Postmodern Chick Flicks: The Return of the Woman's Film

Postmodern Chick Flicks The Return of the Woman’s Film

Roberta Garrett

Postmodern Chick Flicks

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Postmodern Chick Flicks The Return of the Woman’s Film Roberta Garrett Senior Lecturer in Literature and Cultural Studies, University of East London

© ROBERTA GARRETT

2007

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978– 1– 4039– 9819– 4 ISBN-10: 1– 4039– 9819– 1

hardback hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garrett, Roberta, 1965– Postmodern chick flicks : the return of the woman’s film / Roberta Garrett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN–13: 978–1–4039–9819–4 (cloth) ISBN–10: 1–4039–9819–1 (cloth) 1. Motion pictures for women. I. Title. PN1995.9.W6G37 2007 791.43082—dc22 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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For Paul, Matty and Esme

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Contents List of Film Stills

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1

Postmodernism, New Hollywood and Women’s Films

15

2

The Early 1990s ‘Postmodernist’ Melodrama: Female Virtue in the Consumer Age

54

3

Romantic Comedy and Female Spectatorship

92

4

Costume Drama, Historiography and Women’s History

126

5

Neo-Noir and Noir-Lite: Masculinity and Postmodernist Aesthetics in New Retro-Noir

155

Conclusion

189

Notes

209

Bibliography

212

Filmography

222

Index

224

vii

List of Film Stills Front Cover From Far from Heaven, 2002 Featuring Julianne Moore Directed by Todd Haynes Killer Films/The Kobal Collection Introduction From Down with Love, 2003 Featuring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor Directed by Peyton Reed 20th Century Fox/Regency/The Kobal Collection/Douglas Kirkland

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Chapter 3 From Sleepless in Seattle, 1993 Featuring Ros Malinger and Tom Hanks Directed by Nora Ephron TriStar/The Kobal Collection

115

Chapter 4 From The Hours, 2002 Featuring Jack Rovello and Julianne Moore Directed by Stephen Daldry Paramount/Miramax/The Kobal Collection/Clive Coote

149

Chapter 5 From Out of Sight, 1998 Featuring Jennifer Lopez Directed by Steven Soderbergh Universal/The Kobal Collection/Merrick Morton

173

Conclusion From Mona Lisa Smile, 2003 Featuring Julia Roberts Directed by Mike Newell Columbia/Revolution Studios/The Kobal Collection

206

viii

Acknowledgements Many thanks are owed to those who have helped me to finally bring this to fruition. My friends and colleagues at the University of East London have given me much useful help and advice over the years, particularly Susanna Radstone, Kate Hodgkin, Reina Lewis and Peter Morey. Special thanks are owed to my PhD supervisors, Christine Gledhill and Peter Brooker, who were patient, supportive and generous throughout. My friends and family have supported my work in many different ways. Connie and Sue Garrett were particularly encouraging; I am indebted to Hugh Hadfield for his technical support and to Paul and Maureen Hadfield for looking after the children while we were working. Many of my friends with young children also helped out with high-quality childcare – sometimes at short notice – particularly Gemma McCarthy, Marion Herbert, Tracey Woods and Christine Bottomley. Finally, very special thanks are owed to Paul, Matty and Esme Hadfield for allowing me the time and space to complete this. For permission to use the images from Down with Love, Sleepless in Seattle, The Hours, Out of Sight, Mona Lisa Smile and Far from Heaven, the author and publisher thank the Kobal Collection.

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Introduction

Like many women who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, my encounter with films featuring central female protagonists and focusing on traditional female concerns was largely confined to afternoon reruns of old black and white movies or the occasional Technicolor 1950s melodrama. Although fascinating, and – in the case of the classical 1930s and 1940s productions – often slightly eerie, the form which I later understood as the classical woman’s film bore no relation to the relentless diet of post-classical, blockbuster, horror, sci-fi and action productions which dominated my teenage cinema-going years. Part of the appeal of femaleorientated popular film cycles from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s for postclassical female viewers was precisely their status as part of a faded world of popular film culture in which feminine heroism and self-sacrifice were routinely glamourised and celebrated. Studying feminist film criticism in the late 1980s and 1990s helped me to contextualise this strange and distant form. Key texts by critics such as Molly Haskell (1979) Mary-Ann Doane (1987) Christine Gledhill (1987) and Jackie Byars (1991) analysed the thematic concerns and aesthetic codes of what came to be defined as ‘the woman’s film’: a broad critical category which included classical cycles such as the maternal melodrama or gothic woman’s film. Feminist approaches to these texts varied from a broadly positive view of the value placed on domesticity and women’s concerns within the films (Byars) to a more negative assessment of the ‘pathologisation’ of the feminine in cycles such as female gothic or the medical discourse film (Doane). Despite these different perspectives, the range of feminist work on these cycles during the 1980s and early 1990s highlighted the significance and relatively high profile of the female audience during the classical Hollywood era. The audience for women’s films may well have been associated with, as Haskell puts it ‘wet, wasted afternoons’ and a form of cinematic 1

2 Postmodern Chick Flicks

over-identification patronisingly associated with women (Haskell, 1979: 154) but at least, in industrial terms, it still counted for something. In marked contrast, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s popular films targeted specifically at the adult female audiences and dealing with female friendship, family relations and romance were, with rare exceptions, relegated to the made-for-television or straight-to-video market (Hillier, 1993). As I argue in greater length in the first chapter, neither the experimental, self-conscious new Hollywood cinema (influenced by French New Wave) of the 1960s and early 1970s nor the big-budget blockbuster era of action, horror or science-fiction which succeeded it gave much priority to either female protagonists or what are culturally perceived as ‘women’s’ concerns. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s there was little evidence to suggest that the form of the popular women’s film was ever likely to return to prominence; Hollywood post-classical production trends having, thus far, increasingly catered for the tastes of adolescent males rather than adult females. In addition to the industrial neglect of female-orientated film during this period, feminist film criticism was also ambivalent in its attitude towards female-orientated popular film genres. Critics such as Janet Winship (1987) Charlotte Brunsdon (1997) and Christine Geraghty (1991) have discussed the uneasy relationship between feminist scholarship and popular feminine cultural forms, such as soap opera, the woman’s film or popular women’s magazines. There is a desire to avoid adding the feminist voice to a general highbrow, misogynistic culture of derision for all things popular and female-identified. But this is set against an equally pressing need to explore the ways in which female-orientated popular forms do often work as much to reinforce polarised gender roles and negative attitudes to women as to question or challenge them. Feminist interest in popular female forms thus treads a precarious line between wanting to reclaim or defend certain female-orientated forms against snobbery and sexism and recognising and acknowledging their complex role in mediating patriarchal ideals concerning sexuality, romance and family life. If the classical woman’s film or 1950s melodrama provided a crucial space within patriarchy for female-identified themes and issues, these were also articulated within the socio-cultural constraints of the conservative gender ideology during these periods. Not surprisingly, in its early, predominantly Marxist-psychoanalytic phase, feminist film criticism was more interested in supporting the development of a radical, countercultural feminist film practice than reviving the conventional ‘weepie’ woman’s film, with all its attendant gender norms. However, by the late 1980s, the ubiquitous concept of ‘male gaze’ was under assault from many quarters, with feminist film theory beginning

Introduction 3

to explore positions of cross-spectatorial identification and the pleasures to be gained by female viewers from the traditionally male genres – such as the science fiction, horror or action film – which had long dominated popular post-classical Hollywood production (Clover, 1992; Tasker, 1993). There was also much critical interest in the slightly wider range of roles that were beginning to be inhabited by the female figure in popular cinema. The emerging 1980s trend for women in professional roles such as lawyers, law enforcers and investigators in films such as Jagged Edge (Marquand, 1985), Black Widow (Rafelson, 1986) or Blue Steel (Bigelow, 1990) was the focus of much feminist debate and discussion, as was the new action heroine of films such as Aliens (Cameron, 1986) and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Cameron, 1991). The more rigid tenants of early feminist cine-psychoanalysis and feminist counter-cinema were increasingly being challenged (by both production trends and new critical approaches which responded to them) but the new direction of anti-essentialist, nongendered viewing theory or viewing patterns was as much at odds with the notion of female-orientated cycles and the traditional woman’s film as the anti-popular, anti-pleasure stance of much early cine-psychoanalysis.

The return of the chick flick But however anachronistic the concept of the popular women’s film, addressing the traditional feminine concerns of romance and relationships may have seemed in the 1970s and 1980s, the ‘chick flick’ has steadily clawed its way back into popular consciousness. From the first big cycle of women’s melodramas in the early 1980s, through the persistent stream of high-profile costume dramas and, in particular, the continuing triumph of new romantic comedy, female-orientated and identified cycles have continued to flourish throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. The widespread current media circulation of the term ‘chick flick’ is, in itself, evidence of this phenomenon. Furthermore, this trend has developed in tangent with a more general burgeoning of popular, female-orientated cultural forms, such as ‘chick lit’ (the work of writer such as Jane Green, Freya North and Helen Fielding) and ‘chicks television’ (Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives). This book examines the formal and thematic properties of contemporary female-orientated film cycles, considering the reasons for their unforeseen and unexpected return to popular prominence and their relation to broader socio-cultural trends and attitudes concerning gender roles and female identity from the late 1980s onwards. The emphasis I place throughout the book on the ‘return’ or ‘revival’ of the chick flick is not only to highlight the relative absence of female-orientated

4 Postmodern Chick Flicks

production cycles in the immediate post-classical period, but also to situate these cycles within a second, but equally important theoretical framework; that of postmodernist criticism. By defining the new cycles as postmodernist, the book extends the range of cultural filmic cycles and forms that have been understood and addressed through the filter of postmodern film criticism. In its widest sense, postmodernity is primarily a periodising concept, denoting a new global era of technological innovation and socio-economic relations from the late 1960s onwards. Within this broader conceptual framework, famously developed by critics such as Lyotard (1989), Jameson (1984) and Baudrillard (1985) and much debated since the mid-1980s, the term is roughly equivalent to a range of other contemporary epoch defining terms, such as post-industrial and post-Fordist. It is also associated, in a general sense, with the triumph of consumer capitalism and the expansion of the media industries and mass media culture. In the more localised area of film studies, postmodernism is also strongly related to the concept of ‘post-classical’ Hollywood cinema. However, I have not identified and described the new female-orientated cycles as ‘postmodernist’ only in the sense that all cultural products which have emerged in popular Western culture since the 1960s are, in some way, now ‘postmodernist’. The book’s central premise is that what distinguishes the new woman’s film from previous female-orientated forms is the integration of certain specific aesthetic, formal and thematic concerns that, in other contexts, have been identified as postmodernist. Indeed, I want to propose that it is the postmodernist aspects of the new female-orientated cycles which have enabled ‘chick flicks’ to return following the monumental shifts in cultural conceptions of female identity, sexuality, and employment and educational aspirations since the 1960s, providing an aesthetic framework which can incorporate the tension between historical conceptions of female identity and the values, expectations and aspirations of contemporary female audiences. Throughout the book I will therefore use the critical understanding of postmodernist cinema to cover a range of recurring thematic interest and textual feature, applying these to the new female-orientated film cycles. In the 1980s, early accounts of postmodernist cinema focused specifically on the self-conscious use of direct or indirect cinematic allusions introduced by the first generation of film school-educated directors. The emergence of cinematic allusionism is tied to the influx of a new generation of innovative young film school-trained directors. Hollywood ‘new wave’ directors – such as Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, Martin Scorcese and John Carpenter – attempted to pay homage

Introduction 5

to a previous generation of classical Hollywood directorial stars and to bring touches of European art cinema to popular Hollywood production. This particular mode of often arcane cinephilic allusionism was understood by an educated, cinema-going elite. Later accounts expanded the taxonomy of postmodernist features to include anti-realist distancing devices (such as characters directly addressing the camera, abrupt shifts in character or location), metagenericity (the playful, self-reflexive mixing of well-known generic formulas) and the frequent references to either past or contemporary film and television shows and popular culture which were becoming ever more prevalent in post-classical cinema. The critical understanding of postmodernist cinema – identified by critics such as Noel Carroll in the late 1970s or Fredric Jameson’s well-known work on the nostalgia film – eventually developed into a more widespread view of a complex realignment of cinema culture, in which the conceptual division between a low-budget modernist experimental art-house filmic practice standing in opposition to a popular realist, genre-based cinema was gradually being eroded (Carroll, 1982; Jameson, 1984: 66–68).

Crime fiction and ‘nasty’ postmodernism Yet the inclusion of distancing and framing devices, genre blending or the self-conscious references to prior forms is by no means universal in contemporary, popular cinema. Although these features are linked to specific historical and socio-cultural developments, such as the increased availability of popular cultural forms (through video, DVD and the proliferation of television channels), the re-circulation of old films, and the widespread use of the language of film scholarship, narrative and aesthetic elements identified as postmodernist are certainly more marked in particular cycles. Postmodernist film criticism has persistently associated these features with film texts featuring high levels of violence, a derogatory and often abusive treatment of women and the depiction of a male criminal subculture: cycles that Paul Gormley has recently defined as ‘the new brutality film’ (Gormley, 2005). Spanning two decades of Hollywood production, the critical identification of postmodernist cinematic features has continued to cluster around texts associated with violence and the young male audience. Many of these films have also been the subject of debates on censorship laws as they featured unusually explicit depictions of violence. Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, 1992) Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986) and Natural Born Killers (Stone, 1994)) and American Psycho (Harron, 2000) are all examples of ‘nasty’ postmodernist cinema that provoked the wrath of the censors.

6 Postmodern Chick Flicks

The association of postmodernist features with male-orientated cinema spans the work of cultish experimental directors, such as David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsece, David Fincher and Michael Mann, and mainstream action movies, such as the Die Hard series. For example, in the 1980s there was much critical interest in the work of David Lynch as postmodern auteur, with critics such as Fredric Jameson, Tim Corrigan and Norman Denzin praising his work as an innovative alternative to the bland recycling and empty allusionism that typified blockbusters production of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such the Star Wars or the Indiana Jones movies (Jameson, 1993: 287–96; Corrigan, 1991: 61–79; Denzin, 1991: 66–81). Quentin Tarantino’s first cult hits – Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction – received a similar response, often from male critics who either ignored the films’ misogynistic aspects entirely or viewed these as somewhat negated by the films’ self-conscious tone and playful manner (Chumo, 1996; Tsalmandris, 1993). Given the regressive articulation of gender/power relations within such texts (particularly the sadistic sexual treatment of Dorothy Valens – played by Isabella Rosselini – in Lynch’s postmodernist ‘classic’ Blue Velvet) it was hardly surprising that the initial critical discussions of the relationship between feminism and postmodernist cinema focused on the forms’ apparent desire to either exclude or offend the female audience (Creed, 1987: 47; Taubin, 1992; Shattuc, 1992; Layton, 1994). More recent accounts of postmodernist cinema (by both male and female critics) tend to pay closer attention to its articulation of gender, but the underlying assumption that an affinity exists between male-orientated, often violent films and postmodernist aesthetic features has remained unchallenged. Some recent accounts go as far as to define postmodernist cinema specifically as a form that has arisen to articulate the problematic condition of masculinity in the postmodern world. This view has been prevalent in responses to the highly self-conscious treatment of masculinity in films such as David Fincher’s Fight Club (Fincher, 1999). Christopher Sharrett describes Fight Club as ‘the most compelling film on male hysteria and late capitalist culture’ (Sharrett, 2001: 321). Similarly Alexandra Juhasz suggests that the film indicates that ‘the postmodern condition is, it turns out, fundamentally a male condition involving nothing more than the loss of masculinity … Fight Club centres on a world-of-men fully peopled by unmales, quasi-males, uncertain males and males-in-waiting’ (Juhasz, 2001: 211). The notion that much violent, male-centred postmodernist cinema unconsciously addresses the destabilisation of masculine identity in postmodern society seems entirely plausible given the hyperbolic, aggressive

Introduction 7

forms of masculine behaviour on display in these films. As critics such as Sharrett and Juhasz suggest, this is as much a response to the postindustrial decline in traditional male jobs and the perceived emasculation of men as new target for body-conscious consumer products than a reaction to feminist gains (Sharrett, 2001; Juhasz, 2001). Yet the overwhelming emphasis on a particular kind of swaggering, nasty filmic postmodernism has skewered debates on postmodernist cinema binding the understanding of a range of postmodernist aesthetic strategies too closely to male-orientated genres. The traditional association of women’s films and affective intensity also goes some way towards explaining the reluctance of critics to perceive postmodernist strategies at work in the new women’s cycles. The standard features of postmodernist cinema – irony, narrative self-consciousness and allusion, are associated with the more cerebral, distanced, ‘masculine’ pleasures of reference spotting than the overengagement which is closely bound to the cultural perception of female viewing pleasure. In addition to the ironic address of cultish postmodern films, moments of emotional engagement tend to be brief and fleeting in male-orientated postmodernism. As Susan Fraiman argues in her perceptive analysis of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino delights in jolting viewers away from moments of intimacy and emotional engagement with a sudden irruption of violence and brutality, a dynamic which is also evident in the work of other postmodern auteurs, such as David Lynch. Put bluntly, postmodernist cinema has thus far been defined as anarchic, cultish and masculine, with directors such as Tarantino accruing ‘an undeniable aura of cool’ (Fraiman, 2003: 2). At the other end of the cinematic spectrum, female-orientated genres are still haunted by the hopelessly uncool figure of the dim-witted, impressionable female viewer.

Allusionism, post-feminism and new women’s films As I have suggested above, this archaic view of the female viewer ignores the way in which the new female-orientated cycles have increasingly incorporated the self-consciousness and framing devices associated with postmodernist aesthetics. More significantly, these are often used precisely to ameliorate the sentimentalism, and feminine naivety associated with older, pre-feminist female-identified forms. For example, as early as the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nora Ephron’s romantic comedies such as When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle incorporated obvious allusions to previous forms – such as the sex-comedy and nervous romance in the former and a direct parody of the over-identifying female viewer of

8 Postmodern Chick Flicks

traditional film romance in the latter – along with interspliced film clips. Despite the inclusion of these elements, critical responses to these films, particular around the time of their release, still tended to view them derivative, clichéd and patronising, rather than self-conscious or postmodernist (Denzin, 1991: 119; Moore, 1993: 18). Even when the self-conscious elements and intentional use of allusionism is acknowledged, there is still a tendency to read these as contributing to, rather than pulling against, the forms’ allegiance to traditional gender power/relations (Krutnik, 1998). The older notion of romance and female false-consciousness was evident in response to the first Bridget Jones film production, in which the Austen references, humour and self-consciousness of the film were often critically overlooked in favour of its perceived preoccupation with the ‘desperate singleton’ (Whelehan, 2000: 309). This is not to suggest that self-consciousness or irony entirely obliterates the regressive emphasis on love and marriage in such films, anymore than most feminist critics would argue that the brutality, violence and misogyny in the work of Lynch, Tarantino or Fincher is rendered harmless by the black comedy and allusion which saturates these films. But just as the preoccupation with excessive and brutal masculinity in ‘nasty’ postmodernism highlights the relationship between male fantasies of omnipotence and the perceived destabilisation of male power, the distance placed between old, cinematically familiar notions of femininity and contemporary sexual and social mores inevitably emphasises shifts in socio-cultural perceptions of gender/power relations. The prior cinematic frame is particularly obvious in a cluster of highly self-conscious recent women’s films such as the camp remake of The Stepford Wives (Oz, 2004), the Sirkian homage Far from Heaven (Haynes, 2002) or the almost painfully allusionist, Down with Love (Reed, 2003). Not only is the latter an aesthetic and formal pastiche of previous sex-comedy forms (via costume, star performance, location and period voice-over) but the films thematic content – based strongly on Michael Gordon’s classic 1959 sex-comedy, Pillow Talk – repeatedly circulates directly around gender power issues. Based in the early 1960s and thus prior to the emergence of feminism as a coherent, political force, the proto-feminist heroine is jokily recoded as the ‘down with love’ girl, played by Renee Zellwegger. In this sense, the film typifies the way that postmodernist forms oscillate between past and present, re-inflecting their self-conscious imitation of past forms with current preoccupations. Renee Zellwegger – by this point strongly associated with her role as Bridget Jones, the archetypal singleton heroine of the romantic comedy revival – reworks the Doris Day figure of Pillow Talk in the depiction of protagonist Barbara Novak.

Introduction 9

From Down with Love, 2003.

The dual association of the Jones/Day figure is complicated further by the link to Kim Novak, emphasised in the scene in which male protagonist, Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) irritates the heroine by pretending to mistake her for the early 1960s Hollywood star. The film’s pre-feminist setting selectively draws on the aspects of prior figures and themes that are the most compatible with what – in broad terms – has been identified with the contemporary discourse of ‘post-feminism’. Straddling a number of cultural forms, particularly those aimed at women, post-feminist attitudes promote the view that ‘women’s economic, geographic, professional, and perhaps most particularly, sexual freedom are harnessed to individualism and consumerism’ (Tasker and Negra, 2005: 105). In accordance with this conception of popular

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Postmodern Chick Flicks

post-feminism, the figure of Barbara Novak embodies an exaggerated and self-consciously artificial femininity that is associated with fun, freedom and independence rather than oppression or manipulation. Novak is depicted as a skilful and confident consumer. Significantly, in terms of the film’s post-feminist approach to gender roles, this pastelcoloured, girlish femininity is twinned with adult sexual desire and a craving for economic independence and consumer power. The Doris Day impersonation thus draws on the entrepreneurial ambition, feminine self-assurance and sartorial flamboyance of Day’s role in Pillow Talk without the pre-permissive sexual restrictions and inhibitions tied to this figure. While Kim Novak is famously associated with her role as constructed object of perverse male fantasy in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Barbara Novak’s investment in feminine accoutrements is presented as self-determined and empowering. Furthermore, unlike Day in the sexcomedies but akin to Bridget Jones and other heroines of contemporary chick lit, television and film, Barbara Novak benefits from mutually supportive relationships with other women. In this and many other respects, the film’s postmodernist pastiche of past forms is aligned with common currency of contemporary post-feminist attitudes. The feminist value placed on female alliance, self-respect and the desire for economic and career achievement is endorsed but placed within a framework of consumer power and individual achievement rather than collective struggle. The film is typical of post-feminist forms in that it studiously avoids the ‘f’ word and adopts a tongue-in-cheek, playful postmodernist approach to attitudes that might smack of hard-line political activism. The gains achieved by second wave feminism – such as increased education and career opportunities for Western women – are integrated into the film’s logic of female aspiration and independence, but their association with hard won historical and political struggle is erased from the film’s light, playful treatment of gender/power struggles. The film’s repackaging of feminist politics as Novak’s upbeat, best-selling guide to female self-advancement Down with Love, both acknowledges and parodies the impact of the angry, unapologetic feminist tracts of 1960s and 1970s (such as the Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, 1963, or Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, 1971). But it also links these to the current Bridget Jones-associated phenomena of the contemporary women’s personal growth/self-help publishing market. Down with Love is certainly one of the more directly postmodernist – and post-feminist – examples of the new female-orientated film cycles, its arch tone and relentless use of allusion, irony and pastiche crushing the more conventional pleasures of the romantic fantasy. But the use of

Introduction 11

cinematic allusion, irony, distancing devices and a preoccupation with the past are features which persistently reoccur in the more high profile, popular examples of the new female-orientated cycles. This is evident in early examples of the new romantic comedy cycle. For example, When Harry Met Sally also draws on obvious references to both the 1960s sex-comedy and the 1970s post-permissive, ‘nervous’ romance, particularly those associated with Woody Allen. The principal characters justify their actions and behaviour according to models provided by the Hollywood classic, Casablanca and the film is intercut with faux-documentary footage of older couples. As I have suggested, the persistent framing of the romance fantasy in new female-orientated cycles allows the woman’s film to reappear in a context in which its traditional themes of self-abandonment in love and selfless devotion to another have been persistently battered by contemporary socio-cultural values. Lacanian approaches to the romance fantasy have long pointed to its compensatory function: it exists to provide the consoling illusion that true oneness with ‘the other’ is possible, a structure of disavowal that attempts to override the divided nature of subjectivity and the subject/ object split through romantic self-abandonment and rapprochement (Lapsley and Westlake, 1992). Add to this primal problem the lingering, influential feminist critique of the romance fantasy as a form of false consciousness, the rising Western divorce rate and an ever-intensifying culture of consumer individualism, and it is not difficult to see why film romance can no longer be played ‘straight’. In the new romantic comedy the emotional intensity and affect associated with the classical woman’s film is therefore juxtaposed with a sceptical attitude towards romance and a critique of past cinematic gender/power relations.

Gender and generic reformulations The romantic comedy’s inherent ‘battle of the sexes’ structure and light, comic approach to romance has made it particularly compatible with both a sceptical post-feminist attitude to courtship and postmodernist distancing and framing devices. However, the romantic comedy is only one of the key revived female-orientated genres that have reappeared since the early 1990s. The book also examines the self-conscious framing of the romance fantasy and critique of historical gender power relations in the revival of more traditionally ‘affect-driven’ women’s forms, such as the romantic melodrama and costume drama. The chapters are (broadly) chronological and specifically genre and cycle based, examining the different ways in which post-feminist

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Postmodern Chick Flicks

discourses and broader cultural attitudes are articulated within various postmodernist female-orientated forms. Thus the romantic melodrama cycle from the early 1990s – films such as Ghost (Zucker, 1990), Sleeping with the Enemy (Reubens, 1991), Indecent Proposal (Lynn, 1993) and Pretty Woman (Marshall, 1990) – combines the classical woman’s films melodramatic preoccupation with death, persecution and prostitution with a wider social critique of male power, recoded and updated as the discourse of ‘yuppie’ greed. Concentrated in the early 1990s, the cycle largely predates the more dominant strand of ironic, allusionist romantic comedy and its emphasis on the female economic aspiration and consumer power. Conversely, the new melodrama draws on the older notion of ‘woman as cultural saviour’ opposing the cynical 1980s culture of consumer excess. Traditional feminine and melodramatic values are reworked to incorporate a critique of the sexual exploitation and a marked emphasis on economic independence rather than the feminine consumerism more widely associated with chick lit and chicks television. The revived costume/period drama has been more obviously influenced by feminist ‘art-house’ cinema and its critique of historical gender roles. In the key films examined in the chapter, Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) and the Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002), the techniques of Brechtian anti-realism are blended with contemporary historiography, metafiction and postmodernist framing and distancing devices. The use of these elements is also linked to an ideological critique of the patriarchal construction of marriage and motherhood, enhanced by – rather than in competition with – the use of costume and period settings. All three are strongly associated with highbrow literature and a feminist literary critical tradition, yet they also draw on the popular filmic pleasures associated with the period form. The (relative) commercial success of such films is also indicative of the continuing dissolution of boundaries between popular women’s cinema – defined in industrial and popular critical terms through its association with conventional women’s concerns, such as romance and family life – and a politicised, experimental feminist cinema. Rather than being rare examples of a intelligent ‘counter’ costume form, the films emphasise the genre’s longstanding association with the female literary tradition and its critique of historical gender/power relations. The three chapters that focus specifically on forms identified with the female audience are followed by an analysis of contemporary film noir. Crime fiction has been a key generic focus for the development of violent, male-orientated postmodern cinema. However, the new attention to the female audience and influence of the revived female-orientated

Introduction 13

genres becomes increasingly evident in neo-noir and crime fiction from the mid-1990s. For example, Steven Soderburgh’s noirish Out of Sight (1998) uses many of the hallmarks of ‘nasty’ postmodernism – fast editing, loud retro soul/jazz soundtrack and a thematic interest in male gang culture, but also blends this with a critique of tough-guy masculinity, a screwball romantic plotline and a leading female law enforcer. Similarly, Katherine Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) integrates a female-led melodramatic critique of corporate greed and police corruption with tech-noir trappings. In a more general sense, while neo-noirs exhibiting the classical ‘fatal woman’ plotline (such as Basic Instinct, or its more recent sequel, 2006) have become increasingly farcical, the form has been rejuvenated by new noir-lite combinations of crime and romance or comedy, such as Heartbreakers (Mirkin, 2001), Intolerable Cruelty (Coen, 2003), the remake of The Thomas Crowe Affair (McTiernan, 1999) and Jackie Brown (Tarantino, 1997). Even Tarantino’s latest productions, the eye-poppingly violent, allusionist, Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004) anchor postmodernist gallows humour and brutality to one of the staple themes of the classical woman’s film: maternal protectiveness and the mother/ daughter bond. The concluding section of the book considers the recent cluster of women’s films that return to one of the central preoccupations of postmodernist cinema of the 1980s – the concept of cinematic ‘fiftiesness’. Jameson’s early 1990s analysis of cinematic fiftiesness points to the decade’s mythological significance as a perceived moment of prepermissive cultural cohesion. Films such as Something Wild (Demme, 1986) Blue Velvet, or the more mainstream, Back to the Future (Zemickis, 1985) articulated fiftiesness through the oedipal dramas of the adolescent male. Like the reworked noir-hybrids, the recent cycle of female-orientated films that overtly or covertly return to the decade – The Stepford Wives, Far from Heaven, Mona Lisa Smile (Newell, 2003) – shift the focus from youthful male to mature female protagonist, alighting on the figure of housewife and mother. Her demonisation or destruction (also apparent in the less female-orientated but equally self-conscious, Pleasantville, Ross, 1998) suggests a degree of female disenchantment with the contemporary revival of the ideology of female domesticity. This rejection of past roles – articulated in this cycle through the trope of ‘fiftiesness’ – exhibits a complex mix of hostility and sympathy in its treatment of the culturally and historically overloaded figure of the domestic goddess. In more general terms, it highlights the ideological ambivalence of the revived female cycles. The most persistent feature of the new women’s cycles is their self-conscious, knowing tone and obsessive interest in past

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forms, genres and the prior gender roles carried within them. In the more obviously feminist-inspired new female cycles – such as the costume drama – this is combined with a level of affective intensity and a strong and sympathetic engagement with prior forms of female oppression. In other forms, such as recent romantic comedy or 1950s revival cycle, the ironic distancing of the romance fantasy and rejection of the masochistic glorification of feminine self-sacrifice is more obviously in line with the discourse of post-feminist individualism. For example, in Down with Love and The Stepford Wives, irony and allusion is used to trivialise – even sneer at – past forms of gender oppression. For these reasons, although the book certainly aims to challenge the overwhelming critical emphasis on violent, male-orientated postmodern cinema – and the persistent idea that female viewers can barely recognise even the crudest forms of irony and allusionism – it is less a defence or critique of the new female cycles than an attempt to understand and account for their use of postmodernist elements which contextualises these in relation to broader cultural perceptions of gender roles, past and present.

1 Postmodernism, New Hollywood and Women’s Films

One of the key problems for anyone attempting to look closely at a particular field of postmodern cultural production is the overwhelming scope of theoretical and popular media definitions of what constitutes postmodern culture. The popular circulation of the term ‘postmodern’ has expanded to the point where it can encompass everything in the contemporary cultural sphere and thus tell us very little about any specific cultural or artistic form. Ironically, about the only thing that does seem clear is that, as both a critical and periodising concept, the term ‘postmodernist culture’ has been applied in quite different ways to various artistic and cultural products. Thinking through the underlying reasons for these differences, and their significance in structuring and producing certain kinds of political and cultural debates on postmodernism and cinema, is a useful place to begin narrowing what can seem like a potentially limitless field and disentangling the more general concept of the postmodern from its cinemaspecific or even film text-specific usage. To put it another way, while there are obviously many points of overlap between approaches to postmodernist architecture, literature, film, music or photography, there are also important differences that reveal much about what postmodernism means in relation to specific cultural systems. Looking closely at these distinctions is particularly useful in understanding the problematic relationship between feminist theory, women’s cinema and postmodernist aesthetic strategies. This chapter will therefore begin by looking at the particular critical and industrial context in which definitions of postmodernist cinema developed. It will explore why there has not, as yet, been much critical interest in the possibility of a productive interaction between feminism and postmodernist cinema, the latter understood as a particularly self-conscious 15

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and ‘knowing’ cinematic practice (dating from the 1960s) which foregrounds its inclusion of prior cinematic codes and conventions and anti-realist devices. As I argued in the introduction, postmodernist cinema has most famously been associated with a certain kind of cultish male-orientated cinema of the late 1980s and1990s exemplified, in different ways, by the work of directors such as David Lynch, Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and David Fincher. This chapter will consider the industrial, theoretical and wider socio-historical context that led to this particular critical conception of the form. It falls roughly into two halves. The first traces the roots of popular Hollywood postmodernist cinema through the development of ‘new Hollywood’ in the 1960s and the emergence of a cohort of film-school-educated directors and an increasingly cine-literate audience during the last three decades. The second half looks at the relationship between shifting critical conceptions of feminist film theory, women’s cinema and postmodernist cinema in the 1990s. It argues that while a popular postmodernist cinematic practice initially emerged and was critically identified in genres associated with the male audience, the past decade has witnessed the development of a specifically feminised postmodernist practice in popular women’s genres.

Popular postmodernist cinema and postmodern culture One of the most striking aspects of early debates on postmodernist aesthetic strategies and cinema is how rapidly the concept of postmodernism came to be associated with mainstream Hollywood rather than ‘art-house’ or avant-garde counter-cinema which flourished during the 1970s. This might not seem all that surprising given that the ‘post’ in postmodern is now widely understood as signifying what Jim Collins describes as a ‘decentred’ culture, suggesting the perceived collapse of the high/low cultural divide – and the rejection of modernist elitism – rather than the triumph of a newer, better or more advanced kind of modernist practice (Collins, 1989: 16–28). Nevertheless, as Andreas Huyssen points out in his discussion of the term’s etymology, postmodernism was not widely associated with the reshaping of divisions between ‘mass’ and ‘popular’ culture until at least the late 1970s/early 1980s. Prior to this point the cultural and artistic forms that had acquired the term were essentially new forms of modernist avant-gardism developed along what he describes as the ‘Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis’ (Huyssen, 1986: 188). Although these later movements were clearly rebellions against the established forms of canonical ‘high’ modernism – perceived as having

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exhausted their critical edge – they were equally resistant to and critical of mass culture. For Huyssen, as for many other commentators, the primary distinction between these ‘late modern’ movements and the postmodernist practice of the 1980s and beyond is in its relation to mass culture. Huyssen states: My main point about contemporary postmodernism is that it operates in a field of tension between tradition and innovation, conservation and renewal, mass culture and high art in which the second terms are no longer automatically privileged over the first. (Huyssen, 1986: 267) Critical accounts of postmodernist cinema are particularly interesting in this respect as the emergence of a postmodernist cinema aesthetic was, almost from its inception, strongly identified with Hollywood and the popular sphere. Indeed, Jameson’s widely reproduced ‘Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (1984) (which takes Hollywood film as one of its prime examples of the new postmodernist aesthetic) and ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ (1985) were critical interventions which did much to alter the status of postmodernism from that of a still largely obscure artistic practice to a cultural dominant, opening up the range of contemporary cultural products/practices and artistic forms which could be understood through this analytical framework. Jameson’s analysis shifted critical interest in postmodernist cultural forms away from the avant-garde practices of what Huyssen retrospectively defines as late modernist movements towards a more populist understanding of the term. Jameson’s periodising analysis cut across the high/low divide and brought a disparate group of cultural practices and forms under the theoretical macrostructure of Ernst Mandel’s neoMarxist analysis of modern and late modern economic foundations (Mandel, 1978). The essays’ wider concept of postmodernist cultural practices – applied to the design of shopping malls, poetry, the visual arts and popular cinema – informed the development of a more inclusive understanding of the postmodern cultural scene in the 1980s. This developed alongside the growing influence of postmodern philosophy and social and cultural theory during this period. In addition to Jameson’s work on the relationship between postmodernist cultural forms and global late capitalism, the wider circulation of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (through English translation, 1979) and the work of Jean Baudrillard, particularly, the English translation of The Ecstacy of Communication in

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Hal Foster’s Postmodern Culture (1985), also broadened the concept from a small-scale rebellion against canonical modernism to a full-blown sociocultural and economic ‘condition’. This broader understanding of the term denoted the complex interaction between modes of thought and being, social organisation and economic production along with cultural and artistic practices that fed into the nebulous concept of ‘the postmodern condition’. From its more concrete historical basis in post-war technological advances, including shifts in the dissemination and production of knowledge and the reorganisation of economic production (sometimes also referred to as post-Fordism or post-industrialism), to the more abstract Baudrillardian notion of the disappearance of ‘real’ history, society and the triumph of media-generated images, consumer lifestyles and the ‘aestheticization’ of everyday life (Featherstone, 1991: 66–72), the concept of the postmodern expanded to embrace all aspects of contemporary Western cultural existence. Paradoxically, while this later, broader understanding of the postmodern reduced the cultural sphere to just one aspect of the seismic transformations that constitute the postmodern global order, it was also recognised as an increasingly important and powerful sphere of activity (Jameson, 1984; Baudrillard, 1990: 63–97; Harvey, 1989: 59–65). Postmodernist cultural forms not only symbolise, transcode or, more problematically, attempt to make sense of the postmodern condition (in the manner that modernism attempted to grasp and make sense of the experience of early twentieth-century modernity), but the phenomenal growth and increasing power of the leisure, entertainment and cultural industries in the late twentieth century has also blown apart older manufacture- or heavy industry-orientated ‘base and superstructure’ models of the relation between culture and the economic sphere, demanding a new analysis of the importance of cultural production. The expanding power and influence of the media and cultural industries has also developed hand in hand with the perceived death of high culture and the ‘democratisation’ of cultural and artistic forms. As Jameson suggested in the early 1980s, the postmodern cultural landscape is one in which all cultural forms are subject to the relentless demands of commodity production, and no one can occupy the position of Olympian detachment from mass entertainment adopted by high modernism (Jameson, 1984: 85–87). More recent critics also suggest that this process accelerated throughout the 1990s, with cultural divisions across the highbrow/lowbrow schism collapsing in favour of what critic John Seabrook’s analysis of postmodern culture critiques as the complete triumph of ‘nobrow’ culture (Seabrook, 2000).

Postmodernism, New Hollywood and Women’s Films 19

However, if the range of cultural and artistic practices described and understood through the rubric of postmodern theory has undoubtedly expanded from the early 1980s onwards, it is still true to say that film analysis was one of the first fields of cultural criticism in which this broader, mass entertainment-orientated definition generated considerable critical interest and excitement. There is little question that, even in the 1980s, there were still distinct differences between what was defined as a postmodernist practice in literature, the visual arts and cinema. For example, while Huyssen conceptualises the difference between late modernism and postmodernism via a comparison of the work of Samuel Beckett and the relatively populist and accessible postmodernist writers such as Italo Calvino or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jameson’s pool of references was comprehensive and wide-ranging enough to address both avant-garde artists – such as John Cage – and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas movies. Similarly, in the well-known 1980s Hal Foster anthology Postmodern Culture, Jameson’s article sits alongside postmodern critiques of visual artists, photographers and musicians such as Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and John Cage (Foster, 1985: ix). Although the latter are engaging with popular images and ideas in a more ambivalent manner than previous generations of avant-garde artists, there is still a strong sense of critical distance informing their work. They operate both within and outside of this sphere and thus maintain some detachment from it. The embrace of the popular is generally taken as one of the hallmarks of postmodern cultural forms – distinguishing them from the supposed elitism of ‘high’ modernism – as far as literature is concerned, it would be more accurate to argue that while many postmodernist writers such as Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino or Umberto Eco knowingly incorporated aspects of popular culture within their work, they were nonetheless producing texts which are widely regarded as quality literature. Such texts are, for the main part, distributed and marketed in quite different ways from the still buoyant ‘pulp’ genre sector of the market. In contrast, from the earliest discussions of postmodernist cinema by Jameson, Nöel Carroll, Norman Denzin or Jim Collins (Collins, 1989: 90–96) to the more recent and generalised deployment of the term within film criticism, critiques of postmodernist cinematic production – whether critical or celebratory – have generally been more closely aligned with Hollywood than with the avant-garde or ‘art-house’ sector of the market. The question of how and why a more ‘popular’ postmodernist practice emerged and was identified by film theorists and cinema critics is extremely pertinent for feminist criticism. As feminist film theory and cinematic

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practice were strongly aligned with avant-gardist counter-cinema at the point at which popular postmodernist cinema was beginning to draw critical recognition – roughly from the late 1970s onwards – this proved a strong obstacle to critical interest in the possibility of a more populist feminist practice which implemented postmodernist aesthetic strategies. In the following section I want therefore to set out some causal factors for the ‘popular’ development of cinematic postmodernism during this period and highlight the particular form this took before addressing its relation to feminist criticism and women’s cinema in more detail.

Cinematic allusionism, genre and new Hollywood Jameson was one of the first critics to find points of commonality between the aesthetic strategies associated with the ‘late’ modernism discussed by Huyssen and the emergence of an aesthetic of allusionism and generic self-consciousness in the Hollywood productions of the 1980s. In ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ he links features such as the use of pastiche and a general sense of flat stylishness over depth and meaning with the late capitalist drive towards the commodification of cultural forms and their tendency to absorb and cannibalise past styles from either end of the perceived ‘high/low’ cultural spectrum (Jameson, 1984: 64–66). However, a historical overview of the emergence of a popular postmodernist cinema aesthetic also suggests that this tendency towards populist eclecticism, stylistic homage and the cross-over between generic forms was actually more fully developed within film than other comparable fields of cultural production from the late 1970s onwards. There were quite specific industrial and cultural conditions which favoured the emergence of what Carroll describes as a popular rather than avant-garde or radical ‘cinema of allusion’ (Carroll, 1982: 52) which allowed this style to become a significant aspect of what defined ‘new’ Hollywood over old. The uneven development of this process – which I will expand upon below – highlights one of the problems with broad-based postmodern cultural critiques. Approaches that move swiftly from architecture, photography, literature and other cultural forms have a tendency to glide over the particularities of specific cultural systems in favour of the bigger metacritical picture and are thus somewhat skewed towards finding the same taxonomy of postmodernist features in different forms rather than exploring critical misfits or points of dissent. In his interesting re-evaluation of Jameson’s work on postmodernist cultural forms, Peter Walsh suggests that this is a key problem with his approach to cinema (Walsh, 1996).

Postmodernism, New Hollywood and Women’s Films 21

Jameson nominally grants semi-autonomy to specific areas of production, but his underlying macrostructure constrains his interpretation of what is specific to the culture of post-classical Hollywood. This is not only the case in the earlier, shorter essays on postmodern culture – which sweep through different forms at breakneck speed – but also informs his more sustained analysis of postmodernist cinema, The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Jameson, 1995). In the latter text, a rather eclectic range of films from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are read solely in terms of their function as allegories of the ghostly traces of the late-capitalist global system. But Mandel’s grand scale historical materialist periodisation of three stages of capitalism does not leave much space for the analysis of the smaller trends, cycles and subcycles of post-1960s cinematic production or the interrelated questions around identity politics – such as gender – that have been so significant within film scholarship over the last two decades. Similarly, although they are less reliant on one underlying metacritical logic, Norman Denzin and Jim Collins tend to cross-reference between postmodernist cultural and artistic forms – via postmodern philosophy – rather than focus on the localised industrial/historical and political context which shapes certain kinds of generic and narrative cinematic forms. There is an important place for this kind of wide-ranging cross-cultural (meta) critique. Indeed, if one of the defining aspects of postmodern global economic and cultural systems is the interlacing webs of multinational corporations and their control of media, information and entertainment empires, we can scarcely make sense of postmodernist cultural forms without it. Yet surprisingly little work has been undertaken on the equally significant connections between the development of postmodernist cinema and the industrial infrastructure or more localised cultural context from which it emerged. For example, while initial critical definitions of postmodernist cinema located it largely within popular Hollywood production (Carroll, 1982; Jameson, 1984) – as opposed to artcinema, women’s cinema, European or non-Western cinematic forms – there has been little critical interest in the relationship between the emergence of a popular postmodernist cinema and the simultaneous industrial development of post-classical or new Hollywood. Aside from the predominance of the broader critical approach linking the development of a postmodernist cinematic mode to the ‘postmodern condition’, this also reflects a degree of critical unease regarding the historical specificity of postmodernist cultural practices. As many of those opposed to the notion of postmodernism as a new and distinct aesthetic practice have argued, the aesthetic features discussed by Jameson – such as the use of irony, parody and other forms of fictional

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self-consciousness – are not confined to the late twentieth century, and, as such, are not wholly tied to particular industrial or cultural circumstances. In addition to this, since classical Hollywood and modernism are generally situated as polar opposites, with Hollywood occupying the position of modernism’s other (Huyssen, 1986: 47–51), a ‘post-modernist’ Hollywood, in the sense of going beyond or rejecting aspects of modernism, is a problematic concept.1 Furthermore, using the more ‘popular culture’-orientated understanding of the term, if certain themes, plots and stylistic features defined as postmodernist have become increasingly prevalent, perhaps even characteristic of much Hollywood production from the late 1970s onwards, there is still enough conventional genre production among the industry’s vast output to problematise its status as the dominant cinematic mode of address. For these reasons it would be a mistake to conflate postmodernist cinema with post-classical Hollywood. Nevertheless, there are also important points of overlap between the industrial structure of new Hollywood and the wider socio-economic transition to post-Fordist production methods which are clearly linked to the emergence of a certain kind of generically self-conscious, ‘allusionist’ cinema. Tracing the overlap between shifting production methods, corporate structures and postmodernist cinema gives the development of this late twentieth-century aesthetic and stylistic cinematic mode a more concrete historical and cultural basis. Many accounts of postmodernist cinema note the high degree of familiarity with classical film among contemporary audiences, or the way in which much postmodernist cinema draws attention to the gulf between contemporary production and the golden Hollywood features which return in quotation marks (Jameson, 1984: 66; Collins, 1993: 254; Sharrett, 2001: 328–30). However, they rarely consider the historical, cultural and economic factors that produced both a popular, sophisticated, self-conscious textual style and a mass audience who were cine-literate enough (through the postFordist redistribution of old Hollywood) to embrace it.

New Hollywood and the recirculation of classical film The concept of new or post-classical Hollywood is nearly as contentious as that of the postmodern itself. But there are certain concrete historical events that give it a firmer historical basis and have come to signify the watershed between old and new Hollywood. Many cine-historians situate the 1948 Paramount decrees (in which anti-monopoly legislation severed the link between production and exhibition centres) as a formative moment for new Hollywood (Schatz, 1993: 11; Maltby, 1998: 23, Balio, 1990: 3).

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The Paramount legislation is also regarded as a symbolic act, dividing the old autocratic, vertically structured ‘Fordist’ studio system – of restrictive contracts, in-house training programmes and despotic studio bosses – from the horizontally structured, multi-product entertainment conglomerates more typical of the contemporary film industry. Despite its basis in entertainment rather than manufacture, the rise, fall and eventual recovery of the American film industry provides an interesting example of the transition from what David Harvey describes as Fordist ‘economies of scale’ to the postmodern, post-Fordist ‘economies of scope’ (Harvey, 1989: 142–88) that have dominated the global market in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In this respect, the relationship between post-Fordist economic restructuring and post-classical or ‘new’ Hollywood also bridges the gap between the broader understanding of the socio-economic, globalised postmodern condition and the emergence of what is generally understood as a postmodernist aesthetic mode within a branch of the cultural industry which has undergone this sort of transformation. Although Hollywood still promotes itself as an LA-based dream factory – continuing to trade on the glamour associated with tinsel town and the old studio system – the postFordist shift into sub-contraction and ‘synergy’ and the creation of diverse, multi-product global communication and entertainment networks have ensured that major studios now resemble their predecessors in name only. Cine-historians such as Steve Neale and Rick Altman have convincingly argued against the notion of classical Hollywood as a Fordist mass-genre production line (Altman, 1998; Neale, 2000: 233–42), suggesting that studio production was more flexible than previous critics – such as Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson – had allowed in their taxonomy of Hollywood genres and the studio system (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, 1988). But even if the films were more varied and individual and the genre system less determining than the ‘Fordist’ analogy implies, there is little doubt that old Hollywood was a more localised, solid and autonomous industry than its fluid, multi-product, globalised, contemporary counterpart. In contrast, consolidation with other entertainment media, sub-contraction to smaller producers and investment in film-related merchandising is what kept the major studios afloat during the leaner years and allowed them to flourish in the 1980s and 1990s. The transition from classical to post-Fordist new Hollywood was also strongly influenced by wider economic factors and demographic and social shifts: in particular, the growth of other entertainment empires, such as television in the 1950s, video in the 1970s, cable and satellite home entertainment systems in the 1980s/ 1990s, and the post-war expansion of the youth market.

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To take some of these factors in turn, a continuing myth concerning post-classical Hollywood is that the arrival of television, video and other home-based forms of entertainment poached cinema audiences, making them reluctant to leave the sofa, let alone struggle to nasty, decaying, inner city cinemas. Historical accounts from the 1990s onwards suggest that the relationship of mainstream film to television was both more complicated and generally more fruitful than this (Schatz, 1993: 12–17; Lafferty, 1990; White, 1990: 145–63). As Richard Maltby points out in his discussion of the development of ‘consolidated entertainment’ empires, classical cinema was always subject to competition from other media, such as radio (Maltby, 1998: 28). The difference with television and later video, cable and satellite entertainment is that these newer media also created lucrative exhibition opportunities, allowing for the resurrection and resale of old films and wider circulation of new films to previously inaccessible home-based sectors of the audience. As early as the 1950s, film studios were investing in ‘telefilm’ companies and exploring the possibilities of television as a major new outlet for film exhibition and distribution. While television did manage to corner certain areas of cinema production – such as newsreels and B-movies – bigger budget feature films were soon being sold for television exhibition. When, in the 1960s, television companies attempted to lower the cost of buying up feature films by producing ‘cinematic’ television alternatives – such as the mini-series or TV movies – studios retaliated by pouring money into a yearly handful of ‘high-concept’ or blockbuster productions that are often viewed as the defining mode of new Hollywood production. The term ‘high-concept’ refers to lavish special effects-driven texts that are preceded by a costly publicity offensive, merchandising and commodity tie-in products. Both Thomas Schatz and David Cook cite Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1974) as the first true high-concept film (Schatz, 1993: 17–25, Cook, 1998: 22), and the promotional campaigns for the recent blockbusters, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005) and King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005) suggest that this phase of production has not yet run its course. The development of the high-concept, special effects-driven blockbuster is also associated with the changing demographics of the American audience. Post-war affluence and the expansion of the youth market contributed to what Richard Maltby and Tim Corrigan describe as the ‘juvenilisation’ or ‘teenaging’ of American cinema via the predominance of action and adventure blockbusters (Maltby, 1998; Corrigan, 1998: 47–49). Similarly, critics such as Schatz and Cook (Schatz, 1993: 19; Cook, 1998: 38) note the continuing industrial dominance of the high-concept blockbuster.

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But if shifting demographics and the growth of television failed to undermine the popularity of the cinema feature film, it did create product differentiation and shape the kinds of texts that have been associated with Hollywood production in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Following the invention of the non-TV-friendly widescreen in the 1950s, feature films were produced with the possibility of ‘panning and scanning’ (clipping and reshaping) for small screen exhibition already worked into their aesthetic design. The emergence of home video was more of a straightforward industry gain. Video stimulated production and guaranteed extra exhibition and sales opportunities, with over half of total film revenue now produced through home rentals and further opportunities for the recirculation of classical texts. Clearly, such developments strongly influenced the emergence of a postmodernist cinematic aesthetic. While the high-concept blockbuster showcased state-of-the-art special effects, as Jameson argued, it often relied on and paid homage to old adventure and fantasy texts in a self-conscious manner, texts which, due to the increased availability of old Hollywood, were easily recognisable to contemporary audiences. The expansion of new exhibition and distribution networks strongly influenced this process, encouraging studios to open the archives and release old films. From the mid-1960s onwards, old Hollywood movies became a routine part of television output, dramatically raising the price of classical texts. Aside from generating yet more revenue, this also kept the forms, themes and genres of past eras of production fresh in the public’s mind, often imbuing them with a new historical and cultural significance. Moreover, TV channels specialising in old films – such as Turner Classic Movies (TCM) – repackage and redefine any old movie, not just those hailing from the golden era of studio production, as classics. Film channels also regularly run theme-based clusters of old movies, linking the development of certain forms and genres or the popularity of certain stars with broader issues of national and cultural identity such as the civil rights movement or feminism. Predictably, Hollywood’s role in promoting racial and sexual equality is emphasised in these special themes. Even major terrestrial channels, such as Channel Four in the UK, frequently run four or five hourly programmes listing the greatest ‘all time’ movies or stars. The recirculation of classical Hollywood is thus strongly bound up with the assumption that old equals ‘quality’ and the growing mythological status of the old ‘Fordist’ Hollywood which returns in many contemporary postmodernist texts.

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Postmodern cinema and genre In broad terms, genre tends to be associated with the ‘Fordist’ production methods of classical Hollywood, while post-classical Hollywood is defined through its production of ‘metageneric’ blockbusters and the self-conscious postmodernist blending of prior cinematic codes. Postmodernist genre-blending works to unravel genre boundaries, but, paradoxically, the widespread media circulation and availability of classical Hollywood and the expansion of a cineaste’s awareness of genre codes has also reinforced the cultural significance of genre distinctions as a means of understanding and categorising filmic forms. Postmodernist generic play therefore reaffirms the significance of genre distinctions while also recoding past genres as defunct objects of nostalgic fascination. Perhaps more significantly, attempts to classify postmodernist cinema in terms of its unique metagenericity or preference for pastiche and to posit a clean break between classical/post-classical forms tend to overplay the rigidity of classical genre boundaries, which falter in the face of difficulties surrounding even the most apparently stable of old Hollywood genres, such as the western or gangster film. New genre theory (Maltby, 1998: 24–28; Altman, 1998: 23–39; Neale, 2000: 237–35) emphasises the post-classical critical construction of genre boundaries over industrial genre production, arguing that while classical production was not tied to or structured by genre boundaries, critics required solid boundaries in order to carve out and protect their own professional territory. Altman accuses much genre criticism of effacing its own role in shaping these formal boundaries, abandoning cine-historicism in favour of myth, archetype and universal structures. Conversely, Altman traces generic ‘evolution’ through the constant sliding of generic terms from adjective to noun, a recycling process whereby adjectival attributes – such as ‘musical’ or ‘western’ – come to attain the status of a free-standing genre, commanding an entire field of disparate narrative and stylistic elements. Attaching more significance to broader disputes than stable generic features, Altman proposes a generic map based on a ‘nomad-poacher’ metaphor in which shifting (nomadic) codes and conventions may, given favourable critical and industrial circumstances, come to be widely recognised as the constitutional elements of a full-fledged genre. However, these features do not remain fixed in generic boundaries for long: . . . when cycles settle into genres, their fixity makes them perfect targets for raids by new cycles. When their wandering in the wilderness

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is done, nomads spawn civilisation only to be robbed and plundered by yet another wandering tribe. (Altman, 1998: 38) New genre criticism thus raises important questions for critics of postmodernist cinema. If there is nothing unique in this process of genre recycling and repackaging, what is it that separates postmodernist genre poaching and generic recycling from the genre repackaging which has – according to critics such as Altman – long been a part of the everyday to and fro between industrial production, audience perception and critical analysis? The answer to this crucial question lies largely in the self-conscious and ironic manner in which such codes and conventions are recycled and the intense and uniquely cine-literate, media-savvy culture in which these films circulate. The emergence of popular postmodernist cinema relies on the assumption of a degree of cine-literacy among contemporary audiences. This is directly proportional to the increased availability of both classic and contemporary filmic forms and the circulation of a critical vocabulary which – given its origins in the relatively recent discipline of film scholarship – simply did not exist for ‘classical’ cinema audiences. Although levels of cine-literacy obviously vary, a seasoned film buff might spot an arcane auteurist or generic cinematic reference to which other, less cine-literate members of the audience are oblivious. It would be hard, however, for anyone to miss the direct intersplicing of classical Hollywood in certain postmodernist films. Similarly, it is no longer unusual for contemporary film characters to sit around watching and discussing old movies or basing their patterns of behaviour and aspirations on them. Altman’s emphasis on the significance of cinema scholarship in establishing genre boundaries (which are then available for ironic reinvention) is therefore compatible with an understanding of the emergence of postmodernist cinema when this is understood in the context of the expansion of this critical vocabulary and a high level of genre awareness among contemporary audiences. But the self-conscious postmodernist recycling of old Hollywood works in a rather different way from the routine recycling and repackaging that took place in the classical period. Far from simplifying the complexity, or overlooking the fluidity, of classical Hollywood genres, a critical interest in postmodernist cinema should provide the basis for a renewed attentiveness to the specificity of prior codes, conventions, cycles and how these are being understood and reclassified.

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The (first) new Hollywood renaissance The emergence of a popular postmodernist cinema aesthetic thus crosses and intersects with that of new Hollywood at several points. It is clear how the availability of, and new reverence for, classical Hollywood products feeds into the production of self-consciously parodic or allusionist texts. It also seems logical to assume that the genre-blending which is associated with both postmodernist cinema and the ‘high-concept’ blockbuster (the self-conscious mix of historical and contemporary action/adventure in Spielberg’s 1982 Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example) was related to a production strategy in which more money was lavished on fewer films. To recoup the original outlay, high-concept productions were generically coded with the broadest cross-generic appeal. But there are other factors concerning the general cultural reappraisal of American cinema. The new influx of creative talent and the wider political and cultural climate surrounding new Hollywood were equally important influences on its consolidation and the emergence of postmodernist cinema. To give a fuller account of the relationship between new Hollywood and postmodernist cinema, I want to look more closely at the wider ideological, historical and social basis for the development of classical cinematic allusion and its relationship to the new commercial and critical status awarded to classical Hollywood production. This analysis will draw on Carroll’s definition of cinematic allusionism (which predated the association of cinematic self-consciousness or classical allusion with postmodernist cultural forms) (Carroll, 1982), and the broader left-leaning cine-historical accounts such as those offered by John Belton (1996), Tim Corrigan (1998), David Cook (1998) and Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner (1990). While these critics also tend to neglect the relationship between allusionism, postmodernist cinema and feminism or women’s cinema, their emphasis on social and cultural movements takes us further towards these issues and suggests some possible reasons why women’s cinema did not ‘go mainstream’ in the manner of other experimental filmic forms during this period. To begin with, it is worth stressing that while cine-historical accounts of new Hollywood’s ability to expand and flourish under new conditions cannot fail to highlight its commercial success, those focusing on its artistic or creative development during the same period take a more critical view. As I have already suggested, the idea that Hollywood film production was thrown into crisis in the immediate post-war period by competition from home entertainment is strongly disputed by more recent cine-historical accounts of the industry during this period. The American film industry

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experienced a period of dwindling cinema attendance and decaying cinemas, but this was more a product of the Paramount ban on theatre ownership (prior to television exhibition) and the changing age, location and composition of post-war cinema-goers than competition from other media. While the new affluence of the youth market and the demographic shift to the suburbs were likely causal factors, left critics such as Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner also associate the decline of classical Hollywood with wider social factors, such as the erosion of the social fabric and the collapse of the 1950s social consensus (Ryan and Kellner, 1990: 3) For Ryan and Kellner it was the burgeoning of a more diverse audience with less homogeneous or predictable tastes and expectations than classical cinema audiences that led to a period of financial insecurity and lack of direction. This destabilisation of the industry was also exacerbated by the introduction of new censorship codes in the late 1960s. The ‘x’ code opened up the possibilities of addressing a wider range of thematic material within mainstream cinema. However, it also tended to segregate audiences on the basis of age or preferences regarding the presence of explicit sex or violence. Interestingly, many cine-historians suggest that it was precisely this period of financial instability and creative uncertainty that brought about the ‘new Hollywood’ golden age of radical, innovative and experimental filmmaking of what was later defined as postmodernist cinema. The new Hollywood renaissance cited by many critics tends to be ascribed to the new audiences’ disenchantment with mainstream cinema and the ensuing financial crisis (Carroll, 1982: 54; Ryan and Kellner, 1990: 3; Belton, 1994: 302; Maltby, 1998: 22; Cook, 1998: 11). According to these critics, the industrial crisis produced an environment in which the new studio management was unusually receptive to new talent and ideas. In an indirect way, the post-Paramount deconstruction of the old autocratic, hierarchical system allowed the new generation of babyboomer directors and producers to develop more experimental modes of cinema within the mainstream. This influx of talent included many of the directorial stars of new Hollywood, such as John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Jonathan Demme, Michael Cimino, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. As Carroll argues, the presence of these film-school-educated directors and producers, armed with a new reverence for classical Hollywood and a familiarity with and enthusiasm for European art cinema, brought both allusionism and self-conscious cinematic techniques to new Hollywood production. Relying on the appreciation of an educated film-literate minority who

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were, according to Carroll, in the process of re-evaluating film as a serious artistic medium, such directors developed a self-consciously allusionist style, which also paid homage to the great Hollywood auteurs. Unlike the later blockbuster use of generic allusion as ‘pastiche’, these filmmakers attempted a more respectful, interrogative reconstruction of revered past forms. Carroll states: Among those engaged in this discovery of film history – particularly American film history – were some people who would become filmmakers. Like their confreres, they were caught up in the whirl of discourse and discovery. They, too, used the nascent critical categories as a crude taxonomy for understanding film, for labelling it, and, most importantly, for fixing standards of seriousness and accomplishment. In their study of film history, they learned the exemplary themes, styles, and expressive qualities as these had been selected and distilled by American auteurism. These filmmakers predictably attempted to incorporate the budding film-historical sensibility – the central intellectual event of their youthful apprenticeships – into their works. (Carroll, 1982: 52) This particular configuration of film-school recruits, a new collegeeducated cine-literate audience with a new reverence for popular Hollywood and a period of industrial insecurity goes a long way towards explaining the integration of popular (classical) cinematic techniques and the art-house style associated with French New Wave cinema within new Hollywood production. The new generation of filmmakers were active in incorporating and blending high/low, European and American styles and forms through the deployment of cinematic allusionism and thus introducing a new, more self-consciously stylised mode of practice to popular filmmaking. Features which were subsequently defined as postmodernist – such as allusionism or the self-conscious manipulation of generic expectation – were thus tested out and developed within popular Hollywood (albeit during an innovative period) and became widely recognised by a large section of the cinema-going public. For critics such as Carroll and Ryan and Kellner, these forms of nonrealist experimentalism were, initially at least, aligned with the youth movements and identity politics of the late 1960s (Carroll, 1982: 79; Ryan and Kellner, 1990: 17–48). For Ryan and Kellner they extended what critic Biskind (1983) had earlier identified as a pre-existing socially conscious, critical strain of film production already apparent in some popular texts of the late 1950s and early 1960s. While popular mainstream but

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politically liberal texts such as the epic Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960) or Sirkian melodramas manifested a ‘creeping leftism’ (Ryan and Kellner, 1990: 3), the work of the new generation of rising directorial stars combined this with aspects of European counter-cinema and the self-conscious genrebending of films such as Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967), The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich, 1971) and McCabe and Mrs Miller (Altman, 1971). These cine-historical accounts also note a rapid decline in the innovative usage of these features dating somewhere from the mid- to late 1970s, a point at which popular cinematic self-consciousness and generic referencing become aligned with the conformity of the big budget ‘highconcept’ blockbusters rather than the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s. In particular, the use of prior cinematic allusion becomes less associated with the self-conscious critical reinvention of previous genres and more closely aligned to an uncritical nostalgia for the dated and illiberal cultural values expressed in prior forms: the generically coded heroism, celebration of traditional masculinity and cultural superiority manifested in texts such as Star Wars (Lucas, 1978) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1982). Belton argues: . . . stylistically youthful and inventive but politically conservative, the authentic expression of ideas that took place in the past is today replaced by quotation and allusion. (Belton, 1996: 52) In a similar manner, Carroll, Ryan and Kellner associate the spread of cinematic allusionism with the death of idealism and genuine experimentation. In 1982 Carroll warned: With the foreclosure of the prospects for utopia, allusionism loses much of its glitter. It can deteriorate into mere affectation, nostalgia, and at worst, self-deception when filmmakers or now middle-aged viewers think that in and of itself allusion to film history is charged with the psychocultural importance it had when the sixties turned into the seventies. (Carroll, 1982: 81) In an extended overview of the development of new Hollywood in the decades following the ‘renaissance’, Ryan and Kellner also suggest that while cinematic innovation flourished in a climate of increasing prosperity, the 1970s recession coincided with industrial reconsolidation and its reversion to a more conservative mode of genre production. The industrial and economic crisis of the 1970s – which among others, David Harvey theorised as a crisis of Fordist economic organisation which produced

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the transition to global post-Fordism – provides the wider historical context for the rightward shift which many film critics perceived in new Hollywood productions during this period (Harvey, 1989: 141–97). Charting the Reagan era and the rising power of the new right in the 1980s, Ryan and Kellner argue that as the boundary-testing socially critical texts disappeared, the industry settled back into the production of either ‘conservative’ new genres (such as the occult horror film or disaster movie) or the equally low-risk reproduction and reinvention of earlier generic forms such as the sci-fi fantasy or the action-adventure film (Ryan and Kellner, 1990: 76). This politicised chronology of the rightwing shift towards blockbuster production is also endorsed by more recent accounts, such as David Cook, who argues: From the cinema of rebellion represented by films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider and Medium Cool, America and youth transferred its allegiance to the ‘personal’ cinema of the seventies’ auteurs without realising how corporatist and impersonal it had become. (Cook, 1998: 38) Supporting this wider, negative perception of new Hollywood, all of these genres also fall within the more general category of the special effects-driven or ‘high-concept’ blockbuster and are broadly aimed at young audiences. For Ryan and Kellner, although aspects of countercultural radicalism lingered on, the moral ambiguity, open-endedness and multiple points-of-view which characterised the most innovative mainstream film production of the late 1960s and early 1970s were replaced by a broad shift towards texts which emphasised masculine authority, individualism and strong leadership. This was not only expressed in disaster movies or rétro fantasy films but, also, they argue, resonated as, or more, strongly in the ‘acclaimed’ works of the new Hollywood auteurs such as Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1977), Francis Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) or Apocalypse Now! (1979). All in all, like the accounts of Belton (1994, 1996), Cook (1998) and Corrigan (1998), Ryan and Kellner’s sustained account of this period stresses the gradual defeat of Hollywood radicalism. Echoing Jameson’s account of the increasing commodification of all areas of cultural and artistic products in the era of postmodern production, they suggest that the more experimental mode of allusionist filmmaking buckled under internal pressure from the financiers and dealmakers that came to dominate the post-Fordist structure of new Hollywood in the 1970s. The drift from radical postmodernist allusionism to this more conservative form of postmodernist genre reworking was thus exacerbated by the external

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social and political context of the ascendant right and the waning radicalism of the new Hollywood directorial stars themselves.

Feminism, postmodernist cinema and new Hollywood Looking at accounts of the development of new Hollywood alongside Carroll’s discussion of the rise of cinematic allusionism suggests three important factors concerning the relationship between new Hollywood, post-Fordism and postmodernism. Firstly, that the new Hollywood of the late 1960s provided the ideal industrial and cultural environment to nurture the emergence of a new mainstream cinematic mode later defined as postmodernist. Secondly, that while self-consciousness and the implementation of counter-cinematic distancing devices were aspects of this form, its most pronounced feature was its use of prior cinematic allusion linked to both the academic re-evaluation of classical Hollywood and its recirculation through new media exhibition outlets. Thirdly, that the initially critical, ‘interrogative’ use of allusion was all but eclipsed by the derivative recycling of past styles associated with big budget, youthorientated ‘high-concept’ productions. From a feminist perspective this critical trajectory – particularly its distinction between, put crudely, radical and conservative postmodernist filmic practices – requires further analysis and discussion. Critics of new Hollywood are right to emphasise the industry’s enthusiasm for revived DC comic heroes, or blockbuster texts which conflate and regenerate the plots and characterisation found in pre-war ‘Buck Rogers’ type adventure serials and to highlight, within these forms, the endorsement of traditional notions of male heroism and their relation to a broader rightwing shift. However, the more radical or ‘authentic’ texts suggested by many of these authors as offering a more progressive version of a postmodernist cinematic practice are rarely those that engage with feminist concerns or women’s experience in any obvious manner. The broad outline of the social/cultural context from which postmodernist cinema developed in Hollywood and the shift from counter-cultural cinema to a mainstream postmodernist cinema of banal pastiche suggested by the broad socioeconomic accounts offered by Carroll, Ryan and Kellner or Belton and Cook does not give particular attention to the women’s movement or feminist film production. Their accounts therefore overlook the puzzling issue of why the then flourishing women’s cinema movement did not have a greater impact on the emergence of a popular postmodernist mode.2 Despite the apparent ‘window of opportunity’ offered to certain budding counter-cultural directors during this period, few women filmmakers

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made the kind of cross-over move identified by these critics as a key element of the creative energy which produced the ‘new Hollywood Renaissance’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even allowing for the misty-eyed nostalgia for 1960s radicalism which informs some of these accounts, the proposition that this period witnessed the development of a new Hollywood style which was influenced by both European ‘counter-cinema’ and older Hollywood forms is extremely persuasive, making the absence of women directors and feminist cinema all the more significant and enigmatic. The most probable explanation for this absence comes back to the issue of (perceptions of) popular versus mainstream cinema and the specific relationship between the women’s film movement, feminist film theory, postmodernist film and popular cinema. As I have already suggested, there is a fairly widespread critical assumption that the emergence of a postmodernist aesthetic within various cultural forms is associated with a gradual process of cultural democratisation; a new cultural order in which notions of cultural authority, quality and good and bad taste have been turned upside down by the increasing commodification of highbrow artistic forms and the self-conscious turn towards allusionism and cultural eclecticism. Thus Jameson notes the abolition of critical distance (Jameson, 1984: 57) and decline of high modernist rigour in favour of a cultural celebration of camp, kitsch or older popular forms now deemed ‘classic’ as a key feature of the postmodern cultural scene (Jameson, 1984: 54). Cultural critics such as Andreas Huyssen and Jim Collins have celebrated this reconfiguration of perceived cultural value, applauding the demise of the canon and the plurality of the new cultural scene (Huyssen, 1986: 188). For Collins in particular, post-modernism (which he hyphenates to accentuate its status as a rejection of modernism rather than its latest manifestation) brings with it the welcome disintegration of narrow class-bound notions of taste and cultural authority. Linking this shift with longer term developments – such as rising literacy rates, the expansion of further education and the growth and diversification of markets and audiences for popular fictional forms, Collins associates the decline of high modernism with the triumph of a more egalitarian cultural scene in which a range of narrative forms jostle for acclaim and attention. In this sense, Collins’s view has much in common with the Lyotardian belief in the decline of the hierarchical, white, middle-class, Western grand narrative of cultural taste and authority in favour of the emergence of a plethora of micronarratives (Collins, 1989: 16–28).

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This latter view implies an obvious compatibility between postmodernist cultural forms and feminist critiques of ‘male’ modernism, or in a more general sense, patriarchal assumptions of cultural superiority. Although, as Andreas Huyssen points out, the Frankfurt school associated ‘mass’ culture with the feminine (Huyssen, 1986: 44–62), the dissolution of the high/low divide and critiques of modernist elitism have not automatically led to a more positive re-evaluation of either ‘feminine’ or feminist cultural forms by male critics. The critical rehabilitation of popular feminine forms – such as romance – by feminist critics can, in a broad sense, be viewed as an aspect of this postmodernist re-figuration of the cultural scene, yet feminist critics still fought hard to shift the prejudicial perceptions of these forms and establish them as legitimate objects of critical interest. The development of the postmodernist cultural scene has also witnessed the rise of what Imelda Whelchan describes as ‘retro-sexism’, that is, the popular postmodernist tendency to revive and celebrate ‘laddishness’, understood as a contemporary blend of thuggishness and sexism (Whelehan, 2000: 11) Whelehan’s critique of (largely British) retro-sexist culture (such as the 1990s rise of lad’s magazines) has much in common with Ariel Levy’s more recent critique of the normalisation of the porn industry in the US through the recent spread of ‘raunch’ culture or Susan Fraiman’s discussion of the uncritical cultural celebration of ‘bad boy’ attitudes (Levy, 2005; Fraiman, 2003). All emphasise the way in which aggressive masculine attitudes and the sexual exploitation of women are coded as ironic, cool and therefore permissible, annoying only to badtempered feminists. As I stated in the introduction, the ironically coded celebration of bad boy masculinity has been particularly prevalent in cultish postmodernist cinema. But the 1990s also witnessed the emergence of a ‘feminised’ popular cinematic practice that has, as yet, remained untheorised. In the next section I will consider the reasons for this absence in more detail through an analysis of the development of feminist film theory and the rise of ‘masculine’ postmodernist cinema.

Feminist responses to postmodern theory and postmodernist cinema culture If male critical accounts of postmodernist cinema have not been particularly attuned to feminist issues, it is also the case that while the last decade or so has produced many examples of feminist interventions in, or approaches to, postmodern philosophy and social theory, feminist approaches to postmodernist cinema have been far less numerous. Feminist work on

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postmodernist cultural forms have tended to focus on literature and the visual arts rather than on cinema. One reason for this absence is that other areas of cultural production – literature in particular – seemed to provide a more fertile ground for a productive interaction between feminism and postmodernist artistic practices. Women artists seemed most likely to develop a postmodernist feminist practice in cultural fields such as literature and the visual arts, in which they already enjoyed a degree of power and recognition. Indeed, many feminist critics argued that women writers and artists had been busy developing postmodernist approaches to narrative forms and visual representation for some time prior to their identification by the largely male-defined discourse on postmodern theory. As Barbara Creed and Meaghan Morris argued in response to Craig Owens’s early attempt to find points of commonality between postmodern and feminist approaches to cultural forms, ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’ (1985), it is patronising to assume that female critics and artists are patiently waiting to be defined or redefined as practitioners of postmodernist creative strategies by male critics (Creed, 1987: 47). As Morris puts it: The interesting question, I think, is not whether feminists have or have not written about postmodernism, or whether they should have (for despite the ‘baffled’ expectation, the hope, perhaps, of eventual fiancailles, there is no suggestion here that feminism in any sense needs postmodernism as a component or supplement). My question is rather under what conditions can women’s work currently ‘figure’ in such a debate. There is general agreement between the male critics I’ve cited that ‘feminist work by women’ can figure when appropriately framed (‘effectively situated’) by what has mainly been, apparently, a man’s discourse. (Morris, 1988: 12) But despite Morris’s concerns about the intellectual gender-power game played out over the critical terrain of initial definitions of postmodernist art forms, many women artists and writers have come to be strongly identified with the postmodern by both male and female critics. Some obvious examples are writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter or visual artists such as Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman or, more recently, Tracey Emin. When used in this context, a feminist-postmodernist approach usually indicates a feminist practice which attempts to counteract patriarchal representations through the use of prior fictional allusion, irony, parody and self-reflexivity rather than the exploration of a more truthful, uncontaminated version of female identity.

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In a broader sense (referring to the wider reconfiguration of highbrow/ lowbrow forms and the reworking of popular literary genres) it has also been applied to feminist reinterpretations of genres – such as sci-fi, fantasy or crime fiction – which have previously been predominantly associated with male writers and male audiences. Feminist-postmodernist aesthetic strategies are thus aligned with the shift away from ‘gynocentric’, Anglo-American radical or cultural feminist approaches (such as the work of Mary Daly), towards poststructuralist semiotic and psychoanalytically informed critiques of the subject and identity. Whether or not their work is explicitly or overtly theoretically aware, postmodernist-feminist cultural forms tend to undermine and challenge prior representations without proposing any alternative female essence. If certain modes of feminist practice have attempted to demystify women’s bodies or give more accurate, insightful accounts of female experience (often in the autobiographical or ‘confessional’ mode), those described as postmodernist feminists, such as the writer Angela Carter or the photographer Cindy Sherman, are more likely to revel in mythology, fantasy and the implementation of anti-realist distancing devices, to twist and upend patriarchal mythology from the inside rather attempt to debunk it altogether.3 However, as Tania Modleski has argued, one of the problems with this kind of distinction between a ‘radical’ gynocritical feminist and postmodernist feminist practice is that it has often led to a gross oversimplification of previous feminist work, much of which has been castigated as, at best, naively essentialist and, at worst, that which promotes a narrow white, middle-class female viewpoint as universal female experience (Modleski, 1991: 3). As Modleski rightly points out in her critique of certain postmodernist-feminist approaches, in particular, the anti-essentialist work of critics such as Judith Butler and Denise Riley (Butler, 1990; Riley, 1988): Ironically, then, anti-essentialists may be no more prepared to deal with such issues as race and ethnicity than the ‘essentialists’ whom they criticise for neglecting these issues. (We may note for example, that the anthology, Feminism/Postmodernism, which makes frequent claims for a postmodern feminism a superior ability to deal with issues of race, contains no substantial discussion of these issues.) (Modleski, 1991: 18) It would be fairer and more accurate to say that while there is no straightforward link between a postmodernist artistic/cultural practice and the ability to unite under a common banner while also recognising

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the diversity of female experience, as a set of aesthetic strategies, postmodernist cultural practices are perhaps better equipped to deal with multiple perspectives, conflicting viewpoints or the recognition of ‘micro’ rather than grand narratives than an aesthetic which privileges truth and authenticity. The second distinguishing factor that has been crucial in the identification of these artists and writers as postmodernist feminists (although they have also been understood in many other ways) is their relative accessibility and broad-based appeal. Although more clearly located within what might be still regarded as the ‘high-’ or middlebrow than out-and-out popular realm commanded by popular cinematic allusionism or George Lucas and Steven Spielberg films, artists such as Kruger, Sherman, Carter or Winterson managed to straddle both sectors of the market while still retaining a feminist critical edge. By contrast, readily identifiable examples of a similar kind of postmodernist feminist cinematic practice were distinctly thin on the ground until the 1990s. As feminist-postmodernist forms appeared to flourish in other areas of cultural production, little critical attention was given to the possibility of a postmodernist feminist cinema. Much of the present book is concerned with re-addressing examples of feminist cinematic postmodernism, that is, a postmodernist cinema that is either explicitly influenced by feminist film theory and politics (such as Potter’s Orlando or Campion’s The Piano), or a more popular ‘allusionist’ female-orientated cinema (such as the films of Nora Ephron) which is also critical of prior, cinematically familiar, gender roles that has been overlooked through the kind of discursive bias noted by Morris. However, it is also the case that when initial conceptions of postmodernist cinematic practice were taking shape (in the late 1980s), the divide between mainstream and women’s cinema was simply not porous enough to allow for the development of a cross-over populist, feminist, postmodernist practice in the manner of literature or the visual arts. Despite the development of a thriving culture of feminist countercinema, the growth of women’s film festivals and feminist film theory during this period, the generation of ‘bratpack’ directors who crossed the counter-cinema to mainstream divide and pioneered the emergence of a popular postmodernist cinema within the mainstream were, like the majority of their pre-feminist, classical predecessors, exclusively male. Although some feminist critics did identify a postmodernist practice in the work of some women directors, for example, Meaghan Morris’s discussion of Nelly Kaplan’s La Pirate’s Fiancee (1969), such films are more clearly aligned with avant-garde counter-cinema than the audience-friendly,

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allusionist, cross-over texts which established cinematic postmodernism as an essentially popular cinematic form (Morris, 1988: 1). While a new generation of innovative young male directors shifted from the margins to the mainstream, feminist counter-cinema remained marginal and excluded from popular Hollywood even during the turbulent years of the first ‘renaissance’. The absence of feminist intervention during this period reflects both the more inflexibly patriarchal structure of Hollywood production (as compared with the areas of cultural production in which a feministpostmodernist practice was able to achieve recognition, such as literature) and, to a degree, feminist film theory’s subsequent total and uncompromising rejection of what was viewed as patriarchal Hollywood mainstream cinema. As many feminist critics have subsequently argued, the initial theoretical paradigms adopted by feminist film scholars and filmmakers during the 1970s left little room for either female spectatorship (on any other terms than self-abnegation) or for the recognition of articulation of feminist politics within popular Hollywood cinema. Uniting a Marxist critique of classical realism with a psychoanalytically informed approach to the politics of sexual difference, early feminist film theory posited an unbridgeable gap between the unconsciously bourgeois, patriarchal foundation of classical Hollywood narrative and a politically motivated anti-narrative feminist film practice which would expose its hidden machinations to the viewer. The number of theoretical texts which wholeheartedly expounded or endorsed this perspective was, even at the time, relatively small – Laura Mulvey’s well-known essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), Stephen Heath’s Lacanian critique of classical narrative (1978), Colin MacCabe’s critique of realism (1974) or Mary Ann Doane’s work on the woman’s film (1987) are prominent examples. Indeed, as early as 1973, Claire Johnston – who initially endorsed the view that women’s cinema should be anti-narrative and anti-popular – called for a re-evaluation of the importance of the popular entertainment film and what it might offer feminism and women viewers. In order to counter our objectification in the cinema, our collective fantasies must be released: women’s cinema must embody the working through of desire: such an objective demands the use of the entertainment film. (Johnston, 1973: 31) By the 1980s, collections of essays, such as The Female Gaze (1988), edited by Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment, or the anthology

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Female Spectators (1988), edited by Deidre Pribram, attempted to find new models of spectatorship which allowed for both a more empowering female viewing experience and one which could encompass a range of female modes of spectatorship. Nevertheless, anti-popular, anti-narrative psychoanalytic approaches continued to exert a profound influence over the development of feminist film criticism throughout the decade, a period in which critical definitions of postmodernist cinema were very much in the ascendant. Indeed, one of the appealing aspects of the critical identification of an emerging postmodernist cinematic mode is that it paved the way for a return to analysis which closely examined the historical specificity of cultural forms, as opposed to the somewhat inflexible identification of particular apparently transhistorical and transcultural psychoanalytic conceptions of sexual difference within classical and contemporary cinema. However, since the initial critical conceptions of postmodernist cinema paid little attention to gender issues (despite both their high prominence in other fields of film criticism and the clear relevance of such questions in relation to golden Hollywood allusion and the nostalgia film) it is not surprising that initial feminist responses to the (largely male) identification of postmodernist cinema took the form of a broadside on the unacknowledged sexism of these theoretical interventions with their critical mapping of a new cinematic form in which questions of gender appeared entirely absent. One of the first and perhaps best known of such feminist critiques is Barbara Creed’s Screen response to Jameson’s analysis of cinematic nostalgia: ‘From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism’. If constructions of postmodernist cinema tended to turn away from psychoanalytic criticism – a critical terrain which had been well and truly colonised by feminist approaches – Creed turned feminist cine-psychoanalysis back on postmodernist cinema, questioning the unconscious investment in prior gender roles manifested in the nostalgic revival of old Hollywood. Establishing what was to become something of a pattern in male and female critical responses to postmodernist cinema in the 1980s and early 1990s, while Jameson theorised the nostalgia mode in terms of its superficial engagement with the past, Creed argued that its apparent depthlessness actually concealed a deep and troubling seam of unconscious misogyny (Creed, 1987: 66). The distinctions between gendered responses to postmodernist cinema become even more apparent in relation to the more innovative, cultish examples of the popular form, particularly the work of ‘new auteurs’ such as David Lynch, Jonathon Demme and Quentin Tarantino. For instance (although Jameson is often associated with the critique of rétro

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cinema articulated in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, Jameson, 1985: 116–18), Jameson’s later extended essay on postmodernism and film argues that certain postmodernist texts use allusion to stage what he refers to as an ‘allegorical’ encounter: a critical exploration of cultural perceptions of past and present read through prior cinematic references (Jameson, 1993: 287). It seems significant that Jameson’s two chosen examples, Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986) and Something Wild (Demme, 1986), were both films criticised by feminists for their stereotypical and, in Blue Velvet, degrading and brutal treatment of female protagonists. Jameson’s essay does draw attention to the presence of gendered tropes such as the femme fatale and the gothic villain. But these are considered aspects of the text’s construction of a self-consciously cinematic version of the past as opposed to their relation to the changing social and cultural status of women. As I have already stated, Jameson was not alone in his enthusiasm for Lynch’s work. Norman Denzin, Ryan and Kellner all view Lynch as a rare contemporary practitioner of intelligent, rather than banal, allusionism. Responses to Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) were also been surprisingly gendered in emphasis. Male critics tend to give far less weight to issues of violence, gender identity or the absence of women in favour of Tarantino’s wit, ingenuity and sophisticated narrative structures. Although male and female critics do not fall into straight pro- or anti-Tarantino camps, there is certainly a tendency to prioritise issues of gender identity among female critics that was often absent from male critical accounts of the early 1990s. This ranges from Amy Taubin’s damning review of Reservoir Dogs, in which she argues: What makes Reservoir Dogs such a 90s film is that it’s about the return of what was repressed in the television version of 70s masculinity – a paranoid, homophobic fear of the other that explodes in hate speeches, in kicks and blows, in bullets and blades. Reservoir Dogs is an insular film – women get no more than thirty seconds of screen time, people of colour get zero, yet not a minute goes by without a reference to coons and jungle bunnies. (Taubin, 1992: 2) to Patricia Mellencamp’s assertion that Tarantino’s films create: an imaginary and historical place where male fantasies of power and honour and love for other men can be realised at a safe distance. This is voyeurism par excellence, where men watch men, where exhibitionist men are simultaneously objects and subjects of their own desire. In this world, women are no longer necessary. (Mellencamp, 1995: 82)

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to Sharon Willis’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the text’s articulation of gender and race (Willis, 2000: 189–216). Despite clear differences in approach (while Mellencamp and Taubin accuse Tarantino of excluding women, Willis suggests that the aggressively infantile drives at work in Tarantino actually demand the imagined censure or disapproval of an imagined female presence), these feminist critics, along with Alison Butler, have all, in their different ways, tended to view the texts’ construction of gender as absolutely central to their appeal, consistently drawing attention to their treatment of women and female spectators. In short, while (some) male critics have given scant attention to the treatment of race and gender in texts such as True Romance (Scott, 1993: screenplay by Tarantino), Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, this is precisely what feminist critics have found both significant and often offensive about this particular aesthetic form. Perhaps more significantly, critical approaches to postmodernist cinema have continued to focus largely on texts strongly identified as masculine in genre i.e. texts which prioritise crime, male gang culture and violence. Many of the best-known, widely recognised 1990s examples of popular cinematic self-reflexivity – such as Reservoir Dogs – have also been texts which pushed the boundaries in relation to visceral, ‘in-your-face’ depictions of screen violence. The selfconscious allusionist style pioneered by popular Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s seemed to find a natural affinity with the fast editing, rétro soundtracks and thematic preoccupation with male gang culture depicted in texts such as Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990), True Romance, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996) and The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995). Debates about Tarantino also draw attention to what might be referred to as a second or even third stage of postmodernist cinematic allusionism, or what Sharon Willis refers to as cinematic ‘nostalgia for nostalgia’ (Willis, 2000: 284). This indicates a form of postmodernist filmmaking which can be distinguished from both the first wave of auteurist allusionism – in which new Hollywood directors sought to pay homage to the best of classical and European art cinema – and the blockbuster celebration of older action and adventure forms which superseded it. This latter manifestation of postmodernist self-reflexivity is marked by its range of ‘lowbrow’ subcultural popular references and specific appeal to a generation of viewers whose formative years were steeped in an unprecedented exposure to classic and contemporary cultural forms, a development thus strongly linked to the restructuring and rise of new Hollywood and the expansion of the home entertainment industry. In a wider sense it reflects the music, fashion, TV and film industries’ tendency

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to plunder, cannibalise and repackage older forms as ‘classic’ largely on the basis of their value as signifiers of the past as opposed to their continued relevance or innate cultural worth. Such texts are valued often precisely because of their status as lowbrow nonsense, to be enjoyed with ironic humour. This celebration of the lowbrow is one of the features which distinguishes Tarantino from filmmakers such as David Lynch and Martin Scorsese, whose Hollywood careers were rooted in the new Hollywood renaissance of modernist auteurism. A proudly ‘lowbrow’ director, Tarantino famously acquired his wide and eclectic range of references from working in a video store. Such oft-proclaimed humble origins are very much part of the Tarantino mythology – highlighting his status as an eternal and ordinary fan and distinguishing his roots from that of the film school backgrounds of the previous generation of directorial stars. Reflecting this difference in approach from the first wave of selfconscious postmodernist directors, Tarantino’s films are less concerned with the painstaking reverential reproduction of scenarios reminiscent of classic Hollywood (in the manner noted by Carroll in 1982), than humourously referencing and recycling B movies, trash television and forgotten seventies pop. If the cult of nostalgia goes some way towards explaining the new auteur’s appeal to contemporary audiences, it does not fully account for their predilection for depictions of graphic violence. The range of references used by the new auteurs include not only classical film but also popular television and – in Tarantino’s case – martial arts movies from the 1970s. Given the predominance of violent images in post-1960s television and film it is not altogether surprising that the second generation of postmodernist filmmakers refer to these in accentuated form. However, it is still a fairly selective view of past cultural forms. Even in the patriarchal context of 1970s Hollywood, as Charlotte Brunsdon’s work on the seventies ‘independent woman’ or Christine Gledhill’s analysis of Coma indicate, popular cinema was beginning to take on feminist perspectives and produce films in which women and/or female relationships occupied centre stage (Brunsdon, 1982; Gledhill, 1998). The extreme interest in male gang culture and visceral violence exhibited in male-orientated postmodernist films might suggest that the relationship between postmodernist cinema and certain modes of masculinity noted by critics such as Creed in 1987 has become more deeply entrenched in the 1990s. This is the position put forward by feminist critics such as Alison Butler, who states: As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, redefinitions of masculinity in cinema seemed to give way to reinstatements of masculinity. Reservoir Dogs

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(1992) initiated a new cycle in US cinema, in which extreme violence, narcissism and misogyny became the stock-in-trade for young filmmakers. . . . the lack of originality here, in form and content, signals a double accomplishment: cinema has been reinvented and so has masculinity. (Butler, 2000: 76) While it might be tempting to attribute the perceived ‘failure’ of the (avant-garde) feminist film movement to the onslaught of violent maleorientated texts, the proposition that male-orientated postmodernist misogyny pushed other radical cinematic forms further into the wilderness needs careful consideration. The aim of this book is to move away from – rather than add to – critiques of well-known male postmodernist auteurs. Nevertheless, it is necessary to readdress the claim that such texts either successfully ‘reinvent’ masculinity or that this has undermined the development of feminist cinema. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this cycle is their claustrophobic depiction of a hermetically sealed masculine subculture. Constrained by both their formal reliance on quotation and allusion and their thematic concern with the criminal underclass, if such texts attempt to reinvent masculinity it is hardly a triumphant rebirth. The ‘positive’ masculine values described by Mellencamp may be one aspect of the hypermasculine gang culture depicted by the new auteurs, yet its more prominent feature is the destructive nature of the testosteronefuelled male underclass and its relation to an infantilised masculinity that destroys women, other men and themselves. Drawing connections between the Die Hard series and Pulp Fiction, Fred Pfeil argues: To turn from the most recent Die Hard film to Pulp Fiction, the crossover cult success of 1994, is to see now immediately the full emergence of an unabashedly pre-Oedipal white, straight masculinity’ (Pfeil, 1998: 180) In this respect, the new auteurs’ treatment of violence is significantly different from that of the first generation of post-war youth-orientated directors. As Ryan and Kellner persuasively argue, when the first generation of self-conscious, allusionist auteurs – such as Micheal Cimino or Francis Coppola – gradually shed their youthful idealism, they went on to produce a cycle of 1970s texts that endorsed masculine individualism and authoritarianism. Some of the most highly acclaimed films of the period, such as The Godfather (Coppola, 1972), Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1979) and Apocalpse Now! (Coppola, 1979)

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present violence as both endemic to human society and a legitimate means of retaining individual integrity in the face of social and psychic disintegration. If the new auteur’s approach to violence lacks the gravitas of the first generation of post-censorship mainstream violent texts, it also, perhaps to its credit, lacks the reverential, quasi-mystical stance towards masculinity and the violence that went with it (Ryan and Kellner, 1990: 87–95). Significantly, fragments of these earlier texts are also referred to within the work of the new auteurs. As Sharon Willis notes in her analysis of Pulp Fiction, popular images of 1970s masculinity figure prominently in Tarantino’s work, yet the manner in which they are ‘recycled’ often provokes amusement rather than respect. The scene in which The Deer Hunter associated Christopher Walken bequeaths to his friend’s infant son a gold watch carried ‘up his ass’ for the duration of the war is a prime example of this. While Willis’s psychoanalytic interpretation suggests that the scene ‘establishes its pleasures and shocks as rooted in infantile regression to anal sadism’ (Willis, 2000: 282), it might also be noted that much of the scene’s humour relies on sending up the pomposity and reverential approach to masculinity associated with these 1970s male icons. Such texts are truly ‘cultish’ in that the masculine subculture is not presented (as in the work of the new auteurs of the 1970s) as legitimate source of power, but as a bizarre, self-destructive cult far removed from the social body. This is one of the reasons why the introduction of real time references, such the male group’s discussion of Madonna in Reservoir Dogs, works not to heighten textual self-reflexivity – as it might in a more conventionally realist film – but to add a measure of historical and cultural specificity to texts which would otherwise appear so extraordinarily insular as to be almost free-floating, devoid of any connection to the extra-cinematic culture from which they originated. The intertextual insularity and extreme nature of this vision of low-life masculinity does not render its treatment of race or gender unproblematic, harmless or inoffensive. However, it does resituate it, not only within a socially marginal criminal underclass, but as an underclass trapped in some indefinable B movie/trash television past. Christopher Sharrett makes a similar point regarding the more recent self-conscious treatment of male violence in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) as compared to its manifestation in 1990s popular Hollywood blockbusters. He states: Fight Club seems to be a satiric response to works like Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995), films that yearn for the restoration of male authority

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by reference to legendary triumph of primeval patriarchal law. (Sharrett, 2001: 321) In a similar manner, Michael Mann’s stylised, gang movie Heat (1995) also depicts the male criminal underclass in terms of disempowering cultural marginalisation and the de-glamourised abuse of women, rather than heroic masculine individualism. More importantly, while there is no denying the popularity of these violent, self-reflexive, maleorientated films, the assumption that they edged women’s cinema out of the independent sector does not really stand up to close analysis. Indeed, what is particularly interesting about the recent growth of the new Hollywood’s independent sector is the way in which the ‘hard’ masculine genres, such as the work of the new auteurs, has flourished alongside the re-emergence of equally successful ‘softer’ feminine forms – such as costume drama or romantic comedy. For example, Disney-backed independent Miramax began the costume drama boom of the 1980s and 1990s with the production of Merchant Ivory’s first popular hit A Room with a View (1985) and went on to produce highly successful costume dramas with a more obvious feminist agenda such as Howard’s End (Merchant Ivory, 1992) or The Piano (Campion, 1993) but were also responsible for producing Pulp Fiction (1994) and more recently, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2. The parallel growth of such apparently polarised forms in the independent sector is intriguing given the contemporary critical shift away from viewing genres as gender-specific, suggesting the importance of cross-genre analysis. The distanced, allusionist treatment of femininity in many new woman’s films is paralleled by an exaggerated masculinity in nasty postmodernism. As I will discuss in more detail in later chapters, looking at the development of postmodernist cinema, it is perhaps less surprising that these generic forms co-exist, given that both are, to some degree, coming back to older gendered genres and reworking them with an awareness of their historical and cultural specificity. The expansion of the independent sector (which has predominantly taken place in the 1980s and 1990s) has provided an important space for both riskier (violent, masculine) experimental postmodernist production and for many of the reworked ‘postmodernist’ female genres I discuss in this book. While the (smaller) independent sector continues to produce the occasional ‘art-house’ hit such as Rose Troche’s 1994 black and white low budget lesbian romance, Go Fish (Can I Watch?), bigger independents have also produced ‘cross-over’ popular feminist texts such as Desperately Seeking Susan (Seidelman, 1984, Orion), Thelma and Louise

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(Scott, 1991, Pathe) or A League of their Own (Marshall, 1992, Parkway Productions). In particular, the leading independents, sometimes referred to as ‘mini-majors’ – Miramax, New Line and Castle Rock – produced texts such as: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (Lynch, 1992, New Line), When Harry Met Sally (Reiner, 1989, Castle Rock), Bridget Jones’s Diary (Maguire, 2001, Miramax) and Pleasantville (Ross, 1998, New Line). The expansion of the independent sector (which has predominantly taken place in the 1980s and 1990s) therefore goes some way towards bucking the trend for ‘high-concept’, blockbuster production noted by earlier new Hollywood cine-historians. More importantly, the greater financial muscle provided by big studio backing has allowed low-budget texts by little known directors to reach wider audiences. If the independents have provided space for the male-orientated violent postmodernist cinema of David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher, it has also helped to revive female-orientated genres such as the romantic comedy or costume drama.4 The female-orientated films mentioned above are stylistically and thematically a world apart from the radical women’s counter-cinema of the 1970s, but as I will demonstrate in later chapters, their self-conscious, postmodernist use of past generic forms is frequently aligned with feminist-influenced attitudes towards gender, romance and history.

Anti-essentialism and popular women’s cinema Much of the development of feminist film criticism over the past two decades has been a succession of attempts to break free of the more negative implications of earlier psychoanalytic accounts of the relationship between women and popular cinema, and in particular, to develop a less defeatist account of feminine spectatorship. As Alison Butler suggests, the initial cine-psychoanalytic conceptualisation of the female spectator in terms of lack and absence or the self-abasing association with a masculinised sexual script was more effective in pathologising the feminine than deconstructing the masculine viewing position: For feminist film scholars studying a cultural form so massively dominated by men, the construction of a theoretical paradigm in which the absence of female subjectivity is a first principle has been more or less a disaster. (Butler, 2000: 74) Alison Butler rightly expresses doubts concerning a gender politics in which the concept of ‘woman’ or female identity is viewed as undesirably

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essentialist. As the recirculation and revival of what are assigned as women’s genres demonstrates, given the continuing level of cultural investment in these terms it is difficult to take on patriarchal power relations without taking on and working through culturally ascribed conceptions of gender. Both in the more popular and more obviously feminist-influenced new postmodernist women’s cycles there is a strong, self-conscious interest in playing with and repositioning notions of gender identity and social attitudes and expectations. The heavily laden use of irony in such films also suggests the need for a new model of female spectatorship which is devoid of the old pathologising notions of female pleasure and identification. One of the first objections to the Lacanian model and the concept of the ‘male gaze’ was its inability to deal adequately with classical narrative texts which are orientated towards and enjoyed by women or to account for other differences between viewers – such as class, race or sexual orientation – which might determine their responses as much or more than the proffered ‘masculinised’ textual viewing position. Much revisionist film theory has thus been concerned with the metatheoretical problem of disengaging the theoretically neat but inflexible masculine, patriarchal model of the implied spectator from the complex, messy conscious and unconscious responses of the ‘real’ viewer. Far from ignoring the issue of female spectatorship, the shift away from the early materialist psychoanalytic model was closely tied up with the positive re-evaluation of female viewing pleasure and what have subsequently been redefined as feminine genres. Alongside the 1980s publication of anthologies such as E. Deidre Pribram’s Female Spectators (1988) and Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment’s The Female Gaze (1988), extensive feminist work was undertaken in previously unaddressed areas of classical production – such as melodrama – or assessing the possibility of a ‘resistant’ feminist interpretation of male-orientated genres, such as film noir. Feminist film criticism has continued to discuss, support and draw attention to the films of self-consciously politicised feminist directors and, in a wider sense, the global contribution of women filmmakers whose work focuses on female historical and cultural experience. Alongside its continued interest in looking at both the work of Western feminist directors such as Potter and Campion or the more avant-gardist work of directors such as Lizzie Borden (de Lauretis, 1990: 12) and the work of non-Western female directors such as Moufida Tladi and Deepa Mehta (Butler, 2000: 89–188), feminist critical analysis of popular cinema has been increasingly favourable, reflecting and responding to the evident

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influence of feminist politics on popular genres, such as those I discuss later in this book. In this sense, a ‘postmodernist’ feminist film criticism is a mode of film criticism which is not only ‘postmodernist’ in the sense of identifying and analysing postmodernist forms (although that it clearly one of its tasks) but one which has absorbed and responded to postmodern critiques of gender essentialism and ethnocentrism, which adopts the pluralist anti-essentialist approach promoted by critics such as Linda Nicholson (1990). Given the range of cinematic forms that it addresses, a monolithic feminist theoretical approach is clearly not appropriate. Contemporary feminist approaches must continue to promote the work of female filmmakers and pick apart the seemingly obvious attraction between certain kinds of texts and viewers – for example, the surprisingly tenacious preference among female viewers for particular generic forms (such as costume drama) – while also acknowledging the pleasurable possibilities of gender cross-identification and audience engagement with texts which do not seem to speak to, reflect or engage with their subjectivity in any direct or obvious way. Feminist work on the lesbian, gay or black gaze or male identification with female victimhood – such as Carol Clover’s work on the horror film – suggests that one of the chief pleasures of the cinematic experience is the considerable scope it offers for both trying on other identities and affirming our own identity and experience through that of others (Clover, 1992). In the light of these developments, the shift towards theories which prioritise spectatorial mobility and bring a broader range of subjectivities into play seems less of a rejection of the feminine than the next logical step in moving away from the rigidity of the original model of subject/ text relations.

New female genres: The ironic ‘chick flick’ The question for feminist criticism, therefore, is how to balance the acknowledgement and affirmation of mobile and diverse subjectivities and subjective responses with a continuing commitment to feminist creative and critical strategies. While women, working-class, gay and black viewers are able to take pleasure in and bring their own perspectives to bear on a variety of cinematic forms, a greater number and range of representations of these groups on screen would extend and enhance these possibilities and pleasures while also feeding back into broader social, cultural and institutional conceptions of subjectivity, gender, race and sexual identity.

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The early theoretical notion of oppressive patriarchal images bearing down from above has all but disappeared in favour of a Gramscian approach in which textual meaning is viewed as contested, rather than absolute, and cultural meanings emanate from a plurality of groups rather than being entirely determined by the relationship between a powerful, media-controlling male elite and the omnipotent male viewing subject. Yet there is no denying the continued under-representation of certain groups within popular cinema or the fact that the industrial structure of mainstream cinema is still heavily male dominated. In this sense, feminist approaches to cinema must continue to champion the work of feminist directors and highlight the political and cultural importance of gender representation in cinema while also acknowledging that, given the considerable impact of feminist politics on contemporary film culture, it makes little sense to continue to think of women’s, or even feminist, cinema as an entirely separate species from popular filmic representation. If the Marxist-psychoanalytic model was too oppressively negative and anti-popular to fully account for the complexity of meaning in classical American cinema, it is even less well equipped to deal with the diversity and scope of new Hollywood production. It seems likely that the shift away from this theoretical paradigm, even in studies of classical cinema, has been strongly influenced by developments in contemporary production that bear witness to the way in which cultural politics inevitably make their mark on even popular, mainstream forms of representation. As Teresa de Lauretis argues in her 1980s assessment of women’s cinema, any later account of women and cinema needs to begin by unpicking the oppositions between ‘Hollywood vs independent, avant-garde vs classical, entertainment vs political, alternative vs mainstream cinema’ established in early cine-psychoanalysis (de Lauretis, 1990: 6). Clearly, these issues also intersect with many of the wider debates on postmodernist aesthetic strategies and postmodern culture. The particular historical, industrial and cultural circumstances governing the emergence of a postmodernist aesthetic of cinematic allusionism and textual self-reflexivity have already been discussed. Its early appearance within the popular sphere, initial association with the late 1960s new Hollywood renaissance and later manifestation in the form of metageneric highconcept productions ensured that postmodernist cinema has largely been theorised as a regressive right-wing form, best understood in relation to Jameson’s influential model of the ahistorical nostalgia film and the decline of radical politics in the 1980s. In feminist terms, this has often been equated with the perceived 1980s anti- or ‘post’-feminist backlash culture of the Reagan era. But as the boundaries between binaries such

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as Hollywood versus independent and entertainment versus political cinema have gradually dissolved, so too has the association between popular postmodernist allusionism and anti-feminist discourses. Although they are still woefully under-represented, women filmmakers are certainly more visible than in previous decades, and many – such as Sally Potter, Jane Campion, Patricia Rozema, Alison Anders, Kathryn Bigelow, Sharon Maguire, Penny Marshall, Mira Nair and Beeban Kidron have successfully crossed the low- to high-budget divide. Perhaps more significantly, their choice of thematic material and generic form indicates the development of a postmodernist feminist sensibility within popular film production. One sign of this is the tendency to work within, rather than reject, traditional generic forms – in particular, to re-inflect those already deemed popular with women with a more obvious feminist approach. For example, as Teresa de Lauretis notes, the 1980s saw the revival of ‘the romance or fairytale adapted to accommodate films dealing with lesbian relationships, such as Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (1985) or Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaid Singing (1987) formula’ (de Lauretis, 1990: 24). The women’s bio-pic has also been a form in which female directors are well represented: Iris (Rosa Verges, 2004), Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002) and Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2002) were all female-directed. Similarly, as I argue in greater depth in later chapters, both romantic comedy and costume drama returned in a bolder, more self-consciously feminist form. Many of the best-known women’s/feminist films of the last couple of decades have been those that worked more or less within the framework of the historical romance or costume drama, such as Sally Potter’s Orlando, Jane Campion’s The Piano or Stephen Daldry’s The Hours. As Alison Butler also notes: During the 1990s, a number of significant women’s films have engaged with historical situations in meticulous, sensuous and rigorous ways. I would list, for example, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), Moufida Tlatli’s Silence of the Palace (1994) Marleen’s Gorris’s Antonia’s Line (1995) and Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady (1995). (Butler, 2000: 76) If the list was expanded to include more mainstream examples of texts dealing with cultural memory and history within female-orientated narratives, it might also include Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café (Avnet, 1991), A League of Their Own (Marshall, 1993), How to Make an American Quilt (Moorhouse, 1995) or, more recently, Far from Heaven and Mona Lisa Smile. As I will argue in later chapters, such texts range from

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the ‘rigorous’ to the downright sentimental, yet their gendered engagement with issues of history, memory and identity is rarely nostalgic in the superficial manner that Jameson or Carroll’s analysis of early cinematic allusionism suggests. Indeed, as Patrice Petro argues, given women’s exclusion from grand historical narratives and the public stage, one of the tasks for feminist-postmodernist historicity is to find ways of both exploring and celebrating women’s history through the analysis of everyday trivia and the smaller domestic details. Postmodernist-feminist history must: . . . reclaim the banality – in the sense of everydayness – of gender, sexuality and sexual orientation. At the same time, however, it must refuse postmodern melancholy and its discourses of lack and loss, of ‘history at an end’ if it is to represent women’s past losses and imagine their future gains. (Petro, 1996: 199) The cinematic revival of conventional ‘feminine’ forms has been given much less critical attention than the simultaneous trend towards generic reworkings that situate women in conventional male roles. This is perhaps because the emergence of high-profile genre/gender reworkings, such as sci-fi ‘action women’ in texts such as the Alien series, the feminist road movie (notably Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise, 1991) or all-female westerns such as Tamra Davies’s Bad Girls (Kaplan and Davies, 1994), appear more obviously compatible with the theoretical shift away from gender/ text identification into notions of spectator cross-identification and the disintegration of the anti-popular, avant-garde project of women’s cinema. The self-conscious approach manifested within many reworked (new) feminine genres suggests points of commonality between these and revised male genres featuring women, both forms relying on and exploiting the audience’s generic expectations. The rise of a new kind of clever, self-conscious ‘chick flick’, a text aimed at female audiences, often working through a recognisable feminine genre but also playing with and often critiquing the form is also indicative of not only the feminist appropriation of postmodernist techniques but a broader feminist re-evaluation of popular culture in which, as Charlotte Brunsdon has argued, femininity is no longer ‘the other’ of feminism (Brunsdon, 1997: 84–85). How far feminists should defend or rehabilitate feminine cultural forms continues to be a contentious issue – some of the new self-conscious female cycles are forms that are certainly more ‘progressive’ than others. At its best, a postmodernist feminist filmic practice highlights and

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explores the tensions in traditional feminine genres, re-inflecting their assumptions and conventions with an ironic feminist consciousness. Thus while recent forms of costume drama do not reject the sartorial ostentation of the form, they often use this in an exploratory or symbolic sense, drawing attention to its significance in carrying the weight of social status and signifying the boundaries of gendered behaviour. Similarly, the more popular ‘woman’s melodramas’ of the early 1990s treads a fine line between traditional notions of feminine virtue and contemporary notions of female independence, aspiration and achievement. At worst, the new female cycles exhibit a hollow, superior treatment of past modes of screen femininity – exhibited in films such as Down with Love or The Stepford Wives – which nonetheless registers a level of distance from older forms of female oppression. As I argue in later chapters, the emergence of a self-conscious, feministinfluenced ‘chick flick’ requires a revised view of postmodernist cinema (previously defined largely in male terms) which can accommodate the complex interaction between classic and contemporary genres in these revived women’s forms, and the way in which older expectations of generic gender/power relations are playfully repositioned in the light of the culture’s broader registration of feminist approaches to sexual morality, social ethics and, in a broader sense, the cultural construction of gender identity.

2 The Early 1990s ‘Postmodernist’ Melodrama: Female Virtue in the Consumer Age

In Pam Cook’s influential discussion of the woman’s film, she poses the question: . . . why does the women’s picture exist? There is no such thing as ‘the men’s picture’, specifically addressed to men; there is only ‘cinema’ and ‘the women’s picture,’ a subgroup or category specifically designed for more than half the population, relegating them to the margins of cinema proper. (Cook, 1983: 17) By the early 1990s, critical interest in the woman’s film had largely shifted away from the underlying political and cultural causes for its existence to the question of whether it was ever really a valid generic or critical category in the first place. While feminist film criticism began to open up and develop new approaches to traditionally ‘masculine’ areas of cinematic production (such as horror, science-fiction or the action genre), a certain unease regarding the whole notion of female-orientated texts and the woman’s film seems to have crept into discussions of women’s forms during this period. Yet the growing academic scepticism towards, or lack of interest in, the analysis of female-orientated texts was, ironically, also paralleled by increasing industrial and popular media interest in the female audience. Paradoxically, as feminist criticism turned away from the concept of women’s films, the trade press were busily talking up the success of a cycle of high-profile femaleorientated hits and predicting that the decade would produce a ‘boom’ in female-orientated film production cycles. How is this disparity between academic, popular and industrial interest in female genres to be accounted for? As I argued in Chapter 1, there 54

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is much evidence to support the view that the 1990s did indeed witness a resurgence of what are widely perceived as female-orientated forms such as the domestic melodrama, romantic comedy and costume drama and that the particular cycles which emerged during this period are strongly influenced by postmodernist aesthetic techniques and, albeit indirectly, postmodern theoretical approaches to history, gender and genre. However, the influence of postmodern gender theory – and its critique of feminist ‘essentialism’ – is also closely related to the feminist disengagement from this field in the early 1990s. This raises difficult questions regarding how to situate contemporary female-orientated texts in relation to different modes and applications of what can broadly be described as postmodern cultural theory and its critique of gender binaries. Should a postmodern critical approach to the issue of gender and genre work towards the dissolution of gender/genre oppositions or integrate postmodern approaches to cultural theory with an earlier feminist critical attraction to, and interest in, what are widely regarded as female-orientated cultural forms? This book is strongly based on the analysis of new female-orientated cycles of production and thus endorses the latter argument. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, a feminist critical interest in what I define as female-orientated postmodernist genres is not incompatible with a postmodern theoretical critique of gender essentialism. These contemporary filmic forms can be usefully understood through a combination of postmodernist and feminist perspectives. However, before looking more closely at the first of these 1990s cycles – what I refer to as the ‘postmodernist’ melodrama – the apparent contradiction between the postmodern critical case against the female-orientated genre canon and the industry’s simultaneous claims for their triumphant return require closer analysis. In his recent re-assessment of genre theory, Rick Altman questions what he views as the widespread circulation of the generic category, ‘woman’s film’, across a range of disparate texts on the sole basis of their assumed address to the female audience (Altman, 1998: 27–33). While his overall argument makes a strong and persuasive case for the role of critics – rather than audiences or the industry – in establishing generic boundaries and focusing on particular forms, the feminist critical constitution and rehabilitation of the ‘woman’s film’ in the 1980s is nonetheless singled out as a particularly extreme example of critical will over industrial classification. Altman traces the critical history of the woman’s film and identifies the process whereby the critical production of the form grew out of studies of melodrama in the early 1970s. Altman argues that feminist critics were quick to establish the family melodrama – as opposed

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to the action or adventure melodrama – as paradigmatic of the form. By shifting the critical focus towards this subcycle of the melodrama, feminist critics placed women at the centre of the form, redefining it as a ‘feminine’ domestic genre and eventually subsuming it under the more general banner of the woman’s film. Citing the growing body of feminist work on the classical woman’s film in the early 1980s, Altman suggests that Mary Ann Doane’s removal of quotation marks from the term in The Desire to Desire (1987) boldly dispelled any remaining ambiguity concerning the genre’s legitimacy. Doane’s analysis marked the cycle’s coming of age as a distinct generic category defining it particularly in relation to an obsessive interest in women’s psychological pain and trauma. Altman goes on to argue that this triumph of feminist critical intervention empowered feminist critics to then freely attach the term to more contemporary texts: Starting with Annette Kuhn’s 1982 Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema and E. Ann Kaplan’s 1983 Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, the corpus was expanded to include not only classic Hollywood films, popular novels and television programmes, but also recent films and video produced by women. Increasingly, the term woman’s film has been used as a broad-based banner flown at academic conferences and film festivals alike under which a variety of activities may march arm-in-arm. (Altman, 1998: 33) Although Altman finally argues that feminists are justified in carving out their own critical and professional territory, the overall tone of his discussion of the woman’s film casts feminist critics in a conspiratorial light, placing great emphasis on the apparently unassailable status of women’s genres (Altman, 1998: 33). Aside from the subtle allegations of academic skullduggery, Altman’s discussion underplays the continuing problems attached to the generic status of texts targeted at women. The woman’s film did undoubtedly gain credibility in the 1980s as a recognisable classical filmic form, but feminist critics have generally been somewhat cautious of using the term in relation to post-classical texts. One reason for this is that the woman’s film is primarily viewed as a pre-feminist form, strongly associated with the particular conditions of women’s oppression in the 1930s and 1940s. Thus studies such as Mary Ann Doane’s analysis of the medical or gothic woman’s film in The Desire to Desire (1987) or Pam Cook’s analysis of costume drama (Cook, 1996) strongly emphasise their historical and cultural specificity. Furthermore, many of the critics who were active in raising the profile

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of classical female-orientated genres specifically restrict the definition to classical Hollywood. Molly Haskell – one of the first feminist critics to draw attention to the woman’s film – stated: Women-orientated films, like the women-orientated plays from which many of them were adapted, disappeared from the cultural scene . . . at one time the “matinee audiences” had considerable influence on movie production and the popularity of certain stars. This influence has waned to the point that the only films being made for women are the afternoon soaps, and there is little attempt to appeal to women in either regular film or night-time television. (Haskell, 1979: 187) Despite Altman’s assertion of unbridled classical and contemporary canon formation, until the 1990s there were actually few attempts to take the concept of female-orientated popular cinema across the classical/ post-classical divide. Those that did address more contemporary femaleorientated texts are generally tentative about applying the term ‘woman’s film’ outside of its established classical context. For example, Charlotte Brunsdon’s 1982 discussion of the popular, male-directed, but clearly feminist-influenced, ‘independent heroine’ movies of the 1970s – An Unmarried Woman (Mazursky, 1978), Girlfriends (Zinneman, 1978) and Julia (Weill, 1978) – traces their thematic relationship to the 1940s woman’s film while also highlighting the differences in mode of address, characterisation and narrative resolution which bear testament to ‘a new female audience . . . only properly understood in relation to a whole range of extra-textual cinematic social, political and economic factors’ (Brunsdon, 1982: 20). Similarly, Mimi White’s (1989) analysis of the development of a 1980s cycle of female-orientated texts – Robert Zemekis’s Romancing the Stone (1984), Douglas Day Stewart’s Thief of Hearts (1984) and Susan Seidalman’s Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) notes the tendency – common in later women’s cycles – to incorporate a feminist critique of the discourse of romantic love within the overall romance framework.1 For example, in Romancing the Stone, the female protagonist is a writer of pulp romance whose textual adventures undercut and contrast with the idealistic view of heterosexual romance perpetuated in her novels. Far from becoming a catch-all term for classical and contemporary female-orientated texts, the woman’s film – with its associations with the weepy, female matinee audience – has more often provided a jumping-off point for comparative readings which address the differences between classical and contemporary women’s texts.2

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The rarity of these attempts to define a post-classical woman’s film is also clearly related to the post-Fordist restructuring of ‘new Hollywood’: its promotion of the special-effects driven action-adventure ‘blockbuster’ and its strong and well-documented gravitation towards young male rather than mature female audiences from the 1970s onwards (Maltby, 1998: 26; Schatz, 1993: 19). Indeed, one of the reasons that feminist critics were keen to rehabilitate the popular classical woman’s film during the 1970s and 1980s was to establish the importance of classical female audiences during a period in which contemporary female viewers appeared all but forgotten by the mainstream industry. But the academic shift in the 1990s away from the analysis of both classical and contemporary female-orientated forms was also related to a more general theoretical critique of the notion of gendered genres. The increasing presence of ‘iconic’ female protagonists in traditionally male action roles – such as Ripley (Sigorney Weaver) in the Aliens series, Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton) in The Terminator (Cameron, 1984) and Terminator 2 (Cameron, 1991) – created much critical excitement and interest, while the ‘gynocentric’ concept of female-orientated texts came up against the notions of spectatorial cross-identification and accusations of gender essentialism. If the growth of new areas of critical interest – such as the female-centred action-adventure film – was, to a certain extent, a response to changes in production, it also signalled a new postmodern direction in feminist thinking on these subjects which entailed taking on notions of multiple gender and sexual identifications. In making a case against what she perceives to be the ‘canonisation’ of female cultural forms, Charlotte Brunsdon’s Screen article, ‘Pedagogies of the Feminine: Feminist Teaching and Women’s Genres,’ was indicative of a wider critical movement away from the analysis of female genres which was strongly influenced by postmodern cultural theory. Brunsdon suggested that the 1980s tendency to focus on forms identified as in some way belonging to, or associated with, the female audience led to ‘rapid canon formation’ and the critical construction of a body of work on women’s genres ranging from the woman’s film to soap opera and women’s magazines (Brunsdon, 1991: 364). She argued that the new feminist canon worked to create and legitimate a restrictive notion of the female spectator who then came to be situated as the natural and exclusive audience for such forms. The tendency to view female spectators and cultural forms in this way was, according to Brunsdon, exacerbated by the desire to move away from the earlier, often derogatory, feminist evaluation of femaleidentified fictional forms (charged with perpetuating patriarchal

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notions of femininity) into a triumphal and recruitist re-evaluation and defense of feminine cultural forms such as soap opera, women’s magazines or the woman’s film. According to Brunsdon, feminist criticism needed to avoid the tendency to see-saw between ‘celebrating or pathologising the pleasures of gynocentric texts’ in an attempt to define authentic and inauthentic modes of feminine identity (Brunsdon, 1991: 373). Brunsdon’s critique of female genre analysis is echoed by other critical discussions of female genre work such as Ien Ang’s re-interpretation and critique of Janice Radway’s work on the romance (Ang, 1988) or Andrea Stuart’s re-analysis of Janice Winship’s work on women’s magazines (Stuart, 1990). This critique belongs more broadly to what can be described as postmodern gender theory and the attack on the perceived gender essentialism of earlier feminist approaches. Drawing on the antiessentialist work of Denise Riley, Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, Brunsdon finally suggests that one solution to the problem may be to attach less significance to both ‘feminine’ cultural forms and female identity altogether. With particular reference to Donna Haraway’s ‘cyborg’ feminism she argues that the category ‘woman’ needs to be based on a consciously chosen political affiliation rather than a ‘natural matrix of unity’ grounded in biological sexual difference (Brunsdon, 1991: 337). The key issue here is one of feminism’s oldest problems but one which postmodern theory has brought back to the fore: that of distinguishing between the historically and culturally specific notions of what constitutes ‘woman’ and the real women thought to exceed these definitions but who are nonetheless subject to and constructed through them. In this sense, Brunsdon’s critique is part of a widespread postmodern rejection of what was perceived as an earlier feminist willingness to ascribe common characteristics, attitudes and behavioural forms to biological sexual differences. If the terrain of bodily essentialism has been re-addressed by contemporary theories which stress either the ‘performativity’ of gender behaviour, the body as a space of fantasy or the technological possibility of erasing sexual difference altogether, feminism has also been accused of denying women other forms of identification or political and social allegiances. As postmodern (feminist) critics such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson argue, identity-based progressive social movements – whose project is to forward the interests of one particular social group – can find it difficult to accommodate the competing claims of other forms of identification or affiliation outside the group among those they seek to represent and support (Nicolson, 1990: 2). Academics such as Fraser, Nicolson, Brunsdon and Nancy Cott (Cott, 1987) have accused feminism

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of privileging biologically based gendered selfhood over equally important divisions between women on grounds of class, race or sexual orientation and thus of becoming as authoritative and inflexible as the patriarchal forms of thought it sought to challenge and overthrow.

Women’s films in the early 1990s: The trade press response The feminist shift away from the analysis of gendered genres was thus a product of both a changing cultural scene – in which such distinctions no longer appeared so clear cut – and a concurrent shift in critical emphasis in which staking out and defending feminine cultural forms was no longer necessarily viewed as a progressive strategy. In the light of the return of women’s film genres over the last fifteen years, this view seem to somewhat overplay the power of academic criticism and the canonical status awarded fictional forms associated with women. If academic research based on female-orientated film genres was as ubiquitous and powerful as the anti-essentialist argument suggested, would it have been displaced so rapidly? Would the return of women’s films genres have received so little critical attention? More importantly, the accusation that the analysis of female-orientated texts inevitably leads to essentialist views of gender identity is far from clear-cut.3 The anti-essentialist thrust of some early 1990s criticism may act as an important corrective to the tendency to assume a natural fit between the female audience and certain textual forms or to assume a uniform response among a diverse group of female spectators who constitute that audience. However, the study of what are culturally deemed ‘feminine’ forms can only be charged with essentialism if its purpose is to bolster an unproblematic identification between female audiences and particular textual or generic forms. While some ethnographic work on female-orientated genres closely addresses the relation between actual viewers and certain kinds of texts, the psychoanalytically informed notion of the classical woman’s film was more concerned with ‘the feminine viewing position’ as a site for exploring the impossibility of femininity as an active subject position and deconstructing the way in which its unusually strong presence in these texts threw mainstream patriarchal cinema off-balance. Although it is important to maintain a distinction between the assumed female viewer, or the textually constructed female viewing position and real female viewers (whose responses to the same text will differ), as long as women are regarded as a distinct section of the audience, the question of what the mainstream film industry expect them to enjoy and what

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kind of texts they respond positively to, should remain central to feminist film criticism. Cultural forms aimed at women remain an important index of socio-cultural fantasies, expectations and attitudes towards gender identity. It is therefore difficult to ‘deconstruct’ gender identity without awarding them close attention. Feminist critics should resist the temptation either to defend these forms on grounds of their underdog cultural status or demonise their constructions of femininity, but, as Tania Modleski argues in her critique of anti-essentialist thinking, ‘in the final analysis it seems more important to struggle over what it means to be a woman than over whether or not to be one’ (Modleski, 1991: 20). In addition, one of the strongest reasons for feminist criticism to continue paying attention to these areas of production is the continuing popular media investment in the concept of gender-specific filmic forms. As I will demonstrate below, popular discourses on mainstream cinema – such as film reviews and the trade press – continue unselfconsciously to categorise texts on the basis of their presumed gendered appeal. The popular circulation of the term ‘chick flick’ in recent years to describe texts headed by a female lead and driven by emotion rather than action or adventure is, even when used with a degree of irony, indicative of the continuing importance of these categories. Moreover, the perceived ‘revival’ of popular women’s films in the 1990s has produced a heightened popular media interest in this topic. The trade/review press interest in the revival of female-orientated forms initially focused on a spate of early 1990s films – Pretty Woman (Ross, 1990), Ghost (Zucker, 1990), Sleeping with the Enemy (Reuben, 1991) and Indecent Proposal (Lynn, 1993). As critics noted, these female-orientated blockbusters drew heavily on classical female-orientated forms and tended to be assessed in terms of their revival of themes and forms associated with classical Hollywood. The success of these texts thus initiated much critical and trade press discussion of the tastes and behaviour of the female audience. For example, after the long-running success of Pretty Woman and Ghost (the top grossing films of 1990), Warner president D. Barry Reardon told The Hollywood Reporter: . . . over the last five or six years the adult female audience has taken on more importance to us in marketing . . . women do have a dominant effect. If they want to go to the movies they usually drag their date . . . you will probably sell two tickets instead of one.’ (Grove, 1990: 10)

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Another appealing factor for the industry is that, as Grove points out, ‘adult female-appeal pictures also tend to cost less to produce than action-adventure aimed at younger males’ (Grove, 1990: 10). This comment is indicative of the way in which much of the industrial interest in the female audience was related to concerns about the continued viability of its post-1960s blockbuster action-adventure-orientated production strategy and its tendency to cater for the perceived taste of young, male audiences. As Jim Hillier comments in The New Hollywood: In fact, the image of the average moviegoer as a teenager that has been around since the 1960s no longer holds true. In 1990, 31 per cent of the American audience was in the 12–20 year old bracket (which makes up 15 per cent of the population), and 25 per cent were aged 21–29, making 56 per cent of the audience under 30. This leaves those over 30 responsible for 44 per cent of ticket sales (30–39 year olds accounting for 20 per cent of admissions and over-40s for 24 per cent). While the proportion of under-30s in the audience has slipped from 67 per cent in 1984 to 56 per cent in 1990, that of the over-40s increased from 15 per cent to 24 per cent. The greying of the movie-going audience (which reflects that of the population at large) will undoubtedly begin to have its effects on the movies being made. (Hillier, 1993: 33) Hillier relates this demographic shift to an industrial strategy to pursue female viewers, quoting Fox production chief Roger Birbaun’s statement: The demographic on women, today, is very strong, and it makes it exciting that a studio can develop a slate of pictures that doesn’t just cater to one demographic. It used to be that we only made pictures for teenage boys, now all our demographics are broader and deeper than that. (Hillier, 1993: 33) Similarly, Screen International’s 1995 Box Office Review asserted: ‘After years of making action and adventure films for boys of all ages studio executives are concluding that a new audience has emerged that is changing all the rules: women’ (Bahiana, 1996: 93). As these comments indicate, the ‘return’ of women’s films was perceived as a phenomenon that spanned various different cycles of production rather than one particular form. Cycles that were perceived as heralding the return of the women’s film were, along with the romantic melodrama of the early 1990s, the female friendship or ‘group

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ensemble’ film, the romantic comedy and costume drama. The female friendship cycle can be stretched to include some texts from the late 1980s such as Penny Marshall’s Beaches (1988) or Herbert Ross’s Steel Magnolis (1989) but tends to be particularly associated with the girl-gang or female buddy texts of the mid-1990s, such as Waiting to Exhale (Whitaker, 1995), The First Wives Club (Wilson, 1996), Now and Then (Gatter, 1995), The Joy Luck Club (Wang, 1993), Boys on the Side (Ross, 1995) and How to Make an American Quilt (Moorhouse, 1995). Aside from the three melodramas directed by women among this group (Penny Marshall’s Beaches, Jocelyn Moorhouse’s How to Make an American Quilt and Lesli Linka Glatter’s Now and Then), Waiting to Exhale, The First Wives Club and The Joy Luck Club were all based on popular women’s fiction (by Terry McMillan, Olivia Goldsmith and Amy Tan). While this cycle is heavily concentrated in the mid-1990s, the production of romantic comedy and costume drama is more evenly spread across the decade.4 By the mid-1990s, the trade press and fan magazines were also picking up on the trend. For example, Lizzie Franke’s 1995 Premiere analysis of female-orientated films begins by stating: In the ‘30s and ‘40s ‘women’s pictures’ were all the box-office rage and the likes of Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck called the shots. In the ‘80s we had Kim Basinger in skimpy clothing traipsing through swamps after Richard Gere. Now led by Little Women and this month’s Boys On The Side the ‘women’s picture’ is back. (Franke, 1995: 32) Other critics were more sceptical about Hollywood’s much talked of desire to embrace the female viewer. In his analysis of female-orientated production trends and trade press responses to them, Peter Kramer suggests that while studio executives professed their renewed commitment to the female audience, the ‘feminisation’ of production predicted by studio executives following the early 1990s success of Ghost and Pretty Woman failed to materialise and Hollywood went back to its tried and tested action-adventure formula (Kramer, 1999: 93). Indeed, Kramer suggests that the considerable attention given to this subject in the trade press in the early 1990s on the basis of a handful of hits actually indicates the degree to which this section of the audience had been neglected for the previous two decades. Jim Hillier also doubts there has really been any long-term shift in the industrial perception of female viewers: The industry is on the whole very short term in its thinking and tends to ricochet around trying to repeat successes. Thus having

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assumed that what will succeed is action and or/star-orientated pictures, it is then faced by the failure of Hudson’s Hawk, Days of Thunder and Another 48 HRS alongside the success of much cheaper pictures like Pretty Woman and Ghost. So the adult female audience is ‘rediscovered’ and played to, until the failure of For the Boys implies that perhaps it is not out there after all, before, that is, Prince of Tides becomes a hit and implies, on the contrary, that perhaps it is . . . To this day Hollywood gives the impression of being very unsure as to who its audience, or audiences are. (Hillier, 1993: 33) If the female-orientated success stories of the early 1990s were exaggerated by industry spokespeople and some enthusiastic critics, the debates surrounding the production and popularity of these texts nevertheless indicate the degree to which the popular cultural evaluation and discussion of film texts has been attuned to gender issues since the early 1990s. The hyperbolic response to the perceived shift in production is in itself significant, putting issues of women’s films back on the popular agenda and leading to the circulation of terms such as ‘chick flicks’. Furthermore, while Kramer is right to note that only Ghost and Pretty Woman were ‘top’ US box-office successes (occupying first and second place in 1990), worldwide box office figures for the 1990s show romantic comedy holding up well throughout the decade and less ‘popular’ female genres, such as the costume drama, scoring well for independent charts.5 Catherine Preston’s work on romantic comedy and romantic drama confirms this view. She states: There has been a steady rise over the last fourteen years in the production of what are referred to in popular reference sources as Hollywood ‘romance’ films. Between 1960 and 1969 there were an average of 7 romances released a year. In the 1970s that figure went down to 5 per year. In 1980 the production of romances began to rise and between 1984 and 1989 an average of 20 were released each year. Between 1990 and 1996, the annual average rose to 26, peaking at 40 in 1991. Hollywood has not approached this level of romance films since the 1950s’. (Preston, 2000: 229) Given these figures, it is possible to assert that, although they have not in any sense eclipsed the Hollywood focus on action–adventure films, female-orientated films – i.e. those featuring a female lead and focusing on the perceived ‘woman’s realm’ of relationships, family and friendship – sustained their profile since the early 1990s.

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As the debates on this subject indicate, the ‘return’ of the woman’s film has been attributed to a variety of causes: the shifting demographics of American audiences (a growing sector of over 30s assumed to be less interested in action–adventure films), the industry’s attempt to extend any offbeat, unexpected hit into a cycle or, as suggested in the previous chapter, the still limited, but marginally increased presence of women working in mainstream film production. The latter point requires some further analysis. Although femaleorientated cycles have continued to flourish from the early 1990s onwards there is little evidence that female directors have achieved greater prominence on the back of this trend. For example, Jane Campion’s 1993 best director Oscar for the innovative costume drama, The Piano, did not result in the predicted string of similar awards for women filmmakers in the following years. A decade passed before another female nominee appeared in this prestigious category and Sophia Coppola’s 2003 nomination for another ‘sensitive’, emotion-driven film, Lost in Translation, was only the third in the entire history of the academy awards. Although Coppola missed the Oscar – gaining the less prestigious best screenplay award – the nomination was still viewed as providing a significant boost for aspiring women filmmakers. This is understandable given that, as a 2002 survey conducted by Martha Lazen found, nine out of ten of the top 250 Hollywood films in that year were directed by men (Tutt, 2004). Industry spokespeople cite anti-social working schedules and the expectation that gifted directors should conform to the masculine stereotype of the charismatic, driven egomaniac as factors which continue to impede the progress of female directors (Kay, 2004: 11). But if the focus is shifted away from the undoubtedly high profile area of directing, it appears that women have fared better in recent years. Four of seven main Hollywood studios – Columbia, Paramount, Universal and Buena Vista – are now female-led. Women are also well represented in marketing, development and, in particular, production. In the latter area women such as Paula Wagner, Laura Ziskin, Gale Anne Hurd and Christine Vachon have long been key figures within the industry. Although only the Vachon is associated with female-orientated productions (such as Far from Heaven and Boys Don’t Cry, Pierce, 1999), Lazen’s survey also found that women writers (who were, like directors, gaining ground but still shamefully underrepresented) wrote more complex and more numerous roles for women. A broader view of the industry does therefore suggests that despite the lower numbers of female directors (particularly in popular mainstream production) the general increase in women working in other areas of

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popular film production has been a factor in the promotion of femaleorientated cycles (Kay, 2004: 11). The resurgence of women’s genres also created a new generation of female stars associated with the new chick flicks: Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan in the early 1990s and more recently, Cameron Diaz, Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon and Renee Zellwegger. Once sufficiently established as bankable stars – via the new femaleorientated cycles – their popularity then fuelled the demand for further female-centred and female-orientated productions. Again, contemporary female stars still lag behind their male counterparts in the salary stakes and the ability to open a picture – Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz are currently viewed as the only female stars who can do this – but they certainly exist in higher numbers, and command proportionally higher salaries than the female stars who came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, when women’s films had virtually disappeared from popular film production (Kay, 2004: 11). But the broader concept of women’s genres raised in these debates tells us relatively little about what constitutes a contemporary women’s film or how the concept can operate across a fairly diverse spectrum of textual forms. Are some women’s cycles more ‘feminine’ than others? Or less open to male viewers? If so, why? What is it that signals a text’s gendered address? While critics generally opt for the presence of at least one prominent female figure and an emphasis on emotion driven drama, there are clearly also metalinguistic signals, music being a prominent factor. For example, Lizzie Franke argues: All it takes is a few chords of soft tinkly piano music to tell us exactly what kind of film Boys on the Side is going to be. Just two chords and we know that we’ve got a whole symphony of emotions on the way. Listen to this, then watch the trailer for Outbreak and hear the brisk drum roll, marching orders for the action and macho posturing in store . . . Tinkly piano music for the girls, drum rolls for boys: they may as well have marked the sex divide with pink and blue colour schemes. (Franke, 1995: 32) But even this distinction is true only of the female friendship or domestic melodrama (in which tinkly piano music does indeed feature prominently). Contemporary romantic comedies (such as those produced/directed by Nora Ephron) often favour reworked jazz classics, while costume dramas (with the exception of Michael Nyman’s famous composition for The Piano) tend to use existing classical scores. The baseline in popular (review/trade press) definitions of what is perceived

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as a ‘woman’s movie’ remains the presence of women combined with romance, friendship or family. Although forms such as costume drama and romantic comedy are perceived to have made a comeback, it is not surprising to note that certain classical film themes have virtually disappeared altogether. For example, childrearing – a predominant theme in classical women’s texts such as the ‘maternal’ melodrama – is rarely a key issue within any of the contemporary female cycles. Similarly, the medical discourse narrative of female psychological and physical trauma largely faded along with the classical woman’s film. From the late 1980s there have been intermittent clusters of films in which women die prematurely, such as Beaches and Steel Magnolias in the late 1980s and Stepmom (Columbus, 1998), Sweet November (O’Connor, 2001), Autumn in New York (Chen, 2001) in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but these more traditionally sentimental and somewhat mawkish productions have not developed into sustained cycles or attained the box office figures that turn a traditional ‘woman’s picture into a broader-based hit. As a general rule, the new women’s cycles tend to be more upbeat and have less invested in the notion of feminine suffering and anguish associated with classical female-orientated forms. The preoccupation with ‘persecution, illness and death’ that Doane perceives in classical women’s films is much less apparent in recent women’s cycles (Doane, 1987: 17). Furthermore, the presence of postmodernist devices – such as cinematic allusionism and textual self-reflexivity – within these cycles, provides a framing structure that tends to offset the intensity of feeling associated with classical female-orientated forms. As I will argue at greater length in later chapters, this shift in mode of address is informed and made possible by wider socio-cultural developments in which it is possible to perceive a critical distance between past and present modes of female subjectivity. The new cycles register and re-inscribe a broader and, on the whole, happier range of female experiences. Interestingly, the contemporary subcycle which goes furthest towards exploring individual tales of raw misery is that of the female friendship film, in which the narrative exploration of pain and oppression is also ameliorated by the ‘consciousness raising’ structure of the text and its therapeutic emphasis on the solace of shared pain. It is also not surprising that those cycles in which the presence of women and traditional feminine concerns are offset or complemented by either the strong presence of a male protagonist (the early 1990s melodrama), or a gender neutral formal element (such as humour in romantic comedy), have a broader box office appeal

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than those which focus exclusively on women. The importance of this dynamic is indicated by the higher rating of the early 1990s melodrama and romantic comedy which feature in the top ten listings. Costume drama and female friendship films rarely achieve this, unless, like Titanic, they combine the costume romance plot with lavish special effects and plenty of action.6

The ‘postmodernist’ melodrama The remainder of this chapter will look closely at the first and most commercially successful of these new women’s cycles – the early 1990s melodrama – through a close analysis of three popular male directed ‘women’s’ texts from this period, Jerry Zucker’s Ghost, Adrien Lynn’s Indecent Proposal and Joseph Ruban’s Sleeping with the Enemy (although Amy Jones wrote the screenplay for Indecent Proposal). I have chosen to focus on this cycle (rather than the female friendship or ‘dying woman’ films) as these high-profile films demonstrate the way in which the revival of woman’s film was synonymous with a process of generic repacking, or in Altman’s terms, ‘poaching’, and the acquisition of cross-gender, blockbuster elements. The films are also indicative of the way in which the revived postmodernist women’s cycles were starting to reformulate conventional cinematic notions of femininity and classical dramatic situations, in this case, those linked to the history of stage and screen melodrama, and repackage them to new generation of female viewers. Unlike the other revived woman’s cycles – in which the ‘post-feminist’ idea of independent woman or singleton predominates, the couple-centred melodrama blends an older notion of feminine virtue with the zeitgeist early 1990s ‘structure of feeling’ in which values coded as masculine – such as individualism, ambition and plain greed, are rejected in favour of an anti-materialist, ‘feminine’ ethic of cooperation and mutual support. The melodrama thus draws on a more traditional view of woman than later postmodernist female-orientated cycles (which tend to concern the conflict between female freedom, creativity and ambition versus the social demand for heterosexual coupledom). Before addressing these texts in more detail I want to highlight some generic and thematic features common to each and link these to more general postmodern theoretical concerns. As Peter Kramer comments of the cycle, ‘the publicity surrounding such texts was distinguished by its continual references to the films’ endorsement of old-fashioned values and romantic themes’ (Kramer, 1999: 100). Conversely, I want to stress

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that while this cycle is not as obviously self-conscious or saturated with prior cinematic allusion as subsequent female-orientated 1990s cycles (such as the romantic comedy), it nonetheless draws on a range of textual features associated with postmodernist forms. Furthermore, the cycle is thematically driven by the dramatisation of ethical problems relating to the socio-cultural order created by post-industrial, postmodern capitalism. The notion of a ‘postmodernist’ melodrama might initially seem somewhat unlikely, given the association between postmodernist forms and irony, parody and fictional self-consciousness. Women’s melodrama is popularly understood as a form that works through a tonal register in which sincerity and emotion are privileged over the more cerebral pleasures of textual self-reflexivity. Female-orientated cycles have traditionally been associated with a lack of spectatorial distance, fostering the ability to lose oneself, whereas postmodernist forms are viewed as engendering a cooler, more detached response. The new woman’s forms play it both ways, blending affect and irony while also integrating textual elements which offset the excess of feeling associated with female spectatorship. If the early 1990s melodrama at some points utilises the full range of metalinguistic signals – such as the use of soft-focus and a stirring score – to prompt a heartfelt response, much of the critical discussion of the form tends to miss its equally strong incorporation of generic elements associated with postmodernist aesthetic strategies. Working against what is popularly regarded as a traditionally feminine mode of audience engagement, the cycle re-invigorates and re-defines the female-orientated domestic melodrama through a blend of classical and post-classical generic tropes. Indeed, while much of the trade press views the cycle as bucking the trend towards ‘highconcept’ metageneric blockbusters (indicative of an audience desire for softer, human-centred drama after the peak of the action movie years), it seems more likely that it was precisely the inclusion of some of these blockbuster elements within the new postmodernist female-orientated melodrama which led to its broader commercial success. Thus, the biggest box office hit of the cycle – Ghost – blended gothic elements, high-tech special effects and a fast-paced ‘masculine’ crime and action plot with its more traditional theme of love beyond the grave. In a similar manner, while Sleeping with the Enemy was highly derivative of a classical female-orientated cycle – that of the ‘paranoid’ or gothic woman’s film – its use of score, shot construction, mise-en-scene and graphic depiction of violence stretched the suspense and psychological tension of its classical elements strongly in the direction of the popular slasher/stalker horror model. The film’s final sequence, in which the

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heroine does combat with the psychopathic male stalker, is particularly close to the ‘final girl’ scenario (usually following the grisly death of all companions) that close many a post-1970s horror film. Of the three, Indecent Proposal is the most consistently ‘feminine’ in its almost exclusive concern with the heterosexual couple, yet there is a strong emphasis on style over substance and a late 1980s preoccupation with clothes and interiors. The narrative flow is also disrupted with sequences – such as the hotel love scene – which replicate the aesthetic style of a pop promo in lighting, camera angles and fast editing. Aside from this blending of generic codes and forms, the three films contain a marked degree of intertextual referencing. For example, Indecent Proposal draws on Robert Redford’s status as both a fading Hollywood idol and his past screen depiction of another lonely rich guy – Jay Gatsby in Jack Clayton’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby (Clayton, 1974). Similarly, as Jane Caputi has argued, Sleeping with the Enemy repeats – to invert in nightmarish form – the ‘Cinderella’ elements of Julia Roberts’s previous hit, Pretty Woman (Caputi, 1991: 3), while the film’s overall plotline is a self-consciously intertextual ‘feminist’ reworking of the paranoid ‘my-husbands-trying-to-kill-me’ classical gothic woman’s film.

The new domestic melodrama and its critique of postmodern society Despite its self-conscious address and inclusion of generic elements associated with the horror (Sleeping with the enemy) or the action film (Ghost), in popular film criticism the cycle was consistently lauded as heralding the return or revival of women’s genres. The perceived return of women to the big screen following the demise of central female roles in the 1970s and 1980s and the assumed feminine appeal of these texts can be linked to two factors. Firstly, their strong melodramatic critique of 1980s greed and materialism. Secondly, the way in which this critique is tied up with a revised and updated vision of woman as the sign of virtue. The cycle depicts women as cultural saviours and redeemers, keeping male wickedness under check. In all three texts, cross-generic elements are thus pulled together by a strong melodramatic logic and the equation of femininity and the films’ female protagonists with notions of innocence, justice, purity and feminine self-sacrifice. According to Thomas Elsaesser, melodrama stages moral and ethical issues through the ‘interiorisation and privatisation of what are essentially ideological conflicts’. Moreover, he states that ‘the popularity of melodrama coincides with periods of intense social and ideological

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crisis’ (Elsaesser, 1995: 352). Both statements provide a useful way into the cycle’s thematic, ethical concerns and its gendered articulation. Appearing at the tail-end of the 1980s, the cycle’s tortuous sexual and emotional dynamics provide the privatised dramatic motivation for an exploration of the conflict between the energy, excitement and entrepreneurial spirit associated with the Western post-industrial financial boom and the increasingly negative connotations of greed and material excess which it began to accrue as the decade drew to a close. Virtue is feminised in these texts (the films’ heroines affirm creativity and community), while villainy is repeatedly embodied in the figure of the cleancut, designer suited, ‘yuppie’. The values which have come to symbolise the 1980s – the triumph of style over substance, conspicuous consumption, the single-minded pursuit of wealth and the self-regarding ‘me’ culture of the Reagan years – are imbued with an almost satanic power, overshadowing and eventually devastating the lives of the central characters. Indeed, the way in which the 1980s has subsequently come to be mythologised as the decade of the yuppie (embodied by Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) and his ‘greed is good’ mantra in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street) (Stone, 1987), owes much to the late 1980s proliferation of what might be called Hollywood’s ‘anti-Wall Street’ narratives. This is not to suggest that the manifest content of such texts – that is, their ‘feminine’ concern with romance and heterosexual coupledom – is merely a means of making their underlying ideological message more palatable, but that the sentimental feminine aspects of these texts are wholly bound up with their wider social vision and critique of latecapitalist economics. As I will illustrate in the analysis of each text, the ‘postmodernist’ inflection of other generic elements, such as the horror/thriller aspects of Ghost and Sleeping with the Enemy, give its cultural critique a darker, more forceful impact. In this sense the cycle’s postmodernist formal elements contribute to its liberal critique of postmodern capitalism and the presentation of women as social guardians and saviours. Significantly, the appearance of the cycle also coincided with feminist debates concerning a perceived cultural and political anti-feminist ‘backlash’ generated by the high-profile publications of tracts such as Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women (1992) or Marilyn French’s The War against Women (1992). French and Faludi argued that, throughout much of the 1980s, government and the media co-orchestrated an ideological campaign which sought to undermine and invalidate feminist objectives by infringing on women’s right to abortion, equal pay and other legislative issues. According to French and Faludi, ‘backlash’ rhetoric sought to persuade women that feminism – rather

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than patriarchy – was responsible for their continued dissatisfaction and that marriage, motherhood and domesticity were not traps to ensnare them but means of liberating women from the lonely, stressful life of the career spinster. The new melodrama’s representation of the female figure as protector of hearth and home and, in a wider sense, as the guardian of a more compassionate social order might initially suggest that the cycle incorporates aspects of this regressive social and political current. But as I will stress in my analysis of each film, while the texts place relationships and the domestic sphere at the centre of women’s lives, in all three films, a battle to achieve respect, independence and equality within this space is undertaken by the female protagonists. The cycle’s emphasis on domesticity and relationships is not one that encourages men to take up the role of provider, chasing money and status while women flourish in the domestic sphere. On the contrary, the calamitous events which befall the couples in Ghost, Indecent Proposal and the psychotic dark side of the husband in Sleeping with the Enemy are strongly associated with the male characters’ dangerous desire for worldly status and with their over-investment in the competitive, corrupt masculine sphere.7 The cycle’s broadly liberal critique of postmodern capitalism is thus echoed by a feminist-influenced critique of ‘masculine’ values (particularly male aggression and worldly competitiveness) and an exploration of their negative impact on family life.

Femininity and cultural redemption in the 1990s melodrama Since the rise of American melodrama on the mid-nineteenth-century stage, a relatively feminized victimhood has been identified with virtue and innocence. At least since Uncle Tom and Little Eva, the suffering victims of popular American stage and screen have been endowed with the most moral authority. (Williams, 1998: 43) As I have already suggested, Ghost, Indecent Proposal and Sleeping with the Enemy begin by offering a 1980s fantasy of affluence and material success that is closely associated with the worldly aspirations of the leading male figures. As this swiftly disintegrates and descends into domestic crisis, order is restored through the rejection of what are clearly identified as the masculine values of ambition and competitiveness and the healing influence of a woman-led, ‘feminine’ culture of caring and compassion. In Jerry Zucker’s Ghost, this indictment of late 1980s

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decadence is accentuated through the film’s Manichean moral logic and its postmodernist inclusion of gothic and supernatural elements more commonly associated with the horror genre. Unusual for a contemporary mainstream text, let alone a love story, Ghost not only asks the audience to believe in the after-life, but goes so far as to include the chilling image of cackling devils dragging the dying villain down below while a celestial cloud of white lights finally redeems the hero from purgatory. The crude and somewhat ironic conflict between the spiritual and material world is signalled from the beginning of the text as Wall Street banker Sam Wheat (Patrick Swazey) and girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore), a sculptress, wrestle with the problem of dragging a vast and overbearing angel figure into their new, spacious Manhattan apartment. If the text’s opening sequences concern a common woman’s theme, that of Sam’s masculine inability to express his feelings and fully commit to Molly, the plot quickly takes the unusual step of killing off the male protagonist in what initially appears a random street-robbery. More predictably, the representation of killer Willy Lopaz (Rick Aviles) – a poor, Puerto Rican criminal – appears initially to pander to the worst racial stereotypes and bourgeois fears. Yet both these events have further unexpected consequence as Sam returns in ghostly form and Lopaz is revealed to be in the pay of Sam’s treacherous friend and colleague, Carl Bruner (Sam Goldwyn). If Sam Wheat (his name signifying his underlying wholesomeness) represents the more acceptable face of material aspiration, Carl is pure yuppie villainy, authorising his friend’s murder in order to conceal his money laundering activities and connections to drug barons. The moral universe which the film initially appears to endorse is further complicated by the introduction of African-American petty criminal, Ode Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg), who Sam enlists to protect Molly and avenge his death. While Sam’s murder is wrongly attributed to a lone street criminal rather than the outwardly respectable white banker, Carl, the low-life fake spiritualist turns out to have genuine psychic powers and a finely tuned awareness of corruption and social disadvantage. The depiction of Ode Mae has also been subject to much negative criticism due to its comic portrayal of ‘folksy’ blackness and her marginal plot function in assisting an affluent white couple. Ode Mae is also desexualised to the point where Sam can ‘inhabit’ her body in order to maintain physical contact with Molly without any suggestion of sexual exploitation or lesbian eroticism. Nevertheless, Ode Mae also gets the sharpest, funniest lines and introduces a much-needed comic element which undercuts both the text’s intense gothic nastiness and sentimental

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excess. Although clearly coded as comic rather than sexually attractive, she is also a far more powerful figure than the pale, insipid Molly who spends much of the film in tears and, unlike all the other characters, does not even warrant a surname. The film employs both conventional notions of black and white (devils and angels) and a reverse pattern in which ‘whiteness’ is associated with death and decay – through Sam and the vampirical subway ghost – and blackness with warmth, energy and life-enhancing power. It is literally ‘through’ Ode Mae that the stuffy, repressive white male is finally able to acknowledge and express his feelings for Molly. Indeed, it might be viewed as a reversal, rather than extension of, conventional racial and gendered power roles, as Sam is entirely dependent on Ode Mae to uncover the crime plot and protect Molly. The postmodernist, metageneric integration of the gothic crime plot brings together issues of public and private morality that strengthen the feminine, emotion-driven aspects of the text; the film’s postmodernist generic elements are entwined with its melodramatic feminine critique of social injustice and patriarchal power. Sam’s final transformation from unreconstructed masculinity to emotionally expressive ‘new mandom’ is achieved not only through his embrace of the feminine values dually represented by Molly and Ode Mae, but is also reinforced through his rejection of the aggressive and brutal world of Wall Street revealed through the crime/action plot. Indeed, one of the more unusual aspects of the text is the way in which the supernatural, gothic elements of the plot are not set against the high-tech electronic world of global finance but used to emphasise its ghostly but omnipotent power. As Jameson argues in The Geo-Political Aesthetic (Jameson, 1995), in post-1970s American texts new communications technologies metonymically evoke the sinister and mysterious nature of post-Fordist global economics through their association with political conspiracy. In a similar manner, Ghost emphasises the silent power of ‘voodoo’ economics through electronic money laundering, fake bank accounts and the rapid and terrifying appearance and disappearance of vast sums. Villain Carl Bruner’s well-deserved descent into near madness following the instantaneous deletion of millions touches on an increasing cultural fear of economic meltdown as global finance moves into the abstract realm of e-commerce. Again, bringing together both the feminine melodramatic and postmodernist aspects of the text, Sam’s escape from purgatory involves confronting both his own ‘feminine’ emotional vulnerability and the dark side of this hyper-masculine world along with the concrete social inequalities it creates.

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The text’s postmodernist play with race and power binaries is also echoed through its treatment of femininity and redemption. The depiction of Molly is very much in the sentimental mould of feminine victimhood and virtue typical of the melodrama. Molly is, from the outset, depicted as a civilising force for Sam, embodying the traditionally esteemed feminine virtues of innocence and loyalty. Molly is in need of protection, is utterly duped by Carl and refuses to press charges against Ode Mae even when she (wrongly) believes her to be a charlatan exploiting her bereavement. But what is also striking is the way in which Ode Mae, the Brooklyn petty criminal, is also presented as a virtuous woman despite her brash manner and uncompromising behaviour. It is the presence of both the more traditional (if rather implausible) good woman alongside her street-smart sister that allows the film to redefine and update the notion of feminine goodness and its redemptive power in a contemporary, postmodern socio-cultural context. At first sight, this resurgence of femininity defined by a rather limited notion of virtue would appear to correspond with the ideological and political re-articulation of conventional gender roles proposed by Faludi and French during this period. The cultural recirculation of femininity defined largely in terms of virtue also implies the existence of its shadow side, the more obviously misogynistic fantasy of the scheming female villain. As many feminist critics have noted, cinematic representations of this sort were not in short supply during this period with the revival of the femme fatale in 1980s neo-noir (Creed, 1987: 55; Pidduck, 1995). As this film illustrates, melodrama survives through the redefinition rather than rigid reassertion of moral and ethical positions linked to gender and class roles. Along with its contemporary critique of financial corruption and postmodern social inequalities (heightened by its postmodernist engagement with new generic codes), the new melodrama also works to encompass and absorb rather than oppose contemporary, feministinfluenced conceptions of social and sexual morality. Its dual representation of the virtuous woman thus combines the traditional conception of feminine sweetness and vulnerability with a more assertive, updated version in which moral fibre is aligned with the ability to act courageously in the ‘masculine’ sphere represented by Ode Mae.

Prostitution and women’s melodrama Elsaesser’s proposal that in melodrama ideological conflict often exists ‘together with the metaphorical interpretation of class conflict as sexual

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exploitation and rape’ (Elsaesser, 1995: 352) is also useful in thinking through the gender and class conflicts staged within these texts and the symbolic significance of prostitution in these early 1990s fables of wealth, power and morality. In 1993, Sky movies ran a large billboard advertising campaign for the British television premiere of Indecent Proposal: a waist to thigh shot of a woman wearing only her knickers with the vulgar, jokey slogan, ‘when the price is right they come down’. The advert managed to offend large sections of the public and was eventually withdrawn from circulation by the Advertising Standards Association. Nevertheless, it did bluntly convey the film’s concern with prostitution and women as objects of exchange between men. This was in marked contrast with much of the wider media attention attracted by the film that tended to focus on its female-orientated moral dilemma of whether a million dollars was a worthwhile trade off for extra-marital sex with a stranger. Indecent Proposal contains many of the metalinguistic, non-verbal signals associated with women’s films – such as tinkling piano music in the opening scene – as in other postmodernist melodramas, but considerable weight is given to the perspective of the male characters and the film contains an ‘oedipal’ power struggle – between a younger man and a powerful, paternal figure – which is strongly linked to its critique of 1980s materialism. Like Ghost, also starring Demi Moore, the plot centres on a young, affluent, attractive white couple. Both work, but, as in the other texts in the cycle, the husband’s career assumes primacy. However, unlike in Ghost and Sleeping with the Enemy, David does not work in the financial sector but is an aspiring architect whose chief goal is to build an impressive home for his family. In this sense, David’s ambitions are not, as in Ghost, initially in conflict with the stability of the couple but attuned to their mutual needs. The battle between ‘masculine’ materialism and ‘feminine’ ethics develops as the couple fall victim to the 1990s recession and David is corrupted by his desire for worldly status through competition with a decadent, older billionaire. A desperate trip to Las Vegas in which the couple attempt to win back their lost savings precipitates wife Diana’s encounter with rapacious Casino owner, John Gates, and the gradual disintegration of their marriage. Situating the text within the cycle’s more general preoccupation with the negative social effects of Reaganite right-wing economics, the characteristically nineteenth-century melodramatic concern with innocence corrupted is thus re-articulated here through the conflict between the values of the impoverished, but respectable, middle-class professional

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and the shady dealings of vulgar 1980s yuppies. As I suggested earlier, the narrative flow is disrupted by the postmodernist inclusion of a lengthy scene reminiscent of both soft porn and the pop video promo. This inclusion of other generic styles and codes specifically links sexual and material corruption (such as the MTV-style depiction of the couple rolling around on a bed of Casino won money) and reinforces its theme of corrupted innocence. Yet the depiction of Gates – the corrupting influence – is a far cry from the ‘pantomime’ depiction of the evil yuppie villain figure of Ghost and Sleeping with the Enemy. Despite his association with the tacky Las Vegas Casino, Gates’s role is drenched in pathos, his disaffection with the tawdry world of late 1980s decadence becoming increasingly apparent. The ‘softening’ of the melodramatic villain in Indecent Proposal – as opposed to the demonisation of this figure in the horror/gothic influenced melodramas – is linked to the film’s blend of romance with soft porn and pop promo textual styles and its more depersonalised representation of social inequality as abstract, systematic and damaging even to those who benefit from it. Although Gates’s self-pity is never transformed into showing compassion for others or acknowledging his own culpability in perpetuating the hard-faced values of the market, the audience is continually asked to sympathise with him. Laura Mulvey’s description of the tragic or ‘male’ melodrama in which the hero is brought to his knees and finally redeemed and rehabilitated (Mulvey, 1977) applies to the young architect rather than ‘sugar daddy’ Gates. It is David who undergoes the film’s central process of learning integrity, respect for women and rejecting the masculine values of material achievement represented by Gates. Abandoned by Diana, David undergoes a period of humiliation (drinking, living in squalor) before finding redemption through his acceptance of a humble teaching post and a rediscovered love of architectural beauty. Taking the text’s crude opposition between worthy professionals and parasitic money-men to its conclusion, David regains Diana’s love when he realises that Gates is, as he states ‘not the better man, he’s just got more money’. The textual endorsement of this view is confirmed in one of the final scenes, in which David’s reconciliation with Diana is precipitated by his donation to her favourite charity. Indecent Proposal’s broadly oedipal structure leads to the young hero’s eventual triumph over the corrupt paternal figure. David does not win Diana through a conventional show of male power but through a rejection of competitiveness (strongly coded here as masculine) and the embrace of a more compassionate, selfless value system symbolised by his charitable donation. In this respect the postmodernist

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woman’s melodrama is much tougher on male greed and selfishness than early 1990s male melodramas such as The Doctor (Haines, 1991) or Regarding Henry (Nichols, 1991). The latter films were also critical of a historically specific notion of unbridled, anti-social masculine ambition, but the male melodrama’s predominantly male viewpoint was linked to selfsalvation rather than a gendered critique of male-coded values. Forgiven by all, the wounded male regains his place in society and can look forward to a more fulfilling future. In the woman’s melodrama the redemption is symbolic and cultural rather than individual. Out-and-out villains such as Carl Bruner are destroyed, but even the redeemed Sam Wheat cannot avoid death, while the corrupt Gates is condemned to a lonely, loveless existence. Only the relatively innocuous David is allowed to regain his place in society after a period of abject humiliation. As in Ghost, David’s journey of self-realisation leads him to accept the values espoused by his wife from the beginning. Like Ghost, tensions between class identification and ideological positions are refracted through what are clearly presented as gendered patterns of behaviour and value systems. Diana values hearth, home and ‘creative’ achievements (such as David’s plans to build an impressive family house) while her husband is sucked into material competitiveness and incensed by his inability to compete with the big boys. More significantly, Diana is willing to sleep with Gates not for her own material benefit, but to please her husband. These aspects of the text would seem to confirm the early 1990s popular feminist view of a Hollywood-endorsed ‘backlash’ against women’s rights, articulated through a nostalgic and regressive celebration of feminine domesticity and self-sacrifice. Similarly, it concurs with Creed’s objections to the nostalgia mode and the way in which revived classical genres can drag restrictive gender stereotypes in their wake. Yet it is also significant that Diana’s separation from David initiates a period of financial autonomy and career aspiration that is also endorsed by the narrative. Furthermore, the film does not blame or punish Diana for sleeping with Gates, even when it is made clear that she enjoyed the encounter rather than merely enduring it in a spirit of wifely duty and self-sacrifice. Redefining the concept of feminine virtue beyond its traditional sexual connotations, she remains the film’s centre of moral authority even after abandoning her husband and moving in with Gates. This is indicated both thematically and sartorially. Thematically, it is made clear that Diana’s attraction to Gates is based on her desire to ‘heal’ his emotional wounds rather than an attraction to his wealth and status. Swathed head to toe in white clothing, the scenes in which Diana

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accompanies Gates visually reinforce her moral purity. The film’s nostalgic association of woman and virtue is thus updated through an appreciation of female moral integrity that is not wholly tied to sexual behaviour. Diana’s moral superiority is associated with her attempt to counter David and Gates’s masculine competitiveness with emotional honesty. The film’s continuing endorsement of Diana’s virtue indicates the degree to which the new melodrama repositions its surface preoccupation with sexual morality onto its overriding concern with wider ethical and social issues. The nice young couple’s acceptance of the million-dollar proposal is a clear metaphor for the corruption of traditional family values by nasty 1980s materialism. Once the deal is accepted, the couple’s plans for their Edenic dream-home (snatched by Gates) are shattered and their failing relationship is beset by jealously and mistrust. However its feminist-influenced treatment of this theme also ensures that as David prostituted his wife – then had the gall to treat her like an adulteress – it is he who is condemned and punished throughout the remainder of the film. The early 1990s melodrama thus provides an identifiable template for addressing class conflicts and points of ideological tension via gender representation. The depiction of the female protagonist illustrates the continuing power of the figure of ‘woman’ through Diana’s role as saviour of David’s integrity (David rejects competitiveness and materialism in order to regain Diana’s love and respect) and as a symbol of the cultural desire for social justice and opposition to class exploitation through her resistance to Gates’s attempts to buy her. However, it also suggests a degree of elasticity in the way this is combined with contemporary social attitudes towards sexual morality and female economic independence. The smooth integration of feministinspired notions of female independence and sexual and financial autonomy within the ‘postmodernist’ melodrama owes much to the domestic melodrama’s long standing association with the female audience and, in broader terms, what is culturally perceived as a feminine perspective on relationships and cultural value systems. In the postmodernist melodrama, values which are presented as feminine such as cooperation and the desire to care for and nurture others, do battle with – and triumph over – the masculine sphere of worldly competitiveness and 1980s materialism. This ability to mesh feminist attitudes towards ‘personal’ morality with older female identified values in the cycle of ‘postmodernist’ melodrama is particularly apparent in Joseph Ruben’s reworked female paranoia movie: Sleeping with the Enemy. In this text, a similarly redefined

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melodramatic triangle of bad man/good man/virtuous heroine carries the story but the film is both more obviously derivative of its classical female-orientated predecessors and more closely inspired by the legacy of the women’s movement (hence the title’s adoption of a feminist slogan). However, like Ghost and Indecent Proposal, its critique of patriarchal power is also closely tied to historically and culturally specific attitudes concerning the conflict between the cold, hard, world of business and the traditional family and community values represented by women. In her analysis of Sleeping with the Enemy, Jane Caputi puts forward the view that every light, ‘sentimental’ Hollywood representation of romance or family life spawns a dark, nightmare representation of the same theme (Caputi, 1991: 4). Using this logic, Caputi argues that Sleeping with the Enemy constitutes a kind of feminist corrective to Garry Marshall’s popular romantic comedy Pretty Woman (1990), focusing on the way in which the former develops and explores some of the more troubling aspects of the latter’s underlying gender/power dynamic. Caputi draws out some interesting visual and thematic parallels between the two films, arguing that the brutal, controlling behaviour displayed by the murderous husband in Sleeping with the Enemy is nothing more than the flip side of the ‘masterful’ romantic hero as depicted by Richard Gere in the blockbuster romantic comedy, Pretty Woman. Caputi asserts: Both films represent collective female fantasies. Although superficially distinct in genre, subject, and tone, each takes the same material – the socially constructed power differential between women and men, the co-mingled fear and love that women feel for men in a culture that aggrandises men and devalues women – and shapes these into either utopian fantasy or high paranoia nightmare. (Caputi, 1991: 7) The status of such films as in some way representative of ‘individual’ female fantasies cannot be easily established. Although such texts do appear to attract a higher proportion of female viewer, they also have a wider cross-gender appeal and are mediated through the industrial structure of male-dominated Hollywood. This is not to suggest that such texts are merely male conceived versions of what appeals to women, but that the relation between what are widely assumed to be ‘female fantasies’ (i.e. those led by a female figure and which privilege emotional dynamics), the production process and the heterogeneous female audience is extremely complex. In many cases films do not even need to be led by a female figure to be culturally assigned as ‘chick flicks’. Thus while Ghost and Indecent Proposal feature men in strong leading roles,

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the overall tone and subject matter was enough to guarantee that they were still regarded as female-orientated texts by the trade and review press (Kramer, 1999: 101). Sleeping with the Enemy’s references to both the classical woman’s paranoia film and Pretty Woman provide another mediating framework. What is clear is that popular discussion of such texts did tend to strongly focus on their status as collective feminine fantasy: a tendency which was particularly marked in the case of Pretty Woman’s Cinderella plotline (Radner, 1993: 60). For this reason, such texts assume a particular cultural significance as women’s texts and can – as in the case of Pretty Woman – become the focus of much popular discussion of women’s desires and aspirations. Pretty Woman’s vast popularity adds significance to the uncanny similarities and points of reference between Pretty Woman and Sleeping with the Enemy. The many reference points between the two films suggest an intertextual play in which the latter encourages audiences familiar with the former to reinterpret its view of heterosexual romance in a more critical light. But if the status of such texts as the exclusive property of the female audience is problematic, there is little doubt that the cultural fantasies offered within these texts rely on the persistence of certain gender-specific themes – such as prostitution as a metaphor for class exploitation – or the way in which women are situated as the moral saviours of both individual men and, in a symbolic sense, post-industrial, postmodern culture. A key feature of the new or postmodernist melodrama is that feminine warmth and compassion does battle with the cold, hard ‘yuppie’ culture of the late 1980s. In Sleeping with the Enemy the conflict between these gendered spheres is drawn in particularly stark terms. The film also takes a more overtly critical, feminist attitude towards gender/power relations than Ghost or Indecent Proposal. Perhaps because of its tougher, anti-patriarchal stance, the cycle of classical women’s film that it references is that strongly influenced by gothic/horror genre – the women’s paranoia film. Identified by Mary Ann Doane, this constitutes a subgenre of the 1940s women’s film comprising texts such as Suspicion (Hitchcock, 1941), The Two Mrs Carrolls (Godfrey, 1947), The Secret Beyond the Door (Lang, 1948), Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940) and Gaslight (Cukor, 1944). According to Doane, the factor linking these earlier films is their assumption of ‘a compatibility between the idea of female fantasy and that of persecution – a persecution effected by the husband, family or lover’ (Doane, 1987: 36). The genre is itself highly derivative of the gothic – a well plundered form that has a long established cultural association with female viewers

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(Modleski, 1982: 59–84). The peculiar resonance of the gothic with female audiences tends to be attributed by critics such as Doane and Modleski to the form’s ability to explore male villainy from a female or even proto-feminist perspective. The title of the film in question (Sleeping with the Enemy) with its sinister suggestion of the fundamental untrustworthiness of all men, and the secondary implication that women are also held hostage by their own heterosexual allegiance to patriarchy, ambivalently carries both overtly feminist and more conventionally gothic associations. The film’s title might also be construed as typically ‘postfeminist’ in that it utilises a radical, second-wave feminist slogan – referring to the oppression of all women by all men – and depoliticises this in application to a story of one particularly mad, bad villain victimising a singularly virtuous and innocent heroine. To consider both of these possibilities it is also useful to refer back to the more general problem of the woman’s point of view within the specular regime of popular cinema and the figure of the persecuting male and its historic construction within a feminised gothic/horror tradition. In Freudian psychoanalysis the ‘problem’ of seeing is essentially structured by the castration complex. The anxiety attached to the female image is that deriving from the unconscious trauma of the sight of the female genitals. Feminist cine-psychoanalysis has therefore asserted that the problem of vision is not only tied to the female image, but is also primarily a problem of and for the male psyche, which popular cinema spends much of its time attempting to assuage. However, this then presents the problem of how to account for the construction of the female ‘look’ in female-orientated genres and the question of what happens to the visual organisation of the film when it is structured by the gaze of the female protagonist. Can this circumvent the masculinisation of the viewing position? In her 1980s analysis of the woman’s paranoia films of the 1940s Mary Ann Doane answered this question with a definitive no. In The Desire to Desire she argues that in films structured by the visual, cognitive and emotional perceptions of the heroine (such as the women’s paranoia movie), the anxiety and horror which is normally mapped (and thus contained) within the space of the female image is simply displaced onto other, more threatening spaces. She states: A certain de-specularisation takes place in these films, a deflection of scopophiliac energy in other directions, away from the female body. The very process of seeing is now invested with fear, anxiety, horror, precisely because it is objectless, free-floating. (Doane, 1987: 129)

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In the woman’s paranoia film, much of this anxiety is remapped onto the film’s domestic topography that then becomes symbolic of the marriage and more specifically, the enigmatic, unknowable figure of the husband himself. Marital relations are thus characterised by fear and mistrust in such films. The heroine’s anxieties are also compounded and intensified by her suspicion that these may, after all, turn out to be paranoic delusions. The female look is therefore shot through with anxiety/ instability becoming an unreliable source of narrative coherence. In Doane’s analysis there is no space within Hollywood production for an empowering female-led or orientated film, even within texts targeted at and centred on women. But what is also striking in the films she cites is how frequently the heroine’s paranoic fears are eventually narratively substantiated one way or another. After all, in classic paranoid woman’s films – such as Hitchcock’s Rebecca – the enigmatic husband really did murder his wife. Moreover, paranoia is not only a dominant structuring device within the woman’s film, it characterises much popular romantic literature, in which the figure of the punishing, persecuting male also looms large. In her analysis of romance fiction Tania Modleski suggests that this figure serves two important functions for the female imaginary. It firstly eroticises, and therefore attempts to transform male bad behaviour from a grim reality into pleasurable fantasy (he only hurts me because he loves me), and/or it provides a guilt-free receptacle/projection for female rage, recast as the persecution of the innocent women (it is permissible to hate men because, in actual fact, they really are murderous villains) (Modleski, 1982: 61). While the heroine is encouraged to dismiss her feelings of suspicion and mistrust by those around her and by her own lack of confidence, the gothic ultimately works to validate such fears, awarding them an underlying kernel of truth. The important distinction between these well-known feminist approaches is that while Doane reads the filmic construction of female paranoia as wholly determined by the intrinsically masculine structure of the cinematic apparatus, Modleski interprets its presence in romantic literature as the inscription of a proto-feminist consciousness, however distorted this appears through the emotional dynamics of that form. This secondary aspect of the gothic is more clearly brought into view in the contemporary reworking of the genre. In the opening sequence of Sleeping with the Enemy the domestic sphere is once more cast as the site of female dread and repression. Heroine Laura Burney (Julia Roberts) is virtually imprisoned in the clinical, ‘masculine’ space of her minimalist yuppie home. Again we are confronted by the tall, dark, moustached, villain in the figure of her

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husband Martin (Patrick Bergin). However, Sleeping with the Enemy opens with the moment that forms the denouement of the classical paranoid woman’s film: the revelation of the husband’s true motives and identity. While the paranoid woman’s film demanded the concealment of violence, and thus perpetuation of our suspicions, Martin is ‘revealed’ almost immediately through the graphic depiction of domestic violence and psychological bullying. The exposure of such violence swiftly recasts the sinister, but enigmatic, husband in the less flattering role of a commonplace wife-beater. The nameless fears and anxieties of the paranoid heroine are immediately narratively justified and given a specific focus. In contrast, it is the villain/husband himself who is pathologised, not only through his sporadic outbursts of violence, but, in a postmodernist reversal of the idea of the stereotypical, neurotic housewife, through his obsessive attention to domestic order. The recurring presence of this familiar figure suggests that while the villainous husband remains a prominent figure within the fantasies which are culturally coded as feminine, for example, in a more recent film such as What Lies Beneath (Zemeckis, 2000) – he is no longer at the centre of a compensatory or masochistic ‘female’ fantasy – he becomes wholly resistible, if not repulsive. The nameless fears of the heroine are finally articulated and the romantic hero demystified. In this sense, a generically derivative female-led blockbuster such as Sleeping with the Enemy provides an interesting counterpoint to the theoretical concern with conservative rétro genres. A much hyped star-led text with strong thriller/horror elements, the film nonetheless contains strong feminist elements which are accentuated through its association with a wellknown classical form and the shocking revelation of what was concealed or absent within its classical predecessor. Sleeping with the Enemy thus invites the audience to reinterpret the romance dynamic of shy, suspicious bride and wealthy, mercurial husband in the light of feminism’s exposure and critique of marital violence and abuse. The presence of Julia Roberts – a star famous for girl-next-door niceness rather than glamour or action roles – helps to engage the audience’s sympathy and reinforce its critique of patriarchal power.

Nostalgia and the revised paranoid women’s film But if the text’s view of gender roles is anything but nostalgic, its familiar critique of the designer label conscious, urbane male is aligned with a highly nostalgic view of small-town America. Following the suspense/ thriller aspect of Laura’s escape, the narrative trajectory follows a more

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conventionally feminist quest towards the discovery and recognition of selfhood, while two questions hover in the background: will she escape the evil husband and will she form another relationship? What is striking here is the location chosen for Laura’s new life. Senta Falls, Iowa, seems an unlikely spot for a newly liberated heroine. Our first view, from the Greyhound bus on which Laura escapes, gives us a Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985) mainstreet and central square, with the inevitable patriotic flagpole, together with sunny suburban streets and angelic children. The whole scene seems designed to evoke the strongest sense of ‘coming home’ to a secure and comfortable base, away from the urban corruption associated with the murderous husband. The text’s initial feminist thrust appears to be countered by a backlash celebration of small-town homeliness, reinforced by the heroine’s choice of rambling family home and transition from glamorous trophy wife to a homebody in floral dress. In the broader context of popular cinema, Sleeping with the Enemy’s celebration of the small-town echoes the evocative use of what Jameson describes as ‘fiftiesness’ in postmodernist cinema of the 1980s. According to Jameson, fiftiesness connotes two affective responses – that of comfort and security and/or boredom and frustration. The use of fiftiesness within postmodernist cinema can be identified in both high-tech, special effectsdriven blockbusters such as Back to the Future or more self-conscious, satirical treatments of the theme in films such as Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986). For Jameson the more interrogative use of fiftiesness is one which sets up an allegorical encounter between past and present, or additionally, as in Blue Velvet, appears to satirise not the actual 1950s, but the cultural fantasies woven around the decade (Jameson, 1993: 287). Central to the mythology of fiftiesness is its temporal relation to ‘permissiveness’ and the counter-cultural movements that succeeded it. The American 1950s thus tends to be constructed in polarised terms, either a moment of innocence prior to corruption or, as in the recent film Pleasantville (Ross, 1998), as a period in which patriarchal, racist, small-town, small-minded attitudes dominated the political and cultural agenda. For feminism it generally carries pejorative associations with sexual repression, domestic drudgery, and the discursive construction of the suburban housewife that drove women to organised rebellion – this version of fiftiesness prevails in later female-orientated films which are either overtly or covertly about the period, such as Far from Heaven or The Stepford Wives remake which I address in the final chapter. The early 1990s context of ‘anti-wall street’ narratives provides the cultural and moral imperative for an alternative view of small-town living. Despite its early 1990s setting (and concern with culturally specific ethical and moral issues), Sleeping

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with the Enemy also evokes fiftiesness by contrasting the heroine’s isolated designer home with a utopian vision of community.8 One interpretation of this nostalgia for community and an unspoilt small-town paradise is that it works to reconstitute fantasies of the domestic and the community through feminism, i.e. as a place of retreat not only from the career ladder or worldly ambition, but from male violence and, in a wider sense, patriarchal values. Additionally, it can also be understood as a manifestation of more deep-rooted gendered conflicts. In Sleeping with the Enemy the nostalgic representation of the small town is not only associated with the heroine’s emancipation from her punishing, paternalistic husband but is also close to her mother’s home. In a more general sense, Laura’s return to the small town associates Senta Falls with childhood, the maternal and the desire to return a preoedipal moment. The de-gendered pre-oedipal is suggested here through the degree of gender ambiguity which enters the text in some of the Senta Falls scenes. While Laura generally adopts a more fluid, conventionally ‘girlish’ mode of dress, she also sports a masculine disguise – complete with false moustache – when visiting her mother. Similarly, the film’s only upbeat scene is one in which new boyfriend Ben (a drama teacher) invites Laura to plunder the school wardrobe. To a backtrack of Van Morrison’s ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ she takes clear pleasure in trying on and discarding a series of male and female costumes, openly playing with and enjoying gender ambiguity. Laura’s desire to live without men – which is violently intruded upon by the return of the psychotic husband, and less forcefully but nonetheless insistently by the arrival of the ‘new-mannish’ boy-next-door Ben (Kevin Anderson) – can be interpreted as both the acknowledgement of a progressive feminist demand (for independence) and a retreat from the restrictions of heterosexual gender identification. The ‘pathologisation’ of the feminine position which is identified within the subgenre of the woman’s paranoia film – from which this text clearly derives – may be linked here not to castration (a masculine structure of looking), but rather, to a feminine registering of the traumatic imposition of a masculine sexual economy. This can then be understood through a rather different psychoanalytic paradigm, for as Luce Irigary argues: When analytic theory claims that woman must give up her love for and of the mother, abandon the desire of and for her mother, if she is to enter into desire for the father, woman is thereby subjected to a normative heterosexuality which is nonetheless completely pathogenic and pathological. (Irigary, 1993: 20)

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If the project of much post-Freudian, feminist cine-psychoanalysis is to resituate maternal identification as the key structure of female fantasies, it is also important to consider how far the cultural registration of this fantasy is mediated through the context of what Doane describes as ‘male phallocratic discursive mechanisms’, that is, through the scopic regime of classical narrative (Doane, 1987: 290). In the ‘classic’ woman’s paranoia film, female desire (as structured through the perception of the female protagonist) is mobilised at the level of the ‘positive’ female oedipus, i.e. as the masochistic desire for the punitive father/husband. By rejecting this scenario and privileging the instability of gender identity and the pre-oedipal desire for the mother, Sleeping with the Enemy highlights not the instability of the female look, but perhaps more subversively, the instability of compulsory heterosexuality itself. There is no final rejection of the heterosexualising norm, but Laura’s eventual acceptance of the gentle, more compassionate Ben does at least go some way towards recognising the possibility of a rather different kind of male object choice. This is articulated thematically – Ben works in a caring, ‘feminised’ profession – but also manifested through the relay of looks between the husband, the heroine and the lover. What this amounts to is a fairly straightforward alignment of Laura as the object of Martin’s gaze while Ben is the object of Laura’s. For example, Laura’s first view of Ben is one in which she spies on him through the window. In contrast, from the opening shot on the beach to his first view of Laura since her escape, Martin views Laura while she is unaware of his presence. Reinforcing Martin’s role as updated melodramatic villain, the latter is typical of the horror/suspense shot where the female victim is tracked by the hidden assailant. If the look of the female protagonist is situated as unreliable here, it is in respect to the bad man only, where he assumes the typically masculine position of sadistic visual mastery. The last sequence, in which Martin’s repossession of the domestic is signified by the stacked kitchen shelves and the orderly towels, operates through the classic mechanisms of domestic topography and visual instability identified by Doane. Laura runs wildly about the house, the camera reflecting her panic and fear. Yet, in the final scene, the excessive violence of her revenge – shooting him four times at close range – more than compensates for his earlier attacks. In the closing shots, the dying husband reaches towards her abandoned wedding ring. The camera then closes in on the discarded ring, which frames the background view of the lover and heroine’s embrace. The mise-en-scene therefore constructs the terms by which the problematic articulation of heterosexual romance can be resolved in the text as a whole.

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If the fictional representation of marriage is still – as in Doane’s account of the paranoid woman’s film – ‘haunted by murder’, (Doane, 1987: 123), the film’s inclusion of Laura’s life outside marriage – albeit pursued by her husband – offers the possibility of an independent existence beyond the miserable marriage, a possibility which is rarely acknowledged within the paranoid woman’s film. The heterosexual imperative is reaffirmed through the heroine’s final union with Ben, but the traumatic disruption of mother/daughter identification is somewhat compensated for in the figure of the caring ‘newmannish’ lover. So despite a clear rejection of the classical woman as helpless, self-punishing victim, heterosexual relations are finally reconstituted, perhaps in a manner more acceptable to contemporary audiences. The film thus clearly rejects patriarchal marriage in favour of a more casual and equally balanced relationship. The mother/daughter relationship provides the model for subsequent heterosexual relations – that of closeness and mutuality as opposed to the emotional dynamics of the female paranoia model, in which difference, estrangement and the imposition of the paternal law (as signified by the persecuting husband figure) are the crucial determinants of normative, male/female, adult relationships. Sleeping with the Enemy blends aspects of the nostalgia film and the classical woman’s film in ways that critically reflect on both. It is particularly significant that the destabilisation of gender identity articulated in some of the film’s later scenes works not to deconstruct its feminist message or positive view of mother–daughter relations, but develops in conjunction with these aspects of the film, linking an anti-essentialist postmodernist feminism to an older preoccupation with female solidarity and the importance of mother–daughter identification. Thus, outside the confines of her marriage, Laura is able to reclaim her relationship with her mother and experiment with her gender identity. In a similar manner, what might be regarded as a regressive and nostalgic desire for an earlier cultural epoch, here manifested in the idealised representation of small-town America, is hijacked and transformed into a place of female retreat and independence from both men and the aggressive, callous world of 1980s greed and material aspiration.

Melodrama, men and the cultural power of femaleorientated narratives The early 1990s postmodernist melodrama provides a useful generic focus for reconsidering the question of whether and how feminist criticism should give particular attention to female-oriented filmic forms.

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Brunsdon’s warning to avoid either pathologising or feeling the need to defend such texts on ground of their gendered appeal is also useful here, given both the dismissive and negative response of some critics, twinned with the industry’s desire to promote its new found enthusiasm for the female audience (Brunsdon, 1991: 376). As texts constructed with women in mind, their treatment of the female figure is clearly significant as a focus of early 1990s cultural fears and fantasies about women. Yet the symbolic function of these figures – their place within the strong melodramatic morality tale pattern of these texts – also indicates the wider cultural power of what are perceived as women-orientated narratives; the degree to which such figures also carry atavistic meanings alongside their function as representatives of contemporary cultural perceptions of gender roles and the everyday experience of real women in the 1990s. In Ghost and Indecent Proposal the melodramatic function of women as symbols of justice and as cultural saviours is re-inflected with post-feminist attitudes towards female independence and sexual morality. In a similar manner, Sleeping with the Enemy’s Laura Burney takes on both patriarchy and – in a symbolic sense – the dark side of 1980s consumer capitalism embodied in the figure of her villainous husband. The representation of the male figures is also shaped by shifting attitudes towards what constitutes a ‘good’ man that are also strongly informed by feminist attitudes. The pain and trauma undergone by male characters is foregrounded, while the strong and silent mode of masculinity is replaced by an emphasis on emotional literacy and the ability to respect, rather than protect or provide for women. As Fred Pfeil has argued, texts concerned with a perceived crisis in contemporary masculine psychology are often either implicitly or explicitly antifeminist, associating women’s increased independence with male loss of pride or self-esteem (Pfeil, 1995: 37). In contrast, the postmodernist melodrama lays the blame for male misery squarely on male egotism, the inability to express vulnerability and, in a wider sense, the harsh values associated with the patriarchal business or financial sector. Significantly, the male figure who is both the most obviously domineering and encapsulates the greatest sense of masculine crisis – the scary, psychotic husband figure in Sleeping with the Enemy – is also presented the least sympathetically. The cycle articulates early 1990s cultural anxieties concerning social inequality and power hierarchies within the textual framework of the redefined woman’s domestic melodrama. Ghost and Indecent Proposal situate narratives that are heavily focused on moral and ethical questions

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clearly within the cultural and social context of deregulated postindustrial, post-Fordist economic systems. Crucial to this landscape is the figure of the yuppie, trader or entrepreneur as symbol of social disintegration, linked to the triumph of an ethos of individualist wealth acquisition and consumer greed associated with this period. The postmodernist inclusion of new generic codes within the women’s melodrama – such as horror, gothic or thriller elements and the use of special effects – gives this critique of postmodern capitalism a more forceful impact, emphasising its darker side and transforming the symbolic representative of this world – the yuppie – into a contemporary melodramatic villain. In its inclusion of horror/thriller elements the postmodernist melodrama had much in common with the mid-1980s ‘yuppie horror’ cycle identified by Barry Keith Grant. The key difference is in the location of villainy. In yuppie horrors such as Desperately Seeking Susan, After Hours (Scorcese, 1985) and Something Wild (Demme, 1986) the middle-class, male hero descends into a hellish underclass world of greed and criminality. Although the ‘monstrous’ criminal subculture functions as the repressed other of prosperous late capitalist culture, villainy is still deflected from the yuppie hero onto those excluded from the white, male bourgeois world of social and material success. In the woman’s melodrama greed and cruelty is more insistently associated with the wealthy. It is more forcefully resisted and, in typically melodramatic terms, more consistently countered by feminine virtue. This postmodernist critique of the social and cultural order is thus allied with and reworked through a redefined melodramatic form in which women are the active agents in both remaking heterosexual relations on more equal terms and attacking the social and power hierarchies created by the ‘masculine’ postmodern economic order. The postmodernist melodrama also highlights the complexity of popular postmodernist engagement with past forms and contemporary social and cultural concerns. As these texts indicate, postmodernist generic codes and postmodern ethical and social concerns were combined here to create a redefined postmodernist women’s melodrama in which traditional notions of sexual and social morality and gender, race and class hierarchies were critically explored. The cycle’s emphasis on feminine virtue connects it to an older tradition of stage and screen melodrama. Yet it also draws on the more radical separatist tradition within late 1970s and 1980s feminist politics in which women’s politics was entwined with environmentalism and anticorporatism (Daly, 1979). The emphasis on the sexual exploitation of women also echoes the anti-pornographic campaigns led by writers

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Susan Brownmiller (1975) and Andrea Dworkin (1981, 1997) in mid1970s and early 1980s and, linking it to older forms of melodrama, forms of late nineteenth evangelical feminism that espoused female purity and moral superiority. The gradual decline of the influence of this form of separatist, anti-capitalist feminism in the 1990s is evident in later cycles and indicative of the rise of what is generally identified as a ‘post-feminist’ shift towards personal ambition and aspirations rather than a broader based feminist critique of social values.

3 Romantic Comedy and Female Spectatorship

The early 1990s discussion of ‘blockbuster’ women’s films – circulating via the trade press, fan magazines and popular film reviews – proposed the likelihood of a long-term shift towards female-orientated production cycles which would gather momentum throughout the decade. As the comments from these sources in the previous chapter indicate, much of this discussion relied on a broad definition of women’s films, loosely drawn together through a common interest in romance, relationships and the primacy of a female figure. As I have already suggested, re-assessing production trends linked to critical responses and assumptions about the gendered audience for certain kinds of texts, demonstrates the emergence of a number of distinct, generically based subcycles which were perceived as the ‘property’ of the female audience in the early 1990s. These address those areas of postmodern cultural life defined as feminine through quite different formal and thematic conventions; for example, melodrama, romantic comedy, the female buddy movie or costume drama. What also becomes clear through an analysis of production patterns and box office figures from the 1990s onwards is that while some cycles did indeed enjoy the growing popularity predicted by enthusiastic critics in the early to mid-1990s, others enjoyed only a brief moment of glory. In the previous chapter I discussed the relationship between the revised postmodernist melodrama and its timely conflation of anti-materialism and feminine virtue. It seems likely that its swift rise and fall reflected its status as a popular filmic contribution to a specific moment of cultural and political disaffection with 1980s Reaganite post-Fordist economics. Unlike the ‘yuppie’ horror film, or male melodrama, its articulation of this moment of cultural crisis was also one which drew on both an older melodramatic view of feminine virtue and in a less obvious form, a rapidly 92

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fading form of essentialist, radical feminism in which women were perceived as innately opposed to the 1980s politics of self-interest and greed. Like the romantic melodrama, the romantic comedy was the subject of much popular media attention in the early 1990s and was also received and evaluated as a ‘revived’ golden Hollywood generic formula. For example, writing in the Guardian in 1991, film critic Mike Bygraves argued that Hollywood had not only ‘. . . renewed its love affair with romantic comedy’ but that (on the basis of the success of Pretty Woman and Green Card) ‘Romantic comedies look set to take over from the big-budget action movies of the 1980s’ (Bygraves, 1991: 30). In this case the prediction turned out to have some validity: although high-concept, big-budget action movies continued to dominate at the box office, Hollywood’s ‘renewed’ enthusiasm for romantic comedy proved more than a brief flirtation, with a steady stream of hits spanning the decade and beyond. These included Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989) (Screenplay by Nora Ephron), Gary Marshall’s Pretty Woman (1990), Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Paul Hogan’s My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), Gary Marshall’s ‘sequel’ to Runaway Bride (1999) and Nancy Meyer’s What Women Want (2000). The genre also bestowed star status on actors such as Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan and Renee Zellweger who became strongly associated with the form. Outside Hollywood, Londonbased romantic comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (Newell, 1994), Notting Hill (Mitchell, 1989) and more recently, Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Beeban Kidron’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) proved the most lucrative British cinematic exports since the 1960s. The global success and ‘branding’ of Bridget Jones highlights the way that, by beginning of the 2000s, the classical romantic comedy formula – which had not hitherto been regarded as a specifically female form – had become synonymous with the more recent phenomena of the popular ‘chick flick’ and, by association, the interrelated media boom in chick lit and female-orientated television shows such as Ally McBeal, Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives. In this chapter I want to consider the reasons why the new romantic comedy became the predominant popular women’s film genre in the early 1990s and why it has remained so for a decade and a half. Tracing its development from When Harry Met Sally’s, innovative, women-centred reworking of the sex-comedy and ‘nervous’ (1970s) romance (Reiner, 1989) through to Bridget Jones’s Diary (Maguire, 2001) and the unremitting allusionism of Down with Love (Reed, 2003), the chapter argues that the romantic comedy has proved an important generic site for the articulation of tensions between the social and economic aspirations of contemporary

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women, the continuing power of traditional gender roles and the atavistic, cross-gender desire for bonding and emotional fulfilment. As with the early 1990s new melodrama, focusing on the postmodernist aspects of these texts – particularly their use of prior cinematic allusion – is especially useful in highlighting their contemporary blend of romance and cynicism. The romantic comedy – as the predominant contemporary women’s form – is also the most closely associated with the discourse of postfeminism. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra make the point that in postfeminist discourses ‘the achievements of certain important legal rights and enhanced visibility for women (in areas including law, politics and education) are positioned alongside a persistently articulated dissatisfaction with the rhetoric of second-wave feminism. Thus, the continued contradiction between women’s personal and professional lives is more likely to be foregrounded in postfeminist discourse than the failure to eliminate either the pay gap or the burden of care between men and women’ (Tasker and Negra, 2005: 108). Although the new romantic comedy is rarely directly critical of ‘oldstyle’ (second-wave) feminism, the heroines of such films tend to be conventionally attractive and – at least at a surface level – desirous of heterosexual commitment. Despite having a career and material aspirations, being able to support themselves financially and having supportive friends, there is a persistent sense of lack associated with their singleton status. In a manner typical of post-feminist attitudes, their independence and career aspirations are downgraded in favour of the pursuit of ‘personal’ happiness, understood in relation to men. But the form’s use of irony and allusionism also undercuts the traditional gender-coded fantasy, as does the female figures’ insistence on a more equal relationship. In more general terms, the new romantic comedy’s articulation of lack and desire (the basis of all romance) must be understood in comparison with and in relation to the previous cycles it so frequently draws on.

From nervous to new While popular media accounts of this cycle of blockbuster romantic comedies (dating from around the late 1980s) stressed its status as a revived female-orientated form, academic cine-historians also argued that the new cycle was heavily dependent on prior manifestations of the genre (Neale, 1992: 17; Krutnik, 1990: 171–73). I want to begin by re-examining the assumptions concerning both its gendered appeal and its references to classical romantic comedy. Firstly, it is important to note that although the classical romantic comedy has received a good deal of critical attention

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(particularly in the 1990s) it was never a particular focus of feminist interest nor identified as belonging to that group of classical cycles brought together under the broad banner of ‘the woman’s film’. One obvious reason for this is that while the genre revolves around thematic preoccupations culturally defined as feminine (desire and romance), it has tended to allot at least equal weight to the perspective of the leading male. In contrast, one of the most striking aspects of the classical woman’s film is the way in which the object of the heroine’s affection is less a focus of the film’s attention than her excessive desire for him, which can happily flourish with or without his actual presence. The romantic melodrama’s preference for doomed romance and absent heroes suggests that the latter is more conducive to the narrative exploration of female desire, allowing it to develop unfettered by the actual demands and mundane realities of long-term heterosexual relationships. As critics such as Mary Ann Doane have argued of ‘weepie’ classics such as Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948), the hero’s absence and/or indifference provides the ideal conditions from which to muster maximum dramatic effect from the heroine’s intense, self-sacrificial passion (Doane, 1987: 118). The morbid preoccupation with the darker aspects of female experience associated with the classical woman’s film recedes from female-orientated cycles that have appeared since the early 1990s. Even in the postmodernist melodrama, which is the most derivative of the classical women’s ‘weepie’, specific forms of female unhappiness – such as unwittingly ending up with the kind of brutal bullying husband depicted in Sleeping with the Enemy – are countered by self-assertion rather than self-sacrifice. In the classical romantic comedy, anguish and heartbreak are off set by the genre’s use of humour. Whereas the classical female-orientated romantic melodrama encouraged a ‘feminine’ identification with the suffering heroine, the romantic comedy subjects the whole business of romantic angst to a salutary measure of ridicule. As Frank Krutnik argues: Whereas (melo) drama relies upon the spectator’s engagement with a fictional articulation of a set of narrative problems – an engagement based upon identification with one or very few of the desiring characters – the process of comedy more acutely involves a play between identification and distanciation. (Krutnik, 1990: 149) Comic events tend to puncture and defuse the excess of emotion associated with the romantic melodrama. In addition to the distancing effects of comedy and the intrusive presence of the male protagonist, the classical

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romantic comedy also exhibited a structural drive towards marriage and coupledom that took precedence over the individual desires of each partner, thus limiting specific identification with the heroine. If the (broad) conventions of classical romantic comedy are so clearly at odds with those of the classical woman’s film, why has this particular cycle been identified as both ‘feminine’ and derivative of earlier modes of the genre? To answer this question I want to look at recent cine-historical approaches to the romantic comedy, including those that view the latest cycle as a nostalgic and anachronistic reworking of earlier modes. Although distinguishable from the romantic melodrama in terms of the differences that I have identified, the romantic comedy, like any other film genre, encompasses a shifting field of thematic and formal elements. Among key studies of the genre – Krutnik (1990, 1998), Neale (1992), Babington and Evans (1989), Olson Lent (1995), Shumway (1991), Rowe (1995) and Musser (1995) – a degree of critical consensus exists concerning the historical specificity of and formal distinctions between cycles such as the early comedy of remarriage (1920s–1930s), the screwball comedy (1930s–1940s), the sex-comedy (1950s–1960s) and the nervous romance (1970s). Not surprisingly, most critical accounts foreground the genre’s role in mediating cultural shifts concerning courtship rituals, the norms of sexual behaviour and the social function of marriage. Given the structural and ideological differences between its various cycles, the romantic comedy constitutes a particularly rich source of inquiry regarding these issues, highlighting the way in which the specific rules and conventions which comprise the discourse of heterosexual coupledom have been articulated in different cultural contexts. For example, Charles Musser’s analysis of the first Hollywood manifestation of the form – the Cecil B. de Mille ‘comedies of remarriage’ or ‘old love’ – suggests that the genre was initially driven by the need to reconcile post-war patterns of rising divorce and a (marginally) greater degree of female independence to the duty-bound conventions of Victorian marriage. Put crudely, this results in comedies such as Why Change Your Wife? (de Mille, 1920) and Old Wives for New (de Mille, 1918) in which frustrated, long-term couples are encouraged to rekindle their initial passion rather than ditch their spouses in favour of newer/younger partners. Likewise, the much-scrutinised cycle that succeeded it – the 1930s screwball is generally understood within the framework of a more radical redefinition of marriage, in which polarised gender roles and the Victorian cult of domesticity have given way to a more progressive friendship-based model. Hence the emphasis on childlike play and mutual attraction which characterises screwball’s such as

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Bringing up Baby (Hawks, 1938), It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934), His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940) and The Lady Eve (Sturges, 1941). The screwball comedy occupies a privileged position in most histories of the form, being the most commercially successful of the classical romantic comedy cycles and the one which brought together the characteristics commonly associated with the form’s overall composition: comic situations, loveably eccentric protagonists and a romance narrative which more or less conforms to the rule of initial antagonism leading to eventual compromise, negotiated through a series of comic interactions. To return to the questions surrounding the re-emergence of the form in the late 1980s and its nostalgic concern with past forms, I want to focus on accounts of the later cycles, particularly the manner in which many socio-culturally based historical critiques of the form focus on the distinction between the late 1950s/early 1960s ‘sex-comedies’ and the late 1970s ‘nervous’ romance. Within most histories of the romantic comedy, the transition between these cycles is understood as a key point of thematic and ideological rupture, separating the innocent playfulness of the earlier classical cycles from the self-conscious cynicism of the late 1970s mode (Neale and Krutnik, 1990; Krutnik 1990; Neale, 1992). This moment is critically marked by Brian Henderson’s influential, if somewhat premature, 1978 generic post-mortem: ‘Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?’ Drawing on Freudian approaches to the romantic comedy, Henderson argued that since the genre thrived on erotic sublimation – the reorientation of libidinal energy into flirtatious verbal banter – it was unlikely to survive the impact of less stringent censorship laws. In Henderson’s view, the possibility of more explicit visual depictions of pre-marital sexual activity deprived the genre of its famous euphemistic language games. He also argues that, in a more general sense, permissiveness heightened the conflict between the desire for personal fulfilment and socially sanctioned forms of sexual behaviour. Although the contradiction between individual desire and the rules and regulations governing sexuality had been a central theme of romantic comedy since its cinematic inception, Henderson argued that, by the late 1970s, the prohibition of extra- and pre-marital sexual activity was no longer seen as a fair trade-off for marital security: a problem explored in comedies such as Semi-Tough (Ritchie, 1977) in which the major protagonists are unwilling to submit to the restrictions of the marriage contract: Romantic comedy posited men and women willing to meet on a common ground and to engage all their faculties and capacities in sexual

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dialectic . . . what we begin to see now in films is a withdrawal of men and women from this ground. (Henderson, 1978: 19) As it turned out, Henderson was wrong to assume that the circulation of more explicit sexual discourses and the wider cultural effects of the sexual revolution would result in the genre’s obsolescence. Nevertheless, this understanding of the relationship between liberalisation and the genre strongly influenced attitudes towards the predominant romantic comedy cycle of the 1970s – identified as the ‘nervous’ romance by Frank Krutnik (Krutnik, 1990). This cycle is best exemplified by Woody Allen’s urbane social comedies Play it Again Sam (Ross, 1972), Manhattan (Allen, 1978) and Annie Hall (Allen, 1979) – from which the term ‘nervous romance’ originates – in which marital breakdown and serial monogamy became new sources of humour and erotic tension. The critical trajectory which emerged from these approaches – in which the sexual conformity of the classical cycles is set against the permissive angst of the post-classical ‘nervous’ mode – provided the critical context in which the more recent cycle or romantic comedy (late 1980s onwards) was initially understood as nostalgic and revisionist. Despite the wider critical emphasis on the new romantic comedy as a revised classical form, it seems clear that if romantic comedy can be said to exist as a distinct generic category (allowing for the formal and thematic differences between cycles), the genre’s current incarnation in the late 1980s/early 1990s was a little too close to the nervous romance to constitute a wholesale generic ‘come-back’ (Krutnik cites texts produced as late as 1987 as additions to the nervous cycle). What was at stake was the less sudden reappearance of a neglected genre, than the revival of certain attitudes, situations and structural features deemed reminiscent of the popular classical cycles. For example, Steve Neale’s discussion of the contemporary ‘new’ romance drew attention to ‘the persistent evocation and endorsement of the signs and values of old-fashioned romance’ (Neale, 1992: 295). Similarly, Krutnik’s analysis of new romantic comedies such as Moonstruck (Jewison, 1987) and Broadcast News (Brooks, 1987) suggested that the new cycle worked to . . . intensify this desire to return to heterosexual romance in the contemporary era of sexual revisionism. Twenty years after the peak of the sexual revolution, the concept of ‘the couple’ is being reinvoked as safeguard not merely against the divisions of modern life but also against the post-AIDs danger of ‘illicit sexuality. (Krutnik, 1990: 172)

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For both Krutnik and Neale, stylistic and thematic references to earlier modes of romantic comedy underpinned the recent cycle’s ideological allegiance to revisionist sexual politics. The return of certain structural features associated with the ‘screwball’ comedy – the marital denouement for example – was therefore firmly situated within the context of late 1980s Reaganite neo-conservatism and a post-permissive backlash linked to right-wing politics and the AIDS crisis. This evaluation also has to be understood within a critical discourse that emphasises the genre’s overall ideological tendency to endorse and validate the idea of marriage and monogamy. From this perspective, the permissive scepticism of the nervous mode is swiftly abandoned in favour of a more generically characteristic and conservative celebration of long-term heterosexual coupledom. Or to put it another way, while the values endorsed within the new romance are regarded as those which permeate the genre as a whole, their reappearance in the wake of cultural incredulity towards these ideals seems inevitably tinged with nostalgia – hence the critical emphasis on the genre’s return or revival. It is at this point that critical approaches to the ‘new’ romantic comedy intersect with broader, cross-generic debates on the nostalgia film and postmodernist representational strategies. As I argued in Chapter 1, feminist theoretical engagement with postmodernist cinema has frequently drawn connections between the nostalgia mode and the patriarchal desire to return to pre-feminist conceptions of sexual difference. Accordingly, many of the new romantic comedies were accused of manifesting this nostalgic anti-feminist impulse. For example, Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman – one of the first texts to be identified by both academic critics and the trade press as part of a ‘new’ female-orientated romance cycle – was criticised by both feminist academics and those writing in the popular press for its ‘Cinderella’ plotline and rose-tinted view of prostitution, fuelling feminist suspicions that cinematic nostalgia serves to reinforce old-style patriarchal fantasies. Gender-based critiques of postmodern nostalgia had much in common therefore with Neale and Krutnik’s more general view that the revived genre was more conservative than the nervous 1970s mode. Indeed, Steve Neale includes ‘countering the threat of the independent woman’ as one of the four defining features of the cycle (Neale, 1992: 295). The main difference between these perspectives is that while Neale and Krutnik’s broader accounts linked the new romantic comedy to a more general mood of neo-conservative ‘sexual revisionism’, feminist critics were quicker to situate the new romance within the specific context of a perceived antifeminist backlash and connect this with Hollywood’s early 1990s attempts

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to reclaim the hearts of the female audience through ‘patronising’ romance narratives. Lizzie Franke’s analysis of Hollywood’s sudden interest in ‘feeling’ movies states the case bluntly: ‘Such a notion of what women want panders to old-fashioned values with women as slaves to sentimental and warped visions of themselves – as in Pretty Woman’ (Franke, 1994: 100). The new romance was thus initially condemned as a women’s cycle in the most pejorative sense of the term, as a genre in which female viewing pleasure is tied to anachronistic conceptions of feminine fantasy and the idea of the weak-minded, sentimental female viewer.

Gender, romance and the ‘informed’ female viewer Thus summarised, the question of what genres appeal to gendered sections of the audience and debates on the post-classical ‘return’ of old Hollywood formulas converge in approaches to the 1990s cycle of romantic comedies. Having traced these two paths and the point at which they intersect, I want to highlight some (critical) problems concerning the association of nostalgia, anti-feminism and the new cycle. To begin with, the approaches to the new romance that initially viewed it as regressive were heavily reliant on the opposition between the ‘permissive’ nervous mode of the 1970s and what they view as the repressive nostalgic cycle dating from the late 1980s. From a feminist perspective the superior critical value attached to the nervous mode is, to say the least, somewhat problematic. Although the nervous cycle goes some way towards exploring issues of marital breakdown, the constraints of monogamy and the influence of feminism – as Krutnik observes in his incisive analysis of Woody Allen’s Manhattan – it tends to do so from the perspective of the ‘nervous’ menopausal male protagonist. On the other hand, the classical cycle which the new romance is frequently said to evoke (in particular, the screwball comedy) is marked by its inclusion of strong-willed heroines and mutual fun and companionship as a basis for marriage. If the new romance is aiming to appeal to women, it is not surprising that this older cycle offers a model of relationships which is more in tune with the aims and expectations of contemporary female viewers than the nervous cycle’s preoccupation with male anxieties. However, the older, pre-feminist cycle’s more ‘liberal’ attitudes to women also problematises the assumption that shifts in socio-cultural attitudes and practices are reflected within genre cycles in a straightforward manner. As with the postmodernist melodrama, although contemporary attitudes and expectations of gendered behaviour provide an important framing context

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(and generate new sources of dramatic material) even prior to the selfconscious allusionism attributed to many postmodernist texts, genre cycles were indebted to and informed by the tropes and conventions of previous fictional models. They were and continue to be – as is particularly apparent in the case of romantic comedy – at some level driven by atavistic desires and fantasies. Brian Henderson’s assumption that romantic comedy would disappear without the determining effects of sexual repression was proved wrong because he emphasised its comedy over romance, underestimating the genre’s powerful manifestation of the desire for love and companionship. Irrespective of its emphasis on relationship breakdown, the desire for happy long-term relationships is registered as strongly in the nervous mode as in any previous cycle. Indeed, the nervous cycle’s emphasis on unhappy angst-ridden singles may work to endorse the value of marriage and monogamy as much as a traditional happy ending. The weight attached to the viewpoint of each member of the couple and the level of equality within their relationship is, from a feminist perspective, a more important indicator of the degree to which the film challenges patriarchal assumptions concerning the balance of power within heterosexual relationships than its inclusion or rejection of the marital denouement. This is particularly important given that, generically speaking, the sexual dynamic between the major protagonists in romantic comedy tends to be presented as representative of the conflict between masculine and feminine values and attitudes towards love, sex and marriage. This may also explain why the new cycle of romantic comedy was quickly characterised as a women’s cycle in that the genre’s characteristic learning process – in which the central protagonists modify their behaviour in accordance with the desires of the other partner – leans fairly heavily towards the female protagonist. For example, in Pretty Woman, the male hero Edward (Richard Gere), a callous, wealthy corporate raider, learns to reject the aggressive masculine values of the workplace and give up corporate wheeler-dealing under the tuition of his impoverished, uneducated but morally superior prostitute girlfriend, Vivien. Similarly, in Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck, the love of a ‘good’ woman, Lorreta Castorini (Cher) enables the brooding, emotionally stunted hero Ronnie (Nicolas Cage) to reconcile a long-standing feud with his brother and re-establish his status within a wider network of extended Italian–American families. These thematic concerns highlight the way in which, as I argued in relation to the postmodernist melodrama, romance narratives also function to mobilise socio-cultural concerns around other issues, such as class/power relations or conflicts

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between the individual and the community, which clearly have a wider cross-gender appeal. The symbolic function of fantasies culturally demarcated as masculine or feminine exceeds their association with real socially and historically constructed gendered audiences. If such films are indeed popular with female audiences (although not exclusively so), the old trope of the impressionable female viewer is woefully inadequate in dealing with the complex, often ironic, tone of the nostalgia mode and its implications for understanding contemporary modes of spectatorial engagement. As I argued in Chapter 1, the prevalence of cinematic self-reflexivity and popular use of prior cinematic allusion is generally associated with the restructuring of Hollywood into post-Fordist multimedia ‘new Hollywood’ and the increased availability of classic and contemporary films via the expansion of video, DVD and cable television. In his early 1980s discussion of post-classical Hollywood and allusion, Nöel Carroll argued that explicit references to prior cinematic codes and styles assumed the emergence of the ‘informed viewer’ stating: informed viewers are meant to recall past films (filmmakers, genres, shots and so on) and that (2) informed viewers are not supposed to take this as evidence of plagiarism or uninspired derivativeness in the new film – as they might in a previous decade – but as part of the expressive design of the new film. (Carroll, 1982: 52) In Carroll’s early account of the emergence of post-classical cinematic self-reflexivity this level of cine-literacy is still deemed to be the preserve of a privileged coterie of ‘film school critics, college-bred film appreciation societies and film society audiences’ (Carroll, 1982: 52). But more recent discussion of post-classical spectatorship – such as Tim Corrigan’s work on new Hollywood auteurs – suggests that the once esoteric vocabulary of film scholarship has extended beyond an elite group of cinephiles to the wider viewing public, assisted by both the recirculation of old texts and self-conscious allusions to them in contemporary cinema (Corrigan, 1998). The assumption that contemporary film audiences are ‘in the know’ at least to the extent of recognising heavy-handed thematic and stylistic references to classical generic forms has become commonplace in discussions of postmodernist auteurs such as David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino. But the notion of the newly cine-literate informed viewer runs the risk of underplaying both the complexity of classical generic codes and audience engagement with them. Genre cycles have always referred to and drawn life from their predecessors. It is less a question of a sudden shift

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from naïve belief to irony than the emergence of a more heightened sense of past cinematic codes and styles that is registered within certain contemporary films and, it seems fair to assume, appreciated and understood by contemporary audiences. Although the idea of the informed viewer has never been explicitly gendered, as I demonstrate below, when this higher degree of cinematic self-consciousness reaches the popular woman’s film it is bypassed by both popular film criticism and cinehistorical accounts of the forms re-emergence in favour of the old trope of the impressionable female viewer ensnared by patriarchal visions of feminine desire. As I will stress in my readings of the two Nora Ephron films, if the new romance is distinguished from previous cycles through the knowing inclusion of intertextual quotation or the nostalgic evocation of past styles, by foregrounding the formal and thematic particularities of previous cycles it may work as much to ‘expose’ their ideological endorsement of marriage and monogamy as to reinforce their values and ethics. Even when bathed in the rosy glow of nostalgia, the semiotics of oldfashioned romance cannot help but highlight the gap between pre- and ‘post’-feminist views of romance and relationships. One of the most broadly appealing aspects of the new cycle may then be that it revives a particularly dizzy brand of romance, but tempers it with a postmodernist irony, allowing the clued-up contemporary ‘post’feminist viewer to have it all: to indulge in the derided pleasures associated with the romance fantasy or weepie woman’s film while also maintaining a degree of critical distance. Lapsley and Westlake’s psychoanalytically based analysis of the new romance is one of the few critical approaches to the new romantic comedy which acknowledges the dual character of the cycle. Their reading of Pretty Woman argues: By deliberately announcing itself as a fairy tale, Pretty Woman succeeds in bridging the contradiction faced by the spectator who is no longer able to believe in romance (especially in a film so beset with implausibility and inconsistency), yet at the same time wishes to do so. (Lapsley and Westlake, 1992: 28) If the narrative play of distanciation and engagement typical of romantic comedy is accentuated by the overt fantasy framing of the new allusionist style, this results in a ‘double displacement’ of the traditional romance fantasy (through comic disruption and nostalgic distanciation) that is at odds with the notion of the over-identifying, vulnerable female viewer.

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Romantic irony and the single girl The continuing popularity of the form throughout the 1990s and early 2000s also problematises its perceived relation to late 1980s/early 1990s neo-conservative politics. If the popularity of the postmodernist melodrama – which more clearly relates to a specific cultural moment – was relatively short-lived, the new romantic comedy has gone from strength to strength, emerging as the front-runner of women’s genres over the past decade. To consider this phenomena I want to focus on the particular mix of irony and romance that characterises this cycle, relating it to the wider emergence of modern ‘chick’-orientated entertainment in the early 1990s. Although some early examples of the cycle – such as Pretty Woman and Moonstruck – echo the ‘postmodernist’ melodrama by situating women in the role of moral redeemer, later examples such as Sleepless in Seattle, Runaway Bride or Bridget Jones’s Diary tend to focus more strongly on the female protagonist’s attempts to balance independence and/or career fulfilment with the desire for long-term relationships. Even in a film such as What Women Want – which focuses more on the male protagonist – the romance narrative is structured by the female protagonist’s anxieties concerning her career or lifestyle aspirations versus her attraction to the male lead. From When Sally Met Harry’s efficient Sally Albright (Meg Ryan), through to the ‘kookier’ female leads, such as Julianne Potter (Julia Roberts) in My Best Friend’s Wedding, or Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger) in Bridget Jones’s Diary, the thematic concern with the feisty, single late 1920s/early 1930s female persists across the cycle. At a surface level, this does reflect a specific socio-economic trend of our times. As numerous ethnographic surveys have indicated, the improved education of Western women and their professional advancement has resulted in a higher number of women remaining single for a greater part of their life (Garrett, 1997). Yet single working women are hardly a novelty, after all, women have been working in ever greater numbers since the beginning of the twentieth century. What has shifted is the social status and cultural fantasies concerning the newly identified figure of the ‘singleton’, rather than spinster or traditional maiden aunt. The fictional singleton is still haunted by the low status of the traditional spinster (hence the continuing preoccupation with pair-bonding) but the emergence of a generation of educated, independent women with far greater choices concerning relationships and marriage creates a tension between the old pressures and new pleasures and aspirations.

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One of the most appealing and successful aspects of these texts (and their richest source of comedy) is the way in which the ‘feminine’ romance fantasy is offset by, or set against, a cooler framework of postmodernist irony. Either the heroine herself sways between an idealistic belief in, and feminist inspired critique of, romance (Bridget Jones’s Diary’s reworking of Pride and Prejudice, for example), or her belief in the traditional romance fantasy is cut down to size by a hard-headed but loyal friend – such as Becky (Rosie O’Donnell) in Sleepless in Seattle. This productive tension between romance and irony is not only a feature of the new romantic comedy, it is also the structuring aesthetic mode for contemporary ‘chick lit’ and female-orientated television shows, such as Sex and the City and Ally McBeal, which also turned the spotlight on the lifestyle and aspirations of young, independent professional women. Like many of the new romantic comedies Ally McBeal also features a central female protagonist whose attempts to sustain her belief in oldfashioned romance are undermined by both the cynicism of the secondary characters and the programme’s use of fantasy sequences to emphasise its heroine’s dreamy disengagement from the harsh realities of modern life. Rather than directly attacking the figure of the independent woman, such fiction uses this figure as a focal point for the comic exploration of the conflict between romantic idealism and both the broader post-permissive cynicism typical of the nervous cycle and a more specifically feminist-inspired suspicion of the discourse of romantic love. In other words, if the narrative play of distanciation and engagement typical of the romantic comedy (and various other contemporary female-orientated fictional genres) is accentuated by the overt fantasy framing of the recent cycle, this results in a double displacement of the traditional romance fantasy (through comic disruption and prior fictional allusion) which undercuts the notion of the susceptible female viewer. The popularity of romantic comedy over romantic melodrama – and a particularly tongue-in-check version at that – suggests that if there is a ‘feminine’ viewing position offered to women by contemporary Hollywood it is more compatible with comedy, or at least postmodernist irony, than the pathos and sentiment associated with the classical woman’s film. Furthermore, the nostalgic elements in such texts – those drawing on both the classical melodrama and previous cycles of the romantic comedy – must be considered in relation to their framing context. Clearly there can be no straightforward re-assertion or re-articulation of prior generically coded values and ideals; popular reworkings will always bear the traces of contemporary preoccupations. Anne Friedberg

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neatly summarised this issue in her discussion of space, time and postmodern cinema when she stated: For feminists, nostalgia seems to be a two edged sword: it can return to outworn values erasing all intervening history; and yet nostalgia has the potential to reinvent the past, to contrast its values in a critical combination with the present. Vintage clothes, vintage cars, and old movies are recycled in a new relation to the present. (Friedberg, 1993: 189) As I have shown, the initial theoretical engagement with the recent cycle of popular new romantic comedies accused them of endorsing the ‘outworn values’ of prior romance as a means of evading the complexities of modern gender relations, particularly the influence of feminism. I want to highlight the more ambivalent, feminist-influenced use of nostalgia and self-reflexivity through an analysis of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, focusing particularly on the way in which these texts explore the tensions between old and new romance, refracted through direct cinematic quotation and references to prior generic codes and conventions. It is no coincidence that both films are closely associated with scriptwriter Nora Ephron, who also directed Sleepless in Seattle. Ephron’s influence is particularly significant here given both the rarity of female scriptwriters in Hollywood and the relatively high priority awarded to sharp dialogue – as opposed to action – within the romantic comedy form. Having achieved moderate success with her screenplays for the realist docu-drama Silkwood (1984) and earlier downbeat romance Heartburn (1985), Ephron’s association with award winning blockbuster When Harry Met Sally won her unusual fame as a scriptwriter, eclipsing even that of the director Rob Reiner and allowing her a more central role in the development of the ‘sequel’ Sleepless in Seattle (Myers, 1992: 28; McCreadle, 1994: 187). Ephron’s acclaim is largely due to her perceived ability to imbue modern romance narratives with an old style Hollywood magic. This is no easy task given the conflict between the genre’s characteristic central drive towards marriage and coupledom, its previous emphasis on conventional gender roles and the attitudes and expectations of contemporary postfeminist audiences. In When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, Ephron tackled these problems in two ways, giving the genre’s sexual dialectic both a more ‘feminine’ slant and using codes and conventions from previous cycles in a knowing and recognisable manner. Through the inclusion of well-known

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past romantic comedy tropes such as the split-screen phone conversation in When Harry Met Sally (reminiscent of the 1950s sex-comedy) or the direct intersplicing of Leo McCarey’s 1957 weepie classic, An Affair to Remember, in Sleepless in Seattle, both films assume the spectator’s awareness of the form’s many classical antecedents which allows for the kind of critical engagement with stock-in-trade sexual archetypes suggested by Friedberg. Reinforcing the nostalgic elements of the texts, the extra-textual discourses surrounding the films’ release focused approvingly on what was viewed as their charming, old-fashioned evocation of past romance. Reviews and star interviews highlighted the referential homage to past romantic comedies, playing on Nora Ephron’s aristocratic Hollywood connections as the daughter of famous 1950s script-writing partners, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, and Meg Ryan’s (then) newly acquired fame as ‘the new queen of romantic comedy’. Meg Ryan’s presence within both films also did much to bolster their identification with female audiences, as a star perceived as particularly appealing to women. Following the success of When Harry Met Sally TriStar insistently flagged Sleepless in Seattle as a ‘chick’ movie, flaunting the Ephron/Ryan partnership. Furthermore, the text’s presumed appeal to women was also perpetuated in interviews with stars, Ryan, Tom Hanks and Rosie O’ Donnell. Predictably, Hanks claimed to hate it, while Ryan and O’ Donnell were gushingly enthusiastic. Initial (popular media) critical responses to the film thus tended to reinforce its romance narrative at the expense of its ironic wit (Coburn, 1993: 55). More ambivalently, Ephron herself stressed that it was ‘not a movie about love but about love in the movies’ (Myers, 1992: 28).

‘Post’-feminist romance and intratextual female viewer My readings of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle will stress the latter aspect of these films, highlighting the way in which their use of references to prior cycles of romantic comedy and melodrama work to undercut both the patriarchal logic of certain well-known romantic comedy cycles (particularly the 1950s sex-comedy and the nervous romance in When Harry Met Sally) and the notion of the impressionable female romance viewer (in Sleepless in Seattle). Of the two films, When Harry Met Sally is the less overtly ‘rétro’ although it too draws on a recognisable range of romantic comedy references. At the time of its release many critics drew attention to its obvious appropriation of elements associated with the ‘nervous’ romance: the opening jazz score, black and white credits, Manhattan backdrop and narrative concern with the social and romantic entanglements of professional thirty-somethings. Kathleen Rowe went so

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far as to describe it as remake of Annie Hall, while Norman Denzin viewed it as a pale imitation of the more sophisticated, serious ‘nervous’ mode (Denzin, 1991: 112–24). Again, the distinction drawn here by Denzin was between the serious, self-analytical tone of the ‘nervous’ romance and the shallow, style consciousness of the late 1980s cycle. Denzin’s scathing analysis of the film suggested that it retreated from the ‘nervous’ cycle’s painful but worthy exploration of ‘anhedonia’ (the term he uses to designate an epidemic of pleasure blocking postmodern angst) into banal romance fantasies, he stated: When Harry Met Sally refuses Woody Allen’s argument that anhedonia is a basic feature of the contemporary condition. Every character in this film, including the six documentary couples, finds happiness in marriage. (Denzin, 1991: 119) Similarly, while Frank Krutnik’s 1999 analysis of the film recognises its playful generic self-consciousness, he argues that this is mobilised in the service of the film’s overall conservatism. Comparing the film unfavourably with examples of the ‘nervous’ mode he states: When Harry Met Sally is an exemplary new romance because it values aesthetic fabrication not as part of a process of critical self-awareness, as in Annie Hall does, but as a necessary tool to achieve the reconsolidation of romantic illusion. The film reorders the repertoire of romantic comedy conceptions to paper over the void exposed by Alvy Singer’s brutally honest auto-critique. (Krutnik, 1999: 19) Yet in many ways When Harry Met Sally is less a sanitised, lightweight take on the nervous romance than an amalgamation of 1970s nervous and 1950s sex-comedy visual motifs, figures and preoccupations which offers a more feminist slant on both cycles. At a narrative level, the playboy-meets-prude plotline is more reminiscent of a Doris Day/Rock Hudson classic than the 1970s permissive mode (which tends to feature introspective, troubled women such as Annie Hall). The inclusion of documentary style interviews featuring ordinary, older, less affluent or photogenic couples than those whose experiences command centre stage also adds a realist frame to When Harry Met Sally’s concern with yuppie romance, intensifying the contradictions between different narrative codes and formal features. In addition to this, the fantasy frame that surrounds the main plotline is accentuated, as in Sleepless in Seattle, through the (largely female)

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characters’ discussion of their desire for ‘love in the movies’ and the many references to the canonical weepie, Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942). As one of the best-known Hollywood golden oldies, contemporary textual allusions to Casablanca are numerous, indeed, the film tends to function metonymically, its status as a signifier of ‘classic’ Hollywood eclipsing actual narrative content. In When Harry Met Sally the particular references to Casablanca (and its famous menage-a-trois) again emphasise its generic roots in the 1950s sex-comedy and the nervous mode. In Play it Again Sam (Ross, 1972), the inner world of the insecure, leading male character Peter (Woody Allen) is dominated by an alter ego/ fantasy companion in the form of Casablanca’s Rick (Humphrey Bogart). The Bogart fantasy is set against intermittent appearances of his ex-wife. While the (fantasy) ex-wife criticises and humiliates him, Bogart encourages him to be more assertive with women, constantly reminding him of his superior status. Although the film initially uses the Bogart fantasy to set up and explore the comic incompatibility between classical Hollywood machismo and Peter’s failed encounters with ‘actual liberated’ modern women, Bogart’s approach is finally vindicated in his dealings with the leading female protagonist Linda (Diane Keaton) who, as the Bogart fantasy anticipates, proves highly responsive to flattery and his aggressive sexual advances. Given When Harry Met Sally’s obvious affiliation to the nervous mode (New York, jazz score, troubled sophisticated urbanites and so forth), its references to Casablanca allude to both the classical film and Woody Allen’s later appropriation of it. As in Play it Again Sam, references to Casablanca serve as a focal point for its exploration of gender-based differences in approaches to love and sexuality in the generic terrain of the romantic comedy. This generically based heterosexual conflict is wholly in keeping, not only with the nervous romance, but also the concerns of the 1950s sex-comedy, in which an easy pact between hero and heroine can only be forged when, as in Freud’s famous dictum, men agree to exchange love for sex, and women, sex for love. In When Harry Met Sally the gender battle-lines are drawn during the protagonists’ first encounter. This takes place when, in their late teens, Harry and Sally share the journey from Chicago to New York, en route to embarking on their high flying media careers (he becomes a political consultant, she a journalist). Our first view of the couple finds Harry leaning up against Sally’s car, kissing her besotted roommate, while Sally, eager to begin the journey, looks on with mounting irritation. Having hinted at the generically familiar antagonism between a frosty, level-headed woman and a lady-killing, predatory man, this dynamic is reinforced in the following scene in which character is established through heated debates

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on well-known pop cultural scenarios. The conversation centres on Casablanca’s famous denouement and the question of Elsa’s (Ingrid Bergman) climatic ‘choice’ between the respectability and social prestige awarded through marriage and the possibility of sexual fulfilment embodied by Rick (Bogart). Predictably, Sally assures Harry that she, like Elsa, would happily relinquish passion for worldly recognition and material comfort: Sally: I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in Casablanca with a man that runs a bar. Harry: You’d rather be in a passionless marriage than with the man you had the best sex of your life with just because he runs a bar? Sally: Any woman would do the same, women are very practical like that. Harry chauvinistically interprets her response as confirmation of Sally’s sexual inexperience, thus prompting her unconvincing and embarrassed retort as they enter the road stop diner: ‘it just so happens that I have had plenty of great sex’, an announcement which is greeted by hushed amazement by the onlookers. As a comic moment, the incident thus strictly adheres to the Freudian logic of the sex-comedy, in which the ‘prudish’ woman is situated as the butt of the sexual joke. To achieve this, the exchange must (improbably) overlook the fact that – as everyone knows – Elsa makes no such decision. On the contrary, Casablanca’s denouement tugs at the heartstrings precisely because Rick’s decision to send her packing – when she clearly wants to stay – is his final ennobling act. But the obvious misreading serves to emphasise another, more figurative allusion to earlier modes of romantic comedy as Sally is quickly established as self-centred and sexually repressed – in a similar mode to figures such as Pillow Talk’s (Gordon, 1959) Jan Morrow (Doris Day) – and Harry as her spontaneous unrestrained, sexual other. The conversation is thus followed by Harry’s sexual proposition and Sally’s shocked refusal, a scene strongly reminiscent of the 1950s sexcomedy, in which, as Krutnik reminds us: In their ability not to ‘give in’ to the sexual demands of the wolfish playboy, her (Doris Day’s) characters were subjected to continual abuse from the latter in regard to her ‘sexual competence’ . . . The hero’s efforts to bring her to bed represented in large part an attempt to break her will, to shatter her sexual self-confidence and independence. (Krutnik, 1990: 7)

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At a deeper level, the conflict between these familiar figures also recalls Freud’s theorisation of differentiated male (anaclitic) and female (narcissistic) modes of romantic attachment (Freud, 1978). Broadly speaking, anaclitic love – the ‘masculine’ type – arises as the male subject successfully transfers his active, infantile desire for the mother into the erotic over-valuation of subsequent female figures. Conversely, narcissism – the ‘feminine’ type – deflects the same desire selfwards, resulting in the cool indifference, or ‘frigidity’ of the self-contained, Doris Day/Sally Albright female figure. The Freudian underpinnings of this dynamic are significant given the influence of psychoanalytic thinking on previous cycles of the romantic comedy, particularly the nervous mode, which frequently includes fantasies and dream sequences (Play it Again Sam), and many of the characters discuss their therapy sessions. In When Harry Met Sally this gendered division and the popular Freudianism of the chattering classes is alluded to in scenes in which the central characters discuss their sexual dreams and fantasies: Sally: I dream a faceless man rips my clothes off Harry: That’s the sex-fantasy you’ve been having since you were thirteen? Don’t you vary it? Sally: Yes, mainly what I am wearing. Harry subsequently confesses that he is troubled by a repetitive dream in which, performing at a ‘sex-olympics’, his mother gives him the lowest score. Initially at least, then, Harry and Sally remain inextricably bound to the narcissistic/anaclitic drives embodied by their generic forebears: a dynamic that bars the acknowledgement of an active female desire. In keeping with the film’s tagline ‘can women and men be friends or does sex always get in the way?’ or perhaps, more accurately, can they be both friends and lovers? The attempted resolution of the gendered conflict between the feminine desire for love and male desire for sex forms the core of the main story line. As we might expect, the protagonist’s first fleeting encounters – in which these differences are somewhat overstressed – paves the way for their developing friendship and eventual reapprocement. Meeting for the third time, now in their early thirties and with two failed relationships behind them, Harry and Sally’s final encounter results in a more sustained exploration of these conflicts, couched significantly, in terms of a feminist critique of the sexual double standard.

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By this time Sally has outgrown her youthful narcissism. Again, this is signified through references to Casablanca, as Sally backtracks on her earlier assertion regarding the essentially practical, non-sexual nature of feminine desire. The split-screen phone conversation in which the couple are in bed, discussing the film alone in their apartments, marks a key turning point from antagonism to intimacy. But while Sally has mellowed with age, Harry remains bound by his chronic Madonna/whore complex, unable to contemplate friendship with Sally on anything other than a strictly platonic basis. This is presented as symptomatic of Harry’s anachronistic attitudes, yet it also allows both Sally and the audience a privileged insight into the psychical workings of the ‘wolfish’ male: a situation which generates much of the film’s subsequent humour. For example, the film’s best-known scene – that of Sally’s faked orgasm in the Katz diner – is striking and effective not only because it so sharply parodies and explodes male sexual vanity (phallic insecurities are endlessly paraded and explored within the nervous cycle) but because it does so from a specifically ‘feminine’ viewpoint. Echoing and reversing the earlier diner scene, in which Sally unconvincingly and unwittingly exposes her sexual insecurities to a stunned audience, Harry is now the object of a parallel sexual joke, in which the increasingly worldly Sally’s intentional public disclosure serves to embarrass him. This reversal of the usual sex-comedy formula is also articulated, perhaps more forcefully, in their first sexual encounter. By contemporary standards the scene is unusually oblique, cutting swiftly from Sally’s initial advances to an expression of post-coital rapture on her part and barely suppressed panic on his. The ambiguity of the scene allows for two interpretations. Firstly, the suggestion that it is Harry’s friendship with and, in effect, his respect for Sally, that prevents a sexual relationship emerging. However, as Harry subsequently accuses her of seducing him, it also suggests that beneath his macho posturing Harry is simply unable to cope with a sexually mature woman. Again, this aspect of the narrative is strongly reminiscent of the nervous romance, in which any trace of sexual assertiveness on the part of the female protagonist is presented as both deeply threatening to the male ego and an obstacle to the development of the heterosexual couple. The late 1950s/early 1960s sex-comedies presented the deregulation of sexuality as highly desirable for men, but by the time this was extended to women (as depicted in the nervous romance) it became synonymous with the ‘castrating’ liberated woman. As Frank Krutnik

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points out, in the 1970s cycle the male celebration of promiscuity has ‘soured’: The breakdown of marriage is revealed to bring not plenitude but loss. Once the safety net of sanctioned monogamy has been pulled away, the emotionally vulnerable male protagonists of films such as Starting Over and Manhattan spend their time thrashing around in a bleak lonely landscape of insecurity and deprivation, to be saved in the nick of time by a woman whose own desires can be subordinated to that of their own. (Krutnik, 1990: 60) When Harry Met Sally’s post-feminist slant on previous cycles offers no such solution. The film differs from its most obvious generic reference points – the sex-comedy and the nervous romance – precisely in its attempts to move beyond the Madonna/whore division, and accommodate a feminist ethic of sexual self-definition within the more traditional, monogamy-orientated sex-comedy formula. Thus Harry’s immediate sexual rejection of Sally is followed by a series of humiliating efforts to retain their friendship and his final, impassioned, declaration of unconditional love. The generic learning process – which in previous cycles results in the submission of woman to the superior male wisdom – is heavily weighted in Sally’s favour. Or as Norman Denzin put it ‘Sally wins, friends can be lovers, lovers can be friends’ (Denzin, 1991: 119). Denzin viewed this as indicative of the text’s broader ideological agenda in which ‘Harry, punished for his sexual misdemeanours, surrenders his freedom, promiscuity and independence to the demands of marriage, family and home’ (Denzin, 1991: 119). Although Harry’s final submission was certainly compatible with Hollywood’s late 1980s neo-conservative impulse, to read the denouement solely in this light ignores the extent to which it challenges the androcentric bias of the two previous romantic comedy cycles. Harry’s promiscuity is problematised – pathologised even – less in defense of Reaganite ‘family values’ than its perceived degradation of women, a view articulated by female characters such as Sally. As such, it seems more informed by a feminist agenda than the Reaganite permissive backlash. Furthermore, the film’s ‘endorsement’ of marriage is also highly ambivalent. The climatic New Year’s Eve declaration is followed by a sharp change in tone as the couple plummet from the heightened emotional intensity and excitement of the party into the dull, sepia-tinted world of the old married couples. Accentuating this contrast, the expansive shot of the

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brightly lit ballroom cuts to the fixed camera and unflattering lighting which frame the final documentary interview. Far from celebrating heath and home, in a manner typical of the new postmodernist romantic comedy, the final interviews puncture the romance fantasy with a heavy dose of realism.

Women’s time and romantic destiny In part, the fall from the ecstasy of romance to the reality of long-term marriage is an inevitable consequence of taking the story beyond its usual point of closure. Even in a form such as the romantic comedy, which tends to favour successful marital closure rather than heroic separation, this is generally anticipated rather than realised, perpetuating the belief in romantic fulfilment. Ephron’s next production, Sleepless in Seattle (Ephron, 1993), went much further in exploring the conventions of screen romance and its association with female viewers. If When Harry Met Sally’s key reference points are the nervous romance and the sex-comedy, Sleepless in Seattle’s ‘feminine’ preoccupation with magic, fate and metaphysical matchmaking are much closer to the traditional terrain of the woman’s film or romantic melodrama. Again, the film’s overbearing 1940s Harry Connick Junior score, its perpetual references to previous cinematic romances and self-conscious idealisation of ‘love in the movies’ serves to both eulogise and poke fun at classical Hollywood romance and its assumed association with sentimental female viewers. The film opens with the untimely death of Sam’s (Tom Hanks) wife, leaving an eight-year-old son, Jonah. Concerned for his emotionally repressed father, Jonah phones a national radio helpline and Sam is finally persuaded to confess everything to the voyeuristic radio shrink, impressing women the length and breadth of America with his display of heartfelt, new mannish candour. One of these women is the heroine, reporter Annie (Meg Ryan), who tunes in to the broadcast after returning from her parents’ house, having just announced her engagement to the ‘wrong partner’, Walter (Bill Pullman). Despite her impending marriage to the wealthy but dull Walter, Annie becomes increasingly obsessed with the anonymous caller; she exploits her professional contacts and access to classified computer records to finally track him down. Following a predictable series of misunderstandings, the star-crossed lovers do not actually meet until the last two minutes of the film in which we are encouraged to assume that Annie will take up the role of Sam’s new wife and substitute mother to the boy.

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From Sleepless in Seattle, 1993.

Clearly then, the plot is less concerned with narrating the lover’s courtship rituals than exploring Annie’s desire for Sam, which is articulated through the language of prior cinematic romance, particularly the fraught miscommunication between the protagonists of An Affair to Remember. Although Annie’s feelings are finally reciprocated, for the majority of the film Sam is busily going about his daily business, oblivious to her existence. In this respect, Sleepless in Seattle conforms to three of the central characteristics of the woman’s film. Firstly, it shows the excessive (verging on pathological) investment in the discourse of romantic love by the female protagonist. Secondly, it depicts this desire as that nourished by an overactive imagination and exacerbated by the ‘feminine’ inability to distinguish fact from fantasy (the film is saturated with references to screen romance and its centrality in the lives of women). Thirdly, it presents a conception of ‘woman’s time’ as fate or destiny as cyclical rather than historical. The later aspect of the woman’s film has been much discussed in relation to the 1940s and 1950s classical mode. Mary Ann Doane’s analysis of this period points out: The temporal modality necessitated by the discourse of the love story rests on the assumption that it is the woman who has the time to wait, the time to invest in love. A feminine relation to time in this context

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is defined in these terms – repetition, waiting, duration which resists any notion of progress. (Doane, 1987: 109) This aspect of Sleepless in Seattle was also noted by feminist cultural critic Suzanne Moore, who expressed concern regarding its influence on young female viewers, suggesting that the film was nothing less than ‘an instruction, albeit fictional, to trust their hearts and not their brains’ and ‘a cynical movie, a wised-up film pretending to be an innocent oldie’ (Moore, 1993: 18). This response to the film’s overt use of the fantasy frame overlooks the fact that it is the apparent ‘innocence’ of the ‘oldie’ that serves to conceal its ideological message, while the cynicism of the contemporary modes produces the opposite effect, problematising audience’s identification. Heroine Annie does succeed in getting her man, but Meg Ryan’s swooning, over-the-top performance ensures that she is also an object of (gentle) ridicule: a caricature of the impressionable female viewer. Indeed, one of the film’s main preoccupations is what Mary Ann Doane describes as the ‘despecularisation’ of the woman’s film – the inability to fetishise and objectify (to hold the cinematic object at a distance) that the patriarchal imaginary ascribes to the female viewer. Annie’s unshakeable faith in romantic destiny is thus closely aligned with her fascination with screen romance. The figure of the enraptured female viewer thus functions metonymically: a charming reminder of a lost moment of spectatorial innocence. As such, it serves less to re-inscribe such a position than to remind us that the modes of spectatorship are not only gendered, but historically contingent. This is particularly apparent in the scene in which Annie and her cynical sidekick, Becky (Rosie O’ Donnell), compose a letter to ‘Sleepless’ while watching An Affair to Remember. Presented as something of a feminine ritual, the afternoon movie rerun elicits a tearful response from both women. But only the unusually dizzy heroine is foolish enough to read her destiny in old Hollywood terms, lifting dialogue straight from the movie and inserting it into the letter. Annie’s weepy enthusiasm is therefore undercut by Becky’s pithy comments regarding the difference between actual relationships and love in the movies. If Sleepless in Seattle mocks the excessive pleasure attributed to the female viewer, it also highlights another, perhaps more central, feature of the classical Hollywood love story – the relation between absence and desire. In Sleepless in Seattle this convention is stretched almost to breaking point as face-to-face contact is delayed until the last two minutes of the film.

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The hero’s absence from or indifference to the heroine is a central characteristic of the 1940s woman’s film or romantic melodrama, allowing the plot to focus solely on the desires of the female protagonist. Along with feminist approaches, Lacanian approaches to romance are useful in explaining the persistence of this structuring logic and its unconscious significance for male and female viewers. In Lacanian terms, the dynamic of lack and fulfilment is the core element in any romance, providing the key to the continued popularity of the form, and giving it an almost atavistic, cross-gender psychic pull. Paradoxically, it also provides the most convincing evidence of the absence of the sexual relation, in that, by foregrounding the desire for absolute oneness with the loved object the romance both reveals the impossibility of this desire, and attempts its resolution. As Lapsley and Westlake put it: ‘people do not fantasise about what they have got’ (Lapsley and Westlake, 1992: 28). At root, then, romantic love is the doomed project to recover what is lost in the acquisition of subjectivity: access to the Lacanian ‘real’ or the Freudian (M)other. For both sexes this takes the form of an attempt to circumvent the big Other (the socio-symbolic order) through achieving oneness with the other (the loved object). As the subject’s very existence is premised on the intervention of the socio-symbolic order, this is, by definition, impossible. The imposition of the socio-symbolic order (via language) both splits the subject and allows it to come into being. Likewise, it organises the terms of heterosexual desire; language constructs sexual difference (and thus attraction) while also ensuring that there can be no genuine rapport – only mis-recognition – between the sexes. From a Lacanian perspective, the underlying motive of romance fiction is to offer an imaginary antidote to this depressing scenario, something that Hollywood romance has always excelled at. Given the impossibility of romantic fulfilment, this solution can only be temporary, a proposition which goes some way towards explaining the fact that, in the majority of romances, the running time given to conflict and misunderstanding far outstrips the brief moment in which rapport is (temporarily) achieved. Such a model is useful in considering the popularity of all forms of romance, but it is especially helpful in understanding a film like Sleepless in Seattle, which, even by the standards of Hollywood romance, seems unusually preoccupied with the void between the central protagonists. As love stories go, the film has a peculiarly hollow feeling which is accentuated by its use of visual motifs; the hero and heroine staring at the stars on opposite sides of the country or the recurring shots of the eerie, translucent computerised map, charting their movements back and forth, coast to coast, continually failing to make contact.

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Aside from the closing moments, the only contact they have is that of Sam’s confessional radio broadcast and Annie’s pursuit of him via the internet, demonstrating the Baudrillardian view that ‘the most intimate processes of our lives become the feeding ground of the media’ (Baudrillard, 1988: 20). This postmodernist exaggeration of classical features parodies the preoccupations of the old Hollywood weepie, revealing their artifice; yet it also updates and re-articulates them, drawing new pleasures from old scenarios. The aching void at the centre of the romance fantasy (which might at other times have been filled by something as mundane as a letter) is now bridged by the phone-in chat show, the internet or the old Hollywood movie. In Sleepless in Seattle these ‘superficial’ forms of communication function as the means for mobilising a deeper intimacy which is, of course, anticipated rather than realised. Despite its comic allusions to earlier modes of female spectatorship, the film thus manages to cling to the utopian dimension of popular romance. Beginning with the death of the mother (the origin of both fulfilment and lack) and finally ending with the reconstruction of the family unit, Sleepless in Seattle attempts to ameliorate the alienation, displacement and spatial dislocation associated with the (post) modern condition by reassuring us that true intimacy is still possible, not in spite of new technologies, but perhaps even because of them. This underlying dynamic was also apparent in Ephron’s next Ryan and Hanks production, You’ve Got Mail (1998). The obvious allusionism of Sleepless in Seattle (and its relationship to An Affair to Remember) is also apparent here as the film is essentially a remake of the 1940 Hollywood romance, Shop around the Corner directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Both films feature the prolonged miscommunication narrative featured in Sleepless in Seattle but the former substitutes email for the letter-based romance of the classical version. With the tagline ‘at odds in life . . . in love on-line’, You’ve Got Mail contrasts the couples’ face-to-face niggles and bitterness with email rapprochement. Once again, far from being a cold and alienating form of communication (lacking the intimacy and personal touch of a letter) email provides the purest form of human contact, overriding the political and economic conflicts between the protagonists. The popularity of and critical response to the self-reflexive new romantic comedy raises important issues for feminist film analysis and critics of postmodernist cinema. When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle demonstrate that, as Anne Friedberg suggested, postmodernist allusions to past genre cycles can work as much to expose the ideological baggage of the previous forms as to unleash it on a new generation of unsuspecting (in this case, female) viewers (Friedberg, 1993: 189). Although When Harry Met Sally is so cinematically derivative that it is almost a pastiche of earlier

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modes, it is not, in Jameson’s terms, ‘blank parody’ (Jameson, 1984: 65) It is an artful amalgamation of nervous and sex-comedy motifs which, by allotting more sympathy and on-screen space to the female figure, exposes the androcentric bias of the two previous cycles. Similarly, Sleepless in Seattle’s direct intersplicing of old Hollywood alongside its humorous treatment of the susceptible female viewer adds a distancing frame to its celebration of old-fashioned romance. The play of distanciation and engagement within the new romance suggests that it offer a proactive critical feminine viewing position which is more in line with Carroll’s conception of the wised-up informed viewer of postmodernist cinema. This produces an aesthetic mode which might be described as ‘romantic irony’, a mode which is perfectly tailored to the preferred subject matter of these texts – the independent ‘wised-up’ late twenties early thirty-something woman’s search for love and romance on reasonably equitable terms. Generic cycles do not reflect social trends or dominant political ideologies in any direct form, nor should we expect them to. As these cycles indicate, generic forms are as much subject to and mediated through the force of their generic and fictional logic and conventions as by cultural and social shifts. But if the classical romantic melodrama or feminist identified ‘woman’s film’ registered ‘an unwholly amount of misery’ (Altman, 1998: 32) the emergence of the new romantic comedy as the predominant popular women’s form registers the cultural tensions between old expectations and new possibilities. As the desire to have children is rarely an aspect of the new woman’s cycle, the singleton is able to support herself financially and generally has some form of ‘urban family’ to replace the more traditional nuclear model, the generic drive towards marriage appears increasingly irrational and anachronistic. This is often narratively justified by the heroine’s characterisation as an unusually idealist ‘old-fashioned’ girl, in the manner particularly associated with the leading figures played by Meg Ryan in the 1990s. Early critics of the genre viewed its reintroduction of the marital denouement as evidence of its patriarchal intentions, but this has been absent from some later examples, such as My Best Friend’s Wedding, in which the heroine finally opts for single girl freedom and the companionship of a close gay friend.

From allusionism to pastiche: Bridget Jones’s Diary and Down with Love By the end of the decade, the triumph of romantic comedy as the leading chick-flick genre was further emphasised by the success of Sharon Maguire’s filmic adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). Given the

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bestseller status of Fielding’s comic novel in the US and UK, and its broader association with the lifestyle and behaviour of the perceived new generation of female ‘singletons’, it was not surprisingly that the film proved an instant box-office success. Compared to the earlier Hollywood new romantic comedies – particularly the Ephron/Ryan productions, it was also well received in the popular media. Although it was backed by US money, Bridget Jones’s Diary was perceived as a quirky, unpretentious British film, devoid of the glossy sentimentalism associated with the new cycle, more akin to Mike Newell’s smallbudget 1994 hit, Four Weddings and a Funeral than the Ephron/Ryan self-conscious Hollywood romances. Renee Zellweger’s willingness to emphasise the humiliating slapstick elements of the novel (appearing drunk with smudged make-up, falling over, wearing unglamorous underwear) and, in Hollywood terms, uglify herself through weight gain set her performance apart from the kooky but more conventionally feminine Ryan or Julia Roberts. But like previous examples of the new femaleorientated cycle, the film highlights the self-conscious aspects of Fielding’s work, particularly its debt to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Casting Colin Firth, strongly associated with his role as Mr Darcy in the popular Andrew Davies BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, as Mark Darcy foregrounds the Austen connection, as does the film’s exaggeration of the rivalry between Darcy and Hugh Grant’s Cleaver (mirroring the conflict between Darcy and Wickham) that culminates in the fight scene in both of the Bridget Jones productions. Once again, the underlying, classic story of misrecognition and misunderstanding is interwoven with the tension between fun, freedom and independence and the desire for commitment and stability. In her critique of the Bridget Jones phenomena, Imelda Whelehan posits Bridget Jones as the flip side of the discourse of ironic laddism associated with British magazines such as Loaded in the 1990s. She states: ‘Fielding’s comic irony does not deflect from the fact that the readers find fragments of themselves in Bridget Jones to the point where the BBC in 1998 staged a Bridget Jones night devoted to the “singleton”. ‘The novel and other romantic comedies, such as Sleepless in Seattle, displays under its comic layer a generation of single women desperate to find a man to the point of utter self-abnegation’ (Whelehan, 2000: 139). Whelehan rightly highlights the manner in which the popular media appropriation of the Jones phenomena regards the character as media shorthand for single and desperate, but this should be distinguished from the more subtle interplay of social forces and individualism apparent in Fielding’s work. Although ironic laddism and female-orientated romantic irony share a self-conscious, knowing address and preoccupation with

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past cultural forms, Whelehan underplays a key difference in their approach to feminism and pre-feminist conceptions of gender. Ironic laddism is an outright rejection of feminist politics, a blatant celebration of the pre-feminist gender power order. Conversely, female-orientated popular forms are clearly shaped and influenced by feminist concerns. Figures such as When Harry Met Sally’s Sally Albright or Bridget Jones may be ambivalent about their singleton status, but they also value their independence, career achievements and friendship networks, they are thus clearly ‘post’ rather than anachronistically pre-feminist. Both Sleepless in Seattle and Bridget Jones’s Diary also include self-conscious references to feminist debates about the perceived anti-feminist backlash and are self-aware concerning the media’s unfairly negative preoccupation with single women. Looking at women’s texts in relation to the early 1990s backlash debates, it is important to recognise that the ironic comedies of the 1990s did not invent the figure of the needy, insecure, single woman, but took up this pre-existing misogynist media stereotype and remythologised her as a more sympathetic figure for female audiences. Furthermore, within the, admittedly limited, versions of female success and failure offered within this framework, the heroines of such texts tend to be rewarded, rather than punished, for staying single longer. They inevitably find the perfect partner who values them all the more for retaining their independence and spirit. As many critics of the genre have pointed out, one of the key features of romantic comedy across the decades, and particularly from the late 1980s onwards, is the male protagonist’s final acceptance of the superior wisdom of the female figure and what are coded as ‘feminine’ values. The importance of this female audience-friendly closure is emphasised by its absence in more conservative and overtly farcical film sequel to Fielding’s bestseller, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Kidron, 2004). As Mark Darcy has already wholeheartedly committed to Bridget in the previous film, the sequel resorts to even more bizarre plot contrivances and an excessive use of slapstick to continue the story beyond the romantic comedy’s normal point of closure. In order to drag out romantic misunderstanding, Bridget is depicted as neurotically and unnecessarily jealous of one of Mark’s female colleagues. To add to this implausible scenario, the colleague’s attachment to the couple turns out to be motivated by an infatuation with Bridget herself, rather than Mark. Similarly, the film’s crude attempts to draw humour from the heroine’s confinement in a Thai prison (wrongly convicted of drug trafficking) are clumsy and ethnocentric. Bridget is depicted arrogantly dispensing advice to the Thai inmates by quoting Western romantic self-help manuals and

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trading her wonderbra. This scene in particular serves only to emphasise the cycle’s historical and cultural dependence on the singles culture of wealthy urban centres. The Bridget Jones brand depends on audience identification with a plucky, irrepressible victim of gender inequality. Placing this figure in the context of more overtly disadvantaged women, such as first-world women prisoners in the developing world, drastically undermines her status as lovable underdog. In a more general sense, taken beyond its usual geographical and cultural limits, and beyond the normal closure point of female triumph, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason does indeed depict the white middleclass thirty-something female singleton as, shallow and annoyingly selfobsessed. If Maguire’s adaptation of Fielding’s novel somewhat downplays the heroine’s ambivalence towards marriage, in Beebon Kidron’s sequel any residual resistance to conventional female roles is virtually eliminated altogether: Bridget is just downright desperate. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason thus abandons the crucial tension between the longing for love and commitment and the desire for a prolonged, irresponsible youth that has been at the heart of the most successful new romantic comedies. As this tension provides much of the cycle’s humour and interest, the film falls back on slapstick, farce and a loud and a continuous and intrusive pop soundtrack to retain audience’s interest. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason enjoyed widespread commercial success in the US and Europe on the back of the original’s success. However, unlike the first Jones adaptation, which combines a relatively naturalistic vision of the modern urban lifestyle of young, professional single women with the conventional nineteenth-century society romance plot, Edge of Reason’s implausible ‘carry-on’ knockabout style severs the connection with contemporary social and cultural attitudes. In this sense, the film may be indicative of the cycle’s exhaustion, slipping too far towards postmodern playfulness to connect with the emotional and political concerns of the contemporary female audience. In the final section of this chapter, I want to return to Peyton Reed’s 2003 self-conscious romantic comedy, Down with Love (mentioned briefly in the introduction), a film that perhaps more forcefully indicates both the cycle’s gradual abandonment of naturalistic elements and its descent into what Jameson described as ‘blank parody’ (Jameson, 1984: 1965). Like When Harry Met Sally, Down with Love owes much to the 1960s sexcomedy, indeed, its homage-style borrows plot structure, interiors and star gestures and mannerisms directly from the Rock Hudson and Doris Day classic, Pillow Talk. The treatment of prior generic references also emphasises the differences between the earlier, more innovative use of

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former styles and the latter’s more overtly nostalgic, backward looking approach. Reiner and Ephron’s reworking of the sex-comedy combines it with the self-doubt and urban cynicism of the 1970s mode. It also introduces contemporary elements such the new professional woman, the growth of the media-based occupations and the 1980s lifestyle preoccupation with food and restaurants as signifiers of contemporary class and taste. More significantly, the film incorporates feminist critiques of patriarchal behaviour and assumptions. The addition of these zeigeist elements gives the film a contemporary feel, despite its many references to nervous and sex-comedy conventions. Conversely, Down with Love’s heightened reproduction of early ‘sixtiesness’ is hermetically sealed. Rather than shifting between distanciation and engagement, it moves wholly towards distanciation and the sterile, ironic appreciation of frozen images of the past. The film’s tongue-in-cheek gender politics are articulated through clichéd images of filmic 1960s masculinity and femininity. Leading male, Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), is a mix of James Bondstyle macho antics and Rock Hudson playboy charm and duplicity. Barbara Novak (Renee Zellweger) – a stylish and highly stylised amalgamation of blonde ‘ice-queens’ Doris Day and Kim Novak – pretends to be a ‘down with love girl’ to finally ‘catch’ Catcher by distinguishing herself from his many disposable girlfriends. The gender divide is heavily emphasised throughout by clothing, music and apartment interiors – his brown, wood-panelled and full of gadgets, hers a mix of pastels and fluffy furnishings. As in When Harry Met Sally (and previous sex-comedies) the key characters’ symbolic function as proud representatives of the values of their sex is also emphasised by the presence of less assertive friend whose own gender identification is much less secure. Sexual politics is thus presented as very much part of the film’s time-capsule politics and attitudes, a humorous remnant of past cultural forms. Indeed, if it was not for the final plot twist, in which the scheming, desperate Novak actually does blossom into an independent, career-orientated ‘down with love’ girl, the film’s depiction of women would be more patronising than its 1960s original, in which Doris Day is sassy and self-composed prior to her encounter with Brad Allen (Rock Hudson). The film does include the now generically familiar triumph of the female protagonist, but its retrospective view of the period is signalled less by the integration of a post-feminist awareness and attitudes than by its relentless parade of iconic 1960s style items and a post-permissive inclusion of overt sexual references. For example, parodying the suggestive split-screen bath conversation between Doris Day and Rock Hudson, Barbara and Catcher’s split-screen phone conversation places them

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directly on top of one another, even stimulating oral sex, followed by a mutual cigarette. While the film pokes fun at a crassly drawn notion of women’s liberation and pre-permissive sexual innocence, its nostalgic vision of 1960s New York is in stark contrast to more familiar contemporary images. Made in 2002 (released in 2003), thus relatively soon after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Down with Love is as much of a post 9/11 film as the many disaster movies – such as The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich, 2004) or War of the Worlds (Spielberg, 2005) that have been viewed as covertly registering the tragedy and its effect on the Western psyche. From its opening credits sequence, which feature a 1960s-style animated New York skyline, to the opening shot of Manhattan with the upbeat voice over ‘the place is Manhattan, the year 1962’, to Novak’s first impressions of the city, we are left in no doubt that the film is a celebration of dynamic US capitalism. Down With Love’s blatantly nostalgic evocation of the post-war long boom is symbolised by Manhattan in the early 1960s. Replicating the visual landscape of the 1960s sex-comedy, the film uses studio backlots and sophisticated new digital matting techniques to construct its highly stylised and idealised vision of New York, even to the point of tampering with well-known city locations. For example, in the opening sequence, after striding out of Grand Central station, Novak’s awed gaze immediately alights on both the Empire State and the United Nations, neither of which are actually visible from this vantage point. Novak then hails a cab from outside the United Nations building, its global status and significance underlined by a procession of international flags. Perhaps more significantly, she also witnesses a group of comically dressed ‘ban-thebomb’ protesters, who collapse with aped terror at the sound of a firing exhaust pipe. The scene then shifts to Novak’s frustrated attempts to squeeze into a skyscraper elevator. Jameson’s view of the nostalgia film as a form of cultural denial, an inability to engage with the present is apposite in thinking through the film’s glowing representation of early 1960s New York. Down with Love’s hyperreal depiction of tall buildings against clear blue skies, the attention given to the United Nations headquarters and the Empire State building (Manhattan’s key global landmark prior to the completion of the World Trade Center in the 1970s) and the comic explosion cannot fail to evoke the more recent images of destruction. Thematically also, Manhattan is presented as egalitarian place of opportunity for bright, ambitious and hard-working newcomers. As in Pillow Talk, the two central protagonists are low-born hicks from out-of-town. Mirroring his 1960s prototype,

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Catcher, the self-made man, accrues the respect of his high-born but neurotic sidekick. The possibility of self-advancement is also open to women despite their greater disadvantages. As Novak’s best-selling novel and global fame indicate, success and material self-sufficiency are no longer a male preserve. In its symbolic use of New York City, Down with Love projects an idealised vision of a burgeoning meritocratic post-war America, a nostalgic counter-image to the perceived threat of the closed, misogynistic culture of Islamic fundamentalism. The film’s hyperreal nostalgia thus denies both the ongoing struggle for gender and class equality in prosperous Western societies and the crisis of national and global identity produced by 9/11. Using the Rick Altman model of genre repacking and generic evolution, it seems likely that this particular cycle, as a form that can engage innovatively with the past and the present, is showing signs of imminent extinction. But the legacy of the new romantic comedy is also apparent in other forms and genres. For example, popular women-orientated television shows, such as Sex and the City and, more recently, Desperate Housewives, integrate the self-consciousness of the cycle with sharp appreciation of contemporary social and sexual mores. The new romantic comedy’s more enduring features – such as its particular blend of romance and irony and the creation of feisty ‘post’-feminist heroines – suggest that, at its best, the pleasure and popularity of the form arose from its ability to balance a ‘post’-feminist awareness of the dangers of the romance fantasy and the importance of economic and social independence with the underlying cross-gender drive towards emotional and sexual fulfilment.

4 Costume Drama, Historiography and Women’s History

From the early 1980s onwards, much of the academic critical debate on postmodernist aesthetic practices has been concerned with the question of historical representation and whether objective and meaningful engagement with the past is possible, or desirable, in the context of postmodern culture’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1989: xxiv). While Lyotard’s discussion of metanarratives drew attention to the fictionalising process underlying the grand narrative of Western historical progress and cultural superiority, Foucault’s analysis of knowledge–power relations and histories of marginal subjects – such as criminals or the insane (Foucault, 1973, 1977) – along with the post-1968 growth of academic interest in counter-cultural histories (women’s, black and gay), contributed to a growing cultural suspicion that historical truth claims have tended to serve the interests of the powerful, silencing other voices and experiences. Poststructuralist approaches, linguistics and semiotics also cast doubt upon notions of historical authenticity, foregrounding the instability of language and the inevitable process of narrativisation which raw historical material must undergo in order to create a logical historical account. The shaky boundary between history and fiction has also been the preferred subject matter of numerous acclaimed ‘postmodernist’ literary texts. Writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson and Graham Swift have produced novels which blend the biographical and subjective and/or supernatural and mythological with more traditional accounts of significant historical events, interrogating and drawing attention to the narrativising process. For example, Vonnegut’s ‘classic’ postmodernist novel, Slaughterhouse Five (1970), integrates an account of the Dresden bombings with a spoof pulp sci-fi narrative. The lighter generic framework does not mitigate 126

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the shocking impact of the novel’s wartime events but rather serves to emphasise the problem of recounting, and, by doing so, attempts to make sense of such overwhelming and unimaginable horror. Such texts do not abandon the notion of significant past events or actual deeds done but continually remind us that all historical knowledge is ‘textual’, and thus brings with it questions of point of view, authorship and authority, the issue of who gets to tell the story from what perspective and why. Literary critic Linda Hutcheon describes such novels as ‘historiographic metafictions’ stating: Historiographic metafictions situate themselves within historical discourse, while refusing to surrender their autonomy as fiction. And it is a kind of seriously ironic parody that often enables this contradictory doubleness: the intertexts of history and fiction take on parallel status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of both ‘world’ and ‘history’. (Hutcheon, 1988: 124) Historiographic metafictions became a significant strand of what was critically regarded as postmodernist fictional practice, but debates on postmodern cinema took a different turn, rapidly crystalising around the issue of the popular nostalgia film. Although critics such as Carroll had already drawn academic attention to the work of the new crop of ‘bratpack’ film directors and their preference for revisiting, and paying homage to the work of ‘classical’ Hollywood directors (Carroll, 1982), Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism and culture was the first widely circulated account of the relationship between the socio-economic conditions of postmodern culture and the emergence – within popular cinema – of what he refers to as ‘the nostalgia film’ or ‘la mode rétro’ (Jameson, 1987: 116). Jameson argued that the most significant aspect of this newly emerging cinematic form was its preference for stylised depictions of history and the assumption of audience pleasure in recognising classical cinematic references and generic codes over and above serious attempts to make sense of, or analyse, historical events. Viewing the nostalgia mode as a hermetically sealed form referring only to Hollywood’s own generically coded version of its classical past, he describes it as ‘an alarming and pathological symptom of a society incapable of dealing with time and history’ (Jameson, 1987: 117). Jameson and Carroll both drew attention to the way in which the nostalgia film’s references to the past are both self-conscious (with a heightened attention to ‘rétro’ features, such as cars, furniture and clothes) and

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covert, in that the nostalgia film is nominally set in the present. In short, the nostalgia film’s interest in the past was condemned as all style and no substance, a mish-mash of coded historical styles which failed either to engage with their own time or reflect critically on the past cultural forms they evoked. For some feminist critics the desire to revisit old genres also seemed deeply troubling, less for its abandonment of attempts at historical authenticity than for the aforementioned suspicion. Critics such as Barbara Creed, Amy Taubin, Patricia Mellencamp and, more recently, Alison Butler (Creed, 1987; Taubin, 1992; Mellencamp, 1995; Butler, 2000) articulated that the nostalgic appreciation and celebration of older genres was at least partially motivated by the desire to return to the ‘intensely polarised gender roles’ associated with them (Creed, 1987: 57). The emergence of women’s film genres that playfully and self-consciously implement prior cinematic codes and conventions to undercut, rather than reinforce, the patriarchal logic of their antecedents points to the inadequacy of a debate which is framed only in terms of postmodernist cinema as an aesthetic mode which either fails to engage with the past in any meaningful way or does so only in order to haul the generically based androcentrism associated with certain past styles back into the domain of popular contemporary cinematic representation. As Creed argues, self-conscious generic reworkings inevitably bear traces of the cultural and social circumstances from which they emerged, yet this level of filmic self-consciousness is also what allows for the critique of prior modes of sexual difference registered in femaleorientated genre reworkings such as the early 1990s gothic melodrama, Sleeping with the Enemy, or the reworked nervous romance and sexcomedy, When Harry Met Sally. Popular reworkings of well-known genres can foreground older discourses of romance and femininity while also highlighting Hollywood’s own role in creating these (such as the idea of the susceptible female viewer in Sleepless in Seattle). Moreover, the emergence of a postmodernist cinema defined through its playful inclusion of past styles and genre conventions has not been accompanied by a popular cinematic retreat from films which attempt to lay claim to the past in a unified (in that they deal with one specified time frame) or direct manner. In particular, Hollywood’s preoccupation with twentieth-century American history is registered in forms such as the ‘bio-pic’ – Chaplin (Attenborough, 1992), Malcolm X (Lee, 1992), Nixon (Stone, 1995) and The Hurricane (Jewison, 1999) which blend the high-profile biographies of political and cultural icons with the depiction of wider social and

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cultural movements. In the sphere of women’s genres, this wider cultural preoccupation with the past is also registered in female-orientated forms such as the female friendship movie: for example, films such as Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café (Avnet, 1991), The Joy Luck Club (Wang, 1993), How to Make an American Quilt (Moorhouse, 1995) or Now and Then (Glatter, 1995) in which emotional bonds are created through the telling (and showing) of women’s life histories. Like the bio-pic, their engagement with the past also corresponds to wider postmodernist approaches to history – and the critique of ‘macro’ historical ‘masternarratives’ – in that memory and subjective experience is central to their depiction of historical forces and events. However, this chapter will consider a more overtly historically based filmic form associated with the female audience which was more consistently popular throughout the 1990s: the costume drama.1 Focusing particularly on Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2001), I will argue that the genre provided some of the most innovative examples of both a self-consciously politicised feminist/postmodernist filmic practice and a cinematic version of historiographic metafiction. The chapter will then assess the cycle’s ability to straddle the mainstream/art-house cinematic divide and – referring back to some of the issues concerning the broader political and cultural implications of a ‘postmodernist’ feminist practice raised in the opening chapter – re-situate a feminist interest in women’s historical experience in relation to other subjectivities and forms of historical oppression.

The heritage debate and recent costume drama Like the popular Hollywood ‘nostalgia film’, the costume drama has been accused of privileging style over substance and historical authenticity. While Jameson derided the Hollywood nostalgia film as a mishmash of self-referential generic codes that failed to engage with broader historical forces, the (usually British) costume drama has been castigated for peddling a sumptuous, sentimentalised, class-bound version of Edwardian and Victorian England that fails to acknowledge the historical experience of the struggling, impoverished masses. Critically connected by the increasingly derogatory use of term ‘heritage’ film, film scholars such as Andrew Higson (Higson, 1993) argued that the rising popularity of lavish British productions such as Merchant Ivory’s adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (Ivory, 1985) or Chariots of Fire (Hudson, 1981) coincided with the cultural triumph of an elitist,

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conservative, middle-class value system in the 1980s and 1990s which re-imaged and idealised the British past free of class conflict and political dissent. In a later piece Higson describes the British ‘heritage’ film in the following way: Many heritage films are adaptations of novels and plays which already have some sort of classic status. Most of them are set for at least part of the time in the sorts of buildings and landscapes which are now conserved by bodies such as the National Trust and English Heritage, and these settings are generally inhabited by familiar aristocratic English types and the values and lifestyles they bring with them . . . One of the key terms which validates these films is authenticity – the desire to establish the adaptation of the heritage property (whether conceived as historical period, novel, play, building, personage, decor, or fashion) as an authentic reproduction of the original. (Higson, 1995: 27) In Higson’s analysis the heritage film pursues surface authenticity (of costume and decor) at the price of a deeper authenticity, which could encompass broader social and historical forces and engage with the experience of the masses rather than the elite. In the popular (British) media, the costume drama or heritage film’s preoccupation with stately homes and the historically repressed sexuality of the English upper classes is also a frequent subject of satire and ridicule. Yet, as academics such as Claire Monk (1994: 33) and Pam Cook (2005) have argued, the costume drama/heritage film also provides an important generic space in which the concerns of women are championed and wider issues of sexual identity are addressed. The contempt reserved for it in some critical quarters seems closely connected with its feminine preoccupation with clothing and interiors and its inclusion of ‘effeminate’ male types. The costume drama is one of the few genres in which male actors are to use Laura Mulvey’s famous phrase, coded with, ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ or, to put it another way, as eye candy for female audiences. The sneering response of some critics to the overt sexualisation of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy in the BBC production of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (and his subsequent elevation to big screen star status through his associated role in Bridget Jones’s Diary) suggests a discomfort with the genre’s registration of female desire.2 Citing films such as A Room with a View, Howard’s End (Ivory, 1992), Maurice (Ivory, 1987) and Carrington (Ivory, 1995) (films in which either female or

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homosexual desire is set against oppressive social expectations and attitudes) Claire Monk points out: What most unites the post-heritage film is undoubtedly an overt concern with sexuality and gender, particularly non-dominant gender and sexual identities: feminine, non-masculine, mutable, androgynous, ambiguous . . . the transgressive sexual politics of the post-heritage film places it in genuine opposition to a 1990s Hollywood defined mainstream. (Monk, 1995: 33) However, the ‘Hollywood defined mainstream’ has also been strongly influenced by the late 1980s/1990s British costume drama’s emphasis on women’s historical experience and feminine desire. For example, from the 1990s onwards filmic adaptations of Jane Austen novels such as Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995) and Joe Wright’s more recent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (2005) have offered a feminist-inspired take on nineteenth-century classics – foregrounding sisterly love, women’s restrictive social conditions and plucky heroines valiantly resisting oppression. In John Madden’s playful Shakespeare in Love (1999) a noblewoman crossdresses her way to the Globe stage, finally achieving public recognition and acclaim. Even James Cameron’s 1998 blockbuster Titanic (Cameron, 1998), which is roughly two parts costume drama to one part action movie featured rebellious Edwardian heroine, Rose (Kate Winslet) performing strenuous physical feats in order to rescue her lover. The heroine’s final rescue from the icy water is also justified and celebrated in terms of her ability to bring the spirit of new womanhood into the new century. In a more general sense, costume drama has moved further away from the quest for surface ‘authenticity’ identified by Higson towards the exploration of historical conceptions of sexuality and sexual difference. For example, Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility tweaked the novel in order to strengthen the female characters and place the sisters’ relationship at its heart, while Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of what is generally regarded as one of Austen’s more conservative novels – Mansfield Park (Rozema, 1998) – knowingly shuns attempts at literary-based authenticity in favour of scenes of explicit sexuality and the inclusion of a strong lesbian attraction between heroine Fanny Price and Austen’s villain, Mary Crawford.

Avant-garde showbusiness This feminist-influenced manifestation of popular costume drama has much in common with postmodernist/feminist approaches to history

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in other fields of cultural production, such as literary historiographic metafiction. While the 1980s/early 1990s Merchant Ivory productions did not specifically emphasise gender issues, the growing popularity of the costume drama, with its increasing emphasis on historical conceptions of female identity and desire, provided an important cultural context for the reception of more experimental postmodernist costume and period dramas such as Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2001). It is not uncommon for critics to draw a distinction between a conservative, traditional ‘bad’ costume drama (Merchant Ivory productions, Austen adaptations) and the innovative use of costume and interior in the films of ‘auteurs’ such as Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman (Pidduck, 1997). Yet one of the more interesting aspects of films such as The Piano, Orlando and The Hours is their amalgamation of art-house cinematography and the inclusion of anti-realist devices with a more generically conventional concern with romance, costume and interiors. Orlando and The Piano were also ‘cross-over’ successes for female directors previously associated with small budget, experimental cinema. Potter’s previous productions, Thriller (1979) and The Golddiggers (1983), are texts that exemplify a particular moment of anti-pleasure, avantgardist feminist filmmaking. In contrast, Orlando – which Potter herself described as ‘avant-garde showbusiness’ (Florence, 1992: 279) – was both a critical and commercial hit. Similarly, while Campion’s moderate success with small-budget productions such as Sweetie (Campion, 1989) and An Angel at My Table (Campion, 1990) had already secured the services of Hollywood stars such as Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill and Holly Hunter for The Piano, the film’s widespread appeal and anOscar (the first for a female director) elevated her, at least temporarily, to the Hollywood A list. The presence of self-consciously feminist directors working in the mainstream, within what are generally regarded as traditional women’s genres, indicates the way in which the boundaries between popular and ‘feminist’ cinema are becoming increasingly blurred. Rather than creating an alternative (anti-populist) mode of costume drama, films such as Orlando and The Piano bring to the surface the form’s potential ability to mount a critique of historical gender/power relations and to address the cultural construction of gender and sexual identity – particularly its limitations and constraints – within a given time frame (or frames, in the case of Orlando). In Daldry’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s complex postmodernist novel The Hours, the historical critique of gender roles is also emphasised throughout, but this is achieved through the more obvious

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device of cutting between contrasting periods and social contexts, with the inclusion of a contemporary narrative. Like The Piano, it featured wellestablished Hollywood stars, securing an Oscar and conferring gravitas on Nicole Kidman. Despite its dourer tone and lack of conventional romance, The Hours was also a commercial and critical success, suggesting that generic expectations have shifted towards the mainstream acceptance of a more interrogative mode of period drama, alongside the more upbeat, sexually charged forms – such as the recent remake of Pride and Prejudice. As I argued in Chapter 1, one of the perceived advantages of a postmodernist feminism (suggested by critics such as Linda Nicholson, 1990) is its superior capacity to recognise and respect other subjectivities and forms of oppression. As the work of self-consciously pro-feminist directors using ‘postmodernist’ aesthetic strategies, films such as Orlando, The Piano and The Hours also provide important textual frameworks for considering the strengths and limitations of postmodernist/feminist cinematic practice and, given the prior criticisms of ‘heritage’ cinema, for assessing its ability to foreground points of commonality with other oppressed groups within a popular female-orientated form.

Metafictionalising the feminist ‘canon’ – The Piano, costume drama and the nineteenth-century novel Campion’s The Piano returns to the familiar models through which historical modes of femininity have been addressed in the popular imagination – the historical romance and costume drama – and reworks and revises them in the light of late twentieth-century feminist critiques of these genres. Retaining the affective intensity associated with these forms, The Piano could not be further away from the earlier modes of Brechtian counter-cinema favoured by feminist filmmakers in the 1970s. Yet it also departs from the ‘genteel’ mode of experimental, critical costume drama epitomised by Potter’s Orlando. The contrast in the mood and atmosphere of the two texts is closely related to their literary frame of reference. Potter’s starting point is Woolf’s cerebral modernist classic, while Campion’s key reference is the perennial favourite of women readers – the nineteenth-century female-authored romance novel. This is significant given the long-standing association of the form with both woman readers and feminist critics; feminist literary criticism successfully debunked the liberal humanist readings of authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes and reinvented them as proto-feminist writers dealing explicitly with feminine themes and experiences.

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The nineteenth-century realist novel has also provided a rich source of material for historiographic, metafictional reworkings by twentiethcentury feminist novels such as in A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1991), Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) or Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002). The Piano has much in common with these literary metafictions and works through a similar revisionist logic, but rather than operate comparatively through two temporal planes – in the manner of Possession or the filmic version of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1971) – it seamlessly integrates contemporary (feminist) critiques of the nineteenth-century gothic melodrama into its mid-nineteenth-century landscape, allowing certain repressed aspects of the original to come to the surface, while still retaining the emotional intensity associated with the form. For all these reasons, it seems appropriate that The Piano was followed by the publication of a novel tie-in, rather than the more usual screenplay, reflecting the film’s status as a ‘quality’ production and trading on its relationship to highbrow nineteenth-century classic literature as well as its cinematic roots in costume drama and historical romance. The Piano is the perfect nineteenth-century novel that never was, amalgamating the best-known tropes of nineteenth-century gothic, historical romance and melodrama. The film bears traces of, among other novels, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. Campion herself explicitly refers to the nineteenthcentury romance stating: I feel a kinship between the kind of romance that Emily Brontë portrays in ‘Wuthering Heights’ and this film. Hers is not the notion of romance we’ve come to use; it’s very harsh and extreme, a gothic exploration of the romantic impulse. I wanted to respond to these ideas in my own century. My not writing in Brontë’s time means that I can look at a side of the relationship that she could not develop. My exploration can be a lot more sexual, a lot more investigative of the powers of eroticism. I have enjoyed writing characters who don’t have a twentieth-century sensibility about sex. (Bruzzi, 1993: 7) The Piano retains many of the key features associated with the femaleauthored nineteenth-century romance – such as a powerful, sympathetic heroine, an empathic landscape and an interest in sexual constraints – without sliding into pastiche or crude ‘feminist’ didacticism. One of the key devices by which this is achieved is through Ada’s (Holly Hunter) mysterious silence. This enhances both her status as a slightly

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uncanny, sprite-like figure (reminiscent of the equally ‘stunted’ and strangely powerful Jane Eyre) and avoids the problem of giving too direct a focus to Ada’s social and sexual repression. If Ada spoke it would be tempting to award her with an anachronistically late twentieth-century feminist consciousness: her silence can hint at this through the more generically appropriate means of association. Ada’s emotions are suggested through overhead shots of the lush, dark forest, the ocean bed and, of course, through her association with the symbolic piano itself. While Michael Nyman’s score clearly belongs to the late twentieth century (period music is used largely for comic effect, such as Morag’s demand for a waltz to cheer up the brooding central characters, or Ada’s initial attempts to repel Baines with her aggressive playing), it is woven into the film’s metalinguistic use of symbols and images, providing the perfect vehicle for expressing the silent Ada’s fluctuating emotions.3 The range of symbolic and metaphorical meanings which the film generates draws on the nineteenth-century novel’s interest in the relationship between the natural and supernatural while also suggesting the more self-conscious poststructuralist association of ‘woman’ with the pre-linguistic (pre-oedipal) realm celebrated by theorists such as Lucy Irigary (1993). This is particularly evident in the relationship between Ada and her double-in-miniature daughter, Flora. As in Orlando, the mother–daughter bond is suggested through the use of identical costumes and close physical proximity (conflict between Ada and Flora is also signified through their adoption of non-identical clothing). As nineteenth-century heroines are rarely mothers, the addition of a female offspring (as in Orlando) suggests a conscious ‘revisioning’ of the form in which maternal feeling is presented as being in competition with, rather than subservient to, heterosexual attraction. Rather than simply idealising the mother–daughter relationship, the initial symbiotic, non-linguistic sensual bond between Ada and Flora is disrupted by the daughter’s growing attachment to her stepfather and jealous hatred of rival Baines, thus producing the outburst of violence towards Ada as Stewart discovers the affair. The Piano’s depiction of the ‘family romance’ in the complex relations between Ada, Flora, Stewart and Baines also suggests a self-conscious use of Freudian and Lacanian concepts and images. The film’s knowing use of psychoanalytic tropes (such as voyeurism and fetishism) is particularly apparent in its depiction of clothing and sexuality. One of the criticisms often levelled at costume drama is that its preoccupation with costume and visual display takes precedence over a deeper engagement with the past. The derogatory use of the term ‘bodice ripper’ to refer

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to popular women’s historical romance highlights the popular critical assumption that uncomfortable, body-contorting Victorian and Edwardian clothing is used to titillate and fetishise within (usually literary) popular historical romance. The Piano’s use of sartorial signification is more varied and ambivalent. Although Ada’s hooped skirts and starchy bonnet seem cumbersome and ungainly when trudging through the wet mud or climbing out of the boat in the opening scene, the crinoline also provides shelter for Ada and Flora during their night on the beach and prevents Stewart from getting underneath Ada’s skirt in the attempted rape scene. Perhaps more importantly, the contrast between Ada’s pallid complexion and her dark, voluminous skirts gives her a slightly sinister, other-wordly, appearance, adding both ‘weight’ and depth to her silent, brooding presence. In her discussion of the film’s use of costume, Stella Bruzi describes Ada and Flora as ‘dwarfish dolls’, their clothes appearing slightly too large for their slender bodies (just as Stewart’s clothes were deliberately cut on the small side, reinforcing his persona as a man ill at ease with his body) (Bruzzi, 1995: 261). But the film’s use of clothing is also closely bound to its depiction of nineteenth-century sexuality and its interest in psychoanalytic concepts. Campion rather disingenously highlights the film’s pre-permissive attitudes towards this subject, yet The Piano exploits the current fascination with Victorian sexual repression to maximum effect. What prevents the scenes in which Baines and Ada act out their striptease bargain over the piano keys, or in which Baines touches Ada’s leg through the hole in her stocking, from appearing prurient or exploitative is not an ‘innocent’ pre-permissive avoidance of a fetishism, but an overt, full-scale exploration of the erotic and intellectual (that is, symbolic) potential of sexual repression linked to the striptease and an undisguised fascination with Victorian underwear. From the outset, the film is self-consciously preoccupied with scopophilia, fetishism and voyeurism in the character’s relations to each other and the viewer’s relation to the text. Scenes which play on the alternate exposure and concealment of the body and sexuality such as Baines’s discovery of the hole in the stocking, Baines appearing naked to Ada from behind the curtain in his hut, Stewart’s observation of Baines and Ada having sex, or Baines’s fetishistic caress of the piano in Ada’s absence recur throughout the film. As a contemporary re-visioning of the nineteenth-century novel, the film can also move beyond suggestion into the actual depiction of Baines and Ada’s sexual encounter. However, even this scene ‘perversely’ cuts between indoor shots of the couple and Stewart’s observation of them from the crack in the wood.

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Stewart’s obvious voyeurism is ambivalent in its effect, making the audience aware of their own voyeuristic position but also disavowing this through its association with the least sympathetic character in the story. What is also interesting about the scene is that far from shoring up Stewart’s position as masterful, objectifying male (in the manner of early film theory) or producing an outburst of masculine fury, Stewart becomes dimly aware of Ada as an autonomous subject, seeming almost in awe of her sexual power. It is when Stewart is unable to access or share in this that he becomes the angry, punitive husband prefigured in the Scottish community’s little production of the ‘Bluebeard’ myth.

The Piano and ‘Brontësque’ otherness The film’s postmodernist reworking of the female-authored nineteenthcentury novel manages to draw out the proto-feminist subtext common to many ‘classics’ while still retaining the moral complexity of the central characters: Stewart is not simply dismissed as an incorrigible misogynist but appears equally tortured by his own inability to ‘reach’ his wife in the way that Baines does. Ada is finally able to ‘choose life’ and to relinquish the self-destructive impulses of the romantic heroine in favour of speech and a comfortable life with Baines. The Piano thus works as historiographic metafiction, revising and reworking aspects of nineteenth-century-based costume drama and drawing attention to its own construction through the self-consciousness of these references and the inclusion of metafictional scenes, such as the ‘Bluebeard’ production. However, The Piano has also been accused of privileging gender over colonial oppression, of perpetuating racist stereotypes (in its depiction of the Maoris) and reducing the lower-class Scottish female characters to comic caricatures (Dyson, 1995). Linda Dyson argued: ‘the critical acclaim surrounding the film constructed The Piano as a feminist exploration of nineteenth century sexuality and tended to ignore the way in which ‘race’ is embedded in the text’ (Dyson, 1995: 267). Given its metafictional ‘Brontësque’ qualities, it might be more useful to consider the film less as an exploration of nineteenth-century sexuality per se than an exploration of nineteenth-century sexuality via certain themes, images and motifs associated with classic female-authored nineteenth-century literature. This does not diminish the importance of the issues raised by Dyson concerning the text’s articulation of race and gender but does situate these issues in relation to the film’s overall attempt to both evoke and rework the panorama of class/gender/race relations associated with the nineteenth-century novel.

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One of the most striking aspects of critical responses to The Piano is the way in which critics tended to stress its powerful emotional force. Even academic interpretations of the text describe it in unusually emotive terms. For example, Sue Gillet’s Screen discussion of the film began in the following way: The Piano affected me very deeply, I was entranced, moved, dazed. I held my breath. I was reluctant to reenter the everyday world after the film had finished. The Piano shook, disturbed and inhabited me. I felt that my own dreams had taken form, been revealed. I dreamed of Ada the night after I saw the film. (Gillet, 1995: 286) The film’s affective intensity – its dreamlike quality – is strongly bound up with its ‘Brontesque’ gothicism and the manner in which its strong metalinguistic and symbolic structure draws the audience towards the central character, Ada. While the dialogue is fairly sparse (as though the other characters were in some way touched by Ada’s elective speechlessness), numerous shots of the recently colonised New Zealand landscape (particularly the dark, lush forest) combined with the sweeping score, articulate the film’s concern with repressed sexual passion and unspoken desire. The association between landscape and unrepressed sexuality informs the film’s treatment of the Maori characters, who are depicted as being more in tune with their environment, embodying the idea of an ‘earthy’ sensual lifestyle, free from the complications of Western civilisation. Thus Baines’s ability to respond to, rather than be intimidated by, Ada’s sexuality and win her love is clearly bound to his willing embrace of Maori customs and attitudes (he bears tribal markings and invites the Maoris into his modest home). Stewart’s priggishness is also associated with his cold-hearted, exploitative attitude towards them. As many critics of the nineteenth-century novel have argued, the association between that which is barred from bourgeois white society and colonial subjects is a common trope within nineteenth-century fiction. Moreover, the association between darker skin, the colonies and repressed sexuality is exemplified in Jane Eyre’s treatment of Jane’s raging alter-ego Bertha Mason and the demonisation of Wuthering Heights’s Heathcliff. In The Colonial Rise of the Novel, Firdous Azim argues that the Brontë novels should thus be read: . . . part of the imperialist motif of a genre in which the central subject seeks to establish itself through the eradication of the Other subjects. Whether the narrative subject is male or female, the movement is

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always the obliteration of the Other represented in terms of class, race or sex. (Azim, 1993: 80) In attempting to hold on to the symbolic structure of the nineteenthcentury female-authored novel, The Piano’s concern with repressed sexuality has also retained the dehumanising conception of an ‘other’ in which to locate powerful sexual and emotional impulses. However, the representation of the Maoris is revised to the extent that – far from being the ‘obliterated’ negative repository of repressed Western feelings (in the manner of the dark demonised other of nineteenth-century fiction) – they are depicted as having a more ‘positive’, freer approach to sexuality and social relations. The film’s treatment of lower-class Scottish women is also ambivalent. Aunt Morag and Nessie function primarily as comic figures; the standard of petty conformity that Ada is judged (positively) against. If Ada’s sweeping black skirts enhance her unique, transgressive romanticism, Nessie’s flouncy outfits and stiff curls accentuate her function as pantomime dame. Ada’s silent, brooding passion for Baines is set against Nessie’s silly, girlish infatuation; Nessie’s shrieking response to the shadow ‘Bluebeard’ figure highlights Ada’s stoicism when confronted with a flesh and blood, axe-wielding husband. Yet they are also crucial in providing moments of comedy which alleviate the film’s brooding intensity, and, through their association with the ‘Bluebeard’ production, draw attention to its metafictional qualities. The initial feminist interest in and identification with nineteenthcentury white middle-class authors and their heroines has constituted one of the areas of feminist study which has been frequently criticised for positing a false commonality of women’s experience, denying issues of class and race. This feminist critical tendency to identify with the heroines of nineteenth-century novel – and thus negate its metafictional qualities – is present in some responses to The Piano (Gillett, 1995). While The Piano revises certain aspects of the nineteenth-century femaleauthored text, its Brontësque concern with the subjectivity of a white, lower middle-class woman and her struggle for a stake in the hierarchy of white patriarchal society allows little space for addressing, or rather, re-addressing other subjectivities and histories.

From modernist androgyny to postmodernist female geneology The Piano’s Brontesque references draw on a collective understanding of the cultural significance of the nineteenth-century female-authored

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classic and its proto-feminist subtext. In the next section of this chapter, I want to consider Orlando and The Hours as further examples of the influence of female literary heritage on popular costume drama, in this case, linked to author figure Virginia Woolf. As a filmic reinterpretation of a literary text which is in itself concerned with playfully crossing the generic boundaries of biography, history and fiction, Potter’s version of Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is already doubly, perhaps triply, caught in a metafictional web. In a similar manner, Daldry’s film – part literary bio-pic, part period and part contemporary drama, shifts between time frames and generic expectations. The development of academic feminist criticism and changing critical response to Woolf’s novels also adds another extratextual dimension to both Potter’s and Daldry’s adaptations. The 1970s landmark feminist critical works such as Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own rejected Woolf’s interest in androgyny as a gynophobic retreat from and rejection of female identity fuelled by her own troubled body image due to a history of sexual abuse (Showalter, 1977). Woolf’s endorsement of androgyny was viewed as a painful retreat from her own troubled body image. But Woolf was later critically reclaimed and rehabilitated on a tide of poststructuralist and postmodernist feminist enthusiasm for l’écriture feminine and the dissolution of gender identity through semiotic play. These contrasting views of Woolf’s are apposite in understanding the difference between Potter and Daldry’s (originally Cunningham’s) conception of Woolf’s legacy and influence as the films offer two very different visions of Woolf and her gender politics. Orlando draws much from the association between Woolf aristocratic gender-play and the notion of gender as performance rather than biology. The film’s arch commentary and whimsical humour bring to mind the liberal, privileged bohemian lifestyle associated with Woolf and friends such as Vita-Sackville West. Its camp lightness (reminiscent of Peter Greenway) suggests a culture of pantomime and play. In marked contrast, Daldry’s film explores Woolf’s darker associations. Beginning with her suicide in 1941, the themes of madness and suicide are omnipresent throughout and are linked to the social and psychological constraints associated with femininity and the female reproductive role. What is particularly interesting about Potter’s adaptation is that it departs from Woolf’s original in a manner that challenges the contemporary feminist critical emphasis on gender dissolution/anti-essentialism and gives the filmic Orlando a tougher feminist edge. Woolf’s Orlando – in keeping with its contemporary status as a classic of ‘high’ modernist literature – attempts to dissolve the concept of stable identity, to put

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subjectivity into question and, more significantly, to challenge the assumption that sexual difference is the anchor of selfhood. It proposes a heterogeneous view of the subject and substitutes androgyny for sexual difference. In contrast, for all its visual trickery, cross-dressing and postmodernist play with anti-realist devices (such as Swinton’s asides to the camera), Potter’s Orlando foregrounds the continuing cultural and social significance of female identity grounded in women’s collective historical experience of social exclusion and oppression. Far from rejecting femininity, the film glorifies feminine ‘otherness’ placing emphasis on its problematic relation to masculine, linear notions of time and history. Orlando’s story is thus interwoven with two opposing temporal planes reminiscent of Julia Kristeva’s opposition between monumental/epic and ‘woman’s time’: that of British imperial history (beginning with the 1600s and ending in 1990s London) and cyclical ‘woman’s’ time – from death to (re)birth – with Orlando’s personal quest and the romantic subplot traversing spatial and temporal boundaries and finally culminating, after 500 years, in the birth of her daughter. The juxtaposition of these two trajectories works to highlight not only the interplay between subjective, interpersonal and a broader, more abstract notion of historical forces, but also gives this a more politicised, material basis in women’s experience. In this sense, Potter’s adaptation is both post- and, to an extent, anti-modernist, reviewing and reworking modernist paradigms, reconnecting Woolf’s imaginative flight into androgyny with contemporary postmodernist feminist aesthetics. In her interview with Potter Manohla Dargis put forward the view that Orlando offered a ‘critique of gender politics’, Potter replied that she saw it more as ‘a love poem to the essential self. On the way to finding the essential self we often need to claim a specific identity, to find refuge and solidarity in others that are similar’ (Dargis, 1993: 42). Potter’s response seems surprising given the original text’s interest in dissolving – rather than reinforcing – gender identity and the widespread suspicion and rejection of all forms of ‘essentialist’ politics in recent years. However, I would argue that this is precisely what makes the text such an interesting example of postmodernist/feminist practice; while managing to convey the sense of identity as historically and ideologically constructed, it nonetheless holds on to the notion of a collective, historical female struggle. The text offers an alternative strategy to that of postmodern ‘genderscepticism’ (the refusal to subscribe to a political position locked into the binary logic of sexual difference) (Bordo, 1990: 113). In the project

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of rereading and re-representing the past through the agency of gender, it is useful and appropriate to assume the existence of an ‘essential’ femininity (defined largely through female experience) however strategic this may be. Potter’s treatment of the question of gender and ‘essential’ identity foregrounds both the unfairness and irrationality of gender oppression – the fact that gender should be irrelevant – but also recognises the interrelated manner in which its social and cultural importance (in determining status, power and wealth) leads women to take up their gender as a political rallying point and turn it back on patriarchal society. The ‘strategic’ postmodernist treatment of gender in Orlando allows the film to explore the metaphoric and imaginative power of gender identity without wielding it as an essentialist binary opposition. Bearing this in mind, I want to highlight some of the ways in which Potter shifts the film’s emphasis away from Woolf’s gender indeterminacy to Orlando’s strategic female subject. Firstly, in Potter’s adaptation Orlando is played by a high profile female actor throughout both the male and female sections of the text. Although Tilda Swinton looks superb in her doublet and hose and is described in the initial voice over as ‘tall and thin with an androgynous appearance’ there is no real attempt to masculinise Swinton’s bodyshape, voice or movements. Swinton plays (the male) Orlando more as a gawky, adolescent girl. This adds an ironic twist to the opening line (taken directly from Woolf’s text) ‘there can be no doubt of his sex’, for even viewers unfamiliar with Swinton would immediately recognize the image as that of an attractive woman in Elizabethan costume. Moreover, while the novel’s opening lines are followed by a scene in which the male Orlando is ‘in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which hung from the rafters’ (Woolf, 1992: 13), Potter’s feminised Orlando is first witnessed sitting under a tree reading poetry. The undisguised femininity of Potter’s ‘male’ Orlando has various interesting implications for the earlier part of the text (prior to Orlando’s metamorphosis to womanhood). In particular, ‘his’ love-affair with the Cosack Sasha (Charlotte Valendrey) has all the appearance of a lesbian encounter with the rare depiction of an on-screen lesbian kiss. Same sex desire is also suggested in the strangely still shot of Sasha and Orlando looking out on the ship’s deck, recalling the famous final shot from the classic Hollywood costume drama, Queen Christina (Mamoulian, 1933), in which lesbian icon Greta Grebo struck a similar pose. Secondly, most of the film’s playful treatment of gender reversal and cross-dressing (Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth, Jimmy Sommerville as a cherub) takes place before Orlando is ‘officially’ transformed into a

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woman. The scene in which this transition is revealed to the viewer is one of the more sombre moments in the film: an angelic chorus accompanies Orlando standing naked before the mirror admiring her new feminine form and striking a pose conspicuously reminiscent of Bottecelli’s The Birth of Venus. As the image suggests the ‘fixity’ of Orlando’s identity before the mirror, it works to undercut her comment ‘different sex – same person’. This statement is also negated, more forcefully, in the following sequences in which Orlando returns from his/her stint in Constantinople to eighteenth-century England and finds that, as a woman, she no longer has any legal right to her property or title. The female Orlando is initially depicted in a cumbersome and exaggerated white eighteenth-century crinoline, attempting to manoeuvre her constrained body through a narrow corridor surrounded by white covered furniture which resembles the dress. While the emphasis on costume in The Piano subverts its association with feminine oppression, Orlando’s ostentatious clothing signifies only disempowerment and social restraint. The most uplifting moments in the film are those in which Orlando is either unclothed, or as a woman, when she is dressed in nongender-specific clothing. The following scene in which Orlando is a barely tolerated guest at Pope’s literary salon, chided for belonging to neither a husband or father, also emphasises her immediate loss of status. In her ludicrous costume and wig, Orlando is thus expected to appear rather than participate, to become ‘part of the furniture’ as in the previous scene. In this sense, the film also highlights the conflict between the notion of gender as arbitrary or superficial and the cultural requirement that subjects must take up a sexed identity, while also suggesting that if masculinity is a subject position which allows for a degree of flexibility, female identity is defined as fixed outside certain parameters – in this historical context, those of social, legal and political representation. Thirdly, while Woolf’s Orlando gives birth to a male child and is then, by proxy, allowed to regain some of her former power and influence, in Potter’s Orlando the child is female (with Swinton’s flame-haired niece making an appearance in the last few scenes of the film). The final scene in which Orlando returns to the location in which the story originated is shot by her ‘daughter’ with a hand-held camera, the grainy film giving a sudden jolt to the viewer’s perspective. Penny Florence has argued that this last scene encourages the viewer to retrospectively interpret the film as an attempt to construct a (matra) linearity, suggesting that ‘there is a seeking of autobiographical continuities, about what motherhood might mean, or daughterhood, a female genealogy’ (Florence, 1992: 279).

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However, while the use of the shaky camera certainly draws our attention to the question of how the story has been framed, this is emphasised throughout the text through its metafictional gendering of representations of history. As Julianne Pidduck has argued in her reading of the film, it brings together two conflicting narrative forms, the generally ‘static’ female identified form of the costume drama with its ‘detail-rich, meandering, languorous quality’ and the more dynamic traditionally ‘masculine’ form of the biographical quest or journey (Pidduck, 1997: 172). In utilising these forms to prioritise the mother–daughter relationship (the result of Orlando’s ‘quest’ is her daughter) Orlando parallels the recent interest in women’s autobiography/female geneologies in other fields of feminist aesthetics. Clearly, any adaptation from novel to film will depart from the original writing in some significant respects, but Potter’s version raises some specific questions about the relationship between feminism, gender identity and postmodernist aesthetics. If postmodernism is often associated with the retreat from ‘women’s’ politics into an anti-essentialist critique of gender identity – and is thus opposed to using the notion of female collectivity as a rallying point – Potter’s sophisticated reworking of Woolf’s novel illustrates the possibilities of adopting postmodernist cinematic devices (self-reflexivity, a preoccupation with ‘surface’ detail and so on) in the service of a feminist concern with women’s historical oppression. In addition to this, Potter’s ‘reconstructed’ female subject acts as a locus of resistance to the ‘masternarrative’of British imperial history.

‘I am England and you are mine’ Orlando and romance The gendering of colonial discourse and the process by which the identity of the white imperial male is shored up via the denial of subjectivity to both the imperial white woman and the colonial other is a standard focus of investigation in post-colonial theory. In Potter’s Orlando gendered relations of power and resistance are enacted through a sequence of moments in British imperial history. These moments are presented as a succession of sumptuous visual set-pieces, as highly stylised fantasy locations rather than convincing or authentic portrayals of historical deeds or personages. The use of the slightly surreal backdrop and interiors favoured by British avant-garde directors such as Peter Greenaway or Derek Jarman distances the viewer from a Eurocentric perspective: the scenes in Elizabethan or Victorian England (such as the luminous frozen Thames ice breaking into evenly spaced chunks or the enormous Victorian teacup topiary) appearing quite as exotic, indeed, far more

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so, than the relatively naturalistic representation of eighteenth-century Constantinople. This distancing effect is also further amplified by mythological significance already awarded to some of the events depicted such as the courtiers skating on the ice during the Great Frost of London. In this respect, Potter’s text might well be viewed as a highbrow version of the ahistorical nostalgia film critiqued by Jameson, in which visual spectacle is prioritised over more serious historical engagement. Yet it is this visual excess (the sharp visual contrast between the ubiquitous black clothes worn by the skaters and the white ice for example) which situates the text as an example of postmodernist historiographic metafiction, foregrounding the fictionality of historical representation and commenting critically on prior representation. Thus the restrictive, voluminous skirts worn in the Pope sequence reinforce the scene’s thematic interest in the strict code of conduct to which upper-class English women were forced to submit. Similarly, the ornate wigs and ribbons (again, exaggerated even by eighteenth-century standards) worn by (male) Orlando during his time as a colonial ambassador in the Khiva emphasises the strangeness of the imperial authority rather than the ‘otherness’ of natives. Echoing Jameson’s perspective on the distinction between arch historicity and serious historical engagement, Julianne Pidduck suggests that the film’s playful sartorial language is more suited to the critical analysis of historical gender roles than to its depiction of anti-imperial struggle. She cites Orlando’s rapid departure from the battleground and his flight to femininity as something of a cop-out, revealing the film’s inability to deal with this issue by substituting gender for imperial conflicts: In Potter’s contemporary adaptation, the contested quality of imperial space presents a limit, a vanishing point for a critical feminist costume drama. Perhaps a feminist costume drama can most powerfully and precisely address a particular white, bourgeois experience of English femininity. More generally, perhaps the polite, understated mannered form of this genre, conceived in European bourgeois social experience, does not translate well to address the savagery of bloody colonial conflict? (Pidduck, 1997: 188) Although there may well be limitations to ‘critical feminist costume drama’ (as I suggest below, it does tend to focus on the experience of white, middle-class women) this criticism fails to recognise the ‘postmodernist’ manner in which the film links colonial and gender oppression.

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Pidduck views Orlando’s retreat from the Khiva as symptomatic of the film’s avoidance of issues of colonial conflict, yet this particular episode should be viewed in relation to its overall treatment of issues of power, inequality and national identity. The Khiva sequence depicts these issues at their starkest (in the context of war), but they are also foregrounded in the sections dealing with Orlando’s romantic encounters with Sasha, the Russian ambassador and the American, Shelmerdine (Billy Zane). Moreover, these incidents are in many ways the driving force of the text, each resulting in a shift in Orlando’s perception and a step forward in ‘her’ developmental journey. The encounters are linked to the film’s attempt to find points of commonality between gender and ethnic oppression rather than to sidestep the latter in favour of the former. The question of whether this genre is appropriate or successful in addressing these issues should not be a question of the relative weight of the subject matter (haven’t women also been subject to centuries of state sanctioned brutality?) but whether Orlando’s playful, postmodernist use of anti-realist devices, irony and visual excess softens the hard-edge of its critique of the historical oppression under both patriarchy and imperialism. Despite the seemingly arbitrary time segments – ‘1600, DEATH’; ‘1610, LOVE’; ‘1650, POETRY’; ‘1700, POLITICS’; ‘1750, SOCIETY’; ‘1850, SEX’ – and the rapid, sporadic movement through time frames and historical locations, the film highlights key points in British bourgeois and imperial history, beginning, significantly, at the moment of British global ascendency. As I have already suggested, Orlando’s romance narrative is mapped onto patterns of imperial oppression and resistance. It thus consists of three different encounters with the ‘other’: Sasha, the Turkish prince, Khan (Lothaire Bluteau) (representing, in more general terms, the East), and the American pioneer, Shelmerdine. In the first of these encounters, Orlando (as a man) becomes infatuated with the alluring Sasha and demands her submission, announcing ‘I adore you, you are mine’. Orlando is horrified when Sasha – regarded as semi-primitive by the English courtiers – refuses to submit. In despair at his rejection Orlando is despatched to Constantinople to act as British Ambassador for King Charles. His second encounter, with the Turkish prince, is also a humbling experience. During his time in Constantinople Orlando becomes closely associated with the prince and effectively ‘goes native’. Abandoning his ambassadorial uniform, he is seen relaxing in Harem pants at the Turkish bath. In the following scene in which Orlando is ordered to take up arms with British and Turkish rulers in order to crush the insurrection of the masses he submits to a fainting fit and is reborn as a woman.

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The association between Orlando’s refusal to fight on the side of the British and his ‘feminisation’ through his association with the oppressed colonial other is made quite explicitly here. On his return to England (within the same time frame) Orlando is proposed to by the Archduke Harry (John Wood) who demands that ‘I am England and you are mine’ (echoing Orlando’s pompous declaration to Sasha) and emphasising the connection between territorial and sexual conquest. The continuity between Orlando’s three ‘others’ is primarily articulated through their resemblance despite gender switches – dark haired and olive skinned in opposition to Orlando’s red hair and pallid complexion. However, in the final encounter, staged in Victorian England, the power relationship is reversed following Orlando’s change of gender. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the point that marks both the high-point of British imperial power and thus the onset of its slow decline, the romance is consummated and Orlando is impregnated by the American adventurer, Shelmerdine. He leaves to conquer other lands, while she is left pregnant and destitute, no longer in possession of her title or property. Beginning with her desperate flight through the maze and closing with the image of Orlando standing among and apparently ‘hemmed in’ by the overbearing topiary teacups, the sequence wittily conveys the claustrophobic, oppressive nature of Victorian gender expectations and women’s confinement to the domestic sphere. Yet the final sequence, set in the 1990s, is decidedly upbeat. Suggesting both the historical gains achieved by women in the twentieth century and importance of mother/daughter relations, Orlando returns to her former stately home. The oppressive topiary is now concealed by large white covers. Echoing, but reversing, the earlier scene in which the eighteenth-century Orlando moves awkwardly between the white covered furniture, Orlando rides her motorbike through the avenue with her small daughter, displaying the energy and independence of Shelmerdine’s quest, now appropriated by a single mother. Focusing on the text’s episodic pattern of historical gender/power relations and their relation to constructions of the nation and national identity highlights the complex way in which questions of gender, imperialism and national identity – a subtext to Woolf’s novel – are brought to the surface of Potter’s postmodernist adaptation. While the primary focus of Orlando is the experience of white, upper-class English womanhood (the common focus of the ‘heritage’ film) its deployment of this mode of knowing history is not exclusively used to explore this particular mode of subjectivity but to place it in a symbolic structure of broader relations of power and oppression. As an example of filmic historiographic metafiction, the text successfully exemplifies the politicised

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engagement with history which is possible through the playful postmodernist use of anti-realist devices and its use of visual excess and historical discontinuity.

Woolf, metafiction and the literary bio-pic The conception of Woolf and her legacy in The Hours is sharply at odds with Potter’s uplifting, optimistic adaptation of Orlando. The sombre mood and tone of The Hours is far closer to The Piano. Like the latter it also concerns the conflict between the interior world and social convention, particularly in relation to the social and cultural constraints placed on women. The darker, individualist focus of The Hours also draws parallels with other recent literary bio-pics concerning women writers and artists, such as Iris (Verges, 2004), Sylvia (Jeffs, 2003) and Frieda (Taymor, 2002) which focus on psychological and physical illness. By opening with Woolf’s suicide, the film appears initially to shore up the much-mythologised, dehistoricised figure of the crazed artistic woman. Not only does the film show Woolf sliding effortlessly and, in a witchlike manner, unnaturally, to her death – literally walking into the water – but it also excludes Cunningham’s wartime reference to circling bombers. The voice-over letter to Leonard emphasises that Woolf’s suicidal impulse stems from her own singular mental illness rather than external events – ‘I fear I am going mad again’ – yet in both Mrs Dalloway (in which the shell-shocked Septimus commits suicide) and in Cunningham’s portrait of Woolf, suicide results from a complex relation between external and internal triggers, linked to wider historical events. But if the dramatic opening scene cast a familiar cloud of impending doom over the films portrait of the women writer, unlike recent literary bio-pics, such as Sylvia or Iris, it does, to its credit, attempt to weave Woolf’s artistic achievements into the film at every point. Following the suicide scene, the metafictional historiographic framework shifts between Woolf writing Mrs Dalloway in the 1920s Richmond, the experiences of a young, pregnant mother in early fifties in LA and a successful publisher in contemporary New York. Closely replicating Cunningham’s novel, the film charts one day in the life of each character. The link between them is established in the opening sections through successive shots of the three women waking and rising. Mrs Dalloway is the key thread that runs through each scene: thus we witness Woolf’s painful struggle to create the novel in the 1920s following a bout of mental illness. The familiar feminine theme of domestic incarceration is alluded to as Woolf is, at this point, restricted to the

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home on the advice of psychiatrists, her confinement enforced by Leonard Woolf and the servants. In the 1950s section, housewife Laura Brown attempts to read the novel in brief moments snatched away from her childcare and domestic responsibilities, Mrs Dalloway’s theme of outward competence and inward distress chiming with her own concealed sense of profound alienation. In the late twentieth-century section the film draws comparisons between the life and perceptions of the fictional Mrs Dalloway and publisher Clarissa Vaughan, as Vaughan organises a party for Richard, an ex-lover and successful poet who is dying of an AIDS-related illness. Unlike Orlando, which is a postmodernist filmic adaptation of a modernist text, The Hours is a filmic adaptation of Cunningham’s metafictional homage to Mrs Dalloway. The insular, psychologically focused novelistic ur-text – Mrs Dalloway – has thus already been mediated and reimagined through metafictionalising frame of writer (Woolf) reader (Laura Brown) and an updated version of the central character (Clarissa Vaughan). However, while Cunningham’s novel can still retain the crucial Woolfian device of contrasting outwardly banal everyday conversations and actions with intense interior perception and feeling, Daldry’s adaptation of Cunningham’s novel must work through either suggestion or verbal declaration.

From The Hours, 2002.

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In the Woolf and present-day sections characters do, at some points, articulate Woolfian perceptions of the relation of art, feeling and everyday experience (sounding somewhat pretentious) but much is conveyed through the sombre Phillip Glass score, mise-en-scene and visual symbolism. As in the novel, nature symbolism, particular water and flower imagery, links characters and states of mind. The flowers bought by Clarissa for Richard and the flowers on the cake baked by Laura Brown emphasise the appreciation of beauty felt by the suppressed artistic soul. Domestic objects – such as the cake – are also invested with the power, mystery and symbolic significance that typifies much of Woolf’s work. The writer’s watery death is also mythologised and given symbolic significance through its association with Laura’s later fantasy of suicide by drowning. In a similar manner to The Piano (when Ada is submerged in water but finally decides to ‘choose life’) the water/drowning woman imagery is associated with a subversive, witchlike feminine presence, the madwoman (Woolf) and the ‘unnatural mother’ (Brown) reconfigured as misunderstood artist and visionary. Yet this mythologised figure is also historicised through the period structure of the film and its key Woolfian theme: the conflict between woman as carer and as creative being links the three sections. Continuity is therefore established between Woolf’s domestic incarceration in suburban England and the oppressive ideology of the domestic in the 1950s LA. In the period England section, Woolf is sneered at by her servants for failing to manage her household adequately and openly ridiculed as an eccentric, childless Aunt by her nephews. In the 1950s section, Laura Brown, mother of a three-year-old boy and pregnant with her second child, is equally alienated and miserable despite her fecundity and socially approved role as wife and mother. The encounter between Brown and her intimidating, outwardly confident but infertile neighbour Kitty hammers home the point that both childbearing and childlessness are difficult options when women are exclusively and oppressively defined through their ability to perform the caring or domestic management roles. As in Far from Heaven, Pleasantville and Mona Lisa Smile, the effect of the 1950s ideology of domesticity is depicted in stark and chilling terms in the Laura Brown sections of The Hours. The film is not crude enough to refer directly to the key cultural influences of the period, such as the theory of the determining influence of the mother figure, popularised by child psychologist John Bowlby in the early 1950s, but the impact of Bowlby’s work is very much in evidence here. The slightly atonal postmodern Glass score and the filtered gold lighting used in LA 1950s

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section work to emphasise the contrast between outward conformity and success and interior mental distress. If the trope of the oppressed, lonely 1950s housewife is highly familiar in contemporary cinema, the depiction of Brown’s troubled interaction with her young son in The Hours is still unusually raw and disturbing. The moment in which, having waved her husband away at the window, Brown turns back towards her little boy is particularly unsettling. Shot from his perspective, her frozen smile gradually fades and is replaced by a cold, blank look in his direction. The film momentarily suggests that she might actually intend to harm him, but swiftly moves on to her forced and awkward attempts to behave like a ‘normal’ mother: Richard is allowed to participate in baking his father’s birthday cake. Only in the sequence in which she helps him sift the flour, suggesting to him that it ‘looks like snow’ does Brown appear to take any pleasure in her child, and this is clearly mother/son bonding over the aesthetic appreciation of the appearance of the flour rather than through shared domestic ritual. The treatment of motherhood in the film is a timely reminder of the anxiety and oppression experienced by many women during the era in which theories of attachment, parenting and the negative effects of maternal absence held sway. In both the US and UK there has been a recent cultural resurgence of theories of ‘infant determinism’: the theory that children who spend time away from their mothers in the early years will be irrevocably damaged and a growing perception that all forms of institutionalised childcare are inferior to mothercare. This view has been popularised by new childcare gurus such as Steve Biddulph (2003, 2006) psychologist Oliver James (2002) and sociologist Jane Waldfogel (2006). In the UK, Jill Kirby’s work for the government Centre for Policy Studies has also loudly championed the cause of stayat-home mothers (2002). The majority of these writers and commentators are nominally sympathetic towards working mothers – the consumerist demand for two income families is more often blamed than feminism nowadays – but their approach tends to be mother rather than parent focused, often carrying the assumption that mothers of younger children do not or should not want to engage in paid labour outside the home. In this respect, the Laura Brown section of The Hours is a bold and uncomfortable intervention into popular cultural memory, highlighting the isolation and misery experienced by many stay-at-home mothers and the effect of their unhappiness on their children. As the film progresses it becomes increasingly clear in the present day section that Richard, the dying poet, is Brown’s now adult child. We learn that, although she

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pulled back from the brink of suicide, Brown abandoned her children shortly after the birth of her baby. The film cuts between the 1950s section, in which the young Richard is reunited with his mother after her trip to the hotel and the abortive suicide attempt, and the tearful Richard in the late twentieth-century section. We also learn that Richard’s autobiographical novel includes a scene of maternal suicide, suggesting that the infantile Richard was aware of her intentions. This is later followed by Richard’s own suicide, suggesting that he has, in some way, finally carried through her abortive attempt. But despite the long-term ramifications of Laura’s actions, and the film’s clear implication that Richard has been damaged by maternal abandonment, our sympathy and compassion is still directed towards Brown. When the insensitive Lewis (the adult Richard’s ex-lover) tosses aside Richard’s lengthy and intense autobiographical novel with the casual comment, ‘two hundred pages and then she kills herself over nothing’ we have already witnessed the historically situated distress which precipitates her feelings of despair. Following Richard’s suicide, the now elderly Brown visits Clarissa and is embraced, and thus symbolically forgiven for abandoning her children by Clarissa’s twenty-something daughter, Claire (Clare Danes). The film’s emphasis on comparative cultural moments and shifting social attitudes prevents the viewer from easily assigning blame to any particular character. Although the film concerns patriarchal constraints, the male characters are not demonised or depicted as primarily responsible for female misery. Laura Brown’s husband Dan and Leonard Woolf are portrayed as kindly, loving and well-meaning, despite their collusion with the broader cultural restraints on women. In this sense, the initial individualist focus of the Woolf suicide scene – typical of the bleak, women-focused, literary bio-pic – opens up into a much broader and more complex view of the interaction between the individual psyche and social and cultural conditions. In typical period style, links are forged between female oppression and the social marginalisation of non-heterosexual desire. Cunningham’s concern with gay sexuality and the AIDS crisis is somewhat played down in Daldry’s adaptation, but the link between women’s oppression and compulsory heterosexual desire is re-enacted in the two period sections. Thus Woolf and sister Vanessa’s Bell’s spontaneous and shocking moment of passion is mirrored by the unexpected kiss between suburban housewives, Brown and Kitty. Significantly, in terms of the film’s (and period drama’s) more general interest in marginalised sexual behaviour, both moments contrast with the apparently fraternal relationships depicted with their spouses. Indeed, the only male/female relationship in which intense

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feeling is exhibited is between the bisexual Clarissa and Richard, both of whom have spent most of their lives in same-sex relationships. The metafictional structure of The Hours successfully draws a parallel between the oppression of white, middle-class women and gay men but, as in The Piano, the feelings and experiences of working-class women are given short shrift. The delicate, thin ascetic Woolf is bullied by servants who are depicted as spiteful and uncaring. Nellie, who is based on Woolf’s long-term servant Nellie Boxhall, is portrayed as matronly, course, nasty and overweight (Boxhall was actually younger than Woolf herself). In a similar but less overt manner, Laura Brown, with her slim elegant body and suppressed aesthetic sensibility, is contrasted with Mrs Larch, the childminder, a badly dressed, overweight smoker (Woolf nervously puffing away in the 1920s denotes her agitated, artistic presence and a rebellion against standard femininity, while Mrs Larch’s dangling cigarette signifies her lower-class status). Although Woolf is portrayed as a difficult employer, and Mrs Larch does nothing obvious to harm the young Richard, the servants and the childminder are clearly depicted as lacking the finer feelings that unite Woolf, Brown, Clarissa and the adult Richard. To return to more general questions concerning the return of costume and period drama, the three aforementioned examples, one based on an idealised notion of the nineteenth-century novel, the second on a modernist classic and the third on a postmodernist reinterpretation of a high modernist text, demonstrate both the influence of postmodernist techniques on the genre, and its compatibility with a feminist interest in cultural history. The subjective focus of the costume drama is the ideal vehicle for addressing women’s historical oppression as it automatically shifts the historical frame from the macro- to the micronarrative. Films such as The Piano, Orlando and The Hours are not alternative or ‘counter’-period dramas (although they may present a counter-history), rather they illustrate the genre’s radical potential to readdress historical gender inequalities with a contemporary eye, a tendency which is present, to a lesser extent, in most examples of the ongoing cycle. The selfconscious reworking of historical material, whether to open up issues such as colonialism or the suppression of female sexuality in classic literature (as in Rozema’s Mansfield Park) or to provide a revisionist, femalefocused account of key historical events (such as the treatment of the American civil war in Cold Mountain (Minghella, 2003)) has become commonplace in popular cinema. Looking at the form’s ability to address issues of oppression beyond the standard period interest in the subject of women and sexuality also

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brings us back to the issue of postmodernist technique. It is no coincidence that Potter’s Orlando seems more able to find points of commonality between gender and other forms of oppression than The Piano or The Hours. Despite its use of self-conscious Freudian imagery and concern with the symptomatically silenced woman, The Piano is also locked into the nineteenth-century novel’s preoccupation with the aspirations of the white, middle-class female subject. Similarly, the subjective, psychological focus of The Hours is tied to the class-bound attitudes that typify Woolf’s work and Cunningham’s perception of it. The frame narrative cuts between periods but the sections themselves are relatively naturalistic. Conversely, Potter’s Orlando plays fast and loose with Woolf’s original, using more obvious defamiliarising methods, such as characters directly addressing the audience. Potter draws out Woolf’s interest in gender difference and oppression, but unlike The Hours and The Piano, the focus is not psychological and internal, but more directly (if playfully) historical and socio-cultural. The central protagonist’s asides to the camera are linked to a more selfreflexive notion of character as Orlando is continually being repositioned by social and cultural structures. It is this postmodernist dynamic of shifting perspectives within a socio-historical framework that more readily allows for the recognition of other subjectivities and experiences.

5 Neo-Noir and Noir-Lite: Masculinity and Postmodernist Aesthetics in New Retro-Noir

In the preceding chapters I have attempted to address the question of postmodernist filmic practices and gender representation by examining the use of filmic techniques associated with postmodernist cinema – such as irony, allusion or self-reflexivity – in genres associated primarily with the female audience. The rationale for focusing on what are generally regarded as women’s genres: costume drama, domestic (romantic) melodrama, or romantic comedy is twofold. Firstly, to extend the analysis of the ideological and political uses and effects of postmodernist aesthetics into areas which have hitherto tended to be associated with a conservative ‘feminine’ aesthetic of emotional over-engagement. It seems clear that many contemporary female-identified films tend to blend the more conventional pleasures associated with these forms with either a wry acknowledgement of their social function in fuelling traditional female aspirations (as in recent romantic comedy) or with a more obviously feminist-inspired attempt to critique traditional genre roles by working against generic expectation. My second purpose is to re-interrogate the perception of popular postmodernist cinema as a form at best indifferent to feminist concerns, at worst as an insidious manifestation of an anti-feminist backlash. By focusing on popular female genres, such as the melodrama, I have attempted to develop an understanding of the possibilities of female-orientated, postmodernist cinema which moves beyond either the appreciative evaluation of a worthy but marginal, anti-popular cinematic feminist postmodernist filmic practice (drawing on a notion of postmodernist cinema as the natural successor to modernist avant-gardism and feminist counter-cinema) or the identification of a broadly male-orientated, often violent or overtly misogynistic ‘popular’ postmodernist cinema 155

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aligned to the work of directors such as David Lynch, Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino. The rapid association of postmodernist cinema with a certain kind of casual, derogatory depiction of the female figure tended to lock postmodernism and feminism into adversarial positions which foreclosed the possibility of a more productive alliance between postmodernist aesthetics and feminist politics in popular, as opposed to ‘art-house’ or independent cinema. It also seems increasingly apparent that, given some of the complex problems around gender/genre distinctions, spectatorship and the way in which classical genres reappear in different guises in the context of post-classical cinema, the distinction between a ‘bad’ backward looking, misogynistic postmodernism and a putative, female-orientated popular postmodernism is increasingly untenable. One of the problems with the feminist debate on postmodernist cinema is that while the aesthetic techniques associated with the former have become more and more widely disseminated across a range of popular cinematic forms, its theoretical analysis was tightly bound to Hollywood texts of the 1980s and thus the cultural climate of the Reagan era and the ascendency of the American Right. Bearing this in mind, I want to reconsider what was initially understood and rightly condemned by feminist critics as the more ‘maleorientated’ violent side of popular postmodernist cinematic production. Having investigated the development of an ironic, postmodernist sensibility in popular women’s forms, it is now possible to return to masculine postmodernist cinema, and to ask how its re-articulation of prior filmic forms has evolved in response to the popular development of a more feminised postmodernist cinematic practice. In keeping with the generic focus of this approach, this issue will be addressed through a historical/textual analysis of that most contentious of genres – film noir. There are several reasons why noir provides a useful starting point for critical re-engagement with male-orientated popular postmodernist cinema. Aside from its well-known association with various forms of feminine deviance and the subsequent interest it generated for feminist critics, noir connects many of the issues associated with classical and ‘rétro’ genres which have been discussed in the previous chapters. It is also the (revived) genre cited in many of the key critical essays on postmodernist cinema that appeared in the 1980s; critics such as Carroll, Jameson and Creed, for example, develop much of their analysis of more general trends through an analysis of neo-noir. More importantly, noir provides a telling example of the way in which debates on postmodernism, gender and

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genre often seem to be taking place in parallel worlds. While broader critiques of postmodernist neo-noir assume a universal understanding of what the genre entailed, noir critics move further away from any concrete definitions of the form. The critical evaluation of a film’s postmodernist credentials (primarily through its knowing inclusion of prior cinematic references) tends to carry with it certain assumptions concerning the stability of classical Hollywood genres and the universal recognition of their constituent parts which are very much at odds with recent academic approaches to classical genre production. The contemporary cinephilic appreciation of classical Hollywood genres comes from many sources. The studios have much invested in the extension of a critical vocabulary that allows them to repackage – and thus resell – old products, but there has also been an extension of genre-spotting snobbery from a cine-literate elite to ‘ordinary’ viewers via the wider availability of old films through cable and video, the proliferation of film-appreciation websites and so forth. As these categories circulate more freely in popular discourse, academic film criticism has become increasingly circumspect about working with the established models of genre production (Neale, 2000: 17–29; Altman, 1998). Nowhere is this contradictory trend more apparent than in debates on film noir. Once a genre familiar only to the serious film buff, noir is now a label attached to virtually any text featuring a little clever lighting, a crime plot and an alluring female villainess (a point I will return to later). Curiously, while the term seems to circulate more and more freely within contemporary cinema – spawning subcycles such as neo- or technoir – more sustained, historical noir critiques are constantly drawing attention to its status as, in Rick Altman’s terms, a ‘phantom genre’ (1998: 35), cobbled together by critics.1 Rick Altman’s reassessment of genre theory clarifies the problem. For while critics are right to draw attention to both the problems of defining noir (given the length and intensity of these debates this problem could hardly be ignored) and its status as what Krutnik refers to as a ‘post-constructed’ category (1991: 17), the argument that generic boundaries were far from stable even during the classical period calls into question the distinction between noir and the more stable or easily recognised genres. According to Altman studios tended to blur such distinctions for fear of limiting their potential audience. Not surprisingly, the industrial strategy, such as it was, attempted to make the film’s appeal as broad and inclusive as possible (offering something for everyone) rather than seeking target audiences through generic distinctions. Where generic labels did gain

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audience and industrial recognition, their popular currency tended to be fleeting and provisional, quickly surpassed by or amalgamated with another term. Thus, while it is possible that the label ‘western’ or ‘gangster’ film had a currency with classical audiences unfamiliar with the concept of ‘film noir’, this was far looser and more transient than some critics of the form imply. Moreover, the widely held view that the complex and innovative noir style was a subgenre of the gangster film would seem to refute the idea that the gangster film was an ‘uncontroversial’ genre with inflexible boundaries. Without wanting to open up the general difficulties of generic distinction, it seems likely that some of the problems which have arisen concerning the critical constitution of noir are as much a product of the intense scrutiny that it has been subject to in recent years than evidence of its inherently enigmatic or mysterious nature. The contrast in critical status between noir and female-orientated genres is also significant. Those which have been retrospectively defined and appropriated by feminist critics (such as the woman’s film) are viewed with suspicion, as lesser genres struggling for recognition, whereas noir’s status as a ‘post-constructed’ category has only served to enhance its mystique. As I will discuss in more detail below, this disparity between the status awarded to post-constructed classical Hollywood categories on the basis of their gendered appeal obviously informs approaches to postmodernist reworkings of these forms. The unequal treatment of classical genres on the basis of their gendered appeal may go some way to explaining why the postmodernist recycling and re-articulation of noir features was addressed by critics of postmodernist cinema while the return of certain female-identified classical features went unnoticed. Critical studies which highlight the difficulty of defining classical noir are often strongly informed by a sense of its marked superiority to other classical forms, its anti-realist expressive visual qualities and associations with European art cinema, placing it a cut above the standard output of Fordist studio production. Likewise, the presence of ‘noirish’ qualities in contemporary cinema tends to be viewed as something that raises the run-of-the-mill detective or crime story into something with a bit more class, conferring sophistication and glamour on mainstream popular texts. Indeed, as I have already suggested, the popular dissemination and appropriation of such an obviously ‘film schoolish’ critical category as film noir in everything from star interviews to the TV listings guide is indicative of the way in which postmodernist cinema is as much about this collective interest in and understanding of conceptions of genre, form, or the relationship between contemporary cycles

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and their well-known classical predecessors as the presence of particular set of aesthetic practices. But if the noir-mystique has been inflated by successive attempts to pin it down, the heightened level of critical concern with the form has nonetheless produced a cluster of salient issues concerning the relationship between gender/genre in classical and postmodernist neo-noirs. Aside from comparing the articulation of gender in classical and contemporary neo-noir there is the question of how both these forms are being defined, by whom and to what purpose? More specifically, how do assumptions about classical noir – particularly those concerning its articulation of gender difference and the significance of aberrant female figures – feed into the production and reception of contemporary (postmodernist) noir texts? There is little doubt that there is something in noir that seems to have (re)captured the interest of the viewing public and industry alike in a manner that other classical forms (such as the western) have not. However, the emergence of and critical reaction to the spate of popular neo-noirs that appeared during the late 1980s has to be understood in relation to a complex combination of re-definitions of classical noir, debates on the postmodernist nostalgia film, and wider social and cultural concerns with the re-negotiation of social and sexual identities.

The rise and fall of the ‘killer bimbo’: Neo-Noir from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s Gender has been centre stage in debates on classical noir for some time. Although it is still largely regarded as a masculine genre (a point I will return to later), noir is also one that feminist critics and, in a wider sense, gender-based critiques have been active in redefining. Feminist psychoanalytic and historical materialist approaches have addressed the androcentric outlook of much classical noir, which is no longer an assumed and unquestioned filter through which other issues – such as class, criminality or social deviance – are explored. Feminist critical interventions not only exposed noir’s underlying patriarchal logic but also managed to rescue the femme fatale from obscurity and recast her as proto-feminist heroine. Following the feminist critical work of the 1980s, recent noir critiques tend to foreground the issue of masculinity itself as a site of tension, an issue to be explored and resolved often through violent action or encounters with women. It is perhaps for this reason that feminist critics were quick to note the omission of any analysis of this aspect of the

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revived form in the initial attempts to make sense of its reappearance by critics such as Carroll and Jameson. For example, Carroll’s extensive and illuminating analysis of the rise of cinematic allusionism began in the following way: One rootless man, driven by an illicit passion for another man’s wife; a murderous bargain with the siren; fateful destruction. It’s an old story. Or to be more exact it’s an old movie – shades of The Postman Always Rings Twice (’46) and Double Indemnity (’44) . . . We understand Body Heat’s plot complications because we know its allusions . . . Even its eroticism requires our explicit association of the female lead with certain movie myths – for example, the woman-as-devil archetype – in order to be really forceful. (Carroll, 1982: 51) Described thus, Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 noir-thriller Body Heat, a film singled out as exemplary in its use of audience-friendly allusion by both Carroll and Jameson, provided fertile ground for a gender-based analysis of what precisely was evoked in this text and why it might prove forceful for mass audiences. Yet neither attached much importance to the text’s gender dynamics outside of acknowledging them as part of its strategy to evoke classical noir and to clamour for its critical respectability. This was particularly surprising given that both Carroll and Jameson linked the emergence of neo-noir and the ‘rétro’ or ‘nostalgia’ film to the demise of counter-cultural politics and the death of American radicalism. This association of a particular cultural/political moment with the emergence of the nostalgia or rétro film has been highly influential in establishing the initial critical view of popular postmodernist cinema as an almost inherently conservative form. Yet neither of these critics made the connection between the obvious prioritisation of certain archetypal gender roles within these texts and the contradictory shifts in gender identity which had taken place as a result of the second wave women’s movement in the 1970s. It might be noted that the two prior filmic references cited by both Carroll and Jameson as the classical template for Body Heat (Kasdan, 1981) – The Postman Always Rings Twice (Garnett, 1946) and Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944) – are not just any old noir classics (bearing in mind the many varieties of cycles and subcycles in the overall noir corpus) but film noirs which have a particularly strong investment in a ‘deathly desire/fatal passion’ plotline. One of the most striking aspects of this variety of noir is the way in which it gravitates towards the alluring figure of the spider woman/femme fatale figure.2 In this respect Body Heat

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was indeed a ‘neo-classic’, if one can use that term, establishing a format replicated by many subsequent neo- or rétro noirs. Although it is difficult to draw clear distinctions between classical and neo-noir, one element that does tend to characterise the difference between noir and neo-noir is the latter’s prioritisation of the deathly desire narrative and the significance of the figure of the femme fatale at the expense of other ‘noirish’ features. Jameson signals this difference by drawing attention to the strangely insipid quality of Body Heat’s leading male actor – William Hurt – as compared to the more charismatic or overtly macho leading men of yesteryear. Jameson perhaps underplays the degree to which the outwardly macho leading men in classical noirs were often troubled and inwardly vulnerable. However, there is little doubt that male vulnerability is accentuated in the neo form. Hurt is downright pathetic, a shadow in comparison with the vivacious Matty (Kathleen Turner). Yet Jameson links the frailty of the film’s leading man to its lack of noirish gravitas as opposed to its heavier emphasis on the female lead. Casting the bland Hurt alongside Kathleen Turner serves the crucial neo-noir function of pushing the femme fatale into the spotlight. The first of a succession of failed professionals and duped lovers, Hurt is the prototype of the down-at-heel neo-noir lover, just as Turner’s aggressively stylised, heavily made-up femme fatale – both oddly anachronistic yet prescient of the 1980s power-dressed professional woman – established a particular kind of ‘neo-femme’ aesthetic emulated in many subsequent neo-noir films throughout the 1980s and 1990s. If Hurt is an even weaker version of previous noir anti-heroes, Turner is, if anything, tougher and sexier than her classical predecessors, her 1940s ‘rétro’ styling coinciding with a more widespread shift away from the youthful, fresh faced, unassuming ‘natural’ look adopted by many popular actresses of the 1970s and the frosty facade of the ‘post-feminist’, padded-shouldered, retro glamour-puss of the 1980s. The cultural significance of the return of the femme fatale figure was not lost on feminist critics entering into the 1980s debate on postmodernist cinema. Barbara Creed’s analysis of what was at stake for women in the emergence of the nostalgia film gives much attention to this issue (Creed, 1987). As Creed’s approach was the first key feminist intervention in the postmodernist cinema/feminism debate, I want to consider her analysis in some depth. Creed’s overall approach was one which attempted to bring together two hitherto separate fields of postmodern criticism: the more arcane, academic-philosophical debates on postmodernity – particularly the work of Lyotard, the critique of ‘master narratives’ and the popular cultural use of gendered imagery and ‘rétro’

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aesthetics. She begins by referring closely to Alice Jardine’s work on ‘gynesis’: the analysis of the relationship between poststructuralist/postmodernist critiques of Enlightenment reason which is aligned to the interrogation of a dominant white, masculine subjectivity and which privileges ‘feminine discourse’ as a mode exterior and resistant to this. Jardine is somewhat suspicious of this abstract privileging of ‘the feminine’, she nonetheless stresses the importance of this process for feminist critics, viewing it as part of a wider disenchantment with the master narrative’s investment in male superiority guaranteed through the primacy of reason, logic and the Cartesian subject. In a broader sense, Jardine links the postmodern to ‘the loss of the paternal signifier’ (Creed, 1987: 52), and welcomes postmodern critical attempts to think about gender beyond binary oppositions, concluding that feminism and postmodernism ‘should unite in their efforts’ (Creed, 1987: 50). In considering popular film in the late 1980s Creed reaches a less optimistic conclusion. She agrees that the postmodern condition may indeed produce a feeling in the zeitgeist of waning male potency and the sense that male identity is somehow ‘in crisis’; her reading of the way in which this is expressed in a range of popular postmodernist film texts suggests that ‘the changes presently occurring in the cinema, the crisis of the master narratives, may not necessarily benefit women’ (Creed, 1987: 66). Creed comes to the conclusion that far from allowing for the possibility of less rigidly defined modes of gender representation or a more sympathetic exploration of female experience, this collective sense of declining male power seemed to produce a redoubled cinematic misogyny and a backlash of anti-female paranoia. Roughly translating ‘gynesis’ into ‘becoming woman’ (the loss of masculine status guaranteed through the Enlightenment privileging of masculine logic and rationality over female irrationality and sensuality), Creed argues that, at an unconscious level, many postmodernist texts are informed by male fears of the impact of techno-science on gender hierarchies. Creed points to a variety of ways in which this is manifested. The first is through a morbid preoccupation with the female reproductive system in ‘body-horror’ science fiction. Along with the more general postmodernist cinematic fascination with the internal body (which continued well into the 1990s and beyond) Creed suggests that the abject female body looms large in much late 1980s cinema. Citing Alien (Scott, 1979), Aliens (Cameron, 1986) and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) and Videodrome (1982) she argues that the repulsion expressed in these texts encapsulates a male horror of being reduced to the non-status of women, the terrifying (postmodern) possibility that the system of binary oppositions

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which keeps the hierarchical relation between male/female in place is crumbling along with the master narratives that held it in place. While this is addressed in one generic form via body-horror sci-fi (the disgusted fascination with the female reproductive system manifested in the Alien series for example), she suggests that noir is also a genre that largely owes its reappearance to its pronounced fear and fascination with woman, embodied in the figure of the femme fatale. Referring back to Jameson’s analysis of the ‘nostalgia film’ she states: Significantly, at least three of the films quoted by Jameson, Chinatown, The Conformist and Body Heat belong to the category of film noir a genre which deliberately plays with the notion of the femme fatale, the phallic mother whose image constantly threatens to undermine the phallocentric order and turn son against father. In each of these re-makes the male protagonist fails in his self-appointed task, largely because the patriarchal symbolic, the Law, has also failed – reduced already to the status of just one ‘class’ amongst many, to cite Lyotard again. (Creed, 1987: 55) Creed was clearly right to draw attention to both the significance of the gender dynamics in the neo-noir (particularly in the absence of any interest in this issue from the leading male postmodernist film critics of the time) and to the way in which, in contrast with their classical predecessors, neo-noirs tend to allow the scheming female to evade punishment. But her general dismissal of neo-noir as regressive male fantasy belies the complex responses engendered by the form and the particular appeal of classical and neo-noir to contemporary female critics and audience. The femme fatale was certainly a prominent figure in the classical noir universe, but in neo-noir she is far more powerful and effective at achieving her goals. With one or two notable exceptions – such as the predominantly male, The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995) or LA Confidential (Hanson, 1997) – in the 1980s and 1990s the form became increasingly identified with the dynamic of deathly desire and the deadly woman. Like a popular TV character awarded her own spin-off series, the femme fatale came to signify ‘noirishness’ even in texts which paid little heed to other noir conventions. Thus texts as varied as Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992), Final Analysis (Joanou, 1992), Body of Evidence (Edel, 1992) and The Last Seduction (Dahl, 1994) were grouped together as neo-noirs largely because of their sexed-up, bloodier reworking of this theme. But to view the popular cultural revival of texts orientated around deathly desire and the bad woman as stemming entirely from misogynist

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fantasy – generically clothed in noir and reactivated by a zeitgeist of waning male authority – neglects the ambivalent meanings of such a figure, not only in contemporary neo-noir, but also in previous incarnations. Although the ‘bad-girl’/siren has a much longer history, the appearance of the classical noir heroine is often associated with the perceived threat to male identity posed by women’s increased employment prospects and economic status in the 1940s. Feminists have long argued that one of the more interesting aspects of classical noir is the way in which the overall appeal of the classical noir heroine competes with and undermines the impact of her punishment, creating a tension between the text’s often overt ideological pro-family, anti-crime message and the excitement and desire generated by this figure (Harvey, 1998). As famous neonoirs – from Body Heat, to Basic Instinct and The Last Seduction – tend to fully exploit the appeal of the femme fatale while minimising the desire for or possibility of male retribution, it seems unlikely that this could effectively work as a nostalgic palliative to anxious male audiences. Much of the ironic humour associated with postmodernist forms is harnessed in the service of this figure. For example, in The Last Seduction, much of the film’s darkly comic tone derives from the heroine’s ability to double-cross her gullible lovers by adopting modes of traditional feminine behaviour that are revealed to the audience as comically at odds with her real intentions. While neo-noir may, at some level, register male fear of women and feminine sexuality, it also, at another level, explores the pleasure and excitement of the femme fatale that also embodies a non-gender-specific spirit of individualism and anti-authoritarianism. Not only is the heroine frequently allowed to ‘get away with it’ but, in neo-noir, the audience is encouraged to applaud her verve and ingenuity in doing so. If the classic noir heroine tends to be confined within a male oedipal triangle, caught between a paternalistic father/husband figure and a demanding, dependent lover, the contemporary femme fatale is more likely to be an independent, high-earning professional. As Yvonne Tasker argues, the return of the femme fatale is, in this sense, just one aspect of the popular cinematic sexualisation of the working woman (Tasker, 1998). Nevertheless the femme fatale’s reincarnation as professional woman rather than desperate, frustrated wife is, in itself, a kind of progress. The feminist objection to such figures is less that they teasingly hold out the promise of alternative modes of female identity while finally working to ward off the threat posed by the independent, sexualised female, than that these qualities are insistently associated with either the

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amoral pragmatism of Body Heat’s Matty Walker and The Last Seduction’s Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) or the murderous impulses of Basic Instinct’s Katherine Trammel (Sharon Stone). Like the virtuous heroine of the postmodernist melodrama, the ‘woman as redeemer’ who functions to restore a sense of community and humanitarian values to a rapacious, individualist culture, the neo-noir heroine’s entire being is given over to the hungry pursuit of all that consumer culture has to offer. For this reason, it could be argued that in much postmodernist cinema there is a tedious return to the old opposition between Madonna and whore, in which ‘woman’ is once more called upon to represent all that is worst and best in a culture at a given historical moment. Yet to read these films solely in this way is to ignore another significant distinction between neo-noir and its classical predecessors. More important than the tendency within neo-noir to celebrate rather than punish such figures is the way in which their presence is either heavily coded as cinematic allusion (Body Heat), overlaid with irony (The Last Seduction), or both (Basic Instinct). For this reason alone, the neo-noir automatically generates a different set of meanings that are tied up with the contemporary audiences’ heightened awareness of the codes of prior noir, their articulation of gender and the way in which these are being self-consciously recycled. If there is one aspect of classical noir which critics do agree on it is the existential weight of the classical form: whatever else it may have been, classical noir was not a genre played for laughs. The occasional witty exchange or wisecrack may be an accepted part of the formula, but the overall noir ‘mystique’ clearly owes much to the pervading atmosphere of gloom and despair with which it is so strongly associated. As the neo-noir cycle developed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, initial attempts to recreate the weight and solemnity of the original form gave way to black humour and a jokey, self-conscious kind of misanthropy. The mixed feminist and gay reactions to Basic Instinct’s depiction of glamorous ice-pick wielding lesbians is indicative of the way in which such texts tend to confound notions of inspirational ‘positive’ and offensive images through sheer excess. Although this film offended some sections of the gay community, its hyperreal exploration of paranoic male fantasy appealed to others. In addition to its laboured allusions to Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) Basic Instinct constantly foregrounded Catherine Trammel’s status as object of desire and fantasy; no more a plausible or sympathetic character than Cat Woman or Pussy Galore. One only has to compare a (relatively) self-conscious cine-literate neo-noir text like Basic Instinct to Adrian Lyne’s conventionally realist treatment of

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the 1980s ‘career bitch’ in Fatal Attraction (Lyne, 1987) to see the difference a little irony can make. While the latter’s attempt at depth psychology is harnessed to the obvious pathologisation of the career woman – played without a hint of irony – the former sends up the dynamic of deathly desire by pushing it to ludicrous extremes and removing any sense of plausible motivation or character identification. Similarly, in neo-noir films such as The Last Seduction or Black Widow (Rafelson, 1986) the notion of the femme fatale as sad rather than bad, damaged by childhood trauma and thus potentially ‘curable’ and controllable was subjected to ridicule. As a general rule, within neo-noir the satisfaction of the anticipated closure/disclosure of the investigative narrative structure is supplanted by the pleasure of witnessing the heroine gleefully get away with double-crossing everyone in her path. The Last Seduction – probably the most knowing of the neo-noir cycle – also went furthest towards presenting the femme fatale as outlandish feminist heroine. The story is shot largely from her viewpoint (unusual even for neo-noir) and the denouement, in which she disposes of two men and walks away with the stolen cash, is downright triumphal. Just as the rétro romantic comedy encourages contemporary audiences to indulge their romantic fantasies while also maintaining a healthy degree of ironic distance, the early 1990s neo-noir tempered its depiction of deadly women with a similar caveat. Even the ‘early’ neo-noirs (e.g. Body Heat), which tend to be reverential rather than parodic, lose the noirish credibility they seek through their paint-by-numbers reproduction of what Carroll describes as ‘the approved cinematic iconography for fear, lust and loathing’ (Carroll, 1982: 51). By strongly coding its conventions – in particular, the depiction of the noir heroine – as fantasy, the neo-noir invites female audiences to revel in the sheer nastiness of the femme fatale. The noir heroine may indeed draw life from men’s fears and fantasies about the perceived increase in women’s social, sexual and economic power but, in the 1980s and 1990s, she has undoubtedly also functioned as an emblem of female desire and aspiration, a hyperbolic mish-mash of the post-feminist preoccupation with a certain kind of hard-nosed individualist, careerist feminism and the old archetype of the dangerous seductress. In her analysis of what she refers to as the ‘fatale femmes’ of recent cinema (appearing in a wider range of analysis than the neo-noir, shading into more conventional horror/thriller cycles) Julianne Pidduck draws attention to the strange disparity between popular depictions of female violence against men and mounting statistical evidence and heightened social awareness of incidences of actual male violence against women.

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Pidduck argues that while the ‘fatale femme’ cycle accentuates conservative fears about women’s independence, it may also function as a revenge fantasy for female viewers: The prevalence of the fatal femme narrative seizes obsessively on the exception to the overwhelming rule of male violence committed against women … Where in our everyday lives as women we are bombarded by the evidence of our increasing vulnerability, poverty and limited social power, the femme fatale’s embodied social, sexual and physical powers offer an imagined point of contact, if not simple identification – as imagined momentum or venting of rage and revenge fantasies the importance of which cannot be underestimated. (Pidduck, 1995: 72) One of the legacies of feminist campaigns concerning domestic violence and rape is that violence against women is both more culturally visible (manifested in popular texts such as Sleeping with the Enemy) and less socially acceptable. For these reasons it seems likely that the revived femme fatale of the early 1990s was a composite figure unleashed through both male and female fantasies, the typically noirish male perceived threat of increasing female power is thus blended with a female revenge fantasy which is itself a product of a new discourse concerning gender power relations and violence. However, the heightened self-consciousness and derivative manner typical of the deathly desire-based neo-noirs also ensured that it was not a cycle with long-term potential. As with other exhumed genres, unless new elements are blended in, witty allusion soon spirals into risible imitation, bad parody and finally, spoof. As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, the key element in the more commercially successful revived cycles is their ability to update and revitalise old formulas, reconnecting them with contemporary social stereotypes and cultural concerns. Escalating levels of violence and explicit sexuality accompanied the demise of the neo-noir until the femme fatale became an exhausted cinematic trope. If audiences were amused and titillated by the voracious ‘killer-bimbos’ of Basic Instinct, later noirish sex/death thrillers, such as the Madonna vehicle, Body of Evidence (another reworking of the ‘deathly desire’ plot first recycled in the 1980s) were commercial and critical failures. The cycle final descended into either the straight-to-video market or the pure rétro spoof of films such as John Waters’s Serial Mom (Waters, 1994) in which – adding an ironic twist – Body Heat’s original neo-noir

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heroine, Kathleen Turner, plays a conventional housewife turned serial killer. As one of the more prominent examples of a revived classical form, the neo-noir’s descent into sensationalism or humourless pastiche reveals much about the limitations of this mode of popular filmmaking. As many critics of the form have noted, postmodernist generic reinterpretations, however affectionate, are prone to a certain lack of energy and intensity (Carroll, 1982: 81). This emotional flatness – what Jameson refers to as ‘the waning of affect’ – is apparent in the neo-noir’s failure to generate the high levels of tension and unease associated with the classical form (Jameson, 1984: 61). The very familiarity of the deathly desire plotline limits its ability to create suspense among contemporary audiences. As Jameson argues of Body Heat, the neo-noir’s self-conscious preoccupation with the ‘surface’ elements of rétro style draws attention away from its dramatic centre of forbidden desire and criminality. Early neo-noir critics such as Carroll viewed this lack of affective intensity as part of the expressive design of neo-noir, arguing that the nervous tension associated with the original was replaced by the more cerebral pleasure of intertextual reference spotting. Although this may well have been the intention of some of the 1960s brat pack filmmakers to whom Carroll refers, it seemed to produce an affective void which was filled by ever more visceral scenes of sleaze and brutality. In contrast, the most powerful, influential examples of popular postmodernist cinema tend to be those that slide seamlessly between different modes of address, alternating the cool, distanced pleasures of ironic humour or intertextual play with tear-inducing moments of human drama. The most thoughtful, innovative women’s films of the past decade – such as The Piano – have also been those that do not allow postmodernist cynicism to spoil the cathartic pleasure associated with the form. It is this combination of tears and cine-literate genre awareness that has allowed for the popular rehabilitation of women’s genres and their renewed popularity among contemporary audiences. However, this blending of alternate modes of address is not entirely confined to women’s genres. Even Quentin Tarantino’s productions, which are often seen as the epitome of this kind of hollow, smugly derivative contemporary filmmaking actually include their fair share of scenes designed to provoke emotional engagement and character identification – the camaraderie and ‘honour amongst thieves’ displayed in the scenes between dying Mr Orange (Tim Roth) and paternalistic Mr White (Harvey Keital) in Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, 1992), for example, or the frisson generated by Vic (John Travolta) and Mia’s (Uma Thurman) date in Pulp Fiction (1994).3 His more recent productions, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and, particularly,

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Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004 and 2005) integrate aspects of the maternal melodrama into their hyperreal depictions of torture and violence. Thus Beatrice Kiddo’s (Uma Thurman) brutal pursuit and murder of Bill and his gang is finally offset by her unironic joy at rediscovering her small daughter. Alternatively, and perhaps more commonly, rétro genres avoid the dangers of disappearing into intertextual oblivion by recombining noir elements with other forms. In his discussion of noir spin-off cycles, Slavoj Zizek draws attention to … those films which attempt to resuscitate the noir universe by combining it with another genre, as if film noir were today a vampire-like entity which, in order to be kept alive, needed an influx of fresh blood from other sources. (Zizek, 1993: 199) According to Rick Altman’s model of generic repackaging there is nothing particularly unusual in this: renewal via reconfiguration with other forms is the standard model of generic development that keeps the system ticking over (Altman, 1998). What does perhaps distinguish this process, where it concerns rétro or postmodernist forms, is the way in which metagenericity is foregrounded as part of the aesthetic design of the text. For example, Ridley Scott’s early postmodernist classic, Blade Runner (1982), extracted maximum effect from what was – at that point – an innovative blend of noir and sci-fi. As ‘tech-noir’ has rapidly become a more familiar cycle it has lost originality but gained generic credibility. Thus, the noirish elements in Blade Runner that reoccurred in The Terminator (Cameron, 1984), Terminator 2 (Cameron, 1991) and the Alien series have now become a familiar aspect of contemporary sci-fi genre codes. Similarly, as genres redefine themselves through the inclusion or exclusion of different elements they also generate new social and ideological meanings. As neo-noirs began to emphasise the feminist overtones of the femme fatale – as independent professional woman – they created figures of fantasy and identification for female audiences. Continuing this trend, new metagenetic noir blends have produced configurations that go much further in reworking noir gender dynamics and embracing a range of previously unaddressed social and cultural concerns. In the remainder of this chapter I want to examine two recent noir hybrids which expand, rather than compress, the scope of the noir universe. Bridging ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ postmodernist cinematic codes, in sharp contrast to the early forms of postmodernist cinema cited by critics such as Creed, such films combine elements of recent

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neo-noir and the cultish male-orientated postmodernist cinema of the early 1990s with a feminist thematic emphasis on masculinity as a social and cultural ‘problem’.

Noir-Lite If early critics of postmodernist cinema tended to focus on those noirs (e.g. Double Indemnity) which reworked the gullible-man-meets-schemingseductress plotline, there have also been those that attempted to rework noir by placing women in the investigative rather than criminal role. For example, films such as Katherine Bigelow’s Blue Steel (1990) in which a female trainee cop is stalked by a serial killer, merge the raw, blood and guts sensationalism of much neo-noir with a preoccupation with the ethical and personal dilemmas experienced by young, professional women. As the growing numbers of popular texts dealing with women in highprofile, traditionally male-dominated working environments testifies, this scenario has become a fertile source of dramatic action, producing a now substantial strand of television and film drama with a liberal, issue-led feel.4 It is interesting to note that if women working in ‘business’ or the financial sector are still often portrayed as pushy, obnoxious and unfeminine, on-screen female lawyers, medics and criminal investigators are represented more favourably. Cynthia Lucia’s analysis of the cinematic treatment of women lawyers points out that they are often presented as less objective than their male counterparts, and more likely to be swayed by personal interests and issues (Lucia, 2005: 23) This is also apparent in the treatment of female investigators, but the tendency to over-invest is often combined with a more positive – if still stereotypical – ability to empathise and an enhanced perceptiveness in key female investigator films such as Coma (Crichton, 1978), Black Widow (Rafelson, 1987) or The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991). The on-screen depiction of female professionals draws a fine line between dedication and an obsession which is associated with failure in the personal sphere. This has long been the structuring narrative of many male-centred Hollywood crime dramas but the gender switch is still remarkably effective in reinvigorating a wide range of investigative/suspense narratives, offering boundless opportunities to rework well-worn crime plot devices. The generically familiar moral and ethical conflict with superiors is heightened by a gendered clash of attitudes and approaches, and romantic involvement with criminals is invested with a new erotic charge. As in literary and television female-orientated crime fiction, the form thrives

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on the tension between patriarchal notions of law and order and the female detectives’ own code of honour and practice. The investigative process is often dually focused on crime and the structural sexism of the law enforcement hierarchy. But if the overtly politicised ‘liberal’ outlook of much recent women’s crime fiction marks it as a distinctly 1990s/2000s phenomenon, the figure of the female detective is not solely a feminist-inspired reversal of the norm. In her illuminating reappraisal of classical noir Elizabeth Cowie suggests that even within classical film noir – as opposed to the genteel, occasionally female-led, ‘whoddunit’ story – there are as number of well-known classical texts structured by a female investigative gaze. Citing examples such as The Secret beyond the Door (Lang, 1948) and The Reckless Moment (Ophuls, 1949), Cowie argues that the neglect of womancentred classical noir illustrates the tendency for noir critics – even those who are highly attentive to noir’s gender dynamics – to construct a noir corpus largely based around the ‘hard-boiled’ writing school and the prominence of the male private eye. Cowie also questions the distinction between the ‘woman’s paranoia’ cycle and classical noir. Despite the urban/masculine and feminine/ domestic contrast, the two forms nevertheless share a number of common features: a central enigma, off-balance shot composition, chiaroscuro lighting and, perhaps more importantly, a sense of impending doom. As noir is a form defined as much by these tonal or formal aspects as by plot or story line in the conventional sense (although here too there are similarities), Cowie’s observation tells us much about the way in which noir has been increasingly critically (re)constructed as a male genre; that is to say, a genre preoccupied with the problems of male identity. This is an assumption which, as I have already suggested, inevitably feeds into attitudes and approaches to neo-noir. Bearing this in mind, it could be argued that female-investigator noirs although clearly influenced by feminism are also paying homage to an alternative noir offshoot; one which has, thus far, received little attention. Katherine Bigelow’s Blue Steel (Bigelow, 1990) is an interesting example of this form. Critics have generally focused on its status as action cinema yet its police procedural framework is also intertwined with an exploration of the dark side of the romance fantasy. Drawing on what could be described as the noirish elements of the woman’s paranoia film, it plays on the potential threat posed to the young, inexperienced heroine by the seductive advances of a powerful, wealthy older man. As Cowie points out, although classical noirs sometimes featured women in the unofficial role of investigator, for reason of verisimilitude they were

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rarely depicted as either lone private detectives or state officers. The narrative possibilities offered by the now plausible representation of female law enforcers have been eagerly seized on in a number of recent policeprocedural or neo-noir films. In the first of the two 1990s noir hybrids I want to look at, Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (Soderbergh, 1998), the focal point of the narrative is the protracted sexual frisson between state marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) and bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney). Like other acclaimed recent noirs – LA Confidential and Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Out of Sight is based on an acclaimed crime novel (by Elmore Leonard). Like Jackie Brown, it features an ethnic woman, in this case Hispanic, in the leading role and contains the still rare Hollywood depiction of a white male/ethnic female romance. In addition to the powerful presence of one of America’s premier male heart-throbs, Out of Sight seems primed to appeal to the female audience in several key respects. Firstly, although it was generally promoted as a straight neo-noir, the romance plot overshadows what is – in noirish terms – an unusually transparent and fairly weak crime plot. Despite its convoluted structure (use of flashback and so forth), this largely consists of a failed bank robbery, prison bust and the pursuit of a final big heist which will allow protagonist Foley and self-consciously named criminal sidekick, ‘Buddy’, to retire from the criminal underworld. The core narrative is clearly Sisco’s romantic and official pursuit of fugitive Foley, by whom she is captured in the initial prison bust out. Out of Sight is less a typical femme fatale/deathly desire noir (or even a gender-switch reworking of this theme) and more ‘noir meets romantic comedy’, a ‘feminised’ noir or ‘noir-lite’ in which the fatalistic, doomladen atmosphere associated with the classical form is replaced by an altogether jollier screwball comedy approach to the criminal underworld. Secondly, the depiction of the smart, articulate and resourceful Sisco is far closer to the new female investigator of much recent feminist crime fiction than the femme fatale of previous neo-noirs. Sexy without being objectified, intelligent and tough while retaining a healthy degree of distance towards the macho antics of male officers, Sisco is a composite of positive male and female attributes. Similarly, the leading male protagonist embodies a masculinity more often associated with another female-orientated genre – romance fiction – than that of the hard-boiled detective or criminal. Foley is appropriately masculine and ‘exciting’ without being overtly threatening or aggressive in the manner of the gothic male hero. Indeed, his underlying decency is constantly underlined and set against

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From Out of Sight, 1998.

the corruption and cruelty of lesser criminals. Eschewing violence whenever possible, Foley is a witty, lovable rogue, whose courteous and protective behaviour towards vulnerable women and weaker men (a category which includes the majority of the male cast) compensates for his petty offences. Thus in the opening scene Foley manages to rob a vast corporate bank largely by flirting with the female cashier. His gentlemanly code of conduct is also displayed in the kidnap scene, in which he quickly assures Sisco that he has no intention of ‘forcing himself’ on her. Foley’s status as an archetypal figure of heterosexual female fantasy is constantly alluded to within the text, with many references to female attraction to ‘rough trade’ and the rather disingenuous intratextual denial that this may be what motivates Sisco’s attraction to him. In addition to this, the film contains two slightly surreal sexual encounters, one a dream sequence, the other an actual event but presented in the manner of a dream or fantasy. Significantly, both scenes are framed

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from Sisco’s perspective. The first of these occurs early on in the film when Sisco, gun in hand, creeps into Foley’s hotel hideout and climbs into his bath. Although the audience is initially unaware that this is a dream/fantasy sequence (while the hotel room is in the film’s terms ‘real’ she is not, at this point, aware of its existence) its significance as such is accentuated in the following scene, in which Sisco awakes in her hospital bed after escaping a minor car crash during the prison bustout and her ‘capture’ by Foley. In the dream sequence, Sisco appears confident, agile and in control (fully dressed and armed while Foley is naked and vulnerable) whereas in the hospital scene, she is treated little better than a naughty schoolgirl, patronised by her overbearing but affectionate father and belittled by a senior FBI colleague. The second scene, which also takes place in a hotel, is a more complex mixture of male and female viewpoints. As the protagonists wake up in bed together (a naturalistic scene) we are clearly meant to understand that the encounter has taken place, yet the preceding scene, which fast cuts back and forth between the hotel bar conversation and Sisco undressing (apparently in the hotel lobby), leaves us unclear how much of this is another of her lust-fuelled fantasies. As in the dream sequence, Foley’s new mannish sensitivity is emphasised in contrast with the boorish behaviour of other males; in this case, his timely appearance wards off a group of arrogant, predatory advertising executives. If the two fantasy/dream sequences reinforce the film’s strongest overall theme – that of forbidden passion and the romance which can only exist ‘out of sight’ due to the couples’ respective positions on either side of the law (other meetings, in which they are more clearly positioned as criminal/police officer are more conventional), the film also suggests another dimension to the theme of impossible love, the tacit acknowledgment that men like Foley are an idealised feminine fantasy. Out of Sight contains many of the hallmarks associated with directors (such as Scorsese and Tarantino) who tend to appeal to young male audiences’ loud funky soundtrack, lots of jump cuts, freeze frames and the obligatory smart-arse cinematic referentialism. In the opening sequence Sisco and Foley, together in the trunk of the get-a-way vehicle, discuss the merits of various well-known gangster films, while, in a later scene, Michael Keaton produces an ironic reworking of his Jackie Brown role as the incompetent FBI agent. But like Soderbergh’s previous low-budget hit, Sex, Lies and Videotape (Soderbergh, 1989), Out of Sight utilises many of the standard features associated with neo-noir and, in a wider sense, youth-orientated postmodernist cinema to explore female desire and

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romantic expectation in a manner more typical of the postmodernist romantic comedy or melodrama. The third key factor which suggests that the text is consciously attempting to reach a wider, cross-gender audience is its approach to verbal abuse and explicit violence. One way in which the increasingly parodic and derivative neo-noirs of the early 1990s attempted to revive the genre’s flagging fortunes was to include increasingly graphic depictions of sex and violence. At the same time, the popularity of new directors like Tarantino and the new mode of popular postmodernist filmmaking was bound up with censorship wrangles concerning the levels of violence in films such as Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers (Stone, 1994) or Pulp Fiction. In short, for around the past fifteen years, the emergence of ‘popular’ postmodernist cinema has been strongly identified with debates about escalating levels of on-screen violence. Many critics were particularly disturbed by the way in which the vernacular wit and charm displayed by the leading characters in these texts (with whom the audience is encouraged to identify) went hand-in-hand with an extraordinary capacity for brutality and astonishing levels of misogyny and homophobia (Taubin, 1992). Popular postmodernist texts – such as Reservoir Dogs or Scorcese’s Goodfellas (1990) – revel in a mode of ‘tough-guy’ masculinity that offends and alienates many viewers. In contrast, while Out of Sight celebrates certain traditionally masculine virtues – namely, honesty, loyalty, and a chivalrous respect for women – scenes of graphic violence are kept to a minimum. Although the film has an undercurrent of menace, this kind of action tends to take place off-screen or in muted form; thus the scene in which the inept petty criminal Glen takes part in a bloody, drug-related assault – probably the nastiest event in the film – is hazy and dreamlike. However, what is also striking about Out of Sight’s depiction of violence is the way in which it is also strongly informed by racial difference. The film features a range of non-white characters – including a Hispanic female protagonist and Foley’s conscience-ridden Afro-American sidekick, Buddy, but a clear distinction is drawn between the lovable petty-criminals (Buddy, Glen and Foley) and the sadistic gang led by ‘Snoop’, the black boxer. In his analysis of classical noir, Julian Murphet (1989) draws attention to what he describes as noir’s racial unconscious, that is, the relation between noir’s pervading sense of darkness and danger and the film’s racial logic. Murphet points to the black migration to northern industrial cities and the development of Afro-American street culture throughout the first part of the century as an important – if rarely acknowledged – socio-historical background which frames the aesthetic and thematic

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preoccupations of classical noir. Viewed in this context, the white hero’s experience of the urban street as a dangerous, alien space suggests a subliminal textual recognition of this shift in the cultural/ethnic landscape which is also manifested in noir’s distinctive lighting effects. Noir is often understood in relation to the rise of the ‘independent’ woman and women’s increased economic opportunity, but Murphet also argues for the interrelation of gender/race in the constitution of classical noir’s paranoic, individualist framework. He states: What I am going to call a racial unconscious can be seen to determine certain symptomatic effects. Noir’s excessive sexism suggests an illegitimate subtext of racist polemics which, I am arguing, is alluded to by the absence of woman from the spatial seme of the street. It is an absence which masks another, deeper absence. (Murphet, 1989: 26) Thus, in Murphet’s view, the figure of woman in classical noir is overburdened by the weight of white male anxieties concerning both racial and sexual difference. The idea of race as an unconscious presence in classical noir is a useful starting point for considering the interrelation of gender/race in recent noir variants. As I indicated earlier, many of the recent neo-noirs feature Afro-American characters in prominent roles; indeed, Jackie Brown and Out of Sight have relationships between white men and ethnic women at their core. This dynamic as I will argue below, is also foregrounded in Bigelow’s 1995 tech-noir, Strange Days. Furthermore, in all three films, the non-white female protagonist is awarded a level of intelligence and depth of character denied to the one-dimensional, white ‘killer bimbos’ of the previous neo-noir cycle. But if ethnic women now function as street-wise heroines in recent crime fiction, and are depicted as smart, sassy and upwardly mobile, black men are often relegated to the roles of pimp, drug pusher or minor gang member. In Out of Sight the line between lovable rogue and sadistic gangster or rapist is sharply drawn between the chivalrous Foley and Snoop’s mainly black gang (the one white member is overweight and incompetent rather than evil); black men are either cuddly and subservient (Buddy) or menacing and dangerous. The film even goes so far as to depict the suave Foley rescuing Sisco from the threat of sexual violence at the hands of the scary black criminal. Similarly, in Jackie Brown one of the more complex and unusually sympathetic representations of a struggling black, working-class heroine in recent years is offset by Samuel L. Jackson’s familiar portrayal of the scary black gangster abusing his white ‘ho’.

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The repressed threat of black street culture which, in Murphet’s argument, functions as an unacknowledged backdrop to classical noir becomes all too apparent in these texts. Similarly, Clooney’s depiction of Foley (extended in his performances in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, 2001 and Ocean’s Twelve, 2004) appropriates the ‘hipness’ of black criminality identified by critics such as Susan Fraiman and particularly associated with Tarantino’s films, but without the menace (Fraiman, 2003). Similarly, in 1998 J. Lo was still sufficiently ‘street’ to add noirish credibility without carrying the more negative associations of black street culture for white audiences. As Chris Holmlund argues in her analysis of the film, although the discourse of filmic post-feminism is usually associated with white, middle-class heroines, the blend of female professionalism and (selfconscious) romance fantasy adheres to the pattern established by earlier female-orientated post-feminist, postmodernist texts (Holmlund, 2005: 118). The significant gender difference in neo-noir’s racial dynamics may at some level also register the recent US cultural phenomenon in which young black women are increasingly moving up the social scale – achieving educationally and securing professional jobs – while their male counterparts slide further down. As in recent British discussions concerning the gap between the educational achievements of boys and girls, debates on unequal gender achievement are often informed by the sexist assumption that it is peculiar and undesirable for females of any class or ethnic group to out-achieve males (Garrett, 1997: 137). Nevertheless, the marked difference in representations of black men and women in recent postmodernist cinema suggests that while the cultural representation of the female figure is becoming increasingly varied and complex, encompassing and connecting a range of social and cultural ideas and fantasies, in this genre at least, the figure of the young black male functions in a traditional racist rather than ironic manner, as the amoral criminal other of mainstream society, and, in particular as a threat to white women. Indeed, in Out of Sight and Jackie Brown upwardly mobile black women are seen to choose older white men over younger black men on precisely these grounds, rationalising such racist stereotyping through its association with a ‘progressive’ attitude towards gender relations. However, as I also want to suggest in relation to my next example of contemporary noir, although Out of Sight projects the worst male behaviour onto young black men, the text’s overall treatment of masculinity correlates with a wider tendency in which men are depicted as struggling to retain power or come to terms with a culture in which male authority is no longer taken for granted.

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Tech-Noir, cyberpunk and masculinity In the second of the two noir hybrids – Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (Bigelow, 1995) – the ‘problem’ of male identity in the late twentieth century is also pushed to the forefront of the text. But what is also interesting about Strange Days is the way in which questions of subjectivity, race and gender are addressed through its metacritical thematic concern with the cinematic apparatus itself. Strange Days, is also, in many ways, a more specifically noirish example of tech-noir, a subcycle of 1990s scifi-noir blends, than many of the dystopian big-budget, techno-action movies which initially attracted this label. Associated with Terminator and Aliens director James Cameron (who provided the screenplay), Strange Days attempts to integrate the more complex, existential elements of noir into the bleak, futuristic urban backdrop commonly found in many recent tech-noir blockbusters. In this respect, Bigelow clearly aspires towards the kind of subtle scifi-noir genre blending most successfully demonstrated in that quintessential postmodernist classic, Blade Runner. One of the reasons why Blade Runner remains a key postmodernist film is that it is a rare example of a text which not only blends different genres, but also brings together the aesthetic techniques associated with postmodernist film (genre blending, the ironic re-invention of the noir hero) with a thoughtful, critical exploration of the broader philosophical and socio-economic implications of ‘the postmodern condition’. Like Blade Runner (1982), Strange Days is also an example of extrapolative, dystopian sci-fi which mixes the intratextual interest in postmodern technologies and consumer culture with the aesthetic sophistication and self-consciousness of many neo-noir texts.5 However, as a film made in the late 1990s, it also goes much further than Blade Runner in reexamining the figure of the white, male noir detective. As I have already suggested, from a feminist perspective, one of the most interesting developments in the more obviously derivative forms of neo-noir throughout the late 1980s and 1990s was the progressive disempowerment of the male protagonist. As the cycle developed this figure was slowly eclipsed by the femme fatale, becoming increasingly ridiculous or marginal (Basic Instinct, The Last Seduction). In Strange Days, the white, male protagonist, Lenny Nero, is clearly the focal point of the narrative, yet he is also a genuine loser (the name implies both decadence and a play on ‘no hero’). Tarnished by his sleazy porn-merchant lifestyle, rejected by one woman and infantilised by another, Nero is a far cry from the romantic antiheroism of Blade Runner’s Deckard (Harrison Ford), and provides an alternative to the overt machismo of many recent cyberpunk film heroes.

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As some feminist critics have noted, popular filmic cyberpunk tends to reproduce highly conventional gender roles in a futuristic high-tech context where they need no longer exist, arguing that cyberpunk’s enthusiasm for polarised gender differences, often based on archaic notions of physical difference suggests a deep seated reluctance to address the possibilities that the exploration of ‘virtual’ space or prosthetic body enhancement offers for freeing the human species from biologically based gender distinctions.6 For example, in her comprehensive overview of cyberpunk novels and films, Claudia Springer argues that far from erasing or undermining oppressive modes of sexual difference, there is a strong strand in cyberpunk cinema which revels in overblown, almost cartoonish representations of cybernetically enhanced masculinity and femininity. Popular films such as Robocop (Verhoeven, 1987) and The Terminator are obvious examples of this tendency towards the exaggeration of gendered features and, in particular, the accentuation of male physical power (Springer, 1996: 95–124). Even in filmic representations of virtual space, where ‘real’ bodies are shed, cerebral power frequently takes on a human shape with heightened sexual characteristics. Thus, in relatively early examples of cinematic cyberpunk – such as The Lawnmower Man (Leonard, 1992) – the feeble and childlike Jobe is transformed – in cyberspace – into ‘cyberbeefcake’, taking on the muscular shape associated with steroid-enhanced bodybuilders. This gendered approach to cinematic cyberspace was, in some respects, inherited from the work of popular cyberpunk writers such as Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. Although Gibson and Sterling do not envisage the ‘external’ physical enhancement of the body in cyberspace, cyberpunk fiction developed the concept of cyberspace as a space to be ‘jacked into’ by cyber ‘cowboys’; an amorphous ‘feminine’ space which provides the backdrop for male adventure and conquest much in the manner of the Wild West or noir’s mean streets.7 Thus in cyberpunk ‘classics’, such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984), hero Case is a direct descendent of the cynical, hard-boiled noir hero. Like the noir hero, cyberpunk cowboys frequently take a beating and are at the mercy of more powerful forces, yet still remain the focus of moral authority and primary figure for reader identification. In Springer’s view, the popularisation of this masculine conception of cyberspace is particularly ironic given that, unlike the heavy industrial machines of the mechanical age (which did at least lend themselves to fictionalised fantasies of masculine potency and energy), the most advanced areas of (post) modern technology tend to be small and smart rather than big and bulky. In everyday usage electronic microcircuitry and computer technology make for an obsolete, or at least rather underused,

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body. By an extraordinary sleight of hand, cyberpunk manages to remake the computer ‘nerd’ into an agile, hard-boiled hero. As Springer puts it: ‘Cyberpunk fiction explicitly transforms the passivity induced by electronic technology into forceful energy’ (Springer, 1996: 73). Springer’s 1996 critique of contemporary cyberpunk/sci-fi echoes many of the early points made by Creed in her analysis of neo-noir and postmodernist science fiction in 1989. Like Creed, Springer views much contemporary cyberpunk cinema as driven by a patriarchal fear that advanced technologies – such as artificial intelligence or cybernetic body enhancement – will progressively undermine the superior status awarded to male minds and bodies. If early ‘body horror’ registered this through a warped vision of the female reproductive system and the fear of what Creed describes as ‘becoming woman’ (through penetration of the male body, grotesque depictions of alien gestation and birth and so on), in Springer’s view, filmic cyberpunk compensates for this potential loss of masculine power by imagining new technologies in hypermasculine form, that is, through muscular cyborgs, or exaggerated ‘virtual’ sexual difference. This analysis still provides a powerful explanation of the blatant gynophobia manifested in some recent films. David Cronenburg’s Existenze (Cronenburg, 1998) provides a textbook example of the kind of gynecological, body-horror misogyny which Creed detected in the director’s work ten years earlier. Similarly, in The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999), although the hard, muscular shape favoured by earlier cyberheroes has been somewhat scaled down to human form, the conquest of cyberspace still relies on the mastery of combat skills and physical agility defined in masculine terms. Nevertheless, as with neo-noir, there have also been significant shifts in the production of tech-noir and more general sci-fi texts which problematise the rather bleak view developed by Creed (1987) and later Springer. For example the Alien series – Alien (Scott, 1979), Aliens (Cameron, 1982) Alien 3 (Fincher, 1992) and Alien Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997) – on which Creed bases much of her analysis, has become more informed by feminist values with each sequel. The trademark, reproductive body-horror imagery still dominates the series, its horrified fascination with the reproductive capacity of the female body is consistently undercut by the equally central presence of an unusually strong, intelligent female protagonist and the films’ thematic critique of male-dominated techno-science. Thus in the most recent addition to the series the two female characters are the clear repository of ‘humane’ values, united against the perverse male desire to control and manipulate human and alien reproduction.

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In a similar manner, Bigelow’s Strange Days blends aspects of cyberpunk with a female-led critique of the tech-noir universe. One of the most striking aspects of this film is the way in which it explores the notion of ‘becoming woman’ through identification and empathy rather than gynophobic repulsion or the compensatory machismo of filmic cyberpunk. Focusing on the figure of a failed professional (ex-cop), who seems slightly bemused by his loss of status and authority, Lenny Nero is closer to the weak, incompetent protagonists of recent neo-noir than the cyberspace warriors of films such as The Matrix. However, rather than staging what Creed describes as ‘the loss of paternal authority’ (Creed, 1987: 52) through either male victimisation or re-empowerment, Strange Days moves towards rapprochement and a more willing white, male recognition of other subjectivities. The film’s interest in exploring different subject positions is foregrounded through its central techno-motif SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) or ‘playback’. Unlike many cyberpunk/tech-noir texts – which are concerned with digital/computer-based technologies – ‘playback’ is essentially an extension of the cinematic experience itself, a wireless device for taping and replaying ‘real’ events with an added dimension of also recording the subject’s physical and mental responses. This frees Strange Days from the problem that many filmic cyberpunk texts have in attempting to convey visually the vertiginous excitement of the bodiless human form ‘jacking into’ cyberspace. While this works surprisingly well in popular fiction – where readers can supplement the rather broad and unspecific descriptions offered by writers such as Gibson – visual representations in which three dimensional figures cavort in cyberspace (such as Tron, directed by Lisberger in 1982 or The Lawnmower Man), often appear crude in comparison to the spectacle of even low-grade special effects in non-computer-based action forms. It is perhaps not too surprising that one of the more acclaimed recent cyberspace texts – The Matrix – circumvents this problem by depicting the cyberspace matrix as a complete simulation of late twentieth century urban life which those within accept as real. Similarly, while Strange Days attempts to emphasise differences between video/TV and SQUID/playback, its proximity to these media allow for the plausible depiction of playback within conventional cinema. More importantly, in terms of the film’s status as postmodernist noir, this proximity also gives it a self-conscious metalinguistic edge which opens up questions concerning cinema, spectatorship and gender. What is particularly intriguing here is the contrast between the film’s intradiegetic plotline – which attempts to uphold a classical distinction

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between true experience and ‘false’ images – and the film’s own status as an exemplary form of all-action playback. Set in an apocalyptic, alternative present, Strange Days associates playback technology with the sleazier side of unlimited consumption. Although Nero’s latent decency is suggested by his unwillingness to deal in snuff ‘clips’, both the encounters with potential customers – one involving a middle-aged Japanese businessman, the other a prurient lawyer – present it as a technologically superior means of serving up seedy male fantasies and exploiting and objectifying women. Initially at least, playback appears to reinforce the conventional opposition between male voyeurism and female display.8 Lenny, in particular, is defined through his preference for the visual – as ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliet Lewis) comments ‘I love your eyes Lenny, I love the way they see’. Both Lenny and Faith are corrupted by playback; he is unable to sustain ‘real’ relationships, Faith becomes obsessed by her own image, tending to appear either on stage, in playback, or in front of a mirror. There is also a marked contrast between her initial waif-like naturalistic ‘playback’ appearance, in which she and Lenny go roller-skating (one of the rare clips that takes place in daylight) and subsequent scenes, in which the hardened, cynical ‘post-playback’ Faith has become part of the demi-monde – heavily sexualised, constantly pouting and striking sultry poses. While this serves to highlight Lenny’s misguided faith in the ironically named, chameleonlike anti-heroine, it also reinforces the notion that playback and, by extension, other forms of reproductive apparatus inevitably lead to a distorted, alienated female identity. The relationship the film establishes between female objectification and playback is also reinforced through the contrast between Nero’s friend and protector Mace (Angela Bassett) and the vulnerable playback users, Faith and Iris. Mace’s stern disapproval of and unwillingness to experiment with playback technology is consistently linked to her level headedness, her ability to cope under pressure and willingness to earn an honest crust. As a struggling, black single mother, Mace occupies a privileged position within the narrative; while the other female figures are reckless and selfdestructive. Mace rises above the sleazy culture in which other characters are immersed, continually berating Nero as a porn merchant who deals in ‘second-hand’ memories. It is no coincidence that Mace is the only character whose real memories – as opposed to artificially constructed playback reproductions – are shared with the viewer. The fact that the memory sequence recounts a genuine first-hand trauma, in which her husband, the father of her child, is dragged into police custody, further accentuates her ‘privileged’ status as a survivor of real oppression. While wealthy men

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safely experience the dangers of the urban underworld through the traumatic experiences of others, Mace’s miseries are externally imposed by a racist, sexist social order. In this sense, Mace is awarded a degree of ‘authenticity’ and depth of character denied to the other characters. This figure is also a familiar aspect of the fictional worlds of tech-noir, cyberpunk and cyborg fantasies. Representations of the cyberpunk/technoir action woman range from the prosthetically/surgically enhanced (such as William Gibson’s Molly Millions) through to the more moderate muscular frame displayed by Mace, Ripley or The Terminator’s Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). As Claudia Springer points out, despite their apparent strength, what these brittle figures tend to have in common is a personal history of abuse and victimisation: One scenario that has emerged with remarkable frequency is that of the cybernetic woman who seeks revenge for the emotional and sexual abuse she suffered as a child or young woman. She is simultaneously one of the most compelling and one of the most problematic figures in Cyberpunk, for her appeal on a feminist level is frequently undermined by her conventional patriarchal presentations … Whether she has been hardwired or not, her speed and decisiveness figure a computer’s abilities. Her former passivity has been replaced with swift aggression. (Springer, 1996: 135) The marked contrast between the pink waitress uniform Mace sports during the police-raid memory sequence and her masculine, leather-clad appearance in subsequent scenes, suggests that she has undergone this transformation, but her anger is that of the maternal tigress rather than the embittered rape victim. Similarly, in her discussion of Strange Days, Yvonne Tasker links Mace’s role in the film to the wider depiction of ‘muscular maternal’ figures in recent action movies (Tasker, 1998: 69). The most famous example of this concerns another waitress turned warrior heroine – that of Sarah Connor’s metamorphosis from scatty youth to hardened killing machine and protector of the race in The Terminator. Mace’s and Connor’s toughness is, like the victims of sexual abuse, justified through its association with an updated version of traditional notions of feminine virtue also manifested in the postmodernist melodrama. Violated women and protective mothers are permitted the expression of rage and anger to a degree which would be unacceptable in other circumstances. However, in Strange Days the representation of the angry warrior woman is also bound up with the film’s attempt to address other social

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issues, particularly the endemic racism of American culture. Not just a mother but a strong, black single mother, Mace symbolises an authenticity linked to the black community and the protest movement led by Jeriko One. Like the film’s depiction of female strength, its depiction of the strong single mother is somewhat ambivalent. Although Mace is defined ‘positively’ in comparison to the superficial, flighty white characters (particularly the women), she is also painfully earnest, defined wholly by her anger and made virtuous by suffering.9 Mace’s function as a socially, historically grounded anchor point in an ephemeral, chaotic world reflects the film’s wider postmodern concern with the hedonistic excesses of late twentieth-century consumer culture and authentic and inauthentic modes of being. As I suggested earlier, the film’s intradiegetic plotline establishes a distinction between real experience and the shallow world of playback which is closely associated with the exploitation of women. For example, the scene in which Nero demands a more convincing sexual performance from his female playback porn stars is followed by a tense chase sequence in which the barely dressed Iris is aggressively pursued by two male police officers. This is typical of the way in which the scene draws the connection between the distanced pleasures of male fantasy and the real terrors that result from female objectification and powerlessness. Yet, at another level, the text also suggests more interesting possibilities concerning the relationship between gender/subjectivity and representation that contradict its rather pious rejection of playback (and thus, by extension, cinema itself). Firstly, there are obviously problems with the notion of playback as distinguished from conventional film or television. Despite Nero’s sales pitch comment – ‘forget all that crap about it being like TV but better’ – playback is barely distinguishable from contemporary video technology. Its advanced ability to offer emotional/physical responses ‘cut straight from the cerebral cortex’ negates the obvious fact that conventional cinema has long been able to induce these kinds of visceral effects. As Alison Landsberg points out in her analysis of cyberpunk cinema and cultural anxiety about the loss of ‘real’ history/memory, even relatively early quantative assessments of cinema goers – such as the Payne Studies in the 1930s – established that changes in pulse rate, temperature, blood pressure and other ‘physiological disturbances’ were a routine physical responses experienced by filmgoers (Landsberg, 1995: 180). Ironically, Bigelow herself is a director celebrated for her superior ability to induce precisely these kinds of responses. Irrespective of the sexist bias which has helped to single her out as a woman working in what is

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still regarded as the masculine idiom of the action genre, Bigelow’s films do tend to privilege bizarre lighting effects, weird dream sequences, use of slow motion and unusual shots and angles over plot and characterisation. Thus in The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro begins his critique of cine-psychoanalysis by citing Blue Steel as a film so rich in awe-inspiring visual trickery that it illustrates the inadequacy of a theory based on lack when faced with the ‘fullness’ of the cinematic image: Bigelow pushes the action film’s tired formulas to a point of delirious frenzy through specifically cinematographic means. Blue Steel is a perverse and powerfully stylised exercise in visual excess. (Shaviro, 1993: 2) Strange Days is less successful in its use of experimental aesthetic techniques than Blue Steel, but it is certainly stylised enough to cast doubt upon the film’s surface plotline opposition between genuine first-hand experience and superficial, dangerous, thrill-inducing reproductive technologies. There is something rather disingenuous about a film which attempts to lecture the audience about the dangers of vicarious identification and the seductive allure of the visual image while simultaneously working to engage the spectator through the full range of sophisticated visual effects. The film therefore connects with forms such as the postmodernist romantic comedy and costume drama by containing, in this case, a tacit acknowledgement that while living within the ‘postmodern condition’ may heighten the desire for ‘real’ experience, for raw historical accounts or uncorrupted passion, unmediated by the intrusive presence of fantasy and fictional devices, postmodernist self-consciousness highlights the way in which our understanding and evaluation of subjective experience, relationships and past events are, and have always been, filtered through dominant cultural fictions and discursive structures. Furthermore, there is also much in Strange Days which suggests that, far from constraining our experiences, reproductive technologies enhance perception by allowing viewers to experience the consciousness of ‘the other’. If playback encourages its users to retreat into a fantasy world, to objectify and exploit women and, in its most horrifying form, heighten a serial killer’s excitement, it also, like cinema, offers a means of accessing other subjectivities and modes of experience through visual images and emotions. This possibility is addressed in tantalising ways throughout the text. For example, although we witness the killing of Jeriko One via Mace’s experience of a white woman’s consciousness, the sequence does not

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explicitly draw attention to the implications of this. Similarly, the scene in which Nero’s wheelchair-user friend taps into the physical and mental sensations of an able bodied jogger closes ambiguously, his response suggesting both pleasure and a heightened awareness of his real physical deprivation. However, it is in relation to gender issues that Strange Days adopts a more experimental approach to playback. In the scene in which Nero describes the erotic possibilities of playback to a potential male client, his Faustian speech, ‘ I’m your priest, your shrink ‘and so forth, concludes his list of playback goodies with the promise that the male attorney can ‘be a girl’. In the following scene, we see him writhing in pleasure during a teenage girl’s shower clip. At first glance the scene appears to conform to the usual porno trope in which the male gaze fetishes female auto-erotism. But there is a significant difference between the external, objectifying gaze (requiring distance) and the more experiential shift in gender consciousness displayed here. Given the emphasis in many cyberpunk and tech-noir films on the desperate preservation of an accentuated form of masculinity or the disgust and gynophobia activated by the threat of ‘becoming woman’, this willingness to explore the feminine in close proximity and to embody ‘the other’ suggests a willing suspension of male power which is absent from many cyberpunk and indeed, noir texts. William Gibson’s Neuromancer is exemplary in this respect, for while it includes a technical device which is remarkably similar to playback (known in the text’s vernacular as ‘stim-stim’ or stimulated-stimulus) as Springer and other feminist critics have commented, Gibson studiously circumvents any issues around gender cross-identification which might have arisen in the text, even in passages in which the male ‘cybercowboy’ (Case) ‘switches’ directly into the consciousness of Molly Millions for fairly lengthy periods of time. In contrast, the treatment of playback in Strange Days seems unable to avoid this issue. Along with the more obvious interest in cross-gender sexuality, the text’s suspense/thriller plot requires that male characters simultaneously experience a horrifying murder from the perspective of both male killer and female victim. The scene in which Nero witnesses and experiences the killing of prostitute Iris is a turning point in the film, his split identification leading to a more enlightened view of women as he recoils from identification with killer and experiences Iris’s pain and terror. The film explores the possibility of ‘becoming woman’ through an emphathy based on experience rather than disgust or horror. The ‘victim’ role is not, as in Creed’s analysis, expelled, rejected and turned back

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upon the victim as hostility, but brought directly into the male protagonist’s consciousness, becoming a starting point for empathy and identification. In a more general, non-genre-specific sense, the unavoidable implications of playback as analogy of cinema itself undercut the film’s overt denigration of the form and the association it initially draws between visual representation and the exploitation and objectification of women. The film’s overall logic implies that while video technologies may well allow for the degradation and objectification of others they can also be very effective at allowing the viewer access to other modes of subjectivity and experience. Although this is always mediated by the spectator’s own subject position, as the film suggests, it is nevertheless an extraordinarily powerful means of addressing or re-addressing the perceptions of others. Interestingly, even at the localised plot/suspense level of the text, playback is morally ambivalent, used as both an instrument of torture by the murderer, Max (heightening the victim’s terror by feeding it back to them) yet it also provides the key piece of evidence which finally exposes the racist killers to the higher ranks of the LAPD. Despite its unsatisfactory conclusion which re-establishes power in the ‘legitimate’ hands of an older white male police chief – Strange Days generally works against the filmic cyberpunk and noir preoccupation with either restoring male authority or lamenting its decline. As in Out of Sight, there is a sense of rapprochement, of mutual respect and enlightenment between the weakened male hero and female heroine. Creed’s analysis of the misogynistic fear of ‘becoming woman’ captured a dominant mood in the late 1980s and early 1990s cinema which can be linked to both the philosophical concern with the postmodern crisis of power, knowledge and authority, and, at the level of political and cultural debate, a Right wing backlash against feminism. Manifested through the figure of the vilified femme fatale of early neonoir, many popular texts of this period draw a crude link between male instability, family breakdown and women’s increased educational, social and sexual power. However, even within neo-noir, the initial admonishment of the erring female soon gives way to a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the cartoonish female villainess. Furthermore, the later examples discussed here work against Creed’s dire prognosis for popular postmodernist forms. Although Out of Sight and Strange Days are still preoccupied with the loss of paternal authority, the blame is not projected onto castrating female figures in the manner of early neo-noirs but on the reckless behaviour exhibited by anti-heroes such as Jack Foley and Lenny Nero.

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If early 1990s neo-noir derived much from the backlash culture of the American Right, more recent noirs connect feminist critiques of masculinity with the older notions of female moral supremacy. Although sympathetically drawn, the two male protagonists in question, an ageing bank-robber with no formal qualifications and a sleazy, porn merchant, unable to hold down a reasonable job are relatively disempowered. In this manner, Strange Days and Out of Sight depict men as unable to function effectively in the postmodern world. Conversely, and in sharp opposition to the demonisation of women in early neo-noir, their female counterparts are depicted as hardworking, responsible citizens, bringing together the previously domesticated figure of the woman as moral saviour with a positive portrayal of the working woman. In their recognition of female strength and ingenuity these films capture and narrativise a wider shift in attitudes towards shifting gender/ power roles, connecting these with noir’s more traditional concerns with white male authority and the fear of urban crime and lawlessness. While classical noirs situated the male detective as the agent of moral authority, both Out of Sight and Strange Days confer this privilege on street-wise ethnic women. In Strange Days, in particular, the depiction of Mace as female vigilante is specifically connected to an older, melodramatic ethic of female victimhood and moral supremacy which is also present in the postmodernist melodrama. What is particularly striking about these recent crime fiction/noir variants is their generic debt to the codes and conventions of the new female-associated filmic forms. Alongside the inclusion of the melodramatic ‘woman as redeemer’ figure and the priority awarded to social bonds and relationships, these neo-noirs amalgamate the codes and conventions of recent (nominally) female-orientated fiction with stylistic elements common to the ‘male-orientated’ postmodernist noir influenced crime fiction of the early 1990s.

Conclusion Fiftiesness Revisited: Desperate Housewives on the Big Screen

Much of the recent academic and critical work on memory and history assumes that we are in the grip of a cultural ‘memory crisis’. Traditional ‘macro’ sources of historical knowledge have become – post-Lyotard and post postmodernism – viewed as suspect grand narratives, often skewered towards maintaining existing power relations of gender, race and class. Yet the veracity of subjective accounts and lived experience has also been undermined by psychoanalytic approaches to memory. An increased attentiveness to the complex operations of the memory, particularly the subject’s capacity to suppress and repress unwelcome memories and to perpetually work over past material in the light of contemporary feelings and experiences, has cast doubt even over eye witness accounts. As I argued in the chapter on costume drama, literary historiographic metafictions address these contemporary concerns by integrating the critique of both broader socio-historical accounts and personal testimony into the very fabric of their narrative structures and strategies. In literary postmodernism, the metafictional return to history eschews both realist objectivity and modernist subjectivism in favour of the selfconsciously mediated approach to history typified by the work of many popular contemporary writers such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan or Rose Tremain. But the predominance of the visual in cinematic representations (rather than language or thought processes) inevitably draws attention towards costume and interiors and historically based films are still referred to, in a slightly disparaging sense that links them to the female audience, as ‘costume’ dramas. Like the negative association between tears, the matinee audience and the female melodrama, the generic tag carries the burden of its association with women viewers: the costume drama remains a genre that is condemned for its preoccupation with feminine fripperies at the expense of a purer notion of historical authenticity. 189

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But historically based dramas can hardly avoid displaying material objects from the known past, such as clothing and furniture. Rather than attempting to attach less significance to these, the recent, ‘interrogative’ mode of costume drama – films such as The Piano, Orlando or The Hours, integrate the meaning of such signifiers of status, wealth and sexual difference into the overall narrative framework. For example, Orlando and The Piano are among a handful of costume dramas that actually depict their heroines struggling with restrictive and cumbersome clothing rather than gliding gracefully along apparently unaware that there bodies are encased in whalebone corsets or crinolines. Costume and interiors shift from sumptuous background to a consciously foregrounded visual element that enhances – rather than detracts from – our perception of past class and gender relations. Such films therefore successfully problematise the distinction between a glossy, ‘middle-brow’ heritage cinema (that fawns over antiques and bustles) and a warts-and-all treatment of the past that does not dwell on such inauthentic ‘feminine’ pleasures. The issue of historical authenticity becomes even more problematic in relation to cinematic representations of the recent past. Debates on the perceived memory crisis have evolved hand in hand with the development of modern technologies of visual reproduction and the twentieth/ twenty-first-century dominance of visual media forms such as photography, film and television. The shadow of the Frankfurt school’s early twentieth-century analysis of the rise of reproductive technologies is apparent in more recent discussions of historical representation. Benjamin’s early critique of mechanical reproduction viewed photography and film as ‘ghostly’ mediums, lacking the depth and weight of authentic art and the aura that made art historically meaningful (Benjamin, 1992). In a similar manner, Kracauer argued that new media technologies – particularly cinema – decontextualised and thus dehistorised the image (Kracauer, 1960). Jameson’s influential 1984 analysis of postmodernist forms echoed the Frankfurt school’s critique of popular culture, initially denouncing the popular postmodernist jumble of past images as essentially schizophrenic: a form that operated in a perpetual present. The nostalgia film was situated as the apotheosis of this schizoid ragbag of cultural images, a pastiche of generic forms that signified the past only through stylistic and formal features, offering no anchor point for insight or analysis. As I argued in Chapter 1, the development of a postmodernist cinematic practice, which is heavily reliant on prior forms, styles and genres, took place gradually throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The burgeoning self-conscious use of past references spawned the late 1970s and

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early 1980s action blockbuster, and the more obviously derivative nostalgia film, yet it also produced more innovative forms of self-conscious, small-budget independent cinema which both integrated and commented on older genres. In his later analysis of nostalgia, Jameson modified his critique to consider this more subversive treatment of the recent past in the work of postmodernist auteurs such as David Lynch and, in particular, the concept of fiftiesness in film texts such as Blue Velvet and Something Wild (Jameson, 1993). My opening discussion of debates on postmodernism, feminism and cinema reconsidered Jameson’s more positive view of these texts in the light of feminist critiques, and the way in which these films appeared to uncritically draw on past images of women which feminist found offensively anachronistic. In this final section I want to return to the issue of fiftiesness and consider a recent cluster of film texts – from the late 1990s onwards – which return to this much-mythologised decade. The chapter will consider the relatively rapid shift from the conservative idealisation of past gender roles in 1980s portrayals of the period to the obsessive concern with issues of race, class and gender manifested in more recent cinematic depictions of fiftiesness. Looking at the way in which new depictions of fiftiesness mediate current social concerns, I will focus on the preponderance of depictions of 1950s homemakers – the original ‘desperate’ housewives – and the way in which this figure is revisited through the now-familiar postmodernist tropes of generic homage, defamiliarisation and irony. The perceived crisis in our understanding of recent history derives much from the sheer volume of twentieth-century historical sources. The explosion of media production, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, provides an overwhelming and unmanageable excess of print, aural and visual media sources and cultural forms: an intensification of media output which is particularly associated with the 1950s. By the end of the decade, despite the continued popularity of cinema and radio, most homes in the US also owned a television. Alongside the increase of easily accessible media sources, in the US at least, a thriving economy and Fordist production techniques fuelled a consumer boom and a technological and aesthetic revolution. Although Western Europe did not fully enjoy the fruits of the Fordist consumer boom until the early 1960s, modern labour-saving devices, home furnishings, cars, clothes and popular music became the key signifiers of American cultural power and prestige from the early 1950s onwards. The popular understanding of ‘fiftiesness’ actually begins with the ‘feel-good’ era of prosperity and

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affluence ushered in with the election of Eisenhower and the end of the Korean War in 1953. These interrelated socio-cultural phenomenon – burgeoning media output and a world of shiny, stylish new objects – feeds directly into the popular notion of ‘fiftiesness’, making the decade, or rather a self-consciously cliched notion of it, a tempting subject for postmodernist plunder.

Postmodern fiftiesness in the 1980s By the 1980s, a new postmodernist media sensibility was beginning to redefine a wide range of 1950s-associated cultural objects – both material and cultural – as both ‘classic’ and fashionably retro. The global popularity of American sitcoms which showcased a specific, middle-class white version of suburban family life were particularly important in defining the 1980s interest in the period. As Jameson pointed out in his analysis of 1980s films, those dealing with the 1950s used the period’s own film and television output as their key visual and ideological reference point. They also exhibited an appreciative interest in contemporary cultural items such as clothes, music and cars. The 1980s boom in consumer choice, luxury products, ‘classic’ style and lifestyle accoutrements therefore fed directly into a cultural celebration of 1950s cultural forms and objects that was articulated as much through advertising (the ‘1950s’ Levi 501’s ads, for example) as popular film. Clearly, a filmic treatment of the recent past shot through with references to prior television and filmic forms differs greatly from the more limited cultural reference points available for costume dramas. The latter are frequently based on classic nineteenth-century novels and a relatively fixed range of furnishings, interiors and clothing whereas the former draws on an extraordinarily wide range of mid-twentieth-century visual, aural and narrative forms. This leads to the postmodernist phenomena noted by Jameson: a particular kind of 1980s ironic, intentionally fake fiftiesness that either parodies or celebrates the decade’s own clean-cut, small-town suburban vision of itself. Its clearest reference point was undoubtedly the ‘must-see’ television output of the period – specifically, the first situation comedies such as I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best. Again, this takes us back to the cultural significance of films such as Blue Velvet or David Lynch’s later and lengthier television reworking of the pseudo-1950s small town, the neo-gothic Twin Peaks. The apparent gothicism is only effective as a counterpoint to the sanitised image presented by popular television during the period. Similarly the celebratory and overtly nostalgic treatment of fiftiesness in

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Back to the Future draws much from the self-idealising view apparent in the 1950s television shows. As Vera Dika notes in her analysis of nostalgia films, the self-conscious reproduction of a particular kind of cosy, pre-permissive fiftiesness actually began in the late 1970s with the popularity of the long-running television sitcom Happy Days and the teen musical, Grease (Kleiser, 1978). Dika’s analysis of late 1970s fiftiesness also highlights the manner in which elements of 1950s male youth rebellion returned in the cuddly and non-threatening form of figures such as Danny Zuko (John Travolta) in Grease in the late 1970s (Dika, 2003: 122). The lovable naughtiness of 1950s male gang culture in Grease was a far cry from Marlon Brando’s menacing presence in The Wild Ones (Benedek, 1954) or the deep sense of youth alienation and frustration in Rebel without Cause (Ray, 1955). Given the emphasis on masculine prowess in these cult classics, their particular view of teen rebellion is not one that should necessarily be revisited. But the general ideological thrust of films such as Grease – and their sanitised view of 1950s teen rebellion – was a clear endorsement of a period depicted as more socially harmonious and community orientated than the post-permissive 1970s. Ethnicity is defined solely in terms of a smattering of non-threatening Italian–American characters and women are bound by the sexual double standard. The production of overtly celebratory, nostalgic 1950s-based films, such as Grease or Back to the Future, is thus clearly linked to the increasing power of the New Right and their attack on the perceived permissiveness and radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Films such as Blue Velvet, Something Wild or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me countered the idealised sitcom conception of fiftiesness with a dose of gothic nastiness. But rather than countering the sexist stereotyping of the latter, they also brought a new element of violent misogyny into the frame. The late 1990s onwards has witnessed the production of another cluster of films that are, to a greater or lesser extent, informed by the popular concept of televisual and filmic fiftiesness. These include films such as Far from Heaven (Haynes, 2002) and Mona Lisa Smile (Newell, 2003) (which are explicitly set in the 1950s), and Pleasantville (Ross, 1998) and The Stepford Wives (Oz, 2004) which draw on a more general sense of ‘fiftiesness’. I will also refer briefly back to the 1950s section of The Hours (discussed in more depth in the chapter on costume and period drama). Despite the conflicting tone of these films and their different generic reference points – melodrama, black comedy, the youth rebellion film and so on, there is a underlying structure of binary oppositions which recurs within recent representations of fiftiesness. All the films draw on some,

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if not all, of the following value-laded oppositions: social programming/ individualism, the repressive small town/urban tolerance, the domestic/ the public, real women/femininity as masquerade, television/modern art. In a more general sense, the films tend to pit an amorphous, ill-defined notion of middle-aged white male authority against youth, women, gays and blacks (although middle-aged white women are often the enforcers of this repressive regime).

From adolescent males to bored housewives: Fiftiesness revisited I want to begin by looking at Pleasantville (Ross, 1998), a film that explicitly draws on and opposes the notion of fiftiesness established in 1980s filmic treatment of the decade. By actually situating its story within a regressive, nostalgic television fantasy, Pleasantville adds another level of self-consciousness to the already culturally overloaded notion of fiftiesness. However, by making the television reference explicit rather than oblique (like many 1980s films that replicate these forms) Pleasantville opens the theme of fiftiesness up for more direct allegorical purposes, allowing for an allegorical encounter between past and present. In many ways the film is less about the contrast between 1950s and late 1990s politics and attitudes and more about the difference between 1980s ‘fiftiesness’ and more recent views of the period. The coming-of-age narrative interest in the expanding knowledge and power of a young, male protagonist mirrors both Back to the Future and Blue Velvet and the initial view of the television town is uncannily similar to the opening sequence of Lynch’s cult classic – here presented as pure simulacra. The Bakhtinian definition of the novelistic chronotope is also useful in explaining the preponderance of representations of small-town 1950s American. The concept of filmic fiftiesness is orientated around a particular spatial and temporal configuration. The visual signifiers associated with this chronotope, the white picket fence, sunny residential street, small-town square and main street produces a particular kind of narrative in which the environmental and social boundaries are tested and explored. In Blue Velvet the protagonist discovers the gothic underside to the apparently harmonious small-town community, whereas in Back to the future troubled adolescent Marty McFly goes back to the cinematically real (but heavily mythologised) small-town 1950s to find the functional middle-class family that he has always dreamed of. Pleasantville is as far removed from the ‘gothic’ oppositional postmodernist take on fiftiesness as it is from the more openly nostalgic,

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mainstream celebratory retro fantasy of Grease or Back to the Future. If gothic fiftiesness sets sleaze and sexual exploitation against social conformity, Pleasantville eschews the nasty underside of fiftiesness in favour of a utopian vision of freedom, tolerance and equality. Using a central metaphor of ‘black and white’ versus Technicolor, Pleasantville sets 1950s conformity – symbolised by the small town and the 1950s sitcom – against the richer, more complex but colourful world of the post-permissive era. The film’s somewhat implausible founding premise is that two teenage twins in the 1990s – a nerdy brother and his streetwise sister – find themselves trapped in the world of a 1950s black and white television town by a mystical TV repairman. Played by Don Knotts – a figure famously associated with the safe, sitcom world of 1950s television through his roles in The Steve Allen Show (1956–61) and The Andy Griffiths Show (1960–68) – the repairman rewards Bud for his enthusiasm for the mock-1950s soap by allowing him to relocate to Pleasantville. The film’s concern with the experiential limits of the town’s inhabitants overlaps with the thematic interests of The Truman Show, released the previous year (1998); Truman’s constructed world is also another version of ‘fiftiesness’, Jim Carrey’s acting style playfully mimics that of the lovable 1950s sitcom dad and the media-constructed town resembles Pleasantville’s vision of a bygone post-war civic paradise. However, unlike the Pleasantville inhabitants Truman is the solitary victim of sophisticated media hoax. The film’s central concerns are therefore the Orwellian themes of paranoia and alienation: it poses the existential question of whether it is better to live comfortably in bad faith or take the risk of individual ethical responsibility. Pleasantville also touches on the theme of security versus risk and integrity, but this is framed less in terms of big-brother style media manipulation (despite the constructed nature of the Pleasantville environment) than as a direct attack on what is clearly shown as the ‘mythical’ and nostalgic concept of 1950s community and security. Although the film draws humour from the sexual naivety and narrowness of the Pleasantville inhabitants, the key function of black and white sitcom/soap opera theme is to pull part, in an often painfully didactic manner, the unconscious conservatism upon which this particular nostalgic fantasy is built. The film cleverly begins by highlighting all the reasons why such a fantasy is attractive to modern audiences before slowly demolishing its appeal. The opening shots, which showcase a contemporary TV channel devoted to black and white programming, highlight the point that Pleasantville is not a rerun of an existing

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1950s show but a newly constructed, intentionally nostalgic version of this form. Pleasantville is specifically advertised as a programme that takes the viewer back to ‘a kinder gentler time’. To drive home this point, shots of the Pleasantville world of perfectly maintained lawns and white picket fences are sequenced by the diffident hero Bud (Tobey Maguire) standing alone in the vast playground of a modern high school, unable to successfully persuade an attractive young woman to date him. The film then cuts between various teachers lecturing kids on ecological disaster, the threat of sexual diseases and looming recession. David then returns home to find his single-parent mother (Jane Kaczmarek) preparing for a date and his slutty sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) planning to invite her boyfriend round to watch MTV; both women attempt to ignore his presence. David’s nerdy preoccupation with the warm-hearted family soap is thus narratively justified by everything we have witnessed up to the point at which he and Jen are mysteriously trapped inside Pleasantville. Aside from the odd joke about fat-laded 1950s recipes, the main thrust of the story from this point onwards is to expose the patriarchal and racist subtext of the all-white, male-dominated mock-1950s fantasy. Although David (now Bud) is ensconced in a conventional nuclear family with a servile, stay-at-home mother and a traditional 1950s sitcom dad, even he rapidly begins to find Pleasantville tedious and repressive. The contrast between monochrome and Technicolor is also obliquely linked to race politics with increasing references to the dangerous influences of colour and, eventually, ‘coloureds’. The Pleasantville inhabitants gain colour by acquiring knowledge, experience and emotional depth as the ‘non-changist’ view of history is challenged by the newcomers and new cultural forms, such as jazz, begin to make their mark. In a manner typical of the cluster of new 1950s films, the town is eventually divided into two hostile camps: colour is associated with women and youth, while the increasingly aggressive attempt to keep the town black and white (through book burning and the barring of ‘coloureds’ from certain areas of the town) is led by its white male elders. But despite its surface commitment to gender and racial equality there are aspects of the film that suggest a buried unease with the challenge to white male authority. Compared to 1980s treatments of fiftiesness – which either idealised it or countered it with violence and sexual abuse – the film clearly throws in its lot with the new social movements and identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s. On one level the film endorses the curiosity of youth and the burgeoning independence and sexual awareness

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of the female characters, yet on another female sexuality is registered as troubling and dangerous. For example, when Bud takes his new girlfriend to lover’s lane, her growing sexual awareness is symbolised by plucking a shiny red apple from the tree and handing it to Bud. In a similar manner, when Bud’s mother experiences her first (solitary) orgasm the tree outside her window ignites, a particularly dangerous occurrence as the town has never before encountered fire. This rather crude symbolism might be taken as parodying rather than endorsing the idea of female sexuality as dangerous and unruly were it not for the fact that the film applauds his controlling influence over both his new girlfriend and his on- and off-screen mothers. Although Bud is nominally sympathetic to his Pleasantville mother’s growing independence, he also encourages her to cover her face in white make-up to conceal the colour produced by her sexual awakening. In a more symbolic sense, Bud’s mother is made to bear the brunt of Pleasantville’s hostility to coloureds. The town’s final descent into violence is actually triggered by the hostile ‘white’ mob catching sight of the diner-owner, Mr Johnson’s colourful, impressionistic nude portrait of the housewife and mother. Bud then steps in to protect his screen mother from the braying crowd, an act that she rewards with copious tears and much gratitude. Not only is Bud’s mother punished for her sexuality, but her on-screen son is finally placed in the powerful role of her protector while his inadequate screen father (William.H. Macy) is excluded from the new, ‘coloured’ family unit. More significantly, when David returns to his real mother, the power relations in the family are also reversed. As she sits sobbing at the table, David wipes away her tears and make-up in a scene that echoes his earlier encounter with his Pleasantville mother. Bud’s on-screen mother is encouraged to disguise her sexual awakening with white powder, yet his real mother’s removal of make-up signifies her decision to give up her boyfriend and commit to the family unit. Furthermore, Jen, Bud’s once promiscuous sister also renounces her sexuality and decides to continue her college education in Pleasantville, convinced that returning to the present/real world would only encourage her to go back to her bad old, slutty ways. Despite paying lip service to more enlightened attitudes, the treatment of Bud’s sister and his on- and offscreen mothers suggests the lingering influence of a polarised view of women in which overt sexual behaviour cannot be easily combined with either maternal feelings or intelligence. Pleasantville is therefore less about challenging male authority than challenging its older and more obvious manifestations. It is no coincidence

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that by the end of the film David/Bud has managed to oust the old TV repairman, his ineffectual, on-screen father and his real mother’s boyfriend. In Pleasantville the nerdy, powerless David gains an attractive girlfriend and wins the respect and admiration of mother and his now appropriately chaste sister. To this extent Pleasantville is as much of an oedipal 1950s fantasy as Back to the future or Blue Velvet, in which the heroic young male also rescues the mother figure, wins the girl and beats off the male competition. Yet it also registers a more sceptical cultural attitude towards white, male authority that demands that other forms of subjectivity are, at least to some extent, recognised and acknowledged. If Pleasantville reworks the male oedipal fantasy via a structure of contemporary identity politics and attitudes, Far from Heaven, The Stepford Wives and Mona Lisa Smile are more clearly aimed at the female audience. It is not surprising then that the articulation of fiftiesness in these films is particularly focused on the post-war idealisation of female domesticity. If the symbolic figure of 1980s fiftiesness is the male teen rebel, the dominant figure in more recent treatments of the decade is undoubtedly the suburban 1950s homemaker, a term which has become synonymous with the notion of the ‘Stepford Wife’. Indeed, to emphasise this point the recent remake of The Stepford Wives begins with secession of clips from past television adverts, old films and women’s lifestyle programmes, many of which hail from the 1950s. This is echoed by an almost identical array of images in the closing credits of Mona Lisa Smile. Along with images of fashion and glamour (catwalks or expensively dressed women splayed out on sports cars) both sequences show a high proportion of clips depicting women gasping with delight at new kitchen appliances or slaving joyfully over husbands and children. The Stepford Wives sequence is accompanied by the mock-horror soundtrack that sets the tone for the film’s camp reworking of the original Stepford Wives, while in Mona Lisa Smile a clip from Joseph Santely’s famous 1944 wartime propaganda documentary Rosie the Riveter (in which a female manual worker promises to give up her job for a man when the war finishes) is followed by a similar collage of shots of beaming brides, bathing beauties, models and housewives, overlaid by Elton John singing a patronising little ditty about what every girl dreams of (At the Heart of Every Girl). As in Pleasantville, the treatment of the housewife and mother figure is a complex combination of hostility and sympathy. Todd Haynes’s lavish Sirkian pastiche, Far from Heaven illustrates the confusion and discomfort that circulates around this familiar figure. As Pam Cook has pointed out,

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many critics viewed Haynes’s homage to Sirk as an aesthetic triumph but a spiritual and emotional failure, the sumptuous period styling and faultless reproduction of Sirkian mise-en-scene only highlighting the film’s inability to generate a Sirkian affective response (Cook, 2005: 14). Cook suggests that such negative responses to the film are themselves steeped in nostalgia, a longing for the ‘real’ and authentic Sirkian product. She argues that the film should be evaluated as a reworking of typical Sirkian themes and imagery that knowingly and successfully incorporates our knowledge of the impending dissolution of social conformity that entraps the film’s key characters. Cook is right to point out that the film’s project must inevitably differ from Sirk’s own, it is not only impossible to reconstruct the response of Sirk’s audience but to reproduce our own reverential response to films that were, in their time, bold and confrontational. However, this does inevitably entail a loss of credibility, and with it, emotional engagement. The intensity of the Sirkian landscape and film score carried the hothouse atmosphere of repressed emotion in his classic melodramas, whereas our distance from this particular lexicon of melodramatic music and imagery ensures that these aspects of the film become coded as arch and ironic, if not faintly ridiculous, in a contemporary film. It is not so much that contemporary audiences delude themselves that problems such as racism or homophobia have disappeared in the years between Sirk’s productions and Haynes’s homage but that the filmic metalinguistic articulation of such conflicts and emotions has shifted so far as to negate an appeal to the modern heart couched in these terms. For example, the way in which the treatment of Frank’s painfully repressed homosexuality is frequently accompanied by dark greenish lighting, skewered sideon, camera shots and atonal music conveys Frank’s sense of guilt and self-disgust in a manner which seems exaggerated, clichéd, and almost comic to modern audiences. Aside from these compositional, metalinguistic aspects of the film, as I suggested earlier, its treatment of the central protagonist, Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) encourages a distanced, rather than empathic response. While Pleasantville displays a masculine unease with female desire, the more obviously women-centred Far from Heaven registers both sympathy and anger towards the figure of the 1950s homemaker. Cathy is initially depicted as affluent, glamorous and caring wife and mother who performs her domestic and social roles with skill and pleasure. Far from being a bored housewife she delights in her fashionably furnished house (with new high-tech gadgetry) and her social standing as a

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role model for other women. In the opening scenes Cathy is interviewed for a society magazine and clearly enjoys displaying her enviable home and successful, handsome husband to the photographer. The film’s Sirkian references ensure that we rightly suspect that Cathy’s perfect world is on the verge of disintegration, but the emphasis placed on Cathy’s New Look glamour, domestic competence and queenly demeanour is significant given the degree of suffering she is later forced to endure. Frank’s homosexuality – rather than any failing on her part – is the catalyst for Cathy’s downfall. His coldness and anger towards her precipitates her growing friendship with black gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), an ‘innocent’ friendship that nonetheless results in an attack on Raymond’s daughter and Cathy’s precipitous fall in social status. At the close of the film, Frank (Dennis Quaid) is happily ensconced with his new lover while Raymond leaves town, refusing her final plea to pursue their relationship despite the negative social consequences. As Pam Cook argues, the final shot of new blossom in a film completely dominated by a palette of Technicolor Autumn tints suggests hope for the future, but Cathy’s immediate situation at the close of the film, as a stigmatised single parent is undeniably bleak. For all these reasons it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Cathy is in some way carrying the film’s burden of historical homophobic and racist guilt. On one level, the film’s desire to ‘punish’ Cathy is linked to its Sirkian forebears. Far from Heaven is generally taken to be closest to All That Heaven Allows (1955) as the relationship between gardener Raymond and middle-class housewife Cathy mirrors the tender romance between the emotionally starved middle-class widow Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) and the warm-hearted, nature-loving gardener Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). However, Far from Heaven’s concern with racial segregation also bring to mind the less prominent references to Sirk’s heart-rendering 1959 racial drama, Imitiation of Life. The reference to the latter draws a less flattering comparison between Cathy’s clumsy and ultimately damaging attempts to reach beyond the racial divide, and the unconscious racism exhibited by the nominally liberal Lora Meredith (Lana Turner). Cathy is both the neglected and abandoned wife and the white mistress of the big house, torn between her desire to reach out to Raymond and support the NAACP and her investment in the existing white, middle-class order. Significantly, Cathy summons the courage to pursue Raymond only when Frank has left her and it is obvious that the affluent, enviable lifestyle she enjoyed at the beginning of the film is now permanently closed to her. Yet Cathy’s plausible moral cowardice – one of the more

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persuasive and affecting aspects of a highly self-conscious film – seems inadequate in wholly explaining the film’s vengeful attitude towards her. The oedipal drama exhibited in Pleasantville seems once again in evidence here, cloaked in contemporary historical and cultural attitudes and attuned to the interests of the female audience. If Pleasantville manifests a tension regarding the sexual awakening of the mother figure, it is Cathy’s competence as a housewife, mother and all-round domestic goddesses that guarantee’s her destruction. The all-powerful mother of infancy is dealt a harsh blow, and Far from Heaven exhibits a lingering delight in observing her gradual defeat and humiliation. The film’s camp quality links this to the familiar gay filmic identification with female victimhood. But for female audiences there is also a doubling of the unconscious desire to break-free from the stranglehold of maternal power and influence and a more conscious desire to shed the constraining and oppressive ideology of domestic servitude and accomplishment associated with the 1950s housewife role. A comparison between Julianne Moore’s role in the 1950s section of The Hours and in Far from Heaven emphasises the subtle difference in these two recent treatments of the symbolic figure of the 1950s homemaker. Giving a powerful performance in both films, Moore manages to mutely convey mounting panic and anxiety in the former, while the depiction of Cathy Whitaker moves from smug self-promotion to bewilderment, anger and finally, redemption. Nevertheless, Moore’s frustrated, suicidal 1950s housewife and mother is more easily forgiven than the competent Cathy Whitaker. This is partly because, unlike Far from Heaven, The Hours is not suffused with the distancing effects of past cinematic homage. The Phillip Glass score and more muted lighting (as compared to the vivid use of Technicolor and Sirkian music) gives the 1950s section of The Hours a sense of real-life intensity and crisis that is lacking in Far from Heaven. But the less sympathetic treatment of its central female protagonist links to a broader recent cinematic indictment of this figure, particularly in recent femaleorientated films. The same underlying dynamic can be found in a much cruder form in the remake of The Stepford Wives. On release the film was critically derided for many reasons, but chief among these was the view that the remake betrayed the original’s chilling critique of patriarchal power. As a much loved genre film with a feminist message, it would be safe to say that the 1970 Stepford Wives had as much of an impact on popular gender politics than any feminist art-movie of the period. The cultural circulation of the term ‘Stepford Wife’ as a derisory term describing women

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who devote their lives to the perfection of domestic skills indicates the lasting influence of the original, although, as in many of the recent films dealing with the ideology of domesticity, the term carries contempt and disdain for women who excel in domestic skills, rather than for the patriarchal cultural demand that this should be women’s primary field of expertise. In a manner that strongly resembles the jokey articulation of gender politics in Down with Love, the new Stepford Wives exchanges the horror/ thriller elements of the original for a camp, mock-horror approach which pours scorn on both the ideology of feminine domesticity and the seriousness of original film. The assumption underlying the film’s light tonal quality is that female powerlessness and male brutality and oppression is a socio-cultural phenomena so completely foreign to modern Western consciousness that it can only return as a comic theme. The use of the 1950s chronotope is also significant here. Although the film is nominally set in the present, many of the clips in the opening sequence of past advertisements and newsreels are taken from the decade. The Stepford location also mirrors the typical small-town 1950s set-up – here updated as a modern gated community. The film’s articulation of domesticity also takes the form of a camp and exaggerated version of feminine fiftiesness, thus when the heroine’s acerbic, intellectual friend Bobbie (Bette Midler) is transformed into a robotic wife, this is signalled by her aggressively styled 1950s hairdo and wide-skirted New Look frock. Joanna’s own attempt to ‘pass’ among the other wives comprises the adoption of pink frilly pinafores and the mass production of pastel-coloured cupcakes. The introduction of a gay male character, who admires the wives not as successful homemakers but as ‘fabulous’ camp icons, drives home the film’s surface assumption that modern women have nothing to fear from the marginalised, anachronistic ideology of female domesticity. Yet, as in Far from Heaven, the film’s brutal and vindictive attitude towards the symbolic figure of the domestic goddess suggests otherwise. The remodelled plotline, in which callous ‘career bitch’, Joanna, moves to Stepford having suffered a career-related nervous breakdown is an all too familiar contemporary story. Indeed, the media attention given to ‘career women’ who give it all up for home and family was one of the many factors that writers such as Susan Faludi drew upon as evidence of a feminist backlash in the early 1990s. Joanna’s red lipstick, boxy shoulders, head to toe black and high-flying media career suggest a stereotypical view of 1980s female careerism, but finger-wagging accounts of women’s failure to cope with the dual demands of family and career have provided an ongoing source of anti-feminist propaganda from the 1980s onwards.

Conclusion 203

The original Stepford wives were the result of a patriarchal plot, whereas new Stepford is created by the town’s leading matriarch, a witchlike figure whose glitzy femininity conceals a steely determination to mould other women into proficient wives and mothers. As the cyborg nature of the women is already known to those familiar with the first Stepford Wives, this small but culturally significant plot-twist provides the film’s one original element. Played with a suitable blend of condescension and incipient insanity by Glen Close (now famous for such cartoonish bad women roles), Claire is the more obvious symbolic manifestation of the evil, controlling mother figure. Far from Heaven’s Cathy Whittaker is an object of mingled sympathy and hostility, whereas The Stepford Wives splits this ambivalent representation of the 1950s homemaker into the ‘daughter’ victims (the young wives) and the controlling, phallic mother (Claire). The film thus draws on two familiar female figures that encapsulate the cultural fear of female power: the career bitch and the pushy, controlling mother. Although the film positions ‘careerist’ Joanna as the polar opposite of the domestic goddess, both exhibit an unacceptable determination to conquer. Yet it would be too simplistic to view The Stepford Wives remake as a misogynistic reworking of the 1970s original. As a female-orientated film, the anger inspired by the symbolic figure of the perfectionist homemaker tells us much about the constant cultural tension between women’s lived experience, changing patriarchal perceptions of femininity and new models of aspiration and achievement. It might be tempting to read the depiction of the career bitch and controlling homemaker solely as patriarchal images that express male fear of female power, but they are also figures that carry the burden of perfectionism for young women. In symbolic terms, the flip side of the pushy, competent careerist is not the pushy, perfectionist homemaker, but that beloved figure of recent women’s popular fiction: the hapless singleton. It is no coincidence that the phenomenal popularity of Bridget Jones and her many kooky, dizzy or commitment-shy sisters coincides with the vindictive treatment meted out to high-flying ‘career women’ and smug housewives in female-orientated fictional forms. From Bridget Jones’s Diary to Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, numerous chick-flick novels, and even Desperate Housewives (in which the central female characters also struggle with their allotted roles and the cultural demands made on them) it is clear that female audiences prefer desperate women to successful ones. And who can blame them? In the last fifteen years to twenty years (from around the mid-1980s) the figure of the young woman shifted from culturally invisibe (or a visibility defined

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solely in terms of sexual attractiveness) to becoming the focus of society’s brightest hopes and dreams. As we are constantly being reminded by popular media commentary, young women now far outstrip their male peers in educational achievement. In a pattern mirrored by many countries in Western Europe, there are now more young women than men training for careers in the traditionally male areas of medicine, law and the burgeoning new media industry in the UK and US. The message is clear: the future is female and there are no longer any sexist barriers to female success. But the discourse of female achievement and independence has flourished hand in hand with an increasing demand for physical perfection, and the discourse of normalising, heterosexual femininity. In addition to the exacting demands of the fashion and beauty industry and despite its camp articulation in films such as Far from Heaven, Pleasantville or the new Stepford Wives, the demand for domestic expertise has not faded along with women’s higher educational achievement or greater participation in the labour force. Women are still exhorted to excel at domestic skills, regardless of any other goals and aspirations they might want to nurture. Indeed, the last ten years have witnessed a boom in television programmes, magazines and books devoted to cookery, fashion makeovers, home decoration and, in particular, mothering, in the US and UK that continue to ram home the message that women are still expected to bear the brunt of domestic and childcare tasks. As previous critics have pointed out, at the more sophisticated end of the scale, such as Nigella Lawson cookbooks, the enjoyment of domestic tasks is explicitly associated with a new generation of educated, affluent women who have rebelled against the perceived all-out rejection of femininity and the domestic by the previous generation of feminists and chosen to re-embrace traditional domestic crafts (Brunsdon, 2005: 112). Nigella Lawson’s knowingly titled baking guide ‘How to be a Domestic Goddess’ or the recent UK reality television programme, Perfect Houswife (in which participants openly snigger at the hosts determination to improve their domestic skills), incorporate the playful, knowing attitude towards femininity and domesticity that, at least at a surface level, characterises The Stepford Wives, Down with Love or Desperate Housewives. At the other end of the scale, lowbrow reality television such as WifeSwap or Supernanny make little attempt to present the mastery of domestic realm as a lifestyle choice for women and openly condemn and criticise women whose housekeeping or childcare methods are not up to scratch. Far from fading into the background, there has been a wholesale revival of the ideology of domestic expertise ranging from an explosion

Conclusion 205

of cookery and childcare books aimed at the chattering classes to bullying reality programmes for the less affluent. The intensification of body-related pressures and the revival of the domestic ideology results in the marked polarity of representations of women in recent female-orientated films, particularly the division between the lovable losers of romantic comedy and the demonisation of the domestic goddess via the reworked discourse of fiftiesness. The darker socio-cultural manifestation of these pressures is registered in high rates of female depression, self-harming and body-related disorders. The lighter side is the pleasure and identification produced by the new heroines of romantic comedy and the sneery attitude towards the revival of the ideology of domesticity registered in the new crop of 1950s nostalgia films.

‘I wanted to make a difference’: New fiftiesness and the angry young woman Mike Newall’s recent Julia Roberts vehicle, Mona Lisa Smile also examines the 1950s ideology of femininity, but addresses this through a range of characters, rather than primarily through the symbolic figure of the 1950s homemaker. This allows for a greater exploration of different responses to these ideological pressures and avoids over-burdening the symbolic figure of the 1950s homemaker with either pity or loathing. Unlike the previous examples, Mona Lisa Smile draws on the campus, rather than the small-town chronotope and concerns the choices open to women prior to marriage and motherhood during the 1950s. On release, Mona Lisa Smile was frequently described as a female version of The Dead Poet’s Society (Weir, 1989). Like the latter the film concerns the educational aspirations of young women and the influence of a rebellious, freespirited young teacher who comes into conflict with the University establishment. But Mona Lisa Smile’s specific interest in the post-war ideology of femininity highlights the much greater conflict between female ambition and wider socio-cultural structures. Fiftiesness is manifested less by clothes, music and consumer objects (although these are obviously present) than in the overt clash between a rising discourse of female independence and individualism and the domestic ideology. While the more self-conscious treatments of the period (such as Pleasantville or Far from Heaven) project contemporary attitudes back onto the period, Mona Lisa Smile gives a much stronger sense of the competing ideologies that existed during the 1950s and the different ways in which individual female subjects responded to these.

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The key character is a single working-class woman who has, through her own efforts, risen through the teaching ranks to become a professor of art history at a prestigious, long-established female college. The film charts her developing relationship with five girls who also represent a variety of class backgrounds and ideological and political perspectives, thus one is a lower-class, sexually adventurous bohemian, another is snobbish and conservative, another boyish and gauche, another a sensitive and intelligent A-grade student. Although Joan, the ambitious A-grade student who becomes closest to Katherine is a more fully drawn character than the others, all the central female figures are capable of self-reflection and change. Thus Joan’s final decision to opt to become a fulltime wife and mother is presented as a conscious compromise adopted within certain socio-historical limits, rather than the result of ignorance or direct coercion. As in the previously discussed 1950s-inspired women’s films, the two female figures that invest the most in the ideology of femininity are cut down to size while those that reject it flourish. Katherine’s chintz-loving, hyper-domesticated flatmate Nancy Abbey (Marcia Gay Harden) is depicted as a lonely, pathetic spinster and the snobbish and bitchy Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst) ends up divorcing her philandering husband. But the film’s approach to these figures is still more fully contextualised and

From Mona Lisa Smile, 2003.

Conclusion 207

sympathetic than their treatment in films that focus exclusively on the hated and feared domestic goddess. Mona Lisa Smile is also the only recent treatment of the era that directly integrates mother/daughter conflict into the plotline, rather than as an underlying symbolic dynamic of historical and cultural change. Thus the student who is initially most hostile to Katherine is under the influence of her mother, a rich, powerful college trustee who regards the college as little more than a finishing school for society wives. This results in a more localised articulation of mother/daughter conflict, as opposed to the intensified projection of hatred onto one symbolic ‘mother’ figure, apparent in the more self-conscious treatments of 1950s domesticity. The fissure between domestic ideology and lived experience is particularly apparent in the scene in which Katherine discusses images from recent advertisements with her class. Facing a student backlash led by the spiteful Betty she asks her students to critically reflect on a number of advertisements aimed at women for objects such as corsets and domestic appliances. The positioning of Katherine in the lecture hall is indicative of her relationship to them throughout the film. For example, in the opening scene, in which she struggles through material they are already familiar with they glare down at her from above. But in the subsequent lesson she flaws their expectations and wins their respect by introducing a number of modernist paintings. In this scene she sits among them next to the slide projector. However, in this climatic scene, the images are projected onto her body, emphasising the tension between Katherine herself and her aspirations as a teacher – the desire that her students should be educated and pursue independent career – and the surrounding pressures of domestic ideology. Significantly, in terms of its feminist reworking of fiftiesness, the film sets modernist experimentalism against the crass, patronising culture of 1950s femininity. Katherine takes the students to view a Jackson Pollock and explodes with rage at the mass production of Van Gogh paint-by-number sets. In a gesture that emphasises the film’s overall approach to modernist individualism, the student’s farewell gift to Katherine is a set of individualised versions of the Van Gogh Sunflowers kit. This symbolic gesture mirrors the importance of modernism in recent postmodernist treatments of conservative fiftiesness. While Jameson’s early work on postmodernism argued that high modernism had been rendered impotent by its insertion into a postmodernist consumer economy, in these latter, postmodernist treatments of fiftiesness, it resurfaces as an important counter-discourse to the culture of white, male hegemony. In Pleasantville ‘colour’, signifying racial diversity and female empowerment, is associated with fauvist colour blocks; in Far from Heaven, Cathy and

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Raymond’s relationship is forged over a Miro exhibition and in The Hours, Laura Brown escapes from domestic drudgery through reading Mrs Dalloway. In a more general sense, the treatment of the post-war period in these films reflects the wider recent postmodernist filmic interest in questions of historical modes of subjectivity and oppression, particularly concerning discourses of femininity and domesticity. I have concluded the book by examining this cluster of films for two reasons; Firstly, that they offer a direct point of comparison with the overtly misogynistic and nostalgic treatments of the period in the ‘first wave’ of popular postmodernist films; secondly, that they highlight the way in which the ‘return’ of the woman’s film is entwined with a shift away from the female investment in the domestic and maternal towards a consistent focus on the tension between female educational and career aspirations and traditional notions of femininity. Although the short-lived early 1990s melodrama counters 1980s male ambition and greed with the traditional figure of woman-as-redeemer, the overwhelming emphasis in recent ‘chick flicks’ i.e. in the reworked costume drama, romantic comedy, neo-noir and the revived 1950s woman’s film is a thematic concern with a feminist-inspired desire for self-determination and discovery, twinned with social and economic power. Thus even the romantic comedy and historical romance understand the discourse of heterosexual romance very much in terms of its incompatibility with a rising counter-narrative of female independence and self-determination. Put bluntly, what the new women’s genres reflect and remythologise for female audiences is a notion of contemporary female subjectivity that has largely shed the classical women’s film’s obsession with trauma, illness and self-sacrifice. The life of the home is presented as something to be escaped from, children are rare, and romance can only exist in heavily drawn inverted commas (hence the compatibility of new women’s films and postmodernist self-consciousness). The new women’s film thus registers the triumph of a liberal rather than radical feminist vision of female empowerment. This particular brand of individualist feminism has become the dominant socio-cultural legacy of the equal rights tradition of feminism, while the collectivist, socialist and radical tendencies have given way to this new discourse of female self-empowerment. Through its use of irony, humour and historical self-consciousness, the new women’s film also responds to the discourse of female self-empowerment by emphasising the continuing chasm between women’s increased expectations and aspirations and the material, psychological and historical boundaries that impede their progress.

Notes 1

Postmodernism, New Hollywood and Women’s Films

1. Critics such as Miriam Hansen have recently disputed this view, arguing that classical Hollywood derived many codes and conventions from European modernist cinematic practices (Hansen, 1999: 332). 2. This period has been documented by feminist filmmaker Ruby Rich in Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Rich, 1998). 3. For example, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson have all either updated or reworked well-known fairytales. Carter’s novel Nights at the Circus centres on a ‘winged’ nineteenth-century trapeze artist, playfully exploring her cultural mythologisation without revealing whether she is truth or illusion (Carter, 1985). 4. Deidre E. Pribram’s recent account of American independent cinema (which includes chapters on women’s cinema, cinema dealing with questions of ethnic identity and postmodernist cinema) highlights the way in which the expansion of the independent sector since the 1980s has also been accompanied by the increasing diversity of its generic output (Pribram, 2002).

2 The Early 1990s ‘Postmodernist’ Melodrama: Female Virtue in the Consumer Age 1. Mini White states, ‘These films can be seen as the contemporary cinematic expression of mass-produced fantasies for women, reworking the classical Hollywood picture refracted through the “new” women’s picture of the 1970s and the romance novel’ (White, 1989: 41). 2. Charlotte Brunsdon’s Screen discussion of the ‘independent woman’ cycle of the late 1970s is a good example of this approach (Brunsdon, 1982). 3. Although Altman’s overall argument stresses the provisional nature of genre boundaries, his emphasis on the feminist canon formation seems to conflict with this approach (Altman, 1998). 4. Karen Hollinger’s recent study of the female friendship film gives a full account of the development of this genre, looking closely at recent examples (Hollinger, 1998). 5. The International Motion Picture Almanac 2000s top grossing films 1990–1999, based on worldwide sales figures, show romantic comedy entries for 1990 Pretty Woman (3), 1993 Sleepless in Seattle (5), 1997 My Best Friend’s Wedding (9) and 1999 Runaway Bride (9) (Stephens, 2000). 6. Peter Kramer’s analysis of Titanic suggests that it is the biggest cross-over (appealing to male audiences) woman’s film of the decade, managing to marry a concern with romance and focus on a leading female figure with the traditionally male-orientated action sequences (Kramer, 1998: 600).

209

210 Notes 7. The conception of women as a civilising influence is a well-established feature of melodrama. The primary difference, in this case, is the way in which this is both tied to feminist attitudes to male competitiveness and articulated through ‘postmodernist’ genre blending. 8. Jacinda Read also notes the feminist twist given to the usually conservative notion of ‘fiftiesness’ and the small town in Sleeping with the Enemy (Read, 2000: 64).

4 Costume Drama, Historiography and Women’s History 1. More overtly historical in that period trappings are usually accentuated in the costume drama but form a backdrop in the female friendship movie. 2. For example, The Evening Standard quoted the response of the secretary of the Jane Austen society to the BBC serial thus, ‘the idea of Mr Darcy diving into his bath wearing not a stitch is awful’ (Cusk, 1996: 1). Maev Kennedy’s discussion of the heritage industry stated that ‘it was the scene of actor Colin Firth’s Byronic plunge into the lake, and hordes of misty-eyed women turned up through the winter after the house was closed for the season’ (Kennedy, 1996: 4). 3. Nyman’s association with avant-gardist British filmmaker Peter Greenaway also foregrounds The Piano’s status as highbrow costume drama.

5 Neo-Noir and Noir-Lite: Masculinity and Postmodernist Aesthetics in New Retro-Noir 1. Any recent noir critic worth his or her salt feels compelled to delve some way into the question of whether noir really constitutes a genre at all before going about their business. Shying away from the term, many cautiously plump for subgenre, cycle (one manifestation of crime fiction) or, even more vaguely, a ‘style’ or ‘mood’ defined largely by lighting, atmosphere and a bleak and despairing tone rather than a recognisable fixed body of plot or aesthetic conventions (Krutnik, 1991: 17). Even those critics bold enough to endorse its generic status disagree about whether it can be viewed as an example of ‘classical’ output and to what degree it was influenced by the avant-gardist, expressionist features of European art-cinema. In one of the longer 1990s critiques of classical noir, Frank Krutnik (who devotes the first two chapters of his study of film noir and masculinity to this subject) states: Despite the increasingly familiar use of the term among film critics and historians film noir remains a hotly debated area of contention. Especially problematic is its very status as a unified group of films – as Spencer Selby suggests film noir is ‘perhaps the most slippery of all film categories’. In the critical accounts which have accumulated since the late 1960s there are so many varying critical conceptions of film noir that there is at times a danger that it will become redundant as a descriptive or analytic category. (Krutnik, 1991: 17)

Notes 211 Similarly, Marc Vernet suggests: What is completely strange in the discourse of film noir is that the more elements of definition which are advanced, the more objections and counter-objections are raised, the more precision desired, the fuzzier the results become, the closer the object is approached, the more diluted it becomes. (Vernet, 1993: 5) Many critics cite the fact that the term was coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946 rather than American studios as a reason for its ‘uniquely’ contentious status. For example, Elizabeth Cowie describes it as ‘the genre that never was’ – since the term was not used by the studios themselves, or by audiences at the time, except perhaps in France where the term originated – the claims for the category lie in a post hoc analysis of similarities identified in certain films . . . Unlike terms such as ‘the western’ or gangster film which are relatively uncontroversial (and were industry categories) film noir has a more tenuous critical status. (Cowie, 1993: 121) 2. Frank Krutnik’s study cites five major forms (Krutnik, 1991). 3. Con Tsalamandris describes Reservoir Dogs as ‘too sly for its own good . . . Reservoir Dogs is a film that knows exactly what it is doing. Only too well. And that’s its biggest problem. It’s too self-aware. The film’s plot manoeuvres, twists and reversals are so well oiled that it’s hard not to notice it going through the motions’ (1993: 96). 4. Well-known examples include television’s Prime Suspect series and films featuring female law enforcers or lawyers, such as Jagged Edge (Marquand, 1985), The Client (Schumacher, 1994) or, more recently, Miss Congeniality (Petrie, 2000), a female-led comedy (starring Sandra Bullock) structured entirely around the perceived mismatch between femininity and authoritative, male-identified professionals. 5. Rather than being entirely based on fantasy, its dramatic material extrapolates from the advances occurring in contemporary science. 6. This is in marked contrast to the more general field of contemporary sci-fi literature in which female writers – such as Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin – have used the form to address issues of gender and science and to create alternative worlds in which gender relations are differently ordered. 7. In cyberpunk fiction the male hero is physically disembodied in cyberspace, yet the mental activity of traversing cyberspace is described in a manner which conveys the energy and excitement of action-orientated fiction. 8. Again, reinforcing its association with cinema, snuff playback replicates snuff movies. 9. In this sense, the figure of Mace connects both with the representation of the female figure as civiliser/redeemer in the postmodernist melodrama and the more specifically racialised figure of the black, female victim turned hero in films such as The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1985) and What’s Love Got to Do with It? (Gibson, 1993).

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Filmography New Hollywood’s ‘early’ postmodernist/allusionist cinema Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967), The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich, 1971), Mr Macabe and Mrs Miller (Altman, 1971) and New York, New York (Scorsese, 1977).

Blockbuster allusionism Star Wars (Lucas, 1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1982) and Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985).

‘Masculine’ postmodernist cinema Manhunter (Mann, 1986), Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986), Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988), Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990), Die Hard 2 (Harlin, 1990), Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, 1992), Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994), Natural Born Killers (Stone, 1994), Heat (Mann, 1995), Seven (Fincher, 1995), Die Hard with a Vengeance (Tiernan, 1995), The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995) and Fight Club (Fincher, 1999).

The postmodernist early 1990s melodrama Ghost (Zucker, 1990), Sleeping with the Enemy (Reubens, 1991) and Indecent Proposal (Lynn, 1993).

New romantic comedy Moonstruck (Jewison, 1987), Pretty Woman (Marshall, 1990), When Harry Met Sally (Reiner, 1989), Sleepless in Seattle (Ephron, 1993), My Best Friend’s Wedding (Hogan, 1997), Runaway Bride (Marshall, 1999), What Women Want (Meyers, 2000), Bridget Jones’s Diary (Maguire, 2001), Down with Love (Reed, 2003) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Kidron, 2004).

Metafictional costume drama Orlando (Potter, 1992), The Piano (Campion, 1993), Sense and Sensibility (1995),Titanic (1998), Mansfield Park (1998) and The Hours (Daldry, 2002).

Neo-Noir and Noir-Lite Body Heat (Kasdan, 1981), Black Widow (Rafelson, 1987), Blue Steel (Bigelow, 1990), Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992), Final Analysis (Joanou, 1992), Body of Evidence, 222

Filmography 223 (Edel, 1992), The Last Seduction (Dahl, 1994), Serial Mom (Waters, 1994), Strange Days, (Bigelow 1995) and Out of Sight (Soderbergh, 1998).

‘Fiftiesness’ in recent cinema Pleasantville (Ross 1998), Far from Heaven (Haynes, 2002), The Stepford Wives (Oz, 2004) and Mona Lisa Smile (Newell, 2003).

Index academic study and criticism of film 60, 94, 126, 138, 140, 157 An Affair to Remember 107, 115–18 After Hours 90 age of cinema audiences 62 Alien films 3, 52, 58, 162–3, 169, 180 All That Heaven Allows 200 Allen, Woody 11, 98, 100, 108–9 allusionism, cinematic 4–14, 20, 22, 28–34, 38–46, 50, 52, 67, 93–4, 102–5, 109, 118, 160 Ally McBeal 3, 93, 105, 203 Altman, Rick 23, 26–7, 55–7, 68, 119, 125, 157, 169 Altman, Robert 4 American Psycho 5 anaclitic drive 111 Anders, Alison 51 Anderson, Kevin 86 Ang, Ien 59 An Angel at My Table 132 ‘anhedonia’ (Denzin) 108 Annie Hall 98, 107–8 Another 48 HRS 64 anti-feminist backlash 71, 89, 99, 121, 155, 187–8, 202 Apocalypse Now! 32, 44–5 Atwood, Margaret 36, 134 Austen, Jane 8, 120, 131–3 authenticity 130–1, 183; historical 189–90 Autumn in New York 67 Aviles, Rick 73 Azim, Firdous 138–9

Baudrillard, Jean 4, 17–18, 118 Beaches 63, 67 Bell, Vanessa 152 Belton, John 28, 31–3 Benjamin, W. 190 Bergin, Patrick 83–4 Bergman, Ingrid 110 Biddulph, Steve 151 Bigelow, Katherine 13, 51, 170–1, 176–8, 181, 184–5 bio-pics 51, 128–9, 140, 148, 152 Birbaun, Roger 62 Black Widow 3, 166, 170 Blade Runner 169, 178 blockbuster films 24–5, 28–33, 42, 47, 58, 62, 68–9, 85, 94, 178, 190–1 Blue Steel 3, 170–1, 185 Blue Velvet 5–6, 13, 41, 85, 191–4, 198 Bluteau, Luthaire 146 Body Heat 160–8 Body of Evidence 163, 167 ‘body horror’ science fiction 162–3, 180 Bogart, Humphrey 109–10 Bogdanovich, Peter 4 Bonnie and Clyde 32 Borden, Lizzie 48 Bordwell, D. 23 Botticelli, Sandro 143 Bowlby, John 150 Boxhall, Nellie 153 Boys Don’t Cry 65 Boys on the Side 63, 66 Brando, Marlon 193 ‘bratpack’ film directors 38, 127, 168 Braveheart 45–6 Bridget Jones films 8, 10, 47, 93, 104–5, 119–22, 130, 203 Bringing Up Baby 96–7 Broadcast News 98

Back to the Future 13, 85, 192–5, 198 Bad Girls 52 Bakhtin, M. 194 base–superstructure models 18 Basic Instinct 13, 163–7 Basinger, Kim 63 Bassett, Angela 182 224

Index 225 Brontë sisters 133–4, 138–9 Brown-Eyed Girl 86 Brownmiller, Susan 90–1 Brunsdon, Charlotte 2, 43, 52, 57–60, 89 Bruzi, Stella 136 Buck Rogers films 33 Buena Vista 65 Bullock, Sandra 66 Butler, Alison 42–4, 47–8, 51, 128 Butler, Judith 37, 59 Byars, Jackie 1 Byatt, A.S. 134 Bygraves, Mike 93 Cage, John 16, 19 Cage, Nicolas 101 Calvino, Italo 19 Cameron, James 131, 178 Campion, Jane 12, 38, 48, 51, 65, 129, 132–4 Caputi, Jane 70, 80 Carey, Jim 195 Carpenter, John 4, 29 Carrington 130–1 Carroll, Noel 4, 19–20, 28–33, 43, 52, 102, 119, 127, 156, 160, 166, 168 Carter, Angela 36–8, 126 Casablanca 11, 109–12 censorship 5, 29, 97, 175 Channel Four television 25 Chaplin 128 Chariots of Fire 129 Cher 101 chick flicks 3–4, 52–3, 61, 64, 66, 80, 93, 107, 119, 203 chick lit 3, 12, 105 chicks television 3, 12 Chinatown 163 Cimino, Michael 29, 32, 44 cine-literacy 27–30, 102–3, 157, 168 Clayton, Jack 70 Clooney, George 172, 177 Close, Glen 203 Clover, Carol 49 Cold Mountain 153 Collins, Jim 16, 19, 21, 34

Coma 43, 170 The Conformist 163 Connick, Harry junior 114 Cook, David 24, 28, 32–3 Cook, Pam 54, 130, 198–200 Coppola, Francis 29, 32, 44 Coppola, Sophia 65 Corrigan, Tim 6, 24, 28, 32, 102 costume drama 12, 14, 46–53, 55, 62–8, 129–37, 140, 144–5, 153, 185, 189–92, 208 Cott, Nancy 59 counter-cinema 31, 133, 155 Cowie, Elizabeth 171–2 Creed, Barbara 36, 40, 43, 78, 128, 156, 161–3, 169, 180–1, 186–7 crime fiction 170–1 Crisp, Quentin 142 Cronenberg, David 162, 180 Cunningham, Michael 132, 140, 148–9, 152, 154 cyberpunk 179–87 Daldry, Stephen 12, 51, 129, 132, 140, 149, 152 Daly, Mary 37 Dargis, Manohla 141 Dash, Julie 51 Daughters of the Dust 51 Davies, Tamra 52 Davis, Andrew 120 Davis, Bette 63 Day, Doris 8–10, 108–11, 122–3 The Day After Tomorrow 124 Days of Thunder 64 The Dead Poet’s Society 205 The Deer Hunter 32, 45 Deitch, Donna 51 de Lauretis, Teresa 50–1 de Mille, Cecil B. 96 Demme, Jonathan 29, 40 Denzin, Norman 6, 19, 21, 41, 108, 113 De Palma, Brian 29 Desert Hearts 51 The Desire to Desire 56 Desperate Housewives 3, 93, 125, 203 Desperately Seeking Susan 46, 57, 90 Diaz, Cameron 66

226 Index Die Hard films 6, 44 Dika, Vera 193 directors, female 65, 132, 184–5; see also women filmmakers disaster movies 124 distancing devices in film 5, 11–12 Doane, Mary Ann 1, 39, 56, 67, 81–3, 87–8, 115–16 The Doctor 78 Double Indemnity 160, 170 Douglas, Michael 71 Down with Love 8–10, 14, 53, 93, 122–4, 202, 204 dream sequences 111, 185 Duchamp, M. 16 Dunst, Kirsten 206 Dworkin, Andrea 90–1 Dyson, Linda 137 Easy Rider 32 Eco, Umberto 19, 126 l’écriture feminine 140 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 192 Eliot, George 133–4 Elsaesser, Thomas 70–1, 75–6 Emin, Tracey 36 empowerment, female 208 Ephron, Henry and Phoebe 107 Ephron, Nora 7, 38, 66, 93, 103, 106–7, 114, 118, 120, 123 essentialism and anti-essentialism 60–1, 141, 144 Existenze 180 Faludi, Susan 71, 75, 202 family melodrama 55–6 fantasy 104–5, 184–5 Far from Heaven 8, 13, 51, 65, 85, 150, 198–208 Fatal Attraction 165–6 Father Knows Best 192 female friendship films 62–3, 67–8, 129 femininity and feminine values 68, 75, 101, 121, 123, 132, 141, 143, 179, 182, 204–8 feminisation of cinematic practice 63, 156, 172

feminism: liberal 208; and postmodern cinema 35–47, 99, 156–7; radical 93; second-wave 10, 82, 94, 160; see also anti-feminist backlash feminist film criticism 1–3, 8, 19–20, 42, 48–50, 54–5, 58–61, 75, 88, 162, 179 feminist literary criticism 133 feminist politics 90 femme fatale figure 161–9, 172, 178, 187 Fielding, Helen 3, 120, 122 ‘fiftiesness’ 85–6, 191–8, 202, 205, 207 Fight Club 6, 45–6 film noir 156–88 Final Analysis 163 Fincher, David 6, 8, 16, 45, 47 Fiorentino, Linda 165 The First Wives Club 63 Firth, Colin 120, 130 Florence, Penny 143 The Fly 162 For the Boys 64 Ford, Harrison 178 Forster, E.M. 129 Foster, Hal 18–19 Foucault, Michel 126 Four Weddings and a Funeral 93, 120 Fowles, John 134 Fraiman, Susan 7, 35, 177 framing devices in film 5, 11–12, 67, 105, 173–4 Franke, Lizzie 63, 66, 100 Frankfurt school 35, 190 Fraser, Nancy 59–60 French, Marilyn 71, 75, 109 The French Lieutenant’s Woman 134 French New Wave cinema 30 Freud, Sigmund (and Freudian theory) 111, 135, 154 Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café 51, 129 Frieda 51, 148 Friedan, Betty 10 Friedberg, Anne 105–7, 118

Index 227 Gamman, Lorraine 39–40, 48 gangster films 158 Garbo, Greta 142 Gaslight 81 gender identity 61, 87, 140, 142, 144 gender politics 123, 140–1 gender roles 13–14, 40, 84, 145, 191 genre distinctions and genre-blending 26–8, 31, 59, 157, 178; see also literature and literary genres Geraghty, Christine 2 Gere, Richard 63, 80, 101 Ghost 12, 61–4, 68–81, 89–90 Gibson, Mel 45–6 Gibson, William 179, 181, 183, 186 Gillet, Sue 138 Gilman Perkins, Charlotte 134 Girlfriends 57 Glass, Phillip 150, 201 Glatter, Lesli Linka 63 Gledhill, Christine 1, 43 Go Fish 46 The Godfather 32, 44–5 Goldberg, Whoopi 73 The Golddiggers 132 Goldsmith, Olivia 63 Goldwyn, Sam 73 Goodfellas 42, 175 Gordon, Michael 8 Gormley, Paul 5 Gorris, Marleen 51 gothicism 81–3, 134, 138, 192, 195 Gramsci, Antonio 50 grand narratives 189 Grant, Barry Keith 90 Grant, Hugh 120 Grease 193, 195 The Great Gatsby 70 Green, Jane 3 Green Card 93 Greenaway, Peter 132, 140, 144 Greer, Germaine 10 Grove, M. 62 ‘gynesis’ 162 Hamilton, Linda 183 Hanks, Tom 107, 114, 118 Happy Days 193

Haraway, Donna 59 Harden, Marcia Gay 206 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 24 Harvey, David 23, 31–2 Haskell, Molly 1, 57 Haynes, Todd 198 Haysbert, Dennis 200 Heartbreakers 13 Heartburn 106 Heat 46 Heath, Stephen 39 Henderson, Brian 97–8, 101 ‘heritage’ films 129–30, 133, 147 ‘high-conception’ films 24–5, 28, 32–3, 47, 50, 93 Higson, Andrew 129–31 Hillier, Jim 62–4 His Girl Friday 96–7 ‘historiographic metafictions’ 127, 129, 147–8 Hitchcock, Alfred 10, 83 Hogan, Paul 93 Hollywood films 17–22, 57, 61, 63, 109, 128, 157–8, 170; postclassical 22–34, 42–3, 50, 58, 102; ‘romantic’ 64, 114, 117 Holmlund, Chris 177 homosexuality 199–200 The Hours 12, 51, 129, 132–3, 140, 148–54, 190, 193, 208 How to Make an American Quilt 51, 63, 129 Howard’s End 46, 130–1 Hudson, Rock 108, 122–3, 200 Hudson’s Hawk 64 Hunter, Holly 132, 134 Hurd, Gale Anne 65 The Hurricane 128 Hurt, William 161 Hutcheon, Linda 127 Huyssen, Andreas 16, 19–20, 34–5 hyperreality 125 identity politics 21, 30, 196, 198 I Love Lucy 192 Imitation of Life 200 Indecent Proposal 12, 61, 68–72, 76–81, 89–90 independent film-makers 46–7

228 Index Indiana Jones films 6 infant determinism 151 Intolerable Cruelty 13 Irigary, Luce 86, 135 Iris 51, 148 irony 105, 165–6 It Happened One Night 96–7 I’ve Heard the Mermaid Singing 51 Jackie Brown 13, 174–7 Jackson, Peter 24 Jackson, Samuel L. 176 Jagged Edge 3 James, Oliver 151 Jameson, Fredric 4, 6, 13, 17–22, 25, 32, 34, 40–1, 50, 52, 74, 85, 122, 124, 127, 129, 145, 156, 160–3, 168, 190–2, 207 Jardine, Alice 162 Jarman, Derek 132, 144 Jaws 24 Jewison, Norman 101 John, Elton 198 Johnston, Claire 39 Jones, Amy 68 The Joy Luck Club 63, 129 Juhasz, Alexandra 6–7 Julia 57 Kaczmarek, Jane 196 Kaplan, E. Ann 56 Kaplan, Nelly 38 Kasdan, Lawrence 160 Keaton, Diane 109 Keaton, Michael 174 Keitel, Harvey 132, 168 Kellner, Douglas 28–33, 41, 44 Kidman, Nicole 133 Kidron, Beeban 51, 93, 122 Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2 13, 46, 168–9 King Kong 24 Kirby, Jill 151 Knotts, Don 195 Korean War 192 Kracauer, S. 190 Kramer, Peter 63–4, 68 Kristeva, Julia 141 Kruger, Barbara 19, 36, 38

Krutnik, Frank 95, 98–100, 108–13, 157 Kuhn, Annette 56 Lacanian theory 11, 49, 117, 135 LA Confidential 163, 172 laddishness and laddism 35, 120–1 The Lady Eve 96–7 Landsberg, Alison 184 Lapsley, R. 103, 117 The Last Picture Show 31 The Last Seduction 163–6 The Lawnmower Man 179 Lawson, Nigella 204 Lazen, Martha 65 A League of their Own 46–7, 51 Lee, Ang 131 Leonard, Elmore 172 Letter from an Unknown Woman 95 Levy, Ariel 35 Lewis, Juliet 182 Line, Antonia 51 literature and literary genres 36–9 Little Women 63 Loaded 120 Lopez, Jennifer 172 Lost in Translation 65 Lubitsch, Ernst 118 Lucas, George 19, 29, 38 Lucia, Cynthia 170 Lynch, David 6–8, 16, 29, 41, 43, 47, 102, 155–6, 191–4 Lyne, Adrian 165–6 Lynn, Adrien 68 Lyotard, Jean-François 4, 17, 34, 126, 161, 163, 189 MacCabe, Colin 39 McCabe and Mrs Miller 31 McCarey, Leo 107 McEwan, Ian 189 McGregor, Ewan 9, 123 McMillan, Terry 63 Macy, William H. 197 Madden, John 131, 153 Madonna 45, 167 Maguire, Sharon 51, 93, 119, 122 Maguire, Tobey 196 Malcolm X 128

Index 229 ‘male gaze’ 48, 186 Maltby, Richard 24 Mandel, Ernst 17, 21 Manhattan (city) 124 Manhattan (film) 98, 100, 113 Mann, Michael 6, 16, 46 Mansfield Park 131, 153 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 19 marriage 96, 113–14, 119 Marshall, Gary 80, 93, 99 Marshall, Penny 51, 63 Marshment, Margaret 39–40, 48 masculinity, masculine identity and masculine values 6–8, 41–6, 68, 72, 89, 101, 123, 141, 143, 159, 162, 175–9, 186, 188 mass culture 16–18, 22, 35 master narratives 161–2 The Matrix 180–1 Maurice 130–1 Medium Cool 32 Mehta, Deepa 48 Mellencamp, Patricia 41–4, 128 melodrama 90–1, 208; see also postmodernist melodrama ‘memory crisis’ 189–90 Merchant Ivory Films 132 metagenericity 5 Midler, Bette 202 Miramax 46–7 Modleski, Tania 37, 61, 82–3 Mona Lisa Smile 13, 51, 150, 193, 198, 205–7 Monk, Claire 130–1 Moonstruck 98, 101, 104 Moore, Demi 73, 76 Moore, Julianne 199, 201 Moore, Suzanne 116 Moorhouse, Jocelyn 63 Morris, Meaghan 36, 38 Morrison, Toni 36 Morrison, Van 86 motherhood 151 Mrs Dalloway 148, 208 Mulvey, Laura 39, 77, 130 Murphet, Julian 175–7 music, use of 66, 122, 135, 150, 199 Musser, Charles 96 My Best Friend’s Wedding 93, 104, 119

Nair, Mira 51 narcissism 111–12 Natural Born Killers 5, 175 Neale, Steve 23, 98–9 Negra, Diane 9, 94 Neill, Sam 132 neo-noir 157–80, 187–8, 208 ‘nervous romances’ 98–101, 105–14, 119 Neuromancer 179, 186 New Right ideology 32–3, 156, 188, 193 Newell, Mike 120, 205 Nicholson, Linda 49, 59–60, 133 Nixon 128 noir see film noir; neo-noir; tech-noir North, Freya 3 nostalgia films 43, 50, 84, 99–107, 124, 127–9, 160–3, 190–1, 194–5 nostalgia for nostalgia 42 Notting Hill 93 Novak, Kim 9–10, 123 Now and Then 63, 129 Nyman, Michael 66, 135 Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve 177 O’Donnell, Rosie 105, 107, 116 Old Wives for New 96 Orlando 12, 38, 51, 129, 132–5, 140–9, 153–4, 190 Out of Sight 13, 172–7, 187–8 Outbreak 66 Owens, Craig 36 Paramount decrees 22–3 Paramount Films 29, 65 paranoia films 82–8, 171, 195 Payne Studies 184 Penn, Arthur 4 Perfect Housewife 204 period settings 12, 153; see also costume drama Petro, Patrice 52 Pfeil, Fred 44, 89 The Piano 12, 38, 46, 51, 65–6, 129–43, 148–54, 168, 190 Pidduck, Julianne 144–6, 166–7 Pillow Talk 8, 10, 110, 122, 124

230 Index La Pirate’s Fiancee 38 Play it Again Sam 98, 109, 111 playback technology 181–7 Pleasantville 13, 47, 85, 150, 193–201, 204–7 Pollock, Jackson 207 Pope, Alexander 143 popular culture 19, 22 pornography 35, 77, 184, 186 Portrait of a Lady 51 Possession 134 post-feminism 9–14, 68, 82, 89, 91, 94, 113, 161, 177 The Postman Always Rings Twice 160 postmodernist cinema 4–29, 32–7, 50, 67, 85, 118–19, 127–8, 137, 144–6, 149, 153, 155–65, 169–70, 175, 178, 184, 190, 208; and feminism 35–47, 99, 156–7; and genre 26–7; and postmodern culture 15–20, 50 postmodernist-feminism 52 postmodernist melodrama 55, 68–70, 79, 81, 88–90, 100–1, 104, 188 Potter, Sally 12, 38, 48, 51, 129, 132–3, 140–8, 154 Pretty Woman 12, 61–4, 70, 80–1, 93, 99–104 Pribram, E. Deidre 39–40, 48 Pride and Prejudice 130–3 Prince of Tides 64 prostitution 75–6, 81, 99, 101 psychoanalysis and psycho-analytic concepts 40, 42, 45–50, 82, 103, 135–6, 159, 189 Pullman, Bill 114 Pulp Fiction 6–7, 41–6, 168, 175 Quaid, Dennis 200 Queen Christina 142 Radway, Janice 59 Raiders of the Lost Ark 28, 31 Reagan, Ronald (and Reaganite policies) 32, 50, 71, 76, 92, 99, 113, 156 reality television 204

Reardon, Barry 61 Rebecca 81, 83 Rebel without Cause 193 The Reckless Moment 171 Redford, Robert 70 Reed, Peyton 122 Regarding Henry 78 Reiner, Rob 93, 106, 123 Reservoir Dogs 5–7, 41–5, 168, 175 rétro mode 127, 160–1, 166–9 Riley, Denise 37, 59 Roberts, Julia 66, 70, 83–4, 93, 104, 120, 205 Robocop 179 Romancing the Stone 57 romantic comedy 10–14, 46–7, 51, 55, 62–4, 67–9, 93–121, 125, 155, 166, 172, 175, 185, 205, 208 A Room with a View 46, 129–31 Rosie the Riveter 198 Ross, Herbert 63 Rosselini, Isabella 6 Roth, Tim 168 Rowe, Kathleen 107–8 Rozema, Patricia 51, 131, 153 Ruban, Joseph 68, 79 Runaway Bride 93, 104 Rushdie, Salman 19, 126, 189 Ryan, Meg 66, 93, 104, 107, 114–20 Ryan, Michael 28–33, 41, 44 Sackville-West, Vita 140 Santely, Joseph 198 Schatz, Thomas 24 Scorsese, Martin 4, 6, 16, 29, 43, 155–6, 174–5 Scott, Ridley 52, 169 screwball comedy 96–100, 172 Seabrook, John 18 The Secret beyond the Door 81, 171 Seidalman, Susan 57 self-empowerment, female 208 Semi-Tough 97 Sense and Sensibility 131 Senta Falls, Iowa 85–6 September 11th 2001 attacks 124–5 Serial Mom 167–8 Sex and the City 3, 93, 203, 105, 125

Index 231 Sex, Lies and Videotape 174 sex-comedies 109–14, 119, 122–4 Shakespeare in Love 131, 153 Sharrett, Christopher 6, 45–6 Shaviro, Steven 185 Sherman, Cindy 19, 36–8 Shop around the Corner 118 Showalter, Elaine 140 The Silence of the Lambs 170 Silence of the Palace 51 Silkwood 106 ‘sixtiesness’ 123 Sky movies 76 Sleeping with the Enemy 12, 61, 68–72, 76, 79–80, 95, 128, 167 Sleepless in Seattle 7, 93, 104–6, 114–21, 128 small-town America 84–8, 194 Soderbergh, Steven 13, 172, 174, 177 Something Wild 13, 41, 90, 191, 193 Sommerville, Jimmy 142 Spartacus 31 spectatorship, female 48–9, 69, 116, 118 Spielberg, Steven 19, 24, 28–9, 38 Springer, Claudia 179–80, 183, 186 Stanwyck, Barbara 63 Star Wars 6, 31 stars, female 66 Starting Over 113 Steel Magnolias 63, 67 The Stepford Wives 8, 13–14, 53, 85, 193, 198, 201–4 Stepmom 67 Sterling, Bruce 179 Stiff Upper Lips 130 Stone, Oliver 71 Stone, Sharon 165 Strange Days 13, 176–88 street culture 175–7 Stuart, Andrea 59 studio system 23, 157 Supernanny 204 Suspicion 81 Swazey, Patrick 73 Sweet November 67 Sweetie 132

Swift, Graham 126 Swinton, Tilda 142 Sylvia 51, 148 Tan, Amy 63 Tarantino, Quentin 6–8, 13, 16, 40–7, 102, 155–6, 168, 172, 174, 177 Tasker, Yvonne 9, 94, 164, 183 Taubin, Amy 41–2, 128 Taxi Driver 44–5 tech-noir 169, 178–83, 186 television 3, 12, 24–5, 192–3, 204 Terminator films 3, 58, 169, 179, 183 Thelma and Louise 46, 52 Thief of Hearts 57 The Thomas Crown Affair 13 Thompson, K. 23 Thriller 132 Thurman, Uma 168–9 Titanic 68, 131 Tladi, Moufida 48, 51 Trainspotting 42 Travolta, John 168, 193 Tremain, Rose 189 Troche, Rose 46 True Romance 42 The Truman Show 195 Turner, Kathleen 161, 167–8 Turner, Lana 200 Turner Classic Movies 25 Twin Peaks 47, 192–3 The Two Mrs Carrolls 81 Universal Studios 65 An Unmarried Woman 57 The Usual Suspects 42, 163 Vachon, Christine 65 Valendrey, Charlotte 142 Van Gogh, Vincent 207 Vertigo 10, 165 Videodrome 162 violence in films 44–5, 166–7, 175, 197 visual arts 36 Vonnegut, Kurt 126 voyeurism 136–7, 182

232 Index Wagner, Paul 65 Waiting to Exhale 63 Waldfogel, Jane 151 Walken, Christopher 45 Wall Street 71 Walsh, Peter 20 War of the Worlds 124 Warhol, Andy 16 Waters, John 167 Waters, Sarah 134 Westlake, M. 103, 117 What Lies Beneath 84 What Women Want 93, 104 Whelan, Imelda 35, 120–1 When Harry Met Sally 7, 11, 47, 93, 104–14, 118–23, 128 White, Minni 57 Why Change Your Wife? 96 Wife-swap 204 The Wild Ones 193 Williams, L. 72 Willis, Sharon 42, 45 Winship, Janet 2, 59 Winslet, Kate 131 Winterson, Jeanette 36, 38, 126

Witherspoon, Reese 66, 196 ‘woman’s film’ as a type 1–3, 7, 11–12, 54–8, 63–5, 95–6, 114–17, 158, 208 women film-makers 33–4, 49, 51, 65–6 Wood, John 147 Woolf, Leonard 148–9 Woolf, Virginia 133, 140–4, 147–54 Wright, Joe 131 Wyman, Jane 200 You’ve Got Mail 118 youth market for film 24, 29–30 yuppie horror films 92 ‘yuppie horror’ films 90, 92 Zane, Billy 146 Zellwegger, Renee 8, 66, 93, 104, 120, 123 Zemkis, Robert 57 Ziskin, Laura 65 Zizek, Slavoj 169 Zucker, Jerry 68, 72–3