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.
In the same way that the generic conventions of the western were subsumed into the urban action thriller in the early Seventies, the Victorian trappings of the female gothic melodrama gave way to the urban milieu of the Female Entrapment Thriller, albeit earlier in the century, reaching its apotheosis in the late Sixties with the release of films such as Repulsion, Wait Until Dark and Rosemary’s Baby. The term ‘Female Entrapment Thriller’ is an invention of mine for identifying the both the films in this study and the central theme underlying the genre. As a transitory generic framework, the Female Entrapment Thriller sought to mediate the shifts in women’s roles, male control and female agency that were taking place in Western society, from the realignment of social values in the post-war Forties, through the retrenchment of traditional values in the Fifties and the resurgence of feminism in the Sixties. To view these films chronologically is to see a trend towards more overt expressions of male-orchestrated aggression against the female protagonist, as the implied violence of the mind games in Gaslight gave way to actual violence in Wait Until Dark. However, the escalation in male violence towards women is complemented by an expansion of female agency in neutralizing this antagonism. By the following decade, these dual trends would be rendered generically normative in the ‘final girl’ figure of the ‘slasher’ film cycle of the late Seventies and early Eighties. As it had done for the female gothic film, the scenario and conventions of the Female Entrapment Thriller were subsumed into the next cycle of female-centred thriller narratives.
Background
The Female Entrapment Thriller arose out of two primary strands of Hollywood cinema. Firstly, it has its roots in what Helen Hanson refers to as the female gothic cycle of the Forties (1). These films were set in a specific historical context (predominantly the Victorian era) and involved a young female protagonist who, after a brief courtship, marries a man with a mysterious past. The narrative trajectory involves her investigation into the history of her marital home, which is figured as a threatening and disorienting environment. Gaslight, the text which epitomizes this cycle, was originally produced as a play in 1938, written by Patrick Hamilton. Its success led to it being transferred to the cinema, first in a British production directed by Thorold Dickinson in 1940, and, most importantly for this study, a Hollywood remake directed by George Cukor in 1944. It establishes the key conventions and issues of the Female Entrapment Thriller.
The other major influence on the development of the Female Entrapment Thriller is film noir. Gaslight apart, the later films in this cycle take place in an urban setting, with a similar emphasis on converting the domestic space into a threatening environment through a claustrophobic mise-en-scene. The atmosphere of paranoia associated with the Female Entrapment Thriller combines the female protagonist of the former with the urban setting of the latter. The antagonist is associated with this urban space, and is only truly differentiated from the villain of the Female Gothic when the Female Entrapment Thriller became associated with the contemporary urban setting. The domestic space is established as a safe, secure, feminine space in opposition to the markers of the urban setting represented in the Female Entrapment Thrillers.
In its development and focus on female agency, the Female Entrapment Thriller can be seen as a transitory subgenre bridging the female gothic films of the Forties and the slasher cycle initiated by Halloween (1978). The representation of the entrapped heroine can be situated between that of the female gothic heroine (with the popularity of Gaslight as both a play and in its film incarnations (1940 and 1944) inaugurating this cycle), and the Final Girl of the slasher film (with Halloween’s narrative structure acting as an extension of Wait Until Dark’s final scene).
Definition
The Female Entrapment Thriller is based upon several key conventions. There are two primary character types: The first is the female protagonist, the entrapped heroine. Her antagonist is a powerful, nearly omniscient man. This character, in three of the films in this study, turns out to be the heroine’s husband. The primary setting is the domestic space, an apartment. Most of the dramatic action is restricted to this space. Before it becomes a threatening environment, this apartment is represented as a feminine space which is associated with the entrapped heroine. This space is rendered threatening and claustrophobic by the intrusion of the antagonist, resulting in the heroine’s realization that this space is no longer secure.
This study shall be divided into three chapters based around three key concepts which underly the diegesis of the Female Entrapment Thriller. While each of these films have several unique points for analysis, these three ideas underpin and run through all four of the films in this study (and other films which were not included for length). The three chapters which make up this study are as follows:
Gender representation
Domestic space
Female Stardom
Owing to the limits of this project, the analysis of these three key concepts shall be based upon the study of four films:
Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944)
Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak)
Midnight Lace (David Miller, 1960)
Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967)
Gender representation
Drawing on the female gothic and film noir films of the mid-to-late 1940s, the Female Entrapment Thriller is concerned with the breakdown of traditional patriarchy and the role of woman as homemaker. The Female Entrapment Thriller, in its popularity as a generic trope from the mid-Forties to the late Sixties, represents a unique schism in Hollywood’s representation of femininity. Rather than re-iterating traditional signifiers of female domesticity, the Female Entrapment Thriller is concerned with the undermining and de-stabilization of traditional modes of femininity and masculinity as a catalyst for engendering female agency.
The Female Entrapment Thriller’s portrayal of women’s roles is based upon the representation of qualities associated with its representation of the role of the housewife, as embodied by the female protagonist. The qualities of this character are clearly defined at the outset: She has no goals beyond those of maintaining the home and looking after her husband. She is exclusively housebound, with no life outside of the domestic space. The world outside the domestic space is the husband’s domain, a division of space which remains unquestioned by the characters. Within the diegesis of the Female Entrapment Thriller, it is the manipulation of these qualities which turns these women into entrapped heroines.
Male control exists in several forms: Firstly, he has knowledge of the world beyond the domestic space. In contrast with the entrapped heroine, who is restricted by her role as a housewife to the domestic space, the male antagonist derives his power through his mobility and inaccessibility. His goal orientation is another strong contrast with the entrapped heroine, who is content with her life. This goal orientation is based on carrying out the entrapped heroine’s death as a means to attaining material wealth.
Domestic space
As an offshoot of the female gothic cycle of the Forties, The Female Entrapment Thriller is directly descended from the women’s films of the same period. As with the other genres collected under the banner of ‘women’s film’, the Female Entrapment Thriller has an obsession with the mise-en-scene associated with its central female characters.
This fixation with mise-en-scene is used to create an illusion of safety around the domestic space, an illusion shattered by the antagonist’s violation of this space. This pretense is generally a reflection on the heroine’s own expectations about the domestic environment as a secure, feminine space. The entrapped heroine’s belief in this space highlight the discrepancy between expectations about the sanctity of domestic environment, and how her expectations are destroyed by the collapse of this belief. This dissolution of the image of her home as a safe and secure environment signals her entrapment within the formerly comforting mise-en-scene of the domestic space.
Derived from Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘unheimlich’, the notion of the ‘uncanny’ is useful for analyzing the transformation of the domestic space from a safe and secure environment, into an ‘uncanny’, threatening space in which the heroine is disoriented and trapped. Generally this transformation is signified through a re-arrangement of household objects (such as the missing items in Gaslight or the ransacking of furniture in Wait Until Dark). However this sense of the uncanny can be represented in more subtle ways. This ‘uncanny’ space can be the result of new knowledge about specific objects (the significance attached to the timing of the trains outside Leona’s bedroom, which will be the signal for the murderer to strike in Sorry, Wrong Number; and the doll containing heroin which the villains are after in Wait Until Dark).
As the primary ‘uncanny’ object of the domestic space, the telephone is the most emblematic of the signifiers of the uncanny domestic space. As a sign of the domestic environment’s permeability, the telephone acts as the medium for projecting the dangers of the outside world into the domestic space, thus rendering it open to violation and conversion into an unfamiliar and uncanny space at odds with its female occupant.
Female Stardom
These films represent a spectrum of star images of femininity. Their star personae, in terms of the representation of gender (especially in terms of female agency), allow the generic conventions of the Female Entrapment Thriller to act as site for critically evaluating the qualities associated with each star, in terms of their durability within the diegesis, and for reflecting upon their particular representation of female stardom.
In Sorry, Wrong Number Barbara Stanwyck’s role as bedridden invalid is a role reversal of her persona as an emancipated independent woman. Handicapped in this way, the qualities associated with this strong image (a robust physicality, an equal or superior footing with her male co-stars) are repressed, leaving the film’s star as entrapped as the character she is playing.
By contrast, Audrey Hepburn’s persona is centred around the story of Cinderella, lending her image an air of the aristocratic. Hepburn’s presence in the thriller narrative of Wait Until Dark sees all the key aspects of her persona (the ugly duckling who becomes a swan; the older love interest; the sage who helps her transition from duckling to swan) become weak points within the diegesis.
Gaslight bases its narrative of emotional torment around the image of the ingénue embodied by its star Ingrid Bergman. The moral purity and passivity associated with this image are emphasized as dramatic pressure points within the diegesis, becoming associated with the heroine’s masochistic relationship with her spouse. This transformation of the ingénue from ideal to victim highlights the dual nature of this image – her contentment in marriage turns to passivity in the face of her husband’s duplicity; her naiveté and innocence is exploited; her emotional restraint is used as a tool to engineer her mental breakdown. The qualities of Bergman’s persona which are emphasised in Gaslight become critical points in her character’s own destruction.
In Doris Day, the Female Entrapment thriller is based around a star associated with the qualities of the Fifties domestic goddess: wholesomeness, sexual restraint and marital loyalty. Midnight Lace is caught in the second stage in the evolution of Doris Day’s persona from ambiguous tomboy to the sophisticated romantic lead of films like Pillow Talk. The film projects a representation of gender through an over-emphasis on costuming at the expense of dramatic consistency. De-emphasizing the more ambiguous (and emancipated) qualities of Day’s persona, the film is transformed from a showcase of her qualities as a cinematic ‘domestic goddess’ into a critique of the limitations of this traditional role, as embodied by Day.
It is important to recognize that these films belong to a part of a transitional cycle rather than being independent of one another. These films feature elements of older genres, primarily the female gothic and film noir, while revealing a gradual development of elements that would become central in the next trend of female-centered thriller narratives. The four films are the most representative of this cycle in that they represent a clear evolution in terms of its key elements: the development of the entrapped heroine from a docile housewife to a true heroine who is solely responsible for defending her own life, rather than relying on outside (male) help; the shift from Victorian period setting to the urban apartment.
The move from the Female Entrapment thriller to the slasher film is marked by a shift in terms of its representations of living spaces, more specifically from the Female Entrapment Thriller’s urban apartment location, to the representations of suburbia in the slasher. This change in locations marks a shift in the image of average living and also marks a shift in perceptions of the safety of these spaces. The actions of the Manson Family did for the suburban home what the crimes of Richard Speck and the Boston Strangler in the mid-Sixties undermining the image of the sanctity of contemporary living spaces (Wojcik, 208).
Part of the reason for the shift is also a result of changes in what audiences wanted to see. The audience was younger, and the Seventies was the first decade in which the major studios took an active role in selling films specifically targeting this market (Nowell, 58). Thus the older concepts of the female gothic, such as the concept of ‘gas lighting’ itself, which remained important aspects of the representation of female entrapment in the Female Entrapment Thriller would be anachronistic to a teenage viewer. A shift in the representation of women means the lonely housewife of the Female Entrapment Thriller becomes somewhat anachronistic in the shifting atmosphere of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Economically, there was no longer an emphasis placed upon stars, leading to the rise of the first scream queens such as Jamie Lee Curtis.
Most significantly, the brutality of the antagonist expanded rapidly following the end of the Production Code (a year after the release of Wait Until Dark). Gone were the elaborate scheming and psychological torture, to be replaced by violence and death. This was matched by the heroine’s transition from housewife to a more emancipated and mobile figure. Her own inclination toward violence also increased. The portrayal of the male antagonist in the Female Entrapment Thriller is reduced from an antagonist who masquerades as a loving husband for money (Gaslight), to an antagonist who gives up the ruse in favor of violent coercion in order to get what he wants (Wait Until Dark). Though the goal is fundamentally the same, the villain of Wait Until Dark is shown to be more than capable of physically abusing and killing anyone who gets in his way. By the time of the slasher, the motivation has been simplified to the death of a woman as an end in and of itself. While the entrapped heroine is replaced by a more emancipated image of womanhood in the slasher, with the image of the final girl becoming markedly less restricted in terms of personal agency and individuality, the mysterious antagonist of the Female Entrapment Thriller is reduced to a literal cipher, represented through an emphasis on masks and the use of a “subjective camera” to suggest the presence of the unseen villain (Rockoff, 15). Already represented as an extension of the diegesis, the antagonist of the Female Entrapment Thriller is redefined in the diegesis of the slasher to be re-addressed as an aspect of how the diegesis would be visualized and presented to the viewer. Put simply, the use of subjective camera would turn the diegesis itself into the violator of domestic space and antagonist of the female protagonist.
The Female Entrapment Thriller demonstrates the ways in which Hollywood genres arise out of earlier traditions and then lay the foundations for new groupings of character types, narrative conventions and themes to arise as distinct genres. As with the urban action film of the seventies, the slasher took the most striking qualities of the Female Entrapment Thriller, in its lone female protagonist, its representation of violence toward women and its violation of domestic spaces (also associated with the feminine) and transposed them to a more contemporary context. So as the Female Entrapment Thriller updated selected conventions of the female gothic film, the slasher did the same for the Female Entrapment thriller.
Bibliography
Barefoot, Guy. Gaslight melodrama: from Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood. New York: Continuum, 2001. Print.
Bingham, Dennis. “‘Before She Was a Virgin...’: Doris Day and the Decline of Female Film Comedy in the 1950s and 1960s.” Cinema Journal. 45. 3 (Spring, 2006): 3-31. JSTOR. Web. 21 Aug. 2011.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women and Chainsaws: gender in the modern horror film. London: BFI, 1992. Print.
Corber, Robert J. Cold war femme: lesbianism, national identity, and Hollywood cinema. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2011. Print.
Derry, Charles. The suspense thriller: films in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock. 1988. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Classics/McFarland, 2001. Print.
Doane, Mary Anne. The Desire to Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Dyer, Richard. Stars. 1978. London: BFI Pub., 1998. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.
Gelley, Ora. “Ingrid Bergman's Star Persona and the Alien Space of Stromboli.” Cinema Journal. 47. 2 Winter 2008: 26-51. EBSCOhost. Web. 21 Aug. 2011.
Hanson, Helen. Hollywood heroines: women in film noir and the female gothic film. London; New York: I.B. Tauris: In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.
Lichtenfeld, Eric. Action speaks louder: violence, spectacle, and the American action movie. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Print.
Moseley, Rachel. “Trousers and Tiaras: Audrey Hepburn, a Woman’s Star.” Feminist Review. 71 2002: 37-51. JSTOR. Web. 21 Aug. 2011.
Nowell, Richard. Blood money: a history of the first teen slasher film cycle. New York: Continuum, 2011. Print.
O’Hara, Helen. “Breaking The Silence.” Empire Mar. 2006:126-29
Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” Women in film noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. New ed. London: BFI Pub., 1998. .47-68 Print.
Rockoff, Adam. Going to pieces: the rise and fall of the slasher film, 1978-1986. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2002. Print.
Schackel, Sandra. “Barbara Stanwyck: Uncommon Heroine.” California History. 72. 1 Spring, 1993: 40-55. JSTOR. Web. 21 Aug. 2011.
Wojick, Pamela Robertson. The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American film and popular culture, 1945 to 1975. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment