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: Gender representation
Representing female agency is a theme which is brought to the fore in the Female Entrapment Thriller, a definite shift in the portrayal of the protagonist from the female gothic cycle of the Forties while anticipating the ‘final girl’ cycle of the late Seventies and the early Eighties.
The Female Entrapment Thriller is defined by the construction of its female protagonist and the violent, unpredictable male-dominated environment she occupies. This construction of the entrapped heroine is based upon some key characteristics, especially docility and innocence. These qualities, initially signifiers of the heroine’s ‘virtue’ and embodiment of traditional femininity, become weaknesses to be exploited and abused by the film’s antagonists.
If the entrapped heroine embodies the characteristics of traditional femininity then the antagonist of the Female Entrapment thriller acts as the embodiment of male control. This control is based upon the qualities which the entrapped heroine lacks. Male control is exhibited through the antagonist’s knowledge of the world outside the domestic sphere. This control is also exercised through their mobility outside the domestic space, and their corresponding inaccessibility to the entrapped heroine. The most important aspect of male control in the Female Entrapment thriller is the antagonist’s goal orientation which is aimed at destroying the heroine in order to gain material wealth.
Female agency arises in these films from the heroines’ will to survive, which involves a kind of emancipation from masculine power. Breaking the stasis associated with the traditional woman’s role of homemaker, this agency is exercised in two ways: initially as a process of investigation producing new knowledge (of the husband), and, at the climax, a violent confrontation with her male antagonist.
Women’s roles
The entrapped heroine’s role as a housewife is the most consistent convention of the Female Entrapment Thriller, particularly in terms of the ways in which this traditional role is reconfigured by the filmmakers. The figure of the entrapped housewife is derived from the cycle of ‘female gothic’ thrillers produced in the mid-to-late Forties, which would become a key influence upon the more contemporary Female Entrapment Thriller. More so than the films that follow it, Gaslight (1944) is indebted to the gothic style of this group of female-centered Victorian thrillers. Mary Ann Doane referred to these films as “paranoid woman’s films,” in which the “paranoia [is] evinced in the formulaic repetition of a scenario in which the wife invariably fears that her husband is planning to kill her...” (123). Set in Victorian London, Gaslight establishes the basic template for the entrapped heroine. Young, naive Paula (Ingrid Bergman) marries older Frenchman Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer); she is completely devoted to her new and mysterious husband, and entirely dependent upon his whims. He uses this patriarchal relationship to his advantage, exploiting all the strictures governing male-female relations of the period to drive his wife to the brink of insanity. In the characterisation of its protagonist, Gaslight drew upon a representation of traditional femininity which would be codified by the Female Entrapment thriller.
The entrapped heroine is generally young, naive and ignorant of the wider world. She is dependent upon her husband for income and home. In Gaslight, Paula forgoes a career as an opera singer to marry her accompanist, and then agrees to her new husband’s desire to move into a London townhouse. In doing so, she allows him to take over the property she has inherited. The entrapped heroine has no children, which can be seen as a signifier of her own delayed adolescence and lack of maturity. This is represented most overtly in Sorry, Wrong Number. Alone in her apartment, Leona Stephenson (Barbara Stanwyck) is dressed in a white nightgown resembling a child’s night shirt. She is referred to by a doctor as a “cardiac neurotic” who suffers from a psycho-somatic condition in which she suffers ‘heart attacks’ when she is frustrated or angry. Her overbearing father is blamed for this condition, having indulged her childish whims into adulthood. Reduced to an infantile state by her condition, she is the epitome of arrested development.
The focus on the role of the traditional housewife highlights her limited mobility and restricted agency as points of dramatic tension. These women have to be housebound in order for them to become ‘entrapped’. The husbands are constantly ‘at work’, out of reach while the heroines are anchored to the domestic space. Thanks to their roles, these women remain relatively oblivious to their husband’s lives outside the home.
The entrapped heroine’s exclusion from the urban environment outside the domestic space aligns her with the “nurturing woman” of film noir, who “offers the possibility of integration for the alienated, lost man into the stable world of secure values, roles and identities” (Place, 60). Janey Place emphasizes that “in order to offer this alternative to the nightmare landscape of film noir, she herself must not be a part of it” (60). The Female Entrapment Thriller differentiates itself from this archetype in that, rather than separating this figure from its central location, its diegesis brings the dangers associated with this ‘nightmare landscape’ into the ‘stable world’ of the nurturing entrapped heroine.
The entrapped heroine is housebound, de-sexualised in terms of costuming, and isolated within the cinematic frame. While Sorry, Wrong Number and Wait Until Dark provide reasons for their heroine’s immobility, this is not necessary. What is important to all the films is that the entrapped heroine is defined by her close proximity to the domestic space of the home. There are no physical barriers to Paula’s and Kit’s mobility, for instance, yet they are each closely aligned with the household space.
By Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) gender roles have undergone something of a reversal of the traditional dichotomy presented in Gaslight. Barbara Stanwyck’s character Leona Stephenson is a sheltered heiress, spoilt and manipulative. In contrast to Bergman’s Paula, she is a more contemporary representation of femininity. Without the social constraints of Victorian London (or at least Hollywood’s representation of it) Leona is a considerably more sexualized figure than the heroine of Gaslight.
Primarily, this element of her character is exhibited through the film’s flashback structure. This style of narration is one of the key tropes Sorry, Wrong Number shares with film noir, a connection reinforced by the presence of Stanwyck. In contrast to Gaslight’s basis in the Gothic style of the paranoid woman’s film, Sorry, Wrong Number represents a stylistic shift from fog-enshrouded London to the chiaroscuro of the modern urban metropolis. The flashback structure also serves as a visual tool in constructing Leona Stephenson’s complicated relationship with traditional gender roles. These flashbacks are essential to the construction of her character as both a docile housewife and an aggressive manipulator of the opposite sex in her own right. She is the only one of these soon-to-be entrapped heroines to be portrayed as the initiator of her courtship, out-maneuvering her best friend in order to seduce her future spouse. In contrast to Paula, Leona completely dominates her husband, controlling his job, his income and his independence. She has shackled him to a desk just as her ailments trap her in bed. This is an effect of her personal wealth, a factor which marks another break with the heroine in Gaslight.
This is not the only film in the cycle to highlight how class differences can affect women’s roles as housewives. In Midnight Lace (1960) Doris Day plays Kit Preston, another rich woman who, in contrast to Leona, is perfectly happy to rely on her husband. Like Stanwyck’s character in Sorry, Wrong Number, she is spoilt and sheltered, but unlike Leona, she does not use her status to wield control over her husband. This reliance on her husband, a common feature of the Female Entrapment Thriller, becomes the primary source of Kit’s dilemma, as she defers the responsibility of protecting herself to him. He fails, first when he sends her to a sanitarium, and secondly, when he finally reveals that he is her unseen tormentor.
Kit’s increasingly disturbed mental state is one of the primary focal points of suspense in Midnight Lace, not only in terms of the effects of her tormentor, but the growing possibility that her mental instability will lead to her entrapment in the system of the mental health institution. Her various encounters with her mysterious tormentor take place over the telephone, encounters of which no one becomes aware until the very end. This leads the other characters to conclude that Kit has made up the whole story. The filmmakers are highly ambiguous in this respect, never allowing the viewer to become a party to these conversations, highlighting the possibility that Kit is delusional. One possible motive emphasized in the film is that Kit is using this ruse to make her husband spend more time at home. “You’d be surprised how far a wife would go to make her neglectful husband tow the bar,” remarks the film’s patriarchal police inspector (John Williams).
This belief in female neurosis echoes the similar maladies (real and imagined) affecting the protagonists of earlier Entrapment thrillers, Gaslight’s kleptomaniac and Sorry, Wrong Number’s ‘cardiac neurotic’. What is most unnerving about the way Kit’s condition is diagnosed in Midnight Lace is that it undermines one of the ideal qualities of the traditional housewife, her selfless devotion to patriarchal order. By transforming it into a symptom of female inadequacy this quality can be exploited by the film’s antagonist.
In her chapter on the ‘paranoid women’s film’, Mary Ann Doane analyses the heroine’s preoccupation with being watched, what she calls the “ever-present sense of being on display for the gaze of a judgmental other...” (126). The ‘other’ in this case, is the gaze of the husband. In Gaslight, Paula’s husband Gregory (Charles Boyer)’s mind games (or ‘gas lighting’) cause his wife to lose trust in her own perception of reality, causing her to become so self-conscious she is incapable of leaving the house. According to Doane, “the encroaching madness of Ingrid Bergman is evidenced by an almost total disintegration of narcissism, of a secure relation to her own body” (127). Doane’s idea of the gaze in Forties ‘paranoid women’s films’ is emphasized throughout Midnight Lace, as the characters surrounding Kit place her under observation in an attempt to diagnose her growing paranoia as the delusions of a lonely housewife: “Many of these films situate themselves within the terms of a dialectic between the heroine’s active assumption of the position of the subject of the gaze and her intense fear of being subjected to the gaze” (Doane, 127). The Female Entrapment Thriller alters this dynamic - the entrapped heroine, as established in Gaslight, is initially oblivious of the gaze, and the narrative is based upon her discovery of this gaze. The entrapped heroine’s embodiment of traditional femininity demands an unintended obligation to be gazed at.
This discovery of the gaze is highlighted in Wait Until Dark. The dynamic of the male gaze and female objectification is emphasized as a form of struggle between the sexes over the role of the housewife. Being blind, Suzy Hendrix is unaware of the men staring at her, and becomes a victim because of her inability to detect these observers. Her introductory scene highlights this vulnerability, captured in a series of long shots which highlight her proximity to these possessors of the gaze. While Suzy goes about navigating the apartment space, the three criminals evaluate her limited capabilities as a housekeeper. The diegesis (and its creation of suspense) is dependent upon evaluating not only Suzy’s capabilities navigating the domestic space as a housewife, but how she will make the transition to defender of this space in her desire to survive in her struggle against her male antagonists. It is only when she actively destroys the mechanism for this gaze (breaking all the lights in the apartment), that she is able to escape the role of entrapped housewife and enjoy a greater level of female agency.
Male Control
The husbands are one of the most troubling aspects of these films: They are either murderers (Gaslight), morally weak (Sorry, Wrong Number), thieves (Midnight Lace), or have jobs that render them absent (Wait Until Dark). Traditional patriarchy, in the form of the husband, is re-defined as the primary source of antagonism within the context of the genre narrative. The husband becomes a site of crisis over male agency within the diegesis, and the space he seeks to dominate, the domestic environment, is an unstable signifier of masculine control, one associated with both security and threat.
Any discussion of female agency can only be made with an understanding of the force impeding it - male control as represented in the figure of the antagonist. Even without his role as the film’s antagonist, the spouse of the entrapped heroine exemplifies the disparity in levels of agency between the sexes. By his mobility and knowledge of the outside world the husband reinforces the entrapped heroine’s sense of isolation and limited agency.
Midnight Lace is particularly concerned with highlighting the disparity between the knowledge of husband and wife, a gulf exacerbated by the fact that, being English, Tony Preston has a better and deeper understanding of his homeland than his American wife.
Mobility is emphasized in Sorry, Wrong Number since Leona is incapacitated at home while her husband is at work. Her husband can be seen as the ‘fall guy’ of film noir, manipulated by everyone around him, including his wife. Therefore, his control lies in his inaccessibility - when he is out of his wife’s sight he is beyond her control. This is emphasized right from the beginning of Sorry, Wrong Number. Following an establishing shot of the city, the opening scene is composed of two slow tracking shots through a darkened office. The first shot ends on a door embossed with the legend:
“Henry J. Stephenson
Vice President
Private ”
Following a dissolve, the second tracking shot moves toward a desk, into a close up of a phone receiver lying on the table. This short sequence sets up two key aspects of male control which recur film throughout the film: the wife’s ignorance of her husband’s work, and the separation of male life into domestic and professional spheres. The husband’s inaccessibility for the majority of the film serves to highlight Leona’s isolation and powerlessness against the approaching time of her death. His absence denies Leona the ability to exert her control over him.
In Wait Until Dark, the controlling, absent Sam Hendrix (Wait Until Dark) is unique for not being the villain. However, his absence from the story is crucial to the villains’ scheme, and Suzy’s sense of entrapment. The entrapped heroine relies upon this man for security and comfort, yet his exclusion from the narrative is often instrumental in the collapse of this dependence.
Another aspect of male control in these films is goal-orientation. Midnight Lace’s Tony Preston (Rex Harrison) exemplifies this sense of purpose: he has been involved in a long-term fraud of his company, marrying Kit so he can cover the loss before it is discovered. While the entrapped heroine’s desire seems to mesh with traditional notions of femininity (marriage and a home), the male antagonist only sees these ideals as a means to an end, in the form of material wealth.
Unlike the duplicitous husbands of past Female Entrapment Thrillers, Wait Until Dark’s Sam Hendrix (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.)’s forceful persona is based on his desire for Suzy to become more independent, which is a telling difference from the more traditionally patriarchal arrangements implicit in the previous films. He is, in essence, pushing her to become a more independent woman who does not rely on him for support, although, as Pamela Wojcik notes, this desire is limited: “being self-sufficient means that Suzy must fulfill Sam’s desires, not her own” (207). While benign, his character’s function is not dissimilar to the function of other male characters in these films, as he disturbs the traditional hetero-normative structure of marriage, and creates a self-reliant female protagonist.
This point is emphasized by the filmmakers, since it is Sam’s actions which act as a catalyst for Suzy’s dilemma: “From a feminist perspective, Wait Until Dark could be taken as a critique of Sam, who fails to be a helpmate and whose demands that Suzy be self-sufficient serve to isolate her and make her vulnerable to intrusion” (Wojcik, 211). Wojcik’s point certainly has validity when taken in relation to how this absence affects the entrapped heroine. Suzy’s burgeoning agency does not build out of the encouragement of her husband. His encouragement is not complimented by compassion or empathy for his wife’s desires (such as accompanying him on his work trips) or fears (he disbelieves her when she tells him a woman’s body was discovered in a nearby lot). His goal-orientation is similar to that of the male antagonists of the Female Entrapment cycle - he is only concerned with Suzy’s independence as a means for serving himself, rather than with consideration for his wife’s needs and desires. Suzy’s agency is only engendered when she is out from under his auspices and her life depends on her own sense of self-reliance.
Wait Until Dark’s narrative is based upon the villains’ ability to toy with Suzy’s fears for Sam’s life outside her limited domain, especially with regard to his job as a photographer (a profession notable for both its reliance on sight and its mobility, two qualities Suzy lacks). Sam’s job keeps him out of the house, and it is the mobility of this job (his trip to Canada) which initiates the film’s action. The villains use this mobility to keep him away from home, sending him out on imaginary photo shoots. His position as Suzy’s ‘eyes’ can then be usurped by the villains as they construct a narrative about his absence for Suzy. This has the effect of turning him into a fictional analogue for the villains of previous Entrapment narratives.
The first two act roles associated with traditional patriarchy, an ex-soldier and a cop, echoing the performance of traditional masculine roles filled by the hypocritical spouses of the earlier films. Their violent, unexpected deaths are a decisive break with the conventions of earlier Female Entrapment thrillers, exchanging the mind games of the previous narratives for a more visceral struggle between a cold-blooded murderer and a seemingly defenseless woman – a narrative development echoed in the slasher narratives of the following decade.
Female agency
The traditional role of the housewife acts to ensure the stasis of the entrapped heroine. It takes the presence of the antagonist, and the potential for her death, to engender a sense of female agency.
Derived from the female gothic cycle, female agency in Gaslight is represented as a process of discovery. This discovery of new knowledge about her husband’s true nature initially represents a loss of control as the heroine is forced to re-evaluate the highly ordered and defined world she inhabits. Mary Anne Doane notes that the main motif of the marriages in the gothic cycle is the wife’s ignorance, as, frequently, the “violence is rationalized as the effect of an overly hasty marriage; the husband is unknown or only incompletely known by the woman” (123). In Sorry Wrong Number female agency is represented solely through the gathering of knowledge, as Leona uses the telephone to piece together the mystery of her husband’s disappearance. This knowledge destroys her notions of the world she has created for herself (such as her husband’s problems and descent into crime). In this instance, the influence of the female gothic cycle is hard to miss in the Female Entrapment Thriller. Helen Hanson’s description of the heroine’s journey in the former is echoed by its more contemporary successors: “The young female gothic heroine undergoes a phase of transition through her marriage” (Hanson, 68). This ‘phase of transition’ is replicated in the development of the entrapped heroine, in her growing awareness that her domestic environment has been violated. Hanson notes of the female gothic heroine that “[learning] about the new family and house that she has entered is central to the transition process” (69). As the Female Entrapment Thriller comes into its own, this process of investigation of the antagonist facing her leads to a discovery of knowledge about the truth underlying her marriage, namely the inability of her husband to provide for, and protect her. This process of investigation is then combined with violence in a manner completely absent from the female Gothic cycle.
The way in which the Female Entrapment films depict this violence represents a break with the psychological manipulations of the female Gothic cycle and a focus on increasingly graphic visula displays of physical violence. In Gaslight, violence manifests itself through the cruel mind games and mental torture Gregory uses to drive Paula insane. In this respect, Gaslight’s portrayal of psychological abuse against a passive female protagonist is closer to the female gothic. This passivity is taken to its logical extreme in Sorry, Wrong Number, which represents a shift in focus from psychological torture to literal violence. Incapable of defending herself, Leona is strangled to death in her bed by an unseen hit man. Violence is threatened throughout Midnight Lace, but never shown. The entrapped heroine is no longer passive, but when directly threatened, Kit Preston flees out of the house. As with Gaslight, it is up to her male protector to rescue her. By contrast, depictions of violence are present throughout Wait Until Dark. It begins with the fight between the villains during their first meeting in Suzy’s apartment. The violence they direct against each other, although brief, highlights a major shift from the cold pragmatism and planning of previous male antagonists. Physical actions, rather than planning, are their primary signifiers, representing a gulf in goal-orientation. The two con artists, Tolman and Carlino, only become involved through blackmail. Finding the doll is their way of avoiding the death penalty for Lisa’s murder, rather than the financial reward promised by Mr. Roat. Suzy’s death, in this case, is merely an afterthought. This scuffle is followed by their discovery of Lisa’s body.
While her death is not shown, the display of her body hanging in the closet is the first image of violence against women portrayed in the Female Entrapment Thriller, and represents a complete break with the previous films in the cycle. The climax represents an escalation of violence, which is presented in a variety of ways. Sergeant Carlino is run over repeatedly by a car, a sequence shown in one extended shot. Mike is stabbed in the back, and pushed down a flight of stairs. The final act of violence belongs to the entrapped heroine, when Suzy stabs Mr. Roat in the chest with the knife he used on Lisa and Mike. Aside from this focus on viscera, this final sequence equates this expression of violence with an expansion of female agency. The diegesis of Wait Until Dark signals an evolution in the entrapped heroine’s relationship with the violence directed against her. While she initially resembles the passive victims of the previous Entrapment films, Suzy is the first entrapped heroine who actively uses the violence of the antagonists to expel him from the domestic space.
The climax of the Female Entrapment Thriller sees the most explicit escalation of this form of female agency, from the reliance on a male rescuer in Gaslight to ‘total self-sufficiency’ in Wait Until Dark as the heroine is forced to directly confront the male antagonist by herself. This climax emphasizes the fact that female agency is based on a need to survive, a result of the narrative structure of the Female Entrapment Thriller.
Bar Sorry, Wrong Number, the ‘happy endings’ of these films could be seen as the heroine’s re-evaluation of her status within the marriage, now as a more independent unit. In such a reading, Leona’s death at the climax of Sorry, Wrong Number can be seen as a recognition of her inability to create a sense of independent agency by losing the traditional, infantile version of femininity which has destroyed her marriage to the wrong man.
The climax of Wait Until Dark, in which Suzy Henrix triumphs over her more physically imposing attacker, can be seen as the highpoint of the cycle and a moment of transition for female-led thrillers. Pamela Wojcik sees Suzy as a “nasceant female action heroine, who uses her wit and imagination to defeat the cunning criminals and protect her home, thus becoming totally self-sufficient” (211). It is this climactic struggle, with its undercurrents of female empowerment, which are the Female Entrapment Thriller’s most enduring legacy. This influence can be most clearly seen in the female-led thriller cycle known as ‘slasher’ films of the late Seventies and the early Eighties. With their focus on the conflict between a lone female survivor (which Carol Clover calls the ‘final girl’) and psycho-killer (the titular ‘slasher’) who typically invades a familiar space (a home or other familiar setting). Her comments on the ‘final girl’ can be equally applied to the entrapped heroine of Wait Until Dark: The “last moment of the Final Girl sequence is finally a footnote to what went before - to the quality of the Final Girl’s fight, and more generally to the qualities of character that enable her, of all the characters, to survive what has come to seem unsurvivable” (39). Clover’s reference to her ‘qualities of character’ highlights the shift in the representation of femininity in thriller films since the female gothic cycle of the Forties. From Gaslight’s Paula to Wait Until Dark’s Suzy, the entrapped heroine of the Female Entrapment cycle charts this evolution from the docile ingénue of the female gothic to the aggressive female agency expressed in the slasher.
Parallels can be drawn between the entrapped heroine of the Female Entrapment Thriller and the final girl of the slasher film. While Carol Clover looks to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as inaugurating most of the key generic tropes of the slasher, the final girl figure can be seen as the logical extension of the increasingly active and, broadly speaking, ‘emancipated’ female protagonists of Female Entrapment Thrillers (Clover, 40-41). A comparison of the four films shows an evolution in the entrapped heroine’s response to danger, from catatonia (Gaslight) through incapacity (Sorry, Wrong Number), and flight but NOT fight (Midnight Lace), to literal combat in the climax of Wait Until Dark, which represents the basic blue print for the ‘final girl sequence’ of the slasher film. Suzy Hendrix's development from a naive innocent into a defender of the domestic space, especially in her appropriation of the violence of her adversary, is echoed by the heroine of John Carpenter’s Halloween and the films which imitated it. In fact, in the shift from endangered housewife to self-empowered woman, the entrapped heroine can be seen as the antecedent for female thriller protagonists such as Clarice Starling (Silence of the Lambs) and Ellen Ripley (Alien).
Conclusion
Across these four films, the representation of a woman’s role as spouse and homemaker undergoes a slow transformation: from a naive outsider in Gaslight, where her escape is facilitated by the arrival of a suitable male suitor, to Wait Until Dark, where the emphasis on a male protector has been removed. The onus is upon the entrapped heroine alone to re-shape her role as home maker into a self-made guardian of the home environment.
Across the Female Entrapment cycle, the image of patriarchy shifts, from the urbane master of the house (Gaslight) to the no-less-controlling but considerably more benevolent patriarch defined by his absence from the house (Wait Until Dark). The husband thus moves from being the gothically inspired villain of Gaslight to the helpless witness of the protagonist’s struggle.
The subject of female agency, through the protagonist’s arc, undergoes its own form of evolution, from Ingrid Bergman’s emancipated damsel-in-distress in Gaslight to Audrey Hepburn’s proto-final girl of Wait Until Dark. The Female Entrapment Thriller’s use of gender representations track a gradual transition commensurate with the shifting social and sexual discourses taking place off-screen.
The entrapped heroine's evolution from passivity to action echoes the shift from traditional images of femininity to new representations of women not bound to the strictures associated with this image (marriage and children). The rise of second wave feminism and the availability of the Pill gave women a sense of independence and agency that would render the Female Entrapment Thriller, with its emphasis on a housewife, anachronistic amid the social shifts of the late Sixties. It would not be until the following decade that this shift in representation of femininity would be felt. Like the era in which it achieved the most success, the Female Entrapment Thriller was a product of transition.
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