Davidtz and Josh Charles,
are hoping for advice from their therapist as they try to decide whether they
should keep the child that Amy is already expecting or get a divorce instead.
Finally, at the end of the week, Paul sees his supervisor Gina for conversa-
tions in which the focus shifts to his own perspective, his own feelings and
problems.
Independently of the strict broadcast schedule and the dramatic structure
associated with it, the narrative of Paul’s failing marriage plays a recurring
role in the series. Its story is closely intertwined with the season’s main plot,
which centers on Paul’s relationship with his patient Laura. All of the stories
together depict a broad range of everyday problems associated with various
social roles and stages of life. Many of the classical topics of psychotherapy
are touched on, whether it be dream interpretation, the interpretation of
slips of the tongue and other parapraxes, or the interpretation of transference
and resistance. Problems connected with traumatization, with the violation
of boundaries, and with many other subject matters of the classical “talking
cure” also figure in the series. On the whole, we are presented with a realistic
modern version of relational, intersubjective “talk therapy,” in which the
therapist’s subjective personal relationship with his patients plays an impor-
tant role in the healing process.7 The fact that the content of the series is
so realistic is probably due to the authentic experience of its creator, Hagai
Levi, who not only studied psychology at Bar Ilan University but also has
years of firsthand experience with therapy.8

The Modular Broadcast Schedule

Since only two of the series’ narrative threads were interwoven, the ones of
Laura and Alex, this unique modular broadcast schedule9 was entirely pos-
sible. Above all, however, this schedule matches the series’ analytical style.
In In Treatment, the so-called Zopfdramaturgie10 employed by the classical
ensemble film (which also includes television series in terms of their dra-
matic structure) is “undone” and fragmented into its individual narrative
threads. The therapeutic conversations that take place on Monday through
Thursday always represent just one side of the narrative; they serve to present
the patients and their interactions with their therapist. The complementary
200 Christine Lang

perspective is recounted on Friday, when Paul sees his own therapist, his
supervisor, Gina. In these sessions, the viewer learns what Paul is thinking
and feeling and is able independently to place it in relation to the statements
that he or she has already heard. The Friday sessions have two functions.
On one hand, in dramatic terms, they constitute the “counterplot” to the
“plot,” that is, to the stories of the patients. On the other, they represent an
exchange among experts, an informed discussion of the usefulness and state
of contemporary psychotherapy and hence a discussion that—on the level of
the implicit dramaturgy—is also addressed to an audience of experts. And
indeed, it is no accident that the symposium on the series was held at UCLA
in 2009.11 In the academic world and the media, the questions raised by the
series, which are in no small measure therapeutic ones, have led to a lively
discussion among professionals.12

Self-Reflexivity
The HBO series In Treatment is not just a modern televisual experiment; it
also provides a complex portrait of contemporary psychotherapy. It is a self-
reflexive, almost didactic exploration that communicates its own narrative
strategies to the viewer, as well as a gripping, realistic drama of human rela-
tionships that deals with the all too human and its problems. Since this is its
topic, it goes without saying that love is a principal element of the dramatiza-
tion, but here it is illuminated from a psychological perspective, as a kind of
symptom or wish-fulfillment fantasy. In Treatment draws on the dialectic of
postmodern cinematic reflexivity as well as on the classical dramatic topos
of the romantic love story with a happy ending, which is also part of its pro-
file. The narrative centers on the therapist Dr. Paul Weston and the various
patients who come to him in the course of the week for their sessions.
In Treatment is thus able to make do with a reduced plot, since the latter
is generated almost exclusively by the dialogues that take place in the con-
text of the therapeutic sessions.
In In Treatment, form and content coincide and permeate each other in
a particularly interesting way. Both the explicit dramaturgy, which controls
the concrete filmic sequence of events, and the implicit dramaturgy, which
draws upon knowledge of the world outside the series, follow the rules of the
subject matter.

The Filmic Aesthetic: The Minimalist Setting

The episodes of In Treatment are condensed into a time period of 28 minutes
each and take place almost entirely in a single room, the office of Dr. Paul
Weston located in Baltimore. The only things we see or hear are the doctor
 The Idea of Love 201

and a patient in therapeutic dialogue. It is all presented in muted colors, soft

lighting, and a classical mise-en-scène, with alternating shots and reaction
shots ranging from medium shots to close-ups; we always see the characters
at eye level, which has an almost “anthropomorphizing” effect. There are
very few dolly shots or gentle zooms. Line crossing is utilized only sparingly
and always in the service of the plot, for example to emphasize a shift in
psychological atmosphere. No effort is made to draw attention to the series’
cinematic technique, and soundtrack music is rarely employed. Virtually no
other TV series is reduced to the spoken word to this extent. The diegesis
unfolds entirely through the dialogues, and in this sense In Treatment does
something that has always constituted the essence of television whenever
it has come into its own, as it were, in structural, economic, and aesthetic
terms and experienced its very best moments: it displays talking heads. Thus,
it is no accident that one of the show’s directors (Rodrigo Garcia) wondered,
“Why hasn’t this been done 20 times before?”13

The Dramaturgy: “Digging for the Truth”

This aesthetic simplicity is designed to encourage immersion, and it calls for
intense observation and listening on the part of the viewer. It relies on the
imagination of the audience, on its participation in completing the filmic
narrative. This same openness in narrative mode can also be seen in a few of
the more recent television series of so-called “quality TV,”14 which are dis-
tinguished by innovative subjects, a recognizable authorial style, and height-
ened narrative complexity. They also demand an “emancipated spectator”15
and incorporate that spectator—or his or her participation—into the artis-
tic process in an interesting way in terms of the aesthetic of reception. One
tends to encounter this openness either in the form of a heavily elliptical
narrative style in which plot threads are left incomplete (for example in
The Sopranos, 1999–2007), or else in that of ambiguous focalizations16 that
allow for different interpretations depending on the recipient’s perspective
(for example in Mad Men, since 2007, and Breaking Bad, since 2008). In
In Treatment we find a different variant of this aesthetic of open form,17
which appeals to the audience to participate by watching in a particular
way and turns its activity into a productive element of the setting. Thanks
to the actors’ naturalistic performances, a dialectic arises between what is
said and what is seen. The viewers listen and place what they hear in rela-
tion to what they see, and just as in the structure of psychotherapy, the goal
is to discover what lies hidden beneath the surface. These reception effects
and communicative strategies are controlled by the dramaturgy, and indeed
psychoanalysis itself is based on the same dramaturgical formula as the ana-
lytical drama (the pièce bien faite, or well-made play), which came about in
202 Christine Lang

France in the nineteenth century and survives today primarily in the form of
“well-made” detective stories and murder mysteries.18 Both psychoanalysis
and the analytical drama are based on the retrospective and gradual disclo-
sure of an event that lies in the past and is therefore a mystery. Typically,
the solution of that mystery is not the end of the narrative; instead, there is
an epilogue involving the newly gained knowledge, and that epilogue rep-
resents the actual solution (or denouement). The prime example of this type
of dramaturgy is of course Sophocles’ ancient drama Oedipus Rex, which is
both an analytical drama and the blueprint for an entire theory of culture
later developed by Sigmund Freud. In one of his famous letters to Johann
Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller once described Oedipus Rex as exem-
plary in this respect: “Oedipus is, as it were, just a tragic analysis. Everything
is already there, and it is simply unraveled.”19
The structure of the analytical drama makes it necessary to dispense
information according to a minutely detailed plan and to anticipate the
thought process of the recipient. In In Treatment, this takes place to an
unusual degree within the performance of the actors; the recipient is urged
to seek the “truths” that lie concealed beneath the surface of the acting. I
will return to this point in greater detail later on.

Transference Love
Right in the very first episode, Paul’s patient Laura reveals that she is in love
with him. She has felt this way for a year, she says, and Paul has become the
focal point of her life. But Paul does not react to her confession as she had
expected or at least hoped. His initial response is entirely professional: “I’m
your therapist. . . . I’m not an option.”20 But it quickly becomes apparent
that this may not be the final word and that mutual love may be an option
after all. This emerges first in Paul’s own session with Gina at the end of that
week and then later in Laura’s second session, when she begins to convince
him: “We’re talking about reality, Paul, which is that I’m in love with you.
That’s reality!”21
Laura’s confession is the opening of a plot in which Paul is caught up
in a whirl of psychological events and therapeutic conflicts and vacillates
between rationality and emotionality, thus establishing the narrative’s cen-
tral tension. Paul does know that obviously patient–doctor love is part of
the psychoanalytic process, but it is not supposed to be reciprocated by the
therapist.
Because In Treatment is such a self-reflexive series, it almost goes without
saying that this love can only be the special kind of love that is inextricably
bound up with psychoanalysis and which, in the terminology of psycho-
analysis, has been known since Sigmund Freud as erotic transference love.22
 The Idea of Love 203

Transference and countertransference are a component of every therapy.

They are even regarded as a necessary part of the process of psychologi-
cal healing. Transference refers to a phenomenon in which one experiences
toward people in the present—in therapy, toward the therapist—feelings
and attitudes whose origins lie in one’s relationships with important people
in early childhood and which are then unconsciously transferred to the peo-
ple in the present. Countertransference denotes the complementary process
on the part of the therapist. Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung pointed
out that transference love occurs in the patient toward any therapist, no
matter which. Initially, Freud and Jung defined transference love as one of
the unconscious mind’s strongest defense mechanisms against healing. But
already in his early Observations on Transference-Love (1915), Freud writes
that as soon as the patient confesses his or her love, it is ineffective, in terms of
the analysis, for the therapist to demand that it be sublimated or suppressed.
In the course of the discipline’s history—after Jung had (not surprisingly)
had a love affair with a patient (it would not be the last time)—transference
was redefined as a helpful tool in analytical treatment. As Freud writes in An
Autobiographical Study (1925): “Nevertheless, its handling remains the most
difficult as well as the most important part of the technique of analysis.”23
A history of psychoanalysis could be gleaned from the fate of transference
love in the course of its development. One might say that it was love and the
confusion it causes that gave rise to psychoanalysis in the first place, and
since then they have repeatedly unsettled it and driven its further develop-
ment. In Treatment succeeds, in a fictional context, in illustrating a dialecti-
cal view of transference love in general on the basis of a concrete case study,
just as the science of psychoanalysis itself has always derived universally valid
conclusions from concrete case studies drawn from literature or reality.
Dr. Paul Weston is caught up in conflicts as a result of his incipient
transference love. In a dialectical process, he negotiates his feelings of love
and emotional experiences, which are after all a component of every therapy,
with himself (his superego) and his supervisor Gina—her job is to assist
Paul to learn from his experience and progress in expertise. As he does so,
the problems that may arise for a therapist in a case of transference love like
this one are illustrated. Paul looks for ways to work with those problems. At
the same time, however, his character obeys a golden rule of drama: to quote
Pascal Bonitzer, the heroes of a story are always blindfolded; otherwise they
wouldn’t do anything, and the plot would stand still.24 This also applies to
Paul’s character, who enters into what is likely to be an unhappy experience
of transference love with one eye opened and one eye closed. Already in the
second week, Paul tells Gina with curious emphasis that he had responded
to Laura’s confession of love by taking a clear and unambiguous stance: “I’m
not going to play around. This is not going to happen!”25 Still, a part of him
204 Christine Lang

thinks or feels differently: “There was a part of me that really wanted Laura
to go through the door”26 —a statement whose meaning is twofold. On the
one hand, Paul should simply have allowed Laura to use the bathroom in his
private apartment. On the other—in a metaphorical sense—he wished that
Laura would cross the threshold between the professional patient–therapist
relationship and the private one. But Paul’s unconscious puts up resistance
at every step: he downplays the issue by observing that he is in very good
company, that of the famous psychoanalysts Freud, Messer, and Davies. A
situation like this is simply a test for every therapist. Gina responds by accus-
ing him of seeking to avoid responsibility, not only now but systematically:
“Every time we go deeper, you reach for some theory . . . these male thera-
pists tormented by the lust for their patients.”27 In the course of the series,
Paul is forced to admit that, although he knows everything there is to know
about the phenomenon of transference love, the simple, undeniable fact is
that he loves Laura. In his second-to-last session with Gina—the dramatic
climax of the season—Paul’s wife Katie has all but given up on their mar-
riage, and even Gina now concedes that the love between Laura and Paul
should perhaps be judged by a different standard: “Maybe love can bloom in
a therapist’s office. . . . Love is bigger than any rules.”28
In this way, Paul and Gina reproduce and reargue the entire historical
discussion surrounding the normative evaluation of, and taboo concerning,
transference love in psychoanalysis in narrative form. And now at the very
latest, it appears that the narrative is bound to become a romantic love story
and culminate in fulfillment.
As mentioned above, the process that Paul—and with him the viewer—
undergoes is a dialectical one. And here something interesting happens,
something that involves the “emancipated spectator,” who knows what to
think about and do with what the series presents. Paul is no more “master in
his own house” than the other characters in the series. Even a highly reflec-
tive degree of conscious thinking and speaking cannot alter the fact that
from the perspective of psychoanalysis all this is merely sublimation and
“cultural conversion,” in which wish-fulfillment fantasies are transformed
into this speech.29 The statements and self-descriptions of the patients—
Paul included—are not to be trusted. What is speaking is precisely the
unconscious.
On the one hand, what we are offered here is a credible narrative that
makes realistic use of knowledge of the world. At the same time, we are
dealing with that strict control of the flow of information in the service of
the drama that turns the viewer into an element of the setting, the same
approach that is also part of the dramaturgy of the analytical drama: the
viewer becomes a detective or a virtual therapist. (S)he listens carefully and
interprets; (s)he tries to decipher the veiled and indirect utterances of the
 The Idea of Love 205

characters, attempts to read what lies hidden beneath the surface of faces
and gestures, and sets out in search of the key to the mysteries that will lead
to the “untying of the knot” and speculates about the outcome of the drama.
(S)he wonders, is it love or just an illusion, just an idea of love? There is a
great deal of suspense associated with this technique of the analytical drama;
the goal is to discover what only the unconscious knows. In the end—and
this is the only logical outcome—the love story turns out to be an illusion,
an error, in which Paul has responded to Laura’s transference love with coun-
tertransference love. In the final episode, Paul leaves his office and winds up
in Laura’s apartment. For the first time, the two of them meet under differ-
ent conditions, and the tension reaches its peak. A scene that functions as
a “delaying element” results in Paul ending up with Laura in her bedroom,
but here he is unable to act.30 He cannot bring himself to touch her; instead,
as we learn later, he has a panic attack—the unconscious speaks—and we
meet him again in Gina’s office. Here, he is once again moving within the
medium of speech and reflection; for him, there is no escaping it.
As always in an analytical drama, however, there is an epilogue. The
love may not be real, but the therapy is a success. Laura no longer needs her
therapist. And Gina describes how Paul’s guilt feelings have broken through
to the surface, which she regards as a success. Paul has shown the best side of
himself: “the very best of you, your deepest standards, personal and profes-
sional and moral.”31 The superego has triumphed. In the end, we may not
have a romantic happy ending, but we do have a fallible protagonist who
seems quite realistic in his fallibility and parapraxes.32 There is a difference
between having a wish, between wanting to do something, and really doing
it. While it is true that, according to Freud, all human beings are initially
focused on the satisfaction of their sensuous needs, they are also all social
beings from the beginning. And hence Freud also says that every analyst in
every case—really always—bears responsibility for the countertransference
love. Thus, In Treatment not only adheres to the ethically defined rules of
psychoanalysis in its narrative; the narrated love story also remains faith-
ful to the series’ analytical style. The aesthetic premise of “talking heads
only” simply rules out the depiction of a love scene in all its physicality as
inappropriate.

The Performative Discourse of Psychoanalysis

The idea of love presented in this narrative—love as a wish-fulfillment
fantasy, as a phenomenon of transference—appears as an ideal subject for
a filmic narrative. Transference and illusion are central concepts, both of
which are abundantly theorized by psychoanalysis and extensively thema-
tized by the artistic medium of film. What makes In Treatment so special is
206 Christine Lang

that it not only takes psychotherapy and its theory as its subject matter on
an implicit level; it also takes the psychological activities described by the
science of psychoanalysis, in all of their facets, as the basis for its dramatiza-
tion on an explicit level. The characters follow the logic of psychoanalysis
in their behavior. In this sense, we are dealing here with a twofold narrative
that refers directly back to itself. In a performative illustration, the internal
workings of human behavior are exhibited and at the same time fed back
into their analysis. In Treatment, then, has an advantage over purely theo-
retical linguistic description, in that it develops a performative discourse
that is appropriate to the sujet.33 Thus, it may be interpreted not just as a
reaction to the threat posed to its status or even its right to exist by the power
of pharmacology and religion, but also as an artistic response to the critique
of psychoanalysis as an ideological phenomenon.34 The strongest argument
for psychoanalytic theory and hence also for the medium of film that is so
closely bound up with it lies in its character as an extraordinarily humanistic
discipline, one that is able to expand so far that it can incorporate all critique
within its own discourse—as shown by In Treatment. And thus In Treatment
really is one of the best examples of contemporary “quality TV,” which is
distinguished by a comprehensive knowledge of its subject matter, a skillful
and innovative use of the rules of cinematic dramaturgy, and the presence
of especially interesting fictional characters—and which last but not least
leaves the moral evaluation of its content to the viewers. In an interview for
The Jewish Exponent, Hagai Levi, the creator of the original Israeli series,
BeTipul, remarked that psychotherapy may need therapy itself. Otherwise,
he said, it will soon be history, since it is under attack on multiple fronts, on
the one hand from “pharmacology, which has become more precise,” and
on the other from “spirituality and religion, which have served as replace-
ments for many people facing problems.”35 Be that as it may, with BeTipul
and its American adaptation In Treatment, on which Hagai Levi works as
a consulting executive producer, two works have entered television history
whose innovative style and approach make them modern psychotherapy’s
most convincing advocates.

Notes
1. In The Jewish Exponent, March 6, 2006.
2. The US adaptation is very close to the original series. Except for the fact that
the names have been changed, all of the characters and most of the dialogue
are taken from BeTipul.
3. While the BBC-produced British miniseries Talking Heads by Alan Bennett
(1987–1998) is reminiscent of the premise of In Treatment, its approach is
different. No therapeutic dialogues are presented; instead, individual char-
acters deliver monologues, sometimes directly into the camera. Its staging is
clearly modeled on the aesthetic of the theater. Even in the silent film era, it
 The Idea of Love 207

was clear that the basic setting of couch and armchair was an excellent sub-
ject for films. In 1925, the United States saw the release of Louis J. Gasnier’s
comedy The Boomerang, and one year later in Germany, Georg Wilhelm
Pabst released his Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul), a serious explo-
ration of psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams. A therapist (but
not yet the setting of the “talking cure”) appears as early as 1912 in Léonce
Perret’s Le Mystère des Roches de Kador. In 1925, the psychoanalyst Siegfried
Bernfeld wrote the screenplay for “a cinematic depiction of Freudian psy-
choanalysis in the context of a full-length feature film,” but the movie was
never made. See Sierek (2000).
The history of film since then, especially in America, is impossible to
imagine without the figure of the therapist. (In Woody Allen’s comedies,
for example, the character of a therapist often occupies a central position.
See Warnecke, 2006.) The same is true for television; in the last decade in
particular, the psychoanalytic dialogue between therapist and patient was
popularized for lay audiences throughout the world by The Sopranos, whose
originality and thematic innovation were based on the idea of sending the
mafia boss Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini) to seek therapy—
from a female psychotherapist—and then turning his sessions with (or
“treatment” by) Dr. Melfi (played by Lorraine Bracco) into a central element
of the entire series.
4. The first season of In Treatment contained a total of 43 episodes and aired
on HBO beginning in 2008. There have been three seasons thus far; the
first two are based on the Israeli original BeTipul, while the third, which was
broadcast in fall 2010, was developed independently by HBO. Ostensibly in
response to the audience’s viewing habits, beginning with the second season,
HBO abandoned its original broadcast schedule, and the second and third
seasons have been broadcast over two weekdays. For more information, see
www.hbo.com/in-treatment (accessed February 4, 2012)
5. In the United States, the first DVD box set of In Treatment was released in
March 2009, followed by one with European DVD region code in 2010. In
Germany the German-dubbed first season was screened daily on public sta-
tion 3Sat as a two-part episode (in 2010). The second season was screened
only once a week in 2011.
6. In the Israeli series BeTipul, the character killed Palestinian children dur-
ing a military operation and has a strained relationship with his father, a
Holocaust survivor.
7. See Stephen A. Mitchell, Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity
(Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2000) and Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis
Aron, Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition (Hillsdale, NJ:
Analytic Press, 1999).
8. The creators have a broader overview of the larger narrative context than the
writers and directors of the individual episodes, and they play an important
role in the series of so-called quality TV. They develop the series and, as
supervisors, have an ongoing and decisive role in all creative decisions. It is
thus entirely legitimate to speak of auteur series in the sense of the European
auteur cinema. See Dreher (2010).
208 Christine Lang

9. See Jane Feuer, “Being In Treatment on TV,” University of Pittsburgh, May

16, 2009.
10. This term refers to a narrative structure in which multiple plot threads run con-
currently or are “braided” together (German Zopf = “braid”)—the translator.
11. www.international.ucla.edu/israel/be-tipul/index.asp (accessed February 4,
2012).
12. As an example, German TV station 3Sat aired a talk about In Treatment
from the perspective of psychoanalysts; see www.3sat.de/page/?source=/
scobel/152089/index.html (accessed February 4, 2012).
13. At the UCLA symposium about BeTipul and In Treatment in 2009; links
to the podcasts: www.international.ucla.edu/israel/be-tipul/index.asp
(accessed February 4, 2012); Rodrigo Garcia also worked as a director for
the series Six Feet Under.
14. See Feuer (1985/2007).
15. See Rancière (2009).
16. In his essay “Discours du récit,” in Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil,
1972), 67–282, in English as Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1983),
and his book Nouveau discours du récit (1983), in English as Narrative Discourse
Revisited, (1990), Gérard Genette deals with various types of focalization that
make it possible to describe the point of view from which a story is told.
17. Umberto Eco first formulated the concept of the The Open Work in the
1960s (English translation in 1989). The concept may be applied not only
to the visual arts but also to cinema in that here, too, narrative ambiguities
and indeterminacies lead to a situation in which the meaning is found not in
the work itself but in its communicative structures. The notion of open form
can also be found in the classical dramaturgy of theater; see Klotz (1996).
18. See Kerstin Stutterheim and Silke Kaiser (2009, 143–146).
19. The whole exchange of letters between Friedrich Schiller and Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe is provided online (in German): http://gutenberg.
spiegel.de/buch/3659/5 (accessed February 4, 2012).
20. Week 1, episode 1, min. 23.
21. Week 2, episode 6, min. 15.
22. As Hagai Levi has indicated, the character of Paul is based on the article
Love in the Afternoon: A Relational Reconsideration of Desire and Dread in the
Countertransference by Jody Messler Davies (1994).
23. See Freud (1925, 47).
24. See Carrière and Bonitzer (2002, 125).
25. Week 2, episode 10, min. 17.
26. Week 2, episode 10, min. 16.
27. Week 2, episode 10, min. 11.
28. Week 8, episode 40, min. 23.
29. See de Berg (2005, 15).
30. The suspense in In Treatment does not result from the fact that the viewer
knows more about the other characters than the protagonist Paul; in fact,
the narrative follows his character almost throughout. Rather, it results
 The Idea of Love 209

from the fact that the viewer suspects more about the true antagonist—the
unconscious—than Paul knows.
31. Week 9, episode 43, min. 19.
32. Dr. Paul Weston is repeatedly shown to be fallible and human in matters of
love. In the second season, it is suggested that he had an affair with a patient
once before, years ago, and in the third season he has a blonde lover some 20
years younger than himself, stereotypically for a man of his age.
33. Juri Lotman points to the special structure of artworks, which in his view
makes them a special and indeed a perfect means for storing information
(unlike science, for example). See Lotman (1981, 87).
34. For example, Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
35. In The Jewish Exponent, March 6, 2006.

Works Cited
Carrière, Jean-Claude, and Pascal Bonitzer. 1990. Exercice du scénario. Paris:
FEMIS.
Davies, Jody Messler. 1994. “Love in the Afternoon: A Relational Reconsideration
of Desire and Dread in the Countertransference.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues.
4: 153–170.
De Berg, Henk. 2005. Freuds Psychoanalyse in der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft.
Stuttgart: UTB.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dreher, Christoph (ed.). 2010. Auteur Series: The Re-invention of Television. Stuttgart:
Merz and Solitude.
Eco, Umberto. 1989. The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni. Boston:
Harvard University Press.
Elkin, Michael. 2006. “Treatment for Couch Potatoes?” Jewish Exponent, March 6.
www.jewishexponent.com/article/15525 (accessed January 4, 2012).
Feuer, Jane. 2009. “Being ‘In Treatment’ on TV.” University of Pittsburgh, May 16.
http://flowTV.org/?p=3891 (accessed January 4, 2012).
Freud, Sigmund. 1925. “An Autobiographical Study”. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 1959/2001. London: Hogarth
Press.
———. 2000. Zur Dynamik der Übertragung, Behandlungstechnische Schriften. 3rd
ed. Frankfurt: Fischer.
Genette, Gérard. 1983. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane
E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 1990. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Jaspers, Kristina, and Wolf Unterberger. 2006. Kino im Kopf. Berlin: Berz and
Fischer.
210 Christine Lang

Jung, Carl Gustav. 1946/2001. Die Psychologie der Übertragung. 4th ed. Munich:
dtv.
Klotz, Volker. 1960/1999. Geschlossene und offene Form im Drama. 14th ed. Munich:
Hanser.
Lotman, Juri M. 1981. Kunst als Sprache. Leipzig: Reclam.
Mitchell, Stephen A. 2000. Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity.
Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Mitchell, Stephen A., and Lewis Aron. 1999. Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence
of a Tradition. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The emancipated spectator. London: Verso.
Reagan, Gillian. 2008. “Gabriel Byrne Can Fix Your Problems in 30 Minutes.”
New York Observer, June 22. www.observer.com/2008/gabriel-byrne-can-fix-
your-problems-30-minutes?page=all (accessed February 4, 2012).
Schiller, Friedrich. 1797. Friedrich Schiller to Wolfgang von Goethe. http://www.
wissen-im-netz.info/literatur/schiller/briefe/1797/179710023.htm (accessed
February 4, 2012).
Sierek, Karl, and Barbara Eppensteiner. 2000. Der Analytiker im Kino. Frankfurt:
Stroemfeld/Nexus Verlag.
Stutterheim, Kerstin, and Silke Kaiser. 2009. Handbuch der Filmdramaturgie. Das
Bauchgefühl und seine Ursachen. Babelsberger Schriften zu Mediendramaturgie
und -Ästhetik. Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlagsgruppe.
Warnecke, Nils. 2006. “Der Stadtneurotiker auf der Couch.” In Kino im Kopf.
Berlin: Berz and Fischer.
Wulff, Hans J. 2001. Konstellationen, Kontrakte und Vertrauen. Pragmatische
Grundlagen der Dramaturgie. Montage AV. http://www.derwulff.de/2–103
(accessed February 5, 2012).

Televised
BeTipul. Created by Hagai Levi. Hot 3. Israel, 2005–2008.
Breaking Bad. Created by Vince Gilligan. AMC. USA, 2008–present.
Deadwood. Created by David Milch. HBO. USA, 2004–2008.
In Treatment. Based on the Israeli series BeTipul, created by Hagai Levi. HBO. USA,
2008–2010.
Mad Men. Created by Matthew Weiner. AMC. USA, 2007–present.
Six Feet Under. Created by Alan Ball. USA, 2001–2005.
Sopranos, The. Created by David Chase. HBO. USA, 1999–2007.
Wire, The. Created by David Simon. HBO. USA, 2002–2008.

Filmed
Boomerang, The. Directed by Louis J. Gasnier. US, 1925.
Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul). Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Germany,
1926.
Mystère des Roches de Kador. Directed by Léonce Perret. France, 1912.
Chapter 15

Fucking Machines:
High-Tech Bodies in
Pornography
Sarah Schaschek

It is like doing drag, like transsexuality, the way we are interfacing with
technology and extending our identity into it.
—Shu Lea Cheang

In discourses on pornography, critics often draw quick conclusions

from the generic imagery as to the “inhumane” styles of production in the
adult film industry. What is criticized about the “sausage factory approach”
(Pettman 2006, 112) of the industry’s low-budget mainstream is the por-
trayal of the performers’ bodies as standardized machines working on each
other for the purpose of the spectator’s sexual arousal (Sontag 1967, 52;
Žižek 2004, 172). This chapter asks what fears about pornography nurture
such an argument, and why pornography is in turn so obviously fascinated
with depicting the body as a machine.1 I argue that the critical perception
of pornography cannot be separated from a deep skepticism about the com-
modification and technologization of the human body that becomes visible,
among other places, in images of sexual action. At the heart of this skep-
ticism is a rather strict conceptualization of “cold” and “dead” machines
as opposed to “lively” human bodies—an opposition that the machinelike
sex presented in pornography conceivably calls into question. By discuss-
ing several short videos from FuckingMachines, a website that stages sexual
encounters between women and gigantic dildo machines, I will suggest that
the pleasure presented in and received by pornography cannot be under-
stood outside the modern framework of market rationality and efficiency.
212 Sarah Schaschek

After taking a look at the “problem” of sexual commercialization, I will

close-read FuckingMachines as a place where the relationship between tech-
nology and sexuality becomes renegotiated.
Pornography ties in with the subject of “dark love” because the genre
repeatedly comes under fire as promoting violence against women. It is
indeed difficult to ignore the deep-seated sexism in the comments of the
users of the FuckingMachines website, and in the often brutal staging of
heterosexual difference in other mainstream productions (Paasonen 2010,
67).2 Although feminists do not fail to point out, for instance in documen-
tary films, that pornography is Not a Love Story (dir. Bonnie Sherr Klein,
1982), it seems feasible to discuss sexually explicit imagery in terms of physi-
cal and emotional passion. Consider that the women on FuckingMachines
are described as being highly aroused (“When she screams in orgasm she’s
cumming hard [sic]”; “powerful vibrators guarantee real female pleasure”
(website), the videos can indeed be read as narratives about sexual relation-
ships. It is also true that, despite increasing academic attempts to shed light
on the genre, and despite the genre’s own aesthetics of maximal visibility,
pornography continues to operate in the shadows of the Hollywood system,3
thereby considerably “obscuring” the debate.

Sex at 350 Revolutions per Minute

What is a machine other than a man?—one might ask at the sight of the
pornographic website FuckingMachines. The videos on the website show
sexual encounters between female adult film performers and so-called “fuck-
ing machines” designed to “get the women off” (website). FuckingMachines
is produced by Kink, a pornography company based in San Francisco that
specializes in BDSM movies (short for bondage and discipline, domination
and submission, sadism and masochism), which makes it essentially fetish
pornography. The website can only be accessed by members with a paying
account; accordingly, the production qualities differ greatly from readily
available “free” websites. Although the term amateur is used to advertise
some of the videos, the women depicted are professional adult film perform-
ers under contract with Kink. And although the fans of the site seem to be
predominantly male, the people who work on set (directors, camerapeople,
and machine operators) are mostly women.4
One video, dated May 25, 2009, shows performer Sasha Grey during
a “sex torture” training. The machine sex is supposed to test Grey’s abil-
ity to keep information confidential when “being seduced” or “forced to
come,” as the torture trainer tells her. After being paddled by the “Robo-
Spanker,” Grey is penetrated by machines called “Snake,” “Sybian,” and
“SatisfyHer”—impressive electronic dildos on metal frames, imitating the
 Fucking Machines 213

thrusting of a penis and intended to “hit the right spots” of a female body. In
one scene, for instance, Grey leans back on an iron table with her legs spread
in order to insert the rotating “Snake” into her vagina.
For several reasons (beginning with the personifying names of the
machines), FuckingMachines can be read as more than typical mastur-
bation scenes with giant vibrators. Although Grey’s body is staged as the
central spectacle in the videos (therefore adding to the impression that the
role of the machine is not much different from that of a man in pornogra-
phy), the machines are also utterly present. They make drilling movements
and buzzing noises; their heavy iron stanchions and turning plates are jux-
taposed with delicate silicon pieces where the machines connect with the
women’s bodies; in other words, the machines themselves offer a spectacular
sight. In fact, what is eroticized here is not only the female characters in
the videos but precisely the fusion of female sexuality and technology in
a curious celebration of “technojoy.” This is underscored by the welcome
text on the FuckingMachines home page, where the producers praise the
technical devices used for filming and playing the videos. The text states
that women are “fucked by robotic sex machines and hard cock on camera
in high definition with downloads or streaming video at speeds up to 350
RPM.”5 In other words, added to the pleasure of seeing sexual images and
high-speed machines powered by strong engines is also the pleasure of see-
ing these things in high-resolution video formats.
Audacia Ray has rightly noted that “the curious and enthralling thing
about these toys is the way in which they cast sexuality and technology
together in a near miasma of technophobia and technofetishism” (quoted in
Ruberg 2008). FuckingMachines videos in fact seem to blow out of propor-
tion the anxiety of men about being replaced by vibrators (Ruberg 2008) as
much as they fetishize the notion of pornography as a portrayal of commer-
cialized, generic, and ultimately “mechanical sex.” From a critical feminist
perspective, FuckingMachines could also be read as a metaphorical depic-
tion of the highly serialized production standards of the pornography indus-
try. This position puts forward a less romanticized idea of pornography as
“machinery” entirely focused on the “economy of pleasure” (Foucault 1990,
154). In fact, the drill of the machines to which Grey and the other women
are subjected on screen seems only to reproduce the drill typical of all mass-
produced culture filmed in great volumes and at great speed and offered to
large audiences. Put differently, if it looks like factory work, we are almost
sure that the production process itself must be like factory work. What is
more, the standardized sex on screen seems powerful enough to contribute
to a more general “normalization” of “cold,” “robotic” pornographic sex.
Accordingly, the viewer as much as the actresses are considered to be on the
“losing” end of this equation (Johnson 2010, 152).
214 Sarah Schaschek

The problem about this assumption is that it operates on the basis of a

binary structure of thinking. If the sex on screen is somehow “problematic,”
then there must be a presupposition of more “human,” less “mechanical” sex.
Despite Linda Williams’s notion that sexual activities “have an element of
the mechanical, of the body as machine” (quoted in Gaines 2004, 36), anti-
pornography critics generally agree that the industry exploits the performers’
bodies like machines and increasingly commercialize them (Jeffreys 2009;
Johnson 2010).

High-Tech Pleasure
At the heart of this perception is the belief that the dual systems of power,
patriarchy and capitalism, mutually constitute each other (Johnson 2010,
148). The affirmation of the patriarchal system through pornography
has been widely discussed by antipornography advocates, who claim that
woman serves as the Other of male superiority in these images.6 The impact
of the capitalist system of pornography on women is inextricably related
to patriarchy, as Sheila Jeffreys has most recently argued in her Industrial
Vagina (2009). But the “fear” of the body’s commercialization also extends
to men. According to this logic, pornography is understood as a business
that exploits both its laborers and its clients in order to make a profit. The
production of sexual imagery is therefore often compared to the Fordist
model of a rationalized labor force and, as a result, appears essentially
“dehumanizing or, at the very least, de-personalized” (Pettman 2006, 120).
By drawing on a passage from Slavoj Žižek’s Organs without Bodies (2004),
Dominic Pettman holds that

[pornography] enacts the “mechanic enslavement” of a libidinal economy

almost completely penetrated by the commodity economy. In this latter sense,
other people, our “sexual partners,” are merely “workstations” on which we
perform. The women work on the men like industrial vacuum cleaners, while
the men “service” the women in the mode of mechanical pistons, resulting in
“a kind of vaguely co-ordinated agglomerate.” (Pettman 2006, 123)7

The metaphorical language Pettman uses to describe the pornographic sys-

tem bears a striking resemblance to the images from FuckingMachines. In
fact, FuckingMachines takes Pettman’s figurative description at face value
by putting actual “mechanical pistons” on stage, thereby further “dehu-
manizing,” if not “demonizing,” the action. The metonymical substitution
of rotating dildos for male adult performers in the videos in my view pre-
dominantly brings out the multiple fears linked with the capitalist “hor-
ror” of pornography. First, there is the fear that the bodies used to produce
 Fucking Machines 215

pornographic images are subjected to a brutal system of capitalism inter-

ested only in efficiency and low wages; this position’s nightmare is not only
the exploitation of the performer but his or her substitution by a machine.
Second, there is the fear that human sexuality is increasingly defined by the
standardized bodies and mechanical sexual acts on screen; this position’s
nightmare is a total commercialization of the body, which continues beyond
the screen.
FuckingMachines draws on each one of these fears while at the same
time defying them both. At first glance, it seems as if the machines in these
clips “take over” the role traditionally assigned to the male performer. From
this perspective, the machine replaces the man on screen; it is a more per-
fect version of the actor, built to perform his “job” but also to prevent the
failures of the male body: the machine never tires or goes soft. Besides, the
machine holds power over the woman on screen by enforcing the “patri-
archal” conventions of her iconographic and narrative positioning as an
object.8 In fact, the camera work in the FuckingMachines clips is much
like that in more typical “mainstream” pornography, which focuses mainly
on the women’s genitals and takes the point of view of a male penetrator.
The machine’s “superiority” is further underlined by the introductory text
to a clip featuring performer Amy Brooke entitled “Two in the Ass Is not
Enough—Stuffing Her Full with Robot cock.” According to this text, the
“double penetration fucking . . . pins Amy to the couch,” therefore reveal-
ing the degree to which the website reinforces the fearful fantasy of passive
women being in the grip of the machine.
The second “nightmare,” the fear of the body’s full commercializa-
tion, draws on the Foucauldian idea of capitalism that, as he says, “would
not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the
machinery of mass production” (1990, 141). In this sense, pornography can
be considered a kind of “biopower”9 that caters to the “administration of
bodies and the calculated management of life” (Foucault 1990, 140). As dis-
cursive “machinery,” pornography clearly works to discipline the individual
body—on and possibly off screen. However, pornography does not impose
a direct rule on the body; instead, by way of film and other media, it is
internalized by the self and works as an invisible but powerful cultural norm
(cf. Baldwin et al. 2004, 284). To consider pornography a direct “violence”
of the body would be to considerably blur the level of production, presenta-
tion, and consumption of pornography. The idea that pornography “com-
mercializes” sex and, as a result, contributes to a standardization of sexuality
presupposes a direct correlation between the consumption of pornography
and the practice of sexual intercourse.10
It is true that pornography is not only accused of depicting performers
as machines but that the films are often themselves perceived as efficient
216 Sarah Schaschek

“Machines That Make the Body Do Things,” to borrow the title of an essay
by Jane Gaines (2004). Gaines argues that the rejection of pornography can
be compared to the rejection occasionally brought to the use of vibrators,
because both seem to stress the technical dimension of the sexual body and
the achievement of quick and gratifying orgasmic results. As an example,
Gaines quotes a feminist critical of electronic sex toys who wonders, “‘Is
the most efficient orgasm the best orgasm? Is the bedroom really a place for
a time-saving device? If so, what are we saving all this time for?’” (Gaines
2004, 32–34). What this antivibrator feminist criticizes is not so much the
use of the vibrator as its function within the capitalist context and its appro-
priation of market values for the realm of “free” time.

The Fantasy of Efficiency

For the same reason, pornography has been widely discussed as a place
where the principles of modernity become visible, particularly those of indi-
viduality, rationality, and systematic analysis. Predominantly consumed in
privacy, and as an instrument that intensifies the pleasure of masturbation,
pornography essentially falls under the umbrella of autoeroticism (Pettman
2006, 112). In Solitary Sex (2003), Thomas Laqueur for instance calls mas-
turbation the “sexuality of modernity” (2003, 18), arguing that it frees the
individual from her sexual dependence on an Other. Laqueur lists a whole
range of areas in which masturbation was propagated as “an act of indi-
vidual liberation, a proclamation of autonomy, an affirmation of pleasure for
its own sake, a way to make money from sex toys, a practice in the cultiva-
tion of the self” (2003, 361). Similarly, Feona Attwood notes that, in today’s
queer communities, “sex work becomes a stylish and alternative form of
self-expression” (2010, 95).
But pornography’s emphatic claim that pleasure can be a simple “do-it-
yourself” practice does not so much suggest that the viewer “copy” the action
on screen as it promises to have in store a particular visual pleasure for each
individual taste if only the viewer is willing to take the self-management of
pleasure into her own hands. The modes of mass production allow the por-
nography industry to offer a wide range of special-taste products optimized
for consumption by viewers of diverse desire. But this special targeting of
audiences does not only produce highly specialized products (such as the
FuckingMachines website); it also “produces” the desire for pornography
and contributes to the marketability of this desire.11 As the antivibrator fem-
inist indicated, the pleasure granted by pornography is “advertised” as being
quick and efficient. Sexual arousal is then no longer perceived as a matter of
complicated “love” but rather as a readily available tool, as Pettman argues
in his book Love and Other Technologies (2006).12
 Fucking Machines 217

Pornography therefore approaches the viewer as an individual adult film

consumer (in the sense that the films are not only supposed to sexually sat-
isfy the viewer but to satisfy her as a customer) as much as it approaches
the viewer as a laborer who works for her own sexual gratification.13 In
other words, the same kinds of cost-and-balance considerations taken to the
production of pornography are applied to its consumption, that is, to the
domain of sexual pleasure.14 Yet, if everybody is asked to “work” for their
individual pleasure, then this makes it difficult to determine who is a pro-
ducer and who is a consumer of pornography at all. Besides, the enthusiastic
praise of individual pleasure considerably conceals the fact that pornography
also gives way to self-exploitation and, ultimately, to the privatization of
violence. As Attwood argues, “Individual freedom is seen as a form of self-
regulation by which individuals are increasingly made to take responsibility
for features of late capitalism over which they actually have no control”
(2010, 101).

Cold Steel on Hot Flesh

But while pornography seems on every level to be saturated by the rules of
the market, while it seems so entirely “in control” of the body and of the
marketability of desire, what it “sells” is precisely an image of the body’s
uncontrollability. The FuckingMachines website may work with “cold” pre-
cision toward the satisfaction of the viewer; yet it sells something that cannot
actually be controlled, let alone be normalized. If the clips on the website
are in fact designed for viewers “who love to see real female pleasure as hot
girls get fucked hard by machine driven dildos” (website), then what is eroti-
cized is not only the machines and their potentially “impersonal” appear-
ance, but also the “real” passion of the performers. In fact, what cannot be
ignored about pornography is the degree to which it aims to transgress the
very notion of the “normal” by focusing on the sensory, the excessive, and the
extreme—as FuckingMachines undoubtedly proves. Regardless of the “real”
experience of the performer in the “grip” of the machines, their moaning,
buckling, and often impressive ejaculating defies the idea that the machines
are the ones “exploiting” the bodies of the performers. In fact, such a reading
overlooks the ambiguity of the imagery already indicated in the website’s title:
FuckingMachines does not answer the question of who is fucking whom, the
machine fucking the woman or the woman fucking the machine.
In my view, it would therefore be insufficient to read FuckingMachines
as an (exaggerated) representation of the female body absorbed by the por-
nographic “machine.” Such a strict separation between the “cold” steel of
the machine and the “hot” flesh of the female body not only ignores the fact
that in the videos the two quite dramatically merge; it also neglects that, in
218 Sarah Schaschek

pornography, one does not work without the other. Consider, for instance,
the way in which the body of the performer and the viewer come in contact
with all kinds of machines during the highly technical process of filming
and screening pornography. As I have indicated above, a clear distinction
between the machine and the body assumes that there is something like an
a priori body “uncontaminated” by power, technology, or commercializa-
tion. Pornography calls into question such a distinction. It shows, in a kind
of Foucauldian move, that the “sexual body” cannot be understood outside
technology and that sexual pleasure may also be technically induced. At the
same time, FuckingMachines goes beyond the idea that technology is neces-
sarily cold and unanimated, precisely by staging the machines as sexual part-
ners. Pornography (and particularly the pornography of FuckingMachines)
therefore essentially renegotiates our relationship with machines.
In Western philosophy, “life” is traditionally distinguished from the
mechanical by the notion of self-organization (autopoiesis) and complexity
(Lash 2006, 324). As Donna Haraway has put it in her “Cyborg Manifesto,”
“basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They
could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author
to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To
think they were otherwise was paranoid” (1991, 152). I have shown above
that it is possible to read the sex machines in the videos precisely as such a
“mocking” of male sexual performance; the crude reduction of the role of
the performers to “mechanical pistons” clearly “caricatures” a commonsensi-
cal notion of male power in pornography. But the massive presence of the
machines on screen also suggests that there is more to these machines than
simply this replacement of men.
It would in fact be more productive to understand the techno-erotic
encounters of FuckingMachines as a kind of “cyborg” moment. Haraway
defines a cyborg as a hybrid of machine and organism; for her the cyborg
blurs the line between what is defined as organic and inorganic, thereby
manifesting a major boundary breakdown between human life and machinic
death. Against the former notion of machines as caricatures of man’s dream,
Haraway holds that

[l]ate twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the dif-

ference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and
externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organ-
isms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves
frighteningly inert. (2006, 152)

It is certainly difficult to draw the line between “organism” and “machine”

in these videos. The sex machines are indeed “disturbingly lively,” if not
 Fucking Machines 219

disturbingly human, in their imitation of male body parts. Although

Haraway warns her readers not to easily take “liveliness” for “human-ness”
(Haraway and Gane 2006, 143), it is almost impossible (and probably unnec-
essary) to avoid any anthropomorphization of the dildos. The sex machines
are clearly marked as humanlike partners, albeit very special ones. At the
same time, the bodies of the women on screen are portrayed as technical
objects. When the fully automatic “Robo-Spanker” hits Sasha Grey with its
transparent plastic paddle, allowing the viewer to observe in detail the red
mark left by the paddle on Grey’s behind, when the “Snake” thrusts in and
out of her vagina with “no guy’s ass in the way,” as Tomcat, the creator of
FuckingMachines likes to put it (Ruberg 2008), what is emphasized is the
technical, hydraulic dimension of pleasure as well as the pleasure of making
this pleasure visible by way of technical instruments. From this perspec-
tive, FuckingMachines takes an almost radical or “subversive” approach to
technology, because it does not understand the machines in terms of “life”
(as the “masculinist reproductive dream” would suggest) but life in terms of
media (Lash 2006, 328).
What this means is that FuckingMachines portrays pleasure as a techni-
cal “problem.” After all, the machines recast female orgasms as the product
of rather “hard labor.” Moreover, what the machines allow the viewer to see
are mainly the minute details of female anatomy enlarged by the close-up
image. In this sense, the machines in the videos do not so much “enslave”
the women as they work to make perceptible the technology of orgasm
itself. The seemingly “dull” rhythm of the electronic dildos, the fact that
most of the machines “just get in and out,” as Sasha Grey puts it in a brief
interview at the end of her clip—all this does not oppose the impression
FuckingMachines leaves on the viewer: that the machines are indeed very
lively figures on screen and that the desire of the female performers is in
turn perceived as a truly mechanical matter. Or, to borrow from Pettman,
FuckingMachines is “emphatically not a case of technology rampaging out
of control, crushing human nature in its machinic path, but rather a situa-
tion wherein the human is constantly recreating itself, from the very begin-
ning, as a technical animal” (2006, 15).

And Say, the Machine Responded?

If FuckingMachines recasts the body (both of the male and the female
performer) as a technical instrument rather than a subordinate object, this
decidedly twists the power relations usually associated with pornography.
It is not my intention to deny that the sight of a woman tucked in between
pumping dildos, vibrating clitoral plates, and breast-sucking vacuum cylin-
ders cannot be arousing or frustrating (depending on the viewer’s response
220 Sarah Schaschek

to this kind of pornography); after all, such a view does not necessarily con-
tradict the traditional patterns of seeing woman as an object of pleasure. But
on the grounds of this techno-relationship, I find it worth taking a second
look at these apparently stable power dimensions.
While antipornography feminists usually criticize that female performers
are visually and practically degraded by men in heterosexual pornography, it
is hard to uphold such an impression in the FuckingMachines videos. Given
that all pornography eroticizes difference, and given that sexual fantasies usu-
ally require clearly drawn roles of dominance and submission, the women of
FuckingMachines seem to resist at least a few of these categories. If anything,
the women are staged as passive for the pleasure of the viewer; but in their
relationship to the sex machines, the women take a more complex position.
Strictly speaking, the women in these videos are both the controllers and
the controlled. At least in terms of the videos’ narrative, the women choose
the machines according to the sexual practice they like. In “Planet Anal We
Have Arrived,” the performer Kelly Devine talks about her preference of
anal sex in a small interview with the camerawoman at the beginning of
her clip. The interview shows Kelly Divine as a self-confident performer and
the FuckingMachines set as an all-female environment. Later in the video,
Devine literally “rides” a sex machine that looks like a motorbike; and she
regulates the speed of the penetration movements and the intensity of the
vibration with a slight turn of the bike’s handlebars. These images suggest
that the performers have at least some control over the action on set.
On the other hand, the role of the sex machines is not simply to please the
woman. This is what I meant when I said above that the machine is staged
as a sexual partner. Even if the woman is practically the “master” of the
machines in these videos, the sex act itself is not portrayed as solo sex but as
a “typical” encounter between two partners. This is only emphasized by the
fact that the performers sometimes have to take quite “uncomfortable” posi-
tions in order to allow the machine partner to go about its business. But it is
also the machine’s massiveness that generates a greater presence than, say, a
small vibrator does. Although the machines in these videos are not portrayed
as autopoietic beings, it cannot be denied that they are built to “respond”
to the women’s pleasure and that they have been “taught” by engineers
to increase or decrease sexual stimulation. Given the fact that there exist
machines today (from nano- to cybertechnology) that are much more capa-
ble of blurring the line between the “natural” and the “artificial” than these
sex machines, pornography can be considered an important place where the
“bodily” and the “mechanical” are renegotiated. In pornography, the body
does not only come intimately into contact with machines but is itself con-
ceptualized as a high-tech matter to the extent that it becomes impossible to
tell where the machine ends and where the human body begins.
 Fucking Machines 221

Notes
1. The idea that pornography portrays bodies as though they were machines
has a long tradition reaching back at least to Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom
(1785/2002). Here, the orgiastic action is organized according to a rigid set
of rules that, as Susan Sontag puts it, underlines Sade’s idea “of the person
as a ‘thing’ or an ‘object,’ of the body as a machine and of the orgy as
an inventory of the hopefully indefinite possibilities of several machines in
collaboration with each other” (1969, 52).
2. Feminists particularly criticize the way that predominantly heterosexual
“pornoscripts” position women as objects of intense visual scrutiny and
focus on the “much more photogenic ‘evidence’ of male pleasure” (van
Doorn, 2010, 425).
3. In Screening Sex, Linda Williams identifies this as the continuing divide
between graphic “fuck film” and Hollywood’s sexual simulation, which is
responsible for the fact that pornography “bear[s] the burden of crowding
all the sex that could not be seen elsewhere in its one-hour plus time spans”
(2008, 129).
4. These observations are based entirely on my own studies of the website.
5. RPM stands for “revolutions per minute” and refers to the motors pow-
ering the machines in these videos. Although grammatically “350 RPM”
seems to describe the speed at which the videos can be downloaded—in fact,
RPM is also a file packaging format—the technical support desk at Kink
Online assured me in a personal e-mail that “RPM” makes reference to the
machines on screen.
6. For an overview of these positions, see Williams (1989), also Paasonen
(2010).
7. For Žiž ek’s full quotation, see his Plague of Fantasies (1997, 180); compare
also his Organs without Bodies (2004, 172–173).
8. For a critical overview of the “objectification” argument, see Feona Attwood’s
essay “Pornography and Objectification” (2004). With respect to these par-
ticular examples from FuckingMachines, it must of course been noted that,
while women may be visually “objectified,” men have much more drastically
been reduced to the hydraulic function of their genitals in these videos.
9. For Foucault, one form of biopower is the so-called disciplinary power.
With respect to my argument about the discursive power of pornography,
it is worth quoting Foucault at length: “[Disciplines] centered on the body
as a machine: . . . the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its
forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration
into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by pro-
cedures of power that characterized the disciplines” (1990, 139, emphasis
in original). According to this logic, the young, clean, and shaved bodies in
the FuckingMachines clips have been “optimized” for penetration. The per-
former’s hairless skin offers maximal visibility; the actresses are young and
“usefully” enduring; the entire personnel are docile to both their partners
and the camera.
222 Sarah Schaschek

10. For an extended discussion of the common lack of recognition of pornogra-

phy’s level of mediation, see Sielke (1996).
11. I take this idea again from Foucault who argues that the discourse of sexu-
ality makes “sex” a desirable category in the first place. According to him,
the discourse of sexuality employs the virtues of enlightenment, rationality,
and individualization, while never actually demystifying “sexuality.” Quite
the opposite, by creating the imaginary element of “sex,” the discourse first
establishes “the desire for sex—the desire to have it, to have access to it,
to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it in discourse, to formulate it in
truth” (1990, 156).
12. Pornography’s commodity value is underlined by the fact that pornographic
films have a certain “built-in obsolescence” guaranteeing a constant need for
more.
13. On the interesting link between sexual labor and love in pornography, see
Attwood (2010).
14. For an innovative discussion of the marketing strategies used by today’s
commercial pornography, see David Slayden’s essay “Debbie Does Dallas
Again and Again” (2010).

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Grundlagen der Dramaturgie. Montage AV. www.derwulff.de/2–103 (accessed
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Zalcock, Bev. 2001. Renegade Sisters: Girl Gangs on Film. London: Creation.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. New York:
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Contributors

Mark Aldridge is a senior lecturer in Film and Television Studies at

Southampton Solent University. His research interests include British tele-
vision drama and both film and television history. Previous publications
include T Is for Television (Reynolds & Hearn, 2008), cowritten with Andy
Murray, exploring the work of writer Russell T. Davies, and The Birth of
British Television (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), an assessment of the medi-
um’s early years.
Lisa Cunningham earned her master’s in English from the University of
West Georgia, and she is currently teaching there. Her work has recently
been published in Paracinema and presented at the Society for Film and
Media Studies and at Film and History conferences.
Samm Deighan is a writer and film critic in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She
obtained an English degree from Rutgers University in 2005 and has studied
at the graduate level at Tufts University and the University of Pennsylvania,
with a focus on Theater History, Film Studies, and Art History. She has
been published in Fangoria and other horror and cult film magazines, as
well as making regular contributions to a variety of blogs, including her
own, Satanic Pandemonium. She also writes fiction and screenplays.
Jenise Hudson is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University where
she is at work on her dissertation on twentieth- and twenty-first-century
representations of black, female, middle-class mental health in African-
American literature. Her research interests include race, class, and gender
representations in contemporary film, black queer studies, black feminist
studies, and African American mental health studies. Her essay, “‘Quaring’
Black Manhood in Brother to Brother” will appear in the forthcoming
special edition of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black
International.
Christine Lang graduated in literary theory, cultural studies and art history
at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2002 and in directing film at the
238 Contributors

Media Art School in Cologne in 2006. Since 2009 she has been an artistic
director fellow in the area of dramaturgy/aesthetics of audiovisual media at
the Film and Television University “Konrad Wolf,” Potsdam Germany. She
works as an author, filmmaker, and curator. Her short films have been shown
at international film festivals and have won several awards. She currently works
on scriptwriting and on artistic research for her PhD on implicit dramaturgy
in film narration. For more information, see www.christinelang.eu and www.
kino-glaz.de.
Suzanne Leonard is assistant professor of English at Simmons College, and
the author of Fatal Attraction (2009), the inaugural text in Wiley-Blackwell’s
series Studies in Film and Television. Her specialties include film and media
studies, feminist theory, and women’s literature, and her articles have
appeared in Genders, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and in various anthologies
including Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History (Wayne State
University Press, 2010) and Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World (Cambridge
Scholars Press, 2009) as well as Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the
Politics of Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2007).
Tiel Lundy teaches film and literary studies at the University of Colorado,
Boulder. Her essay “‘With Myriad Subtleties’: Recognizing an Africanist
Presence in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman” is included in Charles
Chesnutt Reappraised: Essays on the First Major African American Fiction Writer,
(McFarland, 2009) edited by David Garrett Izzo and Maria Orban. She has
also written on Jane Campion and Henry James; her essay “Mired In Desire:
Jane Campion’s Portrait of Erotics” appears in the Journal of Adaptation in
Film and Performance (December 2009). Her current research is dedicated
to investigating the relationship of material and visual cultures, in particular
the role of fashion in film.
Cynthia J. Miller is a cultural anthropologist, specializing in popular cul-
ture and visual media, and her writing has appeared in a wide range of jour-
nals and anthologies across the disciplines, including the recent Télévision:
le moment experimental (in French, INA/Apogee, 2011); Learning from
Mickey, Donald and Walt: Essays on Disney’s Edutainment Films (McFarland,
2011); and Science Fiction Film, Television, and Adaptation: Across the Screens
(Routledge, 2011). Cynthia serves as series editor for Scarecrow Press’s Film
and History series. She is also the editor of the forthcoming volume Too
Bold for the Box Office: A Study in Mockumentary and is on the editorial
board of the Encyclopedia of Women and Popular Culture. Cynthia is cur-
rently at work on several edited volumes: Steaming into a Victorian Future: A
Steampunk Anthology (with Julie Taddeo and Ken Dvorak); Cadets, Rangers,
and Junior Space Men: Televised “Rocketman” Series of the 1950s and Their
 Contributors 239

Fans (with A. Bowdoin Van Riper); and Undead in the West: Vampires,
Zombies, Mummies and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier (with A. Bowdoin
Van Riper).
Meggie Morris is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Institute of Fine
Arts of New York University. Her primary research interests include Spanish
art and film under Franco and during the Post-Franco years, particularly in
relation to the movement known as the movida madrileña, as well as vari-
ous iterations of pop in art, graphic design, and film from the 1950s to the
1980s. She is currently completing her dissertation entitled “Spanish (Sub)
Culture in Transition: Underground Roots and Mainstream Tendencies in
the Art and Film of the Movida Madrileña, 1979–1988.”
Ian Olney is an associate professor of English at York College of
Pennsylvania, where he teaches film studies. His publications on European
cinema and the horror film include articles in Quarterly Review of Film and
Video and Literature/Film Quarterly, as well as a recent book, Euro Horror:
Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture (Indiana
University Press, 2012).
Karen Randell is Professor of Film and Culture at Southampton Solent
University. Her research interests are in film, gender, trauma, and war.
She is coeditor of Screen Methods: Comparative Readings in Film Studies
(Wallflower, 2006); The War Body on Screen (Continuum, 2008); and
Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the “War on Terror” (Continuum,
2010). Randell is also published in Screen (2003), Art in the Age of Terrorism
(2005), the Journal of Cinema Studies (2011), and Generation Zombie (2011).
She is currently writing a monograph on Lon Chaney Sr.
Bailey Ray holds a BA in English from Green Mountain College and a mas-
ter’s in English from Simmons College. Her scholarly work focuses on issues
of gender and race in American narratives, with an emphasis on film and
television, and she has contributed to online educational sources regarding
gender and civil rights history in America.
Karen A. Ritzenhoff is a professor in the Department of Communication
at Central Connecticut State University and also a member of the Program
for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). She teaches courses
on women and film, mass media, film history, visual communication,
American cinema, and television production. Her monograph on Screen
Nightmares: Fernsehen, Video und Gewalt im Film was published in 2010 at
the Schüren Verlag in Germany. She is coeditor, with Katherine A. Hermes,
of Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World (Cambridge Scholar Publishing,
2009) and coeditor, with Angela Krewani, of a special issue on “Leiden,
240 Contributors

Trauma, Folter: Bildkulturen des Irakkriegs,” Augenblick: Marburger Hefte

zur Medienwissenschaft (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2011). Her article on
“Lisbeth Salander as the ‘Final Girl’ in the Swedish ‘Girl Who’ Films” is
included in Donna King and Carrie Lee Smith (eds.), Men Who Hate Women
and the Women Who Kick Their Asses: Feminist Perspectives on Stieg Larsson’s
Millennium Trilogy (Vanderbilt University Press, 2012).
Janet S. Robinson teaches film studies for the Libby Residential Academic
Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In addition to teaching for
the program, she also serves as the associate director. For the past two years,
she has taken her students to the Telluride Film Festival. Her research inter-
ests include gender and film, the horror genre, and teaching pedagogy.
Sarah Schaschek is currently finishing her dissertation on the aesthet-
ics of seriality in pornography (project title “Orgasm Inc.—Seriality in
Pornography”). She is a PhD candidate in American literary and cultural
studies at the University of Bonn. From 2009 to 2010, Schaschek was a
visiting researcher at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara in the film and
media studies departments. Schaschek’s research interests include gender
and queer studies, as well as visual and popular culture.
Terrie Waddell teaches in media and cinema studies at La Trobe University
(Australia). She lectures and researches on the relationship between screen
media, myth, gender, popular culture, and analytical psychology. As well as
numerous chapter and journal contributions, she has authored and edited
the following books: Wild/lives: Trickster, Place and Liminality on Screen
(Routledge, 2010); Mis/takes: Archetype, Myth and Identity in Screen Fiction
(Routledge, 2006); Lounge Critic: The Couch Theorist’s Companion (coeditor;
Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2004); and Cultural Expressions of
Evil and Wickedness: Wrath, Sex, Crime (editor; Rodopi, 2003).
Index
abuse, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 11, 36, 41–2, 99, Australia, xvii, 33, 35–8, 40–2, 44–5,
115, 120, 135, 172, 199 67, 227, 232, 234, 240
Adams, Claire, 72 autoeroticism, 6, 43, 216
Addison, Heather, 128 pornographic
African-American, xix, 51, 147, 169, with machines, 213
171, 177–8, 185, 190, 194 pornography, 216
AgathaChristie.com, 84 via technology, 29
Aguilera, Christina, 15 Avatar (dir. James Cameron), 80–1
Almodóvar, Pedro, xiii, xiv–xvi, xviii–xix,
xxi, 159–61, 163–7, 233 Bacon, Kevin, 51
alter ego, 97, 101–3, 114, 122–3 Bad Biology (dir. Frank Henenlotter),
American Horror Story (FX 2011–2012, 146, 158
dir. Ryan Murphy and Brad Baldung, Hans, 39
Falchuk), 15 Ballard, J.G., 21, 30–1, 226, 233
And Then There Were None (dir. René Bambara, Toni Cade, 177
Clair), 91–4 Banderas, Antonio, xiv
Andersson, Harriet, 125 Bargainnier, Earl F., 91
Antichrist (dir. Lars von Trier), xvii, xxi, Barker, Martin, 19, 21, 30, 225
15–16, 33–45, 234, 235 Barrymore, John, 96
antifeminism, 143 Basket Case (dir. Frank Henenlotter),
anus, 23 xviii, 145–9, 151, 153, 155, 157–8
Archer, Anne, 193 Basket Case 2 (dir. Frank Henenlotter),
archetypes, xix, 84 146, 151
bleeding woman, 154 Basket Case 3 (dir. Frank Henenlotter),
the Final Girl, 148 146, 151
good black man, 177 Baudrillard, Jean, 30
Jungian, 34, 35 Bava, Mario, xvi, xxi, 2–8, 16–17, 229
the matador, 165 Behind the Green Door (dir. Artie
Victorian, 97 Mitchell and Jim Mitchell), 143
Aronofsky, Darren, xi, xvi, xviii, xxi, Belle de Jour (dir. Luis Buñuel), xvi,
109, 111, 115, 121–2, 125–6, xviii, xxi, 131–6, 139, 142–4
130 Bennett, Hywel, 87
Arquette, Rosanna, 24 Bently, Nancy, 64
art house films, 15, 133, 143 Berenstein, Rhona J., 8, 15, 225
Attwood, Feona, 216–17, 221–2 Bergman, Ingmar, 124–6, 130
242 Index

Best Man, The (dir. Malcolm D. Lee), Butler, Dame Judith, 147
174 Byrne, Gabriel, xx, 197, 210
BeTipul (Hot 3, Israel, creat. Hagai
Levi), 197–8, 206–8, 210 Caballero, Ángel, 11
Birth of a Nation, The (dir. D.W. Caged (dir. John Cromwell), 9
Griffith), xvii, xxi, 58, 62, 67, Calvaire (dir. Fabrice Du Welz), 15, 17
186 camera, 4, 7, 21–3, 26–7, 39, 55, 59, 61,
Black Nationalist Movement, 173 74, 77, 119, 140, 221
Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky), xi, lens
xviii, xxi, 109, 113–14, 118, 121, telephoto, 58
125–7, 130 shot, 43, 48, 121, 139, 182, 192
Blake, Michael, 75 close-up, 4–5, 7, 27, 58, 77, 193,
blocking, 7 201
Bloom, Abigail Burnham, 98 cutaway, 5, 39, 119, 136–7
Bogle, Donald, 58 dolly, 201
boia scarlatto, Il (Bloody Pit of Horror) eye level, 201
(dir. Massimo Pupillo), 14 fade-in, 4
Bonitzer, Pascal, 203 iris-in, 71
Bonner, Beverly, 147 low-angle, 5
Boomerang, The (dir. Louis J. Gasnier), medium, 7, 77, 201
207 pan, 4–5, 22, 77
Bordo, Susan, 150 point-of-view, 5, 50, 77,
Bourke, Joanna, 74–5, 79, 80, 226 152, 215
Brain Damage (dir. Frank Henenlotter), reaction, 77, 125, 201
146, 158 reverse, 7, 73
Breaking Bad (AMC, creat. Vince tilt, 5
Gilligan), 198, 201 tracking, 50, 59
Breaking the Waves (dir. Lars von Trier), zoom, 4, 87, 201
36, 45 video
breast(s), 7, 27, 139, 152, 219 footage, 55
Breillat, Catherine, 140 Campbell, Bebe Moore, 173, 176
Bridget Jones’s Diary (dir. Sharon Campion, Jane, 47–57, 63–7, 225,
Maguire), 195 230–2, 238
Brightman, Sarah, 43 capitalism, 195, 214–17, 227, 229
Brood, The (dir. David Carewe, Arthur Edmund, 76
Cronenberg), 20 Carter, Kelley L., 176
Brooke, Amy, 215 Cassel, Vincent, 111
brothel, 132, 134, 136–7, 140–2 castrating female, 10
Browne, Diana, 147 black career woman, 169
Browning, Tod, 80 black matriarch, 171
bullfight, the (corrida de toros), 160–6 castration
Bunny Game, The (dir. Adam symbolic, 51, 57, 64
Rehmeier), 15 amputation, 73
Buñuel, Luis, xvi, xxi, 131–3, 136–7, castration anxiety, xiv, 119
144, 228 censorship, xii, xvi–xvii, 19–24, 29–30,
Burton, Tim, 36, 44, 225 146, 223, 225
 Index 243

Chaney, Lon, xvii, 69–80, 225, 239 Cruz, Vera, xv

Charles, Josh, 199 cyborg, 218
Chastain, Jessica, xiv, xx
Christensen, Erika, 58 Dafoe, Willem, 33
Christie, Agatha, xvii, 83–4, 93–4, Damici, Nick, 51
230–1, 234 Dancer in the Dark (dir. Lars von Trier),
Cinderella, 59, 65 36, 45
cinematography, 48, 50, 53, 55, 63–4 Dangerous Method, A (dir. David
Clair, René, 92 Cronenberg), xiii–xiv
Clansmen, The (writ. Thomas Dixon), Davidtz, Embeth, 199
58 Davies, Jody Messler, 204, 208
Clary, Charles, 71 Day, Doris, 48
class, 96–9, 101, 104–6, 132, 134, de Beauvoir, Simone, 140, 144, 226
140–1, 160, 182, 194 de Nardo, Gustavo, 4
class politics, xix, 181 de Sade, Marquis, 1, 14, 137, 221, 223,
Classic-Horror.com, 8, 16, 235 232
Clémenti, Pierre, 134 Dead Ringers (dir. David
clitordectomy, 43 Cronenberg), 20
clitoris, 42–3 Dead Zone, The (dir. David
Close, Glenn, 98, 190 Cronenberg), 20
Clover, Carol, 25, 31, 111, 127, 129, Deadwood (HBO, creat. David Milch),
148–9, 155–7, 226 198
Collins, Patricia Hill, 172, 175, 177–8 Dean, James, 25
colonialism Death on the Nile (dir. John
effect of, 35–6, 44 Guillerman), 87
color, 6, 201 Deep Throat (dir. Gerard Damiano),
Color Purple, The (dir. Steven 143
Spielberg), 58, 67 Deleuze, Gilles, 30, 135–9, 144, 209,
Constable, Liz, 140 223, 226–7
Corbiau, Gérard, 43 Deneuve, Catherine, 132
Cornet, Jan, xv DePalma, Brian, 63
Cosgrove, Peter, 139, 141–4, 226 Devine, Kelly, 220
costume, 53, 75, 123, 126, 134–5, 139 dialogue, 22, 29, 89, 91, 119, 201,
Craig, Daniel, xiii 206–7
Crash (dir. David Cronenberg), xii, Diawara, Manthia, 58
xvi–xvii, xxi, 19–26, 29–31, Dietrich, Marlene, 88, 90, 93
225–9, 233 dildo, 211–12, 214, 217, 219
Crash (dir. Paul Haggis), 29 disability
Craven, Roberta Jill, 28 amputation, 71
credits, 15, 21, 48–9, 63, 76, 85, 109 association with evil, 71
Creed, Barbara, 24 disabled veterans, 70–1
Cries and Whispers (dir. Ingmar disfigurement, 79
Bergman), 124–6, 130 emotional, 69
Cronenberg, David, xii–xiv, xvi, xxi, First World War, 79
19–31, 124, 130, 226–8, 233 cinematic context, 78
Crush, The (dir. Alan Shapiro), 191 performance, 69, 71, 73
244 Index

disability—Continued Emmanuelle (dir. Just Jaeckin), 133,

physical, xvii, 69 143–4
sexual stereotyping, 74 Endless Night (dir. Sidney Gilliat),
stigma, 71 86–7, 93–4, 226
Disclosure (dir. Barry Levinson), 190 England (UK), 19, 22, 41, 87
Dixon, Thomas, 58–9 Eppenstein, Barbara, 207
Doane, Mary Ann, 52, 63, 67, 235 Erens, Patricia, 157
Dogville (dir. Lars von Trier), 36, 46 eroticism, xi, xviii, 8, 12, 22, 24, 30,
Dolemite (dir. D’Urville Martin), 171 50, 52, 139, 161
Don Giovanni (comp. Wolfgang Europa [Zentropa] (dir. Lars von Trier),
Amadeus Mozart), 50 36, 46
Don Juan, 50, 57, 63
Doty, Alexander, 9, 16, 227 fairy tale(s)
double bills, 1 Grimm brothers, 39, 43
Douglas, Michael, 58, 190 modern, 111
Douglass, Frederick, 57, 65, 227 romance, 54
Douglass, Kelley Brown, 171 sequence, 55
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (dir. John Falchuk, Brad, 15
S. Robertson), 96 Family that Preys, The (dir. Tyler Perry),
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (dir. Otis xix, 169, 179
Turner), 107 fantasy, 34, 38, 122
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (dir. Rouben cinematic space, 70
Mamoulian), 96 female, 121
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (dir. Victor erotic, 122
Fleming), 96 lesbian, 124
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (dir. Roy masochistic, 136, 139
Ward Baker), 107 ménage-à-trois, 27
Dracula, 105 nonconformist, 123
drag, 13, 211 physical harm, 114
Drive (dir. Nicolas Winding repressed, 131
Refn), 30 romantic, 53–5
Dryburgh, Stuart, 63 S&M, 129
Dunbar, Rockmond, 169 sexual, 115, 128, 141
Dyer, Richard, 58, 64 gendered, 48
Dyson, Marcia L., 171 narrative, 70
pornographic, 215
Eco, Umberto, 208 relationship to reality, 138, 140–1
editing, xii, 7, 12–14, 19–20, 24–7, 29, scene, 39, 122
54–5, 73, 77, 129 sexual, 138
El Hombre y la bestia (The Man and the masochistic, 140
Beast) (dir. Mario Soffici), 107 ritualistic, 139
Elba, Idris, xix, 181 S&M, 133, 135, 139
Elsaesser, Thomas, 70 unconsummated, 137
Emanuelle fuga dall’ inferno (Women’s violent, 55
Prison Massacre) (dir. Bruno wish-fulfillment, 200, 205
Mattei), 14 Farinelli (dir. Gérard Corbiau), 43, 46
 Index 245

Farmer, Brett, 9, 16, 228 Frankenstein, 105–8, 229–31

Fatal Attraction (dir. Adrian Lyne), xix, Frauengefängnis (Barbed Wire Dolls)
181–2, 190, 193–5 (dir. Jesús Franco), 14
father-daughter relationship, 53 Frears, Stephen, 95
abusive, 99 Freda, Riccardo, 14
patriarchal, 174 Freeman, Bill, 147
father-son relationship Freud, Sigmund, xiv, 30, 34, 38, 44, 53,
abandoning, 71 153, 158, 202–5, 207–9, 228
murderous, 147, 151 FuckingMachines, 211–23, 234
female agency, 33, 39, 50, 56, 186–7
female gaze, 50 Gaines, Jane, 185, 216
femininity, 9, 11, 33, 65, 74, 111, 114, Gainsbourg, Charlotte, xvii, 33
119, 124, 127, 227 Gallagher, Bronagh, 99
feminism, xx–xxi, 11, 16, 30–1, 45, 48, Garber, Marjorie, 13, 16, 228
53, 56, 63, 65–7, 133, 142, 147, Garcia, Rodrigo, 201
157, 164, 175, 177–8, 195, Gasnier, Louis J., 207
212–13, 220, 222, 226–9, gay, 12, 13
231–5, 238 Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a
femme et le pantin, La (writ. Pierre Soul) (dir. Georg Wilhelm
Louÿs), 136 Pabst), 207
femme fatale, 90 gender, xv–xvi, 2
Femmine in fuga (Women in Fury) (dir. anxiety, 149
Michele Massimo Tarantini), 14 boundaries, 33, 105
fetishism, 25–7, 29, 30, 62, 129, 132, change, 149
139, 147–8, 153, 163, 188, 192, confusion, 149
212–13 hierarchy, 185
film criticism, 19, 67, 186, 235 and Jungian archetypes, 34
film theory, 31, 65–6, 156, 195, 197, norms, 2, 9, 11, 14
227–9, 231, 235 queered, 9
Final Girl, the, xxi, 111, 115, 120, 148, and race, 189
156, 232, 239 black male disempowerment, 190
Fincher, David, xii, xiii, xxi, 15 representation, xvi, 2, 4, 11
Finney, Albert, 85–6 gender identity, 3, 25
fixation, xi, 36, 38 acceptable, 163
flashback, 42, 88, 90, 93 alternative, 8, 14
Fly, The (dir. David Cronenberg), 20 dramatic transgression, 166
Forman, Murray, 25 fluidity, 2, 13, 149–50, 160
Foucault, Michel, 213, 215, 218, 221–2 masculine, 149
framing, 50, 59, 77, 109, 117–18, 121, gender performance
174, 187 confused, 150
France, 161, 202 constructed, 146–7
Franco, Francisco, 160, 162, 164–5, 239 gender politics, xviii–xix, 143, 171, 181,
Franco, Jess (Jesús), xvi, xxi, 2, 11–14, 190
17, 143 African-American, 169–70
Frankenhooker (dir. Frank Henenlotter), gender role(s), xix, 8, 192
146, 158 African-American
246 Index

gender role(s)—Continued yuppie horror, xix, 186, 188, 193,

constructive, 177 195
female disempowerment, 170 pornography, 25, 212
male backlash, 173 BDSM, 212
male dominance, 170, 172 hard-core, 133
rules, 174 S&M, 2, 3, 6
ambiguity, xv, 163, 166 soft-core, 133, 142
change, xvi romance, xvii, 48, 87
clichéd, xiv science fiction, 20
constructed, 157 slasher, 31, 129, 146, 148–9, 155–7,
deconstructed, 3, 6 226
dominance, 162–3 thriller, 51, 86
fluidity, 163 envying woman thriller, xix, 190,
norms, 161 192, 194
passivity, 163 erotic, 51, 67, 181, 234
performance, 160 horror, 73
power-based, xi noir, 61
reversal, 159 trash film, 152
and spectatorship, 2, 4, 8 TV series as extremely long auteur
subverted, 4 film, xx, 198
transgression, xi woman’s film, 53, 228
workplace, 181 George, Melissa, 198
gender theory, 157 Germany, 88–9, 238
Genette, Gérard, 208 Gilbert, Pamela K., 96
genitals (genitalia), xvi, 73, 114–17, Gilliat, Sidney, 86
119, 124–5, 127, 139, 146, Girardot, Annie, 117
148–9, 157, 215, 221 Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The (dir.
genre and subgenre, xx, 1–3, 9–11, 25, David Fincher), xii–xiv, 15
51–2, 70, 87, 149, 157, 159, 194, Gish, Lillian, 58
212 Givens, Robin, 175
art house erotica, 133, 142–3 Glover, Danny, 58
blaxploitation, 171 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 202
exploitation, 133, 142 Gone with the Wind (dir. George
fantasy, 80 Cukor, Victor Fleming, Sam
Hollywood Wood), 62, 67
woman’s film, 52, 63, 65, 227 Gowland, Gibson, 76
women-in-prison, 9–11 Grant, Barry Keith, 188
horror, xii, 1, 20, 25, 31, 38, 45, 70, Grant, Jacquelyn, 171
80, 111, 120, 124, 127, 129, Grey, Sasha, 212–13, 219
144–5, 154, 157–8, 225–9, 232, Griffith, D. W., xxi, 58, 67, 186
234–5, 239–40 Guillerman, John, 87
Euro-horror S&M, xvi, 1, 2, 8–9, Gunning, Tom, 78
14–15 Guzon, Andrea, 12
Euro-horror women-in-prison,
10–11 Haggard, H. Rider, 105
gothic, xviii Haining, Peter, 84, 92
 Index 247

Halen, Kenneth, 72 In the Cut (dir. Jane Campion), xvii,

Hampton, Christopher, 95, 99, 103 47–9, 51, 53, 56, 59, 63–7, 231,
Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The (dir. 234
Curtis Hanson), 191, 194 In Treatment (HBO), 197–203, 206
Haneke, Michael, xvi, xviii, 17, 109, insanity, 102–3
115–21, 123, 125–30, 228, Insex.com, 135
230–2, 234 intertitle, 71, 74, 76
Haraway, Donna, 218 intimacy, xviii, 36, 43, 99, 100,
Harris, Trudier, 177 104–6
Hart, Lynda, 9, 16, 229 emotional
Henenlotter, Frank, xviii, 145–6, 151, imagined, 120
157–8, 229 same-sex, 122
Hershey, Barbara, 112, 121 sexual, 29, 95
heteronormativity, xv, 9, 11–14, 135, cinematic clichés, 141
149–51, 153 exploitative, xv
heterosexism, 171, 178, 227
Hinson, Taraji P., 173 Jaeckin, Just, 131, 133, 144
Hirsch, Gordon, 98, 107, 229 Januskopf, Der (The Head of Janus) (dir.
Histoire d’O (dir. Just Jaeckin), xviii, F. W. Murnau), 107
131–5, 138–44 jealousy, xi, 112, 142
Hitchcock, Alfred, 23, 26, 31, 48–9, Jeanne Dielman (dir. Chantal
63, 67, 88, 93–4, 124–5, 130, Akerman), 143
149, 158 Jeffreys, Sheila, 214
Hodes, Martha, 64 Jelinek, Elfriede, 114
Hollywood, xiv, xvii, 9–11, 21–2, 27, Jolene (dir. Dan Ireland), xiii–xiv,
30, 48, 52–3, 62, 66, 70, xx–xxi
80, 83, 176, 212, 221, Jung, Carl G., 34–8, 44–5, 203, 209,
231, 233 229, 232–4
homophobia, 9–10, 51, 178, 227
hooks, bell, 177 Kaplan, E. Ann, 128
Hostel (dir. Eli Roth), 80–1 Karloff, Boris, 103
Hostel (series 2005–2011, creat. Eli Kendall, Tony, 4
Roth), 15 Kerry, Norman, 76
House of Women (dir. Walter Doniger), Kidman, Dana, 52
9 Kier, Udo, 132
Howarth, Troy, 5–6, 16, 229 Kimbles, Samuel, 35–6, 45, 233
Huffman, Felicity, xv Kingdom, The (dir. Lars von Trier), 36
Humphreys, Matthew, 187 Klein, Bonnie Sherr, 30
Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (dir. Klotz, Volker, 208
Wallace Worsley), 70, 80 Knowles, Beyoncé, xix, 182
Hunter, Holly, 20, 52 Knud, Romer, 34
Huppert, Isabelle, 109, 129 Koepke, Uta, 11
Koroshiya 1 (Ichi the Killer) (dir.
Idiots, The (dir. Lars von. Trier), 36 Takashi Miike), 15
Ikard, David, 178 Koteas, Elias, 23
Illouz, Eva, 192 Kunis, Mila, 114
248 Index

Lacan, Jaques, 30 makeup, 58, 78

Ladies of the Big House (dir. Marion male gaze, 14, 50, 183
Gering), 9 sadistic, 8
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (dir. Just male impotence, 13, 58, 71, 73, 157
Jaeckin), 133, 144 Malkovich, John, 64, 98, 103
Lahti, Christine, 189 Man in the Brown Suit, The (CBS, dir.
Laqueur, Thomas, 216 Alan Grint), 92, 94
Larter, Ali, xix, 181, 186 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (dir.
Lathan, Sanaa, 169 Alfred Hitchcock), 48
Laughton, Charles, 89, 93 Mansfield, Jayne, 20, 25
Lavi, Daliah, 4 Mansfield, Richard, 96
Lea, Sharon, 178 Mara, Rooney, xiii
Lee, Christopher, 4 March, Frederick, 96, 103
Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 53 Margheriti, Antonio, 14
lesbian, xiv, 9–10, 12, 16, 63, 65, Marks, Laura, 37, 45, 231
142–3, 174, 229, 231–2 Marsh, Mae, 58
lesbian gaze, 11 Martin, Valerie, 95, 100, 106
lesbian relationship, 125 Martinez, Nacho, xix, 161
lesbianism, 10–11 Mary Reilly (dir. Stephen Frears), xviii,
Levi, Hagai, 197, 199, 206 95–6, 98–9, 103, 106, 108,
Levine, George, 102 231–2
lighting, 7, 50, 58–9, 182, 201 masculine dominance, 3, 162–3, 169,
Litteer, Heather, 50 173
Little Deaths (dir. Sean Hogan and African-American, 170
Andrew Parkinson), 15, 17 masculine potency, 79
Long, Nia, 174 masculinity, xii, 9, 11, 26, 31, 58, 66,
Long, Walter, 58 69, 81, 111, 149–51, 154, 162,
Longmore, Paul. K., 71 171, 184–5, 195, 229, 232, 234
L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock (The African-American
Horrible Dr. Hichcock) (dir. dominance, 173
Riccardo Freda), 14 Maslin, Janet, 53, 66, 231
lost child complex, 33–5, 44 masochism, xviii, 3–6, 8, 36, 39, 52,
lost child, the, xvii, 33, 35–6, 38–43 64, 110, 123, 131–3, 135–44,
Lott, Eric, 64 212, 225–7, 233
Louÿs, Pierre, 136 Matador (dir. Pedro Almodóvar), xviii,
Lumet, Sidney, 85 159–65, 167
Lurie, Susan, 63 matriarch(al), 116, 129, 157, 171, 175
lust, 96, 98, 125, 133, 169, 204 Mattei, Bruno, 14
Lynch, David, 133 Mayans, Antonio, 12
Mayne, Judith, 9–10–11, 16, 231
Ma, Jean, 119, 127–8 McCubbin, Frederick, 37
Mad Men (AMC, creat. Matthew McDaniel, Hattie, 62
Weiner), 198, 201 McGill, Bruce, 183
madness, xi, 39, 101 McHugh, Kathleen, 48
Magimel, Benoît, 115 Melancholia (dir. Lars von Trier), xiii,
Maida, Patricia, 83–4 xxi, 37, 46
 Index 249

melodrama, 1, 13, 63, 67, 71–2, 91, symbolic, 149

109, 123, 127–9, 145, 177, 228, violent, 121
230, 235 motherhood, xiv
gothic, 14 movie poster, xiii, 76, 90
Melville, Herman, 71 movie trailer, 87, 89, 93
metaphor(s) Moynihan, Patrick, 172–3
the bullfight, 161, 166 Mulvey, Laura, 27, 30–1, 63, 66,
car crash as sexual struggle, 25 132–3, 144, 231
critical feminist, 213 murder, 41, 55, 83–6, 88, 89–92, 124,
for disability, 79 147–8, 155, 162–4
house as society, 194 murder-suicide, 162–3
for loss of virginity, 124 Murder on the Orient Express (dir.
lost child as internal ghost, 33 Sidney Lumet), 85–7, 94, 226
for oral sex, 73 Murphy, Ryan, 15
for rape, 155 Museum of Sex, NYC, xi, 109, 128
for sexual desire, 128 music, 48, 56, 67, 77, 87–8, 118, 177,
for sexuality, 109, 123 201
transformation, 40 score, 4, 7
for virtue and promiscuity, 114 music video, 15–16
women as commodities, 183 mutilation, xiii, xvi, xvii, 19, 21, 43
the wound, 110 self-inflicted, xvi, xviii, 42, 109, 114,
Mills, Hayley, 87 116–17, 119, 125, 127
mise-en-scène, 7, 22, 48, 55, 58, 74, 201 Mystère des Roches de Kador, Le (dir.
misogyny, xix, 2, 39, 51, 169, 183 Léonce Perret), 207
Miss Marple (BBC, 1984–1992), 92 myth, 34, 37, 39, 139
Mitchell, Timothy, 165–6 American family, 194
monster, xviii, 70, 77–8, 95–101, Black Macho and the Myth of the
103–6, 114, 145, 149, 151, 157 Superwoman, 174
montage, 192 cultural, 48
Moore, Susanna, 47, 50, 56, 62, 64 disability
morality, 19, 20, 24, 29, 58–9, 86, hypersexuality, 74
97–8, 103, 132, 134, romance, 79
172, 206 Don Juan, 50
Moreau, Dr., 105 Final Girl, 111, 120
Morgan, Joan, 177 Greek, 38, 41
mother, the, 21 Hollywood, 48
mother-child relationship race, xvii, 47–8, 57, 62–3
kidnapping, 193 romance, 51, 53–7, 59, 63
mother-daughter relationship, 53, 63, sex, xvii, 47, 57
112–14, 117, 122, 128
affectionate, 125 Naqvi, Fatima, 129
controlling, 118–19, 121, 123–4, Neale, Steve, 70
127, 129 Nin, Anaïs, 131
dysfunctional, 121 Not a Love Story: A Film About
incestuous, 114, 120 Pornography (dir. Bonnie Sherr
repressive, 116 Klein), 30
250 Index

Obsessed (dir. Steve Shill), xix, 181–2, Pierce, Richard, 147

184–6, 188, 191–3 Pillow Talk (dir. Michael Gordon), 49,
obsession, xi, xiv, xix, 96, 101, 134, 67
159, 162 Pinn, Anthony B., 171
O’Connell, Jerry, 183 Playing House (dir. Tom Vaughan), 191
Oedipus Rex (writ. Sophocles), 202 Poirot (ITV, 1989-), 92
orgasm, 6, 24, 28, 42, 109, 120, 122, Polan, Dana, 52–3, 66, 232
128, 140, 212, 216, 219 politics, 19
“little death, the “ (le petit mort), 22, Pollock, George, 92
42, 109, 122, 128 pornography, xiii, 213
Other, the, 151, 156, 214, 216 accepted in mainstream, 133
sexual, 127 American torture franchises, 15
antipornography critique, 214
Pace, Lloyd, 147 autoeroticism, 216
Page, Geneviève, 136 BDSM, 212
Parker, Sarah Jessica, 49 body as machine, 211
Partners in Crime (ITV, 1983), 92 booking, 152
passivity, 56, 79, 163 consumer, 216–17
patriarchy, xviii, 2–6, 8, 10–11, 36, 53, discourse, 211
143, 157, 170–5, 182–9, 214–15 fear of, 211, 214–15
African-American feminist critique, 30, 212, 220
female complicity, 175 fetishism, 212
Penalty, The (dir. Wallace Worsley), horror, xii
69–72, 80 industry, 216
penis, 23, 26–7, 30, 43, 50, 62, 149, male-centered, 30
152, 213 internalized, 215
penis envy, xiv Internet, 135
Perry, John Weir, xix, 35, 37, 45, 231–2 machine as man, 215
Perry, Tyler, 169–71, 173–4, 176–9, 226 production, 212
Petley, Julian, 19 sex machines, 211–13
Pettman, Dominic, 214, 216, 219 techno-erotic relations, xx, 213
phallic, 3, 5–6, 26, 51, 56, 61, 63, 73, mainstream
148–50, 154 comparison to, 50
phallus, 30, 114, 142, 149 meaning
Phantom of the Opera, The (dir. Rupert alternate readings, 212
Julian), 69–70, 76, 78 capitalism, 214–15
Philbin, Mary, 76 cultural norm, 215
Pianist, La (The Piano Teacher) (dir. market rationality, 211
Michael Haneke), 15 mechanical sex, 213
Piano, The (dir. Jane Campion), 47, patriarchy, 214
52–3, 63–6, 227, 230, 232 techno-erotic relations, 218
Piano Teacher, The (dir. Michael outside mainstream, 212
Haneke), xviii, 109, 113–16, power relations, 219–20
118, 124–7, 129 S&M, 3, 6
Piccoli, Michel, 134 straight, 2–3
Pierce, Peter, 38 soft-core, 133
 Index 251

in tension with romantic love, 116 powerlessness, xi, 35, 56, 62, 128, 138,
violence 190
social acceptability, 115 prostitute(s), 9, 132, 134, 137–8, 147
visual point of view Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock), 93, 124,
male, 215 130, 149, 158
voyeurism, 23, 116, 118–20, 123, 129 psychoanalysis, xiv, 34, 197–8, 201–7
woman’s role, 220 psychoanalytic theory, 142, 164, 206
word as metaphor psychoanalytical interpretation, 70, 146
explicit materialism, 182 psychoanalytical terminology, 6, 34–8,
Portman, Natalie, 109, 121 42–3, 99, 153, 174, 202–5
Portrait of a Lady, The (dir. Jane psychological
Campion), 47, 49, 52–3, 63–4, action, 150
66, 229 atmosphere, 201
postfeminism, 181, 191, 195, 227, 238 block, 44
power, 3, 5, 6–7, 10, 25–6, 33, 218 boundaries, 43
acting, 62 conflict, xix
assertion confusion, 151
African-American women, 176 distress, xvii
capitalist, 214 dominance, 160
of cinema, 56, 62, 86 dysfunction, 121
of cultural norms, 215 event, 202
of desire, 138 fear, 25
differential, 119, 174 flaws, 172
of disabled body, 69 healing, 203
of fantasy, 138 legacy, 35
female, 50 perspective, 200
heteronormative, 9 regression, 33
of heterosexualizing law, 11 wound, 106
of love psychology, 34–5, 199
destructive, 106 psychosis, 79, 146
male, 172–3, 183, 188 female, xiv, 190
in pornography, 218 psychotherapy, xiv, xx, 198–202, 206
of narrative, 53, 55 Pugh, Sharieff, 51
phallic, 149 Pupillo, Massimo, 14
and pleasure, 8
of queerness, 13 queer, xvi, 1–2, 9–13, 16, 216, 227,
racial, 190 237, 240
representational, 37 queer gaze, 14
of scientific knowledge, 97 queer theory, 10
of sex machines, 215 queer zone, 9, 12–13
of sexist ideology, 172
sexual, 134 race, 185
destructive, 114 barriers, 194
social, 102 black macho narrative, 171
subversive, 9 and gender, 189
Power, Tyrone, 88 black male disempowerment, 190
252 Index

race—Continued romantic love story, 200, 204

hierarchy, 185 Ross, Becki L., 6, 9, 11, 14, 16, 232
majority empowerment, 186–7 Rowe, John Carlos, 48, 63
minority disempowerment, 185 Ruffalo, Mark, 50
myth, xvii, 47–8, 57, 62–3 Rustichelli, Carlo, 4, 7
racial other, 186 Ryan, Meg, 49, 59
racialized interpretation, 63 Ryder, Winona, 112
sterotyping
aggressive black man, 186 S&M, xvi, 1–3, 10, 12, 14, 15–16, 129
virginal white woman, 186 lesbian, 8–9
racial politics, xix, 181 queer, 8, 13
rape, xiii, xv, 10, 26, 57, 61–2, 74, 114– sadism, xii, 2–5, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 26,
16, 129, 132, 136, 146, 152, 36, 40, 99, 115, 120, 137, 164,
154, 187 212
anal, xiii Sadoff, Diane, 64
rating, xii, 19 Sadomania (dir. Jesús Franco), xvi, xxi,
G, xvi, 19 2, 9, 11–14, 17
NC-17, 19–20, 22, 24, 29, 132 sadomasochism, xviii, 1–3, 5, 8, 30, 39,
R, 19–20, 22, 29 43, 114, 133, 135, 137, 143. See
Rauch, Alan, 102, 107 also S&M
Ray, Audacia, 213 Saine, K.B., 176–7
Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock), Saw (dir. James Wan), 80–1
26–7, 31 Saw (series 2004–2010.creat. Leigh
Refn, Nicolas Winding, 30 Whannell and James Wan, 15
Rehmeier, Adam, 15 Scanners (dir. David Cronenberg), 20
Riegl, Alois, 37 Schaefer, Eric, 152
Rihanna, 15 Schepelern, Peter, 34, 45, 233
Rinaldo (comp. George Fridiric Schiller, Friedrich, 202
Handel), 43 script, 62, 91–2, 135, 181
Roberts, Julia, 99 Seltzer, Mark, 126
Robertson, John S., 96 semen, 23, 27, 30, 129
romance, xiii, 87, 92, 159 Serna, Assumpta, xix, 161
conventions, 53 set, 135, 140, 212, 220
dangers of, 55 sex act(s). See also autoeroticism;
fairy-tale, 54 fetishism; masochism;
and female masochism, 52 pornography; sadism;
female subject, 52 sadomasochism; sexual
fetishized, 192 intercourse; sexual practice;
gothic tradition, 47 sexual relations
Hollywood, 62 anal, xii, xiii, 13, 21, 23–4
in a mystery, 88 metaphor
myth, 51–7, 59, 63 oral sex, 73
narrative, 55 oral, 50, 52
novels, 83–4 pornographic
Spanish, 163 anal penetration, 215
violent, 136 anal sex, 220
 Index 253

with machines, 211–13, 215, 217, masochistic disavowal, 137

219, 220 technological, 218
Sex and the City (HBO 1998–2004, sexual politics, 30, 111, 189
dir. Darren Star), 49, 65 sexual practice, 166, 220
sexism, 91, 171, 212 normalized, xiii
African-American transgressive, xvi, 116, 120
female subjugation, 171 sexual predator(s), 6, 162, 164
sexual abstinence, 111, 115, 123, 125, sexual purity, 111, 120
128 sexual relations, 3, 8, 153
sexual attraction, xi, 63, 190 racial sterotyping, 57–8
lesbian, 142 sexual relationship(s), 6, 135, 152–3,
racialized, 187 212
shared obsession, 162 conventional, 132, 142
sexual desire, 140, 160 heterosexual, 126
female, xvi, xviii, 29, 128–9, 141, cultural response to impotence,
163 157
aberrant, 124 with technology, 29
repressed, 121 unconsummated, 156
unfulfilled, 127 sexual revolution, xii, 115
heterosexual, 23–4 sexual satisfaction
male, 11 from car crashes, 28
violent, 166 from partner murder, 162
sexual encounter(s), 119, 142 sexual stimulation
failed, 120 by childhood memory, xiv
illicit, 142 compulsive, 43
interoffice, 184 by machine(s), 220
lesbian, 12 sexual taboos, xii, 54, 159, 161, 164,
pornographic 204
women and machines, 211–12 sexuality, xii, xiv–xv, xix, xxi, 8, 11, 14,
racialized, 64 22, 26, 28, 103, 107, 129–30,
role reversal, 163 177, 222, 228, 230, 232
violent, 164 autoerotic, 216
sexual experience, 22, 112, 137–8 censored, 29
normative, 75 commercialized, 215
sexual foreplay, 28 explicit, 132
masochistic, 140 female, xiv, xvi, 21, 23–4, 27, 33, 43,
S&M, 116 63–4, 90, 120, 124, 129, 131–
sexual identity, xv, 12 2, 140, 142
fluidity, 13 destructive, xviii, 114
sexual imagery, xi, 213–14 forbidden, 120
sexual intercourse, xv, 14, 114, 116, heterosexual, 12
122, 125, 153, 215 lesbian, 9
sexual pleasure, 123, 141, 217 nonconformist, 114
discovery, 122 regressive, 127
female, 30 regulated, 126
female agency, xvi repressed, 114, 120
254 Index

sexuality—Continued Smith, Paul Julian, 164

self-directed, 127 Smith, Tasha, 178
violent, 111 Smith, Terri Susan, 148
male, xviii Snead, James, 47, 65
dangerous, 51, 61, 63 Soderbergh, Steven, 58, 65–6, 233
destructive, 6 Something Borrowed (dir. Luke
deviant, 21, 157 Greenfield), 195
disability stereotyping, 74 Something Weird Video, 146
psychotic, 79 Sontag, Susan, 135, 221
racial stereotyping, xvii, 58, 61, 64 Sopranos, The (HBO, creat. David
transgressive, 69 Chase), 198, 201, 207
violent, 156 sound, 6–7, 96, 118, 119
monstrous, 157 soundtrack, 14, 53, 162, 185, 201
murderous, 162–3 Spader, James, 20
nonconformist, xviii Spain, xviii, xix, 159–66
repressed, xviii Sparkling Cyanide (ITV, dir. Tristram
techno, 212–13 Powell), 92, 94
transgressive, xx, 21 spectatorship, xvi, 1, 2, 7–8, 11, 13–14
vicarious, 156 Spornick, Nicholas, 83–4
violent, xviii Springfield, Dusty, 56
sexualized gaze, 132, 137, 142 Srpski film (A Serbian Film) (dir. Srdan
Shakespeare, William, 71 Spasojević), 15
Shaviro, Steven, 3, 8, 16, 233 Staff, Kathy, 100
Shaw, Deborah, 64 Stage Fright (dir. Alfred Hitchcock), 88,
She’s a Girl I Knew (dir. Gwen 93–4
Haworth), xv, xxi Steel, Anthony, 132
Shelley, Mary, 105 stereotype
sibling relationship, 53, 126 disability, 80
incestuous, 54, 125 hypersexuality, 74
psychotic, xviii, 146–8 English teacher, 49–50
Siegmann, George, 58 ethnic
Sierek, Karl, 207 Latin lover, 57
Silverman, Kaja, 131 gender
Singer, Thomas, 35–6, 45, 233 male dominance, xiii
Single White Female (dir. Barbet masculine violence, 146
Schroeder), 191 lesbian, 9
Skaebnesvangre Opfindelse, Den (The racial, 62–3, 185
Fateful Invention) (dir. August angry black woman, 174
Blom), 107 black female resentment, 191
Skal, David J., 71, 78 black pimp, 171
Skin I Live In, The (La piel que habito) black professional woman, 174
(dir. Pedro Almodóvar), xiii, mammy, 62
xiv, 159 role reversal, 186
Slayden, David, 222 sexually aggressive black man,
Sleepless in Seattle (dir. Nora Ephron), 57–8, 62, 186
195 virginal white female, 186
 Index 255

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 71, 96–8, Tombs, Pete, 10, 16, 143, 234
100–1, 103, 105 torture, xii, 10, 25, 40, 43, 102, 134–6,
Stewart, James (Jimmy), 26 212
Stoker, Bram, 105 Towers, Harry Alan, 92
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tracy, Spencer, 96, 103
The (writ. Robert Louis Traffic (dir. Steven Soderbergh), 58,
Stevenson), 96 64–6, 195, 227, 233
Street, Sarah, 91 TransAmerica (dir. Duncan Tucker), xv,
Studlar, Gaylyn, 70, 76, 80 xxi
Suchet, David, 86 transgender, xiv, xvi, 159
Sullivan, Thomas Russell, 96 transsexual
surrealism, 38, 48, 79, 122, 128, 132–3 actor, 13
Sweden, xiii, xxi character, xv
Sweet, Vonte, 58 transsexuality, xv, 211
Swimfan (dir. John Polson), 191 transvestite, 159
Sylwan, Kari, 125 trauma, xiv, 33, 36, 41–2, 70, 105, 121,
198–9
Talking Heads (BBC 1987–1998, creat. True Crime (writ. Mark Seltzer), 126,
Alan Bennett), 206 130, 233
Tarantini, Michele Massimo, 14 Two or Three Things I Know about Her
Tarkovsky, Andre, 36 (dir. Jean-Luc Godard), 143
technology, 78
human interaction, 20, 22, 28–9, Ullmann, Liv, 125
211–20 Underwood, Blair, 198
television, xi, xviii, xx, 15, 83–4, 86, Unger, Deborah Kara, 20
92, 174, 198–201, 206–7 United States (US), xiii, xv, 1, 19, 22,
Ten Little Indians (dir. George Pollack, 70, 133, 193
1965), 91–2, 94 Unknown, The (dir. Tod
Terry, Ethel Grey, 72 Browning), 80
Testament du Docteur Cordelier, Le (The Ustinov, Peter, 88
Testament of Dr. Cordelier) (dir.
Jean Renoir), 107 vagina, xv–xvi, 27, 50, 116–17, 120,
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The (dir. 124–5, 148, 154, 213, 219
Tobe Hooper), 156 van Doorn, N., 221
That Obscure Object of Desire (dir. Luis van Hentenryck, Kevin, 147
Buñuel), 136 van Wageningen, Yorick, xiii
theology Varden, Norma, 89
black Variety, 72, 78, 81, 231
male chauvinism, 171 Venus in Furs (writ. Leopold von Sacher-
black liberation, 170 Masoch), 131, 135–6, 144
Thornham, Sue, 49, 65–6, 195, 227–9, vergine di Norimberga, La (The Virgin of
231 Nuremberg) (dir. Antonio
Thulin, Ingrid, 124 Margheriti, 14
Tohill, Cathal, 10, 16, 143, 234 Victorian, 53
Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu (Tokyo Gore Police) era, 95, 101
(dir. Yoshihiro Nishimura), 15 literature, 96, 105
256 Index
Victorian—Continued
London, 96
propriety, 104
scientific inquiry, 102
sexuality, 63
social control, 95
social ills, 106
society, 97, 100, 103
theater, 96
women, 125
Videodrome (dir. David Cronenberg),
20, 29, 124, 130
violence, xi–xvi, xviii–xix, 1, 5, 10, 15,
22–8, 33, 43, 45, 47–8, 51–2,
57, 60–1, 84, 96, 106, 111, 113,
115–16, 120–1, 124, 126, 128,
130, 132, 134, 136, 140,
145–6, 148–9, 154, 156–7, 159,
161, 212, 215, 217, 233–4
domestic violence, xix
African-American, 169, 174
self-inflicted, 109–10, 114, 120–1,
124, 126–7
sexual, 163–4
virgin, 14, 109, 111–12, 114–15, 118,
120, 128, 134, 141, 154
virgin, the, 21
von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, 1, 14,
131, 135, 137, 143–4, 227
von Trier, Lars, xii, xiii, xvii, xxi, 16,
33–4, 36–40, 42, 44–6, 233–5
voyeurism, xi, 22–6, 28, 116, 118–20,
123, 126–7, 129, 163, 187
Wallace, Michelle, 174, 177
war
First World War, xvii, 71, 74–6, 79
reconstructive surgery, 78
Iraq, 198
Second World War, 89
US Civil War, 57
aftermath, xvii, 48, 57–8
Wasikowska, Mia, 199
websites
AgathaChristie.com, 84
Classic-Horror.com, 8
FuckingMachines, 211–21
Insex.com, 135
Wells, H. G., 105
Wells, Ida B., 57, 67, 234
West, Kanye, 15
Whip and the Body, The (dir. Mario
Bava), xvi, 1–4, 6, 8, 14, 16–17,
235
whore(s), 105, 112
whore, the, 21
whorehouse, 134
Why Did I Get Married?(dir. Tyler
Perry), 178
Widmark, Richard, 85
Wiest, Dianne, 198
Wilder, Billy, 88, 94
Williams, Delores S., 171, 177, 234
Williams, Demetrius K., 171
Williams, Linda, xii, xxi, 2, 3, 6, 8,
15–16, 22, 25, 30–1, 58–9, 63,
67, 144, 164, 166–7, 179, 214,
221, 223, 225
Williams, Linda Ruth, 51, 63, 234
Wilson, Ajita, 11, 13
Wire, The (HBO, creat. David Simon),
198
Witches’ Sabbath, The (art. Hans
Baldung), 39
Witness for the Prosecution (dir. Billy
Wilder), 88–90, 93–4, 226
Wood, Robin, 38
Worsley, Wallace, 69
yonic, 154
Zalcock, Bev, 10, 16, 235
Žižek, Slavoj, 214
Zolkas, Magdalena, 34, 45, 235