The politics of disappointment: Todd Haynes rewrites Douglas Sirk

Camera Obscura

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 131-174

  Willis, Sharon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248547979     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-18-3_54-131     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. To name just a few of these important interventions: Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, eds., Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Los Angeles: AFI, 1984);
2. Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is (London: BFI, 1987);
3. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991);
4. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987);
5. Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993);
6. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much (New York: Methuen, 1988);
7. Constance Penley, ed., Feminism and Film Theory (London: Routledge, 1988);
8. Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982);
9. Lucy Fischer, ed., Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
10. On the liminal status of television in US culture, see Lynne Joyrich, "Epistemology of the Console," Critical Inquiry 27 (spring 2001): 439-67. In arguing that television is both conceptually and structurally bound to the logic of the closet, she contends, "By both mediating historic events for familial consumption and presenting the stuff of 'private life' to the viewing public, the institutional organization of US broadcasting situates television precisely on the precarious border of public and private, 'inside' and 'outside.' Here it constructs knowledges identified as both secret (domestically received) and shared (defined as part of a collective national culture)" (445).
11. Dana Heller, Family Plots: The De-oedipalization of Popular Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995);
12. Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 1995);
13. Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media (New York: Three Rivers, 1994).
14. Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 197.
15. Meanwhile, critics both inside and outside the television industry indicated that it had reached a nadir around 1957-58. See William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 193-94.
16. Thus Cathy becomes a kind of intersection of ideological and social deviance for the period. Andrea Slane describes the nexus of "pathologies" that the Cold War period brings together: "The wartime and postwar practice of drawing analogies between vastly different experiences encouraged the homology between fascism and homosexuality, as the theory of family dynamics and identificatory structures thought to produce homosexuals indeed matched the template of social pathologies of many sorts, including those of Nazis and other racists. Through the collapse of these 'pathologies,' the postwar expansion of fears of momism, and heightened surveillance of both individuals and families, homosexuals came to represent the most publicly vilified 'un-American' sexuality, ranking with, and sometimes conflated with, communists in their threat to the Cold War nation"( A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001], 169). As Slane elaborates it, this ideological nexus brings together anxieties about gender and sexuality, since women who pervert their proper role through self-assertion and "masculinization" tend to become the domineering mothers who produce queer sons. But this passage also indicates that racial concerns are bound up in the generalized Cold War therapeutic discourse as it considers properly adjusted democratic citizens.
17. Indeed, Cathy's wardrobe links her to that other feminine prototype of the 1950s, Barbie, who came on the market in 1959. We might say that she functions as the film's very own fantasy Barbie doll, and thus she strikes a forceful intertextual reference with Haynes's short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987).
18. On the simultaneous function of gay and lesbian bars as refuges and sites of containment and surveillance in this period, see Kelly Hankin, The Girls in the Back Room: Looking at the Lesbian Bar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 10.
19. The impasse of discursive exchange reminds us of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued in relation to the "open secret" structure of the closet, "the fact that silence is rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in relations around the closet, depends on and highlights more broadly the fact that ignorance is as potent and as multiple a thing there as knowledge" (Epistemology of the Closet [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 4).
20. In the words of Dr. Thigpen, one of the therapists who wrote the case history on which the film is based, "When Eve Black is 'out,' Eve White remains functionally in abeyance" (Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001], 48). Because of the asymmetry in their relations to the conscious ego, Eve Black, as Graham reminds us, frequently "comes out" and "passes" as Eve White. Significantly, Graham contends, "the ability of the Black twin to 'pass' as the White one pitches the film precariously close to the edge of Hollywood's gender and racial representational boundaries" (48).