Sex in the Ballroom

Although, ever the English major, I wanted to analyze a literary work for my blog post and I definitely didn’t want to talk about Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, I realized that psychoanalyzing the 5-C ballroom dance team was simply too tempting to pass up. Although I was skeptical about Freud’s method of reducing the entire realm of the unconscious to sexual impulses, everything in ballroom dance seems to originate in sexual urges. From specific dance moves and particular styles of dance to the social dynamics of a team, the ballroom team is completely underwritten in sexual overtones.

In the same way that Freud believes that dreams are read not at face value but as a glimpse into the unconscious, a ballroom dance routine could be read according to their symbolic relations instead of according to their pictorial value. When you put a series of maneuvers together during a dance, individual steps, like the random sequence of events in dreams, are not important. Rather it is the juxtaposition of the steps into certain combinations that create the mood for the dance and interprets the song.

One infamous song interpretation happens in the choreography of the Viennese waltz for the advanced ballroom team. Although the waltz is one of the most innocuous styles of dance, this particular one is choreographed to the song “Touch Me” from Spring Awakening. This song is basically describing how the singer feels during sex. At a dramatic point in the music, the choreographer had the follows (or women) run to the leads (or men) and then jump up onto the leads waists and wrap their legs around the leads’ torsos. The obvious phallic imagery was not lost on the dancers, but often the audience is unconscious of the sexuality of the moves. The general social acceptance of dance portraying a certain level of sexuality works in conjunction with the view that ballroom dancing, as a traditional dance style, must be ingenuous.

For instance, the ballroom dance styles themselves are socially acceptable ways of portraying the ardors of sex. Rumba, in particular, is the dance of love in which the passions of intimacy and relationships are tempestuously reenacted on the dance floor. In this dance style, the distance between the partners varies to close embraces and turning away from the partner and performing for the audience. The pace of the movements varies, likewise, between elongated movements and rapid spins and footwork. My favorite rumba is danced by Karina Smirnoff, of Dancing with the Stars fame, and Slavik Kryklyvyy for an exhibition in 2005. Even the specific moves themselves are miniature depictions of sex acts. At one point, she wraps her leg around him and arches backward in an orgasm-like ecstasy.

Ballroom is notorious for promoting gender stereotypes, and this carries over into the sexual undertones of rumba. Men are consistently characterized within dance as epitomizing strength and providing support for the women, who are in turn seen as light, ethereal and graceful. As you can tell from Slavik’s movements, the man has poses of strength in which he stands wide legged, shoulders squared (usually with a masculine-like aggressive facial expression). As you can tell from the photo of Slavik and Hanna at the top of this article, the aggressive masculine pose symbolizes his sexual dominance over the supplicant feminine form. [Note the explicit sexuality of her raised leg and upturned heard.]

It’s easy to transfer the performance aspects of dance into off-the-floor romances. Karina is, again, an excellent example. Her dance partnerships with Mario Lopez in Dancing With the Stars led to two-year dating relationship (they are depicted dancing in the photo at the left). Although Mario and Karina are no longer together, Karina is still in a relationship with fellow dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy. The dynamics on the dance floor are also at work in the ballroom team on campus. Dating another dancer on team is commonly referred to as “teamcest.” This refers to the familial relationship of ballroom company members. When time commitment is coupled with the shared hobby of highly erotic dancing, members develop certain familiarities, which are, by their nature, given to becoming romantic entanglements. Soon, dating another team member is like dating a family member. However, like Frankenstein’s close knit family, ballroom people often exclusively date other dancers, whether or not they are on the ballroom team, thus emphasizing the incestuous nature of teamcest.

I could probably continue analyzing the team in this way without running out of materials. In this case, it is easy to see how sexual impulses control the social dynamics in the ballroom world. However, as when Freud encountered things that could not be explained by the pleasure principle, I believe some things cannot be retraced to the Oedipus complex or even to infantile sexual development at all.

THE REALM OF THE EXPERIENTIAL: DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT

Just last week I watched Julia Loktev’s “Day Night Day Night.” This is a film about one ambiguous 19-year old girl in preparation to become a suicide bomber. Like anther film I recommend “Paradise Now” the lack of dialogue, or much of any semiological framework for that matter left me in total mental disarray, a feeling I’ve grown to be more comfortable with especially when reading ethnographies for my “Gender, Nationalisms, and the State” class. Like the unknown content of the purloined letter, these texts resist an objective semiological analysis. Rather, each positions the subjective experience of ‘women and resistance’ above more salient representational frameworks, disrupting signifying practices in a way that incurs a Lacanian fragmentation of the self and differentiated self.

For a modern thriller, “Day Night Day Night” affixes an inordinate amount of time on the most basic objects of study—the human face. It is mostly a 94-minute emotional flipbook featuring Luisa William’s brooding features. Throughout the film her face maintains an emotional gravity, yet the emotional register is dynamic, obscuring any hint of motive or identity. A mash-up between documentary and emotional thriller, the film toys with the notion of the role of cinema in reproducing a form of reality. Not only is there no plot besides what the audience brings to the idea of a young girl preparing for the bombing of Times Square, there is almost no dialogue— admittedly I almost lost all tolerance for the kind of ‘mind-game’ that the film plays on.

For example, five minutes is spent on the girl brushing her teeth, clipping her toenails, packing, unpacking, and repacking her few belongings. These banal, subjective human activities take on significance because they are performed in a ritualized manner. They refer to what Lacan might interpret as metaphoric substitutes that displace interpretation, in the same way that language only displays the latent connection between signifier and signified. Unlike the kind of thriller I was expecting, the minimalist focus on this woman’s lived experience—clipping her toenails!—elicits a slightly uncanny repositioning of the viewer to the latent content of Luisa’s mind. In fact, with this cinematic fixation, the viewer is forced to empathize with Luisa, and for me, well I found myself hoping she would succeed—solidying the Lacanian fragmentation of self (comfort of the gaze) and the differentiated self (suicide bomber).

Why is this? I think Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’ and Lacanian notion of ‘the mirror stage’ both provide insight into the formation of cinematic introspective relationships. But I wish to locate my experience in the larger framework which the film’s director clearly draws upon. For example, the horrific backlog associated with the word ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist.’ The word’s origins refer to the ‘terror’ and upheaval after the French Revolution, but it is now used to morally delineate between opposing state and non-state sanctioned ideologies.

The kind of ‘terror’ drawn upon in this movie is particularly salient to the question of women and resistance movements. In my class, “Gender, Nationaliisms, and the State”, I’ve learned from reading multiple ethnographies that even the most basic concepts—are constructed in infinitely diverse positionalities. Many of these texts rely on the Lacanian notion that language conceals feminine realities—especially reflected during times of cultural crisis or displacement. This is a notion which brings to light the complicity usually covered by a nationalist discourse. The terms “motherland” “empowerment” “liberation” “political” “terrorism” and “feminism” are words defined by the binary nature of language. “Motherland” for instance evokes a kind of Freudian security of the mother’s womb for the infantilized/oppressed nation, and in separation, the necessity of its citizens to defend ‘her’ from external threats. “Terrorism,” on the other hand, is understood as an internal threat—an attack on ‘innocent’ women and children—and therefore a double attack on the self through the mother/self.

The limitation of conceptualizing of female ‘martyrs’ without resorting to the word ‘terrorist’ is difficult in modern English discourse—resulting from the compression of diverse, subjective experiences to the simplistic nature of the sign. This moralistic framework demarcates violence on the basis of gender. Think of the term “friendly fire” that is so often used in the media to describe the military occupation of Iraq. For me, I think of little boys playing toy guns. Yet, some words incur a moral judgment based not on any reality, but on the arbitrary nature of the sign on any given period in time.

However, films like “Day Night Day Night” are refreshing insofar as they blur the line between subjective experience and imagined ‘universal reality.’ Instead, they provoke sliding of signifiers triggering new forms of representation and introspection.

Horror movies' use of the uncanny

The term uncanny often refers to something that slips outside normal perception. The uncanny is frightening precisely because it is not familiar and arises from intellectual uncertainty. Because of its effects of fear arousal, many horror movies have included events and situations that are known to induce a feeling of uncanny.

A particular situation that induces the uncanny is when the line between human and automation is blurred. In our everyday lives, we are completely aware of the distinct line between human and automation. This knowledge is reassuring in that we know that a doll would not come to life at any moment, or vise versa. Therefore, when this line is blurred, the order in our lives seems to vanish and uncertain then arises. Uncertainty or unfamiliarity then leads to fear.

In Hoffman’s story “The Sandman,” Hoffman uses this tactic to induce the uncanny. One of the characters in the story is Olympia. Nathaniel, the main protagonist in the story, falls in love with Olympia. He is unaware that she is an automation created by the mechanician, or her father, Professor Spalanzani. Because Hoffman shatters the distinction between automation and human, he instills uncertainty in the Nathaniel and the story. This ambiguousness then leads to fear.

The horror movie Child’s Play uses exactly this tactic. In the movie, a notorious serial killer, Chucky, transplants his soul into doll. The doll was then given to a boy, Andy, for his birthday. When Andy was alone with his babysitter, Maggie, Chucky became animated and killed Maggie by striking her with a hammer. Afterwards, Chucky then came to his old friend’s house, burned the house down, and killed his friend. Holland, the director, blurs the line between human and doll to induce fright. The distinction between a serial killer and a harmless doll not longer exists. Because the line is not longer distinct, order in our everyday lives is disrupted and uncertainty arises. This uncertainty leads to fear.

Another situation that induces the uncanny is when situations or events recur many times over. A particular example in Literary Theories: An Anthology is when a lost person, in attempts to find his way back to a familiar locations, winds up in the same strange location over and over. When someone gets lost, he usually does not wind up in the same unfamiliar location over and over again. Therefore, this situation is unfamiliar. Because recurrences like those are unfamiliar or strange, it induces a feeling of helplessness. It induces a sense of helplessness because the lost person seems to be stuck in an endless, nightmarish cycle where he could never get “un-lost.” This helplessness and ignorance at what to do then induce fear.

Two movies that use recurrence to induce fear are the Japanese horror films One Missed Call and The Ring. In the beginning of One Missed Call, Murasaki Yoko’s cell phone rings with a strange ring tone and the call was dated two days in the future. Two days later, on the exact time of the call, Yoko was brutally killed. In the movie, this sequence recurs various times over: a person receives a call dated from the future, he hears his own voice in the call, and he dies at the precise dated moment. In the The Ring, near the beginning to the movie, Tomoko and three of his friends watch an eerie movie clip and after seven days, all four of them die. Afterward, Takayama watches the movie clip, in an attempt to figure out the mystery. He too then dies. Both of these movies place the characters in a recurring cycle that eventually leads to death. The characters seem to be plucked out of their everyday lives and put in this implausible, unfamiliar, situation where they cannot get out. Because of the recurring situations that the characters are placed in are unfamiliar, uncertainty arises. Again, from uncertainty comes fear.

Overall, many horror movies have grossed on using including the aforementioned uncanny situations or events to induce fear to its audience.

Fetish and the Motley

For this month’s blog, I’ve decided to consider the concepts of Marx in relation to our 5-C’s. More specifically, I’ll look at Marx in the context of my work-study wage labor as a Motley barista. Poor Karl will probably be turning over in his grave, if he isn’t already.

Within Capital, Marx details his theory of the fetishism of commodities. He introduces this topic concisely, with the understanding that, “[t]he equality of all sorts of human labor is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labor-power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labor; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labor affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products” (667). It is the resultant inversion of objective and social that creates, for Marx, the fetish. The value which comes from the social form of labor appears objective; the relation between the commodities as products of labor appears social and obscures the social relations that actually exist between the producers. As Marx claims, this fetishism exists everywhere in a capitalistic society, but is recognized nowhere.

The examination doesn’t need to reach any depth, though, before it becomes clear that practically the only similarity between barista-ing at the Motley and the wage labor discussed by Marx is the wage itself. Firstly, I wouldn’t like to meet the person who’d claim anyone working at the Motley or enrolled at any of the 5-C’s is a member of the proletariat. I’m not selling my “life-activity” to earn the means of my immediate subsistence. I use my paycheck to pay for overpriced textbooks and frozen yogurt.

Secondly, working as a barista, I provide a service instead of producing a product. Foaming the milk for your latte and pouring water for your tea doesn’t require that much hard labor (what ends up in your cup might be a bit gross if we did have to work up a sweat over it). And the labor that is expended has no receptacle to contain its value, just a compostable cup, and “the commodity” is, by definition, a repository of labor power in the form of “value.” The latte isn’t a very good commodity. It costs $2.75 or so, and, in a sense, you could exchange it for something else worth $2.75…like a greeting card…or a pack of pencils…. (Does nothing costs $2.75 anymore?) But as the latte sits for 10 minutes and it settles to room temperature and the foam deflates into crinkly little bubbles, it loses almost all of its value; the latte is not a very good commodity. So we make a point of getting it to you directly and because of this there isn’t even a chance for the labor we do expend to be clouded over: you see us make your drink and we hand it to you directly. Yet…there are times when it seems that the counter does more than divide the customers and the baristas physically.

As Marx phrases it, “there it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (667). You hand me your student I.D. card over the counter and I hand you your iced coffee. There is a definite social relation between the barista (me) and the customer (you) but it assumes the form of a social relation between my iced coffee and your flex. It seems that if the Motley patron doesn’t recognize their barista from class or other activities they don’t recognize their barista as an individual. Last semester Iced Coffee Boy came in on almost every one of my Wednesday afternoon shifts and ordered, naturally, Iced Coffee—but “only if it’s cold.” My co-workers and I, not being particularly stupid, began to anticipate his order. Revealing this anticipation was, however, a mistake. Despite his coming in at the same time every week and ordering the same drink with every visit, he was visibly unsettled; maybe he felt the experience was uncanny. He isn’t the only customer to do this. There’s also Irish Cream Latte Guy and the Girl-who-wants-only-steamed-soy-milk. Most customers have drinks they usually order.

Based on the number of ways this interaction doesn’t line up directly with Marx’s conceptualization of commodity fetishism, maybe most people wouldn’t consider this to be an instance of it; but I think that would be an attempt to ignore and even explain away the pervasiveness of the fetishism. Honestly, the majority of Motley patrons do have a more direct relationship with the Motley than that and they do recognize and interact with their baristas. Iced Coffee Boy represents the extreme; but during a rush, or hurrying to get to class, all customers act in that way to varying degrees, quickly extending their I.D. in order to quickly receive their drink. Students of the Claremont Colleges don’t even seem to recognize their flex as “real” money; or maybe they just don’t want to. Another barista, Annie, routinely tells every customer the price of their purchase and they routinely look at her like she’s crazy. This, I guess, is just another way for a barista to unpleasantly break the relationship (or lack there of) which we unspokenly enter into.

I don’t find the limited degree to which Marx explicitly applies to life in Claremont to discount this theory. On the contrary, the fact that it applies to even this degree in our bourgeois enclave suggests to me the truth of his claims. Consider an environment that, unlike the Motley, strives for streamlined hyper-rationality (Wal-Mart?). The employees might wear nametags, but how often are they used. The employees are even replaced with self-checkout stations. The interactions take on increasingly impersonal and increasingly inhuman qualities. Take the consideration a step further, to the level Marx seems to be theorizing on, where the interactions are those of masses of products only, masses of linen, brick, gold, toilet paper and human labor disappears entirely, just as he theorizes. The gold and toilet paper relate to each other based on their “intrinsic” value which appears, finally, independent of the labor that their producers sold to obtain their immediate subsistence.

I'm just not into this movie

One of my favorite pieces that we’ve read so far this year I think was the Propp, especially his ideas about folk myths and their inclusion and repetition in culture. My focus is on the romantic comedy of the twenty-first century.
He’s Just Not That Into You was advertised in a way that I hoped it might dare to break the mold. In the typical American romantic comedy, you get several different stories, but essentially the movie shows you two people, there are difficulties in the way of their relationship, and then they get together. Suddenly this movie is advertised; and I’m seeing non-traditional couples, and it seems to promise a new story.
*spoiler alert* Of course, Hollywood doesn’t dare to be different. For example, one couple that’s been together for seven years is in conflict. They love each other, she wants to get married, and he doesn’t. During the whole film, the male character declares that he’s going to stick to his morals, but guess what! In the end, even when the female is okay with not getting married, he proposes.
This shouldn’t come as any surprise. First of all, there are physical symbols. Just like the Roman hair curl, these characters all play their folk tale parts well. The male character in the example couple is seen doing the dishes. Obviously he’s a good guy that the girl should stay with! Does it matter that she wants to get married and he won’t do her the simple favor of making their commitment official? No, because men are allowed to stick to their principles and females aren’t. Of course, it would be an unhappy ending, so in the end, no one gets what they want, but the guy randomly gives in for a happy ending. Yay Hollywood!
Of course, there’s other fun romantic comedy narrative structures that are propagated here. In a different example couple, there is a man and his wife in an unhappy marriage, and a female temptress that eventually becomes the man’s mistress. Of course, the doting, boring wife is depicted either alone and remodeling their home, or gabbing at work about her “perfect life.” Good Hollywood wives don’t complain, don’t catch on, and they sure don’t get to be sexual beings. In true Hollywood myth, the temptress is blonde, a yoga teacher, and youthful to the point where she still keeps stuffed animals in her room. Obviously she has an older man complex, (Do I detect a hint of Freud here?), and he is unsatisfied with his older attractive wife and needs a newer dumber model to realize that he is going through a midlife crisis.
So if you can’t tell, I didn’t exactly enjoy this movie. I didn’t particularly expect to, but hey sometimes the previews let you hope. In the typical fashion, all the myths held true. Even the bumbling simpleton who couldn’t follow the “rules” of dating ends up getting to be “the exception” to these rules. Most likely, because she’s pretty, but my point is that the narrative structures, and the romantic American myths haven’t changed. They are still being put out there, even when they disguise themselves as otherwise. It’s formulaic, and disappointing.

Bound in Freud's Spell

Even more fascinating than Freud’s theories, in my opinion, are their cultural reception, and the process of their eventual integration into popular culture. We brought up in class how, at the time when Freud was publishing his work, it met a lot of resistance due to its sexual implications. His works argued that an implicit but unconscious sexuality was embedded in all family dynamics, especially in children (who were originally believed to embody innocence). After his death in 1939, Freud’s ideas began permeating society and popular discourse, but one has to wonder… how did such radical theories become so widely accepted? In 1945, Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Spellbound became the first big Hollywood movie to popularize Freud’s ideas, and I think analyzing the film’s depiction of psychoanalysis may provide a glimpse.

The makers of this film were essentially selling psychoanalysis and dream interpretation to the American audience, and were faced with a number of challenges in the promulgation of these ideas. After all, the Hays Production Code was in place at this time, and it included some very restrictive rules regarding sexual content in film; and as we know, Freud’s ideas were often explicitly sexual. The movie does manage to skirt around this issue quite adeptly, with a few double-meaning jokes children wouldn’t likely understand, and a replacement of female sexual desire with Constance’s desire for Hollywood-style romance.

Perhaps more interesting than the issue of sexuality, however, is the film’s dealings with the unconscious. Spellbound was being marketed to Americans who had a strong cultural sense of individualism and autonomy. Such an audience would not be keen to hear that they are forever driven by an unknowable portion of their mind. Freud’s idea of the “unconscious” represented a part of the self which people could never fully access, but which would forever dictate their actions, and the filmmakers needed to address this concept delicately.

And so “Spellbound” never refers to the “unconscious”, which was the term actually used by Freud, but rather to the “subconscious”. The prefix of “sub” infers something subterraneous or buried, which need only be unearthed to be illuminated; the prefix “un” implies, just as Freud intended, something unknowable, which will always remain a mystery.

The distinction is played out in the film quite nicely. A psychoanalyst named Constance Peterson uncovers her originally repressed desire for intimacy when she begins treat a patient called John Ballantine. Ballantine is accused of killing a doctor, and he accepts the blame because of his childhood guilt complex; Constance helps Ballantine uncover a repressed memory of his brother’s accidental death, as well as memories of the doctor being murdered by someone else, finally proving his innocence. At the end of the film, Ballantine is presented as fully “cured”, because the secrets of his subconscious have been fully illuminated. This, of course, is never the case with Freud’s unconscious, which exhibits some symptoms that can be interpreted, but will never be fully understood.

However, the American populace seemed to eat up “Spellbound”s idea of the subconscious; it may hold secret traumas or desires, but they need only be illuminated for the patient to be fully treated and “cured”. A slew of other psychoanalytic films began cropping up after “Spellbound”, and the term “subconscious” maintained its popularity. Concepts of psychoanalysis are now embedded in many aspects of pop culture and academia, although sometimes it seems that Freud’s original meanings have been distorted or cherry picked. I suppose it’s not too surprising. A lot of his ideas were fairly unnerving and/or disturbing, thus have required some level of filtration and delicate presentation to penetrate popular culture.

Clash of the Texts

Last week, I happened to stumble upon a 2005 NBC adaptation of the Hercules myth. From the opening scene, which depicts a man on ship in a storm-tossed sea lifting his arms and praying not to Poseidon, but to Zeus, it was clear that the screenwriters were not prioritizing any kind of loyalty to Greek mythology. Interestingly enough, the filmmakers seem to have attempted to make Hercules a more sensitive, relatable hero who grapples with issues of identity as he struggles to find his place in society. As the creators clearly did not have a Greek history or literature lesson in store for their audience, we are left with the overarching themes of the new text they have crafted.

These themes, especially from a feminist perspective, become highly problematic as the plot unfolds. On the surface, the film espouses a rugged individualism as well as a defiance of organized religion. This immediately calls to mind Protestant critiques of Catholicism during the Reformation period, an interpretation that the script readily supports. However, Hercules’s struggles with religion, determinism, and corruption take a darker turn. It becomes apparent that organized religion is the female, and that, the one being corrupt and evil, the other is as well, and both must be destroyed or controlled in order to restore the peaceful equilibrium of the universe. As offensive as the film is to me, I find the way in which the filmmakers have woven together at least four cultural “texts” (Greek mythology, Reformation discourse, subliminal misogyny, and rugged individualism) absolutely fascinating. The endless layers of intertextuality apparent in the film make it a Herculean labor to interpret. As Barthes recognized in his “Mythologies” essay that we read in class, film is myth, and myth is a “second-order semiological system” where “that which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second” (81). The hodge-podge of signs that serve as signifiers in this film makes it especially interesting to analyze. As it strays from what one might expect (what might be called a “traditional” portrayal of Greek myth), the interpretations that Fish claims we carry with us and bring to the text really stand out. As an American Catholic woman attending a women’s college, I would like to share with you some of what my interpretive community might find noteworthy and significant, but I encourage you also to view the film for yourself, to see what you might bring to it.

As the film opens, the viewer is informed that he is entering “a time outside of history…a time of war, not a war between armies, but a war between gods, as Zeus and Hera fought for power. Their war became the war of mankind, as the followers of Hera battled for supremacy against the worshippers of Zeus.” This war of mankind quickly takes on meaning as a battle of the sexes that comes to dominate the entire plot. It all begins with the double rape of Alcmene, Hercules’s mother. As the high priestess of Hera, she is about to castrate and sacrifice a young man for the harvest festival. Unfortunately, this young man happens to be Tiresias, who also happens to be a hermaphrodite. The priestesses cannot kill the female part of him, so they decide to blind the male part of him by gouging out his eyes with their round ceremonial knife (Freud, anyone?). Tiresias, understandably unhappy with this turn of events, remarks, “I’m not afraid of the gods, Priestess…It is those who claim to speak for them that I fear…Even in my blindness, Zeus has given me a second sight…Zeus will punish you this very night, and Hera will not answer your prayers!” The equation of women, specifically non-virgins, with corrupt organized religion begins. Sure enough, later that night, Alcmene prays to Hera that she be spared her marriage to Amphitryon, a follower of Zeus who is coming to Thebes for her. (Amphitryon follows the cult of Zeus, but this cult is never visibly portrayed onscreen, and often does not seem to exist as an organized religion, merely a vague loyalty.) As Alcmene prays, she is attacked and raped by a faceless man with a thunderbolt scar while the bard Linus watches from behind a wall. After Alcmene limps home, she is raped again by Amphitryon. Hercules and his brother Iphicles are the results of this eventful night. After hearing from Linus that her faceless rapist had a thunderbolt scar, Alcmene decides that he was Zeus in disguise and that Hercules is his son. She then begins unsuccessfully attempting to kill Hercules throughout his childhood.

Hercules survives, as does the film’s fundamental mistrust of the sexual woman. One night, the young and beautiful Megara seduces Hercules while seemingly “under the influence” of something at the annual harvest festival honoring Hera. When she wakes up in the morning, she claims that he raped her, but her father and the other men decide that it would be best for her unborn babies that she marry Hercules. Some years later, Hercules’ conniving mother, Alcmene, convinces his now-resentful wife and evil brother Iphicles to drug him, causing him to hallucinate and kill his triplet sons. The labors are portrayed as a sort of wergild for these murders. Alcmene, Megara, Iphicles, and Eurystheus (the king of Thebes and Megara’s new husband), as devoted followers of Hera, are trying to eliminate Hercules, so they conspire to have him challenge all of the “champions of the mother goddess.” Hence, the monsters he must destroy (and whom his enemies hope will destroy him) are distinctly feminine.

In annihilating these monsters, Hercules always uses their own weapons against them. For example, the first labor is to kill the harpies, and Hercules is portrayed using the harpies as human shields, causing them to kill one another with the razor sharp feathers they intend to fire at him. Once they are dead, the vile swamp they inhabit becomes a beautiful pond and meadow, displaying that the feminine is not only dangerous, but also unnatural. The Nemean lion is described as luring the young men of the countryside to its den to eat them. The lion lures Hercules deep into her cave by pretending to be a naked woman, but transforms into her monstrous true shape as he embraces her. He then uses her own claws to slit her throat. The mares of Lemnos are really women who use a magic medallion to transform themselves into horses on the night of the harvest festival and stampede through the island, trampling their lovers to death. Hercules is given the labor of “taming” these mares. He takes their medallion, causing them to transform back into women, and convinces them to change their ways. When they protest that they are required by “some dark thing of the mother” to transform, he scolds them, saying, “The dark thing is you, not Hera…you choose to let superstition and empty ritual steal your will. Don’t blame Hera for what has always been your choice.” In response to all of this male rationality, the mares surrender their medallion, saying, “Hercules has shown the women of Lemnos that Mother Hera is not found in blood rites and magic icons of power. We surrender to Hercules, tamer of the mares of Lemnos, and in surrender, find strength and victory.” Women who stand before Hercules must surrender or die, not because of his aggression, but because of the force of their own.

This idea that women irrationally destroy one another and themselves is echoed by the actions of Megara and Alcmene, who, though they both follow Hera, are in constant competition with one another. First, Alcmene sabotages Megara’s daughter’s chances at inheriting the throne of Thebes from Eurystheus by encouraging a homosexual relationship between him and Iphicles (prompting Eurystheus to make Iphicles his heir). Megara enacts a scheme that ends with Alcmene unwittingly castrating and killing Iphicles during the harvest festival. The next morning, Megara looks on the grieving Alcmene with contempt, saying, “It was not the goddess who was against me; it was you, you who after Hera, I loved most of all. You, who since my earliest childhood, taught me the magic of my sex, the secret ways of the Mother. But they were just your ways, the ways of a bitter, denied woman stripped of power. Look on your creature. I am just like you.” Throughout the film, motherhood is essentially bloodthirsty and monstrous, and, when left unregulated, communities of sexual women are only capable of destruction.

It must here be noted that there is a sole female protagonist in the film, the nymph Deianeira. She is Hercules’s love interest, though she is pointedly disassociated with the cult of Hera and with the other women in the film. First of all, she has metallic skin and is immortal, so in a very literal way, she is defined as non-human, non-woman. Second, she is identified as a follower of “the path of the virgin goddess” and hence refuses to take part in the harvest festival at the film’s opening, though she observes it and interferes when Tiresias is found to be a hermaphrodite. It is she who introduces to Hercules the anti-organizational religious discourse. The film ends with their wedding, an event of unification identified multiple times as a symbol of the reunification of Zeus and Hera, but as Deianeira has come to represent neither “Hera” nor “woman” as they are portrayed by the text, the feminine in the film remains completely subordinated by the masculine.

It is through the highly feminine and sexual cult of Hera that the film accesses its central discourse surrounding faith and identity. This feminine organized religion is constantly associated with blood sacrifice. The prevalence of blood can be seen to symbolize menstruation, but seems more consciously to refer to debates surrounding philosophies of transubstantiation in Christianity. Rebellion against such religious practices becomes much more evident in the last quarter of the film, with Hercules defying the religious cults altogether, declaring: “I’ll be my own oracle!” and “[I will offer] not a sacrifice of blood, but of reverence!” Here the Reformation discourse comes to the fore, with Hercules practically chiseling 95 theses into a Greek column as he proclaims his new philosophy to a massive crowd gathered around him beside a cliff. The scene is staged to resemble the Sermon on the Mount, with Hercules standing with outstretched arms before a CGI multitude.

From here the film takes an unexpected turn for the existential and atheist. Hercules’s final showdown is supposed to be with Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the Underworld. It turns out that the followers of Hera have tricked Hercules once again: Cerberus does not exist, but their male champion, Antaeus, is waiting in a deep underground cavern to kill Hercules with the round ceremonial castration knife. Linus, who has become Hercules’s faithful sidekick, notices Antaeus’s thunderbolt scar and tells Hercules that he must have been Alcmene’s rapist all along, and that Hercules is not in fact the son of Zeus. This revelation empowers Hercules, as he shouts, “I am not my father!” and, as Antaeus grasps at the dirt trying to literally gain strength from the earth, “Yes, Antaeus, seek the mother’s strength; I am my own strength.” Hercules’s overwhelming strength causes the entire womb-like cavern to collapse with Antaeus inside. The womb is not only the entrance to the land of the dead, but a death trap in and of itself. As Hercules returns from his last labor, he encounters Alcmene, who apologizes for her actions before throwing herself off a cliff. There is a final battle in Thebes, during which Hercules’s remaining enemies, Megara and Eurystheus, are killed. With the final showdown portraying a strange deicide/patricide/matricide, the film assumes a secular individualism and seems to question the existence of the gods in the first place.

As you can see, “Hercules” displays infinite degrees of interpretability. The film seemed to me to be obviously and shockingly sexist, but I was surprised to find that no online film critics or people posting to message boards mentioned anything about this interpretation. I was shocked that no one else seemed to notice what seemed to be being said by this mainstream “family” movie. I then realized that this experience exemplifies the interpretive process Stanley Fish tried to identify in “Interpretive Communities.” Following his ideas, my reading of the film exists for me because I bring to the film pre-existing interpretations of the signs “blood”, “religion”, “rape”, and so on. What signs do you carry with you?

Beware of the Myth

A few weeks ago I went to go see the film “Confessions of a Shopaholic”.  I had read the book a few years ago, and I figured that the plot and characters would be very similar because it was already a simple romantic comedy that could easily be compressed into 100 minutes.  Though many parts of the movie were the same, there was one major change that I found rather annoying and pointless; however, I also found its defects to be relevant to this class so there was a silver lining. 

In the film the relationship between the main character (Becky) and her love interest Luke is quite different from the novel.  The book portrays Luke as a confident self-satisfied billionaire who owns the building Becky works in as a financial journalist.  The two eventually get together after Becky solves her debt problem (without him being aware of it).  In the film Luke comes from a wealthy family, but he takes a lower paying job at a financial magazine so he can ‘make it on his own’.  He finds out that Becky lied about all her financial trouble and feels betrayed, but forgives her after she mends her ways. 

It seems that the screen-writers/film studio decided that the emphasis of the conflict within the story needed to be placed much more heavily on the relationship between Becky and Luke, as opposed to Becky and her friends and family (as in the novel).  At first I couldn’t fathom why they would try to force this story line upon the audience when it’s been so played out.  Especially since the relationship was not developed far enough for such a passionate response to be appropriate.  Then I started to consider that this film had fallen prey to the structure of a romantic comedy, or rather the “myth” of the romantic comedy.

Roland Barthes describes mythology with three “systems” or terms.  The first term, the “form” would be the dialogue: Luke’s outcry of betrayal, and then forgiveness.  This form then demonstrates the “concept” of a relationship.  The signification or message of the correlation between the form and concept is the idea of ‘romance’ within this romantic-comedy.  The film industry feels the need to classify and conform this story, and to limit the definition of relationship, or romance through a very exclusive form.  Indeed, they rely upon the idea that the conflict within a story must be between the two romantically involved characters, in order for the story to be considered a romantic comedy.  This made me think more about Barthes annoyance at “Julius Caesar” and the ‘Roman haircuts’.  As that film relied upon the haircuts in order to convey “Roman-ness”, which excused everything utterly un-Roman about them, “Confessions” tries to shift the conflict of the story and expects that to substitute all the important development in the relationship that should have taken place if the conflict arose between those two characters.

Although that particular sequence of events and Luke’s reaction are one way of demonstrating the romance, just as a haircut can stand for the Romans, it was certainly not the best way.  I think that Hollywood can get caught up in the myth because it can be easier. It’s a shortcut.  In the novel the relationship wasn’t that important, but from the filmmaker’s imagined expectations of the audience, it needed to become a central theme.  Then, instead of making a film with enough substance, they decided to rely heavily upon this structure, this myth, in order to give the relationship some meaning.  However, meaning is not what we actually get from the film.  We understand that the events are supposed to derive meaning because those particular signifiers are shown to us constantly in films, but the repetitive nature and hollowness of this structure renders it meaningless. 

Structuralism can give a work meaning, but when a work starts to rely on the myth, it can become somewhat of a disappointment. 

Analyzing Dreams...Seriously?

I am a dreamer. In fact, I don’t believe that I have ever gone more than a week without remembering a dream from the previous night’s sleep. I have had so many dreams over my nineteen years of existence, that if you were to ask me to explain three of them, I wouldn’t be able to. But there is one. There is one very distinct dream that I remember because I’ve had it multiple times.

In the dream, I’m walking in my house. It actually is my house too. Not some distorted dream house with unknown walls and unfamiliar dark corners. I’m tiptoeing for some reason. I glide around the corner of my hallway and stand prominently in the doorway of my brother’s bedroom. Everything is the exact same. His bed is in the far corner, his wooden desk is to my immediate left, there is a double door closet on my right that is closed, and the cowboy fabric drapes are shut across the windows. Lying in his bed is a woman. It looks as if she is in a white old-fashioned nightgown, but the covers are up to her waist, so it’s a little unclear. She isn’t anyone I know, but if I were to compare her face to a celebrity, I’d have to go with Lucille Ball. Random, yeah? Her red curly hair is in a tight bun but some stray bangs hang across her forehead. She doesn’t see me. My brother’s wall lamp is right above her head and has a pull string. From somewhere, she pulls out a dagger. She doesn’t look concerned, angered, or happy about it. She’s very nonchalant. She tries to hook the dagger on the pull string and succeeds at first. But after a few moments of watching it hang above her face, she looks dissatisfied and takes it down. She pauses, then reaches down to put the dagger beneath the bed. At that moment a giant lion springs from beneath the bed frame, grabbing the woman’s arm, and pulling her from the covers. At this point in the dream, I run away.

Like I said, I’ve had this dream multiple times. It never occurred to me to stay and find out what happens after. And during the dream, I have a strange sense of déjà vu but not strong enough to remove myself from the scene. When I was young, I had night terrors. So I grew to learn how to acknowledge I was in a dream and then wake myself up by blinking. This is the only dream I can recall where I was never aware that I was unconscious. I have always loved trying to decode dreams. But to be honest, Freud had ruined it for me!

While rewriting my dream just now, I was thinking about Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Knowing that practically all dreams looked at by Freud distinguish some sort of sexual character, I had a hard time writing out what I truly remember. Part of me wanted to change parts of the dream to make it less easy to turn sexual. Point being, the desk in my brothers room is wood. But would it have been less sexual if it were made of a different material? Metal, maybe? And the fact that there was a grown woman in his bed. Okay, now looking back I see how it looks. But back then I just thought it was odd seeing a stranger in my house. Period. And, according to Freud, the fact that she’s trying to hide a dagger must be some sort of phallic symbol, mustn’t it?

But in the section we read from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, he breaks down his dream without making it of a sexual character. This inspired me. Since it has been years since I had this dream, I don’t remember the specifics of the day leading up to it. But when reading Freud, I couldn’t help but laugh at how convinced he seemed to feel that his analysis on the dream of the Botanical Monograph was definitely the reason for him having the dream. I was especially amused at how he connected the dried specimen of the plant included in the monograph to a memory from his secondary school. And so, I feel that I can definitely analyze this dream, ten years later just by knowing the relationship I had with my brother at that time.

I often ran to my parent’s room as a child seeking comfort and entertainment right as I woke up. However, they divorced when I was six, making what was once my parent’s room, my dad’s room. Because of their separation, my older brother and I saw each parent for one week at a time. Even though I only saw my mom every other week and my dad on those weeks in between, I was always with my brother. And so, I grew a stronger bond with him throughout the years and eventually, instead of running to my parents room, I’d run to my brothers room. At that time, I couldn’t have imagined anything more terrifying than being separated from my brother, as he was my comfort blanket. In the dream, I am glued to the doorway when I see a stranger in his bed. Often times in dreams, you just take the person you see in the familiar environment as being the one you seek, despite their obviously different appearance. That’s one thing I definitely remember about dreams. But in this dream, I knew it wasn’t him and I was confused. My dad stayed in the house and my mom left, so it was missing the maternal feel it had once had. Perhaps this woman, in the old, white nightgown, was in a sick bed. Perhaps it represented that the maternal figure had left the house and so, in my mind, I was looking at the sick and weak frame of maternal warmth as it was fading away from the house. After reading too much Shakespeare, a dagger symbolizes word to me. And so, this woman represented my mother, who had thrown daggers (figuratively speaking, of course) at my father and now, my mother was “hanging it up” and letting it go. She is trying to put away her fighting words, when the lion (perhaps a representation of my father) takes her from her sick bed, uprooting the maternal figure. This “uprooting” in reality could be my dad keeping the house and having my mom move out. This is when I run away because I don’t want to see anymore.

And so, I have chosen to take from this dream the unconscious feeling of a little girl observing her divorcing parents. She is afraid of not having her older brother there to comfort her, which is why he’s not in the room when she searches for him. She is watching the maternal comfort leave her home and seeing her mother give up trying to talk issues out with her father. And, in her eyes, she sees her father as a beast of some sort uprooting the household by throwing the representation of maternal comfort from the bed.

I find it funny that I was able to analyze my dream. And I believe it to be pretty darn accurate as well! It just seems that we can take any dream and make it work with something in our life, no matter its significance. Basically, we can make all dreams about what we want them to be about. I guess this goes to show that I’m not convinced that the way Freud decodes dreams are accurate. It can all be totally made up! I believe that dreams and other vents of the unconscious can’t accurately be analyzed. There are always so many thoughts and so many things going on around and within something that I find it really hard to believe that true feelings of the unconscious can ever be really identified. Sorry, Freud. I guess I just need more convincing.

Movies and Assumptions

I am currently taking a film class at Scripps, which focuses on a few classic directors from the fourties and fifties, among them Orson Welles. I went into the showing of his first movie, Citizen Kane, fully expecting it to bore me, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the film quite engaging and enjoyable. I went into the next film, The Lady from Shanghai, expecting to enjoy at just as much—and I absolutely hated the film.

Judging by the general fidgeting, confused looks, and whispered sarcasm of my fellow movie-watchers, I was not alone in my opinion, though I am sure the film has its champions. Nevertheless, it got me started thinking about the linguistics of film.

Granted, I may not be the best qualified person to discuss movies, as I watch so few of them. For those of you who have not noticed, I am a rather fidgety person. I find sitting still for two hours rather difficult, especially in theaters, which tend to be dark for knitting or similar occupations. A film has to really capture my attention, or I tend to wander off—sometimes literally.

For those who have not seen The Lady from Shanghai, the best adjective I can think of to describe it is “confusing.” A great deal of very strange things happen, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. I kept expecting for someone to explain, or for there to be clues to help me put it all together, and there never were.

If I invest the time and effort required to actually sit down and follow a movie, I expect to get something back. I, perhaps foolishly, expect the filmmaker to abide by what Jonathan Culler called “the cooperative principal*” and actively attempt to communicate with me. I do understand that a movie is not a true dialogue; I cannot talk back, so I am willing to give the filmmaker (or in the case of a book an author) a great deal of latitude.

While no sane human being world tolerate a conversation with Faulkner (or at least someone who spoke like Faulkner writes) for any length of time, many, myself included, will read his books. I am willing to assume that all of the nonsense, vagaries, weirdness, and digressions that seem to flout normal rules of communication are not there solely to infuriate me, but have some larger communicative purpose. The author is trying to tell me something. I am willing to work at it—so long as I believe it is there.

I do not mean that every movie needs to have some sort of Disneyesque “message” complete with a neat little moral at the end that can be summarized in a couplet, nor do they have to be particularly plot driven. Consider, for example, Blade Runner. I love the film, and I have seen it at least three times, but I still couldn’t tell you exactly what happened, except that Harrison Ford is hunting down some cyborgs. I can’t even give you name the name of a main character—because that is not really what the film is about. The attempt at plot and characterization seem like trappings. The film is about the darkly beautiful cyberpunk cityscape, one of the most breathtaking settings movie magic has ever created.

One could argue that The Lady from Shanghai had a similar purpose. It also has a lot of visually striking scenes, including a famous sequence in a mirror house that is quite long and involved, and admittedly quite impressive. I still hated it.

I have been wondering ever since I made the connection to Blade Runner why I responded to two similar films so differently. I can not quite put my finger on it, but I think it helps to interpret my response in the context of a few of our readings.

The first is Stanley Fish’s remarks about interpretive communities. I certainly believe Fish when he claims that we cannot approach any text as a blank slate; we come at it with certain assumptions pre-made. Maybe part of my problem is that I watched Blade Runner expecting a science fiction film, and that is exactly what I got. I am predisposed to value interesting settings or costuming or props in that sort of movie, because I understand that it is part of the purpose of the film—to dazzle me with movie magic. Blade Runner certainly succeeds on that front.

On the other hand, I went into The Lady from Shanghai fully expecting to interpret it in the same way as Citizen Kane, which was not helpful. They are extremely different films, and they demand a different viewpoint. Trying to read Shanghai like Kane, i.e. expecting it to be tightly plotted, probably only caused me more confusion.

Maybe the larger issue, though, is that I am a structuralist at heart. Like Vladimir Propp with his elaborate dissections of folk-tales, I have a certain map in my head as to how a murder mystery should go—and if The Lady from Shanghai is not a murder mystery, it does an awfully good job of pretending that it is. It has all of the signifiers of a murder mystery—a pretty woman, a dastardly plot, romance, a web of intense motivations, a murder, and even a trial, complete with a clever defense lawyer. I cannot help but think that the signified is a film noir mystery, and that as a consequence at the end someone will explain everything. They never do. It is absolutely infuriating! Darn those arbitrary signifiers that can mean different things!

Blade Runner, on the other hand, opens up with some Star Wars-esque scrolling text about evil robots, there is a long and lovely shot of the future LA, complete with flying cars, and then we see Harrison Ford being told he needs to hunt down some evil robots. In the first few minutes, then, I learn that the movie is about awesome shots of Harrison Ford chasing evil robots through a very interesting set. The plot from there is convoluted, difficult to follow, and full of unnecessary snakes, but in the end, I get to see Harrison Ford confront the evil robot leader, exactly what I expected. (They turn out not to be so evil after all, but I was expecting that too).

There is something inherently satisfying about seeing something conform to the structure that I have come to expect, and I enjoy it. Perhaps that makes me a terrible academic, but I am not ashamed.