NO MORE LADIES - Problems with Feminist

...Problems with Feminist Film Scholarship

It’s been nearly fifty years since feminist Laura Mulvey blew the top off of American cinema with her critical theory “Visual and Other Pleasures”. Employing Freudian psychoanalysis, as her methodology of choice, Mulvey’s watershed 1975 essay has since become the benchmark by which a very narrow-minded body of work has emerged as the be-all-and-end-all of explicative research on women in film. This, of course, is if one buys into the whole white-bred heterosexual family model that early feminist scholarship clung to for more than a decade – and, unfortunately, Hollywood seems to delight in perpetuating as our cultural norm - despite civil rights, the resurgence of gay liberation and the single parent.

Yet, these ‘minorities’ remain conveniently and quietly absent from most discussions in feminist film theory. Instead, the whole ball of yarn tangles on an unsophisticated brouhaha that goes something like this:

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Women become objects in the eyes of men and men relish in objectifying them as brainless objects designed for sexual gratification.

This seemingly simple equation is complicated by the fact that Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic model (on which Mulvey’s theory is based) claims that, as boys, men fear engaging their shortcomings inside a woman’s vagina. Ho-hum, the beat goes on.

Add to that mixed confusion a G-spot of political analysis (basically politics influences film and, to a lesser extent, vice versa) and one begins to develop a very skewed feminist perspective in which the already gutless and emasculated patriarchy is once again blamed wholesale for what’s wrong with American women, or at least the American women as depicted on a flickering spool of celluloid.

The problem?

She’s too beautiful.
She’s not beautiful enough.
She’s concerned only with being beautiful.
She’s not her own person.
She acts too feminine.
Define “feminine”.

She always leans on a man for guidance, sex, protection, kids, marriage, and for her own fulfillment and ultimate happiness.

Well…yes, unless she’s a lesbian. And let’s face it, how many happy lesbians are there in American cinema today? Okay, how many lesbians are there in American cinema today? It’s not a riddle and the answer is – very few.

But consider the flipside of that stereotype: the American male as depicted in American cinema. He’s perpetually butch, buff, and breaking heads in the bar room or on the battlefield. He’s G.I Joe at dawn and Don Juan at twilight, a rogue, a jock, a hot bod bouncing quarters off his shimmering pecs at the beach while rocking the world of every potential Junior Miss within his predatory, testosterone-driven parameter.

Oops, almost forgot, he’s equally as mindless as the American woman on screen and just as incomplete without his girl Friday proudly clutching his swollen bicep before the final credits.

But women like that…don’t they?

Well, no. Or at least they shouldn’t, according to feminists.

Part of the difficulty feminist film theory encounters stems from the fact that it continues to position itself as the “other” in a patriarchal society. Feminists don’t need to point to the obvious external backlash that has reinterpreted their cause as either “monolithic” or “broad-based,” that is, too narrowly construed or too diffused to be of any use to anyone outside of that rabid pack of man-hating, testicle-stomping hypocrites (which is what the conservative left believes is the truth about feminism on the whole).

Yet, despite these external threats, the internal strife amongst feminist film scholars has been a far greater chasm to conquer. One critical distillation is a given: feminist film scholarship enjoys truncating the whole of American cinema in an oppressor/victim model in which men like their women big-breasted and dumb as the proverbial post, and women seemingly enjoy complying with that request. As a result, liberal feminist film theory inadvertently maintains the binary model of sexual differences even as it struggles to dismantle it.

But if American cinema dooms every cinematic heroine to a fadeout in dishpan hands, barefoot pregnancies and the desperately clinging of waifs dripping from the arms of Mr. Right, Prince Charming, et al, then it also imprisons every cinematic hero and anti-hero into that role of the eternal bad guy as far as the liberal-minded female is concerned. There’s no opportunity for equality, even if the guy wants it. There’s no moment when he can just sit back with his beer and cigarette, turn to the objectified bubblehead of external perfection and say, “Okay honey, your turn.”

Feminist film scholars don’t get this. Or if they do, they’re unconcerned with exploring the concept for fear that any deviation from their “men = bad/women = suppressed” model will call into question what is already an unstable theory on increasingly shaky ground.

Now, I’ve run into many a feminist who will explain at length that men on film don’t require in-depth analyses and critical readings because they are part of the patriarchy – hence, they are the obvious problem. End of discussion. The suggestion from feminist film scholars will most likely be that if you (like I) think that the man has been misunderstood in film then you should go soak your head in a pint of queer theory (for those unfamiliar, the homosexual offshoot of feminism proper).

But queer theory has only begun to investigate masculinity in the arts. And there’s a very real problem in letting gay culture and gay literature investigate representations of the heterosexual male. It’s sort of like asking men to explain yeast infections. Thus, while oodles of feminist literature and film scholarship have critically analyzed the female face from every conceivable angle, queer theory has yet to substantially investigate the esthetic beauty of men’s facial features. Instead the body of investigation tends to focus on masculinity in study as part musculature (the functionality of the male body) and part genitalia (both for its practical and symbolic phallic empowerment).

In recent years, some feminist critics and critics of feminism have asked probing questions that investigate the whereabouts of a feminine sub-erotic pleasure in the cinema, in other words, can women get off by watching men just as much as men supposedly get off by watching women. But here again, the whole exercise seems tinged with a tongue-in-cheek, wink-wink/nudge-nudge mentality.

It reduces all women spectators to low morality and rabid sexual fascination for tight buns and ample endowment. Isn’t that what feminists have argued the male spectator has been pleasantly suffering from all along? Instead of elevating their analysis of women’s participation in cinema, feminist scholarship has slowly reduced women’s response to a mirror image or its patriarchal equivalent.

The problem then that most feminist film scholars seem to have with observing their sex on the screen is that they see themselves as either too much the stereotype of predigested feminine ideals, or, as cultural cloning of male stereotypes onto the female body. It’s not enough to see Louise shoot a potential rapist in Thelma & Louise, or to observe Sigourney Weaver gradually transforming in Alien as a “butched” up carbon copy of an iconic anti-hero a la Jean-Claude Van Damme, no. And neither is it satisfactory to assume that this shift toward the ultra-violent grand perversion of their own sexuality is the best that women in film can hope for.

There’s got to be a happier medium. But where is it?

If one accepts gender construction as cultural, then cinema visually illustrates the hyper-pantomime of both masculinity and femininity. It maintains rigid and fixed heterosexual normalcy as its myth. You’re either a guy’s guy or a Sheila. If you’re a lesbian…hey, it’s okay. But you’ll never be the main character in anything outside of a second-rate talk show that quietly eschews your sexual preference as quirky, in vogue, or eccentric. And if you’re gay – well, then there’s the isolated environment presented in “Queer as Folk” or reruns of any number of “homo-friendly” design and decorating shows to live for. How depressing.

While all this is going on, feminist film scholarship continues to maintain that men – all men – are to blame for women’s current representation and misfortune. Frankly, I just don’t get where these chicks are coming from. It seems futile to suggest that a radical break is the only way to get their point across, especially since the attempt at gender anarchy resulted in a 1980s backlash that effectively killed most young girls’ interest in proactive membership.

As for today’s modern young woman, she’s seeking the fashion victim status of respectable prostitution and gearing up to have her mug shot plastered on the back of a milk carton after some thoroughly confused guy – who didn’t take “no” as his answer - leaves her for dead in a dumpster out back of the local Blockbuster, from whence his own crash course in masculine assertiveness has been gleaned.

Hence we’re back where we started with the whole men = evil/women = suppressed model. Yet, today’s young woman is unfazed by her oppression. Instead, she wants sexy. She wants “va-va-va-voom”. She wants to please her man. Oops, there I go again. Stating the obvious and completely overriding the Gloria Steinems of the world who sought to reduce the importance of men to taking out the trash or doing the heavy lifting. Eventually even Gloria had her second thoughts and tied the knot. So, where does that leave feminist film scholarship, Sigmund Freud, Laura Mulvey, and the whole bloody mess?

Well, for starters, any investment in psychoanalysis is fundamentally flawed – even Freud would agree with that assessment. Hence, by association, Laura Mulvey’s theory is predicated upon Freud’s interpretation of the male as the more complete and perfect ego. As such the male is the more idealized gender. This makes him more readily accessible to the cinema spectator. He’s inherently the king of his realm, the master and commander of his cinematic domain, the dude most likely to bag his choice of any number of attractive young hopefuls from a seemingly endless line of parodied womanhood. Damn him! Not exactly.

It is perhaps ironic, though nevertheless relevant, to stress that feminism’s prior reliance has been on theories put forth by Marx, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Freud: all men, all instrumental in the formulation, rationalization, articulation and operationalization of feminism as a social movement. As a result, Mulvey’s psychoanalytic benchmark hasn’t so much been the cornerstone of the movement as its weighty headstone by which most of the feminist film scholarship has been dragged under.

As a spring board for exploring male voyeurism and narcissism in the cinema, the psychoanalytic framework completely discards the reality of film, that by its very nature of distilling the whole of human existence into a two hour time frame, film is not and can never be an accurate representation of anything but the most threadbare fundamentals vaguely related to all male/female relationships. May they all just rest in peace.


@2006 Nick Zegarac (all rights reserved).

HER OWN PERSON...

The enduring legacy of Kate' Hepburn


“I’m irritating,” Katharine Hepburn once jokingly mused in what is perhaps the most emphatic snap analysis of both the actress and the woman. There is no denying something in the vein of an irritant about Kate the great. She gets under your skin.

Yet unlike the proverbial rash, we have loved every moment invested in the scratch. Kate Hepburn is the original displaced person. She didn’t follow the rules; she made them up as she went along. A volatile, asexual powerhouse – instantly recognizable and beholding to no one, she strangely enough has come to belong to us all as one of Hollywood’s most unique and original stars.

And although she was fond of saying that a woman should choose between a husband and a career, she disproved her own theory by developing a life long common law arrangement with frequent co-star, Spencer Tracy. That Tracy, a devote Catholic, remained a married man throughout their twenty-one year affair seems a moot point, especially in today’s climate of laisse faire sexual liaisons. The point herein is that neither suffered from their romantic détente. In fact, for a time theirs was a relationship galvanized into America’s favorite couple.

Hepburn came to us from affluence and privilege; handicaps that branded her “box office poison” in a Hollywood of flaxen-haired submissive girls on the side. When asked why she should not be considered for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, producer David O. Selznick rebutted, “because I can’t imagine anyone chasing after a woman for four hours and winding up with you.”

But Kate’s undaunted determination and stubborn perseverance ultimately triumphed over that auspicious start. Through sheer will power and a lot of hard work she won over the respect of her colleagues and the admiration of audiences. In the process she took home four Best Actress Oscar statuettes, making her the most celebrated female artist in the world to this day.

But exactly what is it about Kate that makes her so great? Is it the unmitigated defiance of those fundamental patriarchal values that defined her generation? Or is it the deviously clever way she manages to exploit stereotypes of femininity to her own advantage.

Perhaps the Hepburn mystique is best summed up in her conveyance of the old married lady “faithful as a bird dog and can’t be devious” - at least on the surface, yet always with that tender bit of playful petty larceny lurking beneath her Cheshire smile and wicked razor sharp wit. In the final analysis then, Katharine Hepburn is probably what most women would like to be; self-reliant and self-dependent. She is capable of doing it all on her own, yet smart enough to realize a solitary journey through life was not worth the taking.


@Nick Zegarac 2006 (all rights reserved).

MEN OF VISION - Darryl F. Zanuck

VISIONARY,
DREAMER,
FILM MAKER/STAR MAKER
...20th Century's Foxy Mogul


How best to reflect on the unquestionably intrinsic talent of Darryl F. Zanuck? In possession of the most impassioned imagination and inquisitive desire to succeed, there was little in Zanuck’s early years that might have heralded the coming of a zeitgeist. What he lacked in formal education was compensated for with candid ambition and blind faith. Ostensibly, Zanuck knew not only what films to make but arguably how best to make them critically and financially saleable.

He drew boundless energies from his diminutive five foot six inch frame, personalizing the products of his dream factory with the Zanuck touch. That, along the way, he arguably misplaced the humility of his youth in a series of unrewarding misadventures and womanizing should remain a sidebar to the immensity of his raw talent, as producer of some of the most compelling and frank motion pictures ever made.

In retrospect Zanuck’s opportunities in life appear as lucky anomalies. Early on he learned to compensate for the shortcomings of an unhappy childhood by employing good old-fashioned and distinctly American ingenuity. At fourteen he ran away from home and entered the armed forces during World War I by lying about his age.

Using time away from the battlefield to pen a series of letters to his beloved grandfather, who made certain they were published in the local newspaper and later, in the military press – Stars & Stripes; at sixteen Zanuck convinced a hair tonic promoter to pay for the publication of his short stories as a novel, thereby earning him the credibility as an author, needed to procure his career as a scriptwriter in Hollywood.

Yet, if great good luck was part of his early mystique so too was a mass of personal contradictions. He ardently pursued actress Virginia Fox until she married him, then embarked on a string of improbable extra martial affairs with his “four o’clock girls” – hopeful starlets who would never go farther than Zanuck’s casting couch.

Desperately craving absolute control of the filmmaking process, Zanuck surrendered it twice after it had been attained; first, to adventurism in WWII, then for personal reasons in 1956. If he apparently desired the respect of his peers he was equally nonchalant about discarding their opinions along the way; for Zanuck was a man who lived life on his own terms. Such was his nature perhaps, but who was the man?

He was born Darryl Francis Zanuck in Wahoo Nebraska on Sept 5, 1902. His mother divorced his father at the age of six and remarried to a man that Darryl despised. Despite his stepfather’s attempts to instill a sense of discipline by enrolling him in Page Military Academy, young Darryl proved not to be a scholar.

All the better it seems for his preparation as a Hollywood mogul. After the briefest of tenures, writing gags for Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle and the Keystone Cops, Zanuck and fellow writer Al St. Clair turned the German Shepard Rin Tin Tin into a national phenomenon at Warner Brothers. Both Jack and Harry Warner considered Zanuck their protégée – one they would afford every opportunity along the way except total control as Vice President in Charge of Production. After launching the studio into talkies with The Jazz Singer (1929), Zanuck went on to solidify Warner’s gritty stylized gangster/melodrama formula. In the course of six short years he oversaw 300 productions and was arguably the most consistently unbeaten producer in the business. Despite his weekly salary of $5000 the young and aspiring mogul was restless.

So, in 1933 Zanuck departed Warner Brothers to helm Joseph Schenk’s latest acquisition; 20th Century Pictures. It proved a fortuitous move, fueling Zanuck’s first burst of genius with an impressive roster of films; The Mighty Barnum, and, House of Rothchild (both in 1934); Call of the Wild, and, Born to Be Bad (1935). For the first time in Hollywood’s history, a studio was being run by a film maker. Zanuck’s involvement in these projects cannot be overstated. Although he found the activity on the set tedious at best, his forte for succinct yet dynamic narratives was ultimately proven in the editing room, and, in his ability to instill equal amounts of admiration and fear in his professional relationships.

A typical day at the studio began with a round of dictated memos. A working lunch segued into afternoon meetings with various producers, before retiring to the screening room to view rushes from his most recent batch of projects. Yet, despite Zanuck’s zeal for fifteen hour work days he did manage to maintain something of a family atmosphere at home, with weekend playtime at his Santa Monica beach house and vacation time for Virginia (right) and his three children in exotic locations around the world.

Fiscally sound in his judgments, Zanuck’s next big break came with the acquisition of William Fox Studios in 1935. The rechristened 20th Century-Fox gained $20 million in secured bank loans, a 96 acre backlot and a roster of stellar and rising stars including Janet Gaynor and Alice Faye. Zanuck knew that the strength of his fledgling studio would be measured throughout the industry by the potency of its star power. But in this respect his studio had only one surefire draw – Will Rogers.

Rogers’ death in a 1935 plane crash may have hastened Zanuck’s resolve to find new talent, but it could not have fathomed the pint size wonderment that ultimately became Shirley Temple. Thrust into a rigorous schedule of four films beginning in 1934, Temple reigned supreme as the number one box office draw during the next three years – enough time for Zanuck to round out the decade by establishing and promoting such stars as Sonja Henie, Henry Fonda, Don Ameche and Fox’s rising heartthrob, Tyrone Power to the upper echelons of superstardom.

Throughout the 1940s Zanuck and Fox entered a golden age, becoming the enviable rivals to L.B. Mayer’s MGM (the biggest and arguably the best studio in Hollywood). Fox’s output of the period veered between the polar opposites of socially conscious melodramas (the critique of anti-Semitism in Gentlemen’s Agreement 1947) and slick and glossy, light-hearted musicals (Tin Pan Alley 1940).

But Zanuck was displeased by his inability to procure at least one project that would be deemed worthy of an Academy Award. His first stab at the Oscar came in 1940 with his ambitiously mounted take on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In re-conceptualizing the project for the screen Zanuck decided to shift Steinbeck’s focus from politics to people – an alteration that, when coupled with Zanuck’s rewrite of the finale, as a life-affirming epitaph, infuriated purists of the novel as well as Steinbeck. Though profitable, the film ultimately lost its nomination to Selznick’s Rebecca. The following year Zanuck rectified his near miss with a qualified hit on both fronts; How Green Was My Valley (1941); the bittersweet tale of a young man’s reflections on his childhood in a Welsh mining town.

Like all moguls of his vintage, Zanuck faced the merciless onslaught of television with great defiance. However, unlike his competitors, Zanuck’s foresight proved to have a remedy for the woe that, while not conclusive was nevertheless temporarily effective at staving off the steady decline in theater attendance. With the premiere of The Robe (1953), Cinemascope revolutionized the experience of going to the movies. Under Zanuck’s personal edict to procure entertainment of “width” rather than “depth” Fox launched a robust schedule of widescreen spectacles.

Yet, while his professional career seemed secure, Zanuck’s private life was decidedly set to take a turn for the worst. While on a European holiday the Zanuck’s were introduced to aspiring Polish actress, Bayla Wegier (right). A protégée of both Darryl and Virginia, and with her name cleverly changed to Bella Darvi, the actress debuted in The Egyptian (1954), a lavishly absurd trifle that did little to bolster either Darvi’s career or the studio coffers.

After only two more films it was quite obvious that Darvi would not become a new star of the magnitude of Fox’s other recent discovery; Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately for Virginia, Bella became Darryl’s much publicized mistress – a move that shattered Bella’s future at Fox, sent Virginia into a depression and forced Zanuck to resign at the behest of his board of directors.

Suffering from extreme burn out, Zanuck pursued Darvi and his dreams of independent filmmaking abroad. However, after six consecutive flops many in the industry speculated that Zanuck’s career was over. Worse, Darvi’s restless and erratic behavior, coupled with her Monte Carlo gambling debts convinced Zanuck to divest himself of her company. Alone and desperate for a hit, Zanuck launched into his comeback project; The Longest Day (1962). A personal triumph, the project almost did not come to pass, due in part to Fox’s exorbitant and mounting costs on Cleopatra (1963).

Determined to preserve not only his pet project but the studio from degenerating into certain bankruptcy, Zanuck made an impassioned pitch to the board that not only won him the respect of his peers but control of the studio once again.

Installing his son, Richard as Vice President in Charge of Production, Zanuck mounted an aggressive campaign of mega hits beginning with The Sound of Music (1965); and although the trend toward profitable quality entertainment continued throughout the sixties and seventies, Zanuck increasingly became a casual participant in these daily operations – choosing instead to spend his time abroad with his latest female companion, Juliet Greco.

However, when a series of high profile musical flops placed another strain on studio coffers, the board of directors once again summoned Zanuck to explain the errors in judgment. Tired and decidedly disinterested in defusing the situation, Zanuck opted for the quick fix instead - he fired Richard (right); a move that quietly prompted Virginia to side with the board and successfully oust her philandering husband from his position for the last time in May of 1971.

Professionally destroyed, Zanuck withdrew from his family and the industry until a cancer operation and declining health forced his return to the United States in 1973. Living out his last remaining years as a quiet retiree, reconciled with Virginia and his family, and usurped of all the creative energies that had once seemed so boundless, Darryl F. Zanuck succumbed to pneumonia on Dec. 22, 1979.

“Of all the big boss producers, Darryl was unquestionably the one with the greatest gifts… for the film making process itself,” eulogized Orson Welles. In the interim since Zanuck’s death those words have taken on a more profound meaning. For Zanuck was a force of nature in Hollywood during both his and its heyday. He was a man of personal vision, even if that mantra became temporarily lost under the thick haze of smoke emanating from the cigar chomped between his lips.

Prolific in his artistic sensibilities, well beyond a mere desire to simply entertain, the films of 20th Century-Fox that were produced under the aegis of Darryl F. Zanuck continue to reverberate with a profound sense of importance. Deeper, richer and with a more distinct canvas, often casting a spotlight on disquieting yet important subject matter (racism, corruption, social injustices), the films Zanuck left behind are perhaps the greatest testament that any studio mogul looking down from heaven on his own legacy could have hoped for.

Like the man himself – his celluloid creations continue to inspire and make us think, and, in the immortal words of George Gershwin: “who could ask for anything more?”

@Nick Zegarac 2006 (all rights reserved).