FIGURING THE LESBIAN: QUEER FEMINIST READINGS OF CINEMA IN

THE ERA OF THE VISIBLE

A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2016

CLARA F BRADBURY - RANCE

SCHOOL OF ARTS, LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

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Table of Contents List of Figures…………………………………………………………………...4 Abstract………………………………………………………………………….7 Declaration………………………………………………………………………8 Copyright Statement……………………………………………………………8 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………...9 Introduction……………………………………………………………………10 Parallel Histories………………………………………………………….21 Desiring Sexuality………………………………………………………...27 Not Yet Configured……………………………………………………….32 1 The Threat of the Woman (Doubled): Mulholland Drive, Genre, and

the Figure of the Lesbian………………………………………………..38 Presenting Absence……………………………………………………….46 Identifying Duplicity……………………………………………………...50 All the Narrative Needs…………………………………………………...65

2 The Translation of Desire: Queering Visibility in Nathalie… and Chloe……………………………………………………………………...72

Making Graphic…………………………………………………………..77 Elaborating Lesbian Desire……………………………………………….85

Queering Heterosexuality………………………………………………...89 Spatialising the Unspoken………………………………………………...94

3 Fantasies of the Elsewhere: Circumstance and the Desire for Identity………………………………………………………………….105

Locating Outness………………………………………………………..113 Veiling and Surveilling………………………………………………….117 Mediating Sexuality……………………………………………………..124 Masquerading Cultural Identity…………………………………………130 4 In-between Touch: Queer Potential in Water Lilies and She

Monkeys…………………………………………………………………140 Sensing Desire…………………………………………………………..144 In-between Touch……………………………………………………….156 Pleasure in Touch...……...………………………………………………166 5 Disorienting Space and Time: Sex as Sexuality in Blue is the Warmest Colour….………………………………………………………………..173 Essential (Dis)orientations………………………………………………178 Desire in Close-up………...……………………………………………..184 Sexuality’s Synecdoche…………………………………………………190 Desire’s Superlatives……………………………………………………199 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….…205 Troubling Visibility……………………………………………………..211

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Bibliography…………………………………………………………………..218 Filmography…………………………………………………………………..244 Total number of words: 73,997

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List of Figures Figure 1.1. Betty (Naomi Watts) in the closing shot of Mulholland Drive

(Lynch, 2001)..………………………………………………….38 Figure 1.2. The cover of Sight and Sound (December 2001) featuring Laura

Harring as Rita in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)..…………..45 Figure 1.3. Dancing couples are joined by black silhouettes in front of a

“purple screen” in the opening of Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)…………………………………………………………….47

Figure 1.4. A translucent Betty (Naomi Watts) greets her imaginary fans in the opening of Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)……………….47

Figure 1.5. Rita (Laura Harring), recently emerged from a car crash and now unable to recall her own identity, chooses a name from a poster hanging on the wall in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)……….52

Figure 1.6. Rita (Laura Harring) is caught trespassing by Betty (Naomi Watts) in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)……………………..57

Figure 1.7. The images of Rita (Laura Harring) and Betty (Naomi Watts) disintegrate as they come to a realisation of Rita’s identity in the decomposing body of Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)…………………………………………………………….60

Figure 1.8. Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) lie in bed following the sex scene that leads them towards Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)……………………………….62

Figure 2.1. Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) is introduced in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003)………………………………………………...73

Figure 2.2. Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) and Catherine (Fanny Ardant) meet for the first time in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003)………………..73

Figure 2.3. Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) presents the symbolic hairclip in Chloe (Egoyan, 2009)………………………………………………….82

Figure 2.4. Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) threatens Catherine (Julianne Moore) in Chloe (Egoyan, 2009)…………………………………………...82

Figure 2.5. Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) falls backwards to her death in Chloe (Egoyan, 2009)………………………………………………….82

Figure 2.6. Catherine (Julianne Moore) dons the symbolic hairslide of her dead lover in the final scene of Chloe (Egoyan, 2009)…………83

Figure 2.7. Judy (Kim Novac) as Madeleine/Carlotta in Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)………………………………………………………….…83

Figure 2.8. Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) recalls her sexual encounter with the husband of Catherine (Fanny Ardant) in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003)…………………………………………………………….90

Figure 2.9. An unnamed ‘hôtesse du bar’ (Prudence Maïdou) laughs as the ‘patronne du bar’ (Évelyne Dandry) serves in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003)………………………………………………...94

Figure 2.10. Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) and Catherine (Fanny Ardant) dance in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003)………………………………….94

Figure 2.11. The duplicity of Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) is exposed to Catherine (Fanny Ardant) in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003)……...96

Figure 2.12. Catherine (Fanny Ardant) enters the bar in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003)…………………………………………………………….98

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Figure 2.13. Catherine (Fanny Ardant) enters her childhood bedroom in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003)…………………………………….98

Figure 2.14. Catherine (Julianne Moore) addresses her ambivalent desire for Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) in Chloe (Egoyan, 2009)……………99

Figure 3.1. Alike (Adapero Oduye) on the theatrical release poster for Pariah (Rees, 2011)……………………………………………………112

Figure 3.2. Ellen (Tara Subkoff) and Claude (Alison Folland) on the poster for All Over Me (Sichel, 1997)………………………………...112

Figure 3.3. Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) at the beach on the poster for Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011)……..112

Figure 3.4. Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) dance through the streets of Tehran in Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011)...........................................................................................116

Figure 3.5. Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) is veiled by the mise en scène in Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011)……………………………...119

Figure 3.6. The surveillance aesthetic of Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011) extends beyond CCTV……………………………………...…121

Figure 3.7. Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri), Joey (Keon Mohajeri), Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) and Hossein (Sina Amedson) dub Milk (van Sant, 2008) into Persian in Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011) ……………..125

Figure 3.8. Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) gazes in a fantasy bar in Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011)……………………………………………..132

Figure 3.9. In the next shot, Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) gazes back in Shireen’s direction in the schoolyard in Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011)…………………………………………………………...132

Figure 4.1. Marie (Pauline Acquart) applauds as if on behalf of the whole audience in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007)……………………145

Figure 4.2. Floriane (Adèle Haenel) receives her applause in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007)………………………………………………145

Figure 4.3. Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser) watches intently in She Monkeys (Aschan, 2011)………………………………………………...147

Figure 4.4. Cassandra (Linda Molin) balances atop a horse in a display of mastery and balance in She Monkeys (Aschan, 2011)…………147

Figure 4.5. Tori (Patrice Donnelly) and Chris (Mariel Hemingway) arm wrestle in Personal Best (Towne, 1982)………………………149

Figure 4.6. Marie (Pauline Acquart) tastes the water that is her connection to Floriane in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007)…………………….156

Figure 4.7. Marie (Pauline Acquart) finally shares the space of the shower with Floriane (Adèle Haenel) in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007)…………………………………………………………...156

Figure 4.8. Marie watches on as Floriane (Adèle Haenel) and François (Warren Jacquin) frolic in the shower in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007)…………………………………………………………...156

Figure 4.9. Marie (Pauline Acquart) and Floriane (Adèle Haenel) share a moment of intimacy on a theatrical scale in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007)………………………………………………159

Figure 4.10. Cassandra (Linda Molin) prepares Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser) for sleep in She Monkeys (Aschan, 2011)……………………..159

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Figure 4.11. Marie (Pauline Acquart) and Anne (Louise Blachère) play together in the pool at the end of Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007)…………………………………………………………..169

Figure 4.12. Floriane (Adèle Haenel) dances alone at the end of Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007)………………………………………………169

Figure 5.1. Emma (Léa Seydoux) and Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) set eyes on one another in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013)…………………………………………………………...173

Figure 5.2. The American poster for Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013)…………………………………………………………...177

Figure 5.3. A panel from Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Colour (2010)………………………………………………….187

Figure 5.4. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux) gaze at women gazing at each other in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013)………………………………………………189

Figure 5.5. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) looks at Emma (Léa Seydoux) and back at herself in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013)…………………………………………………………...189

Figure 5.6. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) baths in sea water in a frame that expresses ecstasy in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013)…………………………………………………………...199

Figure 5.7. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is the artist’s muse in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013)…………………………….201

Figure 5.8. Julie (Juliette Binoche) is crowded by the colour blue that reminds her of her grief in Three Colours: Blue (Kieślowski, 1993)…..202

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Abstract Lesbianism has received unprecedented screen time in the cinema in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. This marks a significant shift away from a prior invisibility, historically interrupted only by invocations of pathologisation, isolation and tragedy. At the same time, critical discourses have increasingly replaced identity categories such as “the lesbian” with the more fluid notions of “queer” sexuality. In this paradoxical context, this thesis identifies and theorises the kinds of cinematic language through which the figure of “the lesbian” has continued to be made legible on the screen. If the cultural invisibility of lesbianism is arguably a thing of the past, the invisibility of lesbianism in academic scholarship is an increasingly notable feature of the current critical landscape. The majority of anthologies on “queer” or “gay” cinema exclude lesbians both as contributors and as objects of study, rendering insecure the equation of political progress with screen visibility. Identifying a shift away from defining lesbian cinema as “about lesbians”, this project offers a series of close readings of narrative feature films released between 2001 and 2013 that put lesbianism in motion. The thesis discusses a range of recent films to consider how the cinematic language of lesbianism has moved beyond the twin burdens the term has historically carried, as deplorably singular and threateningly doubled. In dialogue with debates in psychoanalytic feminist film criticism about the woman in cinema, the first two chapters consider the relationship between lesbianism, narrative and genre in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001), Nathalie (Fontaine, 2003) and Chloe (Egoyan, 2009). My argument explores how these films expose the contradictory relationship between absence and presence in cinema’s production of lesbianism, troubling the ease with which sex can be read as the visual evidence of sexuality. The subsequent two chapters move from psychoanalytically informed studies of the cinematic coding of lesbian fantasy to an investigation of the affective, spatial and temporal registers of desire and eroticism that have provoked recent debates in feminist theory. These chapters consider the ways in which the in-between and expectant modes of subjectivity and sensation that characterise adolescent sexuality coincide with, and accent, lesbian desires in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007), She Monkeys (Aschan, 2011) and Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011). Moving from transactions of power to those of pleasure, the final chapter offers a close reading of Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013) and of the discursive constructions of explicit lesbian sex surrounding it. My reading of the film argues that it formally queers desire in a way that unsettles the over-privileging of sex in the characterisation of lesbian sexuality. Across these five chapters, this thesis explores the relationship between the figuration of the singular lesbian and the multiple registers of her desire and sexuality. In conclusion, the thesis argues that a new field of figurations, emerging from the influences of queer theory, has pushed at the limits of lesbian legibility and generated nuanced and sensitive renderings of debates about sexuality on the screen.

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Declaration No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning Copyright Statement

i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and she has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes.

ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made.

iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions.

iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=487), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.

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Acknowledgements Spending four years discussing feminist film theory with Jackie Stacey, whose work first beckoned me towards the field, has been a privilege. I am astounded by her attention to detail, her painstaking annotations and her clarifying reflections. Words cannot express my gratitude for her encouragement, patience and care. Thanks to David Alderson and Monica Pearl for their rigorous readings of my work and the provocative questions that helped to shape my intervention. Thank you to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Manchester, whose financial support made this project possible. The snowy semester I spent with a dazzling group of feminists at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center gave me the opportunity to write again after an interruption, marking the turning point that brought the finish line into view. Working towards the successes of the Sexuality Summer School over the past five years has been a gift. Many scholars and artists who have taken part in this wonderful series of events have since become valuable mentors and colleagues. Since the day I naively proposed a BA dissertation simply on “feminism and film”, Fiona Handyside’s mentorship, as teacher then friend, has been profoundly influential. From BTP supervisions to cinema trips and spag bol debriefs, our conversations about the movies continue to be ones that I treasure. Old friends including Helen Barron, Jess Drader, El Evans, Tom Grant, Maia Kirby, Chris Richards, Shani Rousso, Rosie Toll, Clare Tyson and Lewis Ward have never stopped asking, supporting and tolerating. Ronnie Barnsley, Laura Guy, Rebecca Pohl and Ros Murray have provided intellectual engagement when I’ve needed it, delightful distraction when I haven’t; Maria Alexopoulos and Emma Spruce have been on hand for doctoral huddles and L Word banter alike. For letting me embarrass them by calling it a “book club” instead of a “postgraduate contemporary literature reading group”, extra special thanks go to the original crew Rose Deller, Jane Stedman and Chris Vardy, who have offered spare beds, sarcasm, excuses to bake, late-night trivia, merriment and long-distance solidarity. (Chris, Lewis and Ronnie even agreed to proofread, as did Rose, who corrected grammar and boosted confidence right up to the final hour.) Thank you to Sara Rance and Peter Speyer for unwavering support in hard times and for nurturing me with pep talks, humour and love; to the other Bradbury-Rance, my sister Madeleine, for cherished advice, silliness and left-wing optimism; to John Fosbrook and Owen and Bryn Fosbrook-Rance for games and laughter; and to Sue Davies for cheerleading and shared tales of daily rituals. I lost my great-grandmother, Beverly Placzek, during the PhD, but the memories of our conversations over tea and toast continue to inspire my every endeavour. For viewing pleasures (not only the best lesbian movies but also the worst, James Bond marathons and Masterchef). For the fresh air, comfort and hilarity that have characterised our introduction to the world of whippet-ownership. For discovering new places and treasuring old ones, for food, walks, for calming, for cheering and for knowing before I did that I could do it, I thank Alice Barnaby.

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Introduction

In 2010, The Kids Are All Right (Cholodenko, 2010), a ‘family values movie’

about a lesbian couple and their children, was in the top ten films released in its

opening weekend in the UK box office.1 In 2013, Blue is the Warmest Colour

(Kechiche, 2013), a three hour-long film of intense drama and explicit sexual

detail about the romance between two young women, won the prestigious Palme

d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2015, Carol (Haynes, 2015), an

adaptation of the novel by Patricia Highsmith that was published in 1952 under a

pseudonym to protect its author’s reputation, was released to widespread critical

acclaim and several Academy Awards nominations.2 Following an

unprecedented wave of equality laws in Europe, Australia and the Americas; the

normalisation across the political spectrum of anti-homophobia; and a gradual

but definite change in the heterocentricity of mainstream visual cultures, the

second decade of the twenty-first century seems to be that in which the lesbian

has reached the realm of the visible.

The long-awaited making visible of the lesbian on the cinema screen has

followed the course of monumental representational change in which everything

is marked by the ways in which it can be turned into an image. New

photographic technologies have transformed the availability, immediacy and

regularity of video production and distribution. The Internet has enabled

television and cinema to widen the remit and spectrum of what can be shown and

1 Cholodenko uses the term ‘family values movie’ to describe The Kids Are All Right in a video interview that accompanies the film’s DVD, entitled The Journey to Forming a Family (2010). See also ‘Weekend Box Office Figures’, British Film Institute, (2015), <http://www.bfi.org.uk/education-research/film-industry-statistics-research/weekend-box-office-figures> [accessed 11 November 2015]. 2 Highsmith’s novel was first published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan as The Price of Salt (New York, NY: Coward-McCann, 1952).

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seen across national borders. Mainstream conventions in film and television, as

well as in other visual media such as video games and web series, have shifted

towards an increase in the violently and sexually explicit.

However, the same decades that have heralded remarkable shifts in the

inclusion of lesbianism in mainstream political, social and cultural

representational fields have also witnessed a revolution in the academic study of

sexuality, taking it away from the ‘identity politics’ of the gay liberation

movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In a paradoxical feat of what might be called

unhappy timing, the lesbian’s delayed and uneasy path towards visibility has

been followed by the elevation of queer theory. The result has been a comparable

invisibility in the intellectual field that might have accounted for such significant

transformations in lesbian representation. Queer theory’s disruption of sexual

identity categories, as welcome as it may be in many ways, provides a

provocation to a self-identifying lesbian theorist and necessarily changes the

shape of a project on contemporary lesbian cinema.

To title this project Figuring the Lesbian is to understand that in this

context is created a visible lesbian whose newfound recognition both enables her

image and confines it to a delineated figure. The adjectival function of the latter

two terms of the title, “queer” and “feminist”, is rarely put into doubt: it does not

require a conceptual stretch to imagine a feminist reading of cinema or a queer

reading of visibility. What these words also do is expose the conventional nounal

singularity of the first term, “the lesbian”. This thesis seeks not only to perform

queer and feminist readings of the lesbian but also to investigate the relationship

between the terms in which the making visible of the lesbian is also a process of

making static. In this thesis I take this up as a structuring problem; rather than

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advancing a conventional history of the recent past of lesbian representation or

an overview of the films that have made the lesbian visible, I provide textual

analyses of a series of films released in the past fifteen years alongside close

readings of the theories of sexuality that problematise their legibility as lesbian.

In Uninvited, Patricia White analyses the lesbian’s marginal presence in

classical Hollywood cinema; Andrea Weiss begins Vampires and Violets by

problematising the trend in which only one image of the lesbian may surface at

any one time and always to the exclusion of other subordinated figurations; and

Clare Whatling argues in Screen Dreams that the cinematic lesbian must be

precisely that: the product only of a spectator’s dream or fantasy.3 In the fifteen

years since these three theorisations, a comparable abundance of films has been

made available for new interpretations. No longer merely ‘the ghost, the

governess, the supporting character, [or] the fan’, nor exclusively the murderess

or the victim, the lesbian has reached new realms of the visible hard to imagine

in the 1980s and 1990s.4

In a survey of films doing the festival circuit in 1995, Rhona Berenstein

noted that ‘lesbians are not born, they’re seduced’.5 In contrast to the gay male

films Berenstein cites that allow their pairs of protagonists to follow their desires

‘well out of the closet’, women ‘need to be coaxed into their lesbianism’ by a

more experienced ‘dyke’ character.6 In disparate films from The Incredibly True

3 Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992); and Claire Whatling, Screen Dreams: Fantasising Lesbians in Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). See also Shameem Kabir, Daughters of Desire: Lesbian Representations in Film (London and Washington, DC: Cassell, 1998) and Tamsin Wilton, ed., Immortal, Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image (London: Routledge, 1995). 4 White, Uninvited, p. xxiv. 5 Rhona Berenstein, ‘Where the Girls Are: Riding the New Wave of Lesbian Feature Films’, GLQ, 3:1 (1996), 125-37 (p. 125). 6 Berenstein, ‘Where the Girls Are’, p. 125.

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Adventure of Two Girls in Love (Maggenti, 1995) to When Night is Falling

(Rozema, 1995), the seductive protagonist is coded as embodying a stable or

essential lesbian sexuality while her heterosexual counterpart is primed to

undergo a process of transformation. Alongside this ubiquitous narrative, another

kind of seduction figures the lesbian not through her predatory self-assurance but

instead through her violent sexuality. The murderous seductress is a stereotype

standing in for, and ‘specularis[ing]’, the lesbian’s more broadly suspected

perversion ‘within a patriarchal framework’.7 The erotic thriller constructs the

lesbian as either a threatening obstacle or laughable insignificance or, as in Basic

Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992) and Single White Female (Schroeder, 1992), as both

at once. The figure of the lesbian as somehow suspect or degenerate reinforces

these films’ reassuring displays of heteronormativity.

What is most enduring about these figurations, crossing between genres

from romance to thriller as they do, is that they persistently figure the lesbian in

the singular. A world away from these routine tropes, and also from the coupled

domestication of The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko’s debut, High Art

(1998), is a film about queer kinships and heroin addiction that ‘upset utopian

views of gay and lesbian relationships as inherently more equitable than, or

superior to, their heterosexual counterparts’.8 In stark contrast to the director’s

mainstream success a decade later, the film was not released in cinemas in the

UK and has only recently been made available on DVD. High Art emerged from

the ‘New Queer Cinema’ (NQC), a moniker coined by B. Ruby Rich to capture a

7 Eva Rueschmann, Sisters on Screen: Siblings in Contemporary Cinema (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000), p. 102. See also Michele Aaron, ‘Til Death Us Do Part: Cinema’s Queer Couples Who Kill’, in The Body’s Perilous Pleasures, ed. by Michele Aaron (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 67-86. 8 B. Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 38.

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series of films that were ‘fresh, edgy, low-budget, inventive, unapologetic, sexy,

and stylistically daring’.9 While the movement most notably made the names of

male directors like Todd Haynes, Isaac Julien and Gregg Araki, it also opened up

the space for lesbian films like High Art and Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994) that

opposed themselves to the overinvestment in the happy ending of Desert Hearts

(Deitch, 1985) and the disappointment of the failed lesbian romance in Personal

Best (Towne, 1982), the two most significant lesbian feature films from the

decade before.10

We might see it as symbolic that the major film released at the close of

this project, Carol, returns from the contemporary era of the visible to resurrect a

mid-twentieth-century past of secrecy and surveillance (via its director’s

associations with the NQC). After the explicit sex scenes of Blue is the Warmest

Colour, the affront to the logic of visibility’s progression is that the erotic and

romantic potential of Carol is generated largely from a series of looks and

fleeting touches. Though it is not explored at length in this thesis, the film

characterises the ways in which the project looks back to the history of the

lesbian’s cinematic image in order to explore her constitution as figure in the

present. Published in 1999, White’s book about the lesbian in classical

Hollywood cinema situates its point of retrospection in a period in which

“‘lesbian” is an intelligible social identity, visible on the nation’s television and

movie screens’.11 Yet, just as the intelligibility observed by White in the 1990s

‘did not simply appear as a new historical phenomenon, dependent on second-

9 Rich, New Queer Cinema, p. xxiv. 10 See Anat Pick, ‘New Queer Cinema and Lesbian Films’, in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, ed. by Michele Aaron (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 103-17 and Maria Pramaggiore, ‘Fishing for Girls: Romancing Lesbians in New Queer Cinema’, College Literature, 24:1 (1997), 59-75 (p. 70). 11 White, Uninvited, p. 6.

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wave feminism and the post-Stonewall gay rights movements as a decisive break

with the past’, so too this project cannot be seen as pinpointing a decisive break

with the twentieth century. This century’s turn to visibility has been the result of

a staggered series of smaller motions. Over a prolonged fifteen-year turning

point, measures of institutionalisation have mainstreamed homosexuality in a

way that might not have been imaginable even at the turn of the century.

Significant transformations have occurred in spheres from the US

military, in which the notorious Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy was repealed in

2011; to the Catholic church, which has begun to change its policies on

homosexuality; to the media, where a popular talk show host (Ellen DeGeneres)

and a respected news anchor (Rachel Maddow) are largely uncontroversial

features of public television; to sport, where the debate generated around the

2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi endorsed a popularised international campaign

against the Russian government’s suppression of sexual freedom. Yet as the

lesbian has been legitimised as a figure, her burden of pathologisation and

alienation has been taken on by the trans* community, including in the feminist

movement where the question of who gets to count as woman has provoked

significant rifts.12 A new institutional visibility has also allowed countries such

as the UK and the USA to announce their “progression” as part of an imperial

rhetoric in opposition to the “regressive” policies of certain non-Western

countries. In the UK, liberal policies brought in by the Conservative government

have accompanied extreme right-wing ideologies against welfare and the

12 For more on the relationship between trans* issues and feminism, see Susan Stryker, ‘Transgender Feminism: Queering the Woman Question’, in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. by Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 59-70. For more on the relationship between lesbianism and second wave feminism, see Victoria Hesford, Feeling Women’s Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 68.

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National Health Service.13 Social visibility has thus been institutionalised,

commodified and politically manoeuvred.

The transformation in Cholodenko’s oeuvre from High Art to The Kids

Are All Right exemplifies the move from a feminist queer cinema to what we

might argue is a postfeminist lesbian cinema, in which profession is pitted

against family and secure domesticity that does not trouble the status quo is the

ultimate goal.14 The allocation of “family values” beyond heterosexuality has

boosted the circulation of a comic drama about a lesbian couple, by a lesbian

director, described by Timothy Smith of the London Film Festival as a film

whose narrative ‘resonate(s) with an audience in a universal way’, and scathingly

dismissed by David Cox as a ‘cosily reassuring message [that] could have been

devised to delight midwestern Tea Party moms, whatever their views on

lesbianism’.15 This is the era in which the campaign for “equal marriage” has

dominated discussions in Europe, the Americas and Australia since the first

legislation passed in the Netherlands in 2001; in 2015, federal legislation was

passed under President Barack Obama’s administration that legalised equal

13 Similarly, what has come to be called “pink-washing” has allowed countries such as Israel to cover over violent governmental actions with the socially liberal embrace of homosexuality. See Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) and Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012). 14 I argued this in my MRes Dissertation at the University of Exeter (2011), and later in ‘Querying Postfeminism in Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right’, in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. by Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 27-43. The feminist study of postfeminist media culture has an extensive bibliography, but key contributions in addition to Gwynne and Muller’s collection include Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (Los Angeles, CA and London: Sage, 2009); Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds., Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001). 15 Timothy Smith, ‘London Film Festival: Lisa Cholodenko’, British Film Institute, (2011), <http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/node/1160> [accessed 21 August 2011] and David Cox, ‘The Kids Are All Right. But Are They?’, The Guardian, (1 November 2010), <http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/nov/01/the-kids-are-all-right?INTCMP=SRCH> [accessed 7 August 2011].

17

marriage across all fifty US states, and in the same year a landmark public

referendum in Ireland passed in favour of equal marriage.16 Yet it is also an era

in which abortion rights have regressed, women remain under-represented in

major sectors including politics, business and media, and myriad other factors

suggest that, despite postfeminism’s semantic disavowal, feminist activism is

more necessary than ever before.17

Part of this twenty-first century context must include the changes in

viewing practices that have contributed to television’s dominance in the race

towards lesbian visibility. The field has been shaped not only by television’s

accessibility but also by its scope; simply put, its form allows for the

championing of long-running narratives. Unequivocally marketing itself on the

‘lesbian as a category of identity’, the long-running show The L Word (Chaiken,

2004-2009) instituted a new era of televisual visibility. The timing of its arrival

in 2004 threatened to uphold the conflation of commodification and ‘political

progress’ of which Robyn Wiegman forewarned in 1994.18 The L Word took on a

Sex and the City (Star, 1998-2004) remit and commodified the middle-class Los

Angeles “lipstick lesbian” (‘Same Sex, Different City’ was its tagline).19 Since

The L Word, television has welcomed regular key lesbian characters on popular

long-running primetime soap operas such as Grey’s Anatomy (Rhimes, 2005-) 16 For more on the politics of gay marriage, see Cheshire Calhoun, Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 17 The analysis of feminism in generational terms constitutes a broad field. Mary Hawkesworth, for instance, states that ‘feminism’s live burial then coincides nicely with neoliberalism’s curtailment of the political agenda [...], limiting feminists’ sphere of action as well as public understanding of the politically actionable [...]’. See ‘The Semiotics of Premature Burial: Feminism in a Postfeminist Age’, Signs, 29:4 (2004), 961-85 (p. 982). Angela McRobbie introduces the idea of feminism being ‘taken into account’ by postfeminism in The Aftermath of Feminism, p. 12. 18 Robyn Wiegman, ‘Introduction: Mapping the Lesbian Postmodern’, in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. by Laura Doan (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 1-20 (p. 3). 19 The L Word also provided, in its almost exclusively female directorial and writing team, credits for directors whose films have otherwise struggled to receive international distribution, such as Jamie Babbit.

18

and The Good Wife (King and King, 2009-) in the USA and Last Tango in

Halifax (Wainwright, 2012-) and Call the Midwife (Thomas, 2012-) in the UK.

Aligning most coherently with the tendency towards the institutionalisation of

lesbian “family values” is The Fosters (Bredeweg and Paige, 2013-), a soap

opera about a lesbian couple with biological, adopted and foster children,

produced by Jennifer Lopez and shown on the Disney-owned ABC Family

network.20 Challenges to identity-based programming have come in the form of

the widening mainstream of new modes of televisual entertainment such as

Netflix and Amazon Instant Video that have given us Orange is the New Black

(Kohan, 2013-) and Transparent (Soloway, 2014-) respectively.21 Orange is the

New Black, while also depicting explicit lesbian sex scenes and multiple lesbian

storylines, does not market itself on L for lesbian but on the ‘camaraderie and

conflict’ of a prison setting whose homoeroticism is, though not denied, not

categorically named.22

The cinematic context has followed a different path towards increased

visibility, its lag perhaps overemphasised by contrast with the box set or the web

series. Despite notable releases marked as signifiers of change, the trajectory

towards what I have called in my title the ‘Era of the Visible’ has been neither

linear nor consistent. One illuminating exercise is to observe which films are

shown not only at BFI Flare (formerly the London Lesbian and Gay Film

Festival), but also at the more internationally prestigious London Film Festival,

20 For more on the phenomenon of The Fosters, see Melanie Kohnen, ‘Cultural Diversity as Brand Management in Cable Television’, Media Industries, 2:2 (2015), 88-103. 21 Additionally, monumental shifts in technology have not only facilitated primetime shows about lesbian lives but also, more recently, low-budget ‘webisodes’ made available to broadening online audiences. See, for instance, The Slope (Akhavan, 2010-). For a specific account of the impact of the Internet on cinema distribution, see Rebecca Beirne, ‘New Queer Cinema 2.0? Lesbian-Focused Films and the Internet’, Screen, 55:1 (2014), 129-38. 22 See ‘Orange Is the New Black’, Lionsgate (2016), <https://www.lionsgate.com/tv/orangeisthenewblack/> [accessed 27 April 2016].

19

from which they have been more likely to get a general cinema release.23 Such

recent films have included Concussion (Passon, 2013), which opened in twenty

cinemas in May 2014 (in comparison to the five hundred and fifty cinemas for

the top box office earner of the same opening weekend); The Duke of Burgundy

(Strickland, 2014), which opened in twenty-three cinemas in February 2015; and

Appropriate Behaviour (Akhavan, 2014), which opened in seventeen cinemas in

March 2015. In 2015, The Duke of Burgundy and Appropriate Behaviour have

prompted the BFI’s recent announcement that 2015 ‘was the year of the strong

lesbian’.24

When Blue is the Warmest Colour won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the

Cannes Film Festival, it encapsulated the incontestable shift undergone over the

previous decade. The Palme d’Or had never before been won for a lesbian

narrative. Neither had the Queer Palm award, instituted in 2010 at the same

festival, until it was awarded in 2015 to Carol. Yet both of these triumphs also

expose the precarious nature of that shift. There are two sides to the “progress”

narrative that has attached to the lesbian’s journey from invisibility to visibility

23 On lesbian, gay and queer film festivals, see Skadi Loist, ‘A Complicated Queerness: LGBT Film Festivals and Queer Programming Strategies’, in Coming to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals, ed. by Jeffrey Ruoff (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012), pp. 157-72 and White, ed., ‘Queer Publicity: A Dossier on Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals (Special Issue)’, GLQ, 5:1 (1999), 73-93. Cult or minority-interest lesbian films are often those lesbian-directed, low-budget features that might be shown in a network of international queer film festivals but not in major film festivals, distributed in straight-to-DVD releases by speciality distributors like Peccadillo Pictures and TLA Releasing in the UK but very rarely screened in cinemas on general release. It is for this reason that, in the filmography at the end of the thesis, I list (where applicable) both the UK cinema and UK DVD distributors of each film, revealing the often surprising cases where significant lesbian films have not been made available; Maidens in Uniform (Sagan, 1931) is an example of a historically important film that is regularly discussed in scholarship on lesbian cinema that has yet to be released on DVD in the UK. 24 Alex Davidson, ‘The LGBT Film Highlights of 2015’, British Film Institute, (22 December 2015), <http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/lgbt-film-highlights-2015> [accessed 22 December 2015].

20

over the past two decades.25 Unlike the Academy Awards, which predominantly

celebrate mainstream Anglo-American films made within the studio system, with

a single category devoted to “foreign language” films, Cannes film festival sets

the tone for the reception of an international corpus of films that might be

recognised as high art.26 While the Queer Palm is independently sponsored and

does not appear on the Cannes Film Festival’s official list of awards, its selection

from amongst the best queer-themed films in the festival’s official selection

provides a simple demonstration of lesbian visibility in one of the most

significant indicators of prestige in the international art house film circuit.

Between 2011 and 2015, fifty-seven films were candidates for the award. Of

those fifty-seven, across four years, just four were directed by women. While

Desiree Akhavan – the bisexual filmmaker who made Appropriate Behaviour –

was the head of the jury for the 2015 Queer Palm, her own film was not in

contention.27

25 A webpage by New York Film Academy reveals the alarming statistics associated with gender bias in Hollywood in particular, where, for instance, there is a ratio of five to one men to women working in film. See Nicholas Zurko, ‘Gender Inequality in Film’, New York Film Academy, (2013), <https://www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/gender-inequality-in-film/> [accessed 16 June 2015]. The first (and still only) woman to have received an Oscar for Best Director was Kathryn Bigelow for the Iraq war film The Hurt Locker (2008). It is a significant paradox that while a female director can only win such mainstream recognition for what has been argued to be a male genre, traditionally “female” genres like the romance can only receive mainstream recognition when mediated by a male director. For a longer discussion of Bigelow’s work, see White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 3. See also the edition of Cahiers du Cinéma (a notoriously male-driven French film magazine) entitled ‘Où sont les femmes?’ (Where are the women?). Ironically, the image used for the cover of the edition is a faceless graphic: a movie camera with legs whose only identifying female feature is a pair of high-heeled shoes. Of particular interest is the filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s contribution: see ‘Côté Françaises: Mieux Loties qu’Ailleurs, Mais Encore Largement Minoritaires, Comment les Cinéastes Françaises Envisagent-Elles la Question du Féminin?’, Cahiers du Cinema, 681 (Septembre 2012), 22-26. 26 GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) produces an annual report on ‘inclusiveness’ in the major studios. In 2014, of one hundred and fourteen major studio releases, only 17.5% ‘contained characters identified as either lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender’ and of those, only 10% ‘featured lesbian characters’. See ‘2015 Studio Responsibility Index’, GLAAD, (2015), <http://www.glaad.org/sri/2015> [accessed 16 December 2015]. 27 For more on bisexuality in these contexts, see Maria San Filippo, The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013).

21

Two trajectories have thus run in parallel. One has seen the

overwhelming visibility of lesbianism as an identity category, as headlined by

The L Word. The other has seen the increasing prevalence of queer recognition in

the form of festival subsidiaries like the Queer Palm that, in correspondence with

the academic context as I will describe, serves to institute a new kind of

invisibility in which the lesbian is subsumed under broader queer

representational categories.28

Parallel Histories

While the parallel histories of queer and lesbian cinema have converged and

diverged over the course of the past twenty-five years, the conspicuous absence

of academic interest in lesbian film has evidenced itself in the continuing rarity

of books dedicated to the subject. Books published since 2000 have either turned

back to the previous century; subsumed film analysis into the study of literature

and film in a way that dilutes the specificity of the cinema’s visual form; or

generalised the study of film as part of broader debates on popular culture that

often foreground televisual images.29 Yet, as I will argue, the figure of the

28 This has often meant the disavowal of lesbian as a term. While the coming out stories of high-profile actors have been a significant part of the recent narrative, Ellen Page, to name a particularly famous example, used the unambiguous but gender indifferent words “I am gay”, while others still more recently, including Kristen Stewart and Ruby Rose, shunned labels altogether. 29 In the first category, see Lucille Cairns, Sapphism on Screen: Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); Robert Corber, Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Lee Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009). In the second, see Christine Coffman, Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006). In the third, see Beirne, Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Judith Mayne, Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Exceptions that have focused on lesbianism within national cinemas include Liang Shi, Chinese Lesbian Cinema: Mirror Rubbing, Lala, and Les (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).

22

lesbian on the contemporary cinema screen is constructed importantly as a

cinematic figure.

A web search for scholarly articles on ‘lesbian film’ and ‘queer film’

reveals a parallel rise in the usage of both terms between the years of 1990 and

2000. However, from the year 2000 onwards, searches in five-year periods

indicate a steady drop in results for ‘lesbian film’ and a striking rise in results for

‘queer film’.30 Thus, alongside the ostensible progress marked by visibility in the

mainstream, in the academy a presumed incompatibility between lesbianism and

queerness sees lesbianism either marginalised within, veiled by or distinguished

as other from queerness.

In an exploration not only of representational visibility on-screen but also

discursive visibility in scholarship, we can observe a longstanding anxiety about

the processes of conflation and obscuration through which ‘the very name

“lesbian” disappear[s] under the rubric “queer”’.31 However, when she coined

the term ‘Queer Theory’ as the title of a conference in 1991, Teresa de Lauretis

proffered a possible solution to the ‘politically correct phrase “lesbian and gay”’

in which ‘differences are implied but then simply taken for granted or even

30 On Google Scholar, for instance, a search for ‘allintitle: lesbian film OR cinema OR screen’ yields sixty-one results between 1990-1995, ninety-six between 1995-2000, fifty-three between 2000-2005, forty-five between 2005-2010 and fifty-eight results between 2010-2015. A search for ‘allintitle: queer film OR cinema OR screen’ yields forty-seven between 1990-1995, sixty-six between 1995-2000, one hundred and twenty between 2000-2005, one hundred and ninety-four between 2005-2010 and two hundred and forty between 2010-2015. 31 Linda Garber, ‘The Curious Persistance of Lesbian Studies’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, ed. by Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 65-77 (p. 67).

23

covered over by the word “and”’.32 Even a linguistically equalising term is here

revealed to subsume the lesbian into a discursive field that excludes her.

However, while Nick Rees-Roberts employs the word ‘queer’ in the title of his

book French Queer Cinema with the understanding that it will be read as

‘convenient shorthand for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identities’, he

states in the same introduction that his corpus will ‘focus primarily on gay male

sexuality (due to the lack of “out” lesbian filmmakers and of lesbian self-

representation)’.33 Other edited collections on national queer cinemas often

follow a similar kind of flattening out of gender difference, or otherwise assign

lesbian films to one distinct chapter whose naming as such marks it as other from

the rest of the umbrella term’s significations.34 In this context, the term “lesbian”

becomes static: not, as Amy Villarejo has written, through its stability as noun

next to queer as ‘modifier’, but as itself a designator of otherness, of that which

must be spelled out.35

Even before the blooming of queer theory in the academy, lesbianism

was a term subjected to the onus of clarifying self-definition, Tamsin Wilton, for

example, referring to the need to preface ‘any exploration of lesbian issues with

32 Teresa De Lauretis, ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, an Introduction’, differences, 3:2 (1991), iii-xviii (pp. v-vi). In the conference that formed the basis for the special edition, ‘Queer Theory’ as a term ‘was arrived at in the effort to avoid all of these fine distinctions in our discursive protocols, not to adhere to any one of the given terms, not to assume their ideological liabilities, but instead to both transgress and transcend them – or at the very least problematize them’. See ‘Queer Theory’, p. v. Just over twenty years later, James Penney has made the controversial claim that ‘queer discourse has run its course, its project made obsolete by the full elaboration of its own logic’. See After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2014), p. 1. 33 Nick Rees-Roberts, French Queer Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 4-5. 34 Books that use ‘queer’ in their titles purportedly as an umbrella term, but whose contents reveal a bias towards male representations, include Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, eds., Queer Cinema: The Film Reader (Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2004) and Robin Griffiths, ed., British Queer Cinema (London: Routledge, 2006). Important exceptions include Christopher Perriam, Spanish Queer Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and Jackie Stacey and Sarah Street, eds., Queer Screen: A Screen Reader (London: Routledge, 2007). 35 Amy Villarejo, Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 27.

24

[…] the catechism of undecidability: the formula of question and response which

problematizes the definition of “lesbian”’.36 The lesbian is stuck between a static

figuration as the only queer category needing exact differentiation, on the one

hand, and an all-too-mobile figuration whose specificities remain unknown, on

the other. In 1995, the same year as Wilton’s observation above, Valerie Traub

begins an article on lesbian film with that very formula, asking ‘what is a

lesbian?’37 Traub’s response to her self-posed question is a refusal to answer, if

to do so would ‘fix that which is fundamentally unstable’.38 This anti-definition

could itself be now described as “queer” in its refusal of particularity.

To write definitively about lesbian film under the banner of queer theory

reduces queer’s potential to move beyond the norms of difference; yet to write

instead about queer film, without specifying lesbian difference, loses sight of the

ways in which social and cultural structures of normativity and marginality have

structured the terms of lesbian representation. My argument is that, rather than

another identity category, queer is the charge or potential through which

lesbianism is enabled to expand its borders. What is key here, however, is that

this productive relationship between queer theory and lesbian film is based on

the queerly paradoxical structure of lesbianism itself: a latent potentiality for

queerness based on the history of the compromised image.

Through the lesbian’s historical cultural invisibility and the law’s refusal

to mark her as it has the gay man, figurations of lesbianism in terms of 36 Wilton, ‘Introduction: On Invisibility and Mortality’, in Immortal, Invisible, ed. by Wilton, pp. 1-19 (pp. 3-4). 37 Valerie Traub, ‘The Ambiguities of “Lesbian” Viewing Pleasure: The (Dis)Articulations of Black Widow’, in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, ed. by Corey Creekmur and Alexander Doty (London: Cassell, 1995), pp. 115-36 (p. 115). Tasker similarly begins an article with the question ‘what is a lesbian film?’ in ‘Pussy Galore: Lesbian Images and Lesbian Desire in the Popular Cinema’, in The Good, the Bad and the Gorgeous: Popular Culture’s Romance with Lesbianism, ed. by Diane Hamer and Belinda Budge (London: Pandora Press, 1994), pp. 172-83. 38 Traub, ‘The Ambiguities of “Lesbian” Viewing Pleasure’, p. 115. Original emphasis.

25

‘immaturity’ or ‘incompleteness’ are used to pathologise her through the

discourse of the passing phase.39 Yet these same terms might, in another context,

be read queerly, as in Jack Halberstam’s suggestion that the reclamation of a

queer ‘notion of a stretched-out adolescence, for example, challenges the

conventional binary formulation of a life narrative divided by a clear break

between youth and adulthood’.40 Yet the lesbian has more often than not been

positioned as an outdated precursor to queer, the term “lesbian” holding within it

a quality that, in Elizabeth Freeman’s words, ‘seems to somehow inexorably

hearken back to essentialized bodies, normative visions of women’s sexuality,

and single-issue identity politics’.41 While lesbianism’s particularity – female

same-sex desire – has marked it, contentiously, as a minority within feminism,

the figure of the lesbian has also come to signify the assumed liberatory politics

of the feminist movement. The ‘feminist-as-lesbian’ is a figure named by

Victoria Hesford as she who is legible ‘as a shorthand notation for women’s

liberation’.42 A possible reversal – the lesbian-as-feminist – might also function

to delineate lesbianism’s excessive significations, for the term “lesbian” is asked

not only to signify the figure of the lesbian woman but also, as Villarejo argues,

39 Judith Roof, A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 5. 40 Judith [now Jack] Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005), p. 153. 41 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 62. Freeman evokes the notion of ‘temporal drag’ to describe ‘the gravitational pull that “lesbian,” and even more so “lesbian feminist,” seems to exert on “queer”’. Ibid. 42 Hesford, Feeling Women’s Liberation, pp. 16-17. Original emphasis. In the early second wave feminist movement, lesbianism was, in Hesford’s words, ‘something closer to what we now call queer – a practice of subverting existing social identities and of anticipating future forms of social and sexual life’. See Feeling Women’s Liberation, p. 239. Original emphasis. Annamarie Jagose has challenged this view, arguing that ‘[t]he tendency to figure “lesbian” as utopic and outside dominant conceptual frameworks essentializes that category as transgressive or subversive’. See Lesbian Utopics (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), p. 5.

26

the progressive politics signalled by that figure.43 Yet the intersectional

assumptions of queerness in opposition to lesbianism’s presumed single issues

are failed by its exclusive usage in particular contexts.44

Rather than the recipient of a clean break between a historical invisibility

and a contemporary visibility, the lesbian in social and cultural representational

terms has always been marked by a discourse that foregrounds the relationship

between the two. Recurring scholarly interventions figure the lesbian either as

‘overwritten by cliché’, as in the generic conventions outlined above, or as

condemned to fall entirely ‘outside sexuality’s visual field’, lost in the slippage

between, on the one hand, the necessary negativity of the female as absence to

male presence and, on the other, the difficulty of homosexual difference.45 Yet

the lesbian’s increased visibility has threatened to fix her: if not in the

pathologising stereotypes of the past, then still in the singular cliché of the finally

recognisable figure. Peggy Phelan challenges the relationship between visibility

and progress, arguing that a path towards visibility must be acknowledged as a

43 Villarejo, Lesbian Rule, pp. 6-7. Wiegman has studied the ways in which these polarised positions have shifted over the course of the disciplinarisation of feminist and queer theory, writing that ‘feminism has diverged repeatedly from itself, proliferated in contradiction across academic, social, institutional, national, and political domains, and recognized, even when repeating, its own contradictions and complicities’. See Object Lessons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 112. 44 Queer is understood in David Halperin’s words as ‘by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’. See Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 62. Its institution into disciplinarity has provoked critiques from those who suggest, firstly, that queer itself becomes the term under ‘sustained and confounding normalization’, or, secondly, that queer theory, having ‘oppose[d] “the master’s house”’ begins to resemble ‘the house that screams for dismantling’. See Wiegman, Object Lessons, p. 305 and Garber, Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory (New York, NY and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 4. If, in Nikki Sullivan’s words, queer begins to function ‘as a new, and less wordy, label for an old box’ it must, in Judith Butler’s, be ‘redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes’. See Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p. 44 and Butler, ‘Critically Queer’, GLQ, 1:1 (1993), 17-32 (p. 19). 45 Heather Love, ‘Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in Mulholland Drive’, New Literary History, 35:1 (2004), 117-32 (p. 121) and Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 2.

27

process of naming and fixing.46 As a response to her historical invisibility, the

lesbian is even more firmly fixed, even ‘brought into being’, as a figure.47 She is

not a precursor to, but created by, her invested image.

The conception of lesbians in cinema figures the lesbian as pre-

constituted prior to her appearance in a given film.48 In contrast, queer, as in the

NQC, is given the adjectival modifying role, holding within it as a term the

qualifying attributes of Rich’s movement – ‘inventive, unapologetic, sexy’ and

so on.49 We are beginning to observe two curiously paradoxical paths that have

run in parallel: one in which aesthetic strategies have overridden the figurations

of happy endings, and another in which political success has been marked out by

the representation of the figure who might be transposed into cinematic form.

Desiring Sexuality

The provocation for the reading of lesbianism alongside queer in this thesis

comes from a conceptual debate between two theories of desire that remain

outside of the trajectory of queer theory’s dominance in the study of sexuality: de

Lauretis’s Freudian reading of the specificity of lesbian desire and Jackie

Stacey’s reading of homoerotic identification and the multiplicity of women’s

46 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), p. 1. 47 Claudia Castañeda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 4. 48 When Villarejo refers to the ‘provocative claim’ that ‘television has always been queer’ but ‘has only recently been or become recognizably gay’, the subtext to the difference between the two is that television as a queer form has preceded gays in television. See Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 3. Original emphasis. Rosalind Galt writes that, ‘[f]or a liberal politics of sexuality, this emphasis on style over representation presents a danger of losing focus, expanding the concept of queerness so far that it becomes a rhetorical placeholder without material weight’. See ‘Default Cinema: Queering Economic Crisis in Argentina and Beyond’, Screen, 54:1 (2013), 62-81 (p. 64). 49 Rich, New Queer Cinema, p. xxiv.

28

desiring spectatorship practices.50 While they both position themselves in

opposition to past manifestations of psychoanalytic feminist film theory that

failed to account for lesbian desire, a tension arises between de Lauretis’s and

Stacey’s work in terms of the sexual and the erotic.51 Taking from Freudian

psychoanalysis the desiring potential of sexed subjects, de Lauretis’s work on

lesbian desire is known for its focus on specificity through a theorisation of what

Sigmund Freud himself ‘could not imagine but others can – a lesbian

subjectivity’.52 In contrast to Laura Mulvey’s early refusal of lesbian desire

outside of the female spectator’s masculine identification, de Lauretis replaces

50 In particular, see de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994) and Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1994). 51 In Laura Mulvey’s seminal theorisation of spectatorship in classical Hollywood cinema, masculinity is paired with activity and femininity with passivity, and the scopophilia (pleasure in looking) that cinema offers is only available to men who, as primary subjects, objectify women on screen. Women can thus only embody the male subject or take pleasure in being looked at and so, according to Mulvey, there is no space for an active female subjectivity. See ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16:3 (1975), 6-18. For an account of this and other theorisations of the gaze, see, for instance, Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman, ‘The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer Viewing’, in A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Popular Culture, ed. by Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), pp. 13-56; Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video (Chichester and New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Whatling, Screen Dreams. Mulvey returned to her essay fourteen years later in ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure” Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun’, Framework, 15-17 (1981), 12-15. ‘Afterthoughts’ reinvigorates the conversation and allows for the displacement, as Stacey reads it, of ‘the notion of fixity of the spectator positions produced by the text’ as well as a focus on ‘the gaps and contradictions within patriarchal signification, thus opening up crucial questions of resistance and diversity’. See Star Gazing, p. 25. 52 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. xiv. For Lacanian theorists, this notion of subjectivity is an impossibility, as the subject ‘is not an entity with an identity, but a being created in the fissure of a radical split’. See Juliet Mitchell, ‘Introduction I’, in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, trans. by Jacqueline Rose, ed. by Mitchell and Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 1-26 (p. 5). In contrast, for Halperin, queer theory should ‘close off all access to the category of the psychic […] by approaching gay subjectivity as an effect of a political technology’. See What Do Gay Men Want?: An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 103. While Halperin – in contrast to Stacey – detaches any psychoanalytic model of subjectivity from his work, his Foucauldian approach to gay subjectivity is comparable to Stacey’s distinction between ‘identificatory fantasies and identificatory practices’, by which she emphasises the production of identification not only in the psyche but also ‘at the level of cultural activity’. See Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 171. Original emphasis. The combination of both of these registers – the social or political and the psychic – are what de Lauretis, in more recent work, alludes to in her configuration of ‘queer’ as a way of describing the drive, a structuring psychoanalytic concept, as ‘a figural space […], a non-homogenous, heterotopic space of passage, of transit and transformation “between the mental and the somatic”’. See Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 13.

29

Mulvey’s focus on gender difference between men and women with that on

sexual difference between women. Objecting to what she sees as a heterosexual

feminist appropriation of lesbianism, de Lauretis instead posits a lesbian cinema

‘constituted in relation to a sexual difference from socially dominant,

institutionalized, heterosexual forms’.53 It is this emphasis on the sexed and

desiring nature of subjectivity that underpins de Lauretis’s contestation of

Stacey’s model of female identification in the cinema.54 De Lauretis’s primary

reservation is that Stacey confuses desire and identification, implying that ‘desire

between women is not sexual’.55 However, Stacey claims not to be ‘de-

eroticising desire, but rather eroticising identification’.56 In Stacey’s model of

spectatorship, female identification involves, throughout a woman’s life, a

continued investment in a combination of auto- and homo-eroticism.57

Psychoanalysis is thus important here for its theorisation of the psyche’s inherent

homoeroticism. Reading both of these theoretical texts after queer theory

provokes the impetus for this thesis, in which homoeroticism might be

reconfigured as the queer potentiality of lesbianism. Instead of employing the

term “queer” merely to replace “lesbian” in the description or categorisation of

directional or intentional desires that follow between singular subject and

singular object, the thesis forces the discussion of lesbianism towards the nuance

that shakes up those very directions.

The debate between de Lauretis and Stacey that I have briefly charted

here evokes a central concern in the thesis to do with how the contemporary

53 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. xii. Original emphasis. 54 See Stacey, ‘Desperately Seeking Difference’, Screen, 28:1 (1987), 48-61. 55 De Lauretis, ‘Film and the Visible’, in How Do I Look?: Queer Film and Video, ed. by Bad Object Choices (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1991), pp. 223-63 (p. 262). 56 Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 29. 57 Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 28.

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context of taken-for-granted visibility affects what is shown and what is felt; if

we are to suggest that the lesbian, too, can function adjectivally rather than as a

predetermined figure, how might this manifest itself?58 Psychoanalytic theory

guides us through the complex and contradictory intelligibilities of social and

corporeal relations. Feminist theory’s “turn to affect” in recent years has been

read as a break from psychoanalysis and synonymous with a focalisation of

desire through surfaces rather than the unconscious.59 Elizabeth Grosz, for

instance, asks whether feminist theory can move its figuration of lesbianism

‘from beyond the constraints imposed by psychoanalysis’ and instead reconceive

of ‘desire […] in terms of surfaces and surface affects?’60 In this thesis I use

affect theory to explore the alternative ways in which we might theorise lesbian

cinema “without lesbians” through a destabilisation of the prioritising of object-

oriented intention on the one hand, and sex on the other, in the cinematic

configuration of desire. As Mandy Merck writes, ‘the love scene’ holds a

‘particularly symbolic function: the ability to represent “lesbian experience”’.61

This sexual specificity engages the legibility of lesbianism as necessarily figured

through sex as the visual evidence through which sexuality registers. The lesbian

58 For discussions of aesthetic strategy in relation to lesbian specificity, see Barbara Hammer, ‘The Politics of Abstraction’, in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. by Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar and John Greyson (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), pp. 70-75 (p. 71) and Edith Becker and others, ‘Lesbians and Film’, in Out in Culture, ed. by Creekmur and Doty, pp. 25-43 (p. 42). These strategies follow broader attempts in women’s filmmaking to do with ‘the potential to rework and rephrase received ideals about what it is possible to say about the perceived unspeakability of the feminine’. See Caroline Bainbridge, A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film (Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 105. 59 For accounts of the “affective turn” in feminist theory, see, for instance, Carolyn Pedwell and Anne Whitehead, ‘Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Feminist Theory’, Feminist Theory, 13:2 (2012), 115-29. 60 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), p. 175. 61 Mandy Merck, Perversions: Deviant Readings (London: Virago, 1993), p. 167. Chris Holmlund emphasises that it is the femme who is ‘most visibly a lesbian when making love with another woman’, because the butch has already marked her otherness through image; the femme’s sexuality must be made visible through the imaging of sex. See Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 39.

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as what Judith Butler might call an ‘intelligible’ sexual identity functions in

order to delineate her specifically lesbian desires and reduce the threat of

homosocial ambiguity.62 Michel Foucault famously announced that the

nineteenth century was the period in which the delineation of behaviours made

way for the categorisations of identities, so that ‘the homosexual was now a

species’.63 Yet in contemporary cinema, it seems, “the” lesbian must still be

evidenced by the behaviours that were her identity’s precursor. While affect has

been seductive for its ‘vital re-centring of the body’, it may also capture what is

not only before speech but also before (sexual) touch.64 Affect theory gestures to

an embodied dynamic not defined by a directional relationship between subject

and object (or between the lesbian and the one who she will seduce), but a mood

of sexual potential.

The final theoretical approach of the thesis foregrounds spatiality in the

formal cinematic queering of lesbian desire and eroticism. In this it draws on the

work of Lee Wallace, who, focusing on the relationship between sexual identities

and cinematic form while leaving behind the psychoanalytic bases of earlier

monographs on lesbian film, explores the ways in which lesbianism ‘disclose[s]

itself within the visual field’.65 Instead of sexuality being implanted into film, it

is constituted in Wallace’s theorisation by film, in which the mise en scène is

more than just ‘the suturing medium of the diegesis’: cinema’s visual codes and

62 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th anniversary edn (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), p. 24. For a background to theories of homosociality, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985). 63 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley, Vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 43. 64 Pedwell and Whitehead, ‘Affecting Feminism’, p. 116. 65 Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, p. 81.

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how they are directed, shot, edited and interpreted are paramount to the creation

of meaning.66

Not Yet Configured

Amid the conception of increased visibility as inevitable progress, the

contemporary cultural imperative is for lesbian cinema to represent the desire

for, and consumption of, identity as a category that can inadvertently overlook

sexuality’s complexity. Yet a coincidence with queer theory’s predominance in

debates over sexuality reveals the instability of the very identity categories

through which lesbianism has been given a name. José Esteban Muñoz argues

that ‘being ordinary and being married’ are ‘desires that automatically rein

themselves in, never daring to see or imagine the not-yet-conscious’.67 Queerness

potentially, in this view, allows itself to see beyond the present, to imagine the

‘not-yet-conscious’ of desire that, rather than defining itself through visibility,

has yet to be configured. In a context in which the lesbian has been made visible

across film, television and new platforms of the digital era, the notion of progress

enforces a figuration of lesbianism in which she has arrived, legitimated through

social reforms and institutional normalisation. The figure of the lesbian on the

contemporary screen registers the history of her own image in ways that can be

delegitimised by social progress. To read the lesbian in this context through

queer theory is perhaps to consider the not-yet-configured, or the not-yet-

configured in terms that we are accustomed to using. The thesis investigates the

relationship between the lesbian’s cultural visibility and the fixing of her

theoretical legibility. The thesis thus aims not only to address the gap in 66 Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, p. 55. 67 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009), p. 21.

33

scholarship about contemporary lesbian cinema, but also to respond to queer

theory’s initiation of that very gap.

Across five chapters exploring films released between 2001 and 2013, the

thesis progresses from the polished lines of the lesbian figure in Hollywood to

generically indeterminate and ambiguously erotic desires. Chapter One explores

how the lesbian is figured as doubly dangerous because of the threat of a

multiplied presentation of women’s desire. The chapter explores the ways in

which Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001) exposes the cinema as a site of fantasy

that produces such double figurations while also accounting and compensating

for the anxiety that is generated in the process. Chapter Two analyses Nathalie…

(Fontaine, 2003) alongside its remake Chloe (Egoyan, 2009), and asks what is

lost in a move to make sex the visible object of sexuality’s representation. The

chapter considers lesbian subtext and its anticipatory or recollective

textualisation through the queer spatialisation of desire.

At the mid-way point of the thesis, Chapter Three continues the project of

the first two chapters in examining the masquerade of visibility involved in

screen figurations of lesbianism while pointing to the focus in the remainder of

the chapters on the relationship between intense desires, abject longing and the

ambivalence surrounding sexuality’s coherence as the endpoint of adolescent

growth. The chapter explores how Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011) constructs

the desire for identity as a fantasy through the negotiations of private and public

space. The chapter interrogates the film’s projection of a desire for urban space

to bear the utopian possibility of a sexual and political liberation ostensibly

evidenced in US cultural imports. Chapter Four investigates the lesbian potential

of ambiguous intimacies that reside in the spaces between touch and speech. The

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chapter asks how Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007) and She Monkeys (Aschan,

2011) figure that potential as generated, but immediately contained, by the

negotiations of control, asking how the queerness of lesbian desire might be

evoked as a series of affects outside of figurative norms. Chapter Five asks how

we might complicate conventional readings of Blue is the Warmest Colour as

dependent on and derivative of existing conventions for the image of the lesbian.

The chapter considers the film’s setting up of a series of orienting structures of

recognition and lesbian categorisation in light of the ways in which it breaks

them down in disorienting turns of temporal and spatial play.

These films were not universally shown at queer or LGBT film festivals:

only three of them, for instance, showed on first release at the London Lesbian

and Gay Film Festival, none at San Francisco’s Frameline and only two at Los

Angeles’s Outfest. Equally, my breaking down of the categorisations of sexuality

through the intentionality or directionality of desire necessarily troubles a focus

on the gender of the director. This question is also raised by the awarding of the

Palme d’Or for Blue is the Warmest Colour not only to the director, Abdellatif

Kechiche, but also to the two main actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa

Seydoux, whose production of sexuality’s visual form in that film extended,

perhaps affectively, beyond gendered direction.

The chapters are structured broadly chronologically, beginning with

Mulholland Drive (2001) and ending with Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013).

The two framing chapters at the beginning and end explore films in which the

figure of the lesbian is most burdened by the past and future of representability.

Navigating through queer theory’s theorisations of sexuality primarily in

Chapters Two to Four, the thesis explores the way in which queer theory takes

35

the lesbian in twenty-first-century cinema from a pastiche of visual absence

(Chapter One) to an excess of visual presence (Chapter Five).

The thesis considers the indebtedness of the films to a history of images

in which cinematic gaze structures and processes of visual mediation might

register desires that forestall social conceptions of lesbianism. While I have

discussed television in this introduction contextually as an important feature of

the contemporary cultural landscape, the thesis is very much about the specificity

of theatrically exhibited feature filmmaking. Television has enabled particular

modes of representation that have, in recent years, easily equated with political

progress: namely, long-running narratives that have transformed the visibility of

the lesbian in the basic terms of minutes on screen. While our notions of

cinematic visibility can of course follow this criterion, the films analysed in this

thesis have been chosen for what I consider to be specifically cinematic features.

Temporally, films present a very particular relationship between part and whole,

or between ephemeral moment and overall scope. This is a condition of the

feature film’s capacity (and the relative scarcity of the moments that make it up)

as well as a symptom of the theatrical context of viewing. Watching a film from

start to finish with no planned interruption draws our attention in a particular way

to sequence and pace: the currency of time has a heightened value. Spatially, the

cinema as a location intensifies the act of viewing, concentrating the screen’s

affective pleasures. Diegetic cinema scenes analysed in three of the chapters

epitomise this spatial provocation of intensified spectatorship, emphasising the

close attention to the look that characterises the whole project.

The corpus includes several co-productions, gesturing towards

transnational (though here, largely European and North American) and

36

transhistorical processes of citation that my project has exaggerated through

readings of unexpected convergences between Mulholland Drive and Rebecca

(Hitchcock, 1940), Nathalie… and Persona (Bergman, 1966), and Blue is the

Warmest Colour and Je, Tu, Il, Elle (Akerman, 1974).68 While the project will be

observed as occupying a particular habitus that is indebted primarily to the

narrative structures of classical Hollywood and its legacy, such transcultural

citations help to construct conceptual configurations of lesbianism’s visual

possibilities in ways that transcend cultural specificities, registering

transnationally without the need for linguistic translation.

The danger, in a context of progress ushered in by visibility, is that, in

asking the lesbian to do the performative work of queer, we retreat into a

heterosexist ideology of lesbianism as a “phase”. Taking this “phasing” as its

provocative risk, this thesis asks a series of questions about the conditions of

lesbian legibility in a corpus of films that, rather than exemplifying the period’s

newfound visibility, trouble the visible itself. How does contemporary lesbian

cinema hinge on an interplay between the singular and coupled figuration of the

lesbian, and how does it both generate and anticipate anxiety in response to the

blurring of the two? What is the relationship between the explicitly seen and the

marginally sensed? How do cinematic spatial and temporal disorientations map

on to the claiming of visibility? To begin to explore these key questions, Chapter

One opens the thesis by investigating the conditions of representability for the

lesbian figure in contemporary cinema through an analysis of a film that

68 As White’s recent monograph on global women’s cinema, an AHRC-funded project by Galt and Karl Schoonover on global queer cinema and a special edition of the Journal of Lesbian Studies on global lesbian cinema have all documented, changing production and distribution contexts have transformed the scope of the field. See White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, p. 199; Galt and Schoonover, Global Queer Cinema (2013), <http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/gqc/about-gqc/> [accessed 5 June 2013]; and Daniel Farr, ed., ‘Global Lesbian Cinema (Special Issue)’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 16:3 (2012), 255-57.

37

intertwines the conventions of lesbian representation with the conditions of

production of cinema itself.

38

Chapter One

The Threat of the Woman (Doubled):

Mulholland Drive, Genre and the Figure of the Lesbian

In the final shot of Mulholland Drive, the grinning face of a young woman forms a

translucent screen against the city lights of Los Angeles. Platinum blonde hair

merges with washed-out skin and a broad smile. The bright red that is missing from

her previously painted lips instead adorns the panel behind her in flashes of

architectural colour. This half-figure is the failed lesbian – an aspiring actress who

has come to Hollywood for fame and found only heartbreak and murder. The image

is a replica of an earlier moment in the film’s opening sequence. A brightly grinning

new arrival to Los Angeles, her avatar in that sequence was not yet seducing or

seduced, not yet failed. In this facsimile of an out of place moment, her depleted

figuration is both inevitable and yet-to-be fully determined.

Figure 1.1. Betty (Naomi Watts) in the closing shot of Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001).

An account such as this, of the lesbian as only half figured, evokes the equation of

lesbianism with invisibility that has historically characterised her cultural presence

39

as only ever ‘an impalpability, a misting over, an evaporation, or “whiting out” of

possibility’.1 In Figure 1.1, the lesbian’s corporeal presence, the site of her

threatening sexuality, is flattened out. She is literally “whited out” to make way for

the opaque city of dreams to which she is in thrall and which she both haunts and is

haunted by.2 A symptom of the film’s distorted temporality, she is created by the

cinema itself – by Marilyn’s hair, by Los Angeles’s lights, by the digital effects that

modify her image towards an oxymoronic overexposed obscurity. As a film that

embraces such retrograde figurations, Mulholland Drive symptomises cinema’s self-

referential response to a changing field of representation.

“The lesbian” is a figure whose predictable cinematic singularity has invoked

pathologisation, isolation and tragedy. Yet her singular figuration is also intensely

paradoxical. De Lauretis writes that ‘it takes two women, not one, to make a

lesbian’.3 It is not only individualised fantasy, but rather shared fantasy, that forms

the site of lesbian subjectivity in de Lauretis’s case study of lesbian representation,

She Must Be Seeing Things (McLaughlin, 1987). For de Lauretis, ‘the’ lesbian

subject is constituted through her doubling. The ‘specularization’ of her own image

produces ‘the subject as both subject and object, autoerotically doubled and yet split

from itself and invested in the fantasmatic pursuit of the other (and in this sense, as

well, it takes two women, not one, to make a lesbian)’.4 Rather than ‘lesbians’ or ‘a

lesbian couple’, in de Lauretis’s precise and precisely repeated wording a duo (‘two

1 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (Chichester and New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 28. 2 See also Richard Dyer, White (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1997). 3 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 92. De Lauretis is inspired here by Jean Laplanche and Jean Bertrand Pontalis’s Freudian argument that ‘we are offered in the field of fantasy, the origin of the subject himself’. See ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, in Formations of Fantasy, ed. by Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 5-34 (p. 19). If the fantasy is shared, or mutually constructed as in the mise en abîme (film within the film), it is this mutuality that constitutes the lesbian subject for de Lauretis. This aspect of her argument will be explored in depth in Chapter Two in relation to the site of fantasy as constitutive of desire in Nathalie…. 4 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 96.

40

women’) is condensed into a singular figuration (‘a lesbian’) that contains the absent

partner, as double, within it. In this reflection on the mutuality of lesbian cinematic

fantasy is captured a culturally established anxiety surrounding the threat of

sexuality’s excess. The lesbian is doubly dangerous to conventional systems of

representation because she multiplies the existing threat of women’s sexual desire.5

This chapter asks how cinema as a site of fantasy can produce such a double

figuration while also accounting and compensating for the anxiety that this doubling

produces. Mulholland Drive exemplifies this complicated circulation of

representational constitutions and recuperations. Regardless of whether or not we

agree that she is ‘two women not one’, it is the threat of the lesbian’s doubled

composition that generates a pervasive tension surrounding this figure. The lesbian

has become attached to a series of cultural clichés that Mulholland Drive manifestly

adopts via the generic conventions of the thriller. Drawing on feminist film theory’s

conceptualisations of the woman’s image and of the woman as image, this chapter

deciphers the two sides of Mulholland Drive’s iteration of the figuration of the

lesbian: her frequently theorised absence (as woman who lacks and as historically

invisible figure) and her threatening over-presence in the form of her double (as

partner or as specularised self). The chapter explores the idea that, instead of leaving

behind the pathologisation of lesbianism that Heather Love argues is rendered

through the chronic figuration of the lesbian as inherent figure of tragedy,

Mulholland Drive can be read as a film about that history.6 Constructed through

5 Roof uses the word ‘anxiety’ when she argues that ‘configurations of lesbian sexuality’ in the parallel discourses of ‘psychoanalysis, cinema, literature and literary criticism’ hinge not on ‘lesbian sexuality per se, but the anxieties it produces’. See A Lure of Knowledge, p. 5. 6 Love, ‘Spectacular Failure’. Corber has discussed the mid-twentieth century social context for this model of pathologisation, in which ‘[e]ven movies such as Pillow Talk [Gordon, 1959] and Marnie [Hitchcock, 1964], which interrogated the construction of female subjectivity in relation to patriarchal social and economic arrangements, reinstalled marriage and motherhood as the “happy ending” of female sexual development’. See Cold War Femme, p. 19.

41

citation of a classical age of cinema and to its director’s own auteurism, the film

purports to tell a story about Hollywood in order to trace the paradox of lesbian

figuration in that very system of production.

Under the jurisdiction of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of

America (MPPDA) – whose dominant statute effectively forbade explicit

homosexual representation on screen for much of the twentieth century – filmmakers

became adept at emitting signs in their films through visual codes rather than

through explicit narrative details, as Wallace writes in her book about the afterlife of

the “Code”.7 Almost fifteen years into the twenty-first century, that afterlife has

arguably been exchanged for a newfound capacity of the figure of the lesbian on

screen to garner mainstream audiences as well as awards, as evidenced in the success

of the notoriously explicit Blue is the Warmest Colour.8 Mulholland Drive looks

back to the visual impossibility of lesbianism as explicitly sexual under the Code,

and forward to its allure and excess. In the title of White’s book Uninvited: Classical

7 The MPPDA, commonly known as the Hays Office (named after its first president, William H. Hays, who served from 1922-45), was a trade association founded in 1922 to protect the film industry against federal intervention and particularly to manage the morality of its films and stars. What it induced was strident censorship of what were perceived to be immoral images on screen. For more on the MPPDA and its ‘code’, see Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909-1925 (London: Routledge, 1988). For a seminal testament to the ways in which homosexual desires could and can be found in films despite the code, see Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, revised edn (London and New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1987). Russo’s book was also made into a documentary film, The Celluloid Closet (Epstein and Friedman, 1995), narrated by Lily Tomlin. Brett Farmer writes that ‘[a]lthough Hollywood’s role as an institution of heteronormativity is indisputable and its representational strategies of homophobic abuse glaringly evident, this in no way exhausts the vast range of cinema’s signifying effects or the dynamic ways in which it is often used and interpreted within the contexts of gay and lesbian reception’. See Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 5. Farmer quotes Ellis Hanson, who ‘asserts with delight camp flourish, “Hollywood, despite its history of censorship and its pretense to heterocentrism, is one of the queerest institutions ever invented”’. See ‘Introduction: Out Takes’, in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. by Hanson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 1-19 (p. 7). Quoted in Farmer, Spectacular Passions, p. 5. 8 Indeed, the notion of “playing gay” in the United States has gone from receiving the wrath of the MPPDA to the adulation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (The Academy), as demonstrated by the overwhelming Oscars success of Best Actress winners including Hilary Swank, who won for Boys Don’t Cry (Pierce, 1999); Nicole Kidman for The Hours (Daldry, 2002); Charlize Theron for Monster (Jenkins, 2003); and Nathalie Portman, who won for Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) and who was up against Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right. The buzz surrounding Freeheld (Sollett, 2015) suggests the possibility of a rare nomination for a lesbian actress in a lesbian role for Ellen Page.

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Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability, ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema’

and ‘Lesbian Representability’ find themselves levelled by equivalence in the

semantics of the title’s first word, ‘Uninvited’, which suggests the lurking presence

of absence that Mulholland Drive shows to be part of Hollywood’s own system of

representation.9 Yet White’s account of ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema’ demonstrates

that ‘Lesbian Representability’ is not entirely forestalled by this uninvitedness, only

distorted, veiled or delayed.10 At Mulholland Drive’s narrative turning point, an

ensemble of characters is abruptly replaced (we might say uninvited) by

doppelgängers played by the same cast but differently characterised. In this switch,

the film’s central actresses must ‘work against the lesbian romance they have

previously assisted to visual consummation’.11 What Wallace sees here as the

undoing of lesbian romance, however, might signify the film’s staging of an illusory

romance that reveals the conditions of production of the cinematic lesbian as figure.

Mulholland Drive begins with the façade of a conventional narrative, telling

the story of Betty (Naomi Watts), a young actress new to Hollywood, who discovers

Rita (Laura Harring), a woman who has lost her memory as a consequence of a

mysterious accident on Mulholland Drive. Together, they try to unearth the true

identity of Rita, who can remember nothing but the name “Diane Selwyn”, an

individual who could be Rita herself but whose body, after tracking her down, they

find dead in her apartment. Betty and Rita progress from amateur co-detectives to

lovers. Their sex scene initiates an expedition to the sinister Club Silencio, which in

turn instigates the film’s crucial twist. Established over the course of two hours as

the protagonists of the incumbent narrative, Betty and Rita disappear altogether and

9 White, Uninvited. 10 Whatling also provides a reading between the lines in a chapter entitled ‘(In)appropriate(d) others or how Vanessa Redgrave turned me lesbian’. See Screen Dreams, p. 1. 11 Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, p. 100.

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are replaced by two new characters, Diane and Camilla, played by the same

actresses. We now follow Diane (Watts) down a nightmare journey of unrequited

love for Camilla (Harring), in which she eventually engineers Camilla’s murder

before desperately resorting to her own suicide. Meanwhile, the film is punctuated

throughout by forays into the narrative of Adam (Justin Theroux), consistently

characterised throughout the film’s two parts (what I will from now on call Act One

and Act Two) as a director dealing with the mafia’s attempt to control the casting of

his new film. Adam’s subplot becomes imbricated in the major story when it is

established, in a final scene, that the reason for Diane’s heartbreak is his engagement

to Camilla.

The most popular reading of the film’s splintered narrative proffers its

fulfilment of a dreamwork logic in which Act Two is a representation of a diegetic

“reality” while Act One is a wish-fulfilment fantasy dreamt up by Diane.12 A

necessarily superficial synopsis such as the one above comes to stand in for the

narrative of the lesbian, masking the complexities of the film itself with its twisting,

turning plot. Mulholland Drive actually ‘ensnares us as spectators’ not through the

forward motion of a narrative that can easily be synopsised, but through the feeling

that it is produced by the self-conscious disruption of such motion.13 Yet, any

analysis based on the necessary linearity of the film’s synopsised form neglects a 12 See, for instance, Frances Restuccia, The Blue Box: Kristevan/Lacanian Readings of Contemporary Cinema (London: Continuum, 2012) and Anna Katharina Schaffner, ‘Fantasmatic Splittings and Destructive Desires: Lynch’s Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 45:3 (2006), 270-91. Other critics argue that this wish-fulfilment logic functions in reverse. See, for instance, Johnny Young, ‘Identity as Subterfuge: A Kleinian and Winnicottian Reading of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive’, Psychoanalytic Review, 94:6 (2007), 903-18. Several critics establish Adam as the metaphorical antagonised father figure: see, for instance, Todd McGowan, ‘Lost on Mulholland Drive: Navigating David Lynch’s Panegyric to Hollywood’, Cinema Journal, 43:2 (2004), 67-89 and Calvin Thomas, ‘It’s No Longer Your Film’, Angelaki, 11:2 (2005), 81-98. Only Kelly McDowell proffers Camilla as the attendant mother figure in the Oedipal triangle, arguing that Diane has been unable to graduate from this juvenile phase of desire. See ‘Unleashing the Feminine Unconscious: Female Oedipal Desires and Lesbian Sadomasochism in Mulholland Drive’, The Journal of Popular Culture, 38:6 (2005), 1037-49. 13 Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 154.

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crucial structural detail. Wallace points out the fact that most critics lead their

readers to believe that the story lines are equally weighted, when in fact the “switch”

does not occur until almost two hours, or four-fifths, of the way in. Wallace seeks to

correct this inaccuracy, arguing that it reduces the lesbian story ‘to the status of a

wish-fulfilment fantasy anchored in the kind of sexual psychosis Hollywood

frequently makes cognate with lesbianism’.14 Mulholland Drive’s lesbian

representation hinges on the Hollywood tendency that Wallace critiques, betraying

the illusion of normality attributed to this familiar trope of ‘sexual psychosis’ and

reflecting it back to its viewers as fantasy (not only the lesbian character’s but our

own).15

Film critics also follow this trend in establishing the singularity of the figure

of the lesbian. Their contradictory theories consistently draw and re-draw Diane,

Camilla, Betty and Rita as versions of the same woman. The bold Sight and Sound

cover from December 2001 that announces ‘David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.’ (see

Figure 1.2) provides only one figure – the fearful face of Rita/Camilla, red lipstick

intact, her hair blended into a black background that makes her appear as if from

nowhere. The magazine here chooses not from the film’s multitude of images of two

women together, but the singular image of woman as victim and then, in the heart of

the article, as femme fatale (as singular victim and then singular threat). The figure

14 Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, p. 100. The 1990s saw a spread of films about murderous lesbian couples, with four released within a single year of one another: Heavenly Creatures (Jackson, 1994), Fun (Zielinski, 1994), Sister My Sister (Meckler, 1994) and Butterfly Kiss (Winterbottom, 1995). For more on these films, see Aaron, ‘Til Death Us Do Part’, p. 72. Recent examples of the lesbian killer couple trope include Breaking the Girls (Babbit, 2013) and Gasoline (Stambrini, 2003). Coffman explores the trope of the ‘psychotic queer woman’, drawing on various representations of the ‘Papin Sisters’ in Insane Passions, p. 191. 15 Mayne writes of Black Widow (Rafelson, 1987), for instance, that while it gestures towards desire between women, it insists on remaining ‘within the conventions of classical narrative by drawing a line between “normal” and “abnormal” behavior’. See The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 47.

45

of the femme fatale is the woman who must be punished for her sexuality.16

Commonly stereotyped in the film noir through a chiaroscuro lighting regime and a

mise en scène populated with reflective surfaces that highlight her fundamental

duplicity, the femme fatale is central to the narrative but must also be the victim of

its fatal conclusion.17

Figure 1.2. The cover of Sight and Sound (December 2001) featuring Laura Harring as Rita in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001).

A Sight and Sound article about Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010), another film

featuring the illusory duplicity of the performer’s narcissistic desire, recounts how

‘the duplicated woman is a largely male fantasy that’s inspired some of cinema’s

most imaginative works’.18 Male doubling has also produced some of the most

16 Julianne Pidduck has written about the neo-noir incarnation of the femme fatale, the ‘fatal femme’, who shares ‘her predecessor’s smart mouth and sexual savvy’ but ‘ups the ante of earlier, more muted cinematic codes of sexuality and graphic violence’ in films such as The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (Hanson, 1992) and Body of Evidence (Edel, 1993). See ‘The 1990s Hollywood Fatal Femme: (Dis)Figuring Feminism, Family, Irony, Violence’, Cineaction, 38 (1995), 65-72 (p. 65). 17 Several scholars have read active, productive power into the figure of the femme fatale, arguing as Janey Place does for instance that ‘[i]t is not their inevitable demise we remember but rather their strong, dangerous and above all, exciting sexuality’. See ‘Women in Film Noir’, in Women in Film Noir, ed. by E. Ann Kaplan, revised edn (London: British Film Institute, 1998), pp. 47-68 (p. 48). 18 Nick James, ‘Double Visions’, Sight and Sound, n.s., 21:2 (February 2011), 36.

46

successful films of recent years, such as Fight Club (Fincher, 1999).19 However, the

magazine inadvertently works to present in plain terms the very clichés and

contradictions, associated with women in particular, that it claims to deride: while a

sub-feature, entitled ‘Double Visions’, celebrates the duplicated woman, the

singularity of the chosen images from Black Swan used to headline the main feature

again highlight an inability to deal with the complexities, and threats, of that very

‘male fantasy’.20

Presenting Absence

The generic thriller narrative at the heart of Mulholland Drive is one that refuses to

make its mystery solvable or even really knowable.21 Its female protagonists might

have the ‘necessary curiosity and a desire to know’, as Mary Ann Doane describes

the unbearable conditions of the ‘Paranoid Woman’, who is ‘revealed as impotent in

terms of the actual ability to uncover the secret or attain the knowledge which she

desires’.22 Yet, as both impotent (amnesiac) woman and potential femme fatale, Rita

both fails to know and fails to be known. Mulholland Drive’s generic affiliation,

which will be discussed in detail in the second part of this chapter, is thus premised

on an absence which forms the inherently contained opposition to the film’s most

19 In Fight Club (Fincher, 1999), the nameless protagonist (Edward Norton) discovers, by the end, that his macho co-conspirator Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is really a version of him in his imagination. In contrast to the inevitable destruction of the woman in films like Mulholland Drive and Black Swan, Fight Club’s happily united heterosexual couple watches the end of the world hand in hand (in the form of the end of capitalism as the city’s financial buildings explode before them). The elimination of the male double, Tyler Durden, leaves the male protagonist not alone but in the arms of the woman whose triangulation of desire has reached its necessary conclusion. 20 All of the films selected for the ‘Double Visions’ feature are directed by men: Metropolis (Lang, 1927), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell and Pressburger, 1943), Sisters (de Palma, 1972), That Obscure Object of Desire (Buñuel, 1977), The Double Life of Véronique (Kieslowski, 1991) and Mulholland Drive. 21 The insert included in the film’s original DVD release lists ‘10 clues to unlocking this thriller’. What becomes clear, as you follow, for example, the instruction to ‘pay attention to the red lampshade’, is that such ‘clues’ are arbitrary: ‘unlocking’ is not the name of the game here. 22 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 135.

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present image: that of the lesbian as “woman, doubled”. On the soundtrack of the

film’s first scene, slow atonal strings with no orienting beat attend a black screen

with bold white credits. Just as we begin to anticipate the motivation for this

forebodingly sombre soundscape, it is interrupted by the rhythmic drums of upbeat

swing music. On screen, several couples jitterbug in front of a purple screen that

directs our attention to the mechanics of filmmaking: the adapted “blue screen”

without its requisite superimposition makes the dancing figures in the foreground

seem two-dimensional, even more so as they are accompanied by projected black

silhouettes of additional dancing couples (see Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3. Dancing couples are joined by black silhouettes in front of a “purple screen” in the opening of Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001).

Figure 1.4. A translucent Betty (Naomi Watts) greets her imaginary fans in the opening of Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001).

By announcing its artificiality and half-finished form, this “purple screen”

draws our attention to the absence of whatever contrived backdrop might have been

added in postproduction. Eventually, the two soundtracks (the sombre and the swing)

start to merge, as the translucent image of a brilliantly lit and smiling woman – the

character we later meet in her fully opaque form as Betty – is layered over the

dancing jitterbugs (see Figure 1.4). The cheers and applause that greet Betty’s

overexposed profile are then hushed by the heavy sighs of a figure in a bed, shot in

close-up. At this point, we do not see the body that we later discover lurks beneath

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these red sheets; on this occasion, it is the musical, rather than visual, clue that does

the generic work of alerting us to this thriller’s main object.

Mulholland Drive thus encapsulates the paradox of representation of the

lesbian: a figure defined by a long history of stereotypes, or a set of overfamiliar

images, but also historically associated with invisibility.23 This paradox is managed

at first without mention of its absent but presaged figure, the lesbian. A general sense

of absence pervades the film through its urban landscape. In what she calls the

‘dream-like terrain’ of Los Angeles and its introduction in this opening scene, it is

not, as Martha Nochimson writes, ‘the girl’s presence but her absence that is

emphasised’.24 While we assume her link to the dancers as well as to the bedroom,

because of her image’s conflation of the two, the figure of the girl (protagonist

Betty) is ‘evoked in negative space’.25 If, as White writes, the ‘narrative work of

classical cinema’ functions through the ‘narrativizing of space […] that articulates

femininity with the image’, Mulholland Drive’s negative spatial configuration

implicates the female character in an unavoidable absence: not only visually, but also

narratively.26 The absence that defines the lesbian figure is here evoked through

cinematic technique (the translucence of Betty’s image) and through anticipated

location (only a street sign for the eponymous Mulholland Drive alerts us to a

Hollywood setting). The absent girl is visually connected to the white lettering of the

street name, blindingly bright on a black signpost against an unilluminated night sky.

This juxtaposition offers us, in one move, the film’s introduction to Hollywood

23 This problematic history of stereotypes is summed up in part by the list of murderous lesbian films documented above. It is also charted in Russo, The Celluloid Closet. Such a history is not confined to cinema: Castle has written a seminal account of the invisibility of the lesbian in literature, using the metaphor of the ghost, in The Apparitional Lesbian. 24 Martha Nochimson, ‘All I Need Is the Girl: The Life and Death of Creativity in Mulholland Drive’, in The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, ed. by Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), pp. 165-81 (p. 167). 25 Ibid. 26 White, Uninvited, p. 79.

49

itself. The superficiality of cinematic signifiers meets the exhilaration of movement;

the glare and glow of celebrity meet the threat of failure. Consummating these

multiple and divergent figurations is the titular highway that winds through the hills

of Los Angeles, described by Lynch as having ‘des allures de route de montagne,

ouverte et sauvage’ (the air of a mountain road, open and wild) and ‘un grand

pouvoir d’attraction et de mystère’ (a great potential for attraction and mystery).27

Such wildness enhances this location’s absenting force because of its juxtaposition

with the perceived glamour of the city. A shot of the anterior view of a black car

dissolving into the dark scene around it initiates a pan that captures LA’s

shimmering landscape. Location and genre are co-dependent, one signalling the

other, but both are incomplete. This is a representation of Hollywood that

acknowledges the back alleys as well as the glistening lights.

The menace of Lynch’s ‘open and wild’ Mulholland Drive is thus shown to

be the underside of Hollywood glamour.28 Both these qualities are perceived in

opposite directions from a single static camera position that pans between them in

the early scene that pursues a car winding its way up the highway. In the car is the

woman who will become, via the crash we are about to witness, the amnesiac Rita.

She is marked both by the glamour of the pearls around her neck and by the

contempt of the Mafiosi in the front seat in whose hands her fate resides. Her image

is alternated with the LA landscape in a series of medium and long shots. Such a

juxtaposition stands as a metaphor for the lesbian herself, whose idealised image

Love reveals to be a ‘ghostly effect produced by the social impossibility of

27 Quoted in Gérard Delorme, ‘David Lynch: Maître du Mystère’, Premiere, (2001), <http://www.lynchnet.com/mdrive/frpremiere.html> [accessed 12 October 2014]. My translation. 28 For an example of this Hollywood decline in the context of mid-twentieth-century Southern California, see Daniell Cornell, Robert Atkins and Dick Hebdige, Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982 (Munich, New York, NY and Palm Springs, CA: Delmonico Books, 2012).

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lesbianism’.29 Mulholland Drive produces, and acknowledges, the thriller genre as

that which frames lesbian desire only as an impossibility. It is death that leads to

transformation that leads to sex that leads to performance. This thread concludes

with the singular figure of the abject lesbian, for the happy, shiny Betty as idealised

image is just that: an image, a spectre.30 As Diane, she is the dead body beneath the

red sheets; as Betty, she is the translucent profile. There is a generic necessity for

this sequence. Inaugurated into a detective story but with no body to begin the

search, Betty and Rita must find one. But then, the dead body being found (in Diane

Selwyn’s apartment), the film must initiate a new kind of search. Rita’s

transformation offers the opportunity for the consummation of desire that can only

be made manifest in the aftermath of the detective story’s climax (the finding of the

body).31 The negativity of the figure of the translucent girl is a fantasy, inconceivable

through a synopsis that, through the necessity prioritisation of events that do occur,

fails to evoke the absences and presences of the narrative drive.

Identifying Duplicity

If lesbianism is made narratively impossible by generic demands (as Wallace claims:

if Act Two undoes the lesbian romance of Act One), the image, as a static moment

that has the potential to disrupt narrative movement, signifies the possibility for

29 Love, ‘Spectacular Failure’, p. 124. Gayatri Gopinath also uses ‘the notion of “impossibility” as a way of signaling the unthinkability of a queer female subject position within various mappings of nation and diaspora’. See Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 15. I discuss this further in Chapter Three. 30 The double as an uncanny or monstrous figure has a long cinematic history in science fiction and horror. See, for instance, J.P. Telotte, ‘The Double of Fantasy and the Space of Desire’, in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. by Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 152-59. 31 Elisabeth Bronfen might argue that this is not just a generic necessity but a fascination of all cultural forms. She writes that, ‘because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of alterity, culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women’. While the body that ensues is treated as being ‘other’, it also indirectly represents a general fear of death so that ‘what is plainly visible – the beautiful feminine corpse – also stands in for something else’. See Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), p. xi.

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lesbianism through erotic identification. This identification hinges on the film’s

geographical location in Hollywood. It also relies on the film’s location in the

history of the cinematic thriller that, as I have described above, has relied on the

doubling of the woman for its structuring anxieties and motivation in films from

Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) and Rebecca to Basic Instinct and Black Swan.

Mulholland Drive relishes the citational practices that pay tribute to its Hollywood

setting. Just as Twin Peaks (Lynch, 1990-1991) drops the history of Hollywood

cinema into its character names (Dale Cooper, Audrey Horne, James Hurley and

Norma Jennings), Mulholland Drive makes the practice of Hollywood citation

explicit.32 The construction of the shot that follows the demand for the amnesiac

woman to provide her name places her to the side and just behind a mirror that

occupies half of the frame. In the mirror is reflected a poster of Gilda (Vidor, 1946),

in which a femme fatale dominates the shot spatially and symbolically, as she

becomes the source of Rita’s new name (see Figure 1.5). In her signature role as the

eponymous Gilda, Rita Hayworth is often cited as the classic femme fatale: she is

suspiciously, then maddeningly, then destructively seductive.33 In Stacey’s words,

‘identification involves the production of identities, rather than simply the

confirmation of existing ones’.34 Rita’s naming confirms this identity production.

The film provides sex as a climactic feature of narrative transformation (emphasised

through literal character transformation in the “switch”). It also provides fantasy as a

32 Critical studies of Twin Peaks have included those assembled in David Lavery, ed., Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995) and Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). 33 For an account of Hayworth’s role in Gilda, see, for instance, Dyer, ‘Resistance through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda’, in Women in Film Noir, ed. by Kaplan, pp. 91-99 and Melvyn Stokes, Gilda (Basingstoke: British Film Institute, 2010). 34 Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 172. Elsewhere in the book, Stacey also draws on Judith Williamson’s argument that the image of the femme fatale is in fact constructed exactly as an image and nothing but an image, needing ‘a viewer to function at all’. See Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture (London: Marion Boyars, 1986), pp. 91-92. Quoted in Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 8.

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scene of desire, wherein identification is eroticised (where erotic identities are

indeed constituted through identification) and desire is maintained through a network

of looks that do not only presuppose sex as an act.

Figure 1.5. Rita (Laura Harring), recently emerged from a car crash and now unable to recall her own identity, chooses a name from a poster hanging on the wall in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001).

Just as Stacey theorises the eroticisation of identification in classical

Hollywood cinema, so Mulholland Drive plays with the identification with those

same Hollywood figures, but through a self-conscious expression that folds desire

into the image. Rita embodies not Hayworth herself, but an erotic identification with

Hayworth.35 Alfred Hitchcock’s films illuminate particularly vividly the imaging of

this erotic identification and the construction of the body via the image as ‘site of

pleasure and sexuality’.36 De Lauretis’s words here evoke the very pleasure and

sexuality that, as Stacey argues, is tied up in identification: in Mulholland Drive, 35 Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 29. 36 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 151. Hitchcock’s work is particularly productive of citation and identification. As Stacey writes, artworks like those of Cindy Sherman, for instance, depend on ‘our familiarity with Hitchcock’s heroines’ and thus invite us as spectators both to identify with the image and to ‘retrace our own steps’. See Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 7. For feminist spectators, this is an even more charged process of recognition, as explored by White in her analysis of Lucretia Martel’s ‘cinephilic’ reference to Hitchcock’s Vertigo in The Headless Woman (2008), in which she ‘reflexively cite[s] her own film’s place in the male-dominated art house and in the lineage of auteur cinema’. See Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, p. 52. Lynch’s more simple gendered slotting into this male-dominated history must not go unnoticed, especially as his oeuvre – with its repeated use of a range of motifs from cast to soundtrack to cinematography – depends to such an extent on self-reflective nods to his own auteurism.

53

Rita’s adopted subjectivity is literally constructed through the image in simultaneity

with her desirability. Rita is what the intra- and extra-diegetic man (Lynch, Adam),

as well as the identifying woman (Betty, Diane), wants her to be. Rita takes on the

image of Hayworth as an image. It is as an image that the woman’s place has been

characterised in the history of cinema. Yet, this is more complicated than her mere

objectification. In Rebecca, for example, the portrait of a family ancestor whose

costume the heroine (Joan Fontaine) appropriates, just as Rebecca de Winter has

done in the past, comes to represent Rebecca’s own image. Bearing ‘the weight of

meaning and serv[ing] as the term of the heroine’s identification with the Mother’,

the portrait on the wall is not of Rebecca, but of an image that Rebecca herself has

assumed.37 The heroine and Rebecca are linked by mutual identification (by the fact

that they have both dressed up as the ancestor in the portrait).38 In de Lauretis’s

argument, the woman, unmarked except by the identification of the other, inhabits

the site of ‘narrative image’: the site of meaning and signal of eventual conclusion

for the hero(ine).39 For de Lauretis, an emphasis on ‘narrative movement’ captures

the progression from one event to the next but fails to consider this narrative image

(whereby the image of the woman is static, as in the Gilda poster in Mulholland

Drive, and yet is intrinsic to meaning). The lesbian as image, especially as

37 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 151. In Rebecca, a young woman (Joan Fontaine, whose character remains nameless) marries the charming Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). She finds herself in competition with Rebecca, the original and deceased but somehow more legitimate Mrs de Winter, who is still the obsession of housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson). Rebecca occupies an absent presence in the house through Mrs Danvers’s enduring loyalty and desire. She is evoked in the scene described above when Fontaine’s heroine unsuccessfully (at Mrs Danvers’s vindictive suggestion) tries to please her husband by dressing up for a costume ball as a family ancestor, a part already played in the past by Rebecca, who, we discover, is not the beloved late wife she is reputed to be but rather the enduring source of Maxim’s disquiet and ambivalence. 38 In a seminal contribution to feminist theories of film spectatorship, Doane writes that for ‘the Joan Fontaine character in Rebecca, the pictures in fashion magazines demonstrate that to possess the image through the gaze is to become it. And becoming the image, the woman can no longer have it. For the female spectator, the image is too close – it cannot be projected far enough.’ See The Desire to Desire, pp. 168-69. Doane’s argument arguably fails to fully assess the erotic potential of the two women’s (the two Mrs de Winters’) temporally divided identification with the very same image. 39 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 109.

54

constructed through citation to this very cinematic history, doubles the existing

threat of the woman as image that feminist film theory has so thoroughly

documented.

In Mulholland Drive, the eroticism of identification begins with Rita’s

adoption of Hayworth’s name, but continues in a convoluted series of identifications

as we discover that all of the names with which we have become familiar have been

fabricated in dreamwork. Rita embodies Hayworth as an image not only through

naming but also through the appropriation of Hayworth’s significance as film noir

femme fatale. This narrative image of the woman guides the many characterisations

in Mulholland Drive, in which desires are formed through mutual identification, both

with each other and with the stars who form the basis of the citational film at the

heart of Adam’s narrative (one that self-consciously revisits a classic Hollywood

aesthetic).40 For Love, Lynch ‘scrambles’ the two plots usually available to lesbian

characters: the abject, heartbroken, lonely woman and the innocent schoolgirl. Love

writes that Lynch refuses ‘to respect the distance between the comic and the tragic

versions of female same-sex desire’, instead showing ‘schoolgirl capers and abject

lesbian longing to be two aspects of a single fantasy’.41 Just as the film switches

between vantage points that show first the glistening illuminations of LA and then its

murky horrors, the role of the actress is passed around between the characters and,

with each exchange, switches from an embodiment of optimism to one of pessimism

and back again: Betty, glowing and aspirational (Watts, Act One); Rita, a mere

appropriation of a bygone star (Harring, Act One); Camilla, launched into a role only

through Mafia authority (Melissa George, Act One); Diane, unemployed and

dejected (Watts, Act Two); and finally the second Camilla, the radiant star of 40 Mark Mazullo has addressed the retro turn of the film-within-the-film’s aural spectacle in ‘Remembering Pop: David Lynch and the Sound of the ’60s’, American Music, 23:4 (2005), 493-513. 41 Love, ‘Spectacular Failure’, pp. 123-24.

55

Adam’s film, whose glory must come at someone else’s expense (Harring, Act

Two).42 What Love calls this ‘single fantasy’ in Mulholland Drive is that which is

brought about through the image of the actress, appropriated and re-appropriated as

an image whose meaning transfers between Betty, Rita, Diane and Camilla.

Mulholland Drive’s Hollywood setting makes it possible to draw a line

between the erotics of identification and performance and the erotics of the

necessarily doubled figuration of the lesbian. If, as Stacey argues, it is the ‘boundary

between self and ideal [that] produces an endless source of fascination’, then

Mulholland Drive’s scene of desire registers at multiple boundary points.43 De

Lauretis’s reading attributes to Rebecca’s heroine a ‘double figural identification’, in

which her desire is manifest in a tension between the narrative image (Rebecca de

Winter, unseen as character but dominant as portrait and force) and the narrative

movement (led by the heroine, whom we see in the flesh but who remains

nameless).44 This tension produces a homoeroticism that hauntingly pervades the

film. The heroine must enable both of these directions of desire; she must function

‘not as a mirror, a flat specular surface, but as a prism’.45 The woman as prism is

literalised in Mulholland Drive in the diffraction of the image of one woman as the

repeated identification of all women in the film. In Rebecca, only one woman is seen

(the nameless protagonist) but she must occupy the position of desire for/of both

42 This list could be extended to include even more film star figures who occupy marginal spaces in the film. Most distinct is Coco, the custodian of Betty’s borrowed apartment, who starts as a kindly figure but becomes increasingly sinister. She is played by Hollywood studio system stalwart Ann Miller, known for her roles in musical films such as Easter Parade (Walters, 1948), On the Town (Kelly and Donen, 1949) and Kiss Me Kate (Sidney, 1953). 43 Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 173. 44 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 152. 45 Ibid.

56

women. In Mulholland Drive, both women are seen but they must be narratively

merged into one.46

Act One yields an abundance of mirror images and reflections while Act Two

has none. This is a film that consciously trades on just such reflective metaphors. In

the first shot that unites the two women – one blonde, one brunette, two meaningful

narrative images for opposing structures of femininity – Betty’s point of view is

replaced by a shot from behind that establishes a divided mise en scène. Two figures

are unified by the camera frame but separated by colour (one naked, one clothed in

vibrant pink) and by the translucent screen of the shower that distorts the image and

creates a diffracted frame within the frame (see Figure 1.6). This shot seems to

generate what Judith Mayne calls the ‘ambivalence of the screen’: a diegetic screen

(the shower glass) highlights the ambivalence of the woman’s image.47 Rita’s body,

soon to evoke the ideal woman (as the idolised film star Hayworth), is now made

translucent behind the glass just as Betty’s was by overexposure in the opening

sequence.

46 This also evokes the merging aesthetic of Persona, which I will discuss at length in Chapter Two in a comparison with the reminiscence of desire in Nathalie…. 47 Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole, p. 46. In Mulholland Drive and Persona, a visual deterioration of the image coincides with the metaphorical merging of the subject and object of desire and identification as in both Figures 1.4 and 1.5.

57

Figure 1.6. Rita (Laura Harring) is caught trespassing by Betty (Naomi Watts) in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001).

The repeated use of the name Camilla (first, the blonde actress designated by

the Mafia to be the star of Adam’s film; second, the reincarnation of Rita as love-

object both for Diane and for Adam) precipitates a surprising and provocative, yet

narratively redundant, moment in which the two Camillas, blonde and brunette, kiss.

This is an act, Wallace observes, ‘that literalises the connection between lesbianism

and diegetic impossibility’.48 We learn to be tricked not only by optical illusions but

also by cuts and substitutions. In classic films such as The Life and Death of Colonel

Blimp (Powell and Pressburger, 1943), the woman’s doubled image is created

through the use of the same actress for different parts, as a method for the man’s

reconciling of his ambivalent desires.49 Over fifty years on, reflections continue to

48 Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, p. 116. In Black Swan, Nina and her doppelgänger, Lily (Mila Kunis), have sex in a scene in which their bodies look to be on the verge of mutation. Nina’s discovery that the encounter never happened in “reality” both unsettles and sanctions the film’s figuration of lesbianism. The transformational cliché of lesbian sex as nothing but a vehicle confirms it as both reality and dream, both artifice and spectacle: in intra- and extra-diegetic terms, it is nothing but a plot device. 49 In The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Clive Candy (Roger Livesy) belatedly discovers his love for Edith (Deborah Kerr), who has married his best friend. His attachment to the image of the wrong woman is manifest in one of the film’s jumps through time, as he begins an affair with a different woman who bears a striking resemblance to Edith and who is also played by Deborah Kerr. Her resemblance, clear to the audience through the use of the same actress, is also a puzzle within the narrative. While Roger Livesy’s character has graduated through the ranks of the army, Deborah Kerr, stalled by a return to youth in a second characterisation, has stayed the same. Her stability is, however, an impossibility that occasions his ambivalence.

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characterise genre films such as Black Swan, whose female characters are always

mediated in some way, whether simply through the placement of mirror images or

through the use of CGI that modifies those mirrorings with uncanny effects.50 The

connections between these pairs of women are made impossible by their

chronological substitutions.

Costume in Mulholland Drive continues to mark out a visual division

between Betty and Rita, prolonging the film’s preoccupation with women as

opposites on the one hand and doppelgängers on the other.51 But this visual principle

is disrupted in their visit to the apartment of the mysterious Diane Selwyn, whose

name is Rita’s only recollection. Here is another preoccupation, with naming,

through which the film draws attention to the contradictions of its visual models of

sameness and difference. Such potential namesakes in their multiplicity also

continue to remind us of the overarching narrative image of the femme fatale as a

stand-in for all women in the thriller. These imitations draw further attention to what

Annamarie Jagose calls the ‘structuring deadlock of lesbian representation’, by

which she means that ‘the lesbian’s visibility is always compromised by being

figured in terms of her others’.52 She is always figured in terms of what she is not. If,

as Jagose writes, lesbian invisibility is ‘not a failure but a strategy of representation’,

50 In an early scene in Black Swan, in which ballerina Nina meets her fellow dancers for the first time, a shared dressing room’s multiple reflections are juxtaposed with the duplicitous chatter of two young women. The subject of their gossip is the bygone star Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder, a poignant casting of an actress who embodies the rises and falls of celebrity), who enters later with a Bette Davis glare as the abandoned star whom “nobody comes to see […] anymore”. Beth is the inevitable mother (as predecessor) and idealised image. She also becomes a visual reflection of Nina, who hallucinates her own image projected onto Beth’s. 51 This speaks to the abiding relevance of butch/femme discourses to lesbian community and identity and, in Sue-Ellen Case’s terms, to a lesbian aesthetic. See ‘Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic’, Discourse, 11:1 (1988), 55-73. Stella Bruzzi writes about the femme fatale in her book on clothing in cinema, in which she refers to the significance of the fact that in Rebecca, the departed Rebecca de Winter is ‘symbolised in death by her renowned beauty and the clothes Mrs Danvers has obsessively preserved’. See Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), p. 120. The pleasure to be found as a spectator in this commodity eroticism is encapsulated by Susie Bright in her interview for the documentary film Celluloid Closet. 52 Jagose, Inconsequence, p. xv.

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then this scene’s simultaneous multiplying and diminishing of the singularity of the

lesbian image is what reveals that ‘strategy’ to be a structuring condition of the

thriller itself.53 Mulholland Drive is a film of incessant citation that, through

obeisance to a cinematic history of musical, aesthetic and diegetic tropes, draws

attention to its own place in this very constituting structure. Betty and Rita’s

discovery of the decomposing body, which we can only imagine belongs to Diane

herself, is a perverse twist in which the half-image of the translucent Betty/Diane in

the opening sequence is fleshed out but through decay, a figure now evoked not just

‘in negative space’ but in the narratively negative space of mortality.54 As Betty and

Rita run out of the building, the edit decomposes both women’s faces, as frame is

layered on frame to create a visual distortion (see Figure 1.7).55 This distortion of the

woman’s / women’s image in post-production replicates the distortion of the shower

screen and also the necessity for the woman to act as a ‘prism’ – as in de Lauretis’s

reading of Rebecca discussed above – who relays the ‘double set of identifying

relations’ of which both Betty and Rita are a part.56

53 Jagose, Inconsequence, p. 3. 54 Nochimson, ‘All I Need Is the Girl’, p. 167. 55 This sequence exposes the possibilities of digital editing (even more so in anticipation of Lynch’s subsequent feature, Inland Empire [Lynch, 2006], shot entirely on digital) just it recalls the generic devices of classical Hollywood cinema. 56 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, pp. 151-52.

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Figure 1.7. Rita (Laura Harring) and Betty (Naomi Watts) disintegrate in the image as they come to a realisation of Rita’s identity in the decomposing body of Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001).

The scene subsequent to this visual decomposition is one of metaphorical

merging. Responding to Rita’s flustered attempt to cut off her hair in the wake of the

shocking discovery of her would-be doppelgänger’s death, Betty insists: “let me do

it”. “It” seems to be a diminishing of the two women’s visually defined difference.

The camera pans along the wall to reveal Rita in a wig to match Betty’s blonde

coiffure, their pairing delivered to us in a reflection. Just as Rita’s titular prototype

Hayworth is reflected in a mirror, so is her visual prototype in Betty. The

transformation is swiftly juxtaposed with a move to the bedroom and a reference to

their doubled image confused with something akin to sexual farce, as the instruction

“you don’t have to wear that in the house” is misread by Rita and she removes,

instead of her blonde wig, the towel that covers her naked body. The movement of

the camera as they begin to kiss is exploratory, moving from eyes to mouth and

down to breasts, and mirrors the curiosity of their rather hackneyed dialogue – “have

you ever done this before?” Their desire is presented both as exciting (the lighting

produces a sweaty sheen, while the soundtrack allows for their audible sighs) and

almost inevitable (the path from Rita’s entry into the bed, to a maternal goodnight

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kiss, to a passionate embrace, is seamless, and the camera’s movement remains slow

and fluid).

A sweep of orchestral strings follows the camera’s pan up Rita’s body to

reach a still shot of her face in profile against Betty face on in the background (see

Figure 1.8). Rita’s lips move as if dislocated from the rest of her face,

ventriloquising for the silent Betty behind her: “Silencio”.57 These two sets of lips,

fused in the image, demand that we see the lips speaking silently (“silencio”) as the

very image that speech cannot replicate. This is one such image that defies the

narrative movement towards lesbian impossibility. The mysterious aural and oral

tricks of the subsequent scene are initiated here in the bedroom, as we start to doubt

what it is that we see and hear. The “arrival” that the scene’s erotic tone has led us to

expect is withheld; instead, the film thrusts its figures into another kind of arrival, at

the enigmatic Club Silencio.

57 Luce Irigaray writes of the woman that ‘within herself she is already two – but not divisible into ones – who stimulate each other’. See This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 24. While Irigaray’s image of the woman’s ‘sex’ is seen by some as the epitome of her essentialist belief in the significance of sexual difference, others assert the metaphorical nature of this image, the ambiguity of the two lips signalling the fluidity of a sex unbound by the discursive singularity of the phallus. The lips form a powerful image because they refer to language (they are the lips that speak to each other) as well as to sexuality. De Lauretis draws a striking conclusion in response, writing that ‘in doubling the image, Irigaray would describe a specifically female eroticism, one that can take place only between two female bodies and that is autoerotic because of the bodies’ similarity or sameness’. See The Practice of Love, p. 93. For more on this debate, see Bainbridge, A Feminine Cinematics and Carolyn Burke, ‘Introduction to Luce Irigaray’s “When Our Lips Speak Together”’, Signs, 6:1 (1980), 66-68.

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Figure 1.8. Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) lie in bed following the sex scene that leads them towards Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001). For the sake of clarity, the brightness of this image has been increased from the original.

The tonality of the post-coital romantic strings gives way to a surreptitious

atonality that introduces us to the location, an old theatre that intensifies the scene’s

intra- and extra-diegetic play with the anxieties and absurdities of performance. The

whole room glows with a blue haze and consolidates the fantastical theatrical setting

with Lynch’s oneiric tone of choice.58 As Rebekah del Rio sings on stage, lighting

brings her face into the foreground and detaches her from the pitch black stage. The

same lighting device similarly disconnects Rita, and then Betty, from the scene that

they share. “It’s all recorded,” announces the emcee on stage, as del Rio’s body falls

to the floor even as her voice continues to sing Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’ with the

same level of intensity. This series of scenes – not at the chronological centre of the

film, as we are reminded by Wallace, but certainly at its narrative climax – presents

the only available sequence for the lesbian within the confines of the genre.

58 Kim Newman points out that blue has coloured all of Lynch’s dream scenarios since the aptly named Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986). See ‘Mulholland Drive (Review)’, Sight and Sound, n.s., 12:1 (January 2002), 51. The colour does seem to take on a texture as well as a visual sheen, apt for Jennifer Barker’s synaesthetic reading of the film in ‘Out of Sync, Out of Sight: Synaesthesia and Film Spectacle’, Paragraph, 31:2 (2008), 236-51.

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The lesbian’s sequential figuration in Mulholland Drive functions through the

recycling of generic cliché, where certain images are, in White’s words,

‘overdetermined in dream language’.59 The difficulty of summarising Mulholland

Drive’s synopsis comes from the fabrication of its own dream language (through

multiple layers of dream-casting – the characters, the film set, the wider context of

production). Angelo Badalamenti’s score choreographs our attachment to the film’s

generic devices.60 While the narrative suffers from indecipherability, the film

reliably offers regular appearances from a recognisable stock of generic characters –

hitmen, police, the dead body – who act as continual reminders that meaning is

being constituted as generic induction, through sound and image if not through

narrative conclusion. If we read Mulholland Drive not only as a film that obeys the

generic plotting of the thriller but one that pastiches it, we can understand why its

adherence to those overdetermined images might operate beyond the level of

narrative structure. In Richard Dyer’s words, pastiche ‘accepts and indicates what is

really the case in all cultural production, that it exists by virtue of the forms and

frameworks of meaning and affect available to it; it acknowledges itself as being in

the realm of the already said’.61 Even as the synopsis eludes us, the knowledge of a

few simple defining features – an inexplicable crash, an investigation, a romance –

places the film wordlessly ‘in the realm of the already said’. De Lauretis’s reading

of the Hitchcockian model of narrative (itself a citation of a mythological model)

59 White, Uninvited, p. 17. 60 Badalamenti’s work on other Lynch projects such as Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet inter-textually prepares Mulholland Drive’s viewers for the mysterious goings-on that characterise those other texts. 61 Dyer, Pastiche (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), p. 179.

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articulates the way in which ‘divided or doubled desire[s]’ are punished.62 It is

precisely through duplication that the woman as lesbian becomes a threat (double the

threat of woman, only a lesbian when one becomes two).63

In Act Two, Mulholland Drive’s narrative is re-ordered into the model we

should expect. When Diane and Camilla (the newly incarnated Watts and Harring)

share a sex/breakup scene infused with what can be read as an intentional

superficiality, they play their roles according to the instructions of the genre.64

Badalamenti’s score ushers us in with a recognisable tone, but familiarity is unsettled

by unexpected reversals. Diane (Betty), suddenly topless, leans into Camilla (Rita) in

a perversion of the maternal leaning that initiated the first storyline’s sex scene.

What proceeds is a characterisation of lesbian desire and heartbreak that the history

of lesbian cinema has taught us to hope for, as reiterated by Love’s playful

parenthesis ‘(“It’s him, isn’t it?” – but of course it is!)’.65 This is a cinematic

figuration of lesbian impossibility, as the scene is abruptly succeeded by a visual cut

62 De Lauretis begins her essay with an examination of the history of Greek myth and its centrality to enduring discourses within and about narrative structure. In her initial arrangement of the differentiation between narrative movement and narrative image, a hero like Perseus or Oedipus embodies narrative movement as he and his story move through the ‘places and topoi’ marked out by Medusa or the Sphinx, on his way to his ‘destination and to accomplish meaning’. See Alice Doesn’t, p. 109. 63 See also Tania Modleski’s reading of Vertigo in which she writes that, ‘[h]owever much we may be invited to condemn [the woman] as duplicitous in her “double desire,” we must also see the way she is used and cast aside or tortured and finally killed off, as man desperately tries to sustain a sense of himself that necessitates the end of woman’. See The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (London and New York, NY: Methuen, 1988), p. 101. 64 As Anthony Vidler writes of the ‘domestic and suburban uncanny’ in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, the uncanny ‘draws its effect from the ironization of all the commonplaces of a half-century of uncanny movies’. See The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992), p. 10. Mulholland Drive draws on such ‘commonplaces’ to produce the mysterious effect so central to the genre it delivers. We might extrapolate, from this generic process of imitation, an analysis of sexuality itself, which, according to Jagose, is ‘retrospectively assembled from the behaviors and affects it touts as its natural expression, is always imitative and belated’. See Inconsequence, p. x. 65 Love, ‘Spectacular Failure’, p. 128.

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to the panels of a film set.66 A retro-costumed Diane walks in to a static scene, and

fragments of the story come together as Camilla, the star of this film-within-the-film,

is kissed by director Adam while Diane is torturously induced to stay and watch.

Elizabeth Cowie writes that fantasy is not defined by ‘the achievement of desired

objects’ – in Mulholland Drive, the girl does not get the girl – but by ‘the

arrangement of, a setting out of, desire, a veritable mise en scène of desire’.67

Fantasy here is the site of desire’s recognition – our engagement with cinematic

citations of earlier images of desire – rather than the site of desire’s consummation

or ‘achievement’. As reality in Act Two ‘hardens’, in Love’s words, ‘to the point of

total immobility’, we become ever more aware of the extraordinary identificatory

mobility of the opening act, which offers the mise en scène of desire as

opportunity.68 We jump to a shot of the close-up face of a teary-eyed and snotty-

nosed Diane, whose point of view comes in and out of focus with the fast heartbeat-

like zoom of the camera as she masturbates.69 Here instead we have the mise en

scène of desire as desperation.

All the Narrative Needs

We might read de Lauretis’s analysis of Vertigo as a step-by-step account of the

structuring dynamics necessitated by Mulholland Drive’s generic adherence. When a

66 The scene gestures to yet another layer of meaning. A television repair shop is a nod to Mulholland Drive’s TV repair job – the film was originally conceived as a television pilot but was then remade as a feature. The film’s major subplot, which sees the film director Adam lose control of his project, also seems to nod to this extra-textual drama. Additionally, as if to mockingly draw attention to its compromised scope and mode of consumption, the DVD of Mulholland Drive opts out of the conventional division of the film into chapters, forcing its viewers to watch it from start to finish as a film. 67 Cowie, Representing the Woman, p. 133. 68 Love, ‘Spectacular Failure’, p. 128. 69 In her account of writings about tears in the history of philosophy, and in particular her analysis of the aesthetic affect of sadness, Eugenie Brinkema argues that, while ‘tears are universally viewed as the sole bodily excretion that is pure and clean’, they can in fact ‘take on the qualities so long endured by shit, urine, vomit, blood, and pus. They can be made filthy, put in the service of deception.’ See The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 18.

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film enlists ‘the terms of a divided or double desire’, de Lauretis writes, it must

follow a set of rules.70 In Vertigo, that divided or doubled desire is operated by ‘the

person Judy-Madeleine who desires both Scottie and the Mother’, for “Madeleine”

(Kim Novac) in that film loves both protagonist Scottie (James Stewart) but also the

image of the Mother as Carlotta Valdes, whose portrait we see but who remains a

detached figure, just as in Rebecca.71 In Mulholland Drive, the doubled desire (of the

lesbian) must, it seems, be divided, here by the attention of the heterosexual man. In

her interpretation, de Lauretis argues that:

when a film accidentally or unwisely puts in play the terms of a divided or

double desire (that of the person Judy-Madeleine who desires both Scottie and

the Mother), it must display that desire as impossible or duplicitous

(Madeleine’s and Judy’s, respectively, in Vertigo), finally contradictory (Judy-

Madeleine is split into Judy/Madeleine for Scottie); and then proceed to

resolve the contradiction much in the same way as myths and mythologists do:

by either the massive destruction or the territorialization of women.72

In a startlingly clear illustration of the terms that de Lauretis sets out for Vertigo,

Mulholland Drive displays desire as ‘impossible’ and then ‘duplicitous’: Betty and

Rita’s desire is dissolved into the nullity of a narrative black hole (impossible) before

being rendered as just another love triangle that ends with lesbian heartbreak

(duplicitous). That same desire is ‘finally contradictory’: if in Vertigo ‘Judy-

Madeleine is split into Judy/Madeleine’, in Mulholland Drive Betty/Rita becomes 70 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 155. Original emphasis. 71 The convoluted plot of Vertigo is crucial to de Lauretis’s argument and to my comparison with Mulholland Drive. In Vertigo, Scottie (James Stewart), a retired detective, is employed to follow Madeleine (Kim Novak), the wife of an old friend. Madeleine seems to be embodying the spirit of her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. At the Mission San Juan Bautista, Madeleine commits suicide and Scottie cannot save her. However, later, it is revealed that “Madeleine” is in fact another woman, Judy, in disguise. This has been a plot to cover up the death of the “real” Madeleine. There was no suicide at the Mission but instead a visual trick; the murder occurred before the diegetic beginning of the film. Scottie meets and falls in love with the undisguised Judy, but is obsessed and forces her to continue to dress as Madeleine. Finally, Scottie and Judy revisit the Mission, the site of the fake suicide of “Madeleine”, where Judy falls accidentally to her death. 72 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 155.

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Betty-Rita but then also Diane/Camilla. If this contradiction must ultimately resolve

with ‘either the massive destruction or territorialization of women’, Mulholland

Drive offers both. In the context of de Lauretis’s argument based on the legacy of

Greek myth in classical cinematic narratives, the ‘territorialization’ of women refers

to their status as mere spaces for the male hero to pass through, their reduction to a

narrative function. In Mulholland Drive, Betty and Rita’s very narrative is

territorialised by Adam as a filmmaker who conducts their occupation of narrative

space. Territorialised by the Hollywood machine itself, by its very logic, the film’s

women are ultimately destroyed: the self-violence and suicide of one effectively kills

all women.73

Mulholland Drive turns all of the female figures into one woman in order to

vanquish the double threat of the lesbian couple. In an essay on lesbian sexuality and

violence, Lynda Hart concerns herself with the murder(s) central to the controversial

Basic Instinct, a film that provoked accusations of homophobia and misogyny upon

its release in 1992.74 ‘When we ask the film to tell us who did do it’, Hart writes, ‘the

only answer it can give us is that the women did it, which is to say, The Woman did

it’.75 As Jacqueline Rose explains in her introduction to Jacques Lacan’s writings on

femininity, the formulation used here by Hart indicates ‘not that women do not exist,

but that her status as an absolute category and guarantor of fantasy (exactly The

73 The territorialisation of women’s space and voice in the realm of performance is exemplified in a key scene from All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950). “Just when exactly does an actress decide they’re her words she’s saying and her thoughts she’s expressing?” asks playwright Lloyd Richard (Hugh Marlow) of diva Margot Channing (Bette Davis). Brought into being by this male writer (like the male director of Mulholland Drive), it is not for herself that she says these words but for him. 74 See the account of the backlash against the film in, for instance, Angela Galvin, ‘Basic Instinct: Damning Dykes’, in The Good, the Bad and the Gorgeous, ed. by Hamer and Budge, pp. 218-32. Rich also offers a brief and playful account of the protests in the opening of her seminal essay ‘The New Queer Cinema’, in which she writes that ‘Basic Instinct was picketed by the self-righteous wing of the queer community (until dykes began to discover how much fun it was)’. See ‘The New Queer Cinema’, Sight and Sound, n.s., 2:9 (September 1992), 30-34 (p. 30). 75 Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 130. Original emphases.

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woman) is false (The)’.76 Rather than women who don’t exist, it is The Woman, as

reduced in Rose’s reading of Lacan ‘to being nothing other than this fantasmatic

place’.77 This is Lacan’s accusation against the fallacy of fantasy. In Hart’s use of

the strikethrough, she invokes a disruption at the heart of the detective genre, the

tropes of which inform the foundations of her argument.78 What makes Basic Instinct

noteworthy, Hart argues, is its inability, or its refusal, to deliver what its genre

promises: an unambiguous answer to the question – ‘whodunit?’ – that gives a

subgenre its name. Hart’s argument suggests that what produces this generic failure

is precisely what produces the genre’s ubiquitous thrill: the female threat to the male

protagonist. Thus, the genre relies on a (fallacious) fantasy of the threat of woman –

it relies on her status, as Rose glosses, ‘as an absolute category and guarantor of

fantasy’.79

Basic Instinct offers a succession of female characters, each of whom has

murderous potential and, crucially, embodies a clichéd figure of womanhood, from

the lover and the mistress to the colleague and the suspect.80 Mulholland Drive

indicates its adherence to the very same paradoxical structure: a dead body, a host of

women as potential suspects. It self-consciously embraces the conditions and

consequences of what we might call the Basic Instinct model, by playing with 76 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Introduction II’, in Feminine Sexuality, ed. by Mitchell and Rose, pp. 27-58 (p. 48). Original emphasis. 77 Ibid. 78 The film begins with the doubling of the lesbian/bisexual murder suspects – writer Katherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) and her almost indistinguishable lover Roxy (Leilani Sarelle). But with a midway twist that reveals the potential threat of erstwhile-unsuspected Beth Gardner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), the film disturbs the generic convention for the Other Woman to be an insignificance to the plot. Beth begins as an accessory to give weight to the backstory of male lead Nick Curran (Michael Douglas), doubling as the investigation’s resident psychologist and as Nick’s ex-girlfriend. But the twist makes Beth central to the film’s thrust towards the answering of the genre’s structuring question (whodunit). By the end of the film, despite a twist that leads us towards Beth as prime suspect, we are left hanging and unsure by a final shot that points the finger again at writer (and now lover) Katherine; the third suspect, Roxy, has been killed off. 79 Rose, ‘Introduction II’, p. 48. 80 renée hoogland writes that it is ‘precisely in her role of “double” that the haunting figure of the lesbian underlines her function in Basic Instinct’s underlying castration scenario’. See Lesbian Configurations (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), p. 40.

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intertextuality, pastiche and the Hollywood setting itself in order to harness its

commitment to a figuration of the Woman as always multiple but embodied within a

single figure. Hart’s chapter goes on to state that ‘[o]ne woman will not do the trick.

Men need one who does it and one who doesn’t do it. It is not “Woman” who

doesn’t exist: it is The Woman.’81 Hart suggests here that The Woman does not exist

because Woman is never singular: Woman means, in the context of the genre,

Women. In Hart’s reading, it does not matter which of the women committed the

murder, only that it was one of them (and not one of the men). But in the ambiguity

of not knowing which one, “one” becomes pluralised through lack of specificity

(hence: ‘the women did it, which is to say, The Woman did it’).82 While ‘one woman

will not do the trick’, one lesbian (as the competitor, the scapegoated figure who

provides narrative tension and then ends up lonely or dead) is all the narrative needs.

Mulholland Drive espouses an aesthetic of the ‘already said’.83 It is a pastiche

of all that the thriller needs. Scenes like Betty and Rita’s rehearsal in advance of

Betty’s audition augment the absurdities of shallow characterisations – their words

are clichés, as are their mannerisms. Even the words they speak to each other in the

bedroom – “I love you” – sound ‘citational’ to Wallace ‘in the wake of the day’s

many rehearsals and auditions’.84 The film paints its images as if in Technicolor,

revelling in the surface affects of just these kind of clichés. But in a film in which

every fiction is open for unravelling, a narrative path cannot possibly be pinned

down, and the only workaround is to refuse the conventional model of narrative

81 Hart, Fatal Women, p. 133. Original emphasis. In another theoretical framework, Monique Wittig’s controversial dissociation of lesbianism from womanhood hinges in part on her assertion that one must ‘thoroughly dissociate “women” (the class within which we fight) and “woman,” the myth. For “woman” does not exist for us: it is only an imaginary formation, while “women” is the product of a social relationship.’ See The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 15. 82 Hart, Fatal Women, p. 130. Original emphases. 83 Dyer, Pastiche, p. 179. 84 Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, p. 109.

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analysis that relies on the linearisation of a synopsis for the basis of understanding.

If, in a film like Black Swan, intertextual images contribute to a path of female

transgression and punishment, Mulholland Drive is a film whose surfaces reject the

linearity of such a conventional narrative scope.

Yet what resides most firmly in the ‘realm of the already said’ is that which

necessarily remains conversationally unsaid, the figuration of lesbian desire. Cinema

constructs the lesbian as a double of the already threatening women and

simultaneously responds to her threat by punishing her with systematic obscurity.

While de Lauretis writes that it is for man that woman is ‘seduced into femininity’, it

could be said that it is for man that woman is seduced into a singular femininity.85

Two women occupy positions in a heterosexual triangulation; one must be

eliminated in order to achieve the necessary heterosexual union. One woman is all

the narrative needs to succeed. Where in Hart’s reading the detective story requires

one woman who did it and one who did not, the love triangle only needs one woman

who is rejected and one whose femininity is sanctified through heterosexual arrival.

Mulholland Drive represents this bind through the archetype that sees Camilla reject

Diane for Adam (master and originator both as filmmaker and as Biblical father).

Mulholland Drive’s generic appeal functions through the thrill of suspense,

generated by the doubled image of the woman as source of an anxiety.86 If

lesbianism is made narratively impossible by generic demands, the image signifies

the possibility for lesbianism through erotic identification: in mirror images, in the

idealisation of the film star and in the refusal of linearity that enables those erotic

85 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 155. 86 Several films have demonstrated the enduring potential for lesbian doubling and desire to provide a film’s principal “twist”. What this in effect displays is the prevalence of the presumption of the spectator’s inability to contemplate, in advance, the possibility of lesbian desire between two female protagonists like Emily (Rooney Mara) or Victoria (Catherine Zeta-Jones) in Side Effects (Soderbergh, 2013).

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fascinations to cross multiple relations and gazes, erotically and auto-erotically.

Lesbianism is forced into a singular figuration which contains the absent partner (as

double) within it, while Mulholland Drive relishes that which brings the absent to the

surface.

Without employing the term “lesbian” or self-identifying as a “lesbian film”,

Mulholland Drive articulates, through its pastiche of the thriller genre and its

Hollywood setting, the tensions of lesbian configuration in cinema, which hinge on

an anxiety about “the lesbian” as two women and hence as the threat of woman,

doubled. Debates around terminology find focus in the twin burdens the term

“lesbian” carries – as identity and as sexuality. Mulholland Drive conveys both of

these in the image of the lesbian as doubled through both erotic identification and

sexual affiliation. The lesbian is a threat because her sexuality indicates that she is

inherently two (de Lauretis’s statement that ‘it takes two women, not one, to make a

lesbian’ conveys to me not a self-evident meaning but an indication of the source of

cultural anxiety).87 Mulholland Drive shows how cinema manages this threat through

a fantasy of the lesbian partner (lesbian number two) as a mere spectre of the first.

Ultimately, sex in Mulholland Drive is both initiated by, and results in, the

fragmentation of the couple and the disintegration of our perception of them as

separate beings. Through a narrative that explores the conditions of cinematic

production in Hollywood, Mulholland Drive illustrates the conditions of figuration

for the cinematic lesbian. Continuing this analysis of the contradictory relationship

between visibility and invisibility in cinema’s production of lesbianism, Chapter

Two considers the necessary troubling of the ease with which sex can be read as the

visual evidence of sexuality.

87 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 92.

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Chapter Two

The Translation of Desire:

Queering Visibility in Nathalie… and Chloe

Troubling the requisites of both mainstream publicity and lesbian subcultural

recognition, Nathalie… accompanies a corpus of films in which explicit heterosexual

activity is counterbalanced by erotic looks between women. Films such as Swimming

Pool (Ozon, 2003) and Adore (Fontaine, 2013) exhibit a charge of eroticism in

tandem with jealousy and competition. Even if these films fail – and indeed

challenge the terms of – the famous “Bechdel test” of gender equality, which

measures a film’s merits based on its inclusion of ‘at least two women’ who ‘talk to

each other’ about ‘something besides a man’, their structures of homoerotic looking

complicate their ostensible foci on heterosexual desire in action or in conversation.1

The eponymous protagonist of Nathalie… is introduced to us in a point of

view shot that roves around the bar in which she works, panning across the faces of

other women before pausing and zooming in on Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) in

isolation.2 As the shot becomes a close-up, Nathalie turns towards the camera (see

Figure 2.1). The gaze she returns is that of Catherine (Fanny Ardant), a middle-aged

woman whose incongruous presence in the bar is matched by her unusual

motivation. Discovering early in the film that her husband Bernard (Gérard

Depardieu) has been cheating on her, she decides to hire a prostitute who will seduce

1 Alison Bechdel and Liz Wallace, ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’, The Rule (2005), <http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/the-rule> [accessed 14 August 2015]. In 2013, a group of Swedish cinemas used the Bechdel test as part of a feminist project to promote gender equality in film. See ‘Swedish Cinemas Take Aim at Gender Bias with Bechdel Test Rating’, The Guardian, (6 November 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/swedish-cinemas-bechdel-test-films-gender-bias> [accessed 9 September 2015]. 2 It is in this scene that Béart’s character changes her name from Marlène to Nathalie at Catherine’s instruction. For the sake of clarity, I will use the name ‘Nathalie’ throughout.

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Bernard and recount tales of their affair. This transaction introduces the potential for

a derivative voyeurism. In Nathalie’s episodic retellings of these sexual encounters,

we are given no visual clues, no graphic exposition of events, but merely the telling

of a story by one woman to another who is thus enabled to participate

retrospectively. The first shot of the two women together is one in which their

coupling is tentative, Nathalie brought into the frame through the mirror behind

Catherine’s seat (see Figure 2.2). The visual doublings in this shot alert us to a

broader tension between duplicity and immediacy foregrounded in the film’s

complicated plot. Yet while the mirror multiplies them and moderates our access to

Nathalie, whom we see only through reflection, the women look directly at one

another without mediation. This intense shared gaze connects them before any words

are spoken, establishing the mood of a film in which it is what remains unsaid that

eroticises a relationship that is unconsummated through sexual action.

Figure 2.1. Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) is introduced in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003).

Figure 2.2. Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) and Catherine (Fanny Ardant) meet for the first time in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003).

In his reading of Nathalie…, Slavoj Žižek rejects any claim to the

relationship between Catherine and Nathalie as lesbian: ‘the trap to avoid’, he writes,

‘is to read this intense relationship between the two women as (implicitly) lesbian: it

is crucial that the narrative they share is heterosexual, and it is no less crucial that all

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they share is a narrative’.3 Countering Žižek, my reading argues that the dynamic in

Nathalie… is defined by the eroticism of the gaze. What they share is not just a

narrative, not just a heteroerotic recollection of a heterosexual act, but rather a

potentialised homoerotic intimacy that is reinscribed through fantasy. Referring to

the shared narrative as the ‘lesbian subtext’, Žižek writes that it ‘distracts us’ from

the preeminence of the women’s desires as they are rendered through words, not

acts.4 Žižek links his reading of Nathalie… to a famous scene in Persona in which

Alma (Bibi Andersson) recalls an orgy in conversation with Elisabet (Liv Ullman).

In her recollection, ‘we see no flashback pictures; nonetheless the scene is one of the

most erotic in the entire history of cinema – the excitement is in how she tells it, [the

story] resides in speech itself’.5 Žižek makes an important distinction, observing that

eroticism in both Persona and Nathalie… arises from the recollection of that which

is not visualised. He asserts here that it is the recollection of sex – that which for him

remains a ‘heterosexual’ narrative – that provides the eroticism.

However, if we see Nathalie and Catherine’s relationship as involved in the

queering of heterosexuality through the eroticising of the homosociality that

triangulates it, rather than the narrowly defined and singular figuration of lesbianism,

the eroticism in their relationship is neither text nor subtext.6 Recounted through a

series of homosocial spaces, the women’s shared experience of sexual interaction

3 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2006), p. 190. Žižek’s reading of Nathalie… occurs in his discussion of ‘what Lacan called la jouissance de l’Autre’ (the jouissance of the Other) and a ‘real clinical case’ in which two lovers reach orgasm ‘just as the effect of “mere talking”’. See The Parallax View, p. 188. 4 Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 189. 5 Ibid. 6 The concept of the queering of heterosexuality was, arguably, first enabled or brought into discursive possibility by the coincidence of the publication of seminal works of queer theory and the influence of the activist group Queer Nation. See Butler, Gender Trouble and Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, updated edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). As Joseph Bristow writes, ‘[t]he imaginative public interventions made by Queer Nation set the terms of a distinctly Foucauldian debate about the labels that have been used to define, limit and indeed naturalize the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality’. See Sexuality (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), p. 194.

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with the same man creates a third relation of queer recollective eroticism that first

depends on, but then sidelines, the heterosexual narrative.

This proposed reading is complicated by a remake, Chloe, which orchestrates

a far less ambiguous delineation of the erotic triangle.7 Emma Wilson suggests in the

introduction to an interview with Chloe’s director, Atom Egoyan, that his films

‘have always dissolved divisions between queer and straight, showing characters

discovering unexpected possibilities in erotic situations’. 8 Yet these divisions are

arguably solidified again in Chloe by the dissolution of eroticism’s ambiguity. In

many notable ways, Chloe barely changes the original film’s structure, borrowing

original lines (such as Nathalie’s seductive opening gambit, “do you want to buy me

a drink?”); visual motifs (the preponderance of glass and mirrors); and

characterisations (Catherine in both films is a gynaecologist, whose job necessitates

a distanced, mechanical intimacy with women’s bodies, while she insists that

Nathalie/Chloe pretend to be a student interpreter). This last metaphor initiates a

sequence of interpretations, or translations, from actions to words and, in the remake,

onwards from words to images. In the original film, the genesis of the plot occurs

when Catherine hears a romantic voicemail from another woman on Bernard’s

phone. In Chloe, Catherine (Julianne Moore) sees a romantic photo of her husband

David (Liam Neeson) and his student via a text message on his iPhone, just the first

instance of many in which the remake makes graphic what is only implied or

7 Chloe was the first film that Egoyan directed but did not write. The screenplay was written by Erin Cressida Wilson, who also wrote Secretary (Shainberg, 2002) and Fur (Shainberg, 2006), both of which controversially challenge conventional depictions of desire, femininity and the erotic image. See Emma Wilson, ‘Desire and Technology: An Interview with Atom Egoyan’, Film Quarterly, 64:1 (2010), 29-37. Wilson has also written about the director in Atom Egoyan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). For more on Anne Fontaine, see references in Rachel Ritterbusch, ‘Anne Fontaine and Contemporary Women’s Cinema in France’, Rocky Mountain Review, 62:2 (2008), 68-81; Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet, Cinema and the Second Sex: Women’s Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s (New York, NY: Continuum, 2001); and Wilson, ‘État Présent: Contemporary French Women Filmmakers’, French Studies, 59:2 (2005), 217-23. 8 Wilson, ‘Desire and Technology’, p. 29.

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obscured in the original.9 There are two crucial differences between the two films

related to this “making graphic”. Firstly, in Nathalie… the tales that Nathalie brings

back to Catherine remain at the level of language, while in Chloe they are not only

verbally described in detail but also visually re-enacted. Secondly, in Chloe, the first

stage of narrative climax is provided by the “lesbian” sex scene that is absent from

the first film. This chapter will explore the effect that the predominance of visually

coded sex in the remake has on our reading of its absence in the original.10

In Chapter One, I proposed that it is through the fantasised duplicity of the

lesbian that she becomes a threat as “the woman, doubled”. I argued that Mulholland

Drive exhibits the symptoms of a broader cultural anxiety that takes the form of a

paradox: between the lesbian’s frequently theorised absence (as woman who lacks

and as historically invisible figure) and the impression of her threatening over-

presence (as not just one woman but two). In this chapter, I explore how the tension

between absence and presence characterises the desire for ‘visibility’ in

contemporary mainstream genre cinema. Chloe’s marketable generic adherence,

bigger budget and superior box office figures coincide with the move towards a post-

9 Wilson’s interview with Egoyan specifically explores the relationship between desire and technology in his films. See ‘Desire and Technology’, p. 1. 10 Dyer uses the concept of pastiche – that which resides in the ‘realm of the already said’ – to discuss the palimpsestic nature of adaptation and the way in which another Moore vehicle, Far From Heaven (Haynes, 2002), becomes the top ‘layer’ of a series of films, each of whose narratives it echoes ‘while altering a basic narrative situation’. See Pastiche, p. 174. Introducing ‘queer’ into this discussion of repetition, Fiona Handyside observes the ‘radical potential that is at the heart of the adaptation process’ exemplified by François Ozon, whose films’ ‘subversive repetition can call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself’. See ‘Queer Filiations: Adaptation in the Films of François Ozon’, Sexualities, 15:1 (2012), 53-67 (p. 54).

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L Word visibility at the end of the decade.11 What is lost in a move to make sex the

visible object of sexuality’s representation? How might we read lesbian subtext

through the queer spatialisation of desire?

Making Graphic

A reading of Nathalie… and Chloe in conjunction allows for the staging of the

debate between the desexualisation of lesbian desire that is created by the attention

to nonsexual forms of homoerotic intimacy on the one hand, and the representational

imperative to see lesbian identity as defined by sex, rather than by desire, on the

other. If desire must be (homo)sexual in order to avoid falling into what de Lauretis

calls ‘a representation of lesbianism that is heterosexually conceived’, then what is

the relationship between homosexuality and the sex that is presumed to be

sexuality’s proper visual rendering?12 Sex and sexuality are the two ‘proper objects

of lesbian and gay studies’ that Butler observes in the 1993 Lesbian and Gay Studies

Reader.13 In her critique ‘Against Proper Objects’, for which the Reader is the

inaugural case study, she writes that the word “sex” is required not only to mean

female or male, but also to hold within it the ‘identity, attribute, sensation, pleasures,

acts, and practices’ that we might otherwise associate with the ‘other proper object

11 Chloe made $11,702,642 worldwide across thirty-five countries while Nathalie… made only $5,228,683 across fifteen countries. See Box Office Mojo (2015), <http://www.boxofficemojo.com> [accessed 7 March 2015]. My phrase ‘post-L Word’ is intended to signal the landmark that The L Word represented. As Sedgwick writes in the foreword to the first collection of essays on the show, it was ‘the first on television to place at front and centre the lives of a group of women most of whom are lesbian’. See ‘Foreword’, in Reading The L Word, ed. by Kim Akass and Janet McCabe (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), pp. xix-xxiv. As she acknowledges, the show also has a complicated and at times playful relationship to its own vanguard of the visible, foregrounding its second season with a subplot about film and voyeurism. 12 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 120. De Lauretis takes exception to any reclamation, on the part of lesbian spectators, of what she sees as ‘heterosexist’ narratives that by chance include some lesbian kiss, look or touch; embracing such films, for de Lauretis, undermines real lesbianism or, in her words, ‘deauthorizes or forecloses actual lesbianism’. See The Practice of Love, p. 122. 13 Butler, ‘Against Proper Objects: Introduction’, differences, 6:2-3 (1994), 1-26 (p. 2). Butler here refers to Henry Abelove, Michele Barale and David Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993).

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of lesbian and gay studies: “sexuality”’.14 De Lauretis’s work highlights a fear that

desire might become conflated with sexuality in a way that obscures the ‘sex’ of

sexuality. Butler’s argument points to the repetitive models of conflation and

obscuration that disguise not only sexuality as ‘mere’ desire, but also sexuality as

‘mere’ sex.15 The potentially obscuring practices highlighted by de Lauretis and

Butler begin to reveal the burden of the visible: that a newly available image will be

asked to stand in for all prior facets of its invisible form.

In contrast to Nathalie…, whose potentially thrilling storyline remains

somewhat muted, Chloe embraces the demands of the thriller, forcing the potential

of lesbian desire to its ultimate conclusion. The explicit consummation of sexual

desire between Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) and Catherine is necessarily paired with

the explicit violence that is invoked through citation as a generic inevitability.

Obsession and excessive desire have become quintessential characteristics of the

psychological thriller’s generic appeal, most notably with the appearance of Alex

Forrest (Glenn Close), the “bunny boiler” of Fatal Attraction (Lyne, 1987).16 Sex

becomes shorthand for the thriller’s mandatory figuration of female sexuality.17

‘“Sex” in the explicit and lesbian/gay sense’, in Butler’s words, which encompasses

14 Butler, ‘Against Proper Objects’, p. 2. The question of where desire might reside in a list like this (between ‘sensation’ and ‘pleasures’, or between ‘acts’ and ‘practices’?) will generate the discussion at the heart of Chapter Four. 15 ‘Merely’ is a word that de Lauretis repeatedly uses throughout The Practice of Love, most markedly when she writes (indeed in her own defence) that her book’s ‘emphasis on the sexual is by no means intended (there should be no need to say it) to reduce lesbian subjectivity to a mere matter of sexual behavior or sexual acts, as if these could be isolated from all other aspects, qualities, affects, social determinations, and achievements that make up each human being as a complex individual and a unique contributor to her or his culture’. See The Practice of Love, pp. xii-xiii. 16 For scholarship on Fatal Attraction and the “bunny boiler” legacy, see, for instance, Suzanne Leonard, Fatal Attraction (Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Deborah Jermyn discusses more generally the ‘female psychopath’ trope in ‘Rereading the Bitches from Hell: A Feminist Appropriation of the Female Psychopath’, Screen, 37:3 (1996), 251-67. Variations on the Fatal Attraction theme that Jermyn lists include Misery (Reiner, 1990) and Black Widow (Reiner, 1990). It is interesting to note the contrastingly indifferent reception of the male antagonist of a film like Pacific Heights (Schlesinger, 1990). 17 This is a discussion that lays the foundations for Chapter Five, in which I use Merck’s analysis of Lianna (Sayles, 1982) to consider the implications of the lesbian sex scene as synecdoche for “lesbian experience”. See Perversions, p. 167.

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sexuality as sexual act, must also signify three conflicting registers of failure: excess,

disappointment and violence.18 Discussing Chloe with an emphasis on its

representation of prostitution, Fiona Handyside has argued that the film’s regressive

trajectory emerges in the killing off of Chloe, the doubly other lesbian-prostitute who

must be punished for her transgression of the patriarchal order.19 The murderous

lesbians of the thrillers explored in the last chapter are again evoked here: lesbian

desire is conflated with obsession and then (usually fatal) punishment in films such

as Basic Instinct and Single White Female.20 Handyside’s redemptive reading of

Chloe suggests that a geographic move from Paris to Toronto reworks the

prostitute’s ‘visible invisibility’.21 This term captures the predictability of the

invisibility of particular forms whereby their presence is defined solely through their

absence. The prostitute’s role is to be reliably ready to shift sexual and spatial zones:

as the character announces in her voiceover at the beginning of the film, “I can

become your living, breathing, unflinching dream, and then I can actually

disappear”.22 This statement foreshadows the character’s dramatic death at the end of

the film.

18 Butler, ‘Against Proper Objects’, p. 2. 19 Handyside, ‘Prostitution in the Streets of Paris and Toronto: Nathalie… and Chloe’, unpublished conference paper presented at ‘Representations of Prostitution, Sex Work and Sex Trafficking between the 19th and 20th Centuries’ (University of Exeter: 2010). 20 In a series of lectures reprinted as the chapter ‘Lethal Lesbians: The Cinematic Inscription of Murderous Desire’, Rich discusses the coincidence of this trend with the media’s attention to “lesbian chic” in the early 1990s. She writes that ‘[l]esbian visibility was attained at long last, freed from the stale stereotype of asexual spoilsport, but the terms of visibility were set by the media and would eventually prove problematic’. See New Queer Cinema, p. 104. 21 Handyside, ‘Prostitution in the Streets of Paris and Toronto’. 22 In Chapter Three I will explore further this spatial ‘zoning’ with reference to Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

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Processes of conflation and obscuration thus occur when sexuality is made

visible through sex.23 Phelan has addressed ‘the implicit assumptions about the

connections between representational visibility and political power’.24 Contrary to

the liberating march of progress that a politics of visibility assumes, the move to

represent what Phelan calls the ‘hitherto under-represented other’ actually serves to

‘name, and thus to arrest and fix, the image of that other’.25 By making the lesbian

visible, she becomes an arrested object of burdened recognition. The weight of

meaning generated by her image obscures sexuality’s complexity behind sex as a

visualised act. Aligning the inevitability of sex (bringing fantasy to reality as a living

dream) with the inevitability of death, Chloe’s visibility is reworked by a genre that

traps her in a double bind: the visibility of sex fixes the figure of the pathological

lesbian along the lines of her generic heritage.26

23 In an article in the radical feminist magazine Trouble and Strife, Sheila Jeffreys asked the question ‘does it matter if they did it?’ in order to answer another: ‘what is lesbianism?’ See ‘Does It Matter If They Did It? Lilian Faderman and Lesbian History’, Trouble and Strife, 3 (1984), 25-29. In the context of a discussion of Nathalie… and Chloe we might rephrase this question as ‘does it matter if we saw it?’ 24 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 1. Beirne nods to the ‘cultural interventions that visibility politics have made’, though she maintains reservations about the political focus on ‘normalizing issues’ such as gay marriage. See Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium, p. 26. In sociology, Monica Casper and Lisa Jean Moore have explored ‘how certain places, spaces, policies, and practices in contemporary society, particularly in the United States, exhibit and celebrate some bodies while erasing and denying others’. See Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (London and New York: New York University Press, 2009), p. 3. 25 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 2. Phelan’s book contentiously analyses the oft-assumed relationship between the feminist Left and visibility politics through readings of performance texts. Rose also observes that ‘the fixing of language and the fixing of sexual identity go hand in hand; they rely on each other and share the same forms of instability and risk’. See Sexuality in the Field of Vision, new edn (London: Verso, 2005), p. 228. Rose begins with Freud’s engagement with an ambiguous drawing of (hetero)sexual activity by Leonardo da Vinci in which ‘[a] confusion at the level of sexuality brings with it a disturbance of the visual field’. See Sexuality in the Field of Vision, p. 226. Rose’s argument is thus provoked not only by the image itself, but also by Freud’s reading of it, so that ‘the fixing of language and the fixing of sexual identity’, as quoted above, have become part of the same discursive structure. 26 See also the pairing of Love Crime (Corneau, 2010) with its prompt remake Passion (de Palma, 2012), in which the competitive, potentially erotic and ultimately murderous relationship between a younger woman and her female boss is heightened in the latter film by sexual manipulation. Unlike in the move from Nathalie… to Chloe, the replacement in the remake of Kristen Scott Thomas’s significantly older woman by the younger Rachel McAdams (who is almost the same age as her counterpart Noomi Rapace) reveals a problematic undermining of the erotic potential of the age difference between Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier in the original.

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In the most basic synopsis of the plot, Catherine has negotiated for Chloe to

seduce Catherine’s husband David and report back what has happened. This almost

exactly replicates the transaction at the heart of the original film.27 But while in the

original film Catherine initiates their first interaction, in the remake it is Chloe. In a

bathroom of a restaurant she drops a hairslide on purpose and then, pretending that it

is not hers, suggests that Catherine adopt it. The rest of the narrative proceeds with

Chloe as the initiator.28 Such an apparently subtle difference forces Chloe into the

role of the obsessive disruptor of family life, setting in motion a series of disturbing

engagements with Catherine and her family, which includes seducing Catherine’s

son Michael (Max Thieriot).29 In a final act of desperation, Chloe threatens

Catherine, pressing the sharp end of the now symbolic hairslide to her throat before

kissing her. It is when Catherine realises that her son is watching this climax of sex

and violence that she pushes against Chloe, letting her fall backwards to her death

through one of the dramatic glass walls of the architecturally ostentatious house.

27 Foucault writes that ‘[c]ivil society is like madness and sexuality, what I call transactional realities (réalités de transaction). That is to say, those transactional and transitional figures that we call civil society, madness, and so on […] are born precisely from the interplay of relations of power and everything which constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed’. See The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, ed. by Michel Senellart, trans. by Graham Burchell (Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 297. There is thus an inherent transactional nature to society itself and to sexuality within it. The transaction at the heart of Nathalie… becomes another mise en abîme for the encompassing transactional (power) relation of the wider social structures for which the arrangement compensates, both within and beyond the film. 28 Sedgwick observes that the status of women is ‘deeply and inescapably inscribed in the structure even of relationships that seem to exclude women’. See Between Men, p. 25. Arguing that women are constantly used by men as items of exchange, Sedgwick draws on Claude Lévi-Strauss, who writes that ‘the total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners’. See The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. by Rodney Needham, trans. by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 115. Quoted in Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 26. By this logic, Chloe is effectively punished for destabilising these terms of transaction. 29 In Fontaine’s more recent film Adore, originally named Perfect Mothers, the parallel desires of two female best friends for each other’s sons creates an even more complicated triangulation, or rather multiplication, in which homoeroticism is created by the women’s desire for the other’s resemblance. This quasi-incestuous trope is sharpened in Chloe when Chloe seduces Catherine’s son Michael; a similar kind of triangulation of unspoken female homoerotic desire or intense intimacy via the brother or father who holds a strong resemblance to the sister/daughter is also a feature of The Falling (Morley, 2015), Ginger and Rosa (Potter, 2012) and My Summer of Love (Pawlikowski, 2004).

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Chloe’s characterisation thus intertwines lesbian sexuality, lesbian impotence,

lesbian menace and lesbian punishment (see Figures 2.3-5).30

Figure 2.3. Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) presents the symbolic hairclip in Chloe (Egoyan, 2009).

Figure 2.4. Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) threatens Catherine (Julianne Moore) in Chloe (Egoyan, 2009).

Figure 2.5. Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) falls backwards to her death in Chloe (Egoyan, 2009).

The hairslide, the accessory with which this train of events is begun, provides

a visual motif at the very end of the film that makes explicit a reference to the

ambivalently erotic doublings of Hitchcock’s heroines. In the finale, family stability

is resumed: the penultimate three shots are of mother, father and son sharing

affectionate looks across a crowded room. This resolution is visually infiltrated by

Chloe’s hairslide, however, which creates in Catherine’s hair a coil reminiscent of

the imitative gesture of Judy/Madeleine/Carlotta in Vertigo (see Figures 2.6 and

2.7).31

30 These are all key features of published monographs about lesbians on film. Cairns, for instance, includes three sequential chapters in her book entitled ‘Bad Girls: Criminality’, ‘Mad Girls: Pathology’ and finally ‘Girls on the Edge: Liminality’. See Sapphism on Screen, p. v. 31 Modleski observes that, ‘[i]n attempting to re-create Judy as Madeleine, Scottie displays the most minute knowledge of women’s clothing, to the point where the saleswoman twice remarks on how well the gentleman knows what he wants. […] the female character, Madeleine/Judy, is like a living doll whom the hero strips and changes and makes over according to his ideal image.’ See The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 91. Madeleine’s original modelling of herself on the image of Carlotta Valdes is the primary source of this idealisation, the hairslide the focusing object of the fetish.

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Figure 2.6. Catherine (Julianne Moore) dons the symbolic hairslide of her dead lover in the final scene of Chloe (Egoyan, 2009).

Figure 2.7. Judy (Kim Novac) as Madeleine/Carlotta in Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958).

Two versions of visibility emerge in contrast to each other in the

consideration of Nathalie… alongside its remake: the diagrammatic visuality of sex

as act on the one hand, and the social or symbolic visibility of sexuality as pleasure

or desire on the other. While the absence of sex in Nathalie… may recall the

historical invisibility of the lesbian in cinema, Chloe’s sexual presence is reminiscent

of the threat of the woman immortalised in the figure of the femme fatale or the

murderess. Chloe’s register of heightened sexual visibility is tied up in the film’s

adherence to the dramatic principles of the thriller.32 Worked out through suspense,

sexual visibility is a generic diegetic necessity for the sake of the narrative twist, as

in films from Basic Instinct to Side Effects (Soderbergh, 2013).

Anne Fontaine’s regretful recollection of what she sees as a lack of ‘erotic

rapport between the two actresses’ accompanies the 2009 release of Egoyan’s film

32 While David Bordwell writes that ‘any theme may appear in any genre’, Steve Neale insists that ‘genres are instances of repetition and difference’. See Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 147 and Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), p. 48. The thriller thus works on the basis not of a particular set of narrative events, but of the pace and mood, amongst other factors, of the disclosure of these events. Chloe directly replicates the series of events of Nathalie… while altering its generic mood by way of replacing subtlety with suspense. While the thriller as genre category is widely advocated but too often imprecise, Chloe would more accurately be placed in the suspense thriller (following its nods to the master of suspense Hitchcock), or even the ‘psychotraumatic thriller’, a subgenre outlined by Charles Derry as ‘organized around the psychotic effects of a trauma on a protagonist’s current involvement in a love affair and a crime or intrigue’. See The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company), p. 192.

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rather than her own.33 Through the ‘hypervisibility’ of sex in Chloe, it becomes in

Nathalie… a structuring absence.34 When we read Nathalie… through the language

made available by its remake, we fix the image of desire in the language of sex.

However, as Rose writes, ‘sexual representation’ or ‘representation as sexual’ must

‘take in the parameters of visual form (not just what we see but how we see – visual

space as more than the domain of simple recognition)’.35 Sexuality in cinema does

not just exist in the transplantation of sexual activity from our idea of it in reality to a

recognisable representation on the screen. The ‘parameters of visual form’ that Rose

asks us to consider here draw our attention as much towards what is not shown as to

what is. However, even if, as in Rose’s understanding, the visual’s incitement to

recognition is not the only variable, it does generate a dominating effect. The

“updating” of Nathalie… threatens to confine a reading of the two films to a linear

assumption of the visible’s predominance over the invisible.36 Yet, as Rose insists,

the relationship between image and sexuality can neither be purely imposed from the

outside as it is by the mandatory reading of Nathalie… in the context of more recent

advances in lesbian visibility, nor can it be left unnoticed. Instead, our engagement

33 See ‘Talking Chloe with Anne Fontaine’, DP/30: The Oral History of Hollywood, (2009), <https://www.youtube.com/user/TheHotButton/featured> [accessed 16 December 2015]. As she recalls in this interview, Fontaine’s actresses refused to make explicit any subtextual lesbian content. In contrast, Chloe’s Moore is an icon of lesbian characterisation, having played lesbian roles most famously in The Kids Are All Right and Freeheld (Sollett, 2015), but also in The Hours (Daldry, 2003) and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (Miller, 2009). As well as being an actress who has consistently (and uniquely) played several lesbian parts, Moore is a public champion of LGBT rights, and the muse of the queer auteur Todd Haynes, who directed her in Safe (1995) and then wrote Far From Heaven (2002) for her. 34 See Pidduck, ‘The Visible and the Sayable: The Moment and Conditions of Hypervisibility’, in Cinematic Queerness: Gay and Lesbian Hypervisibility in Contemporary Francophone Feature Films, ed. by Florian Grandena and Cristina Johnston (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 9-40. 35 Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, p. 231. 36 This relation is explored by Jagose, who writes about the sequentialisation of lesbianism in culture, contesting the ‘efficacy of assuming visibility as the standard measure for sexual legitimacy’ and arguing that ‘lesbian studies’ longstanding focus on visibility and its promise to counter cultural figurations of the lesbian in terms derived from her sexual others draws on the same logics that it contests’. See Inconsequence, p. xi.

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with what we might call the anticipatory pre-sexual image emphasises the sexuality

of that image ‘in potentia’.37

Elaborating Lesbian Desire

In ‘Desperately Seeking Difference’, Stacey explores the erotic pleasures of

processes of identification in Desperately Seeking Susan (Seidelman, 1985) and All

About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950).38 In her response, de Lauretis resists Stacey’s

reading of these films, asserting that such identifications are not desires, but ‘intra-

feminine’ – here she is borrowing Stacey’s phrase – ‘self-directed, narcissistic

“fascinations”’.39 De Lauretis demands that we ask: what is it about these looks that

makes them more than either ‘merely’ homosocial, or merely imitative of familial

structures of intimacy?40 If the physical touches between Catherine and Nathalie in

Nathalie… sometimes replicate those between mother and child, they are shared in

both directions; both women play mother, both child, in a radical demurral of

hierarchies of status, class and age. It is in Chloe, by contrast, that the one-sided

maternal analogy provides a lesbian character whose sexuality must then be

dismissed as childlike.41 Moore’s Catherine is reliably set up as the film’s mother

figure. Her son’s burgeoning sexuality, a plot feature that does not appear in the

earlier film, is experienced by her as a crisis, furthermore distorted in her concern

and desire for Chloe who is both lover and surrogate daughter.

37 Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, p. 231. Original emphasis. 38 Stacey, ‘Desperately Seeking Difference’. 39 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 120. 40 De Lauretis particularly criticises Sedgwick, for her assertion that ‘the relatively continuous relation of female homosocial and homosexual bonds [...] links lesbianism with the other forms of women’s attention to women: the bond of mother and daughter, for instance, the bond of sister and sister, women’s friendship, “networking,” and the active struggles of feminism’. See Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 2. Quoted in de Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 115. De Lauretis’s emphasis. 41 As Jagose writes, Western ‘culture commonly understands homosexuality to be a derivative or less evolved form of heterosexuality’. See Queer Theory (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1996), p. 16. 41 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 262.

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In rejection of such maternal metaphors, de Lauretis accuses Stacey of

proposing that ‘desire between women is not sexual’.42 However, Stacey’s argument,

as later clarified in Star Gazing, is not concerned with ‘de-eroticising desire, but

rather eroticising identification’.43 The choice of the word ‘homoerotic’, as a psychic

category rather than a social one, allows Stacey to recuperate desire within cinematic

identification not only for lesbian women but for all women, where homoeroticism is

an aspect (one of many, she argues) of the pleasures that cinema can afford female

spectators, multiplied beyond those restricted to masculine versus feminine

positions.44 Brought into popularity since the publication of both Stacey’s Star

Gazing and de Lauretis’s The Practice of Love, the term “queer” has since been

mobilised to cut through such dichotomies. My use of the term “queer” is informed

by Stacey’s reading of these ambiguous aesthetic modulations of eroticism and

desire. I see queer as an elaboration, rather than replacement, of “lesbian”.45

In a model of spectatorship that is distanced from the rigid distinction

between lesbian and straight, we can see a queering of female spectatorship through

the eroticisation of identification. Stacey’s work urges us to consider those multiple

processes of identification that are yielded by sometimes-fixed identities.46 In

Nathalie…, these identifications are given shape by Nathalie’s erotic recollections.

As we are reminded by Žižek’s emphasis, ‘it is no less crucial that all they share is a

narrative’.47 It is precisely this construction of a narrative within a narrative that

performs the task of making the queerness of sexuality the register of its

42 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 262. 43 Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 29. 44 Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 27. 45 Villarejo discusses the particular inflection involved in using “queer” as adjective and “lesbian” as noun, suggesting that we might begin to activate lesbianism via its use as modifier rather than modified. See Lesbian Rule, p. 27. 46 It is the desire for such fixed identities that will be the subject of Chapter Three. 47 Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 190. Original emphasis.

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visualisation. The mise en abîme refers in this context to a film within a film in

which a diegetic film draws attention to the wider mode of production.48 In

Nathalie… what is produced is not a film but a scene of erotic identification –

Nathalie’s recollection – that emphasises the film’s encompassing theme. De

Lauretis writes that the mise en abîme situates the lesbian spectator in the filmic

scenario of lesbian desire, transcending the ‘mere’ representation of lesbian desire

from which the spectator is psychically distanced.49 In cinema, the spectator is

caught up in what Jean Laplanche and Jean Bertrand Pontalis call fantasy as a

‘sequence of images’ designed to lead her through a network of ambiguous positions

of desire and identification.50 The subject does not find the place of the object in

fantasy, but finds herself in it. However, she ‘cannot be assigned any fixed place in

it’ and may, despite being always part of the fantasy and present in it in some form

or other, take a somewhat ‘desubjectivized form’.51 For this reason, lesbian

specificity is particularly difficult to decipher in its fantasy form – which is, as de

Lauretis argues via Freud via Laplanche and Pontalis, the only form in which desire

takes shape.

What is of particular interest in de Lauretis’s reading of She Must Be Seeing

Things is her observation of the negotiation of the figure of the lesbian who, as ‘the

filmmaker within the film, constructs a vision of things – events, emotions,

48 Famous examples of the film within a film include Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Reisz, 1981). The latter cleverly adapts the novelistic mise en abîme of the original text, John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969). The phrase mise en abîme emerged in critical theory via André Gide, who cited Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656) and William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (1603) as two key early illustrations. The inner scene in all of these examples comes to expose the major thematic of the artwork as a whole. See The Journals of André Gide, trans. by Justin O’Brien (London: Secker & Warburg, 1947), p. 30. 49 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 90. 50 Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, p. 26. 51 Ibid.

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relationships, and possibilities’.52 We can see this dynamic recast in films such as

Mulholland Drive, Black Swan and Heavenly Creatures (Jackson, 1994). Whether on

a film set as in Mulholland Drive, in the theatre as in Black Swan or in the

unembellished staging of adolescent fantasy as in Heavenly Creatures, the

production of a fantastical show re-situates the female protagonist in an alternative

scene that allows her to watch herself – or watch a version of herself. It is in this

other scene that she discovers the figure of the lesbian as an Other who both is and is

not herself.53

In She Must Be Seeing Things, Jo (Lois Weaver), a filmmaker, watches a film

that she has made alongside her girlfriend Agatha (Sheila Dabney). In de Lauretis’s

reading, the making of a film is a method for the dominant female protagonist to

articulate her desire for another: the ‘words and images she has put together’ become

a figure of desire for Agatha’.54 The crucial element of the particular scene discussed

by de Lauretis is that Jo and Agatha watch the film together and it is the act of

simultaneous viewing that allows the viewed sequence to function as an ‘enacted’

lesbian fantasy.55 It is the diegetic spectatorial positioning that informs our meta-

spectatorial intrigue or pleasure. The framing and mise en scène, not only of the film

within the film, but also of the women’s viewing of it, ‘mediate and complicate our

52 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 87. Original emphasis. 53 For an interesting parallel, see the chapter ‘She is Not Herself: The Deviant Relations of Alien: Resurrection’ in Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene, pp. 36-65. An argument could be made here in counterpoint in relation to the woman as fetish. Restuccia has argued that in Female Perversions (Streitfeld, 1996), the woman is constructed both as fetish and as one who fetishises. See The Blue Box, p. 9. Through Bainbridge’s reading of the same film, we might extrapolate in relation to Nathalie… the alienating effect of the woman’s relation to her own image of femininity. Bainbridge writes that the film ‘disrupts and challenges the spectator’s desire for identification, repeatedly seeking to alienate us from the potential for pleasure in the film, and thereby situating us in terms of the alienation that inscribes the characters on screen’. See A Feminine Cinematics, p. 55. 54 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 89. Original emphasis. 55 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 90.

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own, purposefully distanced, spectatorial relation’ to the scene.56 What is important

here is the simultaneity of the viewing of desire’s visual incarnation.57

Queering Heterosexuality

In Nathalie…, Catherine’s sexuality is voiced by Nathalie, who speaks the words

that Catherine cannot. The film visualises this not by explicitly representing the

actions that Nathalie describes but through the settings in which these verbal

narrativisations take place. Rather than determining Catherine’s sexuality or gender

as “hers”, we might read them instead through Butler not as a ‘possession, but […]

as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another or, indeed, by virtue of

another’.58 Sexuality as a way of being ‘by virtue of another’ is articulated through

the relationship between Nathalie and Catherine’s verbal and spatial transplanting of

desire and subjectivity. In the dressing room at the back of the bar – a women-only

space to which Catherine gradually gains more legitimate access – Catherine and

Nathalie are constantly framed and re-framed by their doubles in the mirrors situated

around the room (see Figure 2.8).59

56 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 90. 57 See also The Clouds of Sils Maria (Assayas, 2014), in which the actress Maria Engers (Juliette Binoche) is asked to play the role of the older of two women engaged in a destructive lesbian affair in the revival of a play in which she made her name as the younger of the two. While the film gestures to angst of Margot Channing (Bette Davis) in All About Eve, what produces its potent homoeroticism is not the lesbian action of the play, which we never witness, but the rehearsals of it in which Maria reads her lines with her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart). Here it is their impersonations of roles they have played and will play on and off the stage that build up the erotic tension. 58 Butler, Undoing Gender (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), p. 19. Original emphasis. This dispossession is another kind of ‘self-shattering’, which is the subject of the conversation between Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips in their book Intimacies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Butler’s essay ‘Beside Oneself’ speaks of the limits of the sexual autonomy that is actually evoked by the individualism of Bersani’s model of sexuality’s self-shattering processes, glossed by Phillips as ‘the individual’s self-cure for his own plausibility’. See Intimacies, p. 93. 59 Sophie Belot reads Catherine’s inhabitation of this space as evidence that she is ‘assum[ing] the position of a man’. See ‘Nathalie…: An Alternative Enunciative Position in Popular French Cinema’, New Readings, 8 (2007), <http://ojs.cf.ac.uk/index.php/newreadings/article/view/22> [accessed 25 November 2015].

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Figure 2.8. Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) recalls her sexual encounter with the husband of Catherine (Fanny Ardant) in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003).

As the women actively inhabit the room, Nathalie tells in graphic detail the story of

her first sexual encounter with Bernard. Not only do the women’s spatial positions

change, but their reflections also confuse and distort their singularity. Instead of

replacing or sublimating the heterosexual gaze as in scenes between Catherine and

Bernard, these movements exacerbate or accentuate the intensity of the homoerotic

gaze. Nathalie’s recreations of her (fictional) sexual encounters with Bernard create

an erotic of recollection in spite of a distancing from sexual activity. Catherine’s

scheming arrangement with Nathalie is ostensibly designed in order to reignite her

relationship with Bernard. Yet he remains visually sidelined. Nathalie’s recollection

is pivotal, but even more so is the fact that these events are only recollected in

dialogue with Catherine. The encounters are necessitated by Catherine, without

whom they would have no reason to occur. Even Nathalie’s name, her

characterisation and her fabricated occupation are all constituted by Catherine’s

wilful imagination. Fontaine describes this genesis as a ‘rebaptism’ and a ‘creation

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of the character’ of Nathalie.60 The French word that Fontaine uses is ‘personage’,

which can be translated not only as person or character, but also figure. Just as we

are asked to consider when watching Persona whether Alma’s persona is created

prior to or through her engagements with Elisabet, so too in Nathalie… we are asked

to both construct and disintegrate the persona and its singularity.61 The multiple

translations of Fontaine’s ‘personage’ pinpoint the way in which Catherine

effectively creates a figure who can figure, or bring into representation, her own

desire.

In both Nathalie… and Chloe, the climax of the narrative occurs when we

discover that the alleged sexual encounters between Nathalie/Chloe and

Bernard/David have never actually taken place, that they are strangers to one

another. Each film discloses this fiction very differently. Chloe’s general advance of

visibility exposes a particularised mode of desire for authenticity on the part of the

eponymous character, who insists that her romance with Catherine is “so, so real”. In

Nathalie…, however, there are clues that disrupt any such bid for authenticity: “I

fake it – it’s my job”, Nathalie says to Catherine of the necessary duplicity of her

role in Catherine’s fantasy and beyond it. If sexual climax is something that can be

faked through professional repetition, then sexual fantasy can be too.62 “Faking it” is

part of Nathalie’s adoption of another person’s identification. Through this doubly

layered identification, the two women are merged in their shared ownership of desire

60 ‘Nathalie… Interview: Anne Fontaine’, CinéArt, (2011), <http://www.cineart.be/fr/movie/nathalie.aspx> [accessed 6 August 2015]. In the original interview in French, Fontaine says that ‘elle fait une sorte de “casting” dans un état de demi conscience, puis elle va rebaptiser Marlène et créer le personage de Nathalie’ (my translation above). 61 A poster for Persona, in which Alma and Elisabet form two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, is actually too dichotomous for a film whose characters undergo a visual process of merging, making it a precursor to the coarser replication achieved by digital editing in Mulholland Drive. 62 Jagose writes that, ‘[a]s a critical figure, fake orgasm brings to visibility the presumptions that underpin claims to the transformative capacities or potentials of some sex acts, some amatory transactional relations or erotic spaces but not others. It therefore acts as a useful reminder that the critical value accorded to certain sex acts is often in the service of systems of discrimination more ideological than erotic.’ See Orgasmology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 178.

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for one man. Catherine’s desire for Bernard, and her growing desire for Nathalie, are

acted out in auto-erotic fantasy. Because Nathalie and Bernard’s encounters are not

shown on screen, the focus must be on the space of the telling. In the dressing room

scene, Catherine is reincarnated as a reflection in the mirror and as the fantasised

object of Nathalie’s recollected sexual encounters. If the ‘boundary between self and

ideal […] produces an endless source of fascination’, as in Stacey’s formulation,

Nathalie… simultaneously fictionalises and articulates a desire that holds that

boundary within it.63 The reflections that expose the cyclical imitations that the

women take on by and for one another also expose the inherently imitative structure

of the image itself.

Drawing on Butler’s discussion of repetition to explore the negotiations of

impersonation in the film Gattaca (Niccol, 1997), Stacey suggests that

‘impersonation requires the repetition of duplicity’, and asks whether Gattaca makes

‘visible the internal contradictions of identity that will lead to its ultimate failure?’64

It is also these ‘internal contradictions’ that generate the potential for the queer

inhabitation of multiple sites of identification. The eponymous protagonist of

Nathalie… represents both the impersonation of someone else’s fantasy and a

fantasy of impersonation itself: she is what Catherine would like to be, just as

Bernard is what Catherine would like to be. Because the impersonation is not

visually rendered, we are allowed to imagine that Catherine might play both roles.

Thus Nathalie… plays on a spectacle of the image as impersonation. It disrupts the

way in which de Lauretis sees this spectacular potential enacted in a film like She

Must Be Seeing Things. De Lauretis writes that it is the ‘performance and reversal of

63 Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 173. 64 Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene, p. 128. Stacey draws on Butler’s essay ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. by Diane Fuss (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 13-31.

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sexual roles as a means of taking up and signalling the position of desiring subject,

that reframe these scenes – much as the film-within-the-film does – as a lesbian

fantasy’.65 Nathalie… refuses to allow for any singular ‘position of desiring subject’.

The desire for desire is found on the part of all of the characters. Desire is the object

of the film’s narrative, but is only made available through impersonations that undo

the subjectivity of that supposed desiring subject.66

Nathalie… suggests not just a single reversal of sexual roles, but a series of

reversals. This model of same-sex desire speaks again to Stacey’s reading of

Gattaca, this time through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: the film’s ‘genetic

impersonations figure’, Stacey writes, ‘multiple chains of vicariation that disrupt the

singularity of gender and sexuality and the authenticity of its embodied form’.67 In

Gattaca, we are presented with what we might see as a conventional love triangle:

Irene (Uma Thurman) is the woman who triangulates the homoeroticism between the

film’s male protagonists, Vincent (Ethan Hawke) and Jerome (Jude Law).68 But

although Irene ‘might be understood as a heterosexual object of desire’, her ‘role is

inextricable from the intimacy between Vincent and Jerome – an intimacy that is

itself founded on a desire to become the other’.69 What is important here is, firstly,

that heterosexuality is not the automatic obstacle to homoerotic desire but potentially

its unexpected source; and, secondly, that the disentanglement of heterosexual

65 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 103. 66 More recently, de Lauretis has analysed the way in which such processes of identification contribute to the thriller’s demands. She writes that in Basic Instinct, ‘female homosexuality – represented as narcissistic identification with a female ego-ideal – and paranoid psychosis, both of which can be equally predicated of Catherine and Beth, constitute them as doubles of each other and make them effectively partners in crime’. See Freud’s Drive, p. 32. 67 Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene, p. 133. Sedgwick explores ‘vicariated desire’ in Epistemology of the Closet, p. 157. 68 In the science fiction realm of Gattaca, Vincent, a genetically inferior “in-valid”, dreams of flying spacecraft; to do so, he must impersonate a “valid”, and so he initiates a genetic transaction with the wheelchair-bound but genetically superior Jerome. 69 Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene, p. 133. This is a queer (via heterosexual) rendition of the triangulation that White reads into Rebecca, discussed at length in Chapter One, and is itself a ‘condition of representability’. See White, Uninvited, p. 67.

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presumption from hetero-social interrelations ‘figures’, to use Stacey’s above term

again, a divergent eroticism. We might argue that it is the equivalent substitutions

that emerge from Catherine and Nathalie’s non-literalised erotic explorations that

queer the ‘singularity, intentionality and directionality’ of desire.70 Chloe’s direct

depiction of lesbian sex reinforces, on the other hand, the very intentionality that the

original film disavows.

Spatialising the Unspoken

It is what remains untouched, unsaid, between Catherine and Nathalie that presents a

queer affective register of desire in Nathalie…. In one scene, the women dance

together in a busy nightclub. They face one another and then simultaneously throw

their heads back, exposing their necks and opening their bodies. The voyeuristic

gaze we must occupy as spectators matches the earlier statement of Catherine’s own

voyeurism on her first visit to the bar in which Nathalie works: she sits on a seat

looking out at the bar, a mirror behind her, and in a close-up from her point of view

we see the arched-backed bodies of sex workers standing at the bar, the camera

contemplating their bare necks (see Figures 2.9 and 2.10).

Figure 2.9. An unnamed ‘hôtesse du bar’ (Prudence Maïdou) laughs as the ‘patronne du bar’ (Évelyne Dandry) serves in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003).

Figure 2.10. Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) and Catherine (Fanny Ardant) dance in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003).

70 Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene, p. 134.

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The repetition of this pose in Catherine and Nathalie’s dancing scene reminds

us, through a recollective visual grammar, both of the foundational eroticism of the

bar, in which the women’s poses are professionally seductive, and also of

Catherine’s gradual initiation into Nathalie’s world. It is this world, far removed

from domesticity, that becomes the foremost space of the film (in Chloe, on the other

hand, the domestic realm remains necessarily dominant in order to shore up the

pathologising demands of the thriller). One of the most intimate scenes in Nathalie…

occurs between Catherine and Nathalie in a taxi on the way home from this night of

dancing. Catherine puts her head on Nathalie’s shoulder and closes her eyes. If we

view this scene with what has been called the ‘future anterior’ – in this case the

anticipatory mode of the future remake – we notice that the remake’s almost

identical shot-for-shot and word-for-word replication of this taxi ride occurs not after

dancing, but after the lesbian sex scene that is missing from the first film.71 With this

anticipation of the ‘future anterior’, we might recast the taxi scene in Nathalie… as

even more intensely erotic, and the dancing scene as one that incorporates the

potential and expectation of its future replacement, the sexual act.

The nightclub scene, followed by a quiet and understated moment of

intimacy in the taxi, puts forward these liminal spaces in counterpoint to the stasis of

the home-based settings. In the women’s final meeting before the deception is

revealed, a climax of emotional intensity sees Catherine and Nathalie caress each

other in the doorway of the apartment that Catherine has rented for Nathalie. From

the taxi, to the bar with its ephemeral sets of clients, to the doorway threshold of a

71 This notion of the ‘future anterior’ (following the French futur antérior) or the ‘future perfect’ (the English grammatical term) is discussed in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). It is also taken up in Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) and Lily Cho, ‘Future Perfect Loss: Richard Fung’s Sea in the Blood’, Screen, 49:4 (2008), 426-39.

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rented bedroom, Nathalie…’s potential erotic spaces are those of transience: neither

inside nor outside but in-between. These spaces are queer not just because they are

homosocial, but also because they reside on the verge of – but are not quite part of –

heterosexual space.72 In de Lauretis’s reading of She Must Be Seeing Things, that

film’s two characters enact for the spectator ‘the function of the “threshold” between

viewing and fantasy, spectator and image, seeing and being seen’.73 In spite of the

absence of the visualisation of lesbian desire through sexual acts, the threshold space

functions cinematically as a queer space of desire.

In Chloe, the women’s desires are made manifest in spaces already

heterosexualised by husbands and clients – the hotel where Chloe works, Catherine

and David’s home. In Nathalie…, Catherine and Bernard’s home is set up as

complicit in their dishonesty. The first shot of Catherine and Bernard after her

discovery of the revealing voicemail reflects them each twice in the encircling

mirrors of their bathroom: they are both literally duplicitous (see Figure 2.11).

Figure 2.11. The duplicity of Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) is exposed to Catherine (Fanny Ardant) in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003).

72 We could read this as a ‘heterotopia’, a ‘kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites […] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’. See Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, trans. by Jay Miskowiec, 16:1 (1986), 22-27 (p. 24). Foucault reads the mirror as such a space: ‘absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal’. Ibid. 73 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 99.

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As they then move to the bed for Catherine to confront Bernard about his

infidelity, we finally see them unmediated by glass or mirror. Yet they do not look at

each other: the shot sees them side by side looking out vacantly. The point at which

they are forced onto the screen without the dissipation of the mirror is a point of

rupture as they are compelled to face up to each other’s non-reflected image, and

Catherine asks: “were you with her last night?” The mirror thus acts as a vehicle of

denial in this domestic space, framing the façade of their contentment in another

layer of fiction.

The marital home is off limits, however, for Catherine and Nathalie’s

coupling: Nathalie never enters Catherine and Bernard’s home, and Catherine is

rarely seen there once she has met Nathalie. The one scene in which Catherine and

Nathalie do share the traditionalised space of the family home is at the house of

Catherine’s mother. Having been called on to help restyle Catherine’s mother’s hair,

Nathalie is then invited to linger in this homosocial space and she ends up staying

the night, sleeping in Catherine’s childhood bed. Catherine enters the room to say

goodnight in a shot that replicates her first entry into the bar to preempt her first

meeting with Nathalie.

In the earlier shot (see Figure 2.12), Catherine emerges from behind a curtain

into the bar that she has twice passed – but until now ignored – on the route that has

been staked out to symbolise her transition from work to home. The curtain, red and

lined with neon beads, acts as a buffer between two worlds: a threshold of public

versus private space that mimics the division between personal and professional. The

colour red is then carried through every scene between Catherine and Nathalie. In

the later shot (see Figure 2.13), Catherine again appears through curtains, yet this

time she is the one introducing the erotic into an otherwise conventional family

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room, that which she inhabited as a child. The thread of eroticism from that earlier

bar to this childhood bedroom is borne in the form of colour: flashes of red in

furniture, clothes and a shared lipstick are all reminiscent of the memorable red

décor of the bar.

Figure 2.12. Catherine (Fanny Ardant) enters the bar in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003).

Figure 2.13. Catherine (Fanny Ardant) enters her childhood bedroom in Nathalie… (Fontaine, 2003).

The generic mode of Chloe gestures to the protagonists of films like Basic

Instinct and Fatal Attraction who are drawn by the desperation of their own

domestic situations to allow themselves to be seduced by the inevitably murderous

woman whose sexuality presents her ultimate threat. In the scene before Catherine

and Chloe’s sexual consummation, the film highlights this theme of domestic

disturbance by situating Catherine and David in the bar of a concert hall as they

congratulate themselves on the talent of their son, who has just played a solo piano

recital. Provoked by David’s overfriendly greeting of a female student, Catherine

hastily makes her way in a taxi to the hotel in which her meetings with Chloe began

and the entrance of which we have watched her look down on from her affluent

office.74 The scene in the hotel room reproduces the climax of an erotic thriller. As

74 Class and professional differences in both films accentuate the instabilities in the power relations between Catherine and Chloe. If Catherine embodies the maternal role, her literal status, high up in a private doctor’s office from which she surveils Chloe at work between hotel and taxi, only exacerbates a fact that is troubled in the first film but not in the second: while this transaction is for Catherine one of potential desire, it is for Chloe primarily financial.

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they sit together on the bed in the warm glow of the hotel room light, Catherine

stares into the cracked and tarnished mirror (see Figure 2.14), whose murkiness cites,

but distorts, earlier mirror images of her dressing room table (in a pose that Chloe

will later mimic in anticipation of a reverse-Oedipal scenario: having sex with the

son of her lover and would-be lover in their bed).

Figure 2.14. Catherine (Julianne Moore) addresses her ambivalent desire for Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) in Chloe (Egoyan, 2009).

The hotel room sex scene, which emphasises Catherine’s ambivalence

regarding Chloe’s demonstrative desire, shows not a radical embrace of lesbianism

unfounded in the earlier film, but rather a now clichéd move to utilise lesbianism in

order to propel the otherwise straight female character forwards in her journey of

self-discovery.75 The climax of Chloe occurs in Catherine and David’s marital home,

arguably the film’s most significant location. The abundance of windows and

mirrors remains a visual motif that in Nathalie… evokes the mediated relationship

between Bernard and Catherine, and in Chloe literally precipitates Chloe’s demise.76

The house in the latter film is architecturally majestic and dominant in its quaint

75 Black Swan is just one example of this trope. Others include, in varying degrees and in a range of genres, Kissing Jessica Stein (Herman-Wurmfeld, 2001), The Children’s Hour (Wyler, 1961) and Personal Best. 76 Glass and mirrors are key features of the film noir in which, as I explored in Chapter One, they come to represent the inherent duplicity of the femme fatale.

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residential context, with walls of glass both internally and externally that allow for

shots from Catherine’s point of view that look through two glass walls from the

bedroom into David’s study as he chats inappropriately with a student. In this way

Chloe sharpens the architectural lines of Nathalie… just as it sharpens the lines of

desire towards the explicit as bearer of the visible.

Wallace has explored the apartment as the ultimate lesbian space in film, one

which evades what she sees as the necessarily oppressive domesticity of the family

home. That home sublimates, she writes, ‘the erotic aspect of [any gay or straight]

relationship into a “major” system of social continuity and conformity’.77 Following

Wallace’s argument, we might suggest that Fontaine’s decision to segregate Nathalie

from the domestic realm effectively maintains the erotic tension that has been

allowed to build throughout the rest of the film. In contrast, the remake’s

introduction of Chloe’s character into the heterosexual home disturbs it but also

sublimates the erotic relationship between the two women. This domestic

disturbance is a theme that has commonly generated anxiety in genres from the

thriller to the melodrama. Often associated with this trope, Moore’s screen presence

in films from Safe (Haynes, 1995) and Far From Heaven (Haynes, 2002) to The

Hours (Daldry, 2002) and The Kids Are All Right has evoked a domestic maternal

promise that fails to provide what we want from it and from her: reassuring

(familial) familiarity.78 Far From Heaven looks back to a melodramatic aesthetic in

which the home has a heavy presence; indeed, key to the family melodrama,

according to Thomas Elsaesser, is the ‘function of the décor and the symbolisation of

77 Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, p. 131. 78 In her reading of The Hours, Pidduck writes that while the film evokes ‘the promise of marital comfort as projected across the screens of Anglo-American popular culture’, its ‘idealized mise-en-scène is marred by dissonances that herald ambivalence, disjuncture, even catastrophe’. See ‘The Times of The Hours: Queer Melodrama and the Dilemma of Marriage’, Camera Obscura, 28:1 (2013), 37-67 (p. 38).

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objects’, whose excessive dominance in the mise en scène takes on the significance

of domestic oppression.79 In The Kids Are All Right, on the other hand, we see how a

trajectory towards the domestication of lesbianism via adoption rights, equal

marriage and the wider acceptance of “new” forms of family brings lesbianism into

the home, but never unproblematically.80

As if to capture these contemporary anxieties, the home itself becomes, in

Chloe, a site of lesbian demise, as Chloe falls through a window of the house

following a final embrace with Catherine. Rather than the de-eroticisation of the

lesbian relationship that Wallace argues is the home’s modus operandi, what we

observe here is the forcing of lesbianism into conformity because the primary lesbian

subject (Chloe, the initiator) is killed off by the home itself.81 This act does not only

allow for the continuity of the film’s heterosexual relationship; it also reintroduces a

relationship that had already begun to break down. Early on in the film, a party scene

shows Catherine arguing with her son and lamenting the absence of her adulterous

husband. In a final party scene that echoes the earlier one, the three characters,

mother, father and son, share a sequence of close-up looks of complicity, creating a

visual unity reminiscent of the idealised image of family reunion literalised in a

79 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. by Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), pp. 43-69 (p. 61). 80 See also Concussion, which explores anxieties surrounding the aftermath of this domestic acceptance: what happens when lesbian desires are taken out of the home. Other films that explore the theme of family include Producing Adults (Salmenperä, 2004) and in the comic mode, The Perfect Family (Renton, 2011). For more on the cinema’s relationship to the family, see Murray Pomerance, ed., A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home (London and New York, NY: Wallflower Press, 2008). 81 Here the film again reveals a Hitchcockian subtext. John Fletcher writes about the way in which Rebecca’s exhibition of ‘the female gothic’ hinges on a structuring ‘intrusion into a space which has been the scene of a desiring and/or murderous action in the past’. See ‘Primal Scenes and the Female Gothic: Rebecca and Gaslight’, Screen, 36:4 (1995), 341-70 (p. 344). The home in Chloe itself takes on this Gothic sensibility not only through Chloe’s climactic death but also through that death’s continual foreshadowing – for instance, through the glass that will ultimately kill her. It is this suspenseful effect that also generates the pleasurable thrill of the genre, what Catherine Spooner argues is the Gothic’s intrinsic concern: ‘the production of pleasurable fear’. See Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 30. See also the film The Duke of Burgundy, in which the house takes on a monumental presence in the sadomasochistic relationship between two women.

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picture postcard at the end of Fatal Attraction. Chloe’s demise, like Alex’s in that

earlier film, has brought around the reinstitution of heterosexuality (though not

without visual hints of lingering disturbance in the form of the hairslide).82 Each film

negotiates the space of domesticity, rejecting it as in Nathalie… to create female

homosocial spaces, or embracing and foregrounding it as in Chloe to reassert

heterosexual dominance.

In Nathalie…, the protagonist’s stories of her fabricated sexual encounters

with Catherine’s husband are fictions both visually and narratively: the encounters

between her fantasised alter ego and Bernard are only projected – to Catherine and to

the film’s audience – by her verbal narrations of them. Catherine fabricates a name

and an occupation, and chooses clothes and accommodation, for Nathalie, a

character with whom she can experience desire for her husband through a play on

the other woman’s sameness to herself. Together, Catherine and Nathalie create and

occupy a space of queer recollective eroticism that is premised on, but not inhabited

by, the man. In Chloe, that potentially homoerotic space is immediately precluded by

the visual reiteration of Chloe’s (otherwise fabricated) sexual encounters with David.

“I can become your living, breathing, unflinching dream…and then I can actually

disappear”, says Chloe in her opening voiceover. This potential for simple

disappearance is precisely what is at stake in the overt signification of Chloe’s erotic

situations as unambiguously erotic. The problem with Chloe’s updating of

Nathalie…, in the wake of an unprecedented increase in lesbian visibility on screen

between 2003 and 2009, is that it hinges on a need for visibility to work in relation to

82 In her second paper on the film, Handyside also picks up on this feature, writing that ‘Egoyan’s Chloe offers a similar play of “popular” and “auteurist” elements, allowing us to unpick the film’s final image – of Julianne Moore’s hair in a loose bun, held by a clip borrowed from the eponymous, now dead Chloe, as a reference to Vertigo’. See ‘Rethinking Authorship: Re-Reading Egoyan via Hitchcock’, unpublished conference paper presented at ‘Film-Philosophy’ (King’s College, London: 2012). Catherine’s identification still morbidly remains as image even beyond the death of the object of that identification.

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the invisible. Chloe is not only graphically but also generically less ambiguous. It

depends on the capacity for the revelation of lesbian sex to act as a twist. Surprise is

a generic inevitability that is premised on the predictability of invisibility (we will

only be surprised if we never saw it coming).

Chloe sharpens the visual evidence of desires that remain at the level of

affect and suggestion in Nathalie.... What lingers as affective potential will be

explored in Chapter Four. Chloe fixes desire in the language of “the sex scene”,

falsely leading us to assume that what we are witnessing in the move from original to

remake is a linear progression from the invisible to the visible.83 If it is desire that is

lost in the move to make sex the visible object of sexuality’s visualisation, this lost

desire has been rendered already queerly ambiguous in Nathalie…. It is formed not

only through heterosexual acts, but also through homoerotic gazes and a queer

spatialisation of desire. In the chapters that follow, I will continue to observe the

triangulations that trouble our conceptions of the singularity of lesbian desire. In

Nathalie…, desire is revealed to hold within it the complexities of identification,

impersonation and vicariation. The image of desire is moreover revealed by the mise

en abîme to be itself an imitation, a fantasy. In the next chapter, I explore the

fantasies of desire that paint the singular figuration of sexuality as identity as always

“elsewhere”. As in Nathalie…, it is the threshold spaces of Circumstance that are

cinematically rendered as spaces of queer desire. This chapter has instituted my use

of queer as a way of thinking outside of the dominant paradigm of sex as evidence of

sexuality and eroticism. I have mobilised queer as an elaboration of lesbianism that

troubles generic figurations. In the following three chapters I suggest that precisely

83 The intensified prestige of “the sex scene” will be discussed at length in Chapter Five, with reference to Merck’s arguments about the evidencing of ‘lesbian experience’ in Perversions, p. 167.

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this elaboration is produced by the films discussed as a symptom of their generic

indeterminacy.

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Chapter Three

Fantasies of the Elsewhere:

Circumstance and the Desire for Identity

The scene in Circumstance that has become the most frequently cited ambassador

for the film’s blend of youthful frivolity, political commentary and uncompromising

drama is the one in which four young Iranians dub into Persian the gay rights biopic

Milk (van Sant, 2008) in a screening room at the back of an underground Tehranian

video store. At the heart of Circumstance’s ultimately tragic narrative, layers of

comic incongruity unfold in the form of a bid to produce the dubbed Milk as a black

market double bill with the Sex and the City movie (King, 2008). As the camera pans

hesitantly left and right across three awkward faces staring beyond the frame at the

sexual images whose sound effects they must translate, several fantasies overlap in

an encapsulation of the queer world the film creates: of escape to the utopian

America of the films they dub; of the radical potential (and humorous

incompatibility) of the sexualities available through those two contrasting films; and

of the film’s own profession of cultural identity beyond the diegesis.

Circumstance was directed by Maryam Keshavarz, a diasporan American-

Iranian graduate of NYU. It was filmed in Beirut as stand-in for Tehran and co-

produced by France, USA and Iran. The dubbing scene gestures to the world beyond

Tehran, creating the fantasy of a universal space linking nation-states via the illusory

and contradictory sexual politics of American film. Rich’s account of the ‘explosion

of lesbian filmmaking’ at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival uses the scene in order to

exemplify the film’s expression of a ‘desire to be somewhere else’.1 For White,

1 Rich, ‘Park City Remix’, Film Quarterly, 64:3 (2011), 62-65 (p. 63).

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whose chapter on Circumstance also begins with this evidently irresistible scene, it

‘functions as a canny commentary on the film’s own positioning within global

cinema networks’.2 White’s chapter focuses on these feminist circuits and the film’s

positionality as a diasporan product of cross-cultural contemporary lesbian

possibilities. Her argument draws on the film’s tagline, whose humanist message

announces that ‘freedom is a human right’.3 In dialogue with White’s reading of the

film, this chapter explores how Circumstance simultaneously epitomises and ironises

the desire for sexual identity as liberation and asks: how does the film construct this

desire as fantasy through the negotiations of private and public space?

In Chapter Two, I argued that fantasy in Nathalie… offers lesbian potential

through heterosexual disruption and vicarious desire, disturbing a ubiquitous hunger

for visibility as stand-in for political progress. I used the work of Stacey and de

Lauretis to foreground those processes of identification that are yielded even within

what we think of as fixed or incontestable identities.4 In this chapter, I explore the

desire for identity, analysing the ways in which cinematic constructions of fantasy

provide hopeful sites of selfhood in the face of identity’s seeming impossibility. In

particular, I consider how the space of the city in Circumstance strikes against the

perceived monolithic oppression of the home and institutes a fantasy of urban

freedom through its role as shorthand for transnational identity. Anthony Vidler

writes that ‘[s]pace, in contemporary discourse, as in lived experience, has taken on

an almost palpable existence. Its contours, boundaries, and geographies are called

2 White, ‘Changing Circumstances: Global Flows of Lesbian Cinema’, in World Cinemas / Global Networks, ed. by Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming), no page numbers. 3 See ‘Circumstance’, Take Part, (2011), <http://www.takepart.com/circumstance> [accessed 22 July 2015]. 4 In particular, see de Lauretis, The Practice of Love and Stacey, Star Gazing.

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upon to stand in for all the contested realms of identity.’5 The physical spaces in

Circumstance are rivalled by fantasy spaces that palpably generate the freedom

promised by the film’s tag line. Circumstance projects a desire for urban space to

bear the utopian possibility of a sexual and political liberation ostensibly evidenced

in Milk and Sex and the City.6

Set in a contemporary Tehran under the presidency of Mahmoud

Ahmadinejad, Circumstance follows two teenage girls, Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri)

and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy), whose rebellion against the oppressive authority of the

morality police begins with drug taking and underground partying and culminates in

a love affair.7 Atafeh comes from a wealthy liberal family and occupies the familial

domestic space in T-shirts watching American television programmes; her father

Firouz (Soheil Parsa) longs for the “one day” when his wife Azar (Nasrin Pakkho)

and daughter can shed the hijab to join him in the water at the seaside. Shireen is the

orphaned daughter of political rebels with no backstory, brought up by an uncle

(Fariborz Daftari) who is unnamed, barely glimpsed and reduced to his insistence on

the arranged marriage that provokes the film’s unambiguous stance against gender 5 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 167. Vidler’s book draws on film and literature to diagnose the ways in which particular configurations of space create a mood of the uncanny, of alienation from that which has before seemed homely (one example for instance is the suburb in Blue Velvet). 6 Milk tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in the United States who, through his seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was responsible for instituting landmark gay rights legislation in the city. Milk was assassinated by a fellow board member in 1978. Described by Nicolas Rapold as ‘eerily of the moment’, Milk was released amid political tensions surrounding Proposition 8, which would revoke equal marriage rights; its storyline follows the defeat of the comparable Proposition 6. See ‘Come with Us’, Sight and Sound, n.s., 19:2 (February 2009), 28-30 (p. 30). With more feature film sequels still anticipated over ten years following its 1998-2004 run on HBO television, Sex and the City remains a landmark text about female friendship, relationships and sex. The introduction to an essay collection on the series suggests that Sex and the City ‘charts a redefinition of the modern woman who chooses to remain unmarried, while offering new representational forms of female empowerment and sexuality’. See Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, ‘Introduction: Welcome to the Age of Un-Innocence’, in Reading Sex and the City, ed. by Akass and McCabe (London and New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2004) (p. 9). 7 A 2014 article in The Guardian explores the role of the morality police in contemporary Tehran, which was seen to be particularly pervasive under Ahmadinejad’s rule but not completely eliminated even in the more ‘moderate’ administration of current president Hassan Rouhani. See ‘Iran’s Morality Police: Patrolling the Streets by Stealth’, The Guardian, (19 June 2014), <http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2014/jun/19/iran-morality-police-patrol> [accessed 1 August 2015].

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inequality. Desperate concession to the Iranian regime’s oppressive policies is

associated with Shireen’s situation. Progressive beliefs and modest rebellion are

affiliated with Atafeh’s bourgeois family, until Atafeh’s drug-addicted brother

Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai) returns as the prodigal son and brings with him new ties to

religion and the morality police. In opposition to a domestic arena that becomes

increasingly compromised by Mehran’s fanatical leanings, the city, with its illusions

of myriad opportunities, becomes the film’s stand-in for the ‘contested realms of

identity’ that market its universality as a romantic narrative that transcends borders.8

The girls’ romance is set against the competing spaces of domesticity and urbanity,

both of which commence as guarantors either of freedom or of oppression but are

ultimately found to be complex, contradictory and inconsistent.

In Circumstance, adolescence and queerness function, through space, as

purveyors and fulfillers of each other’s fantasies of identity. The spatialisation of

cultural idealisation is intensely evoked by the film’s narrative of adolescence in a

non-Western, Islamic state that nevertheless is premised upon a familiarity with or

desire for global queer and youth cultures. Sara Ahmed argues that queer is

‘oriented’ spatially as well as sexually.9 The supposed entry into queer life, coming

out, is a distinctly spatial act, linguistically conceived as a movement from one space

to another, although its implication of finitude disavows the necessary repetition of

multiple “outings”.10 However, Ahmed’s use of ‘“queer” as a way of describing

what is “oblique” or “off line”’ in fact promises to distort the linearity of coming

8 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 167. 9 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 161. 10 ‘Coming out’ signifies arrival even though ‘to come’ etymologically relates to motion. The verb’s usage here signifies instead the accomplishment of the movement, and the ‘coming out’ narrative points to the expectation of an endpoint at which the protagonist has come out. See Oxford English Dictionary Online (2015), <http://www.oed.com> [accessed 12 December 2015].

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out’s spatial and temporal movement.11 Ahmed also describes ‘the presence of

bodies of color in white spaces as disorienting: the proximity of such bodies out of

place can work to make things seem “out of line,” and can hence even work to

“queer” space’.12 Circumstance was written in English before being translated into

Persian. Its North American actors and actresses were taught to speak authentically

by a dialect coach. As White explores fully in her chapter, Circumstance was

designed for a Western audience.13 Against the whitewashing of queer history and a

complicated relationship for queers of colour to North American mainstream

cinema’s structures of visibility, Circumstance troubles diasporic disorientations,

making both spaces seem “out of line” and therefore potentially queer in this sense

through radical orientations reaching across space.14

A second meaning of queer also orients it spatially, in the form of residence

‘in a world’: Ahmed uses the term to describe those ‘specific sexual practices’ that,

for her, intrinsically involve ‘a personal and social commitment to living in an

oblique world, or in a world that has an oblique angle in relation to that which is

11 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 161. 12 Ibid. Ahmed’s reading of the disorienting effect of bodies of colour on white regimes of spatialisation speaks interestingly to the controversies surrounding the release of Stonewall (Emmerich, 2015). This film about the Stonewall riots has been criticised for “whitewashing” a historical moment in the gay liberation movement initiated not by a white gay man as in the film but by trans people of colour. See, for instance, Henry Barnes, ‘Stonewall Sparks Boycott Row after Claims Film “Whitewashes” Gay Struggle’, The Guardian, (7 August 2015), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/07/stonewall-boycott-claims-roland-emmerich-film-gay-whitewash-sylvia-rivera-marsha-p-johnson> [accessed 16 December 2015]. Love writes that ‘“[a]dvances” such as gay marriage and the increasing media visibility of well-heeled gays and lesbians threaten to obscure the continuing denigration and dismissal of queer existence. One may enter the mainstream on the condition that one breaks ties with all those who cannot make it.’ See Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 10. 13 White also suggests a comparison with another diasporan filmmaker, Deepa Mehta, whose film Fire (Mehta, 1996) provoked outrage in India for its depiction of lesbianism. 14 See, for instance, Jessie Daniels, ‘Black Lesbians: Visible, Not Pariahs’, GLQ, 19:2 (2013), 261-63; Kara Keeling and others, ‘Pariah and Black Independent Cinema Today: A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ, 21:2 (2015), 423-39; and Roya Rastegar, ‘Circumstance and Dangerous Elicitations of Truth’, Huffington Post, (2011), <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roya-rastegar/circumstance-and-dangerou_b_947489.html> [accessed 15 September 2014].

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given’.15 The spatialising of queer into particular spaces guaranteed to afford some

kind of sexual liberation is still, however, part of a fantasy of the potential for space

to readily invoke identity categories in their specificity.16 Set against the context of

an oppressive Iranian regime, Circumstance reveals this fantasy for what it is. The

film’s queer spaces are necessarily fantasised ones; only the cinema and the dream

can act as promissory creators of ‘worlds’ of non-normative inhabitation. In response

to what she calls a ‘fetish of the margins’, Suzanna Danuta Walters writes that queer

theory has risked dispersing ‘resistance away from the locatable and specific body of

the lesbian or the gay man and onto this more amorphous site of the “queer body”

(which may or may not be gay)’.17 While queer is routinely positioned in opposition

to the seeming specificity of identity politics and its communities, acts and relations,

Walters’s statement provokes the notion that both ‘bodies’ (specific gay or

amorphous queer) are in fact fantasies of an identity that is deemed to be locatable in

the ‘margins’.

What emerges here is the demand for queer to function both as an identity

spatialised through queer space, and as something marginal, between categories and

15 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 161. 16 Gayle Rubin famously points to the creation of queer urban spaces through migratory practices. She writes: ‘[d]issident sexuality is rare and more closely monitored in small towns and rural areas. Consequently, metropolitan life continually beckons to young perverts. Sexual migration creates concentrated pools of potential partners, friends, and associates.’ See ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. by Abelove, Barale and Halperin, pp. 3-44. Rich’s nostalgic recollection of pre-gentrification New York endorses Rubin’s suggestion. She recalls Times Square as the epicentre of New York’s status as a city that ‘was ours’. See New Queer Cinema, p. xviii. The film Times Square (Moyle, 1980) also invokes Times Square as sexual, queer and oppositional to the city establishment. The film’s antagonist is the commissioner who wants to clean up the area; the threat is that it will be taken away from its queer community through gentrification (as indeed happened there and in other metropolitan areas like London’s Soho). See for instance Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City (London: Penguin Books, 2012). 17 Suzanna Danuta Walters, ‘From Here to Queer: Radical Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Lesbian Menace (or, Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Fag?)’, Signs, 21:4 (1996), 830-69 (p. 840). See also Glen Elder, Lawrence Knopp and Heidi Nast, ‘Sexuality and Space’, in Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century, ed. by Gary Gaile and Cort Willmott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 200-08.

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verging on the indefinable.18 This paradoxical structure speaks to the dual

conceptualisation of adolescence first as a category upon which a familiar genre

depends (the teen film), and secondly as the in-between, even heterotopic time

period between childhood and adolescence. Circumstance accompanies a series of

urban films about adolescent sexuality in which spatial orientations become

metaphors for sexual orientations. On the poster for Pariah (Rees, 2011), in

competition at Sundance in the same year as Circumstance and paired with it by

Rich in her festival round-up, the image of a teenage girl, doubled in the reflection of

a bus window, resides next to a definition of her positioning as the film’s titular

subject: ‘PARIAH [puh-rahy-ur] noun 1. A person without status. 2. A rejected

member of society. 3. An outcast’ (see Figure 3.1).19 All Over Me (Sichel, 1997), a

precursor to Pariah’s depiction of an adolescent girl’s entry into the New York

lesbian scene, announces itself on its poster with the tag line: “In a world that

expects you to fit in, sometimes you just have to stand out” (see Figure 3.2). Claude

(Alison Folland), the main protagonist of All Over Me, is read by Susan Driver as a

teen ‘on the brink of self-discovery’.20 Adolescence here is both constitutive of that

inconstant ‘on the brink’ status but also anticipatory of the conclusive state of ‘self-

discovery’. For Circumstance, the choice of publicity image is particularly striking:

advertising a film whose urbanism is integral to its storyline and mode of address,

the beach setting of the poster announces the very fantasies of liminal space and of

other worlds that this chapter explores (see Figure 3.3). 18 This characterises for instance Halperin’s stance, in which he argues that ‘[t]he most radical reversal of homophobic discourses consists not in asserting, with the Gay Liberation Front of 1968, that “gay is good” […] but in assuming and empowering a marginal positionality’. See Saint Foucault, p. 61. 19 Rich, ‘Park City Remix’. 20 Susan Driver, ‘Girls Looking at Girls Looking for Girls: The Visual Pleasures and Social Empowerment of Queer Teen Romance Flicks’, in Youth Culture in Global Cinema, ed. by Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), pp. 241-55 (p. 249). Driver writes furthermore that queerness in such films is ‘portrayed as an active verb, a doing, a growing, and a maturing into agency’. See ‘Girls Looking at Girls’, p. 254.

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Figure 3.1. Alike (Adapero Oduye) on the theatrical release poster for Pariah (Rees, 2011).

Figure 3.2. Ellen (Tara Subkoff) and Claude (Alison Folland) on the poster for All Over Me (Sichel, 1997).

Figure 3.3. Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) at the beach on the poster for Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011).

At the thresholds of physical encounter, these films’ characters are both

within and without, their positioning mediated by reflective surfaces, dreamlike mise

en scène or handheld mobile camerawork. Catherine Driscoll writes that

‘adolescence defines the ideal coherence of the modern subject – individuality,

agency, and adult (genital) sexuality – while not necessarily ensuring its

achievement’.21 Adolescence occupies a paradoxical space of promise (individuality,

agency, sexuality) that also highlights the precarity of all of these forms as they exist

in what we think of as more reassuringly stable constructions of adult subjectivity.

However, if all identities are ‘never completed, never finished’ but rather ‘in

process’, then what I want to argue is not that adolescence is an inherently liminal

state (though that has been argued by others) but that adolescence has become a kind

21 Catherine Driscoll, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 53. For Alison Waller, this extends to a general anxiety about society’s ‘own infantilism’ which generates ‘attempts to fix adolescence as a separate state’. See Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), p. 1. It is the lack of assurance of achievement that will form the basis of my discussion of queer potential in Chapter Four.

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of metaphor for wider anxieties about the availability of identity to us.22 This

complex set of relations to identity and its mutability can be expressed here by

Lauren Berlant’s use of the word ‘elsewhere’ to describe, in a range of contexts, a

fantasised space or time clung to by our expectation, optimism or apprehension.23 If

identity’s completion in adulthood is the persistent “elsewhere” of adolescence,

Circumstance uses its adolescent protagonists to reveal the desire for an elsewhere

that offers public sexuality and protected domesticity, but only through a fantasy of

relocation to somewhere else.

Locating Outness

Queer comes in here as that which can and must speak against any kind of

monolithic idea of the relationship between sexuality and its singular identity

categorisation or orientation, whether sexual or political. The fantasy of a simple,

coherent idea of sexuality’s anchor in identity is what Circumstance both exposes

and endorses. For Sedgwick, queer should refer to ‘the open mesh of possibilities,

gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when

22 Stuart Hall, ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities’, in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. by Anthony King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 41-68 (p. 47). The introduction to Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s much-cited book on the bildungsroman is entitled ‘The Space Between’. See Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). The third part of Driscoll’s account of teen film is entitled ‘liminal teen film’, a title that suggests a mode at the very heart of the genre that is indefinable, between childhood and adolescence. See Teen Film: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Berg, 2011). Angus Gordon however argues that the ‘theoretical tendency to treat adolescence as the utopian site of a free-floating “liminal” exploration of myriad nonbinding identifications and desires’ is problematic because it masks ‘the extent to which heterosexuality is privileged in the discursive construction of adolescence’. See ‘Turning Back: Adolescence, Narrative, and Queer Theory’, GLQ, 5:1 (1999), 1-24 (p. 6). 23 Berlant writes, for instance, that desire ‘propels you toward an elsewhere that, you imagine, will offer you a fresh start, a new horizon of possibility and fewer economic impediments’. See ‘The Compulsion to Repeat Femininity’, in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. by Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 207-32 (p. 207). Implicit in these words is the notion that this desired elsewhere is perpetual, remaining always out of reach or somehow removed from the presently attainable. Most centrally to my argument here, Berlant writes with Michael Warner that ‘intimate life is the endlessly cited elsewhere of political public discourse, a promised haven’ or a ‘vision of the good life’. See ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry, 24:2 (1998), 547-66 (p. 553). Original emphasis.

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the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or

can’t be made) to signify monolithically’.24 Preceding Ahmed’s spatial queering of

orientation, many of the queer functions that Sedgwick outlines are spatial

metaphors (openings, gaps, overlaps). From the beginning of its use in scholarship,

queer has been spatially constituted, but there has been and continues to be a debate

over its constitution in particular spaces. As the screen representations and

theoretical conceptualisations of adolescence evince a liminal temporality that

nonetheless is assumed to look ahead to adulthood, it is hard to read theorisations of

queer’s amorphousness without observing, between the lines, the elsewhere sexuality

towards which it, too, projects.

Circumstance reveals these spatial moves to be inherently unstable. Where

do we find the ‘oblique world’ in which queer bodies are said to reside?25 Such

questions threaten to set up an oppositional relation between the urban space of

queer potential and the private domain of normativity (posed, for instance, as the

opposition between Western freedoms and Islamic moral restrictions). But even

intimacies which we presume to reside in the private sphere are mediated, according

to Berlant and Michael Warner, through social reproduction and capital

accumulation: all are conducted in a public sphere veiled as private through the

regimes of normative intimacy.26 Circumstance reveals the burdening presence of

the private and public realms – domesticity versus urbanity – to be precarious in

relation to the stabilising of the identity categories we suppose them to uphold or

reject. In Chapter Two, I explored a conflict surrounding the overflow of sexuality

into the domestic realm. In Circumstance, the narrative becomes sinister when

24 Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 8. Original emphasis. 25 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 161. 26 Berlant and Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, p. 553.

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eroticism and deviant sexualities find space within the domestic sphere.27 The

ultimate threat in fact arrives when the repeated passage with which the film begins

– “if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you be?” – is repeated both

within the home and outside of it. Like the films discussed by Gayatri Gopinath in

which ‘the heteronormative home […] unwittingly generates homoeroticism’, the

erotic potential of Atafeh and Shireen’s relationship in Circumstance begins in urban

fantasy but becomes threatening when it comes into contact with the domestic.28

The Tehran of Circumstance is a city that buzzes with colour, silliness,

adventure and the headiness of risk in the face of the constant threat of

criminalisation. The city visually embraces Atafeh and Shireen, as a montage

follows their outbreak from a grey-clad, almost prison-like, schoolyard. In one shot,

they blend into their surroundings as they pass in front of a sympathetically coloured

mural (see Figure 3.4).29 In contrast to the comparatively bland colour scheme of the

film’s interior shots, colour is produced by the urban setting as Atafeh and Shireen

dance through the city streets in quick edits that are timed to a pulsing hip hop beat.

While interior shots are slow and static (with an increasingly ascetic colour palette as

Mehran returns to the fold), the city is presented as visually and aurally playful. The

non-diegetic soundtrack that provides the exuberant pace of this montage links the

27 As I referenced in Chapter Two, Wallace insists that the home itself necessitates the closing down of sexuality, its sublimation into ‘a “major” system of social continuity and conformity’. See Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, p. 131. See also the tension between urban excitement and domestic boredom in Break My Fall (Wichmann, 2011). 28 Gopinath, Impossible Desires, p. 15. Berlant and Warner write of ‘border intimacies’ that ‘give people tremendous pleasure. But when that pleasure is called sexuality, the spillage of eroticism into everyday social life seems transgressive in a way that provokes normal aversion.’ See ‘Sex in Public’, p. 560. See also Amy Kaplan’s exploration of the relationship between domesticity and the nation in ‘Manifest Domesticity’, American Literature, 70:3 (1998), 581-606. 29 This neatly illustrates Grosz’s suggestion that ‘the city is made and made over into the simulacrum of the body, and the body, in its turn, is transformed, “citified,” urbanized as a distinctively metropolitan body’. See ‘Bodies-Cities’, in Sexuality and Space, ed. by Beatriz Colomina and others (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), pp. 241-53 (p. 242).

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city space directly to subcultural risk as the song that accompanies them along the

streets is then carried over and greets them diegetically at an underground party.

Figure 3.4. Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) dance through the streets of Tehran in Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011).

The visual seeds of Atafeh and Shireen’s relationship are planted in the city

streets of a turbulent Tehran although, while the party offers the potential for sexual

experimentation, it is unquestioningly heterosexual. The presumptuous pairing of

Shireen with a strange boy in a side room creates a literal closet space of shame:

neither party is interested, and the boy, Hossein (Sina Amedson), is later revealed to

be gay when he instigates the dubbing of Milk. The hope for the security of Atafeh

and Shireen’s relationship is figured not in this literal closet, nor in the

(hetero)sexualised margins of the party, but in the elsewhere that queer sexuality

promises in the form of (literal or metaphorical) transnational escape. Queer

sexuality is promised as outness via national difference.30 Circumstance’s tag line

reads: “freedom is a human right”. We might imagine its subtext: “freedom is a 30 Butler emphasises the fact that, as long as ‘outness’ is ‘affirmed’, these ‘same notions must become subject to a critique of the exclusionary operations of their own production: for whom is outness an historically available and affordable option?’ See ‘Critically Queer’, p. 19. For another account of homosexuality’s necessary relation to the private sphere for reasons of security and safety, see Jeffrey Escoffier, ‘Sexual Revolution and the Politics of Gay Identity’, Socialist Review, 15:4-5 (1985), 119-53.

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human right in some places but not in others”.31 The dream sequences that construct

the world of which Atafeh and Shireen dream might be set in Dubai, the immediate

focus of their escape, but are stylised in the form of the American culture that

infiltrates the film from all sides. If, as Robin Cohen argues, typical taxonomies of

diaspora include a recurring devotion to an ideal of the homeland, this functions as a

reverse devotion in which the new (home)land (Keshavarz’s USA) is that which is

idealised through fantasy.32 Yet it is not only the elsewhere that is hopefully

idealised. The film plays with the complications of presenting Tehran as an enabling

space of non-normative sexuality: the urban montage is expectant but cannot be

sustained. The spaces of projection that Circumstance constructs are akin to the

‘entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying

examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies’ that construct,

in Berlant and Warner’s words, the ‘queer world’.33 The oppression of Tehran is

compensated for by citational fantasy, metaphorising the desire for out (read: public)

sexuality to be always elsewhere.34

Veiling and Surveiling

A crucial turning point in Circumstance’s narrative is when an unexplained and

sporadic aesthetic mode of surveillance is accounted for: the flattened and distorted 31 The Human Rights discourse that accompanies this ideological positioning problematically assumes the constitution of ‘the human’. For the discussion of the problem of global humanism as premised upon capitalism, see, for instance, Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2007). 32 Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), p. 180. Hamid Naficy’s emphasis is instead on the interstitiality of the diasporic body in An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 35. 33 Berlant and Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, p. 558. Gopinath writes that, ‘[r]ather than evoking an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history, what is remembered through queer diasporic desire and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place riven with contradictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles’. See Impossible Desires, p. 4. 34 Sedgwick writes that the ‘seemingly unambivalent public siting’ of coming out ‘can be counterposed as a salvational epistemological certainty against the very equivocal privacy afforded by the closet’, so we might say that the future promise of outness depends on, but dilutes, the spatial elsewhere-ness of closetedness. See Epistemology of the Closet, p. 71.

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shots that have randomly appeared throughout the film are proved to be, in fact,

actual CCTV. Mehran is seen to be sitting at his desk watching footage of multiple

rooms in the home. Doreen Massey writes that the home is not the imagined space of

‘security of a (false, as we have seen) stability and an apparently reassuring

boundedness’.35 The film’s repeatedly mediated aesthetic turns the home into a space

of public surveillance, leaving us pondering the question of just how many spaces

have actually been under Mehran’s watchful eye. Re-working the domestic

melodrama, the mysterious shots that are explained by Circumstance’s CCTV plot

give the domestic space itself a kind of paranoia, while the ambiguous extension of

this surveillance reveals even public freedom to be precarious.36 As D. N. Rodowick

writes of melodrama’s aesthetic, it does ‘not so much reproduce as produce the inner

turmoil of the characters’.37 The distorted CCTV images cause confusion when they

appear to have captured not only the family home but also supposedly public spaces

like the dubbing room. The private is made semi-public and the public is made

sinisterly accessible in Mehran’s voyeuristically-enabled illusion of privacy. They

produce a blurring of the lines between public and private that also distort our

perception of Atafeh and Shireen’s sexualities as “out”. This is not the hopeful

outness projected onto American film (Milk) or fantasy of escape but a controlled

publicity forced by patriarchal surveillance.

35 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), p. 169. In films such as The Kids Are All Right, the home is a space of high drama in which relationships are compromised precisely because of the prior conviction of domestic stability. 36 As I wrote in Chapter One, the ‘paranoid woman’ of the domestic melodrama creates a space of paranoia through her inability to fully perceive an anticipated threat. See Doane, The Desire to Desire, p. 135. In Circumstance, it is Mehran’s inability to know the truth of his sister’s sexuality that threatens to destabilise the home. 37 D.N. Rodowick, ‘Madness, Authority and Ideology: The Domestic Melodrama of the 1950s’, in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. by Gledhill, pp. 268-80 (p. 274). The genre’s ‘extreme compartmentalisation of the frame’, as Rodowick puts it, serves to oppress the characters in their self-enforced locational isolation. Ibid.

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Shireen becomes the film’s focal point for conflict between the inside and the

outside. Her marriage to Mehran midway through the film exposes her spatial

vulnerability as she is moved from the house of her father to the house of her

husband. From the start, Shireen is continually framed as the passive recipient of

other characters’ movements, appearing still in the frame while others explode into

it. Repeatedly the bearer of the gaze, but only clandestinely, Shireen watches goings-

on in both domestic realms through the cracks in doorways. In one later shot

Shireen, detached from the playful antics of Atafeh’s liberal family, is filmed

standing in the doorway with her hair blending in to the dark room behind her so that

barely an outline of her figure is discernible and the space itself veils her (see Figure

3.5).

Figure 3.5. Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) is veiled by the mise en scène in Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011).

The cinematic apparatus is revealed here to be participating in a masquerade.

The film consistently plays with revealing and withholding (just as in Chapter One I

argued that Mulholland Drive played with the absence and presence of the figure of

the lesbian). Doane writes that the close-up of the veiled woman is ‘a site where the

classical film acknowledges the precariousness of vision and simultaneously seeks to

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isolate and hence contain it’ for ‘the veil functions to visualize (and hence stabilize)

the instability, the precariousness of sexuality’.38 In Circumstance the literal veiling

of Shireen marks her in contrast to Atafeh, for whom the hijab is not necessitated by

her home surroundings or familial dynamic. In a film in which the hijab comes to

represent the tussle over the right to freedom that the tag line expresses, Shireen’s

veiling is a potent symbol. Her metaphorical veiling through the apparatus in Figure

3.5 emphasises not only what can be seen of Shireen but also what she is entitled to

see (the visual veiling is a symptom of her interstitial positioning in the doorway and

her reserved entitlement to watch Atafeh and her family).39 Doane writes that the

veil mimics ‘the grain of the film’, allowing for the woman to be ‘revealed as no

longer simply the privileged object of the gaze in the cinema but the support of the

cinematic image’.40 In Circumstance the reverse happens: the grain of the film

mimics the veil. The film’s complicated play of vision and outness is isolated and

contained by this very image.

The film manages this contradictory register of the promise of outness and its

threat through a commentary on spatialised identity. Indeed, in Figure 3.5 it is not a

literal veil that affects our reading of Shireen’s capacity for vision but the veiling of

the space around her. Mehran’s desire to control her sexuality becomes mapped on

to space, just as in Code 46 (Winterbottom, 2003), as Stacey writes, ‘the desire for

absolute control of sexuality’ is ‘mapped onto the regulation of mobility through

surveillance in a zoned world’ and ‘the threat of the outside is given geographical

38 Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Studies and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 46. 39 See also the film Unveiled (Maccarone, 2005), whose original German title Fremde Haut actually means “Strange Skin”. The English translation draws attention to the process of veiling and unveiling through which the protagonist Fariba (Jasmin Tabatabai) sheds the hijab when she is forced to leave Iran after her lesbian sexuality is discovered, and then dons another kind of veil, drag, when she enters Germany using a man’s passport. 40 Doane, Femmes Fatales, p. 72.

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location and physical presence’.41 In Circumstance, the occasional surveillance

aesthetic sets the tone for patriarchal control of sexuality and institutes the visual

zoning of space.

Figure 3.6. The surveillance aesthetic of Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011) extends beyond CCTV.

As Shireen, Atafeh and their friends enter the barbershop that is the front for

the video store where they will decide on a pair of black market films to dub, the

light shining from within the building through the horizontal blinds against the dark

foreground gives off a televisual effect that again reminds us of these young

characters’ vulnerability to surveillance (see Figure 3.6). As silhouettes, they look

into the shop as if looking into an oversized television screen, but they too are

implicated, captured in the shot’s wider framing. Moments such as this one invoke

the capture of the still frame in which, as in Figures 3.5 and 3.6, the production of

the gaze is isolated in a carefully constructed mise en scène. Our response to a shot

which replicates the external production or reception of the film as cultural product

(we are suddenly made aware of the technology that generates and disseminates the 41 Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene, p. 158. For more on zoning as a kind of alienation and the creation of what he calls the ‘non-place’ as nucleus of the ‘supermodern’ world, see Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. by John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).

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image) is to pause on what Mulvey calls the ‘there-ness and then-ness of the film’s

original moment, its moment of registration’ which normally remains hidden by the

‘“here-and-now-ness” that the cinema asserts through its affinity with story-

telling’.42 Circumstance, of course, continues to tell a story, that of the hazards that

face two young lovers whose cultural circumstances prevent their union, but this

moment allows for a shift in consciousness that highlights the ways in which

technological mediation is adopted to construct the terms of this particular

narrative.43

The surveillance plot of Circumstance functions alongside shots like the

veiling of Shireen and the televisual entrance to the video store to construct strict

zones in which sexuality is made ostensibly available to Shireen and Atafeh but in

which the paranoia of public disclosure remains an aesthetically insinuated menace.

The film presents two sides of a threat marked strikingly by the imposition of

technology into the domestic realm. The first hint of Mehran’s voyeuristic gaze is

when a scene of Atafeh and Shireen dancing in Atafeh’s bedroom to American Idol

converts to a point of view shot through which the girls are watched by Mehran.

Their initial obliviousness to him, and then undisguised surprise to find themselves

watched by him, is the beginning of the unsettling of their own control over their

homosocial – and then homosexual – privacy. It is significant that this is a scene in 42 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 183. See also the film Young and Wild (Rivas, 2012), in which the central character explores the mediation of her explicit sexual encounters through social media. Thanks to Paul Merchant for his reading of the film in ‘“Ahora Que Soy No-Niña, No He Dejado Nada”: Queer Technology and Adolescence in Joven y Alocada’, unpublished conference paper presented at ‘Childhood and Nation in World Cinema’ (University of Cambridge: 2015). See also Spider Lilies (Chou, 2008), whose protagonist is a “web cam girl” who broadcasts her image across the internet. 43 Elsaesser analyses the shifts in consciousness involved in watching the films of Michael Haneke, which employ a similar play with technological mediation and the active engagement it involves. He writes: ‘[i]f Haneke’s films have, from the beginning, proclaimed that there is no outside to the inside of the mediatized world, then “the lie of the image” and “deceptive vision” can only be redeemed once we can also understand “the truth of our world” as the game we are all obliged to play, even if none yet knows the code’. See ‘Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games’, in A Companion to Michael Haneke, ed. by Roy Grundman (Malden, MA, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), pp. 53-74 (p. 72).

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which an American programme blares a cultural promise into the home through

televisual technology. This is followed by the gradually more extreme impositions of

Mehran’s CCTV structures. Technology brings another culture into a domestic world

(American Idol) and is punished by being used to restrict the freedom that that other

culture promises (CCTV).44

In superficial narrative terms, Circumstance tells the story of a city taken

away from its inhabitants, particularly women, who are condemned to have their

actions restricted by the morality police. Yet place is not, as has traditionally been

argued, ‘a site of an authenticity, as singular, fixed and unproblematic in its

identity’.45 Place should be defined instead, Massey writes, by the social networks

that occur within it, but also by what happens outside of it.46 As a practice of

exclusion and inclusion, the formation of place is regulated by the global and the

local, the outside and the inside. In its capacity as an ‘unfixed, contested and

multiple’ identity, our idea of place can be ‘constructed not by placing boundaries

44 It can be difficult to escape the sense that adolescence itself is mediated through its construction as American. Castañeda writes that the child ‘is so often figured in universal or global terms’. See Figurations, p. 6. The adolescent, however, is rather more discursively bound to the West. Rachael McLennan, for instance, uses the adolescent metaphor to describe the state of America itself, while the ‘teen film’ is regularly posited as an American product beginning ‘around 1955, a product of the decline of the classical Hollywood cinema and the rise of the privileged American teenager’. See Adolescence, America, and Postwar Fiction: Developing Figures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 15 and Thomas Patrick Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 14. When Jon Lewis writes that ‘[w]hen we are talking about youth we are talking about a fundamentally mediated culture’, the implication is that when we are talking about American youth we are talking about mediation through American cultural and commercial products. See The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), p. 4. 45 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, p. 5. 46 Other theorists approach a kind of threshold space in their conceptualisations, such as David Bell, who, in an article about sexual citizenship, draws on Sue Golding’s work to posit a paradoxical ‘third space’, the ‘only space for the citizen-pervert, and as such […] the inevitable site of resistance to the refused recognition of negative semantic space: a space of oscillation, perhaps, between the public and the private; always moving, redefining’. See ‘Pleasure and Danger: The Paradoxical Spaces of Sexual Citizenship’, Political Geography, 14:2 (1995), 139-53 (p. 147). The adolescent makes of this ‘third space’ a temporal thirdness. The slash of the ‘hetero/homo’ dyad is where, for Bell, the threat of bisexuality lingers; similarly, he argues, ‘so the citizen-pervert, inhabiting the space between the public and the private, threatens the collapse of both domains’. Ibid. If adolescence exists in the slash between childhood and adulthood it also occupies a kind of perverse space, threatening collapse of what falls on either side.

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around it and by defining its identity through counterposition to the other which lies

beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and

interconnections to that “beyond”’.47 Circumstance demonstrates the ways in which

that ‘beyond’ is consistently brought into the local, creating a to-and-fro series of

hopes and identifications between and across spaces.48

Mediating Sexuality

Berlant and Warner’s notion of intimacy as the ‘elsewhere’ of public life is

revealed in Circumstance to be a necessity; the intimacy of the private sphere is

dismantled by an inevitable paranoia instituted by Mehran’s CCTV regime.49 This

elsewhere is not only a fantasy but also code for anywhere beyond Iran’s national

borders. The film’s discursive construction of identity politics as elsewhere functions

to posit the possibility of sexuality as identity in the form of the liberal possibility for

out sexuality.50 In the middle of a film almost entirely constructed around this

disjuncture between public and private space, the dubbing scene offers one way in

which queer works both to offer us non-normative identity while also shattering the

fallacy of identity itself, both ‘lapse’ and ‘excess’ of normative meaning at once.51

The idea to dub Milk comes from Hossein, a visitor to Tehran from the United States

who befriends Atafeh, Shireen and their friend Joey (Keon Mohajeri). Hossein is

47 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, p. 5. 48 Hall alludes to this link in terms of the relationship between global and local, writing that ‘what we usually call the global, far from being something which, in a systematic fashion, rolls over everything, creating similarity, in fact works through particularity, negotiates particular spaces, particular ethnicities, works through mobilizing particular identities and so on. So there is always a dialectic, a continuous dialectic, between the local and the global.’ See ‘Old and New Identities’, p. 62. 49 Berlant and Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, p. 553. 50 In The Edge of Heaven (Akin, 2007), this need for political and sexual radicalism to be relocated across borders is evoked in the film’s original title, Auf der Anderen Seite, meaning On the Other Side. See also Show Me Love (Moodysson, 1998) – whose original title Fucking Åmål highlights adolescent frustrations associated with growing up in a small town – and Beyond the Hills (Mungiu, 2012), set in the Romanian orthodox church, in which the space itself, filmed in overbearingly dark tones, becomes an oppressive obstacle to desire. 51 Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 8.

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frustrated with his friends for not trying to “change your circumstances”. In the

process, the United States from which he hails comes to stand in for the endpoint of

that hope for change, a symbol of the desired elsewhere that Tehran cannot be. What

Hall calls ‘cultural “play”’ is seen here, compounded of past, present and future

manifestations of cultural identity.52 Amid moderate teasing, Atafeh reassures

Hossein that “we knew you were gay”, situating this American elsewhere as

precisely the site of “having come out” that neither she nor Shireen is able to attain.

The actual dubbing scene is introduced by a shot that imposes the amateur dubbers’

heads in front of a screen upon which is projected a gay rights march at the heart of

Milk and then Sean Penn as Harvey Milk delivering a rousing speech (see Figure

3.7).

Figure 3.7. Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri), Joey (Keon Mohajeri), Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) and Hossein (Sina Amedson) dub Milk (van Sant, 2008) into Persian in Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011).

The projected film is in bright colour, in contrast to the black silhouettes of

the Iranian viewers in the foreground. However, with the sound delivered to the

characters through headphones, Milk’s provocative protest scene is silenced until the

52 Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Laurence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 222-37 (p. 228).

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parodying voice of Joey takes over the soundtrack with his imitation of Penn as

Milk. The elsewhere of gay rights is made urgently present (the only aspect of the

mise en scène visible in colour is Penn in a bright red jersey) and unbearably

unachievable (the speech is silenced except by mocking mediation). In the middle of

the frame, the projector draws attention to the film’s status as film. We might even

consider this space a ‘heterotopia’, what Foucault calls a ‘counter-site’ which

materialises spatially within the social realm but temporally outside of it as a ‘kind

of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites […] are simultaneously

represented, contested, and inverted’.53 And yet, the scene introduces a strict sense of

normative order with Hossein’s insistence that Joey perform a more authentically

gay Harvey Milk.

The film’s narrative use of cinema is shown to project a contradiction.

Roland Barthes describes the cinema’s ‘absence of worldliness’ as he gestures to the

‘urban dark [in which] the body’s freedom is generated’.54 The dubbing scene

provides an urban closet for these adolescent characters, a private space within, but

hidden away from, the public realm and in which the darkness yields an absence of

other worldly markers of location. Symbolically, this scene is also the film’s most

present and vivid offering of worldliness as the desire for awareness of the world

beyond Iran’s borders.55 The fantasy of this worldliness as effectively a desire for

outness is exaggerated by the film’s dispassionate abandonment of the plotline that

would see the dubbing scene’s promised outcome, a black market DVD, make the

characters both producers and consumers of a cultural product. Instead, the scene is

53 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, p. 24. Also interesting here is Jagose’s account of the ‘lesbian’, when conceived as inherently liberatory, as ‘utopic space, ou-topos, no place’. See Lesbian Utopics, p. 163. 54 Roland Barthes, ‘Leaving the Movie Theatre’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 345-49 (p. 346). For more on the relationship between cinematic space and the city, see Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York, NY: Verso, 2002). 55 See Hebdige, ‘The Worldliness of Cultural Studies’, Cultural Studies, 29:1 (2015), 32-42.

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left in the unresolved heterotopia of cinema as fantasy, the promise of worldliness

and of a tangible connection to a space beyond, remaining in the closet of the

cinema’s interior.

When Atafeh and Shireen proceed from Milk’s political oratory to a Sex and

the City sex scene, the noises they perform seem both to threaten the alpha male

Joey, and to bring to the fore the erotic soundscape that has been lacking from the

supposedly sexual reveries of the rest of the film.56 It is their excessive performances

of these audibly erotic sounds in contrast to the hushing of their “real” sex scenes

that maintains the aural transition into the immediately subsequent scene, in which

they sit in the back of a taxi cab replicating the dubbing scene’s sounds and are

arrested by the morality police, marking the tragic shift of the film. The unrestrained

sexuality projected by Sex and the City’s international reputation is mediated by

Atafeh and Shireen and becomes in turn a raw evocation of their own sexual desire

for one another. Culture is mediated by their imitating performance which in turn

shapes their sexual expression. Just as they are punished by the voyeuristic gaze of

Mehran when they unabashedly dance along to American Idol, the result of their

sexual verbalisations here is punishment in the immediately following scene by the

morality police. Earlier in the film Atafeh, on hearing a favourite song, declares “this

song is orgasmic” and exhales the sexual tones of the music with delight. But again

this potential for “orgasmic” sexual pleasure resides in the girls’ relationship to a

56 Temenuga Trifonova writes of Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000) that its film-within-the-film scenario creates an effect in which ‘the emotions expressed during a scene when a character is supposed to be acting (as we discover after the scene is over) often appear as exaggerated versions of the emotions that remain unspoken in the “real scenes” where Haneke’s cold formalism reigns supreme’. See ‘Michael Haneke and the Politics of Film Form’, in The Cinema of Michael Haneke: Europe Utopia, ed. by Ben McCann and David Sorfa (London: Wallflower Press, pp. 65-82 (p. 75). In Circumstance, the hypersexualisation of the “fake” dubbing scenes exposes the under-sexualisation of the rest of the film. The easily recognisable erotic scenes, marked out by colour scheme and music, are those in which that eroticism is similarly mediated by the confinement of its potential to spaces of fantasy: not the film-within-the-film throughout but the mise en abîme of another kind.

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cultural fantasy of sexuality – the song, rather than the sensation, is experienced as

pleasurable.

Part of this outward-looking worldliness involves a nod to a brand of

postfeminist representational politics. Sex and the City, paired with the male-led

Milk, occupies a hope for the potential for female sexual liberation.57 In recent

decades, the neo-liberal politics of individualism have coincided with a postfeminist

media discourse of self-improvement that functions largely through consumerism.58

Together, these dual aspects of the contemporary Western political and cultural

zeitgeist produce the desire for identity categories as ‘constituted through

consumption’, which perhaps incongruously allows for what Dereka Rushbrook

argues is a queer consumer cosmopolitanism.59 Circumstance’s diasporic context of

57 Rosalind Gill writes that the postfeminist sensibility is ‘characterized among other things by a marked intensification of the scrutiny of women’s bodies [but disguised through a] discourse of freedom, choice and playfulness’. See ‘Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times’, Subjectivity, 25:1 (2008), 432-45 (pp. 440-41). Negra writes that postfeminist discourse ‘fetishizes female power and desire while consistently placing these within firm limits’. See What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), p. 4. Other commentaries on this postfeminist myth of choice, particularly its implications for the political programme of feminism, include Elspeth Probyn, ‘New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV Does the Home’, Screen, 31:2 (1990), 147-59 (p. 156). 58 We might compare this with what Galt calls the ‘non-commodity time’ of Suddenly (Lerman, 2002), in which Argentina’s economic context is the backdrop to and generator of a queer aesthetic outside of the neoliberal commodification of lesbian identity. Galt writes that to read Suddenly through a queer lens allows it to become ‘visible both as a national and a transnational text’. See ‘Default Cinema’, p. 70. 59 Dereka Rushbrook, ‘Cities, Queer Space, and the Cosmopolitan Tourist’, GLQ, 8:1-2 (2002), 183-206 (pp. 188-89). Alexandra Chasin has also written an account of the relationship between the gay and lesbian movement and consumer capitalism in which she argues that the ‘increased viability of gay social identity reflects an increased range of choices among identities’. See Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 12. In his discussion of queer cosmopolitanism, David Alderson suggests that, paradoxically, it has ‘produced a conformity of style whose very function is to be recognisable despite cultural differences’. See ‘Queer Cosmopolitanism: Place, Politics, Citizenship and Queer as Folk’, New Formations, 55 (2005), 73-88 (p. 76). Original emphasis. See also Knopp, ‘From Lesbian and Gay to Queer Geographies: Pasts, Prospects and Possibilities’, in Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices, and Politics, ed. by Kath Browne, Jason Lim and Gavin Brown (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 21-28.

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production and its cultural worlding of the experience of Iranian teenagers adopts

this kind of cosmopolitan reach from the USA to Tehran and back again.60

Just as Rushbrook argues that a queer cosmopolitanism is formed through

consumer capital that endorses, and allows for, the ‘creation of multiple, shifting

identities’, Hilary Radner argues that a contemporary culture puts forward the

‘concept of identity as a process of “becoming”’ that ‘has been understood as

offering emancipatory possibilities to the individual who is invited not to take up a

stable, untested and fixed position, but, rather, to see her “self,” or even “selves,” as

subject to a multiple and on-going process of revision, reform and choices’.61 This

model is prevalent as an expression of a desire for freedom of sexual identity, as

outness, through consumption. I have argued above that conceptualisations of

adolescence in theory and largely in practice allow only interstitial spaces for its

(non)subjects. Yet it seems to be no coincidence that in two well-regarded films

from the past fifteen years about intense adolescent friendships, girls claim the

spaces of the city through marginalised practices that are also tied up in a corrupted

form of consumption as a process of becoming.62 In both Thirteen (Hardwicke,

2003) and The Bling Ring (Coppola, 2013), drugs and theft are ways to occupy the

60 Massey suggests that transnational youth cultures are, inherently, ‘hybrid cultures. They involve active importation, adoption and adaptation.’ See ‘The Spatial Construction of Youth Cultures’, in Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, ed. by Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 121-29 (p. 123). 61 Hilary Radner, Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), p. 6. Radner exposes a problematic distortion of the famous Beauvoirian principle that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. by H. M. Parshley (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 295. This is a tension at the heart of any discussion of both ‘post’-feminism and postmodern or poststructuralist feminisms, whereby the unsettling of essentialist notions of gender identity on the one hand morph into maintainers of consumer industries, premised on women’s ‘choice’, on the other. Carissa Showden has outlined these tensions in terminology between an anti-feminist postfeminism and a postfeminism that inherits the political enquiry of postmodernism, poststructuralism or postcolonialism. See ‘What’s Political About the New Feminisms?’, Frontiers, 30:2 (2009), 166-98 (pp. 168-69). 62 For more on intense female friendships during adolescence, see Mary Celeste Kearney, ‘Girlfriends and Girl Power: Female Adolescence in Contemporary U.S Cinema’, in Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood, ed. by Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002), pp. 125-42.

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space that is not one’s own. Dominating the streets in open-top cars or shoplifting on

LA boardwalks, the girls in both these films try to take charge of the urban space

whose publicity gives them freer reign than the closely-monitored family home. In

the latter film – Sofia Coppola’s true-crime portrait of a group of teenagers who steal

vast collections of expensive goods from Hollywood mansions – the inevitable

symbolic publicity of the celebrity homes creates a space that bleeds into the

publicity of the city itself. Circumstance’s protagonists take charge of their city

space by converting it into a fantasy space of transnational escape. The film’s

postfeminist citation of Sex and the City looks beyond the walls of the city and of the

home to a fantasy of social and sexual citizenship accomplished by dreaming in a

postfeminist language of becoming through consumption of values.63 A scene in

which Atafeh and Shireen break a car window, steal the bag within and share a

fleeting kiss highlights how, in the Iranian context, the stakes of transgression are

heightened: the political and moral consequences of the apparently nebulous but

nevertheless dangerous terms of lesbian sexuality under an oppressive regime can be

compared, but only uncomfortably, with the legal and moral consequences of

stealing as a form of US consumerist girl power.

Masquerading Cultural Identity

At the heart of Circumstance’s supposed subcultural or underground political appeal

is a process of spatialisation that charts, embraces and highlights the paradoxical

inconsistencies of identity that the film’s external marketing strategy must

63 Sex and the City is often cited as the epitome of postfeminist media because of its group of empowered female friends who claim their rights to work, friendship, consumerism and family while maintaining their perpetual focus on heterosexual romance. See, for instance, Justine Ashby, ‘Postfeminism in the British Frame’, Cinema Journal, 44:2 (2005), 127-33; Stéphanie Genz, ‘Singled Out: Postfeminism’s ‘New Woman’ and the Dilemma of Having It All’, Journal of Popular Culture, 43:1 (2010), 97-119; and Jane Gerhard, ‘Sex and the City: Carrie Bradshaw’s Queer Postfeminism’, Feminist Media Studies, 5:1 (2011), 37-49.

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advocate.64 In the very first scene of the film, the words whispered by an anonymous

voiceover, “if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you be?” are joined

by the anticipatory percussive rings of a tambourine. The Persian script that adorns

the black screen with its English translation is also part of a fantasy of its own

production context: as I wrote above, the script for Circumstance was written in

English and then translated into Persian, and most of the actors are North American

nationals. The guitar riff that increases the intensity of the opening and brings light

onto the screen is joined by close-up shots of the body of a dancer, directed lighting

accentuating a belly button, a hand and finger, a mouth and then the sequins of a

skirt. The voice on the vocal track is finally attributed to the dancer, Atafeh. Re-

watching the scene with hindsight, we are made unsure about whether Atafeh is

really singing: the centrality to the film of dubbing (Sex and the City) and lip-

syncing (American Idol) prepares us for further masquerades of authenticity. Such a

perversion of our suspension of disbelief in the authenticity of the female voice

highlights the film’s presentation of a masquerade of the feminine image through

which, as Doane has famously written, ‘womanliness’ is revealed to be ‘a mask

which can be worn or removed’.65 The masquerade’s ‘exaggeration of femininity’

functions not only through clothing and demeanour but also through multiple levels

of cultural appropriation: the mask that can be put on and taken off is a performance

of a performance. The face we see in full in Circumstance’s opening scene is not the

dancing Atafeh’s but that of Shireen, whose posture is laid-back and who holds a

64 White analyses this in detail in her chapter. As an interesting point of comparison, she argues in another article that Pariah’s marketing is ‘a case study of how a commercial view of identity politics determines cinematic forms and distribution pathways’. See ‘Pariah: Coming Out in the Middle’, in US Independent Film after 1989: Possible Films, ed. by Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 133-43 (p. 135). Pariah is explicitly marketed as a coming out story, further evidence of the use of identity politics as the promised endpoint, the “out” towards which the protagonist journeys. 65 Doane, Femmes Fatales, p. 25.

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cigarette casually in her hand. She evokes a film noir protagonist taking in the

exquisite beauty of the femme fatale for the first time.

What propels Shireen and Atafeh out of the masquerading, imitating space of

the fantasy – orientalist performance meets Hollywood noir – is again the

soundtrack, on which the music is muted and replaced by the rollcall of names

anticipating the abrupt re-placement of Atafeh and Shireen into the grey and black

tones of the schoolyard. But it is in this shot following that of Shireen’s gaze (the

immediate shot-to-shot juxtaposition of which can be seen in Figures 3.8 and 3.9)

that Atafeh, erstwhile femme fatale, returns the gaze, if only across disparate shots.

Now we get the sustained image of Atafeh’s face that was missing from the opening.

The erotic red tones of their fantasy (Shireen’s red lipstick, the colour filter) find

remnants in the origami crane that, in close-up, passes discretely between their

fingers in the school line. This juxtaposition is all the more profound when it reveals

the fantasy to be just a school girl’s fantasy, a mirage we are trained to read as

redundant.

Figure 3.8. Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) gazes in a fantasy bar in Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011).

Figure 3.9. In the next shot, Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) gazes back in Shireen’s direction in the schoolyard in Circumstance (Keshavarz, 2011).

Both characters overperform their role in the gaze structures set up by the

sequence of shots that shift from one to the other: Atafeh in close-up, Shireen in

medium shot. The abstract shots of Atafeh’s body are captured by a conventional

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gaze, but one that is, unusually, female, instituting a ‘tension between conventional

framing and radical desire’ that, as Sophie Mayer writes, ‘characterises the whole

film’.66 The radicality of the desire is highlighted by a kind of double masquerade on

the part of both Atafeh (singer) and Shireen (voyeur), both of whom occupy not only

particular roles of femininity but also particular relationships to space that they are

unable to attain beyond the fantasy.67 This tension is what defines the film’s use of

space, too, where domestic and institutional zones interact with the radical

reclaiming of the city. Dream sequences such as this one are an extension of frequent

mirror sequences and of the dubbing scene which chart the girls’ ‘desire to be

somewhere else’.68

The film itself participates in a masquerade of cultural identity. In her reading

of the film, White argues that its opening ‘seems intentionally to jam enunciative

codes’, waving the ‘veil of orientalist seduction’.69 To ‘jam’ such codes suggests

both excessive imposition and resulting distortion: the film both employs orientalism

and self-consciously critiques it. White suggests that Keshavarz, an American born

but Iranian-American identified filmmaker, employs her diasporic status in a way

that speaks to wider networks of contemporary global women’s cinema. The opening

dream sequence creates another world for this orientalist ‘veil’ and then abruptly

deposits its actors in the stark grey reality of institutional boredom, banality and then

inequality. In this scenario the global is sensationalised, not only through the

66 Sophie Mayer, ‘Circumstance (Review)’, Sight and Sound, n.s., 22:9 (2012), 97-98 (p. 97). 67 It is revealing that Mayer mistakenly switches the character names in her review. When she writes that ‘Shireen’s dance, in a slinky outfit, is eventually revealed to be intended for Atafeh’s gaze’, it should read ‘Atafeh’s dance’ and ‘Shireen’s gaze’. Atafeh is the more privileged and educated, but less overtly or conventionally glamorous, girl. Shireen is the less privileged girl whose character arc sees her forced into marriage by familial and financial demands. She is most consistently the film’s object of the gaze, subjected to the desiring gazes of both Atafeh and Mehran. The fact that it is Shireen who watches and Atafeh who dances (but also that this mistake is made in a reviewer’s memory of the film while all other details are correct) further disrupts conventional assumptions of to-be-looked-at-ness and the coding of female subjects and objects. 68 Rich, ‘Park City Remix’, p. 63. 69 White, ‘Changing Circumstances’.

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characters’ fantasy of the elsewhere (America), but through the film’s own fantasy of

the homeland (Iran): one is sensationalised while the other is bound by institutions

first mundane (school) and then tragic (prison).

This is a fantasy of globality and universality that remains loyal to

stereotype.70 White observes that the poster for the film relies on an exoticism of

lesbianism as the elsewhere of romantic genre that sells the film based on ‘an

arthouse history of lesbianism as signifier of sexual daring’.71 Both Mayer and White

have referred to the film’s use of the stylised aesthetic of The L Word.72 In one scene

in Circumstance, another stylised fantasy of escape is juxtaposed with Shireen and

Atafeh’s giggling erotic play in the material world of Tehran. Their fantasy is

initiated by Atafeh’s desire to be a contestant on American Idol: “the young can

dream”, mocks Shireen, and with her words is generated an unambiguous dream that

is formed by the promise of the aesthetic, if not the literal location, of Idol’s

American culture. The girls lie on their backs against a deep red sheet, and the

camera swirls above their heads as they dream in verbal evocations of escape. Their

words replicate the opening scene’s disembodied dialogue, continually relying on the

familiar stock of their elsewhere fantasy.

The bar space that replicates the first scene then shifts into a hotel room with

floor to ceiling windows looking from a height over the sea, in which Atafeh and

Shireen undress against a backdrop of a pale blue ocean and white furniture. Unlike

the Beirut location that is shot to look as much as possible like Tehran, this is an

70 See also Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Stacey, Global Nature, Global Culture (London: Sage, 2000). 71 White, ‘Changing Circumstances’. Indeed, White argues here that the film benefits from a DVD market in which ‘“lesbianism” and “human rights,” however complexly figured in the film itself, form an attractive package’. Ibid. 72 See, for instance, Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon, Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and Alison Winch, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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anonymously pristine space.73 The smooth, groomed bodies of the girls are shot at

the slow and seductive pace of a prettified L Word sex scene. Circumstance thus

draws here on a postfeminist economy of the image, which presents prettiness in

terms of aesthetics as well as in terms of conventional notions of beauty.74 The

prettification of Atafeh and Shireen’s fantasies of sexual consummation into

pristinely whitewashed spaces also maintains the film’s presentation of a sexual

elsewhere, of the possibility for out sexuality as defined by white role models (Sean

Penn as Harvey Milk, Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw). The return to the

red sheets of the material bedroom presents a contrastingly cluttered frame,

highlighting a move away from the fantasy’s depoliticising reach.

The fantasy hotel’s visual whiteness demonstrates a de-cluttering of visual

space as metaphor for whiteness as spatially, as well as sexually, liberating. This is

accentuated even more in the following scene in the video store, in which Shireen

chides Atafeh for assuming that radicality is romantic. Radicality in the form of

political protest (a crime for which we are led to believe Shireen’s parents have long

since paid with their life) is only endorsed by success in fantasy: Harvey Milk of the

gay liberation movement is only witnessed speech-giving, not dying for the cause,

before he is swapped for the postfeminist sexual liberation of Sex and the City’s

(straight) women.75 In “reality” – away from the fantasised hotel – the girls are fully

dressed as they kiss, and jerky camerawork echoes the awkward giggles and

73 The L Word excels at the self-conscious employment of the simulacra of its own cultural relevance. LA is the show’s structuring location, despite the fact that it is in fact shot in Vancouver. In the fourth season, it draws attention to this bluff by having Jenny Schecter (Mia Kirshner) shoot a film based on the lives of the show’s ensemble of characters and source locations for it in Vancouver. 74 Galt explains why this kind of beautification is problematic for queer and feminist theory, writing that ‘[t]he space between the aesthetics of the image and that of the body in the image’ contrasts intensely with queer film studies which, she writes, ‘has often focused on identitarian issues and, as a corollary, has rejected aesthetic modes that smack of beauty as a means to refute dominant forms of gay and lesbian representation’. See Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York, NY and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 259. 75 For a different reading of this show’s relationship to lesbianism, see Merck, ‘Sexuality in the City’, in Reading Sex and the City, ed. by Akass and McCabe, pp. 48-64.

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Shireen’s joking words: “do you feel embarrassed?” The transitions in and out of the

hotel fantasy are as smooth as the camerawork; the transition out of this

“embarrassing” exchange is abrupt and replaced by the noisy car horns of the city

streets whose juxtaposition emphasises all the more the extent to which that fantasy

really is “elsewhere”.

For psychoanalytic film theorists such as de Lauretis, lesbianism must always

be presented in cinema as part of a fantasy. Moreover, the predictability of surprise

that attaches itself to lesbian desire in mainstream genre cinema is part of

lesbianism’s signification of ‘sexual daring’.76 Lesbianism is always constituted in

relation to an “elsewhere”. Fantasy spaces thus become stand-ins for the sex that

cannot occur in real space and time. It is only when Atafeh views her own encounter

with Shireen on the CCTV footage of her brother’s computer that their “real” scenes

actually become a kind of mediated fantasy, and that all moments of intimacy

threaten to have been fully mediated all along. This effect evokes what Vidler reads

in the uncanny, whose ‘aesthetic dimension […] precisely elides the boundaries of

the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage

between waking and dreaming’.77 In the singular moment in which Atafeh becomes

voyeur, the film’s networks of surveillance become distorted; just as Atafeh and

Shireen over-perform their roles in fantasy, Atafeh here over-performs the paranoia

of the gaze through the literal eye of the camera, as well as through an explicit

distancing. Throughout the film, she has been able to watch Shireen but rarely touch

her in public. Here, she watches Shireen but cannot touch her even if she wanted to;

the apparatus of Mehran’s voyeurism stands literally between them.

76 White, ‘Changing Circumstances’. It is the predictability of this model that generates the anxieties associated with an uncompromising film like Blue is the Warmest Colour, as I will discuss in Chapter Five. 77 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 11.

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Circumstance establishes citational lifestyle fantasies, fashioned through

what Berlant and Warner have called ‘metacultural’ signs of intelligibility that work

across global feminist cinema networks.78 The tensions in the cosmopolitanism of

the film’s culture-shifting cinematography, evidenced in scenes of dreams, dubbing,

lip-syncing and surveillance, suggest precisely the ‘incommensurate geographies’

that Berlant and Warner evoke in their ‘queer world’.79 This world-making also

produces a fantasy of universality that calls for dominant visions to be drawn upon,

confirmed by the postfeminist image economy of Sex and the City or The L Word.

Circumstance’s diasporan fantasy offers American Sundance viewers an

“elsewhere” of intimacy provided in the L Word-stylised dreams of Atafeh and

Shireen. A vision of a queer world is projected back as an intimacy of an elsewhere

in a space beyond. The ‘virtual worlds’ of Circumstance slip into the spaces between

the seemingly prevalent concrete dichotomy between inside and outside, public and

private.80

The phrase with which Circumstance starts – “if you could be anywhere in

the world, where would you be?” – is mobilised throughout, repeated at intervals

first in fantasy (in the imagined bar), then in “reality” (in Atafeh’s bedroom), then in

repetition (as Mehran re-watches CCTV footage) and finally in a revengeful reprisal

(as Mehran jadedly repeats the words to his wife as threat). The phrase is thus

deployed as a marker that moves through the different spatial realms of

78 Berlant and Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, p. 558. 79 Ibid. 80 Postfeminist culture thrives on this kind of intertextuality and networks and cycles of citation. For instance, the romantic comedy Appropriate Behaviour, about an Iranian American, externally references the latest iconic television show of contested femininity, Girls (Dunham, 2012-). Appropriate Behaviour’s director Desiree Akhavan received rave reviews from Lena Dunham and was invited to feature in the fourth season of Girls. Both directly reference Sex and the City, which leaves behind it a postfeminist legacy of New York femininity. This distinctly American network sets itself apart from the ‘reinvigorated international cinephile circuit’ discussed by White which ‘renew[s] questions about singularity (the stock in trade of auteurism) and collectivity, national cinema and transnational reception in the context of feminist genealogies’. See Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, p. 44.

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Circumstance, enunciating a contradiction at the film’s heart, the desire to

substantiate a queer world. This chapter has explored how the city streets, and all

they suggest (rebellion, freedom, lack of borders), accomplish Circumstance’s

expression of sexuality while at the same time shoring up the identity politics that it

depends on for its universalising humanist message. In many ways, queer functions

spatially to trouble a fetish of identity through which it is itself constructed and

desired. While queer promises to reside in the margins, the world it creates

necessarily invokes identity elsewhere in a time yet to come (adulthood) or other

space (USA).

Throughout Circumstance, the cinematic apparatus is revealed to be

participating in a masquerade of femininity, of spatial consistency and of sexual

legitimacy. The film’s central dubbing scene both mocks and pays tribute to the fact

of sexual identity’s cultural production. The film plays with the relationship between

visibility as visuality and outness, isolating this tension in singular images in which

the mise en scène veils Shireen or in which the characters participate in a televisual,

then surveiling, aesthetic that signifies that which controls them. Sexuality and its

cultural promise are mediated through cultures of the elsewhere. The film’s offer of

“freedom” for its characters as a “human right” is constructed through a series of

fantasy spaces and is thus simultaneously revealed to be itself a fantasy of a time

beyond adolescence or a space beyond the nation. A fantasy of sexual identity as

legitimately public is what is mobilised in signifiers of lesbian eroticism that move

from The L Word to Circumstance via the consumerism of Sex and the City and the

politics of Milk. No such citational markers exist in the films that I explore in the

next chapter, Water Lilies and She Monkeys. In these films it is not the shifting of

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sexuality into fantasy that distorts the assumptions of sexual identity but the shifting

of sexuality into a queerly ambiguous (and ambiguously lesbian) potential.

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Chapter Four

In-between Touch:

Queer Potential in Water Lilies and She Monkeys

The friendship established between two adolescent girls in Water Lilies unfolds as a

transaction that produces a murky tension between infatuation and narcissism. Marie

(Pauline Acquart) strikes a deal with Floriane (Adèle Haenel), the captain of the

local synchronised swimming team. She will avert parental suspicion by playing

chaperone to the older girl’s prohibited sexual rendezvous, in return for the

opportunity to accompany the team in the pool for training sessions and on the bus to

competitions. The film combines the spectacle of performance (its opening is

accompanied by the extravagant ‘Dies Irae’ from Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem,

[1874]) with the comedy of adolescent inadequacy (Marie tries to build up her

muscles to join the team by lifting boxes of laundry detergent) and the muted

disappointment of unrequited desire (Floriane’s reciprocation only occurs in

moments of strategic necessity). The film offers either exuberant bursts of bright

colour to accompany the abundant sensations of Marie’s desire or pale grey and blue

washouts of that desire in the face of Floriane’s indifference. On the one hand, there

are spectacular scenes of performance; on the other, there are slow and languid

scenes of desire’s potential but not its achievement.

In the first of a pair of scenes that evoke the sensory intensity of this

unspoken desire, Marie is granted permission to try on a sparkly “synchro” costume

in Floriane’s bedroom. Jokingly donning the costume over her clothes in a reverse

striptease, she falls onto the bed giggling with Floriane. The promise of attainment

(of the costume, of its connotations of inclusion in the group and of parity with

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Floriane) is sabotaged by silliness. In the immediately subsequent scene, Marie,

willing to do anything for attention and proximity, steals a rubbish bag that Floriane

has just deposited in a bin. As Marie returns to her own bedroom and draws out a

series of Floriane’s discarded objects, the impossible physicality of her desire

unfolds through sight, touch, taste and smell.1 The camera tilts in close-up from

Marie’s inhalation of the scent of a makeup-stained piece of cotton wool; to her

gentle caress of a scrunched-up note; to a perishing apple core held tentatively in her

hands. The camera moves with the apple back up to Marie’s mouth. In a prolonged

close-up shot, she chews, winces and then brings the back of her palm up to her

mouth as if to retch. Marie’s desire for Floriane holds within it both appreciation and

disgust, experienced here on a multi-sensory level.2 The juxtaposition of these two

scenes evokes first spectacle and playfulness and then abjection and misguided

intimacy.3

1 This scene in Water Lilies brings into focus the array of sensory perceptions that arise in puberty. Karin Martin writes that the sexualisation of the body during puberty becomes associated for girls with ‘dirtiness, shame, taboo, danger, and objectification’ which can cause alienation from one's own body and a removal from that body’s source of agency. See Puberty, Sexuality, and the Self: Boys and Girls at Adolescence (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996), p. 27. Ian Wojcik-Andrews writes that, as a reflection of this, in much children's literature ‘the child's body itself is the source and scene of exploration, discovery, and transformation’. See Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory (London and New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 2000), p. 10. Original emphasis. 2 Marie’s relationship to Floriane pairs desire with disgust and expectation with frustration. Melanie Klein accounts for the fact that the child feels both desire and aggression for the mother who is both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ object. She writes: ‘[f]rom the beginning the ego introjects objects “good” and “bad”, for both of which its mother’s breast is the prototype – for good objects when the child obtains it and for bad when it fails him’. See ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’, in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. by Juliet Mitchell, 1st American edn (New York, NY: Free Press, 1987), pp. 115-45 (p. 116). Aggression is thus part of love, and ‘ambivalence’ is that which is ‘partly a safeguard against one’s own hate and against the hated and terrifying objects’. See ‘Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’, p. 144. 3 From Bring it On (Peyton, 2000) to Mean Girls (Waters, 2004), sites of explicit or implicit competition are fashioned by the relationship between the spectacular and the abject. As in these generic films, affects come into tension at the point of narrative climax but are swept aside for the sake of closure. This tendency can be accounted for in psychoanalytic terms: Berlant explains that identity ‘teaches you to renounce your desire’s excess and ambivalence so that you can be intelligible under the discipline of the norms that make hierarchies of social value seem natural by rooting them in the pseudo-natural structure of hetero-sexualized sexual difference’. See Desire / Love (New York, NY: Punctum Books, 2012), p. 52. It is precisely desire’s ‘excess and ambivalence’ from which these conventional teen films seek to protect their protagonists (and audiences).

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In She Monkeys, another film of adolescent athleticism released just a few

years after Water Lilies, desire is also generated through the imbalance of aspiration

and mastery. Rivals for a coveted place in an equestrian vaulting team, in which

gymnastic movement is made all the more precarious upon a moving horse, the two

girls are engaged in a relationship that is absolutely permeated with competition.4

From an early scene in which the newcomer Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser)

contemplates the performance of star gymnast Cassandra (Linda Molin) to a final

reversal in which a wounded Cassandra must watch her protégé in the limelight, the

two occupy for one another a desire for sporting success that veils an ambivalent

desire for the other. The narrative of She Monkeys proceeds even more tentatively

than that of Water Lilies, moving slowly from scenes of competition and aggression

to those of suspended affection. The colour palette of She Monkeys is muted; in

contrast to Water Lilies’ colourful bursts, it consistently maintains the pale brown

tones of the barn filled with sand that keep the space of competition at the heart of

the aesthetic. Like Water Lilies, its performance scenes offer the exuberant drama

and performance that the rest of the film evades. Its figuratively colourful interludes

come from Emma’s little sister Sara (Isabella Lindquist), whose childish discoveries

of pleasure and intimacy run in counterpoint to Emma’s refusal to allow herself to

feel her desire for Cassandra.

4 According to the website for the British equestrian vaulting team, vaulting is ‘a form of gymnastics on the back of a moving horse […] Through choreographed movements, it incorporates beauty and brilliance, power and strength, elegance and precision, all in harmony with the horse’. See ‘Vaulting’, Equestrian Team GBR, (2015), <http://www.equestrianteamgbr.co.uk/team.aspx?strTeam=non-olympic-disciplines-vaulting> [accessed 11 June 2015]. There is a petition for vaulting to be included in the Olympics. It is a highly gendered sport in which, in the UK, only women compete as part of ‘Team GBR’. Synchronised swimming is one of the only remaining Olympic disciplines that is strictly gendered: while women now have access to compete in traditionally male sports such as boxing and weight lifting, men do not have the option to compete in synchronised swimming. See Matthew Jenkin, ‘Synching Feeling: Male Synchronised Swimmers Bid to Be Taken Seriously’, The Guardian, (18 December 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-swimming-blog/2013/dec/18/male-synchronised-swimming-london-ots-angels> [accessed 11 June 2015].

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In one early scene, shortly after the two girls have met, we witness their first

proper exchange. Cassandra, the existing team champion, pushes newcomer Emma’s

thighs into the splits: “Focus!”, she shouts. From the very beginning, the girls’

friendship is forged through the negotiations of bodily discipline. One girl is the

slightly belated mirror of the other, her body moving as instructed by the other. This

silent regime will continue throughout the film, coming to symbolise each girl’s

control over her own and over the other’s body. The last shot of the scene is a wide

angle of the barn in which they are training, with the two girls symmetrically

positioned and their arms outstretched. Their perfectly aligned fingertips are inches

away but not quite touching. It is this not quite touching that marks the film’s

peculiar eroticism.5 The bodily control associated with gymnastic feats means that

touch is given and then withdrawn, and erotic affect is found in the moments in-

between.

The competitiveness that arises from the team cultures of both Water Lilies

and She Monkeys complicates our reading of the homoeroticism that is also a feature

of those spaces. What interferes further with the legibility of “lesbian” desire in these

films is their eschewal of unambiguous sex scenes. A similarly marked absence

prompted my reading of Nathalie… in Chapter Two, in which I addressed desires

conveyed on screen through space and fantasy rather than through the notion of

sexuality as defined by sexual activity. In Chapter Three, I argued that the figuration

of lesbianism is evoked in Circumstance by shifting adolescent desires but is left as a

possibility to be found in a fantasy of “elsewhere” beyond adolescence and the

nation-state. Water Lilies and She Monkeys make no such promises or gestures, the

age and status of their characters forging instead transitory modes of meaning. The

5 See also Mosquita y Mari (Guerrero, 2012), in which the close friendship between two teenage girls is eroticised in moments of almost touching.

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desire for visibility and identity to be found in Chapters Two and Three could be said

to be about the desire for desires to be taken seriously. Water Lilies and She Monkeys

exhibit instead cinematic desires that are fleeting and marginal without being

condemned to the discourse of the “passing phase”.6 Moreover, their summertime

settings remove us from everyday cycles of obedience and hierarchy that reinforce

such temporal markers.7 What is the lesbian potential of those ambiguous intimacies

that reside in the spaces between touch and speech? What happens to that potential

when it is generated but immediately contained by the negotiations of control? How

is the queerness of lesbian desire evoked as a series of affects outside of figurative

norms?

Sensing Desire

Marie’s coming into desire is a process that transpires through sensory abundance.

Wilson observes that ‘we enter [Marie’s] world at a moment of heightened

receptivity, as Marie knows desire for the first time viewing Floriane emerging from

the pool water’.8 Our entry as spectators into the scene of desire is imbued with what

Wilson calls ‘heightened receptivity’.9 This is enforced by the multi-sensory drama

of the film’s first scene, which jolts us from meditative observations of girls

changing and chattering to the abrupt and jarringly loud opening of Verdi’s ‘Dies

6 Roof implies that the phase is inherent to lesbianism in its cultural positionings, in which it is ‘unfixed, mediated, and […] impossible to sustain’. See A Lure of Knowledge, p. 26. Queer’s preferred usage over lesbian potentially gets around this problematic association, allowing for unfixed desires without endorsing a heterosexist ideology of non-heterosexual desire as a phase. 7 In contrast, the classroom as the constitutive site of Blue is the Warmest Colour ostensibly provides both a time and space through which to recognise generic regularity, as I will discuss in Chapter Five. 8 Wilson, ‘“The Sea Nymphs Tested This Miracle”: Water Lilies and the Origin of Coral’, in The Cinema of the Swimming Pool, ed. by Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch (Oxford and New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 203-13 (p. 212). 9 Ibid.

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Irae’.10 Aurally besieged, Marie’s gaze is lifted and we follow it as the soundtrack is

adapted to the flirty dance of a synchronised swimming routine. The spectacle of the

scene conjures the set pieces of 42nd Street (Bacon, 1933) in which, as Lyn Phelan

observes, Busby Berkeley’s choreography produces ‘a curious intensification of both

female fleshiness and abstract uniformity’.11 With precisely this effect, Water Lilies

matches the rhythm of the music with the dolphin-like dives of the swimmers, the

flash of flesh against water and the sharp movements of their angular limbs.

The film’s audience is aurally aligned with the diegetic audience in the pool,

the acoustics of the swimming pool reducing Verdi’s foreboding ‘Day of Wrath’ to

the soundtrack’s echoey recording of scratchy strings and synthesised vocals. But

when Marie’s eyes widen in close-up (see Figure 4.1), a shared soundscape is

subordinated to her fixed gaze on a singular figure emerging from the pool. Floriane

is glorious in bright red and orange, with tightly slicked hair and an arm waving

straight up in the air. As the object of the film’s first shot of an unaccompanied

figure, she is the sole focus for several seconds of screen time (see Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.1. Marie (Pauline Acquart) applauds the spectacle in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007).

Figure 4.2. Floriane (Adèle Haenel) receives her applause in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007).

10 For an account of a series of films that encourage their spectator to open up to ‘sensory awareness and [to] let oneself be physically affected’, see Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 3. 11 Lyn Phelan, ‘Artificial Women and Male Subjectivity in 42nd Street and Bride of Frankenstein’, Screen, 41:2 (2000), 161-82 (p. 169).

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The water beads that glisten on Floriane’s flesh give her an otherworldly

sheen and bring the physical texture of water to the fore. Focused here by the

voyeuristic gaze of Marie at just one of the performers, what Barbara Creed calls an

‘excess of beauty’ in the musical genre heightens but then condenses desire.12 In the

changing room, the multiple chattering girls are homogenised by a swath of colour,

but through Marie’s gaze they become singularly objectified via Floriane. In

Wilson’s expansive reading of Water Lilies, she writes that the film ‘has its own

sensorium and this is tightly aligned with the perspective, the point of view, the

corporeal sensation and affective state of its protagonist Marie’.13 This notion of the

‘sensorium’ captures the film’s meditation on the lingering affects of moments of

potentiality: moments of affective connection rather than a narrative of desire’s

journey.14

Water Lilies communicates not only the failure for desire to live up to its

image, but also the overt lack of necessity for it to do so. According to Berlant,

desire is that which ‘visits you as an impact from the outside, and yet, inducing an

encounter with your affects, makes you feel as though it comes from within you’.15

12 Barbara Creed, Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Publishing, 2009), p. 92. Creed reads these patterns of colour and flesh as overwhelmingly Darwinian. She writes: ‘Berkeley was noted for filming his performers as a group, or in rows, and then tracking along their faces, singling out each performer for a close-up of her beautiful face. The effect is to create an excess of beauty.’ Ibid. 13 Wilson, ‘The Sea Nymphs Tested This Miracle’, p. 212. 14 Katharina Lindner writes that the similarity between the sports film and the musical lies in the interruption of ‘straightforward narrative development’ by ‘athletic/musical performance “numbers”’. See ‘“There Is a Reason Why Sporty Spice Is the Only One of Them without a Fella…”: The “Lesbian Potential” of Bend It Like Beckham’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 9:2 (2011), 204-23 (p. 214). In Dyer’s words, where wordless music is concerned, ‘the affective is to the fore’. See In the Space of a Song: The Uses of Song in Film (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 6. This is partly to do with what Dyer calls the ‘suspension’ of time and space in the musical number. See In the Space of a Song, p. 28. See also Rick Altman, Genre, the Musical: A Reader (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul in association with the British Film Institute, 1981); Neale, Genre; and Martin Rubin, ‘Busby Berkeley and the Backstage Musical’, in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. by Steven Cohan (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 53-61. 15 Berlant, Desire / Love, p. 6. Villarejo uses affect to designate ‘that which is in excess of a rational deliberative scheme and can function as a synonym for desire, insofar as that term involves the feeling of longing, inchoate and propulsive’. See Lesbian Rule, p. 16.

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Through the spectacle of Floriane as singular image, Marie creates an object of

desire that, in Berlant’s terms, is created partly by desire and is thus a ‘mirage, a

shaky anchor’.16 In a similarly voyeuristic opening scene in She Monkeys, we watch

a rehearsal of equestrian vaulting. The heavy breaths of the balancing young female

gymnasts are synchronised with the pounding hooves of the horse as it circles the

barn. Two girls, with identical balancing postures in uniforms of grey and red, hold

on to one another so that their bodies become entangled and seem to create a single

shifting figure. Emma stares from the sidelines as Cassandra stands atop the horse

with her partner’s hand on her waist and her own arms outstretched (see Figures 4.3

and 4.4 and note their almost exact replication of the gaze structures of Figures 4.1

and 4.2). The film thus plays with the (shaky) anchoring of desire in the body and in

the gaze.

Figure 4.3. Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser) watches intently in She Monkeys (Aschan, 2011).

Figure 4.4. Cassandra (Linda Molin) balances atop a horse in a display of mastery and balance in She Monkeys (Aschan, 2011).

In both Water Lilies and She Monkeys, the object of desire is established

through spectacle and through physical prowess, but also through the star’s isolation

within the team and her unattainability: she is an object of voyeurism but not of

16 Berlant, Desire / Love, p. 6. Mayne troubles conventionally straightforward definitions of cinematic spectacle that assume ‘a spectator who is held, contained, and regulated by the mechanisms of the cinematic apparatus’, exploring the spectacle of the woman in The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946) through which it can be seen ‘not just as the imposition of a rigid separation between subject and object, but also as the fantasy of submerged boundaries’. See The Woman at the Keyhole, pp. 17, 32.

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touch.17 The erotic affects of Water Lilies and She Monkeys reside in the ‘cloud of

possibility’ that Berlant writes is ‘generated by the gap between an object’s

specificity and the needs and promises projected onto it’.18 Just as the abject is what

we are repulsed by even as it occupies a space within us, both desire and its

unsustainable needs – given repulsive form as they force Marie into closeness with

Floriane through sensory excess – are mutually constitutive.19 The films present as

painful those ‘needs’ that accompany desire and its promises; however, they also

present them as part of the affect of erotic possibility that I will argue we can call

queer.

The significant tension that defines my interest in both of these films is their

generation and control of potential, either sexual or sporting, both of which might be

erotic. In two films that track the demands of sporting cultures, the anticipation of

winning or losing is inevitable. This anticipation is heightened within teams as well

as between them: of course, not everybody gets selected to compete.20 The eroticism

created by this twofold demand for, and reluctance towards, competition has its own

cinematic history. Its corpus starts with Personal Best, a film structured around the

inevitability of competition between two lovers competing in the same athletic

discipline.21 The romance between Tori (Patrice Donnelly) and Chris (Mariel

Hemingway) begins with an arm wrestle, a now famous scene of foreplay whose 17 As I outlined in Chapter One, desire is folded into the image of the woman: the image becomes, in de Lauretis’s words, the ‘site of pleasure and sexuality’, which is tied for Stacey to the identification with the image, as in Mulholland Drive where Rita Hayworth is site of both identification and desire. See de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 151 and Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 172. 18 Berlant, Desire / Love, p. 6. 19 See Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 20 Halberstam has written about Tracy Moffat’s photography series of Olympic athletes who came fourth in their race, remarking that ‘winning is a multivalent event: in order for someone to win, someone else must fail to win, and so this act of losing has its own logic, its own complexity, its own aesthetic’. See The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 93. 21 The lesbian sports genre is limited: the rarely available Thin Ice (Cunningham-Reid, 1995) is one example. However, films from A League of Their Own (Marshall, 1992) to Bend it Like Beckham (Chadha, 2002) and Whip It (Barrymore, 2009) offer occasional peripheral lesbian characters (or retrospectively outed lesbian stars such as Ellen Page) as well as the sporting team as site of homoeroticism and vicarious lesbian spectatorship, as charted in Whatling, Screen Dreams.

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sweaty, erotic potential seems to predominate, in recollection, over later sex scenes

(see Figure 4.5).22 The film’s trailer makes no reference to the romance at the heart

of the film; what it foregrounds is the competition between the two women which, as

suggested by this arm wrestling scene, is what in turn provides the eroticism that

does not need to be accounted for by sex. In this competition can be found the desire

for one’s own success along with the desire for the impressive other; as with so

many other narratives of lesbian potential charted in previous chapters, eroticism is

found in the intertwining of identification, idealisation and desire, heightened in

these registers because of its uncertain execution in the diegesis, always left in

anticipation of a narrative guarantee by what Jagose calls the ‘structuring

mechanisms of lesbian invisibility’.23

Figure 4.5. Tori (Patrice Donnelly) and Chris (Mariel Hemingway) arm wrestle in Personal Best (Towne, 1982).

What makes Water Lilies and She Monkeys remarkable, however, is a refusal

to allow the resolution to structure the film’s narrative journey. Both films finish in

the lingering uncertainty of either romantic or sporting triumph. Seeking to

22 Personal Best was widely discussed in the academy after its release in 1982. See, for instance, Elizabeth Ellsworth, ‘Illicit Pleasures: Feminist Spectators and Personal Best’, in Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture, ed. by Leslie Roman, Linda Christian-Smith and Ellsworth (London and New York, NY: Falmer Press, 1988), pp. 102-19; Straayer, ‘Personal Best: Lesbian/Feminist Audience’, Jump Cut, 29 (1984), 40-44; and Linda Williams, ‘Personal Best: Women in Love’, in Films for Women, ed. by Charlotte Brunsdon (London: British Film Institute, 1986), pp. 146-54. 23 Jagose, Inconsequence, p. 2.

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champion the failure that ‘allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline

behavior and manage human development’, Halberstam argues that success is tied

up in the regime of growth towards a ‘serious’ adulthood.24 The goal of these

punishing norms is to deliver us ‘from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable

adulthoods’.25 Water Lilies and She Monkeys reside somewhere in-between, evoking

the eroticism of competition while eschewing the necessity for conclusion,

preserving what Halberstam calls the ‘wondrous anarchy of childhood’ and

disturbing ‘the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners

and losers’.26 These encounters unsettle not just the biological imperative towards

reproductive maturity but also the social imperative to grow into maturity as

seriousness. We can think here of the capacity of childishness to lack potential, thus

projecting a cinema of queerness in which ‘unexpected encounters between the

childish and the transformative and the queer’ allow for the ambiguous desires that

24 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 3. For a problematisation of growth narratives in relation to ‘the ideology of possessive individualism at the root of industrialized capitalist cultural formations’, see Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 39. The path of ‘growth’ is a particularly treacherous one in feminist theory, where it has been recognised, for instance, that ‘[h]istorically, only the masculine experience of separation and autonomy has been awarded the stamp of maturity’ or that what the bildungsroman assumes is not even possible: the development of ‘a coherent and harmonious self within existing social contexts’. See Barbara Anne White, Growing up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 13. 25 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 3. 26 Ibid. Halberstam’s invocation of childhood (though not of ‘The Child’) sits uneasily alongside Edelman’s provocative assertion that ‘queerness names the side of those not “fighting for the children,” the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive fututrism’. See No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 3. Original emphases. Along different theoretical pathways, scholars have increasingly begun to theorise a ‘queer child’. See, for instance, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds., Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

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occupy the erotic spaces between success and failure in the competitive worlds of

girls’ teams.27

In She Monkeys, processes of hierarchy necessitated by parental presence are

transferred: Cassandra incarnates for Emma both rebuke and reward. The girls

perform for each other parent, child and lover, but these roles are shifted into and out

of with humour and subtlety rather than occupying permanence.28 Observing that

Water Lilies offers only five – brief – adult speaking roles, Tim Palmer writes that

‘the adult is absolutely marginal, a trace element that barely registers on-screen’.29

The film is socially fantastical with its complete removal from institutional realms of

hierarchy. Yet it is emotionally realist: desires are in high definition while everything

else fades into irrelevance; its adolescent protagonists remain ‘articulately

inarticulate’.30 The importance of coming out through verbalisation is thus markedly

reduced by the film’s affect of non-verbal engagement: conversation is absented

27 Elsewhere, Halberstam sees the bildung chart of growth as anathema to girls’ experience. ‘If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage […] and an ascension to some version (however attenuated) of social power’, Halberstam writes, ‘for girls adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression’. See ‘Oh Bondage up Yours! Female Masculinity and the Tomboy’, in Curiouser, ed. by Bruhm and Hurley, pp. 191-214 (p. 194). The former model comes to define culture’s images of adolescence, however. As Barbara Hudson writes, in contrast to ‘the restless, searching youth, the Hamlet figure […] any attempts by girls to satisfy society’s demands of them qua adolescence, are bound to involve them in displaying not only lack of maturity (since adolescence is dichotomised with maturity), but also lack of femininity’. See ‘Femininity and Adolescence’, in Gender and Generation, ed. by Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 31-53 (p. 35). 28 Katherine Dalsimer writes that in response to ‘anxiety lest the new, more powerful urges invade and disrupt the relationships with those who have been most central in the emotional life of the child – the parents […] it becomes essential that the parents be relinquished as the primary objects of love’ and, having ‘been endowed with omniscience and omnipotence must now be reduced to human scale’. See Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 6. 29 Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), pp. 34-35. 30 Palmer, Brutal Intimacy, p. 37.

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from most scenes, as are parental figures to come out to.31 It is partly the refusal of

particular generic modes that allows Water Lilies to make parental figures invisible

altogether. In contrast, a highly derivative genre film like Black Swan fully engages

with a discourse of sex as rebellion and transformation.32 In Thirteen, young

women’s desires for other women are still necessarily narrated as part of a rebellion

against parents, and go hand in hand with pushing other boundaries through drug-

taking, staying out late and breaking the law.33

In both Water Lilies and She Monkeys, speech is often entirely abandoned in

favour of other ambiguous sensory expressions of a desire that remains “unspoken”

literally and metaphorically.34 Indeed, the titles of both films gesture to the

animalistic pre-verbal interactions of monkeys (She Monkeys) and octopuses (the

original French title of Water Lilies is Naissance des Pieuvres, meaning ‘Birth of the

31 This mode exposes as ironically misguided the desire of journalists to retrospectively dub Water Lilies part of a “coming of age” trilogy. See, for instance, Thea Lenarduzzi, ‘Testing the Waters of Identity’, The Times Literary Supplement, (20 May 2015), <http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1558437.ece> [accessed 11 September 2015]. Following Water Lilies, Sciamma made Tomboy (2011) and Girlhood (2014). In this, Sciamma fits into a group of young female filmmakers in France making films that concentrate on young lives. See also Mia Hansen-Løve’s Goodbye First Love (2012). What I call the teleological semantics of this genre will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Five. 32 This “transformation” is literalised in a scene in Black Swan in which Nina has sex with Lily. As Lily goes down on her, Nina’s skin starts to mutate and she begins her transformation into the “black swan” of the film’s title. We might also think of Carrie (de Palma, 1976) as a film whose narrative of adolescent sexualisation is made extreme through supernatural physical transformation. In Jack and Diane (Gray, 2012), lesbian sexual desire is metaphorically associated with Jack’s transformation into a werewolf. Less extreme physical “transformation” often takes the now clichéd form of the newfound identity and the new haircut as in I Am Love (Guadagnino, 2009) and Caramel (Labaki, 2007). 33 Of course, the list of teen films that exemplify this model is potentially endless, beginning with Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, 1955) and including The Breakfast Club (Hughes, 1985) and Heathers (Lehmann, 1988), on the comic end of the spectrum, and Kids (Clark, 1995) and A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971) on the tragic end. For the runaway trope in lesbian film, see, for instance, The Fish Child (Puenzo, 2009) and Gasoline. 34 In an interview with Elena Oumano, Sciamma has complained that ‘everyone talks in the same clever way in Juno (Reitman, 2007), and I didn’t believe that this girl was sixteen’. See Cinema Today: A Conversation with Thirty-Nine Filmmakers from around the World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), p. 53.

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Octopuses’).35 Water Lilies leaves us pondering these inarticulate desires through

non-verbal affective states: the intensity of verbal silence is made apparent by the

aural dominance of Para One’s musical score and the background chatter of

nameless girls.36 The words spoken by Floriane to Marie are rare (those by Marie to

Floriane are even rarer), and contain mundanities in comparison to the intense desire

that is articulated through silent looking and longing. In several shots dispersed

throughout the film, Floriane undresses in the foreground as Marie wordlessly

watches in the background; her gaze announces her desire, while her refusal to

undress herself until Floriane has left the frame announces, without the need for

words, the apprehension and risk associated with that very desire. In this we witness

the lesbian potential that we might call queer. Here I move away from Halberstam’s

critique of potential as it is configured on the way to success, and instead posit a

queer potential that resides in the in-between, allowed to remain as potential by the

film’s unhurried narrative tempo.

In her essay ‘Lesbian Minor Cinema’, White reads two films that allow for

‘representations of the juvenile that mark the marginalization of lesbian in relation to

a series of terms including gay, women, feminist, queer’.37 However, White reads as

full of potential what could otherwise be read as failure: lesbians have ‘deployed the

35 Kathryn Bond Stockton explores the conceptual alignment of children and animals in modernist literature, writing that ‘[a]s a recipient of the child's attentions – its often bent devotions – and a living screen for the child’s self-projections – its mysterious bad-dog postures of sexual expression – the dog is a figure for the child beside itself, engaged in a growing quite aside from growing up’. See The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 90. Several films have explored this through the literal besideness of a speaking animal who projects the child’s expression back to her/him: see, for instance, Animals (Forés, 2012). Other films in which teenage girls’ behaviour comes to take on animalistic qualities include Attenberg (Tsangari, 2010), in which two friends’ devotion to David Attenborough’s nature programmes instills in them a bizarre tendency towards using their bodies to create animalistic shapes and noises. See also Karen Lury, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). 36 “I’ll explode if I say it”, cries the teenager Ginger in Ginger and Rosa, articulating the dual possibility both of the verbalisation and of the containment of difficult feelings (in this case, her father’s affair with her best friend). 37 White, ‘Lesbian Minor Cinema’, Screen, 49:4 (2008), 410-25 (p. 415).

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minor in a range of culturally successful ways’, she writes.38 Through the Deleuzian

reading of the minor as what is ‘revolutionary’ within canonical literature, White

aligns the term minor with queer as ‘another term that inflects rather than opposes

the dominant’.39 Thus White shifts tone from pitting the lesbian against queer and

other terms, to gesturing at lesbianism’s queer potential. Here lie the grounds for a

mutual, rather than substitutive, relationship between the two terms. The films that

White addresses in her article are very different texts from those analysed in this

chapter. Flat is Beautiful (Benning, 1998) and Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of

the 60s in Brussels (Akerman, 1994) are both short experimental films that are minor

within the lesbian feature mode. White’s article gestures at minority cinema’s own

minors, and points to that minority (or queerness) as the rejection of either the

‘phase’ or of the ‘coming-out’ narrative, refusing ‘predictive narratives in favour of

an unrealized potential’.40 White’s choice of term is key. Not ‘predictable’ (though

the coming out narrative has become a predictable trope of many lesbian films), but

‘predictive’.41 Not only do we see a refusal of the singular moment of identity

enunciation, but also a refusal to predict it. Intense gazes are abundant but frequently

unreturned; touches are insistent in their brief moment of contact but then found to

be all too fleeting. Slowness and interruption build up an overarching affect of

possibility that is erotically, if frustratingly, charged with suspense.42 Both Water

38 White, ‘Lesbian Minor Cinema’, p. 425. Original emphasis. 39 White, ‘Lesbian Minor Cinema’, pp. 411-12. White quotes from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 40 White, ‘Lesbian Minor Cinema’, p. 411. Original emphasis. 41 See, for instance, Appropriate Behaviour, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love and My Summer of Love. 42 Schoonover writes that ‘the debates over slow cinema may be about the question of queerness or what it means to live queerly. Queerness often looks a lot like wasted time, wasted lives, wasted productivity. Queers luxuriate while others work. Queers seem always to have time to waste.’ See ‘Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Laboring Body, the Political Spectator, and the Queer’, Framework, 53:1 (2012), 65-78 (p. 73). For other work on the cinema of slowness, see, for instance, Song Hwee Lim, Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014).

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Lilies and She Monkeys exhibit a homoerotic, or we might now say queer, desire;

like White’s corpus in this regard, they do not predict or anticipate the arrival at

identity through coming out (or coming in to identity) but relish moments of

unarticulated potential.

These moments can be found in the tension in the films between performance

and its underside, control. ‘Between’ is a word that recurs throughout this chapter.

Affect arises in Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth’s words ‘in the midst of in-

between-ness’.43 Moving beyond the realm of desires in fantasy that I charted in

earlier chapters, here desire is an affective trace left in the watery space between

touch.44 As Marie in Water Lilies showers following her first invitation into the pool

for the synchro team’s practice, she sticks her tongue out to taste the water that drips

down, as if tasting her connection to Floriane (see Figure 4.6). Later, when Marie

and Floriane share this same shower (Figure 4.7), the spatial and textural consistency

recalls the more obvious sexual potential of an earlier scene in which Marie has

watched Floriane kiss a boy in this very spot (Figure 4.8). The lesbian potential of

Marie’s desire remains non-sexual but affectively powerful. The scene with which I

began this chapter, in which Marie tastes, smells and touches the articles of

Floriane’s rubbish bin, is a direct articulation of the desires that this film creates in

objects that move beyond bodies, and spaces that bodies move within and beyond.45

43 Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. by Gregg and Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1-25 (p. 1). 44 In another theoretical mode we might read these as the ‘surface effects’ of Grosz’s ‘refiguring’ of lesbian desire. She writes that ‘[t]he sites most intensely invested in desire always occur at a conjunction, an interruption, a point of machinic connection, always surface effects, between one thing and another – between a hand and a breast, a tongue and a cunt, a mouth and food, a nose and a rose’. See Space, Time and Perversion, p. 182. 45 The abject is that which, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’ See Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon Roudiez (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. This also brings to light the potentially abject nature of the failure that Halberstam finds in the passage quoted earlier, wherein failure disturbs ‘the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers’. See The Queer Art of Failure, p. 3.

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Figure 4.6. Marie (Pauline Acquart) tastes the water that is her connection to Floriane in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007).

Figure 4.7. Marie (Pauline Acquart) finally shares the space of the shower with Floriane (Adèle Haenel) in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007).

Figure 4.8. Marie watches on as Floriane (Adèle Haenel) and François (Warren Jacquin) frolic in the shower in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007).

In-between Touch

Both Water Lilies and She Monkeys eroticise spaces in-between, spaces that produce

desire as a queer affect without singular object. There are particular spaces that we

think of as coded in particular ways. The urban space discursively coded as queer

discussed in Chapter Three is one example. Similarly, White writes of the

sociologically-termed ‘environmental lesbian’ traditionally observed to be found in

female institutions such as the girls’ school, manifest in her example of These Three

(Wyler, 1936), an early adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour,

and again emergent in twenty-first century cult favourites Lost and Delirious (Pool,

2001) and Loving Annabelle (Brooks, 2006) amongst others.46 As in Water Lilies

and She Monkeys, in The Falling (Morley, 2015), erotic affects cut across coded

practices. Dispersed affects rather than object-oriented desires pass between

adolescent schoolgirls through the “fainting spell” that inexplicably affects all of the

girls at the school in an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness.47 Eroticism in The

46 See White, Uninvited and Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour (New York, NY: A.A. Knopf, 1934). Other examples include Cracks (Scott, 2009), Tanner Hall (Gregorini and von Furstenberg, 2009) and Bloomington (Cardoso, 2010). Set in a music conservatoire, Highly Strung (Laloy, 2009) turns the intense school trope into a story of obsessive competition and revenge for artistic sabotage as in The Page Turner (Dercourt, 2006). 47 As Mayer argues of the film’s affect of physical contagion, ‘Lydia (Maisie Williams) is falling in love with her best friend Abbie (Florence Pugh), and then falling in love with Abbie’s sudden physical symptoms’. See ‘Things Fall Apart’, Sight and Sound, n.s., 25:5 (May 2015), 28-31 (p. 29).

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Falling is about an affect of bodily movement rather than bodily touching.48 For

Berlant, affect ‘registers the conditions of life that move across persons and

worlds’.49 Additionally, we can posit here the sensations of life that move across and

between bodies. Key here is movement across persons and worlds, a formulation

that unsettles the linear relationship between subject as desiring and object as

desired. If affect also registers those conditions that ‘energize attachments’, we can

see how the queer affects of Water Lilies and She Monkeys are productive of those

potential desires that we might formulate in psychoanalytic terms but are not

synonymous with or subservient to them.50 Affect is what registers the trace of desire

left on the screen by the continuance of the watery motif in Water Lilies. This motif,

and its connotations of spectacle, competition and shared space, has its own queer

affect across the timeframe of the film, while also enabling those familiar ‘genres’ of

encounter that produce distinct desires that unfold in the more traditional

shot/countershot sequences between Marie and Floriane.51

Both films rely on the familiar affects – the thrill of suspense, the agitation of

hostility – promised by genre as ‘an aesthetic structure of affective expectation’.52

48 See Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 49 Berlant writes this in the context of her definition of affect as an elucidation of the cruelty of optimism for the ‘good life’ in the ‘ways that it registers the conditions of life that move across persons and worlds, play out in lived time, and energize attachments’. See Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 16. 50 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 16. 51 As Sedgwick writes, ‘[a]ffects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects’. See Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 19. 52 Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 4. This might be used to describe what we traditionally think of as genre – the thriller or the western – but also more generally as ‘an institution or formation that absorbs all kinds of small variations or modifications while promising that the persons transacting with it will experience the pleasure of encountering what they expected, with details varying the theme’. Ibid. In an interview with Dana Luciano, Berlant further clarifies her use of the word as ‘an affective event that is organized aesthetically, that is, by way of a sensually invested conventional form’. See ‘Conversation: Lauren Berlant with Dana Luciano’, Social Text, (2013), <http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/conversation-lauren-berlant-with-dana-luciano/> [accessed 11 June 2015]. My emphases.

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She Monkeys hints at the Western with its duel scenes and wide-open Scandinavian

landscapes, Water Lilies at the musical with its set pieces and humorous interludes.

While Céline Sciamma has suggested that she wanted her three central characters to

be recognisable features of a teen film genre, it is the dramatic set pieces that guide

our understanding of particular scenes as key to an overarching affect, if not to a

narrative drive.53 Water Lilies also gestures to Greek drama in a scene in which

Marie and Floriane depart from the bleak location of Floriane’s car park meeting

with her sometimes boyfriend François. The girls walk away from the camera, one

on either side of a crack in a concrete plain that stretches away from the centre line

of the camera frame. The pillars of concrete behind them as they sit and the steps

that dwarf them give the impression of an amphitheatre, and it is in this expansive

space that they begin to share intimate secrets and we are offered the first and last

directly returned gaze of the film. Intimacies are shared in set pieces on a grand

historical scale (the stone of the Greek amphitheatre or, as in She Monkeys, the

chiaroscuro lighting of a Renaissance painting), both hinting at mises en scène of

recognisable tragedy (see Figures 4.9 and 4.10). Yet rather than lean towards the

conventional coming out trope, Water Lilies and She Monkeys opt for narratives in

which the confusion and ambiguity of adolescence actually distorts generic potential.

The architectures of Figures 4.9 and 4.10, and their framing and lighting, are

reminiscent of unmistakeable conventions in theatre and painting, yet the anti-

dramatic interactions that occur on these stages – the anticipation of touch, gaze and

speech followed by withdrawal rather than relief - let down the drama promised by

these recollections of historic visual style.

53 Oumano, Cinema Today, p. 190.

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Figure 4.9. Marie (Pauline Acquart) and Floriane (Adèle Haenel) share a moment of intimacy on a theatrical scale in Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007).

Figure 4.10. Cassandra (Linda Molin) prepares Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser) for sleep in She Monkeys (Aschan, 2011).

The films evoke watery spaces of diffracted images and other sensory

generators (of touch, smell, sound and taste). Wilson describes the way in which,

‘with whatever abrasion, Floriane opens Marie’s world and reorganizes her

senses’.54 Significantly, Wilson acknowledges this abrasiveness even as sensory

reoorganisation signals something that we might read as deeply romantic. Yet what

Marie’s senses provide is not only abrasion but repulsion. Desire as a constantly

failing image forces the abject upon us even as it offers the erotic.55 The director

Lisa Aschan has said in an interview about She Monkeys that ‘I wanted every scene

to be a duel’, and the film is rife with competition, staging the girls’ relationship to

one another as one of a heightened affect of precarious competitiveness.56 The

dreaminess of the pace of She Monkeys gestures at violent climaxes but pulls back

before they reach the generic demands of a thriller.

Both envy and jealousy are productive of desire. Cassandra and Emma by

turns tease each other, trick each other and physically hurt each other. Their

interactions are abundantly physical from the start, and outbursts of feeling fall flat,

54 Wilson, ‘The Sea Nymphs Tested This Miracle’, p. 213. 55 Here we might turn again to Berlant and Edelman on the abject, or the ‘unbearable’, facets of sex itself in Sex, or the Unbearable, p. vii. 56 See also Breathe (Laurent, 2014), in which the friendship between two teenage girls is fraught with competition, jealousy and ultimately violence. In Heavenly Creatures, the jealous and competitive relationship is given shape in a dream world through which Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet (Kate Winslet) share their erotic and violent fantasies.

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as if muted by what Catherine Wheatley observes in the film’s ‘pale half-light that

makes everything spectral’.57 A sole utterance of the words “I love you” remains

unanswered, taking place in the shallow water of a beach at dusk. The fairytale

ambience of the Swedish coast meets what Handyside calls the beach’s potential for

‘radical and transformative encounters’.58 But this beach moment provides, rather

than the pleasure of encounter, the pain of it: the verbal promise of romance (“I love

you”) is met with the induction of physical repulsion as Cassandra pulls away from

the vulnerability of her words to place a slimy jellyfish into Emma’s hands. The

desire for, and fear of, intimacy is countered by the pain that always threatens to

have been held with it. Intimacy in its sexual form is even more intensely

paradoxical, its relations ‘both overwhelm[ing] and anchor[ing] us’.59 Cassandra’s

desire is revealed through jealousy and rivalry. Her touch has strictly been one of

discipline, until Emma moves from playful banter to sexual anticipation with one of

the boys encountered early on at the swimming pool and re-encountered at the

beach. Having cut off her own potential for intimacy, Cassandra abruptly disrupts

Emma’s heterosexual potential with Jens (Adam Lundgren), a character whose brief

appearance serves only to reveal the potential for jealousy to provide the evidence of

desire. At Cassandra’s lead, the girls humiliate Jens, stealing his clothes and

57 Catherine Wheatley, ‘She Monkeys (Review)’, Sight and Sound, n.s. 22:6 (June 2012), 76. 58 Handyside, Cinema at the Shore: The Beach in French Film (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), p. 5. Lury writes that the ‘“once upon a time” of the fairytale’ orchestrates the child’s perspective via the ‘representation of different embodied encounters and the adoption of an alternate mythic temporality’. See The Child in Film, p. 6. The fairytale thus evokes both a spatiality and temporality of otherness and potential. 59 Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, p. iv.

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abandoning him.60 This path from jealousy to humiliation initiates a movement

towards physical intimacy. Mystical half-light shrouds the scene in a disorienting

dreaminess, yet it still maintains the predominantly brown and tan palette of the

training room. It is the first time their hands have touched outside of the regimes of

sport. As if to announce the inappropriateness of this moment of undisciplined

contact, the touch of their hands quickly departs from the potential of intimacy to the

bluntness of transaction, as Cassandra hands over half of the cash that she has

retrieved from Jens’s wallet. The potential for Emma’s heterosexual liaision has

been both enabled by Cassandra and destroyed by her.61

In Water Lilies, every scene of physical intimacy between Marie and Floriane

is juxtaposed with a subsequent scene in which Marie watches Floriane with

François. In one shot, the girls’ hands and wrists are in the frame, touching for the

first time as Floriane writes her address on Marie’s palm. The close-up produces an

intense affect of potential intimacy made erotic not only because of the framing of

skin on skin, but also because of the absence in the frame of any social indicators of

separation that distinguish the rest of the film. In the immediately following scene,

Marie must wait alone for Floriane in a long shot of a bleak grey carpark that

emphasises the abrupt suspension of close-up affection. The transaction they have

made – for Marie to be allowed into the team as resident voyeur but only if she

chaperones Floriane’s dates with François – is put into stark relief as the physical

60 This bullying of male peers for the purpose of young female empowerment is a strong feature of Foxfire (Haywood-Carter, 1996), in which a group of girls forms a gang in response to misogynistic treatment by boys and male teachers. The film was remade (Cantet, 2012) in a 1950s setting, which augments the gendered divisions of the original. The original is an adaptation of a novel by Joyce Carol Oates entitled Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (London: Macmillan, 1993). In Wild Things (McNaughton, 1998), the promise of lesbianism as titillation becomes part of a revenge narrative. The comic version of the ‘girl gang’ trope can be found in D.E.B.S (Robinson, 2004). 61 This “enabling” is mirrored in the quasi-incestuous triangulations of desire in films such as The Falling, Ginger and Rosa and My Summer of Love.

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intimacy of their touching hands is superseded by Marie’s lonely waiting.62 Later,

again, physical intimacy between the girls is vicarious, produced only in

conversations they have about boys: Floriane’s verbalisations of her sexuality

produce temporary and short-lived physical manifestations of erotic potential. Even

here, their hands touching as they lie on the bed, the frame divides them and creates

a visual obstacle to diegetic intimacy. In the two-shot that follows, their hands no

longer touch. We are always left just out of reach of the consummation of desire that

we cling to as the narrative convention is resisted.63

The critical task here is to avoid submitting to the promise, or

disappointment, of sex as the evidence of desire.64 In discourses of lesbian

representation now familiar from previous chapters, sex becomes a structuring

presence even in the form of notable absence. In Water Lilies, sex as “sex scene”

becomes a transaction of necessity. Floriane is figured as the film’s object of desire

through the gaze of Marie, the gaze of the viewer and the gaze of the boys who

remain silent and sidelined except as verifiers of Floriane’s desirability. It is the twist

of the film when she reveals that she is in fact still a virgin and that her reputation for

sexuality as activity is an affectation. Rather than an act of desire, sex becomes for

Floriane a necessity for the maintenance of this façade. “I want you to be the first. I

want you to remove it for me. Then it would be real”, Floriane demands of Marie.

Her request heralds Marie’s first visualisation of her desire for Floriane. Tracing

with her finger the outline of lipstick from a much earlier mocking kiss Floriane has

62 In Chapter Two I explored Stacey’s use of Sedgwick’s notion of ‘vicariated desire’. See Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene, p. 133 and Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 157. 63 Berlant sees optimism not ‘primarily as a glossing over, as “fantasy”’ but as ‘a mode of attachment to life’. See Sex, or the Unbearable, p. 5. Yet it is also found to be ‘cruel’, ‘when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially’. See Cruel Optimism, p. 1. 64 Several films beckon this reading through their own climactic narrative trajectory, most famously Claire of the Moon (Conn, 1992), which builds up the sexual tension between its two leads until the very final scene.

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planted on the glass of Marie’s window, Marie then kisses the same spot on the other

side of the glass to fashion two kisses, left slightly out of sync. The kiss itself

endures only as an illusion. Even once realised, the sexual transaction remains

unnamed: the scene in which it is initiated is introduced by Marie’s obscure

agreement to do “what you wanted”. The girls go through the motions of the

breaking of the hymen, itself an antiquated and irrelevant token of virginity, and then

make the bed with quaintly patterned sheets. The ring of the doorbell sounds the

disruption of Marie’s attempt to turn this into a scene of intimacy and re-introduces

François, the absent third term of the triangulated procedure. Marie’s best friend

Anne (Louise Blachère) remains sidelined by the promise and beauty that Floriane

holds for Marie. This scene is cruelly juxtaposed with the arrival of François at

Anne’s house in order to use her for the sex that we are led to believe has again been

withheld by Floriane. Marie and Anne are paralleled as unrequited lovers, both

perfunctorily utilised by their objects of desire. Together, as friends holding hands

on the bed, they consummate the intimacy that they have both sought elsewhere.65

While She Monkeys eschews altogether the necessity for narrative climax in

the form of sexual climax, it offers a central scene that breaks the spatial and

progressive narrative mode of the film so far. Emma and Cassandra have initiated a

friendship that combines the mutual competitiveness of teammates, the identification

of resemblance and the desire for physical prowess. Cassandra has helped to train

Emma’s physical flexibility. She has used the negotiations of bodily discipline to

65 This platonic intimacy between friends complicates our reading of the eroticism of the non-sexual in the queer affects that I have described. In her book about female friendship films, Karen Hollinger includes a sub-genre, the ‘erotic’ female friendship film, within which she places – problematically –Desert Hearts, Personal Best and Go Fish alongside Fried Green Tomatoes (Avnet, 1991). See In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). The latter film famously left out the “explicit” lesbian details of the book on which it was based but kept in much of the subtext that allowed it to remain a cult favourite with lesbian viewers.

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exert power over Emma, as well as to engineer physical proximity. Cassandra

creates in Emma the figure that she would like to be and that she will desire.66

Choreographing and then dismantling the meeting with the boys on the

beach, she has also inaugurated Emma’s sexualisation. Midway through the film,

however, and in a transitional point of the narrative, an embrace that we might

habitually presume will lead to the consummation of the erotically charged

relationship is interrupted by their desire being made repulsive as it is made explicit.

Embracing in a sort of slow dance before returning to the silliness of their physically

playful dynamic, the girls wrestle in a fit of giggles until Emma wets herself.

Following one breakdown of bodily control, Emma must endure another: as if on

demand, she throws up at the precise moment that Cassandra asks her if she feels

sick. In the slow movements that follow there is something ritualistic about the way

that Cassandra takes Emma’s clothes from her, silently preparing her for sleep in a

scene of dark and brown chiaroscuro lighting that evokes the religious solemnity of a

Caravaggio painting. If the theatrical allusions of the amphitheatre scene in Water

Lilies open up space, the dark intimacy of this scene closes space down. When

Emma’s breathing quickens, her stomach stirs with Cassandra’s touch in close-up

before the camera pulls out until we see the whole of her body, presided over by

Cassandra as if in the replication of a pietà. When they kiss, their faces are obscured,

the kiss drowning them in darkness. Their faces move together and, as they do, the

66 Freud’s list of narcissistic forms suggests that a tension arises within the narcissistic love both of ‘what he himself is’ and ‘what he himself would like to be’ as well as the threat of ‘what he himself was’. See ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 73-102 (p. 88). We might call this the All About Eve model of one woman’s supersession by another. Kaja Silverman argues that all forms of narcissistic love are configurations of the girl’s love for the mother. See The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 153-54. De Lauretis warns however of the assimilation of the ‘two terms desire and identification with the mother’, whereby ‘both the lesbian and the narcissistic connotations [of desire and identification], which are socially disparaged or disapproved, become muted under the strong positive connotations of a maternal feminine identification’. See The Practice of Love, p. 190. Original emphases.

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shadows they cast immerse them in the darkness that becomes a motif of physical

intimacy in contrast to the garish costumes of the gymnastics that form the

performance of a spectacle of desire but not its consequence.

The affective relief of tenderness is thwarted, however, as Emma tortures

Cassandra with a flattening of erotic affect through stillness and silence.67 The

yearning for a reversal of desire’s imperative transformation seems to be part of a

resistance to Cassandra’s manipulation. Emma’s shattering of potential is payback

for Cassandra’s control over the friendship, and for her introduction to a disorienting

world of desire. Emma’s withdrawal of touch and of voice is as powerful as

Cassandra’s initial insistence of it.68 To consummate the visual and aural pairing of

desire and control, the immediately succeeding scene returns to the training room,

with the sound of the crack of the whip alongside the interpolations “Cassandra” and

then “Emma”. Intimacy and control become intertwined through aural interruption of

physical potential.

The sound of the whip, which occurs at infrequent but clearly defined

moments in the film, also brings us back into the realm of the gymnastic

performance. Janet Wolff writes of classical ballet that it has emphasised ‘in its

commitment to line, weightlessness, lift, and extension an ethereal presence rather

67 This scene encapsulates Berlant’s contention that ‘[t]he impact of the object, and the impulse that involves the patterning of attachment, are the materials of sexuality and of the optimism (at least for affective relief) that must accompany taking up a position in it. An object gives you optimism, then it rains on your parade – although that is never the end of the story.’ See Desire / Love, p. 13. It is the movement from this precise optimism given by the object, then its ‘rain[ing] on your parade’, that sums up what She Monkeys articulates: that desire provides both pleasure and pain in its possibility and immediate disappointment (brought together here into the same frame). 68 For more on the relationship between touch and trauma, through which a ‘breach of bodily boundaries’ can install ‘a continuum between the physical and the psychic, between the sexual and the emotional’, see Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 51.

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than a real corporeality’.69 She Monkeys negotiates this tension between the ethereal

and the corporeal. Stagings of desirability as spectacle and to-be-looked-at-ness

become literally insubstantial, while moments in which the characters are brought

into the corporeal presence of the other are either moments of extreme discipline and

control, as in the first training scene, or moments that also verge on abjection, as in

the scene above in which it is only losing control of one’s bladder and then one’s

stomach that creates a space for desire as care.70

Pleasure in Touch

In these films, desire is not only articulated through bodily abjection; likewise, it is

not only articulated through the body. If we compare both She Monkeys and Water

Lilies to a film like Personal Best, we can also observe the startling absence of the

sweaty, close-up montages of the latter film’s sporting sequences. Instead, these

films are about an erotic affect that resides, contrary to expectation, in the spaces

between the bodies’ exhibitions of physicality. While Personal Best presents an

almost constant spectacle of physical prowess, both She Monkeys and Water Lilies

put their isolated scenes of athletic performance into tension with everyday

activities. Training scenes that in Personal Best are demonstrators of prowess

become, in Water Lilies in particular, humorous interludes of mundane adolescent

69 Janet Wolff, ‘Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics’, in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. by Jane Desmond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 81-99 (p. 95). 70 Berlant finds in Freud’s work the idea of love as ‘far more complex and ambivalent than that which we find in […] romance ideology [which tends] to disavow erotic ambivalence and install, in its place, a love plot – a temporal sequence in which erotic antagonism or anxiety is overcome by events that lead to fulfillment. But in Freud's model [love] is all bound up with an economy of aggression. In this model, to love an object is to attempt to master it, to seek to destroy its alterity or Otherness. Here, aggression is not the opposite of love, but integral to it.’ See Desire / Love, pp. 24-25. Thus the sado-masochism that characterises competitive desire in She Monkeys is part of, rather than contrary to, the yearning in this scene for desire as care. Indeed, as Phillips tells us in ‘Punishing Parents’, parental care is itself bound up in sado-masochistic cycles of power and frustration. See One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013), pp. 351-71.

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summer play in which, for instance, Marie weight-lifts boxes of laundry detergent

and then asks Anne to measure her biceps.

In She Monkeys, any pleasure in touch is similarly reserved for childishness.

If the space of the pool heralds overt sexualisation for anyone, it is for Emma’s little

sister, Sara, who is dismissed from her swimming class for wearing just bikini

bottoms and for leaving her undeveloped chest bare. The necessity for concealment

secures the body as a staging of inappropriateness (indicating that there is something

to conceal).71 Sara is subsequently intent on wearing clothes for older girls, insists on

wearing a fake tattoo on her arm and misunderstands the affection of her babysitter.

The child’s seeking and enjoyment of intimate touch accentuates the coldness of her

teenage sister’s highly disciplined tactile interactions with Cassandra.72 Touch is

intertwined for the older girls with a power relationship in which intimacy is offered,

but always taken away again. This exemplifies the relationship between the potential

for physical intimacy and eroticism. The latter does not disappear when the former is

withdrawn; indeed, rivalry and dissatisfaction are actually productive of erotic

potential (even if hung on to in the form of what Berlant calls our ‘cruel

optimism’).73 The character of Sara allows for the sublimation of the expectation of

71 As David Buckingham writes, ‘the image of the sexual (or “sexualized”) child fundamentally threatens our sense of what children should be’. See The Material Child: Growing up in Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), pp. 127-28. 72 For more on this relationship in popular culture, see Rueschmann, Sisters on Screen. 73 Berlant, Cruel Optimism. For an example of this construction of lesbian ‘optimism’, see Jacqui Lawrence, ‘Where Have All the Lesbians Gone in TV and Film?’, Guardian, (25 March 2015), <http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/25/lesbians-tv-and-film-call-the-midwife-last-tango-in-halifax> [accessed 15 June 2015].

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Emma’s overt sexualisation as a teenage girl. The queer affect in relation to Emma is

potentialised but subdued.74

The pool itself becomes a site of adulthood meeting childhood. A dramatic

scene in which Cassandra pushes Emma from the top of a diving board in a display

of power and risk is juxtaposed with a shot of the same girls paddling in the

children’s shallow pool, which is where they are accosted by the two boys with

whom they will later share a scene of romantic potential. As a counterpart to the

bedroom as a common site of female adolescent intimacies, the swimming pool itself

generates competition, desire, friendship, alienation and collectivity. These

contradictory relations, encounters and affects mark the swimming pool as a site of

the ‘blurring [of] conventional distinctions between land and water, nature and

artifice, purity and impurity’.75 Water as texture occupies the potential spaces of

tension that arise between desire and competition and between spectacle and

mundanity. The pool in Water Lilies is a space in which, as Sophie Belot argues,

‘structure and movement interrelate and where the figurative and the abstract

connect’.76 The film’s spectacular scenes of synchronised swimming routines,

reminiscent of Berkeley’s choreographed musicals, connect the figurative and the

abstract in shows of pattern and flesh.

74 She Monkeys is regarded by Rosie Swash in an article for The Guardian as ‘dispassionate’, in contrast to the ‘UniLad’s wet dream [of] nubile Swedish girls experiment[ing] with their sexuality’ that she says the synopsis could indicate. See ‘She Monkeys Director Wanted Coming-of-Age Movie to Be “Like a Western”’, The Guardian, (28 April 2012), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/apr/28/she-monkeys-lisa-aschan-interview> [accessed 19 September 2013]. Indeed, this is part of the wider discourse that the film speaks to, gesturing to but dismissing desire as uncomplicatedly direct and sexualised. The use of the word ‘dispassionate’ in Swash’s argument suggests a lack of emotion, a rationality that opposes what I have described as the intense sensuality of Water Lilies. 75 Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch, ‘Introduction: The Cinema of the Swimming Pool’, in The Cinema of the Swimming Pool, ed. by Brown and Hirsch, pp. 1-20 (p. 17). 76 Belot, ‘Céline Sciamma’s Naissance des Pieuvres: Seduction and Be-Coming’, Studies in French Cinema, 12:2 (2012), 169-84 (p. 177).

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The swimming pool is also, in Water Lilies, the space of an unremarkable

conclusion, where Marie and her neglected friend Anne play childish games,

blowing bubbles that trickle discretely to the top of the frame. In contrast, Floriane is

the sole figure in her final frame, precociously embodying a knowing loneliness.77

The spectacle she promises as object of the gaze of the boys around her (an almost

identical earlier scene has rewarded her desire for attention) is juxtaposed with the

childishness of romantic indifference (Marie and Anne have chosen each other for

platonic intimacy instead). The star shapes that Marie and Anne make in the water

are like propulsions back to childhood.

Figure 4.11. Marie (Pauline Acquart) and Anne (Louise Blachère) play together in the pool at the end of Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007).

Figure 4.12. Floriane (Adèle Haenel) dances alone at the end of Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007).

By uniting both shots in the shared haze of a blue filter, this emphasises, like

the pair of scenes with which I began the chapter, the encounter between these two

modes of adolescent bodily inhabitation (see Figures 4.11 and 4.12). In this final

scene it is the swimming pool where Marie wipes off the lipstick from the kiss that

she has received, at last, from Floriane. The refusal to allow this kiss to point

towards individual or romantic growth (Marie ends up more childish than she began)

signals the indifference to sexuality rather than the consummation of it.

77 Throughout the film Anne and Marie’s friendship signals a nostalgia for childhood, from Anne’s insistence that she buy a kids’ Happy Meal at McDonalds to their comically apprehensive discussion, in the same scene, of the relative sizes of their breasts.

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She Monkeys, on the other hand, ends with a shot largely reminiscent of the

one with which it begins, following the queer affect of a relationship between Emma

and Cassandra that is muted and strikingly unclimactic. In a late scene of violent

revenge against unwanted desire, Emma strikes Cassandra in the knee with grievous

ambitions and consequences. At the film’s closure, which returns to the training

room as site of competition and desire (as does Water Lilies to the swimming pool),

Cassandra now looks on alone, bandaged and with crutches. Isolated in her

voyeurism, she takes Emma’s place as sideliner, while Emma is uniformly figured as

part of the team from which Cassandra has been ousted. The UK distributors of the

film, Peccadillo Pictures, call She Monkeys a ‘taboo-busting modern western’, and

the closing music is reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino movie brawl.78 However,

rather than the tension of the duel, this final scene provides the victory of

substitution. Emma is framed exactly as Cassandra was in the original scene, in

close-up from waist to head with arms outstretched and the appearance of

disembodiment from the horse, the ground and the other girls who make up the joint

effort of the team.

Even if She Monkeys is frequently muted and Water Lilies lavishly sensory,

these contrasting affects are still formed in their physical separation of the subject

and object of desire (which in both cases provides, on the one hand, frustration and,

on the other, enduring potential). Queer affects are defined here not only by the

traditionally erotic structures of gaze and spectacle, but also by the tensions that are

created between that spectacle and its underside. In Water Lilies, spectacle is

shattered by way of the banal details of everyday life; in She Monkeys, the inverse of

spectacle is the potential for violence that comes with the necessity of control.

78 ‘She Monkeys’, Peccadillo Pictures, (2013), <https://www.peccapics.com/product/she-monkeys/> [accessed 16 December 2015].

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Indeed, the use of spectacle in She Monkeys ultimately overrides, rather than

reinforces (as in the musical genre), the foregrounding of the couple.

She Monkeys and Water Lilies provoke the frustration and even banality of

closure’s refusal – neither pair of girls ends up happily ever after, nor consummates

the relationship with the sexual act we are trained to read as inevitable.79 Both

protagonists, Emma and Marie, are left in their final scenes fully occupying the

affective female spaces of their desire – the barn and the swimming pool – but

separated from their objects of desire. The queer affects that take the place of

articulated desires are unfulfilled moments in the long summers that epitomise the

temporariness of their adolescent subjectivities. Traces of desire are found in shared

spaces and objects: through the glass or the mirror on which a lipstick kiss is left; in

the shot of the ceiling which is a rare shared focus point for the two girls as they

gaze up at it; and in the watery motif that yields in showers and swimming pools the

spoor of an earlier occupant. These all produce queer erotic affects of the not-

necessarily sexual that arise in tension with the excessive physicality of sporting

worlds. The mises en scène of She Monkeys and Water Lilies privilege the

interrelationships between girls’ friendship and desire, even where no lesbian

‘figure’ is discernible, and offer queer affects within an overarching narrative of

what a visibility imperative may not allow to be called ‘lesbian desire’. This is an

affective mode of filmmaking that is saturated with desire but not defined by desire’s

labelling. Queer affect is enabled and made apparent by the opening up of the senses;

it is induced by desire’s state of attachment but not confined to it. In Chapter Five I

will explore the ways in which Blue is the Warmest Colour delivers a spectacle of 79 As Lisa Henderson writes, ‘[i]n a cultural universe and an era where distributable “gay films” are likely to be feature-length and to affirm gay and lesbian communities through coming-out stories, happy endings, and same-sex kisses, the depth and range of queer feeling and representation are compressed’. See Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production (London and New York: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 105-06.

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overwhelming desire that is materialised through sex but that, instead of reinforcing

a path to sexual orientation, disorients us in a queer time and space.

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Chapter Five

Disorienting Space and Time:

Sex as Sexuality in Blue is the Warmest Colour

Twelve minutes into Blue is the Warmest Colour, a teenage girl, Adèle, crosses a

busy urban intersection. In close-up, the focus on her face evolves as she catches

sight of a girl who is new to us and to her: a stranger with vibrant blue hair and a

grin at the companion across whose shoulders her arms are casually draped. We

track the approach of this blue-haired girl until she crosses the path of our

protagonist. At this moment, the camera swivels along with both girls in a single

sweeping take as they contemplate one another, each contorting her body to keep the

other in sight (see Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1. Emma (Léa Seydoux) and Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) set eyes on one another in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013).

In the aftermath of this wordless, touchless encounter, fast pans and jump

cuts accompany the beeping horns of impatient cars surrounding Adèle in a

disorienting haze of traffic, colour and movement. By this moment in the three-hour

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film, we have been made familiar with three key recurring locations – the classroom,

the playground and the home. This scene yields an abrupt disorientation not only for

its protagonists but also for its viewers. This is the moment at which Blue is the

Warmest Colour begins its delivery of a spectacle of overwhelming desire that,

instead of providing us with a journey towards clarity of sexual orientation,

disorients us in time and space. If this particular moment is a point of transition in a

lesbian bildungsroman narrative in which girl meets girl, it is not the reassuring

transition from innocence to experience that is promised by the teleological

semantics of that genre’s subtext (to come of age).1

Blue is the Warmest Colour won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival,

marking an international landmark in lesbian cinematic history and signalling a point

of convergence between screen visibility and political progress; in the same week,

gay marriage was legalised in France, the film’s country of production. The

paralleling of two scenes in the film that are alike in look and feel, one a march for

workers’ rights and the next a gay pride rally, signals the film’s potential for the

politicisation of identity. However, Stephen Spielberg, the chair of the 2013 Cannes

jury, expressly states that ‘politics was not a companion in our discussion; it was not

in the room’.2 Blue is the Warmest Colour’s triumph seems to indicate moreover an

1 For more on the lesbian bildungsroman in various media, see, for instance, Mia Carter, ‘The Politics of Pleasure: Cross-Cultural Autobiographic Performance in the Video Works of Sadie Benning’, Signs, 23:3 (1998), 745-69; Monica Pearl, ‘Graphic Language: Redrawing the Family (Romance) in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home’, Prose Studies, 30:3 (2008), 286-304; and Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘Exiting from Patriarchy: The Lesbian Novel of Development’, in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, ed. by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1983), pp. 244-57. 2 Andrew Pulver, ‘Cannes 2013 Palme d’Or Goes to Film About Lesbian Romance’, The Guardian, (26 May 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/26/cannes-blue-is-the-warmest-colour> [accessed 20 March 2014]. However, as Pulver’s article demonstrates, Abdellatif Kechiche in fact awarded his film ‘to the youth of France’ and of Tunisia, where ‘they have the aspiration to be free, to express themselves and love in full freedom’. The political accenting of the film’s success in these words is quite clear.

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increase in public and critical acclaim for lesbian narratives.3 Even so, another

Cannes jury member, feminist director Lynne Ramsay, insists that ‘it was just a love

story, and it didn’t matter if it was gay or straight’.4 Ramsay’s universalising and

potentially de-politicising view of the film’s story of first love is not rare.5

Meanwhile, the film’s entry into mainstream media discourse is owed at least in part

to the controversy over its extended explicit sex scenes, and for its actresses’ attack

on their director’s methods.6

For the Cannes jury, the film is not just a lesbian love story. For many critics,

Blue is the Warmest Colour is not a lesbian love story at all. The lesbian popular

culture website After Ellen asks is it ‘a lesbian film?’ and Julie Maroh, the author of

the original graphic novel Le Bleu est une Couleur Chaude, has written on her blog

that ‘it appears to me that this was what was missing on the set: lesbians’.7 The film

3 Blue is the Warmest Colour was the first lesbian film to win the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes; it also provided only the second occasion of a win for a woman, the first being for Jane Campion as director of The Piano (1993). Both Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux shared the prize with Kechiche in an acknowledgement of their crucial contribution to the film’s ‘synergy’. See Pulver, ‘Cannes 2013 Palme d’Or Goes to Film About Lesbian Romance’. White has written about the visibility of female filmmakers at Cannes. See Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, pp. 41-42. 4 Pulver, ‘Cannes 2013 Palme d’Or Goes to Film About Lesbian Romance’. 5 Critics in national newspapers as well as in lesbian popular culture fan pages have focused their attention on Blue is the Warmest Colour’s status as a lesbian film. On one website alone this variously takes the form of a video of ‘lesbian reactions’ to the film; an article that measures the cast’s ‘convincing’ queerness; and a review that asks, straightforwardly, ‘is Blue is the Warmest Colour a “lesbian film”?’ See Trish Bendix, ‘Watch Now! Lesbians React to the Sex Scene in Blue Is the Warmest Color’, After Ellen, (11 November 2013), <http://www.afterellen.com/watch-now-lesbians-react-to-the-sex-scene-in-blue-is-the-warmest-color/11/2013/> [accessed 1 January 2016]; Sarah Terez Rosenblum, ‘Convincingly Queer: Léa Seydoux in Blue Is the Warmest Color’, After Ellen, (6 November 2013), <http://www.afterellen.com/convincingly-queer-lea-seydoux-in-blue-is-the-warmest-color/11/2013/> [accessed 5 December 2013]; and Marcie Bianco, ‘Is Blue Is the Warmest Color a “Lesbian Film”?’, After Ellen, (25 October 2013), <http://www.afterellen.com/blue-is-the-warmest-color-comes-stateside/10/2013/> [accessed 5 December 2013]. 6 As reported by The Guardian, ‘the 10-minute love scene at the centre of the film took a gruelling 10 days to shoot’, and the ‘fight scene was the result of a continuous one-hour take during which Kechiche refused to allow his stars to simulate blows’. See Ben Child, ‘Blue Is the Warmest Colour Actors Say Filming Lesbian Love Story Was “Horrible”’, The Guardian, (4 September 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/04/blue-is-the-warmest-colour-actors-director> [accessed 19 November 2013]. See also Emily Greenhouse, ‘Did a Director Push Too Far?’, The New Yorker, (24 October 2013), <http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/10/did-a-director-push-too-far.html> [accessed 3 December 2013]. 7 See Julie Maroh, Le Bleu Est Une Couleur Chaude (Grenoble, France: Glénat, 2010) and Maroh, ‘Le Bleu d’Adèle’, Les Coeurs Exacerbés, (27 May 2013), <http://www.juliemaroh.com/2013/05/27/le-bleu-dadele/> [accessed 4 December 2013].

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is criticised for its explicit sex scenes on the one hand, and lauded as a universal love

story on the other; it is part of a political movement for some and just another

misogynistic appropriation of the female body for others. In an essay on art cinema

and Lianna (Sayles, 1982), Merck reads the ‘love scene’ as holding a ‘particularly

symbolic function: the ability to represent “lesbian experience”’.8 The questions and

contradictions demanded by Blue is the Warmest Colour’s critical reception seem to

reduce the discourse on lesbian film to just this: the representability of “lesbian

experience”.

On the most prominent English-language poster for Blue is the Warmest

Colour, a shot from the film is manipulated to resemble the graphic novel from

which it was adapted (see Figure 5.2). The profiles of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos)

and Emma (Léa Seydoux), delineated against an opaque powder blue background,

create an hourglass shape that is at a slight tilt: the image’s visual figure-ground

organisation simultaneously hints at and disturbs any potential for symmetry.9 This

poster image capitalises simultaneously on mythologies of feminine sexuality, girlish

innocence and lesbian sameness, through the substitution for hair of a cartoonish

crayoning-in of a royal blue sweep across Emma’s forehead; the uniform red paint of

their parted lips; the makeup-blackened hue of their eyes; and the flattening out of

their skin into static washed-out tones.

8 Merck, Perversions, p. 167. 9 The psychologist Edgar Rubin established the complexities of perception in the relationship between figure and ground, illustrated in the ‘Rubin Vase’ that Blue is the Warmest Colour’s poster approximately imitates. He writes that ‘[i]n a certain sense, the ground has no shape. A field which had previously been experienced as ground can function in a surprising way when experienced as figure.’ See ‘Figure and Ground’, in Visual Perception, ed. by Steven Yantis (Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press, 2001), pp. 225-29 (p. 225). Butler draws on this visual figure/ground relation and its destabilisation of norms of perception to suggest that ‘the object […] of lesbian-femme desire is neither some decontextualized female body nor a discrete yet super-imposed masculine identity, but the destabilization of both terms as they come into erotic interplay. Similarly, some heterosexual or bisexual women may well prefer that the relation of “figure” to “ground” work in the opposite direction.’ See Gender Trouble, p. 167. The visual suggestiveness of Blue is the Warmest Colour’s poster initiates the film’s play with sameness and difference.

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Figure 5.2. The US poster for Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013).

Their smooth pale skin presents them as youthful, but the gaudiness of the

lipstick – added for the benefit of the poster rather than a recognisable feature of the

film itself – sexualises them, turning them into literal caricatures of their roles as

young girls in love.10 The childish handwriting that performs the words of the

English title stands out in contradistinction to the erotic gaze that criss-crosses from

Adèle’s eyes to Emma’s, and from Emma’s eyes to Adèle’s open lips. How might

we complicate this reading of the film as dependent on, and derivative of, existing

conventions for the image of the lesbian? How might we interpret the film’s

establishment of a series of orienting structures of recognition and lesbian

categorisation in light of the ways in which it breaks them down in disorienting turns

of temporal and spatial play?

10 This sexualisation of youth is both a prevalent, and an increasingly threatening, phenomenon. Kerry Robinson and Cristyn Davies write that ‘[w]ithin hegemonic discourses of childhood, innocence is viewed as natural, and moral panic is often associated with a perceived risk of the child’s innocence being compromised’. See ‘“She’s Kickin’ Ass, That’s What She’s Doing!”: Deconstructing Childhood “Innocence” in Media Representations’, Australian Feminist Studies, 23:57 (2008), 343-58 (p. 343). See also Buckingham, The Material Child.

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Essential (Dis)Orientations

While the film’s original French title, La Vie d’Adèle: Chapitres 1 et 2 (The Life of

Adèle: Chapters 1 and 2), bespeaks a linearity of movement from one stage of life to

another, even a cursory look at its narrative arc disrupts the promise of destination.

In an unnamed city in northern France, Adèle is studying for the série littéraire

baccalaureate with an inseparable group of friends, a new boyfriend Thomas

(Jérémie Lahuerte) and a devoted family. Early on in the film, Adèle identifies the

dissatisfaction of sex with Thomas as a desire for women and, following a

disappointingly fleeting kiss with a friend (Alma Jodorowsky) who rebuffs her the

next day, enters into a relationship with Emma, a college art student. Following their

meeting, which is received with disapproval and a homophobic verbal attack by her

friends, Adèle’s social life almost entirely melts into irrelevance as she is consumed

by her relationship with Emma. Fast forward several years to the second chapter of

the film’s original title, and Adèle is now a teacher, living with Emma but

dissatisfied with Emma’s focus on her art work and her preoccupation with her

intellectual friends.11 Following Adèle’s admission of an affair with a male

colleague, Emma abruptly breaks up with her, and she descends into depression.

Rich writes that Kechiche ‘expanded the format [of the graphic novel] to an epic: his

Blue demands viewers’ attention for a full 179 minutes of measured, deliberative

11 Blue is the Warmest Colour’s French subtitle Chapitres 1 et 2 suggests a continuation of Adèle’s narrative, though Kechiche’s desire to explore later “chapters” is complicated by the controversies surrounding his working relationship with the actresses Seydoux and Exarchopoulos. See Jonathan Romney, ‘Abdellatif Kechiche Interview’, The Guardian, (27 October 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/27/abdellatif-kechiche-interview-blue-warmest> [accessed 12 October 2015]. See also Pierre Marivaux, La Vie de Marianne (Paris, France: Le Livre de Poche, 2007). This play by an important eighteenth-century French playwright, from which Blue is the Warmest Colour takes its French title, was famously left unfinished. Earlier films by Kechiche, namely Games of Love and Chance (2003), also cite Marivaux’s influence.

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observations of a young woman’s adolescence, erotic awakening, and maturation’.12

These ‘full 179 minutes’ advance on an expansive scale with the endurance of

notoriously long sex scenes (up to ten minutes long), a fight scene and a fifteen-

minute post-breakup scene in the final half hour of the film. ‘[T]he audience learns

[the film’s world’s] contours through camera work and performance’, Rich writes,

‘with everyone in close-up and nothing essential withheld’.13 In contrast, I read the

film as withholding everything essential – if by essential we mean the transparency

of narrative markers and placeholders that choreograph a cinematic bildungsroman

like Boyhood (Linklater, 2014), which reliably includes at least one scene from every

annual cycle of its measured twelve-year scope.14 Blue is the Warmest Colour

instead conveys a temporal dislocation in which Adèle’s overwhelming desire for

Emma interrupts growth almost literally: from one “chapter” to the next, Emma loses

the blue hair that signifies not only youthful rebellion but also the standout feature of

her erotic appeal; Adèle’s face and hairstyle remain noticeably unchanged. Adèle is

never given, diegetically, the opportunity to follow the process of growing up

awarded to Mason (Ellar Coltrane) in Boyhood, a film whose production

methodology guarantees it.15

Blue is the Warmest Colour’s timeline chronicles more sporadically a move

from the school where Adèle occupies a stable position in her group of friends, to the

12 Rich, ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color: Feeling Blue’, The Criterion Collection, (2014), <http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3072-blue-is-the-warmest-color-feeling-blue> [accessed 7 April 2014]. 13 Ibid. 14 Boyhood was filmed incrementally between 2002 and 2013 with the same cast of actors portraying the same family. For more information on the production process, see, for instance, Ashley Clark, ‘The Interview: Richard Linklater’, Sight and Sound, n.s., 24:8 (August 2014), 20-24. 15 Both films contrast with 52 Tuesdays (Hyde, 2013), a film about a trans* man’s transition and relationship with his daughter, which is set – and was filmed – one day a week over the course of a year, and which marks each of the ‘52 Tuesdays’ of its narrative unambiguously with a title frame. These title frames are accompanied by news footage of current events from that particular day in the year of shooting. This example emphasises the concentration by Blue is the Warmest Colour on a denseness and closeness of scope that shuts out wider contexts.

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bar where she and Emma have their first proper meeting to the various apartments

they share in the film’s second chapter. In the first few scenes of the film, Adèle’s

home life is comfortably established through repeated shots from different angles of

the walk to and from her front door. Instead of a single family mealtime to orient us

in her familial sphere, we are invited to several at which the reccurring dish,

spaghetti bolognaise, situates us in their daily routine, but also later symbolises class

differences in relation to the desire and need for such unadventurous comforts (and

access to the alternative). These regular family mealtimes punctuate episodes at a

second structuring location, the school. Blue is the Warmest Colour commences with

the impression of an ensemble piece through its operation within an important

French tradition of lycée films that include The Party (Pinoteau, 1980), Good Old

Daze (Klapisch, 1994), Games of Love and Chance (Kechiche, 2003) and The Class

(Cantet, 2008). In these films, the school is neither a mere supplementary location to

the home, nor the marker of education’s role as stepping stone; in The Class, the

camera resides only in the school’s classrooms, halls and playground.16 In Blue is the

Warmest Colour, the school location provides an ensemble ready-made: Adèle’s

gossipy friends share almost equal screen time with Adèle in the film’s first act, and

even speak the film’s first words.17

16 The original French title of The Class is Entre les Murs (Between the Walls). Philip French remarks on a ‘remarkable French tradition of school films’ in his review. See Philip French, ‘Au Revoir, Monsieur Frites’, The Guardian, (1 March 2009), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/mar/01/drama-class-entre-les-murs> [accessed 12 October 2015]. 17 The female homosocial classroom belongs to a somewhat different history, one that I explored in Chapter Four. Wallace, following Mikhail Bakhtin, introduces the school as one of four classic ‘lesbian chronotopes’, also including the prison, the bar and the college, that ‘advance specific stories’. See Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, p. 134. Other classic school films include Girls in Uniform. Well into the twenty-first century, the enduringly popular cult films Lost and Delirious and Loving Annabelle prove that the school is still a favourite location for the spatialising of female homoeroticism. Prison narratives also remain common, including the widely acclaimed Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, Cheryl Dunye’s TV movie Stranger Inside (2001) and the TV remake (McNaughton, 1994) of the sexploitation film Girls in Prison (Cahn, 1956). For more on this trope, see Mayne, Framed.

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However, these initially vital friends are at odds with the film’s lesbian

storyline, which disrupts the continuity of these locations rather than secures it.

When Adèle is met by Emma spontaneously at the school gates, she walks away

with her, ignoring the summons of her friends. Just one final school scene occurs in

Adèle’s diegetic adolescence, in which her friends speculate on Emma’s “gouine”

(dyke) image, which becomes immediately transferred onto Adèle herself in an

aggressive naming of her identity. “Tu lécheras pas ma chatte, sale gouine” (you

won’t lick my pussy, you dirty dyke), shouts one of the girls. It is a scene that recalls

the exuberant chatter of earlier playground gossip but with the hard edge of

homophobic condemnation. The space is significant as the only site of the film’s

verbal interpellation of either girl’s sexual identity. This pessimistic episode

expedites Adèle’s transition from this stage of her life; her friends are now silenced

by screen absence.

As Blue is the Warmest Colour progresses, not only do these initial orienting

locations and characters increasingly disappear from the story, but the rapidity with

which we are introduced to new locations and new people intensifies. Two location

templates – school and home – remain prominent. Of the seventy-seven scenes in

Blue is the Warmest Colour’s three hour-long stretch, over twenty-two – a quarter –

take place at school, while twenty-one take place at home. No other location is

privileged to the same extent. However, this statistical record of scene distribution is

misleading. The classrooms, playgrounds, bedrooms, kitchens and dining rooms that

set the scene for over half of the film’s running time are multiplied across the many

years of the narrative span. The reliability of repeated and prolonged returns to

spaces like the classroom is an illusion of familiarity within difference. Incessant

graduations from one similar space to another give the film a forward momentum but

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also a cyclical repetitiveness. The bildungsroman’s theme of progression is stalled

by repeated returns to the same spatial signifier of childhood, the classroom. The

film exhibits both sides of the sensation of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘women’s time’:

on the one hand cyclical, defined by repetition, and on the other hand a ‘monumental

temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time

(which passes) that the very word “temporality” hardly fits: all-encompassing and

infinite like imaginary space’.18 The film begins at sunrise and ends at sunset, the

final mise en scène referencing the very first with a medium shot of an urban street

through which a solitary Adèle walks with her back to the camera. This scope could

represent many years or just a single day, and the film juggles these two temporal

registers of epic scale and intense immediacy.19

If the first half of the film (Chapitre 1) serves to orient us, then the second

chapter takes the seeds of that orientation and disperses them, throwing us into a

time and space of uncertainty. It is striking to perceive how young Adèle looks as

she conducts a classroom of children, having so recently in non-diegetic terms sat

amongst her peers for her own schooling. She is like a child performing an adult

role, never more so than when she stages a party for Emma and plays the role of

housewife; the spaghetti bolognaise she cooks links back to the family scenes of her

adolescence and the film’s beginning, but also marks an ambivalent break in which

she, in a new space, must perform the domestic familial role. Cowie writes that

cinema ‘selects and excludes. It is therefore, even without the spoken or written 18 Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, Signs, 7:1 (1981), 13-35 (p. 16). 19 Much work has been done in recent years on notions of ‘queer temporality’, notably in Elizabeth Freeman and others, ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’, GLQ, 13:2 (2007), 177-95. For an account (and occasional critique) of these models of queer temporality, see Villarejo, Ethereal Queer, p. 18. Villarejo observes that ‘[i]t is important also to note how powerfully sexuality as a field incorporates contradictory temporal models – for example, how psychoanalysis relies on a teleological model of sexual development toward heterosexual reproduction, while that other part of Freud (the part we like more) notices how, as Freeman puts it, “the past is unlikely to remain in the past”.’ Ibid. Villarejo quotes Elizabeth Freeman, ed., ‘Introduction to “Queer Temporalities” (Special Issue)’, GLQ, 13:2 (2007), 159-76 (p. 162).

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word, an utterance or enunciation, an organised presentation of reality which

presupposes an intelligibility of the utterance; it is organised for understanding.’20

Rather than organising, defined as arranging ‘into a structured whole’, Blue is the

Warmest Colour disorganises its reality into a whole that lacks all of its parts.21 With

these gaps in our knowledge (the details of Adèle’s teacher training, her final

departure from her family, her move-in with Emma) the film cannot be organised, in

Cowie’s words, for understanding; it is instead organised (or disorganised) for

misunderstanding, for a failure to understand correctly on the basis of what is

selected for utterance. While it withholds the essentials of the bildungsroman’s

narrative procedure (graduations, goodbyes), the film magnifies, in epic proportions,

the essential scenes of first romance: sex and fights take the place of what Emily

Apter calls the epic’s requisite ‘wars and revolutions’.22 Yet Blue is the Warmest

Colour stretches and compresses, hinting at epic time but refusing the expectations

of that scope. Desire throws the characters, while desire’s disorganised diegesis

throws us, into a state outside of the temporal logic of teleology, just as the film’s

offering and withdrawing of familiar spaces dismantles the spatial logic of

continuity.23

20 Cowie, Representing the Woman, p. 26. Original emphasis. 21 See Oxford English Dictionary Online (2015) 22 Emily Apter, ‘“Women’s Time” in Theory’, differences, 21:1 (2010), 1-18 (p. 4). Apter argues that ‘epic time is typically enshrined in the largely male-authored tradition of the historical novel, which seeks to grab the event through an epoch-defining narrative of watershed dates (wars and revolutions)’. Ibid. 23 Freeman’s adoption of the Shakespearean expression ‘time is out of joint’, taken from Hamlet, argues that queers are ‘denizens of time out of joint’. See Time Binds, p. 19. In Chapter Three I used Ahmed’s notion of queer’s spatial obliqueness; here, we might suggest that Freeman’s argument advances a kind of temporal obliqueness inflecting the lesbian bildungsroman of Blue is the Warmest Colour. See also Jagose’s discussion of the sequencing of lesbian desire in Inconsequence, pp. 102-5.

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Desire in Close-up

Rather than contextualising wide-angles, the majority of the film’s shots are close-

ups, with occasional medium and very few long shots (the exceptions, contrary to

convention, are in the sex scenes, which I will explore below). The sight of the front

door of Adèle’s childhood home, while familiar through repetition, is never

contextualised within a long shot of the city at a larger scale. In comparison to the

home spaces of Circumstance that, as I explored in Chapter Three, are in constant

negotiation with the public sites of the city, Blue is the Warmest Colour’s intimately

shot city streets, while shot “on location”, could, to the uninformed (or un-oriented)

eye, be anywhere. Rather than offering a simulacrum of a well-known capital city, as

Circumstance does (filming in Beirut as stand-in for Tehran), Blue is the Warmest

Colour eliminates any particularising markers. The film’s tempo follows the

immediacy of Adèle’s desire rather than the framing lifeline around it; the textures

we come to know are those of Adèle’s skin rather than the city in which she resides.

Doane writes in her general discussion of the close-up in cinema that, ‘[o]f all the

different types of shots, it is the close-up that is most fully associated with the screen

as surface, with the annihilation of a sense of depth and its corresponding rules of

perspectival realism’.24 This effect is found in Blue is the Warmest Colour, in which

the texture of Adèle’s skin is reminiscent of what Doane calls ‘an image rather than a

threshold onto a world. Or rather, the world is reduced to this face, this object.’25

24 Doane, ‘The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema’, differences, 14:3 (2003), 89-111 (p. 91). Doane’s argument about the close-up also suggests, however, its link to universality rather than particularity. She writes that the close-up ‘has been seen as the vehicle of the star, the privileged receptacle of affect, of passion, the guarantee of the cinema’s status as a universal language, one of, if not the most recognizable units of cinematic discourse, yet simultaneously extraordinarily difficult to define’. Ibid. Original emphasis. 25 Doane, ‘The Close-Up’, p. 90.

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Blue is the Warmest Colour’s world is reduced to close range, to the intimacies of

Adèle’s immediate conditions of life.26

As so many reviews have insisted, this could be anybody’s story of intense

love, but for the moments in which the film does pull away from the universalising

affect of the close-up: the sex scenes.27 Forced to confront a polarised set of

measures based on these two registers – universalism based on the close-up and lack

of locational specificity and lesbian particularism based on the mid-range of its sex

scenes – the film resists both.28 With this resistance to conventional markers of

growth and an accentuation of the intensity of desire in isolation from everyday

experience, the film refuses the linear narrative drive of the bildungsroman promised

by the film’s source text, Maroh’s graphic novel, in which the relationship between

Clementine (Adèle) and Emma involves a kind of induction into lesbian community

26 This marks a notable break from the last critically acclaimed film by Kechiche, Couscous (2007), whose shipyard setting in the French coastal town of Sète, and its links to Tunisia, are crucial to the political force of the narrative. 27 Peter Bradshaw, for instance, writes that ‘this isn’t young love or first love [or lesbian love, one might add to his duo], it is love’. See ‘Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Review)’, The Guardian, (21 November 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/21/blue-is-the-warmest-colour-review> [accessed 1 December 2013]. In D.A. Miller’s article on Brokeback Mountain (Lee, 2005), he derides the easy universalism associated with that film. See ‘On the Universality of Brokeback Mountain’, Film Quarterly, 60:3 (2007), 50-61. Hilary Hinds has also discussed the question of universality in relation to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Kidron, 1989), the BBC adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (London: Pandora, 1985). See ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Reaching Audiences Other Lesbian Texts Cannot Reach’, in Immortal, Invisible, ed. by Wilton, pp. 52-69. 28 Galt and Schoonover write that, ‘[w]hile it may be tempting to regard art cinema’s emphasis on the aesthetic as apolitical, we argue that by connecting the cinematic image to international spaces, it inherently makes a political claim’. See ‘Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema’, in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. by Galt and Schoonover (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 3-27 (p. 20). This observation troubles the ease with which we might detach the close-up intimacies of Blue is the Warmest Colour’s aestheticism from its political programme.

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via sexuality (the words “are you ready?” preface their first sex scene).29 The film

plays with this route to the particularism of lesbianism by teasing us with the

disillusion of its presumed sites of collective identity. Just as the bar is the location

for Adèle and Emma’s first conversation, it is also, in a different incarnation but

similar aesthetic, the site of Adèle’s later affair with a male colleague, the discovery

of which leads to the break-up of her relationship with Emma. The pride march that

signals an investment in the politics of sexual orientation is reduced to a festival of

colour and romantic sentiment, musically, but not verbally, accompanied; the scene’s

twin, a workers’ rights march earlier in the film attended by Adèle and her school

friends, evidences the political invocations of injustice that are lacking in recent

divestments of pride’s political agenda in favour of corporate sponsorship.30

Instead of the ‘overtone’ of lesbian drama that, in Lisa Henderson’s words, is

‘always available as both stereotype and subcultural knowledge’, Blue is the

Warmest Colour evinces an intertextual economy of the image through which its

close-ups find unity with a repertoire of cinematic images.31 James Williams writes

that in Kechiche’s work, ‘different kinds of space are put into play at a range of

levels, from the physical and intertextual to the theatrical and cinematic’.32

29 This references a pedagogical model of lesbian cinema mocked in High Art but reinforced in films such as Personal Best, Lianna, Desert Hearts and, more recently, Imagine Me and You (Parker, 2005), Itty Bitty Titty Committee (Babbit, 2007), The Four-Faced Liar (Chase, 2010) and Kiss Me (Keining, 2011). Notably, The L Word, whose West Hollywood universe is populated by out-and-proud lesbian after lesbian, insists on framing its first season around the coming out story of Jenny, a budding writer whose sensual and sexual awakening is delivered by the feisty and experienced Marina. In her foreword to a collection released after the show’s second season, Sedgwick confesses that ‘I will be relieved when the writers decide they have sufficiently interpolated straight viewers and can leave behind the lachrymose plot of Jenny’s Choice’. See ‘Foreword’, p. xxiv. 30 See, for instance, Chasin, Selling Out and Alan Sears, ‘Queer Anti-Capitalism: What’s Left of Lesbian and Gay Liberation?’, Science and Society, 69:1 (2005), 92-112. 31 Henderson, Love and Money, p. 107. Henderson marks this queer feel as a quality found in the short film Desert Motel (Johnson, 2005), which resides in contrast to a ‘cultural universe and an era where distributable “gay films” are likely to be feature-length and to affirm gay and lesbian communities through coming-out stories, happy endings, and same-sex kisses’. See Love and Money, p. 105. 32 James Williams, Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 189.

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Intertextuality here is about spatial allusion to a genre like the bildungsroman

(through the classroom for instance); the ‘different kinds of space’ that Williams

cites are ‘put into play’ as the film utilises them to provide familiarity and then

withdraws them to shake up our spatial and temporal frames of reference.

In an early scene, we observe Adèle and Thomas in a dark cinema

auditorium: from the vantage point of the cinema screen, we look inwards at the

audience, the glow of the moving image dancing on their faces. The scene is

immediately juxtaposed with a shot of Adèle, filmed in the same dark light that

allows only for a reddish glow of softly illuminated skin. Alone in her bedroom, she

is lying awake and thinking not of Thomas but of the as yet unnamed girl she has

met in the street. As she touches herself, the camera cuts from close-ups of her skin

to close-ups of Emma’s mouth and hands, her blue hair swathing Adèle’s body. In

Maroh’s graphic novel, this fantasy is illustrated by dismembered hands painted a

vibrant blue (see Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3. A panel from Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Colour (2010).

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In the film, a solitary close-up of Adèle cuts to another almost identical

close-up in which the unmistakeable blue of Emma’s hair signals her presence. The

scene forces us to confront our relation to the gruelling intensity of the film’s sexual

realism: are we as shocked when “the sex scene” is part of a fantasy within what is

already a fantasy? In Sex, or the Unbearable, Lee Edelman writes of Lydia Davis’s

story ‘Break it Down’ that it ‘parses the problem of defining an encounter – of

determining whether or not it takes place and of knowing precisely in what it

consists – by reducing it first to a finite number of delimited sexual acts’.33 In this

scene, the ‘encounter’ is precisely not delimited because Emma both is and is not

there. Only the conventions of narrative storytelling tell us that Emma’s presence in

Adèle’s masturbation scene is merely a fantasy – they have not yet formally met or

exchanged words, and Emma has not been present in this scene until this moment. In

terms of her cinematic presence, she is every bit as “there” as Adèle is. It is only

sequence that tells us that this sex scene is enacted solo, yet it is also sequence (in

the form of repetition as described above) that harnesses familiarity and then distorts

it.

In Chapter One, I explored the ways in which Mulholland Drive could be

read in terms of cultural anxieties associated with the simultaneously singular and

doubled conceptualisations of lesbianism on screen. The psychoanalytic film

theories that I drew on articulate tensions between sameness and difference in

these cinematic figurations. If Mulholland Drive draws on a cinematic history of

female homoerotic identifications, Blue is the Warmest Colour accentuates the

cinema’s debt to the aesthetics of fine art. Its alleged objectifications of the

female body find antecedents not only in the pornographic reconstruction of

33 Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, p. 74. See also Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (New York, NY: Picador, 2009).

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lesbian sex, but also in a history of art dominated by the male gaze.34 Adèle and

Emma visit an art gallery on their first date. The camera pauses on Adèle gazing at

Emma gazing at one woman in a painting gazing at another. In this scene of multiple

looking, women are the agents of the look as well as the objects of it (see Figure

5.4). Adèle and Emma simultaneously create the framing to the nude painting

beyond and become framed within it.

Figure 5.4. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux) gaze at women gazing at each other in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013).

Figure 5.5. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) looks at Emma (Léa Seydoux) and back at herself in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013).

The process of the gaze and its photographic capture are accentuated when

Adèle’s gaze at Emma is magnified by a sheet of light between them that reflects her

gaze back inwards at herself (see Figure 5.5). The shot is thus both triangulated and

narcissistic. In the masturbation scene described above, Adèle’s own hands become

Emma’s through the fantasy made real in the cinematic image. Here, Adèle’s gaze

makes her both object and subject, her reflection fantasising, and identifying with,

Emma’s desire through the cinematic image.

In Figure 5.5, Emma’s skin is as white as the nudes in the paintings they

observe, even as white as the alabaster sculpture that follows in the next shot. It is

Adèle, the darker of the pair, who looks on with intense desire at the pale Emma. 34 Indeed, the two antecedents have a shared heritage. Galt writes that ‘[a]lthough feminist film theory has crucially enabled us to engage with the gendering of the image as a question of form, it often retains a suspicion of prettiness that derives from this foundational aesthetic hierarchy’, by which she refers to the mid-eighteenth-century century foundation of modern aesthetics. See Pretty, p. 237.

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Adèle is voracious, Emma is reserved; yet Emma’s blue hair, matching flashes of

teal in the paintings around them, is a mark of both aesthetic cohesion and social

rebellion. Blue is the visual focal point around which the film’s colour palette can

cohere; if it is rebellious, it also becomes familiar. These gallery images set up

potentially controversial, if subtle, racial dynamics between the two characters, but

also distort their easy legibility.35 Of the role of colour in art history, Rosalind Galt

writes that ‘purity has helped construct the white body as transparent, rational, and

modern, linking fleshly corruption and racial otherness to excess colour’.36 In Blue is

the Warmest Colour, this ‘fleshly corruption’ of Adèle’s skin arrives with the ‘excess

colour’ of Emma’s blue hair.37 As if through the desiring gaze, Adèle’s skin becomes

lit according to her own desire and desirability. In the middle third of the film it has

a sweaty sheen, a glow initiated in the bar in which she first meets Emma and

seamlessly carried through to their first sex scene. Premised through this first date in

the gallery, the signification of their domestic commitment and the next stage of

Adèle’s life are also introduced through the gaze as Adèle herself becomes the object

of Emma’s artwork.

Sexuality’s Synecdoche

The spectrum of adjectives used by film critics to describe Blue is the Warmest

Colour is rife with contradictions. While Stephanie Theobald in The Guardian sees

the sex scenes not only as ‘long and relentless’ but also as ‘muted and unsweaty’, 35 Dyer writes that ‘[w]hites are everywhere in representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualised and abled.’ See White, p. 3. Original emphasis. 36 Galt, Pretty, p. 68. In cinema, Galt writes, something similar happens, ‘where the simple, pure qualities of the captured moment place heavily racialized and gendered attributes on the correct or unruly forms of the image’. Ibid. 37 For more on colour in cinema, see the Screen dossier on colour, in the introduction to which Sarah Street writes that ‘colour can be appropriated to destabilize the conventions of “otherness” and exoticism established through colonial imagery’. See ‘The Colour Dossier Introduction: The Mutability of Colour Space’, Screen, 51:4 (2010), 379-82 (p. 381).

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Jonathan Romney in Sight and Sound reads the very same scenes as ‘indisputably

hot, and sweaty with it’.38 Manohla Dargis in The New York Times writes that

Adèle’s ‘hunger is contained, prettified, aestheticised’, while Romney suggests that

the film ‘achieves a sculptural tactility in catching the detail of the heroines’ bodies,

their fleshiness, and the porousness of their skin, blotchy or not’.39 Many of these

terms measure the film’s corporeal qualities – ‘sweaty’, ‘fleshy’, indeed

‘aestheticised’ – but only imply the affective implications of these aesthetic registers.

These reviews not only ask “who can speak for whom?” but also “to what extent can

we see part of that speech (sex) as the synecdoche for the whole (lesbian

experience)?”40 These reviews induct the film into a discourse that, as Merck writes,

‘privilege[s] the body, particularly its sexual functions, as a source of truth about

social relations in general’.41 In the context of the broader arguments of the critics’

reviews, all of these terms are used to convey the film’s figuration of lesbian desire,

which is read by turns as either not accurate enough or too accurate – as ‘lesbian life

painted so that straight people can understand it’ or as ‘direct’ and ‘non-

38 See Stephanie Theobald, ‘Blue’s Lesbian Lovemaking Doesn’t Hit the Spot. For Better Sex Head for the Lake’, The Guardian, (17 October 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/oct/17/blue-warmest-colour-lesbian-bad-sex> [accessed 19 November 2013] and Jonathan Romney, ‘Cannes 2013: Up Close and Physical’, Sight and Sound (Web Exclusive), (24 May 2013), <http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/festivals/cannes-2013-close-physical> [accessed 19 November 2013]. 39 See Manohla Dargis, ‘Seeing You Seeing Me: The Trouble with Blue Is the Warmest Colour’, The New York Times, (25 October 2013), <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/movies/the-trouble-with-blue-is-the-warmest-color.html?_r=1&> [accessed 19 November 2013] and Romney, ‘Up Close and Physical’. 40 Let us compare this with what Jagose observes, that ‘[i]t is not simply that heterosexuality seems irreducible to the sex acts that it nevertheless privileges, but also that heterosexuality is naturalized through a range of practices and institutions that don't seem to be about sexuality at all.’ See Inconsequence, pp. 4-5. 41 Merck, Perversions, p. 167. Holmlund also writes about the automatic closeting of the femme, who is ‘most visibly a lesbian when making love with another woman’. See Impossible Bodies, p. 39. See also Laura Harris and Elizabeth Crocker, Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), p. 2.

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mystificatory’.42 These oxymorons point to an uneasiness with how to talk about a

film whose depiction of lesbian sex is unmediated through the metaphorical devices

we are used to in, for example, the ‘sexy and silly crosscutting between breaking

bread and spreading thighs’ that Henderson recollects in Go Fish (Troche, 1994).43

Susie Bright famously acted as a technical advisor (read: authenticity

advisor) for the neo-noir cult film Bound (Wachowski, 1996), a favourite on lists

such as After Ellen’s ‘Best Lesbian/Bi Movie Poll’.44 Blue is the Warmest Colour, on

the other hand, deplored by Maroh for its lack of any lesbians on set, provides, in her

words, merely ‘a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian

sex, which turned into porn, and made me feel very ill at ease’.45 Maroh’s accusation

that the film is pornographic elicits a demand for a vocabulary to discuss the film in

42 See Theobald, ‘Blue’s Lesbian Lovemaking Doesn’t Hit the Spot’ and Jonathan Romney, ‘London Film Festival: Blue Is the Warmest Colour’, British Film Institute, (2013), <https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=blue-is-the-warmest-colour> [accessed 19 November 2013]. 43 Henderson, ‘Simple Pleasures: Lesbian Community and Go Fish’, Signs, 25:1 (1999), 37-64 (p. 60). Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon, 1997-2003), the first primetime US television show to include a long-term lesbian relationship between two central characters, depicted its first lesbian sex scene as eroticised, but fully clothed, witches’ spellcraft. The show used the ‘specter of witchcraft as a conduit of their romantic connection’, as Sarah-Jane Stratford writes in an article provoked, as it happens, by Blue is the Warmest Colour. See ‘Conservative Americans Are More Terrified of Sex Than Violence’, The Guardian, (4 November 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/04/blue-is-the-warmest-colour-shocking> [accessed 1 December 2013]. It is worth mentioning that Buffy allowed a whole season of Willow and Tara’s relationship to pass before indulging in its much controversialised and since heralded ‘explicit’ lesbian kiss, which remains a marker on timelines of lesbian televisual visibility. See also Beirne, Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium. 44 ‘The Best Lesbian/Bi Movie Poll: Winners!’, After Ellen, (2012), <http://www.afterellen.com/the-best-lesbianbi-movie-poll-winners/11/2012/4/> [accessed 4 April 2014]. On Bound, see Kelly Kessler, ‘Bound Together: Lesbian Film That’s Family Fun for Everyone’, Film Quarterly, 56:4 (2003), 13-22. 45 Maroh, ‘Le Bleu d’Adèle’.

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terms not dictated by a male model of desire.46 Rich writes that criticisms of the

film’s sex scenes ‘as “not real” are underlined by a poverty of vernacular’.47 But the

‘poverty’ of which Rich speaks also extends beyond theoretical or popular

vernacular. Comparisons of Blue is the Warmest Colour’s scenes with pornography

are arguably underlined by a poverty of image: of erotic images of women giving

women pleasure. Rosi Braidotti writes that ‘[i]n pornography, sex is represented

through the spectacle of organs interpenetrating each other, but that proves a very

unsatisfactory image for the act itself. There is always something more to experience

than the image can show’.48 But in the case of Blue is the Warmest Colour, sex is

asked by its critics not only to be a satisfactory image of ‘the act itself’, but also of

lesbian identity more broadly: of the film’s legibility as lesbian. And when sex is cut

into pieces, into singular images of genitalia, we are left with an ‘unsatisfactory’

image of the lesbian as legible.

Blue is the Warmest Colour’s sex scenes are frequently filmed using medium

shots rather than the close-ups of the film’s remainder. The mise en scène is

comparable with experimental feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s film Je, Tu, Il,

46 For feminist critiques of the relationship, or otherwise distinction, between the erotic and the pornographic, see, for instance, Audre Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, ed. by Laura Lederer (New York, NY: William Morrow, 1980), pp. 295-300 and Gloria Steinem, ‘Erotica and Pornography: A Clear and Present Difference’, in Pornography: Private Right or Public Menace?, ed. by Robert Baird and Stuart Rosenbaum (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), pp. 51-55. A wider spectrum of scholarship on pornography, including feminist pornography, can be found in the recently established Porn Studies journal. See Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, ‘Porn Studies: An Introduction’, Porn Studies, 1:1-2 (2014), 1-6. See also Cherry Smyth, ‘The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film’, Feminist Review, 34 (1990), 152-59. 47 Rich, ‘Feeling Blue’. Linda Williams writes that ‘for women, one constant of the history of sexuality has been a failure to imagine their pleasures outside a dominant male economy’. See Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (London: Pandora Press, 1990), p. 4. 48 Rosi Braidotti, ‘Body-Images and the Pornography of Representation’, in Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, ed. by Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), pp. 17-30 (p. 25). Wilson writes that Blue is the Warmest Colour lacks ‘tenderness, endearments, or even chatting between the girls’ as if we are catching ‘scenes from a marathon performance, one set of body shots spliced against another and another’. See ‘Blue on Blue, Heartache on Heartache’, Paris Update, (13 October 2013), <http://www.paris-update.com/fr/film/drama/22021-la-vie-d-adele-chapitres-1-et-2> [accessed 19 November 2013].

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Elle. In both films, two women embrace on a bed in a medium long shot that leaves

open their readability: instead of cutting up – by way of cutting closer to – the

figures’ moving bodies, the shot lets them speak for themselves. In her discussion of

Je, Tu, Il, Elle’s renowned lesbian sex scene, Weiss writes that ‘[t]he roughness and

explicitness of the scene stand in stark contradiction to the art cinema’s heightened,

glamorised eroticism of the female figure’.49 Yet what provokes an uncomfortable

reaction to the graphic nature of Blue is the Warmest Colour’s scenes (for instance,

Maroh’s accusation that they ‘turned into porn’) is, as in Je, Tu, Il, Elle, the longer,

more distanced take that, over the course of several minutes instead of seconds,

lingers for an awkwardly long time before cutting to close-up for the relief of

abstraction.50 While Doane writes that the close-up universalises the image because

it strips it of particularities, it also safeguards against the unambiguousness of the

particular. The close-up montage of sex to which we are accustomed in the art film

49 Weiss, Vampires and Violets, pp. 114-15. 50 Amongst the buzz that Blue is the Warmest Colour has elicited is the surprise, bafflement, scepticism and amusement aroused by the use of prosthetic vaginas worn by both actresses during the sex scenes. See, for instance, Tammy Oler, ‘The Problems with Blue Is the Warmest Color’, Bitch, (2013), <http://bitchmagazine.org/post/the-problems-with-blue-is-the-warmest-color> [accessed 7 April 2014]. We might ask, what is at stake here – the actresses’ “real” touching of each other or the spectators’ “real” viewing of them? Dyer writes, of the cultural production of pornography, that what ‘makes watching a porn video exciting is the fact that you are watching some people making a porn video, some performers doing it in front of cameras, and you’. See ‘Idol Thoughts: Orgasm and Self-Reflexivity in Gay Pornography’, in More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power, ed. by Pamela Church Gibson (London: British Film Institute, 2004), pp. 102-09 (p. 102). In contrast, in an interview about Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (von Trier, 2013), the actress Stacy Martin says that ‘anything that’s penetrative sex, there’s a porn double there. I had a prosthetic vagina […] that’s fake and you can't feel a thing. And that was very important for me because I'm not there to be a porn star – I’m there to be an actress.’ See Matthew Jacobs, ‘Nymphomaniac Stars Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stacy Martin on the “Boring” Filming of the Movie’s Graphic Sex’, Huffington Post, (2014), <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/20/nymphomaniac-charlotte-gainsbourg-stacy-martin_n_4995662.html> [accessed 7 April 2014]. Nick Davis’s article on Shortbus (Mitchell, 2006) reveals the ‘broad continuum of erotic agents and modes’ that allow for ‘the incorporation of unsimulated sex in nonpornographic film’ that we might want to call queer. See ‘The View from the Shortbus, or All Those Fucking Movies’, GLQ, 14:4 (2008), 623-37 (p. 627). Jagose has also exposed queer theory’s reluctance to explore orgasm despite multiple accounts of desire and pleasure offered by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jean Baudrillard amongst other. See Orgasmology, p. 6.

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might be more easily read as erotic than pornographic, but its mediation also makes

it less urgent, uncompromising and, as a result, less demanding.51

In most feature films, music is used to orient us, to orchestrate the way in

which we read what we see on screen, just as the montage of the art film’s avant-

garde love scenes closes down ambiguous legibility even as it masquerades as artily

disorienting.52 Of all of the films that Lucille Cairns analyses in her broad study of

Francophone lesbian cinema, Je, Tu, Il, Elle provides, she argues, ‘by far the most

explicit mediation of lesbian sex’.53 What is striking about Cairns’s assertion in this

context is her use of the word ‘mediation’. For what makes Je, Tu, Il, Elle and Blue

is the Warmest Colour remarkable is a (perceived) lack of mediation. The

controversially explicit sex scenes of Blue is the Warmest Colour refuse to provide

relief from the static and distanced shot, recalling the excruciating bareness of

Akerman’s film, whose sex scenes intensify the immediacy of the sexual by refusing

techniques such as slow-motion montage and atmospheric music.54 These are the

ingredients of the ‘spectacle’ that Merck writes is ‘disturb[ed]’ by the loud volume

51 As Doane observes, drawing on a quotation from Sergei Eisenstein, the close-up provides a greater immediacy and intensity of horror than a medium shot that ostensibly contains an identical source of fear. See Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. by Jay Leyda (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1949), p. 112. Quoted in Doane, ‘The Close-Up’, p. 92. 52 For more on the role of film music in orchestrating spectator responses and affect, see Annabel Cohen, ‘Music as a Source of Emotion in Film’, in Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. by Patrik Juslin and John Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 249-74; Kevin Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London: British Film Institute, 2005); Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (London: Routledge, 2001). 53 Cairns, Sapphism on Screen, p. 161. 54 In contrast, while Desert Hearts also eschews musical accompaniment in its climactic sex scene, it otherwise operates along familiarly orienting lines. Berenstein writes that its ‘sexiness is produced in large part by […] slow pacing, romantic lighting, and gentle gestures’. See ‘Where the Girls Are’, p. 132.

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of Je, Tu, Il, Elle’s sex scenes.55 In both films, we hear every intake of breath and

passionate sigh. Without music for much of the film but most notably for the sex

scenes, Blue is the Warmest Colour provokes a disjuncture between what we see and

the way in which we are used to being told about how to feel about it.56

My comparison between Akerman and Kechiche’s films highlights the

impact of Blue is the Warmest Colour’s sensual and sexual juxtaposition. Weiss

writes of a scene in Je, Tu, Il, Elle, in which Julie (Akerman) arrives at her

girlfriend’s house and demands food before sex, that Julie’s ‘needs, first for food and

then for sex, take her out of the passive, observer role; she now becomes childlike,

vulnerable, demanding, active’.57 Adding to the potential for this comparison, scenes

of eating occur throughout Blue is the Warmest Colour, and the camera lingers on

Adèle’s open mouth as she slurps spaghetti bolognaise at her parents’ house, and

oysters at Emma’s, the latter of which she eats at first squeamishly but then with

relish. Of the many food scenes, the two occasions for parental introduction are

followed immediately by the film’s most explicit sex scenes. The communication

that precedes sex is, rather than speechless, devoid of comprehension. In class terms,

neither set of parents can really hear the other girl’s experience. Adèle is presented

as a character who, in the alleged first chapter of her life, is brimming with sensory 55 Merck, Perversions, p. 175. Merck’s inclusion in her chapter on Lianna of a range of reviews, all of which discard the specificity of lesbian sexuality in the film, highlights something that could equally be said of the discourse surrounding Blue is the Warmest Colour: that ‘the extraordinary unanimity of these responses undoubtedly owes a great deal to the reviews’ aversion to lesbianism’ but is also ‘a product of art cinema, which characteristically solicits essential humanist readings founded on psychologistic saws and authorial (i.e. the director’s) declarations of a given film’s general relevance’. See Perversions, p. 169. This notion of ‘relevance’ as declared by the text’s author plays out strikingly in Maroh’s condemnation of Blue is the Warmest Colour for its lack of lesbians on set: the same film is heralded for its universalism by some, and condemned for its lack of lesbian specificity by others. 56 David Sonnenschein writes about the ways in which sound design can elicit physiological responses in spectators in Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2001). Thanks to Gemma Edney for advice on sources relating specifically to sound and music in the cinema. 57 Weiss, Vampires and Violets, p. 114. Mayne writes of the same scene that ‘food marks the transition from speechless communication to sexual encounter’. See The Woman at the Keyhole, p. 128.

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pleasure. The gallery scene is followed by a picnic in which extreme close-ups

follow the flickering of the girls’ gazes from mouth to eyes and back again. It is

through their mouths and eyes, to the exclusion of the rest of their bodies, that they

first exhibit desirability. The question so often posed in coming out films – “when

did you first know you liked women?” – is in this scene framed by Adèle not

through knowledge but through sensation – “when did you first taste a woman?”

This curiosity is reminiscent of a familiar pedagogical model of lesbian cinema, but

the question is one that seduces rather than defers, shifted by the subsequent kiss

from “when did you” to “I want to”. The film is marketed through the girls’ physical

resemblance – see the poster in Figure 5.2 for example – but it is through taste that

they try out each others’ differences.

The tendency to label “the sex scene” as such renders it inherently singular

and thus monolithic.58 The inclusion of multiple sex scenes in their abundance as

well as ambiguity is part of what disables the term’s usage in relation to Blue is the

Warmest Colour. Just as the film’s locations provide familiarity and structure only to

be withdrawn in an act of disorientation, so too the film’s final “sex scene” disrupts

any argument that can be made about the film’s turning of lesbian sex into a

decorative spectacle. Over the course of fifteen minutes, Adèle sits across a table

from Emma at a bar, the frame unoccupied by anybody else until the final few

seconds that pull out of a suffocating close-up. The longest of the film by far, this

58 This undescriptive term, seemingly without alternative, can be found in readings of films across a large spectrum of contexts, including, to take a selection, Mary Conway, ‘Spectatorship in Lesbian Porn: The Woman’s Woman’s Film’, Wide Angle, 19:3 (1997), 91-113; Creed, ‘The Crash Debate: Anal Wounds, Metallic Kisses’, Screen, 39:2 (1998), 175-79; Palmer, ‘Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body’, Journal of Film and Video, 58:3 (2006), 22-32; Stacey, ‘“If You Don’t Play, You Can’t Win”: Desert Hearts and the Lesbian Romance Film’, in Immortal, Invisible, ed. by Wilton, pp. 67-84; and Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space.

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scene is barely mentioned in reviews.59 Revealing her enduring desire for Emma,

who has begun a relationship with another woman, Adèle spends much of the scene

with her face sodden with tears and snot, the public culmination of countless

antecedent scenes of her physically manifested depression. After seven minutes of

conversation, Adèle clasps Emma’s hand and brings it to her lips, sucking on her

fingers and then on her fist. The shots in this climactic moment shift between various

close-ups: of Adèle’s open mouth, her teary eyes, her desperate and almost ugly

kissing of Emma’s lips and her grasp of Emma’s hand at her crotch. This public

scene is one of the most closely shot and darkly lit of the film. The presence in the

scene of the abject, alongside its absence in the media discourse that contrives the

film’s controversiality, is notable for what it suggests about a prevalent inclination

towards smoothing over such ambiguous framings of desire. The end of this extreme

scene merely summons another school year for Adèle as a teacher. Kristeva

describes the abject as ‘edged with the sublime’.60 That which terrifies us or causes

us pain also induces pleasure in us. Blue is the Warmest Colour is a film that brings

the sublime edge of the abject and vice versa into excruciatingly close contact. The

film juxtaposes its first lesbian sex scene with the pale nude figures of a fine art

gallery (sublime), its last with the bodily fluids of its protagonist’s grief (abject).61

59 In the words of Rich, the prolonged duration of the film ‘may well be an intended bulwark against prurience: anyone going for salacious reasons will have to pay – with their time – for the privilege’. See ‘Feeling Blue’. For more on the distribution and length of sex scenes in (nonpornographic) feature films, see, for instance, Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 45. 60 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 11. 61 Wolff challenges conventional notions of the gendered language of the sublime and the beautiful in art history. She writes that ‘the philosophical language of the beautiful and the sublime has historically, though perhaps not irredeemably, been strongly gendered. Feminist art historians have also exposed the ways in which the “beauty” of a painting has, in the history of Western art, long been conflated with representations of women (especially the nude) and with ideologies of gender.’ See The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 12-13.

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Desire’s Superlatives

In an image used to conclude the film’s trailer, Adèle lies on her back in a turquoise

ocean that seems to envelop her (see Figure 5.6). In this frame-still Adèle’s eyes are

closed and her mouth is slightly open in what we perceive to be a pleasurable state.

In the frame that follows, it is made clear from the angle of her eyes and her

smudged mascara that she has been crying. Her open mouth is a feature that figures

her voluptuousness, sexiness and hunger throughout the film. It is this complex

blend of ecstatic love and desperate heartbreak, and the blurriness of the lines

between them, that characterise the film in its totality.

Figure 5.6. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) bathes in seawater in a frame that expresses ecstasy in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013).

The mise en scène of the aqueous cocoon in Figure 5.6 signifies desire

(Adèle’s open mouth, her red lips, the colour sign of her lover and of their love) and

its disruption (the optical trick that shifts her look from bliss to despair from one

frame to the next). It gestures to the freedom of the love that marks the film (the

water’s potential liminality) and its suffocation (our perception of the water’s

solidification). The lighting also gives Adèle’s hair a bluey gloss, simulating

Emma’s dyed blue hair and punctuating the visual similarity of the two young

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women in a narrative that is an incessant struggle of sameness and difference. The

homophobic accusation by Adèle’s friends of Emma’s “gouine” image verbally

accentuates visual difference and otherness, but its result – Adèle’s alienation –

marks her as equally “other”. Emma’s hair identifies her as different from Adèle but

it is illustrative, or generative, of a colour that comes to unite them, her apparent sign

of uniqueness creating visual homogeny.

Adèle’s prostrate body speaks to her openness to sexuality. At the same time,

the water around her conjures the encircling of the mother’s womb, baptism and

conversion, and cleansing, all of which are figured in the film as a whole by the

central consuming relationship that becomes everything to the protagonist: in the

film’s unmarked second chapter, Emma is friend, lover and mother to Adèle, whose

baptism seems to occur the moment that she is subsumed by the spaces and affects of

desire. The water in Figure 5.6 resembles a mattress, and Adèle’s pose mimics the

earlier scene in which, at the same close-up level, she lies on a blue sheet in her blue-

tinted bedroom and masturbates. In another scene recalled by her swimming pose,

she lies naked on a sofa shrouded in blue cloth with a cigarette dangling from her

mouth, modelling for Emma in her inaugural pose as the artist’s muse (see Figure

5.7).62

62 There is an interesting comparison to make here with High Art, in which Lucy (Ally Sheedy) is a photographer whose sexuality is invested with and by her photography. Her camera is an extension of her desiring eye, as she turns her partner, lover and mother into objects of an artist’s gaze, and our own desiring gaze is heightened as it is emphasised and complicated. Alongside Lucy’s gaze is that of Syd (Radha Mitchell), whose first introduction to Lucy’s friends is through photographs of them. Alongside High Art’s many allusions to The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Fassbinder, 1972), and to the photography of Nan Goldin, are the ways in which the artist’s overbearing presence (in the latter, a fashion designer) turns everything into an object of the artistic gaze, heightening the power of the frame (the camera frame, the door frame, the mirror, the photograph) to exclude and include.

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Figure 5.7. Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is the artist’s muse in Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013).

The modification in translation from the graphic novel’s Le Bleu est une

Couleur Chaude (Blue is a warm colour) to the superlative of the English title (Blue

is the warmest colour) hints at the film’s narrative and visual intensification of

Adèle’s desire for Emma. The colour becomes part of the film’s peculiar register of

desire. Why blue and not the classic red of passion? Why warm and not hot?63 The

French word chaud means both warm and hot, but its English translation selects the

former: not red as the hottest, but blue as the warmest. Blue as the warmest colour to

the exclusion of all others illustrates visually Adèle’s sense of her desire as

unsurpassed and unsurpassable, and of Emma as the superlatively desirable object.

The sequence of shots of Adèle in the water sampled in Figure 5.6 offers a moment

of tension between passion and despair that characterises the film’s broader

exploration of the intensity of first love. The colour blue, found in fabrics, props and

63 Wolff writes about such questions provoked by the colour blue in ‘Colour (Mainly Blue)’, The Manchester Review, (April 2013), <http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/?p=2587> [accessed 31 July 2014]. Carol Mavor writes that ‘blue [is] a particularly paradoxical colour […] blue is the purity of the Virgin Mary, yet blue names a movie as obscene. Or, blue is the colour of eternity, yet blue lips are a sign of approaching death.’ See Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), p. 10. Original emphasis. Significant here is also Blue (Jarman, 1993), the mono-coloured final feature film directed by Derek Jarman after he had been made partially blind. See also Jarman, ‘Blue’, in Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty, ed. by Isaac Julien (London: Koenig Books, 2008), pp. 81-87.

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other textures, is the reminder of desire, just as in Three Colours: Blue (Kieślowski,

1993) it overwhelms the mise en scène as an inescapable reminder of grief (see

Figure 5.8).64 In Blue is the Warmest Colour, blue is what supplements the triviality

of a chance encounter on a crowded street because it comes to figure the

augmentation of desire in fantasy (as in the masturbation scene).

Figure 5.8. Julie (Juliette Binoche) is crowded by the colour blue that reminds her of her grief in Three Colours: Blue (Kieślowski, 1993).

The water around Adèle in Figure 5.6 has a bright sheen to it that confuses

our perception of its surface and depth. In the image we can see Adèle’s skin beneath

the surface but the water seems to congeal around her. This play extends to the

film’s attention to its characters’ surface affects, the tears that signify despair and the

sighs that signify passion always shielding a deeper interiority that is both hinted at

and withheld, consistently confusing the notion of our access to the characters’

emotional depths. Williams addresses cinema’s ability to evoke interiority – not only

through point of view shots, of which Blue is the Warmest Colour actually yields

very few, but also through the ‘exclusive close focus on one character moving

64 See Wilson, ‘Three Colours: Blue: Kieślowski, Colour and the Postmodern Subject’, Screen, 39:4 (1998), 349-62.

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through screenspace’.65 However, such devices – which can offer the ‘illusion of

unboundedness’, as Williams writes – have the potential to be disrupted or disturbed,

such as when ‘the apparent promise of spectatorial identification and unstoppable

access into a character’s subjective space is peremptorily thwarted by the film’s

withdrawal into another type of objective space’.66 Blue is the Warmest Colour

creates an illusion and then breaks it down. Adrift in an urban intersection in Figure

5.1, Adèle’s subjective space is thwarted as we lose our hold on her as the stable

thread of our focus; momentarily, our subjectivity as it has been created by the film

shifts to the object of her desire. In the notable moments in which the camera films

in the face of direct sunlight, the residue of light that creates red rings around the

frame is captured and celebrated through a lingering regard rather than closed down.

The young love that is thrust upon us in high definition requires a feat of endurance,

and a three-hour running time, because it brings with it all of the awkwardness,

explicitness and toughness that comes with lingering just too long.

Blue is the Warmest Colour familiarises its viewer with particular locations,

shots and characters before throwing these orienting frames of reference into

disorder. Just as certain spaces become familiar but are then withdrawn or disrupted,

so too the film flourishes identity politics before refusing to make any clear

declarations. Generic tropes are hinted at but then subverted. Our attention is drawn

to the antecedents of its gaze structures without rejecting them altogether. The film’s

temporality makes similar claims to convention and legibility, but also withholds

their full realisation. The endurance required of the film’s potential generic allies, the

bildungsroman and the epic, is encapsulated in the endurance of the sex scenes,

65 Williams, Space and Being, p. 3. Neale has also written about subjective ‘coherence’, in which ‘the subject’ is produced as ‘the point where [mainstream narrative’s] binding mechanisms cohere, the point from where the deployment and configuration of discourses makes ‘sense’. See Genre, p. 25. 66 Williams, Space and Being, p. 3.

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which have caused so much controversy and have been forced by the film’s

discursive field to ‘represent lesbian experience’.67 Blue is the Warmest Colour hints

at the familiar tropes of a lesbian bildungsroman, but does not submit entirely to the

consistencies that make them “generic”.

The latest film to be released in this thesis’s corpus, Blue is the Warmest

Colour arrives in a moment in which genre is proffered but undone, when familiar

surroundings make way for disorientations. To speak of “coming of age” provokes

more questions than it answers, and Blue is the Warmest Colour brings to light that

genre’s set of problematics: the paradoxical fusion of innocence and sexuality; the

relationship between looking and touching; and the classed nature of the pedagogical

model that brings innocence to experience. A confusing clash of ideological

standpoints frames the debate around Blue is the Warmest Colour: its aspiration as

exemplar of lesbian visibility and coequal to the legalisation of gay marriage versus

its dissidence as not lesbian enough to be a lesbian film. The figuration endorsed by

the poster (the angelic features of the young women, doubled, drawn in visually

clean lines that signal a narratively clean love story) is contradicted by the blurred

lines of the film itself. The events in Blue is the Warmest Colour’s narrative suggest

conventionality but its temporality and spatiality shake up our frames of reference.

This chapter has read that shake-up as part of the film’s contribution to a corpus of

films that defy easy legibility as lesbian.

67 Merck, Perversions, p. 167.

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Conclusion

This thesis has explored how the figure of the lesbian in contemporary cinema is

marked by a paradoxical burden of visibility and invisibility produced at the

convergence of queer and feminist discourses. The unprecedented magnification of

lesbian representation in political, social and cultural spheres over the past two

decades has coincided with a shift in theoretical consciousness brought about by the

significant impact of queer theory in and beyond the academy. Observing the

changing terms whereby lesbianism has been theorised, problematised and then

dissolved in queer theory’s new intellectual paradigm, I have rooted my discussion

in the various registers through which feminist film theory has striven to capture the

lesbian’s contemporary representability: psychoanalysis, affect and close formal

analysis. By acknowledging the overlaps in these approaches to film, often perceived

as chronologically distinct and/or incompatible, I have explored the importance of

recent shifts in lesbian cinema while situating them in the complex history of the

image of the woman that one approach alone cannot illuminate.

The lesbian’s era of visibility has arguably arisen out of the normalisation of

anti-heteronormativity and the broadening of civil rights for LGBT couples and

families. This has coincided with more general transformations in production and

distribution across screen media, including rising numbers of international co-

productions and new digital platforms for transnational dissemination. However,

even in this context of change and opportunity, the conversation continues to be

shaped by the requirements of conceptual and historical ground clearing. Invisibility

is entrenched in the existing discursive field surrounding the history of lesbian

representation. Therefore, instead of being chosen solely on the basis of their

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contribution to the visibility effect (for instance, breadth of distribution or garnering

of mainstream awards), the films discussed in this thesis bring to the fore the

paradoxical nature of this so-called visibility. Even in this context, desire’s

complexity is not easily representable. The lesbian charge in these films generates an

image whose interruption becomes part of its register. The corpus exposes the

various technologies at work in the image’s capture and reception. The mechanisms

of rehearsal, impersonation, modelling and performance reveal paradoxical tensions.

Sameness and difference, self-reflection and identification, and eroticism and

narcissism all reduce the ease with which we might suggest that any one “lesbian”

has been “made visible”.

If Figuring the Lesbian, as in the title of this thesis, is now a sustained device

of popular culture, then figuring lesbianism beyond the fixing of singularity, and

indeed figuring (out) the ways in which the lesbian might still modify and not only

particularise, is a project that has more critical urgency than ever before. Responding

to the interplay between the lesbian’s singular and coupled figurations, the starting

point for this thesis was de Lauretis’s argument that ‘it takes two women, not one, to

make a lesbian’.1 The thesis has read this provocation as an evocation of the lesbian

as the woman, doubled: an amplification of the woman’s existing threat, marked by,

and constituted through, the simultaneous impossibility and paradoxical inevitability

of the presence of the other in desire.

The lesbian was thus doubled before she was coupled. The thesis has argued

that the trace of this cinematic history is found in the visual doublings and figural

reflections that, rather than simply invoking past pathologisations, instead resist the

containment of lesbian desire in the positive image of uncensored sex or culturally

1 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, p. 120.

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endorsed outness. Moving from the visual impossibility of lesbianism in the

twentieth century, and forwards to the limits of the visually acceptable, this thesis

has argued that in the era of the visible in which the lesbian has now been recognised

in law and representation, the sexuality she stands for exceeds the confines of both

her singular and her coupled figurations. Thus, rather than shoring up her

categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible, the films in this corpus,

and my readings of them, have questioned the lesbian’s very on-screen legibility.

Chapter One opened the thesis by analysing Mulholland Drive, a film that

intertwines the conventions of lesbian representation with the conditions of

production of cinema itself. While lesbianism is made narratively impossible by the

film’s reworking of conventional generic demands, this chapter argued that the

image signifies the possibility for lesbianism through the identification with, and

idealisation of, the film star. My readings of all of the films in this thesis dismantle

the primacy of the couple for conceptualising contemporary lesbian cinema; this

chapter inaugurated that project by arguing that the tension between the figure and

her double is central to cinema’s relationship with lesbianism.

Following on from my argument in Chapter One that Mulholland Drive

articulates a broader cultural anxiety taking the form of the paradox of the lesbian’s

absence and threatening over-presence, Chapter Two argued that these two sides –

absence and presence – are forced onto the same page in the reading of Nathalie…

alongside its remake Chloe. This juxtaposition enabled the chapter to challenge

conceptions of increased visibility as inevitable progress. Paying attention to liminal

spaces of fantasy, and the mise en abîme through which the female protagonist

figures her own desire for and through the other, the chapter argued that the

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triangulation of desire does not subordinate the ‘lesbian subtext’ in Nathalie…, but

rather complicates it by unsettling its singularity.2

Chapter Three explored the desire for sexual identity as liberation,

considering the significations of urban space and technological projection that relate

to the mediation of desire. In Circumstance, spaces of cinema, fantasy and

surveillance become sites of projected selfhood in the face of identity’s seeming

impossibility. Against a context in which the woman’s image is both the source of

patriarchal anxiety and its solution, the chapter argued that Circumstance generates

an exoticised and smooth idealisation of a Western ‘elsewhere’ through which a

fantasy of “out” lesbian sexuality is made visually possible.3

Chapter Four analysed the ambiguous intimacies generated by the

competition that permeates desire in Water Lilies and She Monkeys. While eroticism

is established through the spectacle of performance and the idealisation of physical

prowess, this chapter argued that the films present meditations on the affect of desire

rather than a narrative of its journey. While Chapters Two and Three unsettled the

visibility imperative of discourses surrounding lesbian cinema, Chapter Four posited

a potentially queer affect that resides, contrary to expectation, in the space between

bodily exhibitions of physicality.

In stark contrast, the analysis at the heart of Chapter Five interrogated the

status of “the sex scene” as the only available register through which to read lesbian

cinema in popular discourse. The chapter explored the ways in which the sex in Blue

is the Warmest Colour, unmediated by music or the dominance of close-ups that

populate the rest of the film, creates a disjuncture between what is seen and how it is

perceived. The film fixates on the intensity of desire in isolation from everyday

2 See Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 189. 3 See Berlant and Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, p. 553.

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experience, yet, as this chapter argued, its disorganised diegesis throws us into a time

and space out of sync with the linguistic logic through which its discursive sphere

has registered.

Of all of the films discussed at length in this thesis, Blue is the Warmest

Colour has received the most extensive and sustained attention in the press.4 It is

also the only one of these films to have received an 18 certificate – for ‘strong sex’ –

from the British Board of Film Classification.5 The trope that occupies the major

part of Blue is the Warmest Colour’s media attention – narrative climax in the form

of the sex scene – is what initiates a process of conflation in which the explicit

obscures the affective or implicit. It is because the sex scene holds ‘the ability to

represent “lesbian experience”’ that it is Blue is the Warmest Colour, rather than She

Monkeys, for instance, that is asked to account for the authenticity of its

representation of lesbianism.6 In Chloe, the traces of desire borrowed from

Nathalie… are ostensibly enhanced by making sex the only visual register through

which sexuality is perceived. Even in Water Lilies, whose erotic affects are not

accounted for by sex, the act’s pared-down gestures still hold the weight of climactic

transaction – of power, if not of pleasure.

I have drawn attention to this problematic hierarchisation in the structure of

the thesis, by leading up to Blue is the Warmest Colour – a concluding film that

might be seen as the pinnacle of sexuality’s representation – but highlighting its

distortion of this linearity. In this way, the film perhaps unexpectedly brings the

4 While Blue is the Warmest Colour was released in fifty-two cinemas – more than many lesbian films, but five hundred fewer than the major earner for the same opening weekend, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Lawrence, 2013). See ‘Weekend Box Office Figures’. Despite its comparatively low scope of release, Blue is the Warmest Colour was discussed in forty-three features – reviews, articles or commentaries – between May 2013 and October 2015 in The Guardian alone. Mulholland Drive, earning almost three times the box office income, has been discussed in the same newspaper just half that amount in the fourteen years since its release. 5 The other films received either a 15 or a 12 certificate. See British Board of Film Classification. 6 Merck, Perversions, p. 167.

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corpus together, recalling the lingering potential of Chapter Four, the transcultural

appropriations of Chapter Three, the translation of desire in Chapter Two and the

fantasy play of sameness and difference, and its abject result, in Chapter One.

In all of the films discussed across these chapters, we can observe a

negotiation with the ubiquitously linear path that is presumed to consummate the

story of lesbian sexuality. In the latter half of the thesis, I focused on films about

adolescence that refuse the ‘predictive’ narrativisation of burgeoning desire.7 The

queer affects, visual motifs and spaces that, as I suggested, undermine this trend also

risk a renewed reduction to the passing phase characterised by ‘immaturity’ or

‘incompleteness’.8 Queer seems emancipatory, but has the potential to re-inscribe

problematic mechanisms. Here, the same words we use to describe queer’s refusal to

fix sexuality become those we use to contemplate the lesbian’s historical relation to

absence. However, just as Butler famously observes that feminist debates over

gender evoke a ‘sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually

culminate in the failure of feminism’, I have aimed to counter a similar response to

the indeterminacy of sexuality.9 Following Butler, the motivation of this thesis has

been the notion that, if such trouble occurs in the queering of lesbianism, ‘trouble

need not carry such a negative valence’, but rather set out a mode of relation

between the two that is mutual rather than either synonymous or substitutive.10

Reading this series of films together has revealed the constantly and

inherently imitative structure of desire’s figuration. Erotic identities are constituted

through identification. The lesbian finds herself mediated through culture, her

sexuality defined only through a depleted patriarchal vernacular or a performance of

7 White, ‘Lesbian Minor Cinema’, p. 411. 8 Roof, A Lure of Knowledge, p. 5. 9 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. ixxx. 10 Ibid.

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a culturally determined sexual role. Thus the cinematic image, even as it promises to

provide “evidence”, always threatens to reveal itself as that which has been an

illusion. In Blue is the Warmest Colour, Emma’s sexuality first takes form as

masturbatory fantasy before any acquaintance has been made, and is then reduced to

the image of her blue hair that figures desire on her behalf for the rest of the film. In

this precarious present perfect, the optimism of the future makes way for the menace

of the re-written past. The ensemble switch in Mulholland Drive; the death in Chloe;

the surveillance aesthetic in Circumstance: all of these are ways in which, through a

constant preoccupation with revealing and withholding, these films expose, and then

threaten to shield, lesbian desire.

Troubling Visibility

As I outlined in my introduction, lesbian representation can be charted through three

distinct trends. First comes invisibility, in which, because of her dual marginalisation

– sexualised and gendered as both non-heterosexual and non-male – the lesbian falls,

in Jagose’s words, ‘outside sexuality’s visual field’ (though, as White and Wallace

have written, her sexuality is evidenced on screen through other devices).11

Secondly, the lesbian’s sexuality is made representable but perverse: she becomes a

figure of violence or tragedy. Finally, she is welcomed into the romance genre and

her singular figuration makes way for the coupling that accompanies her social and

political transformation from discrimination to normative legitimacy. I have used the

word ‘finally’ here to denote the latest incarnation of representability. The word also

reiterates the definitive status that this particular figuration purports to hold.

However, through a focus on the interruption or subversion, rather than celebration,

11 Jagose, Inconsequence, p. 2. See also White, Uninvited and Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space.

212

of the lesbian’s newfound visibility, the thesis has resisted the seductive narrative of

lesbian film in which the past fifteen years are seen to have delivered a

representational endpoint. The thesis has focused on films that rebel against what we

might call the visibility imperative: the necessity to embrace the era of the visible

and the positivity that it promises as a corollary of “progress”.

Taking the notion of making visible to mean, as Phelan has argued, the fixing

of a set idea in the image, the thesis has both highlighted a visual response to the

new availability of that fixing and questioned the presumed progress that lies

therein.12 The issue addressed by Phelan in 1993 is even more acutely pronounced in

the twenty-first century, in which visibility is more than ever about a heightened

visuality: the shaping of cultural identities into forms that can be made recognisable

on the screen. This visual context has had particular implications for the

representation of sexuality. Even previously marginalised or censored sexualities

have now found visual form in the mainstream. Moreover, this visual form

legitimately includes, and even prioritises, the sexual act: can sexuality now be taken

seriously without it? As such, a new kind of marginalisation occurs through the

fixing of meaning in the prescriptive image.

In the specificity of this screen context, this thesis has responded to the

renewed vitality of a question posed twenty years ago by Traub – ‘what is a lesbian?’

– by focusing not on an answer that implants a social category of identity into

cinema, but rather one that considers the ways in which the category of lesbianism, if

it is a category, has been constructed by cinema itself.13 In an unparalleled context of

the extreme privileging of the visual, the easy answer to Traub’s question is that a

lesbian is categorised by the visual evidence of sex. However, this thesis has argued

12 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 1. 13 Traub, ‘The Ambiguities of “Lesbian” Viewing Pleasure, p. 115.

213

that, in this sexualised form, visibility is neither necessarily indicative of progress,

nor authoritatively definitive: sexual visibility obscures other forms of eroticism

while desire fails, and refuses, to live up to its own image.

The thesis has explored the relationship between the singular figuration of the

lesbian and the multiple registers of her desire and sexuality. Stacey addresses these

problems by choosing a psychic rather than a social category: foregrounding

homoeroticism instead of lesbianism.14 In her response, however, de Lauretis

maintains reservations about what she reads as the implication that ‘desire between

women is not sexual’.15 Twenty years on, queer theory has given us a vocabulary for

exploring the complex facets of lesbian sexuality invoked by this debate. As I

explored in my introduction, the fluid possibilities of queer theory in the academy

have threatened to flatten out gender difference, using this lack of difference to

shield the lack of availability or interest that in fact makes the lesbian disappear

altogether. This trend is echoed in the queer film festivals whose titles often obscure

the overwhelming bias in programming towards gay male narratives. The New

Queer Cinema reclaimed the homophobic notion of queer pathology, rejecting the

ubiquity of representational positivity. The queer lesbian cinema identified by this

project, in the face of the lesbian’s commodification in the positive image, has

enabled queer readings of the very traits through which she has historically been

marginalised. Because of sexist and homophobic socio-economic processes at work

in mainstream cinema more broadly, the lesbian has historically been given visual

form only in male fantasy. Lesbian self-representation has been alienated. However,

through an attendance to the ways in which these socio-historical contexts have

become formal cinematic languages on screen, what has emerged is a further

14 See Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 27. 15 See Stacey, Star Gazing, p. 29 and de Lauretis, ‘Film and the Visible’, p. 262.

214

challenge to the easy categorisation of lesbianism: for instance, the inclusion of male

directors in this corpus urges new mechanisms of subversive identification.

The lesbian is double the image of the woman who is, already, an imitation

of her prior representations. Reading contemporary films through cinematic history

turns the lesbian’s visible figuration into a necessary pastiche, that which

‘acknowledges itself as being in the realm of the already said’.16 This could look like

a retreat to genre or cliché, both variously perceived as damaging instruments of

pathologisation.17 While a pastiche of melodrama acknowledges itself as being

directly referential to an existing genre, contemporary replications, imitations and

parodies of lesbian cinematic history expose the constitutive force of these very

generic structures. However, through subtext, adaptation or affect, they not only cite

but also exceed the ‘already said’. Just as Berlant writes that genre is ‘an aesthetic

structure of affective expectation’ through which the ‘persons transacting with it will

experience the pleasure of encountering what they expected’, so the contemporary

cinematic encounter with the lesbian promises a genre made less familiar by queer

modulation.18

If we are to explore how lesbianism is figured on-screen, we must consider

lesbianism beyond the concrete intentionality of spectatorial identification and the

over-investment in sex as evidence, both of which may not only inforce our anxieties

about queer’s fluctuations but also buy into the more general commodification of

sex. The contemporary films explored in this thesis have responded to the

simultaneity of queer affects of lesbian desire with the new language of identity’s

coherence and installation in the public representational sphere. The thesis has

examined the conceptual centrality of the body, but through affective traces that 16 Dyer, Pastiche, p. 179. 17 See, for instance, Love, ‘Spectacular Failure’. 18 Berlant, The Female Complaint, p. 4.

215

eroticise the spaces in-between as supplements to, rather than precursors of, the

sexual touch that endorses the relationship between subject and object. The

importance of space in the representation of desire and sexuality not only means the

coding of particular spaces, but also the cinematic rendering of those spaces as

erotic through the structuring of the mise en scène and its echoes. The swimming

pool, for instance, is not inherently erotic, but evokes a watery motif whose

repetition across space and time generates an affective charge. Like our suspense in a

Hitchcockian thriller even after the main denouement, our immersion in desire’s

spatialisation lingers beyond the unfolding of what are presumed to be the necessary

narrative details.

The mood of sexual potential that characterises this queer spatialisation of

lesbian desire is captured even through a recollective or anticipatory potential that

moves beyond the scope of the film’s own running time. And yet these surface

affects are also profoundly generative of interiorised identifications that arguably can

only be theorised through psychoanalysis, which has crafted the language for

moving beyond the testimony of the physical. Instead of rejecting psychoanalysis on

the grounds of its perceived sentencing of lesbianism to the non-place of sexuality,

the thesis has used it in dialogue with films that explore precisely such anxieties.

Queer in this context has enabled, rather than flattened out, the paradoxes inherent in

the representation of sexuality, unsettling rather than bolstering its coherence in the

visible image.

This project has read contemporary lesbian cinema through the history of the

woman’s screen image and the suspended terms of cinematic homoeroticism. It

seems appropriate that the film released on the cusp of the project’s completion,

Carol, is one whose erotic register draws so heavily on that history. While lesbian

216

representation has ostensibly emerged from the insufficiency of the marginalised

figurations of the past, it is this marginality that continues to provoke and seduce.

Even if the lesbian in the social and political realm has been normalised and her

difference reduced, cinematically there continues to be a visual citation of earlier

models and forms that complicate her contemporary screen figuration. This is an era

in which positive representations of lesbianism have figured her in ways that have

historically been impossible (as mother and wife; indeed, as protagonist). The thesis

has, rather than accepting this apparent representational terminus as a closing down

of new possibilities for theorisation, instead argued that to understand lesbian

representation in the contemporary context is to trouble her easily narrativised

legibility while observing it in other forms.

These other forms have been conceptualised as the queer affects, genres,

sequences and spaces of lesbian desire. Such cinematic qualities, departing as they

do from the particularisation of sexual acts or coming out declarations, have been

made conceptually intelligible through the enabling terms of queer theory. Yet they

also remain indebted to the feminist film theories that root the project in the history

of the lesbian (non)image. The thesis thus combines two sets of knowledge practices

that, together, expose the complex and sometimes contradictory aesthetic registers

that exceed the singular characterisation of gender or sexuality. Having begun as a

project about lesbian cinema, this thesis has unsettled the assumptions inherent in

that term while simultaneously holding on to its terminological commitments.

Through a feminist reading of lesbian cinema after queer theory, I have offered a

methodological challenge to the notion that the past ten years have offered the

definitive and final encapsulation of lesbianism, deeming it past or done with.

Contrary to the static figurations of these discursive responses to its commodification

217

on the contemporary screen, this thesis has argued that, antithetically, lesbian cinema

– in its queer form – has never been more mobile and dynamic.

218

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Child, Ben, ‘Blue Is the Warmest Colour Actors Say Filming Lesbian Love Story

Was “Horrible”’, The Guardian (4 September 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/04/blue-is-the-warmest-colour-actors-director> [accessed 19 November 2013]

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Dargis, Manohla, ‘Seeing You Seeing Me: The Trouble with Blue Is the Warmest

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Davidson, Alex, ‘The LGBT Film Highlights of 2015’, British Film Institute (22

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Delorme, Gérard, ‘David Lynch: Maître du Mystère’, Premiere (2001),

<http://www.lynchnet.com/mdrive/frpremiere.html> [accessed 12 October 2014]

French, Philip, ‘Au Revoir, Monsieur Frites’, The Guardian (1 March 2009),

<http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/mar/01/drama-class-entre-les-murs> [accessed 12 October 2015]

Galt, Rosalind and Karl Schoonover, Global Queer Cinema (2013),

<http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/gqc/about-gqc/> [accessed 5 June 2013] Greenhouse, Emily, ‘Did a Director Push Too Far?’, The New Yorker (24 October

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‘Iran’s Morality Police: Patrolling the Streets by Stealth’, The Guardian (19 June 2014), <http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2014/jun/19/iran-morality-police-patrol> [accessed 1 August 2015]

Jacobs, Matthew, ‘Nymphomaniac Stars Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stacy Martin on

the “Boring” Filming of the Movie’s Graphic Sex’, Huffington Post (2014), <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/20/nymphomaniac-charlotte-gainsbourg-stacy-martin_n_4995662.html> [accessed 7 April 2014]

Jenkin, Matthew, ‘Synching Feeling: Male Synchronised Swimmers Bid to Be

Taken Seriously’, The Guardian (18 December 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-swimming-blog/2013/dec/18/male-synchronised-swimming-london-ots-angels> [accessed 11 June 2015]

Lawrence, Jacqui, ‘Where Have All the Lesbians Gone in TV and Film?’, Guardian

(25 March 2015), <http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/25/lesbians-tv-and-film-call-the-midwife-last-tango-in-halifax> [accessed 15 June 2015]

Lenarduzzi, Thea, ‘Testing the Waters of Identity’, The Times Literary Supplement

(20 May 2015), <http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1558437.ece> [accessed 11 September 2015]

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Romney, Jonathan, ‘Abdellatif Kechiche Interview’, The Guardian (27 October

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(2013), <https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=blue-is-the-warmest-colour> [accessed 19 November 2013]

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(2011), <http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/node/1160> [accessed 21 August 2011] Stratford, Sarah-Jane, ‘Conservative Americans Are More Terrified of Sex Than

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Western”’, The Guardian (28 April 2012), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/apr/28/she-monkeys-lisa-aschan-interview> [accessed 19 September 2013]

‘Swedish Cinemas Take Aim at Gender Bias with Bechdel Test Rating’, The

Guardian (6 November 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/swedish-cinemas-bechdel-test-films-gender-bias> [accessed 9 September 2015]

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Theobald, Stephanie, ‘Blue’s Lesbian Lovemaking Doesn’t Hit the Spot. For Better Sex Head for the Lake’, The Guardian (17 October 2013), <http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/oct/17/blue-warmest-colour-lesbian-bad-sex> [accessed 19 November 2013]

‘Vaulting’, Equestrian Team GBR (2015),

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2013), <http://www.paris-update.com/fr/film/drama/22021-la-vie-d-adele-chapitres-1-et-2> [accessed 19 November 2013]

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<https://www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/gender-inequality-in-film/> [accessed 16 June 2015]

244

Filmography I have included here the information that most enables the observation of contemorary trends for production and distribution: title, director, country of production, year of production, and (where applicable) cinema or television distributor and DVD distributor.

A Clockwork Orange, dir. by Kubrick, Stanley (UK, USA: 1971), Columbia-Warner Distributors / Warner Home Video

Adore, dir. by Fontaine, Anne (Australia, France: 2013), not on general release /

Paramount Home Entertainment A League of Their Own, dir. by Marshall, Penny (USA: 1992), Columbia Pictures /

Columbia Tristar Home Video Alien: Resurrection, dir. by Jeunet, Jean-Pierre (USA: 1997), 20th Century Fox /

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment All About Eve, dir. by Mankiewicz, Joseph (USA: 1950), 20th Century Fox / 20th

Century Fox Home Entertainment All Over Me, dir. by Sichel, Alex (USA: 1997), not on general release / Peccadillo

Pictures Animals, dir. by Forés, Marçal (Spain: 2012), not on general release / import only Appropriate Behaviour, dir. by Akhavan, Desiree (UK: 2014), Peccadillo Pictures /

Peccadillo Pictures Attenberg, dir. by Tsangari, Athina Rachel (Greece: 2010), Artificial Eye / Artificial

Eye Basic Instinct, dir. by Verhoeven, Paul (USA, France: 1992), Guild Film

Distribution / Technicolor Home Entertainment Services Bend It Like Beckham, dir. by Chadha, Gurinder (UK: 2002), Helkon SK / Lions

Gate Home Entertainment Beyond the Hills (După Dealuri), dir. by Mungiu, Cristian (Romania: 2012),

Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye The Big Sleep, dir. by Hawks, Howard (USA: 1946), Warner Bros. Pictures / Warner

Home Video The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra Von Kant), dir.

by Fassbinder, Rainer Werner (Germany: 1972), Cinegate / Fremantle Media Black Swan, dir. by Aronofsky, Darren (USA: 2010), 20th Century Fox / 20th

Century Fox Home Entertainment

245

Black Widow, dir. by Rafelson, Bob (USA: 1987), 20th Century Fox / Optimum

Releasing The Bling Ring, dir. by Coppola, Sofia (USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan: 2013),

Studio Canal / Studio Canal Bloomington, dir. by Cardoso, Fernanda (USA: 2010), not on general release / TLA

Releasing Blue, dir. by Jarman, Derek (UK, Japan: 1993), Basilisk Communications / Artificial

Eye Blue Is the Warmest Colour (La Vie d’Adèle), dir. by Kechiche, Abdellatif (France:

2013), Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye Blue Velvet, dir. by Lynch, David (USA: 1986), Universal Pictures / Prism Leisure Body of Evidence, dir. by Edel, Uli (Germany, USA: 1993), Guild Film Distribution

/ MGM Home Entertainment Bound, dir. by Wachowski, Lana and Andy (USA: 1996), Guild Film Distribution /

Lions Gate Home Entertainment Boyhood, dir. by Linklater, Richard (USA: 2014), Universal Pictures / Universal

Pictures Boys Don’t Cry, dir. by Peirce, Kimberly (USA: 1999), 20th Century Fox / 20th

Century Fox Home Entertainment The Breakfast Club, dir. by Hughes, John (USA: 1985), U.I.P / Universal Pictures Breaking the Girls, dir. by Babbit, Jamie (USA: 2013), not on general release / The

Movie Partnership Break My Fall, dir. by Wichmann, Kanchi (USA: 2011), not on general release /

Peccadillo Pictures Breathe (Respire), dir. by Laurent, Mélanie (France: 2014), not on general release /

import only Bring It On, dir. by Reed, Peyton (USA: 2000), Entertainment Film Distributors /

Entertainment in Video Brokeback Mountain, dir. by Lee, Ang (USA, Canada: 2005), Entertainment Film

Distributiors / Entertainment in Video Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Whedon, Josh (USA: 1997-2003), BBC [TV] /

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

246

But I’m a Cheerleader, dir. by Babbit, Jamie (USA: 1999), Metrodome Distribution / Metrodome Distribution

Butterfly Kiss, dir. by Winterbottom, Michael (UK: 1995), Electric Pictures / Second

Sight Films Call the Midwife, created by Thomas, Heidi (UK: 2012-), BBC [TV] / 2 Entertain

Video Caramel (Sekkar Banat), dir. by Labaki, Nadine (France, Lebanon: 2007),

Momentum Theatrical / Technicolor Home Entertainment Services Carol, dir. by Haynes, Todd (UK, USA, France: 2015), Studio Canal / Studio Canal Carrie, dir. by de Palma, Brian (USA: 1976), United Artists / MGM Home

Entertainment The Celluloid Closet, dir. by Epstein, Rob and Jeffrey Friedman (France, UK,

Germany, USA: 1995), Electric Pictures / Drakes Avenue Pictures The Children’s Hour, dir. by Wyler, William (USA: 1961), United Artists / MGM

Home Entertainment Chloe, dir. by Egoyan, Atom (USA, Canada, France: 2009), Optimum Releasing /

Optimum Releasing Circumstance, dir. by Keshavarz, Maryam (France, USA, Iran: 2011), not on general

release / Peccadillo Pictures Claire of the Moon, dir. by Conn, Nicole (USA: 1992), not on general release /

Peccadillo Pictures The Class (Entre les Murs), dir. by Cantet, Laurent (France: 2008), Artificial Eye /

Artificial Eye Clouds of Sils Maria, dir. by Assayas, Olivier (France, Germany, Switzerland:

2014), Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye Code Unknown (Code Inconnu: Récit Incomplet de Divers Voyages), dir. by Haneke,

Michael (France, Germany, Romania: 2000), Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye Code 46, dir. by Winterbottom, Michael (UK: 2003), Verve Pictures / Verve Pictures Concussion, dir. by Passon, Stacey (USA: 2013), Picturehouse Entertainment /

Channel 4 DVD Couscous (Le Graine et Le Mulet), dir. by Kechiche, Abdellatif (France: 2007),

Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye

247

Cracks, dir. by Scott, Jordan (UK, Ireland, Spain, France, Switzerland: 2009), Optimum Releasing / Optimum Releasing

D.E.B.S, dir. by Robinson, Angela (USA: 2004), Columbia Tristar Films / Columbia

Tristar Home Video Desert Hearts, dir. by Deitch, Donna (USA: 1985), Mainline Pictures / Media Sales Desert Motel, dir. by Johnson, Liza (USA: 2005), not on general release / not

available on commercial DVD or VHS Desperately Seeking Susan, dir. by Seidelman, Susan (USA: 1985), Rank Film

Distributors / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment The Double Life of Véronique (La Double Vie de Véronique), dir. by Kieślowski,

Kryzstof (France, Poland, Norway: 1991), Gala Film Distributors / Artificial Eye

The Duke of Burgundy, dir. by Strickland, Peter (UK, Hungary: 2014), Artificial Eye

/ Artificial Eye Easter Parade, dir. by Walters, Charles (USA: 1948), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer /

Warner Home Video The Edge of Heaven (Auf der Anderen Seite), dir. by Akin, Fatih (Germany, Turkey,

Italy: 2007), Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye The Falling, dir. by Morley, Carol (UK: 2015), Metrodome Distribution /

Metrodome Distribution Far from Heaven, dir. by Haynes, Todd (USA, France: 2002), Entertainment Film

Distributors / Entertainment in Video Fatal Attraction, dir. by Lyne, Adrian (USA: 1987), Paramount Pictures / Paramount

Home Entertainment Female Perversions, dir. by Streitfeld, Susan (Germany, USA: 1996), Feature Film

Company / Boulevard Entertainment Fight Club, dir. by Fincher, David (USA, Germany: 1999), 20th Century Fox / 20th

Century Fox Home Entertainment Fire dir. by Mehta, Deepa (Canada, India: 1996), Pathé Distribution / Fox Pathé

Home Entertainment The Fish Child (El Niño Pez), dir. by Puenzo, Lucía (Argentina: 2009), not on

general release / Peccadillo Pictures Flat Is Beautiful, dir. by Benning, Sadie (USA: 1998), not on general release /

import only

248

The Fosters, created by Bredeweg, Brad and Peter Paige (USA: 2013-), not shown on UK television / not available on DVD

The Four-Faced Liar, dir. by Chase, Jacob (USA: 2010), not on general release /

TLA Releasing Foxfire, dir. by Haywood-Carter, Annette (USA: 1996), not on general release /

import only Foxfire, dir. by Cantet, Laurent (France, Canada: 2012), Artificial Eye / Artificial

Eye Freeheld, dir. by Sollett, Peter (USA: 2015), Entertainment One / Entertainment One The French Lieutenant’s Woman, dir. by Reisz, Karel (UK: 1981), United Artists /

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, dir. by Avnet, Jon (USA: 1991),

Rank Film Distributors / Carlton Visual Entertainment Fun, dir. by Zielinski, Rafal (Canada: 1994), Metro Tartan Pictures / VHS only Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, dir. by Shainberg, Steven (USA: 2006),

Entertainment Film Distributors / Entertainment in Video Games of Love and Chance (L’esquive), dir. by Kechiche, Abdellatif (France: 2003),

not on general release / import only Gasoline (Benzina), dir. by Stambrini, Monica Lisa (Italy: 2003), Millivres

Multimedia / Millivres Multimedia Gattaca, dir. by Niccol, Andrew (USA: 1997), Columbia Pictures / Columbia Tristar

Home Video Gilda, dir. by Vidor, Charles (USA: 1946), Columbia Pictures / Columbia Tristar

Home Video Ginger and Rosa, dir. by Potter, Sally (UK, Denmark, Canada, Croatia: 2012),

Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye Girlhood (Bande des Filles), dir. by Sciamma, Céline (France: 2014), Studio Canal /

Studio Canal Girls, created by Dunham, Lena (USA: 2012-), Sky Atlantic [TV] / Warner Home

Video Girls in Prison, dir. by Cahn, Edward L. (USA: 1956), Anglo Amalgamated / Direct

Video Distribution

249

Girls in Prison, dir. by McNaughton, John (USA: 1994), not shown on UK television / Polygram Video

Go Fish, dir. by Troche, Rose (USA: 1994), Mainline Pictures / import only Goodbye First Love (Un Amour de Jeunesse), dir. by Hansen-Løve, Mia (France,

Germany: 2012), Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye Good Old Daze (Le Péril Jeune), dir. by Klapisch, Cédric (France: 1994), not on

general release / import only The Good Wife, created by King, Michelle and Robert King (USA: 2009-), Channel

4 [TV] / Paramount Home Entertainment Grey's Anatomy, created by Rhimes, Shonda (USA: 2005-), Sky Living [TV] /

Buena Vista Home Entertainment The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, dir. by Hanson, Curtis (USA: 1992), Warner Bros.

Pictures / On Demand Management The Headless Woman (La Mujer sin Cabeza), dir. by Martel, Lucretia (Argentina,

France, Italy, Spain: 2008), New Wave Films / Drakes Avenue Pictures Heavenly Creatures, dir. by Jackson, Peter (New Zealand, Germany: 1994), Buena

Vista International / Peccadillo Pictures High Art, dir. by Cholodenko, Lisa (USA: 1998), not on general release / TLA

Releasing Highly Strung (Je Te Mangerais), dir. by Laloy, Sophie (France: 2009), not on

general release / Peccadillo Pictures The Hours, dir. by Daldry, Stephen (USA, UK: 2002), Buena Vista International /

Buena Vista Home Entetainment The Hurt Locker, dir. by Bigelow, Kathryn (USA: 2008), Optimum Releasing /

Lions Gate Home Entertainment Imagine Me and You, dir. by Parker, Ol (UK: 2005), U.I.P / Universal Pictures The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, dir. by Maggenti, Maria (USA:

1995), Feature Film Company / import only Inland Empire, dir. by Lynch, David (France, Poland, USA: 2006), Optimum

Releasing / Optimum Releasing Itty Bitty Titty Committee, dir. by Babbit, Jamie (USA: 2007), not on general release

/ TLA Releasing

250

Jack and Diane, dir. by Gray, Bradley Rust (USA: 2012), not on general release / TLA Releasing

Je, Tu, Il, Elle, dir. by Akerman, Chantal (France, Belgium: 1974), The Other

Cinema / Cinéart The Journey to Forming a Family, dir. by Benn, Colleen, Marian Mansi and Julie

Harter (USA: 2010), not on general release / Universal Pictures Juno, dir. by Reitman, Jason (USA: 2007), 20th Century Fox / 20th Century Fox

Home Entertainment Kids, dir. by Clark, Larry (USA: 1995), Electric Pictures / Alliance-Atlantis

Releasing The Kids Are All Right, dir. by Cholodenko, Lisa (USA: 2010), Universal Pictures /

Universal Pictures Kissing Jessica Stein, dir. by Herman-Wurmfeld, Charles (USA: 2001), 20th

Century Fox / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Kiss Me (Kyss Mig), dir. by Keining, Alexandra-Therese (Sweden: 2011), not on

general release / TLA Releasing Kiss Me Kate, dir. by Sidney, George (USA: 1953), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Warner

Home Video Last Tango in Halifax, created by Wainwright, Sally (UK: 2012-), BBC [TV] / 2

Entertain Video Lianna, dir. by Sayles, John (USA: 1982), Mainline Pictures / Optimum Releasing The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, dir. by Powell, Michael and Emeric

Pressburger (UK: 1943), General Film Distributors / Carlton Visual Entertainment

Lost and Delirious, dir. by Pool, Léa (USA: 2001), not on general release /

Peccadillo Pictures Love Crime (Crime d'Amour), dir. by Corneau, Alan (France: 2010), Arrow Film

Distributors / Arrow Film Distributors Loving Annabelle, dir. by Brooks, Katherine (USA: 2006), not on general release /

TLA Releasing The L Word, created by Chaiken, Ilene (USA: 2004-2009), Living TV [TV] / MGM

Home Video Maidens in Uniform (Mädchen in Uniform), dir. by Sagan, Leontine (Germany:

1931), not on general release / VHS only

251

Marnie, dir. by Hitchcock, Alfred (USA: 1964), Universal Pictures / Universal Pictures

Mean Girls, dir. by Waters, Mark (USA, Canada: 2004), U.I.P / Paramount Home

Entertainment Metropolis, dir. by Lang, Fritz (Germany: 1927), Wardour Films / Eureka

Entertainment Milk, dir. by van Sant, Gus (USA: 2008), Momentum Theatrical / Technicolor Home

Entertainment Services Misery, dir. by Reiner, Rob (USA: 1990), Medusa Communications / MGM Home

Enterainment Monster, dir. by Jenkins, Patty (USA, Germany: 2003), Metrodome Distribution /

Lions Gate Home Entertainment Mosquita y Mari, dir. by Guerrero, Aurora (USA: 2012), not on general release /

import only Mulholland Drive, dir. by Lynch, David (France, USA: 2001), Pathé Distribution /

Optimum Releasing My Summer of Love, dir. by Pawlikowski, Pawel (UK: 2004), Feature Film

Company / Universal Pictures Nathalie... dir. by Fontaine, Anne (France, Spain: 2003), Momentum Pictures /

Momentum Pictures Nymphomaniac Vol. 1, dir. by von Trier, Lars (Denmark, Germany, France,

Belgium, UK: 2013), Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye On the Town, dir. by Kelly, Gene and Stanley Donen (USA: 1949), Metro-Goldwyn-

Mayer / Warner Home Video Orange Is the New Black, created by Kohan, Jenji (USA: 2013-), Netflix [online] /

not available on DVD Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, dir. by Kidron, Beeban (UK: 1989), BBC [TV] / 2

Entertain Video Pacific Heights, dir. by Schlesinger, John (USA: 1990), 20th Century Fox / 20th

Century Fox Home Entertainment The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de Pages), dir. by Dercourt, Denis (France: 2006),

Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye Pariah, dir. by Rees, Dee (USA: 2011), not on general release / import only

252

The Party (La Boum), dir. by Pinoteau, Claude (France: 1980), not on general release / import only

Passion, dir. by de Palma, Brian (Germany, France: 2012), not on general release /

Metrodome Distribution Peeping Tom, dir. by Powell, Michael (UK: 1960), Michael Powell Productions /

Optimum Releasing The Perfect Family, dir. by Renton, Anne (USA: 2011), not on general release /

import only Persona, dir. by Bergman, Ingmar (Sweden: 1966), United Artists / Tartan Video Personal Best, dir. by Towne, Robert (USA: 1982), Columbia-EMI-Warner

Distributors / import only The Piano, dir. by Campion, Jane (New Zealand, Australia, France: 1993),

Entertainment Film Distributors / Optimum Releasing Pillow Talk, dir. by Gordon, Michael (USA: 1959), Rank Film Distributors /

Universal Pictures Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels (Portrait d’une Jeune Fille

de la Fin des Années 60 à Bruxelles), dir. by Akerman, Chantal (France: 1994), not shown on UK TV / not available on commercial DVD or VHS

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, dir. by Miller, Rebecca (USA: 2009), Icon Film

Distribution / Icon Home Entertainment Producing Adults (Lapsia Ja Aikuisia - Kuinka Niitä Tehdään), dir. by Salmenperä,

Aleksi (Finland, Sweden: 2004), not on general release / Peccadillo Pictures Rebecca, dir. by Hitchcock, Alfred (USA: 1940), United Artists / Fremantle Media Rebel without a Cause, dir. by Ray, Nicholas (USA: 1955), Warner Bros. Pictures /

Warner Home Video Room in Rome, dir. by Medem, Julio (Spain: 2010), not on general release /

Optimum Releasing Safe, dir. by Haynes, Todd (UK, USA: 1995), Metro Tartan Pictures / Sony Pictures

Home Entertainment Secretary, dir. by Shainberg, Steven (USA: 2002), Metro Tartan Distibution / Tartan

Video Sex and the City, created by Star, Darren (USA: 1998-2004), Channel 4 [TV] /

Entertainment in Video

253

Sex and the City, dir. by King, Michael Patrick (USA: 2008), Entertainment Film Distributors / Entertainment in Video

She Monkeys (Apflickorna), dir. by Aschan, Lisa (Sweden: 2011), Peccadillo

Pictures / Peccadillo Pictures She Must Be Seeing Things, dir. by McLaughlin, Sheila (USA: 1987), The Other

Cinema / First Run Features Shortbus, dir. by Mitchell, John Cameron (USA: 2006), The Works Distribution /

Universal Pictures Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål), dir. by Moodysson, Lukas (Sweden: 1998), Alliance

Releasing / Alliance-Atlantis Releasing Side Effects, dir. by Soderbergh, Steven (USA: 2013), Entertainment One /

Entertainment One Single White Female, dir. by Schroeder, Barbet (USA: 1992), Columbia Pictures /

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Sister My Sister, dir. by Meckler, Nancy (UK: 1994), Arrow Film Distributors /

Channel 4 DVD Sisters, dir. by de Palma, Brian (USA: 1973), British Lion Film / Pathé Distribution The Slope, created by Akhavan, Desiree (USA: 2010-), The Slope Show [online] /

not available on DVD Spider Lilies (Cì Qīng), dir. by Chou, Zero (Taiwan: 2008), not on general release /

import only Stonewall, dir. by Emmerich, Roland (USA: 2015), not on general release / not yet

released on DVD Stranger Inside, dir. by Dunye, Cheryl (USA: 2001), not shown on UK TV / High

Fliers Video Distribution Suddenly (Tan de Repente), dir. by Lerman, Diego (Argentina, Netherlands: 2002),

Tartan Films / Tartan Video Swimming Pool, dir. by Ozon, François (France, UK: 2003), Cineserve / 20th

Century Fox Home Entertainment Tanner Hall, dir. by Gregorini, Francesca and Tatiana von Furstenberg (USA: 2009),

not on general release / Anchor Bay Entertainment That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet du Désir), dir. by Buñuel, Luis

(France, Spain: 1977), Artificial Eye / Optimum Releasing

254

These Three, dir. by Wyler, William (USA: 1936), United Artists / import only Thin Ice, dir. by Cunningham-Reid, Fiona (UK: 1995), Dangerous To Know / VHS

only Thirteen, dir. by Hardwicke, Catherine (USA: 2003), U.I.P / Universal Pictures Three Colours: Blue (Trois Couleurs: Bleu), dir. by Kieślowski, Krzysztof (France,

Poland, Switzerland: 1993), Artificial Eye / Artificial Eye Times Square, dir. by Moyle, Alan (USA: 1980), Columbia-EMI-Warner

Distributors / Network Tomboy, dir. by Sciamma, Céline (France: 2011), Peccadillo Pictures / Peccadillo

Pictures Transparent, created by Soloway, Jill (USA: 2014-), Amazon Instant Video [online]

/ not available on DVD Twin Peaks, created by Lynch, David (USA: 1990-1991), BBC [TV] / Universal

Pictures Unveiled (Fremde Haut), dir. by Maccarone, Angelina (Germany, Austria: 2005),

Millivres Multimedia / Millivres Multimedia Vertigo, dir. by Hitchcock, Alfred (USA: 1958), Universal Pictures / Universal

Pictures Water Lilies (Naissance des Pieuvres), dir. by Sciamma, Céline (France: 2007), not

on general release / Contender Entertainment Group When Night Is Falling, dir. by Rozema, Patricia (Canada: 1995), Metro Tartan

Pictures / import only Whip It, dir. by Barrymore, Drew (USA: 2009), Lions Gate / Lions Gate Home

Entertainment Wild Things, dir. by McNaughton, John (USA: 1998), Entertainment Film

Distributors / Entertainment in Video Young and Wild (Joven y Alocada), dir. by Rivas, Marialy (Chile: 2012), Eros Films

/ import only 42nd Street, dir. by Bacon, Lloyd (USA: 1933), Warner Bros. Pictures / Warner

Home Video 52 Tuesdays, dir. by Hyde, Sophie (Australia: 2013), Peccadillo Pictures / Peccadillo

Pictures