Here's something for your noggin. I've adapted an academic piece I wrote back in 2011. It was pretty long, so I have broken it into pieces and done a bit of re-writing so it isn't the insomnia cure it was.
The Female Entrapment Thriller: Conclusion
Gender representation
Traditional women’s roles come under attack in the Female Entrapment thriller. The qualities of femininity these films assign to their female protagonists emphasize her vulnerability as a potential victim. Her innocence and docility, idealized at the outset as befitting her role as a housewife, are re-interpreted as weaknesses to be exploited by the male antagonist. With no life outside of the domestic space, she has no goals beyond those of maintaining the home and looking after her husband. The space outside the domestic space is the husband’s domain, but the space inside is hers.
Patriarchal control to the point of destruction is embodied by the character of the male antagonist. His control is exercised in several different ways: his knowledge of world outside domestic sphere is greater than the entrapped heroine, and he is able to use this against her. His mobility and inaccessibility puts him out of reach and renders his actions and purpose unreadable to the entrapped heroine. The biggest contrast between the entrapped heroine and the antagonist is his goal orientation He is purely focused on material wealth, rather than the less defined ideals of the housewife. His focus on achieving his goals is the opposite of the housewife’s passivity, seeing the death of the entrapped heroine acts as a pathway to material wealth. Over the course of the Female Entrapment cycle, this goal-orientation is portrayed with a growing emphasis upon graphic depictions of the violence he enacts in pursuit of his objectives.
Nevertheless, this corpus of films represents an escalation of female agency. In Gaslight Paula is a passive figure whose emancipation only takes place as the result of outside intervention. Unlike the heroines of other female-centered gothic narratives, she is completely unaware of her husband’s true identity and makes no attempt to investigate the reasons behind his odd behavior and mysterious past. The process of investigation and subsequent rescue of Paula, are undertaken by a male character outside the domestic space. Leona in Sorry, Wrong Number is more immobilized than Paula, but is more assertive in investigating her husband’s activities via a series of proxy figures she communicates with through the telephone. In Midnight Lace Kit Preston’s investigations of her mysterious tormentor are similarly delegated to other characters. However, in one respect she does exhibit more agency than her predecessors; she manages to escape her entrapment y fleeing the apartment. In Wait Until Dark female agency reaches its full expression through the character of Suzy Hendrix. Not only does she actively investigate the identities and plans of her male oppressors, but she ultimately takes violent action to defeat them.
Domestic space
In the Female Entrapment thriller the image of the household as a place of feminine control, empathy and security is revealed to be an illusion. The violations of familiar living spaces act as an effective critique of the entrapped heroine’s expectations about sanctity of her home and her role. Throughout the Female Entrapment cycle, this representation of the domestic space reveals that all perceptions regarding this central location are merely superficial projections of a predictability and normalcy that does not exist in the diegesis.
In these films, female entrapment is the result of the familiar domestic space becoming an unknown, ‘uncanny’ environment which, by its very nature, works to disorient and ‘entrap’ the female protagonist. This transformation is effected through the re-arrangement, whether deliberate or not, of household objects act as the signifiers of the transformation of this new ‘uncanny’ space. As signifiers of the uncanny, these objects symbolize the entrapped heroine’s loss of control over the domestic space.
In this process of transformation, the telephone is the primary source of the uncanny in the domestic space. The most invasive tool in the villain’s arsenal, the telephone highlights technology’s place as an amoral mechanism open to the use of any malign intention. This duality extends to the rest of the objects in the domestic space, which become tools in the antagonist’s campaign to dominate the domestic space.
Female Stardom
Barbara Stanwyck’s role in Sorry, Wrong Number represents a complete inversion of the key qualities associated with her star persona as an emancipated independent woman. Instead of the ‘selective use’ of specific qualities associated with her star image, which Richard Dyer points out is the most common process of star casting, the diegesis represses the qualities which constitute her image of independence and agency. In contrast to the other stars of this cycle, the arc of Stanwyck’s role forces her into a pattern of dependence upon the film’s characters. The fact that this process ultimately fails reveals that, in the unpredictable diegesis of the Female Entrapment thriller, star images are not fixed signifiers of familiarity or narrative expectations.
The diegesis of Wait Until Dark undermines the conventions of royalty associated with the star persona of Audrey Hepburn by having the characters in the diegesis literally attack them. This assault on the conventions associated with the Cinderella-inspired arc Hepburn’s characters take, are workable with the violent and unpredictable nature of the story world. However, this attack on the expectations of her filmography ultimately acts as an act of regeneration and negotiation for her star persona, recreating the qualities of cinematic royalty associated with Hepburn as the result of her own agency, rather than a sense of narrative predestination.
In Gaslight the aspects of Ingrid Bergman’s star persona are used to turn her characterization of Paula Alquist into the image of an ingénue. Her naiveté and passivity in the role are transformed from qualities of attraction to the signifiers of her encroaching dementia and catatonia. The malleability of these qualities of her star image within the diegesis allows for a re-interpretation of the perceived ‘purity’ within the unsavory context of her character’s relationship with the film’s antagonist. As such, the diegesis reveals that the qualities of passivity and docility which underpin Bergman’s image as an example of ‘ideal womanhood’ can just as easily be read as signifiers of lack of independent agency and masochistic dependence upon male control.
Doris Day is the epitome of the star as domestic goddess, and the narrative’s echoes of past Day films allows for a re-reading of Midnight Lace as a parody of her romantic comedy premise (such as Pillow Talk) through the conventions of a thriller. However, the film’s constant need to emphasise her femininity complicates reading Midnight Lace as a genre text, highlighting the constant process of negotiation taking place between the construction of a star’s image and the conventions of a genre narrative.
Closing
In the early stages of this project the Female Entrapment cycle was going to be regarded as a genre unto itself. However the films appeared to act more as a grouping when taking into account the genres to whom it owed the most influence (namely the female gothic and film noir), and the genre which effectively arose out of its central concepts. As a transitory genre, the corpus of films I have categorized as representative of the Female Entrapment Thriller can be seen as signalling a shift from the period setting of the female gothic of the Forties to the more contemporary urban night-scape reminiscent of film noir.
Tracking the rise of the slasher film in the Seventies, two aspects of this genre evoked a sense of genre continuity and progression from the conventions associated with the Female Entrapment cycle. In terms of narrative, the basic plot structure of the slasher film is remarkable for its similarity and, one could call fidelity to the final ‘stalking’ sequence of Wait Until Dark. The other element was its representation of domestic space, shifting from the urban apartment to the suburbs. In the same way that the Female Entrapment Thriller re-structured the central conflict of the female gothic into a more contemporary representation of the domestic setting, the apartment, the slasher did the same in the late Seventies, moving the site of conflict into the homes of suburbia. In broad terms, much like the representation of femininity, these spatial changes represent the shift in the image associated with a typical domestic setting.
The evolution of female agency from passivity to violence in the Female Entrapment cycle lies in stark contrast to the active heroines of the slasher and more contemporary thriller texts. While less well known, there is a film indicative of the changes in the portrayal of femininity which had taken place between the release of Wait Until Dark and Halloween in 1978. In the same year he made Halloween, John Carpenter wrote and directed a film for television called Someone’s Watching Me! What makes the film an intriguing bridge between the Female Entrapment thriller and the slasher film cycle initiated by Halloween is its construction of its female protagonist: a single career woman. Rather than reacting with fear to her unseen tormentor, this woman actively attempts to exorcise his influence from her new home on her own terms. When viewed with Halloween in mind, Someone’s Watching Me! marks the point at which the entrapped housewife of the Female Entrapment Thriller is replaced with a new image of womanhood, and the point at which the notion of female agency is no longer bound by notions of social, as well as spatial, entrapment.
The presence of female stars did not turn out as expected, and proved to be highly illuminating in highlighting the mechanics underpinning the diegesis of a genre narrative. Clarifying a star image only revealed a complex negotiation between the star and the genre text. A reading of a star’s persona had to take into account the films associated with constructing the image associated with that star. Therefore these films could not be read without keeping in mind the potential narrative and character expectations associated with their most famous roles (Hepburn’s ‘Cinderella’ character arc in Roman Holiday and Sabrina; Doris Day’s 'Gaslight-but-as-a-rom-com' plot).
Though this corpus of films shares conventions and motifs associated with Female Entrapment thriller they do not dictate the limits of the genre. Though it may no longer be as prevalent as a cohesive generic framework, the notion of female entrapment is not an alien concept in either film texts or criticism. While the slasher film can be regarded as the most immediate antecedent of the Female Entrapment thriller, the evolution of female agency and the move out of the domestic space, the argument could be made that the genre’s evolution of agency extends to other thriller subgenres such as the police thriller (Silence of the Lambs being a prime example).
The only restriction with this project is that the limitations of its scope prevented a broader examination of entrapment scenarios beyond the very specific corpus of films in this study. Roman Polanski’s early work of the Sixties deserves a study by itself, but would make for an intriguing offshoot in terms of discussing different types of entrapment (such as male entrapment in The Tenant from 1976). Male or multi-gendered entrapment deserves would make for an interesting companion piece to this study, exploring the similarities and differences of having an entrapped male protagonist as opposed to an entrapped housewife. The wider number of images of masculinity offered in cinema would make a study of masculinity within the context of an entrapment thriller an intriguing proposition for expanding upon the concepts outlined in this study.
While the Female Entrapment Thriller in its original form is no longer a going concern, aspects of the cycle remain a part of the thriller genre. Though it may not be bound by all of the conventions covered in this study, the central idea of female entrapment remains a potent theme in studies of the thriller in all its permutations. In terms of contemporary antecedents, films like Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002) and The Strangers (Bryan Bertino, 2008) seem to have taken on certain qualities of the Female Entrapment thriller. The former’s focus on a single location (like Wait Until Dark) and the latter’s emphasis on the deliberate re-arrangement of the domestic mise-en-scene (recalling Gaslight) as a way of scaring the lonely female protagonist suggest that its conventions remain potent in a contemporary context.
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