Lesbian Desire in Picture Claire
I will also consider Christine
Gledhill’s term “negotiation” as it relates to the role of textual criticism in
cultural texts, most particularly as it addresses the need to consider
“revisions to the cine-psychoanalytic construction of the classic narrative text” (for example,
Mulvey’s early work).[i] Gledhill states that “the critic opens up the
negotiations of the text in order to animate contradictions in play” (Gledhill
175). Additionally, I use the terms
“queer” and “lesbian” with the awareness that the use of the terms (seemingly)
interchangeably can be seen as problematic for certain theorists who find
themselves at opposite ends of the “ism” pole.
I use them sometimes together
“lesbian/queer” to bring attention to my focus, which is on the female representation in the film (and the
female-to-female relations), in order to delineate the queer space the film
allows, which may include representations from a variety of identity
categories: gay; lesbian; queer. My use
of the term “queer” and “lesbian” aligns
with Butler’s (rather than Adrienne Rich’s, for example) in the sense that it
is meant to infer a place (as outlined in the film) where gender can be seen as
unstable, shifting.[ii] I hope this will be a starting point to
address the following: Where is the place for a queer/lesbian subtext film
discussion within an overall analysis of gender? How can a reading that openly seeks to
recover lesbian subtext from film text operate legitimately within overt
lesbian films? How useful is the term
“ambiguous lesbian film” to this project, or is it unfair to an overall project
that seeks to vilify overt lesbian representation? Though Teresa de Lauretis might suggest
otherwise [iii],
Judith Roof suggests it can be a useful
endeavor:
Because the
collision of gender and sexuality becomes so visible in configurations of
lesbian sexuality, they also illustrate how irreconcilable conflicts between
the two are representationally resolved.
Thus by reading these discourses for the lesbian sexuality in them and
analyzing its textual enactments, we see how lesbian sexuality is configured
and how that configurations functions in the text, in the discourse, and by
extension, in the culture. [iv]
The
ambiguous lesbian film utilizes various strategies in promoting this
spectatorial uncertainty. As Holmlund
points out, the films’ female characters are typically portrayed as femmes,
lesbians who are conventionally attractive and feminine in appearance, so that
they can easily be interpreted as either lesbian or straight. …Holmlund has also isolated certain “clichéd
counter-conventions of continuity editing” that mark a relationship between two
female characters as possibly involving lesbian desire: “shot/reverse shots of
two women looking longingly at each other, point of view shots where one woman
spies on another, and two shots where two women hug, romp, or dance together. [v]
Though the director (Bruce McDonald)
attempts to open a space of queer in the film, it is one marked with and
dependent upon stereotypical representations.
In many more ways that fail than succeed, Picture Claire might be considered the working man’s Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg) in the
sense that both films are organized around the themes of doubling and male
hysteria. I only mention this because
of the cultural connections some critics
attempt to make between Cronenberg and his work. For example, Maggie Humm, arguing against a case for
misogyny in Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers says “he also seems to
identify masculinity’s symbolic subordination to women with a colony’s actual
subordination to the Imperial power”[vi]
Initially, lesbian desire is most overtly represented by
Lily (Gina Gershon) such that Lily first
“marks” the queer territory through which much later in the film, Claire
will follow (the yellow brick road?). The
opening voiceover in French spoken by Juliette Lewis in (and subtitled in
English) is first suggestive of this
subtext: “When I was little, I thought
that I was not like other people. That I was different. That I came from the moon. Not the Earth. I’ve lived my whole life in Montreal Hollywood
melodrama. The film accentuates and
exaggerates their romance-when isn’t a romance in fact all. As the viewer will soon see, romance is a
fantasy. When Claire first arrives in Toronto
There is a double significance to
the casting of the two female leads, Gina Gershon and Juliette Lewis, both of
whom have been linked to their real-life queer representations in film and
video. If the film offers a critique of
heteronormative desire, ultimately, its success is mixed due to its reliance on
female stereotype and filmic tropes to show or express these desires. In this
way, the film is not very self-reflexive. If not for the various depiction of women coded
in varying degrees of queer and lesbian, the film could easily be dismissed for
its reliance on lesbian stereotype (and I am uncertain as to what degree of
success this might be true in the film), especially concerning Lily as the
beautiful cord-strangling while-coming lesbian psychopath. Yet in its depiction of a variety of women
images and representations (especially from the minor female parts) the film
offers an opportunity for alternative readings.
How does the film visualize its
female characters? It offers the
ingénue; the deadly femme fatale; the dyke police detective; the dyke
garbagewoman;the masculinized art gallery director; the sexually aggressive
girlfriend. The male characters are the
feminized boyfriend/photographer (he photographs rather than has-such that his
photographs become his access to women); the maniacal and lying druggie; the
maniacal pair of druggie drugpins; the lecherous, lying pawnbroker; the
understanding detective. When pitted against one another, the plight of the male
characters imply a doomed heterosexuality, while the strength and resistance of
the female characters points to an opening up of queer space for the film-a
direction that doesn’t necessarily always remain intact during the course of
the film.
The use of montage is
self-reflexive, making the viewer aware of the spectacle and fantasy of her own
fantasy of finding Billy. It subverts
the fairy tale. It incriminates the
hetereosexual desire in the film by establishing it as self-recognized fantasy. By its intentional parallel with the other
female lead played by Gina Gershon, who has been purposely constructed as a
lesbian in the film, the film attempts to align female desire with female
desire. By its use of fantasy montage,
the film builds upon an earlier established innuendo with the viewer: we know
because of the montage sequences that the romance is a farce. We are meant to connect the two female leads,
to unify them against the male protagonists, for example.
Jackie Stacey
argues for a more nuanced model of cinematic spectatorship, one that would
separate gender from sexuality:
In
films where the woman is represented as sexual spectacle for the masculine gaze
of the diegetic and the cinematic spectator, an identification with a masculine
heterosexual desire is invited. The
spectator’s response can vary across a wide spectrum between outright
acceptance and refusal. [vii]
There is both
male and female voyeurism connected both with and within the film, though it
might seem paradoxical to refer to the term “female voyeurism”. With that phrase, I am thinking of the way in
which Shameem Kabir addresses it, exposing it not for its limitations (it
cannot escape its patriarchal heritage) but for its potentiality as it relates
to female spectatorship:
To
the question of voyeurism, I do of course accept its inevitability in the
cinematic medium, but I think it can be reworked through alternative
positionings of desire. To be obvious,
desire here would not involve ‘mastery’, ‘knowledge’ as control or power politics,
but would redefine the woman as autonomous, self-defined and self-determining
in her desires and equal in her difference.
To enable us to enjoy the voyeurism entailed in our spectating, without
letting it be a means of reflecting merely illicit pleasures, we would need to
move away from trajectories of desire as controlling…[viii]
As a photographer, Billy embodies the
metaphorical male gaze-literally positioning his female lovers as objects of
desire. He takes photographs of his lover (Claire)
while she is sleeping to be used later in his first public exhibition. That
he takes the photographs while she sleeps is important because it exposes
the instability of the male gaze where Billy’s power to capture Claire is only
made possible when she is in a passive state.
Once she awakens (from her metaphorical sleep and dependence upon a
heteronormative state), she becomes empowered.
In a scene which depicts this literally, Claire enters the gallery that
will hold Billy’s first exhibition. When
she walks in, she is greeted by its director who recognizes her from the
photographs on the gallery walls: “Oh, what do you know? It’s the real thing”. Ultimately,
Claire rejects both the photographs and her knight in shining armor, Billy. When she destroys his most impressive
photograph (of her), she offers the ultimate metaphor for resisting the male
gaze, in her refusal to participate in the exhibition. The very next shot sequence is of Lily (Gina
Gershon) who is getting her photograph taken at a pawn shop. She tells the pawnbroker that she needs a
passport “fast”. When he refuses, pretending
to not understand her, she places her gun on the counter. He tells her “That’s old style. I can only
give you fifty bucks for it.” She
replies, “I didn’t want to sell it. I
was thinking maybe I had to use it.” This dialogue, of course, however clichéd,
confirms the impression of Lily as dominant, dangerous and deceptive right at
the start of the film.
When talking about a queer subtext,
it is useful to consider models which explicate and bring out the erotic
undertext in the language of the film.
Richard Dyer, Eve Sedgwick and Terry Castle all provide triangular
models which can be applied to the film, Picture
Claire. Hollinger, for example, recaps Richard Dyer’s discussion about
“heterosexist plot formulas” whose ultimate purpose is to reinforce
heteronormative relations in the lesbian film:
The
story involves a struggle for control of the central female character by
competing female and male love interests.
The woman who is at the center of the contest is portrayed as “without
character, unformed…nothing, an absence,” and because her sexuality is
“malleable-she will be had by anyone”.
In the conflict, the lesbian competitor is ultimately defeated and the
male character triumphs, “getting the girl” and suggesting, as Dyer indicates,
that the “true sexual definition of woman is heterosexual and that she gets
that definition from a man.”[ix]
In this way,
“gayness is used to reinforce the appropriateness of hetereosexuality”. Dyer’s model is true to a degree for the film
Picture Claire in the sense that Gina
Gershon’s character is clearly portrayed as villainous, vindictive, murderous. But because there is no clearly established
overt physical relationship between Gina and Claire, this model is less
applicable to this film than Head in the
Clouds, for example, in which the film overtly depicts an erotic
relationship between Charlize Theron and Penelope Cruz. [x] I mention Dyer’s model because of its reliance
on the type of triangular model Eve Sedgwick talks about though Sedgwick’s project was mostly concerned with
the analysis of the mediated desire
between two males and a female in English literature. Her most famous example is the narrator’s implicit
desire for the fair youth, mediated through the dark lady in William
Shakespeare’s sonnets. But it is Terry
Castle’s female homosocial bonding that I would like to consider in addition to
Dyer’s model. Castle talks about the
“debilitation” of male homosocial bonding in lesbian fiction, referring to the
way in which the male to male relationships seem doomed from the start. Similarly, male relations in the film are
portrayed as violent, cruel,
ineffectual. For example, the scene
directly after the one in which Lily brutally murders Eddie (Mickey Rourke)
shows two men sitting in the car. It is
unclear at this point in the film of
their relationship to Lily, Eddie or the within the film itself, but it
is clear from there dialogue the tension between them. The other male characters are similarly
coded. The couple are metrosexed, and
perhaps queered, intentionally, in their attire and in the way they speak to
each other. Theirs is a queer bond. The
one with glasses is slighter, blonder and better looking. He is feminized to the degree that he becomes
dispensable to his partner, who coldly traitors him when he is accidentally
shot. Their action is thrwarted, interrupted in the scene in which they
attempt to brutalize Lily, interrupted by a little girl who accidentally walks
in on them.
To
theorize about female-to-female desire, I would like to suggest, it is
precisely to envision the taking apart of this supposedly intractable
patriarchal structure. Female bonding,
at least hypothetically, destabilizes the “canonical” triangular arrangement of
male desire, it is an affront to it, and ultimately-in the radical form of
lesbian bonding-displaces it entirely.
Even Sedgwick’s own geometrical model intimates as much…Within this new
female homosocial structure, the possibility of male bonding is
radically
suppressed: for the male term is now isolated, just as the female term was in
the male homosocial structure.[xi]
In the case of Picture Claire, for example, there are two models which illustrate
Castle’s diagram. First, there is the Lily
(Gina Gershon)-Eddie (Mickey Rourke)-Claire (Juliette Lewis), and later,
Claire-Billy (Kelly Harms)-Cynthia (Camilla Rutherford). When Lily kills Eddie, Claire (by a convolution
of the plot and script) becomes integrally linked to Lily’s pursuit of her
money. For the first half of the film,
Lily and Claire are filmically linked causally and psychically. At the same time, while Lily is looking for
the diamonds, Claire is looking for Billy.
Billy is clearly shown as the ineffectual incomplete male. In one of the few sex scenes, it is his
ambitious and sexually aggressive girlfriend Cynthia who initiates sex. Later, during Billy’s opening reception for
his photograph exhibition, Cynthia, bored with the exhibit (and we presume, by
him as well) takes up with a stranger, eventually leaving the gallery with him.
In both cases, the men don’t seem to matter.
They are placed in the plot as a way to showcase the women. Placing the female characters in central
positions of the film, of course, doesn’t necessarily promise a subjective
agency for them. And here the discussion
and relevance of the film’s self-reflexivity (if it exists at all) becomes
highlighted. Though the film relies on
stereotypes of female representation (
The cover of the DVD for the film visually
attempts to “twin” the two actresses (Gina Gershon and Juliette Lewis) by
showing a close-up of their faces. In
reality, the two actresses have very different facial features, and even in the
film, attempts to make them appear similar draw attention to their
dissimilarity of features. Neroni talks about the increasing popularity
of using this method to show the two different aspects of a character’s
psyche. But whereas Geena Davis in Long Kiss Goodnight is split within one
person, Picture Claire by its
twinning of two separate characters provides a literal split to show a similar
type of good/evil morality struggle. In
a similar way, Picture Claire
purposely constructs the two female characters as binary opposites. In this construction, each is given the
appropriate and associative traits that would mark them as gender opposites, as
is common in the use of the double trope.
For example, Gina, as the bad twin, is given masculine traits: she
commits a brutal murder using typically male method-cord strangulation; she
“rapes” the male as she kills him; she wears masculine clothes; she is sexually
aggressive; she is calculating. But like
Jane in Mulvey and Wollen’s The Bad
Sister, Gina’s masculine traits are not seen in the film as wholly
negative. [xii] This construction attempts to reject
mainstream portrayals of violent women by positioning the viewer in Gina’s
point of view. The camera angles allow
the viewer to participate via Gina’s point of view. In this way, we both understand and
appreciate her motive for killing Eddie (Mickey Rourke) and for her need to
keep the diamonds. In this way, then, the
film tries to establish a justification for her actions. Like Susan (Madonna) in Desperately Seeking Susan, Gina “transgresses conventional forms of
feminine behavior”. [xiii] Oddly
enough, the film doesn’t succeed in breaking the stereotype of the good twin,
Claire, as well. Claire as the good twin
is feminized to an overt degree. One of
the motifs in the film is the connection of her character’s quest for the truth
to Dorothy’s quest in the Wizard of Oz. Though
crudely evoked, by its excessive and clichéd allusions to The Wizard of Oz, the film nonetheless
invokes a queer space even down to the inclusion of a Canadian mutt version of
Toto. Though the film maintains her
point of view most the viewer becomes put off by indecision and her supposed naiveté. In this way, her portrayal in the film is
less nuanced and becomes more stereotypical.
In her inverse Cinderella post-ball quest for the prince (Billy), viewer
credibility in the character becomes strained, and the montage memory and
fantasy sequences which are not given to Gina’s character lose their
effectiveness.
In her chapter “The Divided Self”, Lucy
Fischer examines the theme of the double in 1940’s woman melodrama films such
as The Dark Mirror, and A Stolen Life concluding that the shot
sequences in the film substantiate this type of reading:
Furthermore,
the optical processes necessitated by the twin film almost concretize the
imposition of an external masculine view on women. It is the metaphorical, psychological
resonances of these optical practices that are most intriguing-the sense in
which they parallel the kind of psychic processes by which people “project”
aspects of themselves onto other individuals.
Seen in this regard, the good and bad twins in the film seem like
nothing so much as dichotomized male projections of opposing views of the
Eternal Feminine.[xiv]
Even though the
female characters are portrayed as threatening, because their sexuality is
questioned, compromised, somewhat thwarted, the threat is an ambiguous one, and
almost always is directed primarily at themselves: they are self-destructive
rather than destructive. Their power in the film is defeated by the film’s
sustained acknowledgement of this power as damaging, mostly to themselves. In other words, their power is coded as
female stereotype much as the 1940’s femme fatale characters were posited:
treacherous, perverse, sexually aggressive, deceptive and competitive. Fischer talks about the divided self where “the figure of opposing twins seem not to
represent dual lobes of the female psyche but rather two aspects of the broader
cultural conception of woman” (184). The
representation of the “dichotomized” female self is a result of cultural
expectations and anxieties invoked by the powerful woman. Lily represents the lawless, violent
murderous self while Claire is the good girl who performs justified violence.
Here the division is one of morality but I am arguing, of something more. The split is meant to suggest the sexuality
division as well. Lily is the male-killing
queered twin, while Juliette Lewis, and is the initially heterosexual, than
ambiguous one. The film affirms its
queer space by its not insisting that Lewis’ character end up with Billy. In fact, in the rejection of Billy, the film
fulfills this anticipated and setting up of queer space. This is important especially considering the
violent end to Lily-when she is killed off so too is part of the queer space
the film has earlier acknowledged. In
the loss of her “twin”, Juliette Lewis has lost part of the queer space, but
not entirely. “The use of a double
figure to symbolize diverse aspects of a single entity” (186 Fischer). Fischer further suggests, however, that the
these two opposing views of women are a construct of a male gaze, or at least
the idea of what women are supposed to be like according to a male director.
But this notion is somewhat ruptured by the film technique itself. Initially, the fantasy sequences are filmed
in montage-which further highlights their unlikelihood, marking them as fantasy
in the viewer’s eye. By placing them out
of the normal film technique, and making them external to the rest of the
narrative’s filming technique, the film suggests a conscious awareness: again,
for the purpose of fantasy. In other
words, the narrative does not undermine the character’s quest for the
truth. And unlike in Mildred Pierce, for example, important
facts are not being withheld from the character and shared by the viewer. The viewer in this case has access to the
same information as do the characters.[xv]
The Use of
Montage
Teresa De Lauretis has said “film
re-members (fragments and makes whole again) the object of vision for the
spectator”. The montage sequences remind
the spectator that the plot is just fairy-tale; that the film isn’t real. The film attempts to resist the usual
relationship between women and narrative, by not relying strictly on female
stereotypes. The film, directed by a
Canadian film director (Bruce McDonald) known for his independent films, attests
to that attempt, one suggested by Claire Johnston (by) “disrupting the fabric
of male bourgeois cinema within the text of the film”. In this way, the film tries to generate new
meaning.[xvi]
Theoretically,
the inventive interruption of classical narrative is meant to destroy the codes
of mainstream entertainment and ultimately replace them with a cinema that
provokes thought and encourages analysis.
Counter-cinema here borrows from Brecht the idea that critical distance,
and ultimately consciousness-change, can be effected in the theatrical audience
by annihilating the pleasure of identification. [xvii]
But to the
degree that counter cinema subverts everything (including looking relations,
for example), Gaines suggests, is not always the most effective means,
either. Gaines cites Laura Mulvey’s Riddle of the Sphinx as an example of a
film that works almost too hard, withholding “narrative resolution to such an
extreme that women viewers (themselves) have found it disorienting (82). The question that Gaines arrives at in her
discussion of the preferred forms (films which do not necessarily call
attention to their own “devices”) of cinema of Black women filmmakers, and in
her summary of Mulvey’s essay, Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, is one that I would like to consider when
looking at the filmmaking in Picture
Claire: Is the spectator restricted to viewing the female body on the
screen from the male point of view? (84). though Gaines posed this question in
1984, I believe it continues to resonate with feminist film criticism as a
legitimate and viable locus for analysis. Gaines mentions the convincing work
by Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca in “Pre-Text and Text in Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes” in which they claim that Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe “project an
intimacy with each other that invites both identification and a kind of female
voyeurism” (85). Having seen the film, I
agree with that assessment and I would argue, many female to female
relationships onscreen reflect a similar type of cinematic bonding, such as the
kind that I am arguing exists between Claire and Lily. In their case, however, the relationship is
never fully allowed, which is one critique I have of the film. [xviii]
Hilary Neroni examines the placement
of violence within narrative, believing that violent sequences in film appear
to stop the narrative, to exist outside the normal narrative events (Neroni 3). Juliette Lewis is known for her edgy, violent
roles. Her character, Mallory, in Natural Born Killers seemed to “enjoy” killing. Picture
Claire casts her in a much different light: vulnerable and naïve. Lily
(Gina Gershon) is the femme fatale figure, who has an orgasm while brutally
strangling Eddie (Mickey Rourke), for cheating her out of her money. That her character might have enjoyed the violence is unusual, according to Neroni who
says that women who perform violence in film do so under rigid and understood
filmic conventions-women’s violence, unlike the male’s violence-is framed as
being justified. If males are violent as
one extreme reaction to castration anxiety, women’s violence is explained less succinctly. (Neroni 188).
The scene in which she strangles Micky Rourke’s character is mean for
the lesbian gaze. It is erotic and
sensual. She looks beautiful,
dangerous. He looks disgusting, stringy
hair. It is obvious that she is symbolically
killing off the male in this scene.
Gina as the Violent Fucking Woman
This scene offers a much too easy to
be ignored as a patriarchal catchall of
the constructed lesbian stereotype, relying on the masculinization
of Gina Gershon’s character, Lily and
the coinciding emasculation of Mickey Rourke’s character, Eddie at the height
(orgasm) of her violence. She is shown
in the power position-on top-while she strangles him (Neroni 193).
When Lily asks Eddie for her money,
he lies telling her that he got “one of those lockers to put her money.” She replies “that’s kind of too bad. I was hoping we could spend some time
together.” Next, she sits on his lap; they kiss. She strangles him with a cord. The entire time the camera remains on her
face, in a close-up. She seems to be
having an orgasm, struggling and shifting and grinding her body into his
lap. After she kills, him she whispers “They haven’t had lockers at the airport
since the seventies you dumb double crossing fuck”.
Eddie’s murder by Lily becomes a
ritualistic act of revenge-for his lying and cheating her out of her
money. He has betrayed their
partnership, which has been unequal. The
film makes much about the inequity between the two, purposely delineating the
differences between them. His character
is steeped in misogyny, so that when he is brutally strangled by a woman who is
sitting atop him in a pretense of making love, the joke is on him. He pays for his misogyny; the film would like
us to believe. As he is being killed,
his is the passive position, with Gina on top strangling him with a metal
cord. Gender violence becomes
inverted. The sounds of her breath,
gasping, and her body humping up and down suggest the sex act. The viewer isn’t certain is she is killing
and fucking him at the same time, or simply strangling him. If she isn’t fucking him, the film suggests
she is, with the sounds of orgasm coming from her. As she tightens the cord, she humps him
harder, so that the film leaves ambiguous whether the gasps are coming from the
exertion of strangling him or from her orgasm. The murder for Gina Gershon’s
character is not as transgressive as it could be-after all, she is killing a
bad guy-an ignorant drug lord for whom nobody cares. She is doing society a favor, wiping away the poisons of society.
In one of the final scenes of the
film, all three women are held hostage by the drug lord. The scene’s dialogue further connects the
Lily and Claire. For example, he tell
Lily (before Claire has arrived):
“You’re
a smart girl, you’ve been thinking it through.
Is that fucking thing even loaded?
I’m guessing that thing you did with Eddie isn’t sitting too well with
you.
Lily puts the gun down. A few minutes later, Claire enters the
apartment.
Looking at the three women, He
laughs: “Women…Fuck”. Claire picks up the gun that Lily has dropped
earlier. He tells her: “You ever shoot a
gun before. You’re a smart girl.”
Claire
leaves the apartment. As she comes out,
Billy, who has waited for her at the gallery all night, hoping she will show, arrives. He asks “Where will you go?”. Without responding, she walks away from
him. He urges her to leave. “Go. Before they find you.” In one of the
final scenes, in the final merging of her character with Lily, Claire dresses
in Lily’s clothes, before leaving Toronto for Cuba
The
butch adopts fetishes with masculine connotations because they are “most
strongly precoded to convey, both to the subject and to others, the cultural
meaning of sexual (genital) activity and yearning toward women, “not, as some
theorists have suggested, because they “stand in for the missing parts”. For
the femme, desire for the lost or denied female body is signified by a
“masquerade of femininity. [xix]
Both Juliette Lewis and Gina Gershon
have been publicly connected with lesbian, issues either through the actors
they portray or through their participation in lesbian causes (or, in the case
of Juliette Lewis, appearing in Melissa Etheridge’s coming out video).
In the sense that Claire refuses
Billy, she also refused heterosexual love.
In this way, the film resists a full and blown-out castration of queer
identity. Yet, its depiction and its
conclusion are somewhat problematic for the viewer, who has a hard time trying
to forget the bloodied and lifeless beauty of Lily lying on the floor. Perhaps anything the film’s intended message
is one of moral cautionary-careful what you smuggle, steal, etc. This message seems to be inconsistent with my
earlier argument but I would further argue that it isn’t at all, necessarily. The queer community is still closeted in Picture Claire but they are not
altogether invisible. Cinderella leaves
Prince Charming, taking with her the slippers (in a type of mixed filmic
metaphor-the “ruby slippers”) and the loot: A modern day girl’s dream,
refigured? I would argue that with this
ending the film strongly suggests the potentiality of Claire’s burgeoning queer
identity, that may or may not resurface later (when she tires of Cuba) and
comes home.[xx]
[i] See Christine Gledhill, “Pleasurable
Negotiations” edited by Sue Thornham, in
Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. (New
York: New York University Press, 1999), 166-179.
[ii] See Carol Guess’ “Que(e)rying Lesbian Identity” in
The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 28, No. 1,
Identities. (Spring, 1995), 19-37, in which she talks about how lesbian
identity politics (as put forth by Adrienne Rich, for example) has been
problematized by the emerging use of the term “queer” by theorists such as
Judith Butler, for example. Part of the
tension between the two areas of thought has to do with an overreliance on the
notion of a fixed identity (Rich’s
“lesbian”) to the exclusion of all that is male (and thus, patriarchal); and an underreliance on any fixed identity at
all (Butler Butler
[iii] I refer to the ongoing debate between feminist
theorists such as de Lauretis, who cautions against conflating discussions of
lesbian film that operate around a discrete notion of lesbian desire, with
“ambiguous lesbian” films that theorists
such as Jackie Stacey claim focus on female homosocial bonds, as well as erotic
desire as outlined in Karen Hollinger’s “Theorizing the Mainstream Female
Spectatorship: The Case of the Popular
Lesbian Film” in Cinema Journal, 37:2
(Winter, 1998), 3-17.
[iv] See Judith Roof.
A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian
Sexuality and Theory. (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1991).
[v] See Karen Hollinger’s “Theorizing the Mainstream
Female Spectatorship: The Case of the
Popular Lesbian Film” in Cinema Journal,
37:2 (Winter, 1998), 3-17.
[vii] See Jackie Stacey in “Desperately Seeking Difference”
in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism,
edited by Patricia Erens (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
[viii] See Shameem Kabir’s Daughters of Desire: Lesbian Representations in Film (London:
Cassell, 1998).
[ix] See Karen Hollinger’s “Theorizing the Mainstream
Female Spectatorship: The Case of the
Popular Lesbian Film” in Cinema Journal,
37:2 (Winter, 1998), 3-17.
[x] See my essay “Turned Traitor: Limiting the Queer
Space in Head in the Clouds” that
argues that the queer space intentionally arranged in the film between the
three leading characters, Gilda, Mia and Guy, replicates almost exactly Dyer’s
model. Unlike Picture Claire, however, which subverts Dyer’s model with its
film’s resolution, Head in the Clouds,
by killing off first Gilda’s lover, Mia, and eventually, the character of Gilda
herself, subverts female erotic desire,
ultimately reinforcing heteronormative ideals.
[xi] See Terry Castle’s “Stuart Townsend Warner and The
Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction” edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price
Herndl in Feminisms: An Anthology of
Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1997), 532-554.
[xii] See Lucy Fischer’s discussion of Mulvey/Wollen’s film as an example of the use of the double
trope that resists the usual ideology in Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and
Woman’s Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), in which she says “…the traits of
“masculinity displayed by the “pernicious woman are not regarded in a negative
light. Rather, they are seen as marks of
justified rebellion against the constraints of femininity, as defined by
patriarchal culture.” (197). In this way, too, Gina and Claire, who have worked
as drug carriers in the male dominated drug trade also resist a male economic
order against exploitation.
[xiii] See Jackie Stacey’s discussion of desire between women that she attributes to
difference other than one based on a sexual difference, in “Desperately Seeking
Difference” in Issues in Feminist Film
Criticism edited by Patricia Erens (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1990)
[xiv] Lucy Fischer distinguishes at least two types of
criticism directed at the theme and use of “doubling” in film. One focuses on doubling as it relates to the
individual psyche, where it might represent the duality and division of an
internal morality , while the other is
more concerned with connecting the issue of doubling of the character to a
broader social consequence. In other
words, how do the qualities represented by the use of the twinned characters
metaphorically related to social issues, such as gender? For my argument, I am using a bit of both to
suggest that the two characters represent a lesbian identity (Gina) and an
uncertain heterosexual-perhaps, queer one (Claire). In this way, the film offers a critique of
heteronormative desire. Yet any gains
made on this end are muted somewhat by the overreliance of stereotype and the
male director’s distorted projection of women’ power in the film.
[xv] See my earlier essay on Mildred Pierce, in which I talk about the double discourse
intertwined in the film, in which viewers are privy to information related to
the plot that is withheld from the central character. This results in the subversion of Mildred’s (Joan Crawford) voice (and thus, the reduction in power
of her voice-over) in the film.
[xvii] See Jane Gaines’ “Women and Representation” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism,
edited by Patricia Erens (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
[xviii] In my essay “Turned Traitor: Limiting the Queer Space
in Head in the Clouds”, I argue that the
two female lead characters (played by Charlize Theron and Penelope Cruz)
exhibit a much more similar type of relationship that aligns itself more
closely with the cinematic relationship exhibited by Jane Russell and Marilyn
Monroe to which Arbuthnot and Seneca refer
in their discussion of Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes.
[xix] See Karen Hollinger’s “Theorizing the Mainstream
Female Spectatorship: The Case of the
Popular Lesbian Film” in Cinema Journal,
37:2 (Winter, 1998), 3-17.
[xx] This idea of a possible and latent queer desire was inspired by my
reading of Rhona J. Berenstein’s essay
about queer desire in Hitchcock’s Rebecca,
in which she makes reference to the second Mrs. De Winter (Joan
Fontaine)’s burgeoning queer desire.
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