Queer Melodrama: Analyzing the Aesthetics of 1987’s Law of Desire

By Pau Brunet-Fuertes, Edited by Bridget Zhang

When Nicholas Ray combined a colorful, vibrant female melodrama with the  traditionally masculine Western genre when directing Johnny Guitar (1954), he indirectly  opened the imagination of many directors. Pedro Almodóvar was one of them, and he recognized  the potential to combine melodrama with other genres, such as film noir. Law of Desire (1987) is the product of that reimagination of a classic Hollywood genre with a radical sight, resulting in the queer melodrama. Melodramas are considered female territory, a type of cinema that delves into domestic situations with a tint of social conflict, primarily caused by patriarchal constructions. Hollywood has a rich tradition of melodramas and so do other national cinemas such as Mexico, India, and Spain. Because of their iconic weight in popular culture and the exploration of the female universe through drama, music, and aesthetics, melodramas are a particularly rich space for queer filmmakers. Law of Desire tells the story of a filmmaker who gets entangled in a complex homosexual relationship with a devoted admirer, while longing for his lost soulmate and navigating an intricate bond with his transgender sister. The film is a distinct melodrama mixing homosexuals, transgender people, passionate crimes, and “la Virgen de la Macarena”. The final scene of Law of Desire encapsulates all of these melodramatic and queer elements. The scene's complexity relates to the setting, the symbols, and the representations that the three main characters embody in a post-dictatorial country that is beginning to explore a liberal future after years of political and social repression. Almodóvar's cinema is crafted around many visual elements charged with cultural considerations within symbolic orders of gender, sexuality, and desire. In the final scene of Law of Desire, Almodóvar uses allegories and symbols to highlight the film's central theme of a new generation of individuals moving on from Spain's political and social dictatorial past. 

Almodóvar’s aesthetics constantly challenge hegemonic powers by twisting religious iconography and cultural symbology from a queer perspective. Because of the relationship between film language and social context, Law of Desire reaches a complex significance when analyzed as a cinematic apparatus engaged in an oppositional gaze. From a mainstream perspective, cinema has been analyzed by first interpreting the content and then creating a meaning that can be digested easily. Susan Sontag critiques this analytical dynamic in her 1966 book Against Interpretation. She argues, “by reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable [sic]” (Sontag 5). This dominant approach avoids understanding cinema’s form and significance from an ideological perspective, but movies are social agents with the capacity to engage with symbolic meanings and political significance. Jean-Louis Baudry defined cinematographic apparatus as, “[cinematic mechanism] destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology: creating a fantasmatization (Note 1) of the subject, it collaborates with a marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism” (46). While Baudry frames cinema as a mechanism to maintain dominant ideologies, the inverse of this concept is also possible, in which cinema becomes a mechanism against dominant ideologies and symbolic meanings. This framework allows the aesthetic and visual elements of Law of Desire to be analyzed from a queer and deviant perspective.  

The particularity of the final scene of Law of Desire lies in its division into two different locations that are interconnected in time and space through sound and editing. At the beginning of the scene, the police inform Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) that his sister, Tina (Carmen Maura), has been held hostage in her apartment by Antonio (Antonio Banderas), his former lover and passionate fan. When Pablo arrives outside the building, he agrees to go upstairs with the police to free Tina. Almodóvar establishes the connection between the two spaces when Antonio appears on the balcony with Tina while the police are stationed downstairs, pointing lights and guns at him. He demands that Pablo come upstairs alone. At this point in the story, the audience is aware that Antonio experiences his homosexuality secretly, far from the sight of his conservative family. Similarly, Tina and Pablo's gender and sexuality (transgender and homosexual, respectively) also experience a degree of privacy from the exterior world. In both cases, this reality creates a personality split between public and private persona in which these queer individuals need enclosed spaces to experience their freedom. As Marta Saavedra suggests in her essay about Almodóvar’s cinematic world, the director “understands the filmic space as a basic element for the emotional development of his characters” (378). In this last scene of Law of Desire, the filmic space reflects the dualities and dichotomies used by the director as the primary mechanism to create the characters and conflicts developed in the plot. The director establishes the spatial connection between both spaces using cross-cutting and diegetic sound continuity, particularly in the form of dialogue and music.  

Almodóvar's unique visual world is charged with relevant narrative information, which makes it essential to decoding the melodramatic tension in Law of Desire, especially in the actions done by his characters during the climax of the movie. Cross-cutting and sound editing help unify and create tension by using discontinued spaces connected by sound, music, or dialogue (Bordwell 244). Two examples are the use of the song "Lo Dudo" and the fire. One of the most emphatic moments is when Antonio plays the song "Lo Dudo," and that song becomes a connection between the exterior space where public opinion awaits and the inner space or intimate space of the apartment where desire can exist. Because of Antonio’s secret homosexual desire, his relationship with the exterior (social pressure) and the interior (sexual freedom) of the apartment appear connected through the song, which at the same time speaks to the development of the story. With this song, Almodóvar seems to foreshadow the fatal ending as the lyrics are about a love that was intense and wild, but is now over. While this song could have achieved the same functionality as non-diegetic sound, it is vital to point out that Almodóvar uses it in diegetic form to support the idea that Antonio wants the world to know he loved Pablo, even though it is over because of the social pressure placed on him. 

Furthermore, Almodóvar uses fire as a symbol of the inevitable tragedy pushed by the  external (law, order, conservative society) and the internal (the passion of an impossible love). The aesthetic relationship between love and death through the fire inside the apartment serves as a powerful melodramatic mechanism to finish a love story that is still not easy to showcase in the exterior of the apartment. As José Quiroga points out in his book Law of Desire: A Queer Film Classic, “Almodóvar found a cinematic language that allowed him to represent both aesthetic distance from a sentimental notion of life, and the affective triggers that allow for identification with life” (15). The other fire in the scene is happening outside of the building, in front of the police cars. The presence of fire in both public and private spaces links the two worlds together, symbolizing a society that is changing and still dealing with a traumatic past. This convergence of spaces and dualities created first by diegetic music and later by the two fires is essential to understanding the visual and dramatic complexities of the movie.  

On top of the visual elements mentioned, Almodóvar uses another significant aesthetic element charged with critical semiotic significance throughout the scene: the religious installation. The Virgen de la Macarena is an essential symbol that illustrates a radical understanding of sexual repression and liberation from a queer perspective. The director employs such religious symbols to delve into the complex social conflicts of the film. While religious symbolism can be associated with sexual repression and violence, for instance, the controlling mother and the priest who abused Tina as a child, Almodóvar subverts their meaning to something almost mestizo. As Brígida M. Pastor affirms, "the inversion implies the transgression of a culturally designed model of conduct that is heterosexual and therefore implies the complete negation of that model or norm" (8). The Virgin in Tina's house becomes a positive symbol, a female one whom she and Ada trust for protection and the one that will become an almost mystic observer of Pablo and Antonio's love and tragedy. Almodóvar's use of religious symbology combined with Hollywood iconography aligns with what José Esteban Muñoz coined as the disidentification process. Disidentification is the strategy used by minority groups to manage historical trauma and systemic violence by reassembling how the majority sees and oppresses them (Muñoz 35). In the movie, the Virgin, Saints illustrations, crosses, and candles are detached from a Christian meaning to become protective symbols and objects of worship and inspiration almost equal to posters of old Hollywood actresses (Saavedra 382). The fact that a negative symbol in Pablo and Tina's world becomes positive reflects a queer perspective that reclaims traditional symbols from mainstream and conservative spaces to a more radical one. Through this, queer artists developed a complex analysis of the dichotomy between tradition and queerness, which is vital in the last scene of the movie Law of Desire. 

Consequently, it is essential to understand how Almodóvar creates the scene using  excesses in his narrative language through the combination of melodrama and film noir as well  as the radical use of sexuality, religion, and police force. This use of well-known social norms  and beliefs in an opposite and radical way is essential as part of the queer narrative present in the  film. As Pastor points out in her article, "Almodóvar's insistence on adopting culturally  established roles [police] and attitudes [repression] that are performed through parody and a  stereotypical exaggeration, generates a detachment on the part of his characters in relation to the  cultural reality that surrounds them" (13). The melodramatic scene works thanks to the  extravagant construction and connection between characters and the art direction surrounding them, such as the use of folkloric and religious iconography, music, and passionate love scenes. These symbolic and emotional constructions have a dialectical relationship pointing out the dictatorial society and the new liberal one. In their new present, queer characters are reconstructing their identities within a space that provides new meanings to the conservative world of the past (folkloric and religious elements) and the postmodern reality of the mid-1980s (sexual freedom). 

In conclusion, the final scene of Law of Desire showcases Almodóvar's talent in blending melodrama and film noir aesthetics, exploring a subgenre in which he can employ a radical use of sexuality, religion, and police force. By transgressing established social norms and beliefs, Almodóvar creates a unique queer perspective that not only challenges conventional roles and attitudes, but also generates detachment from the cultural reality surrounding the characters. The scene’s juxtaposition of exterior forces, symbolized by law and order, with the interior spaces, realms of sexual freedom, underscores essential dichotomies inherent in queer cinema. These dichotomies are no longer a subtext since the queer experience does not hide between ideas of representability but lies in representation. Almodóvar's cinematic style aligns with other filmmakers of his time, such as John Waters, Derek Jarman, or Todd Haynes, who similarly explored this radical vision of social conventions and helped to create queer visual representation. The intricacy and elaboration of the visual settings in the movie serve to support its complex characters and their connections to post-dictatorial Spain, highlighting the rich world of gender diversity. Almodóvar's film form, characterized by duality, provides a profound and incisive critique of conservatism in society and explores the contrast between public and private personalities influenced by societal decorum. Finally, the microcosm of the scene in the movie serves as a representation of the larger social issues that Pedro Almodóvar explores in the film such as repression, sexuality, and passion, three elements that are all linked to General Franco’s dictatorial period (1936-1975). Almodóvar's distinct and influential cinematic style has become largely influential worldwide to such an extent that his name has become an adjective, "almodovarian," which refers to this stylization of queer and folkloric Spanish social issues that thanks to him have become universal. 

Notes

1. According to Jean-Louis Baudry, fantasmatization refers to the creation of a visual illusion through images, sounds, and colors.  Baudry affirms that fantasmatization is a method to create visual reality according to ideological ideals that appears to be objective. 

Works Cited 

Almodóvar, Pedro. Law of Desire, feature film, El Deseo/Lauren Films, 1987. Bordwell, David; Thompson, Kristin; “Chapter 6: The Relation of Shot to Shot”. Film Art. An  Introduction. McGraw-Hill Education 12th Edition, 2020. 

Quiroga, Jose. “Introduction : Queer Melodrama.” Law of Desire, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.  University of Minnesota Press, 1999 

Pastor, Brígida M. "Screening Sexual and Gendered Otherness in Almodóvar's Law of Desire  (1987)—The Real 'Sexual Revolution'." Studies in European Cinema, vol. 3, no. 1, 2006,  pp. 7-23. doi:10.1386/seci.3.1.7/1. 

M. Saavedra Llamas and N. Grijalba de la Calle, “The creative cinematographic process at the  service of national identity: Pedro almodÓvar and the promotion of spanish stereotypes,”  Creativity studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 369–386, 2020, doi: 10.3846/cs.2020.8563.

Dead Air, Dead Space: Culpability and Collapse in Landscape Suicide (1986), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023)

By Micah Slater, Edited by Avana Wang

Documentary cinema has spent time in alignment with prevailing thought and subversion in equal measure. It has engaged as both dissident and conformist; employing the apparatus as an agent of change, of conservatism, and practically every (nominal) shade in between. Subversive cinemas subsequently frequently employ documentary in service to alternative histories and perspectives. Unfortunately, in order to legitimize these perspectives, these documentaries often reference established documentary norms in terms of form and structure. These norms can be and have been established outside the influence of Hollywood alone. Therefore, it is both of note and of interest when documentaries on subversive subjects make use of subversive forms. This paper poses that the unconventional histories told in Landscape Suicide (1987), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023), reject both prevailing social sensibilities and conventional documentary form. They instead labor towards a film language of space itself, where events and narratives are not best told by people, but through the places where they occurred, the air through which they moved. They choose to thread their narratives through the cracks in the foundation, revealing the looming, imminent collapse of space itself.

James Benning’s Landscape Suicide is part of an anthology focused on space, in an oeuvre already thoroughly marked by meditations of the same. California Trilogy (1999–2001), Ten Skies (2004), The United States of America (1975), and Thirteen Lakes (2004), should all in name and release date alone indicate the expanse of Benning’s spatial sensibilities. His work has often been described as among the greatest of slow cinema; despite the term itself being coined only in 2003 (Luca and Jorge 2022). This combination of slowness, of a deliberate lingering and occupation of space, and of the topics chosen here—Cheerleader Bernadette Protti, who stabbed a friend to death over an insult, and Ed Gein, American serial killer—creates a stark contrast to prevailing models of true crime documentary in both its patience and its condemnation. “Anti-true crime, or the truest version of it,” Landscape Suicide is a product both of Benning’s preoccupation with space and of an effort towards a more ethically-concerned alternative to conventional crime documentary narratives, notorious for their voyeuristic lens and exploitative content (Cole). Picturing the conventional American true crime documentary about these people makes Landscape Suicide’s individual impetus towards a spatial language much more apparent. The people Benning selected–an all-American cheerleader and the Butcher of Plainfield—are high-profile cases that have stirred deep emotion in the American consciousness for decades. However, Benning’s ethics regarding these subjects are acutely apparent in all of the scenes where the individuals are not present. Landscape Suicide is not solely weighing space as an auteurist signature; it is being used to mediate (or perhaps even soothe) the strong feelings that conventional true crime seeks to inflame. The landscapes audiences see are all spaces that the subjects have occupied, spaces we feel to occupy as we view them. Though the locations themselves are explicit, in that they are tied to events of national importance, the rows of houses, two-lane roads, and ungroomed vegetation could very well exist in any part of America. Therefore, Benning’s common experience of space is his great middleman. The “rejection of drama, the implementation of long takes, and stationary shots [...] allow audiences to come to their own understanding,” pointing to efforts toward a film language that believes ethics are tied to spacetime itself (Ross 261-62). This spatial language becomes concentrated—more so than in Benning’s visual diaspora—in Grey Gardens.

Upon release of Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens, many critics condemned the film, claiming that “the brothers had exploited two vulnerable and perhaps unstable women” in the interest of direct cinema (Abbot 108). While discourse has proliferated on this topic for decades, Grey Gardens’ titular estate has remained a visual landmark, a space so iconic (or iconoclastic) it nearly supersedes its residents. After all, the Beales themselves were not mentioned in a title until the 2006 sequel The Beales of Grey Gardens. The first film was made when Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, two eccentric socialites, were subject to headlines after the Suffolk County Board of Health cited multiple violations against the property. The film makes Grey Gardens’ otherness even further apparent: opening on a brief conversation about a lost cat, the camera drifts through empty rooms, focusing on chipped paint, broken baseboards, and finally, zeroing in on a gaping hole in a wall into which Whiskers the cat has allegedly disappeared. And, while Little Edie remarks on the policies of East Hampton (“they can get you for wearing red shoes on a Thursday. They can get you for almost anything”), the film cycles through static shots of the village—affluent, well kept homes; ponds, beaches—before ending on a static shot of Grey Gardens: unpainted, run-down, overgrown [00:01:50]. The language of space here is not nearly as much of an assertion as in Landscape Suicide as it is a foundation, both the source of the sensation surrounding the Beales and what we first—and most consistently—are presented with. While the Maysles seem to marvel at the otherness of this space, again raising the discourse of exploitation, no compromises or alternative locations are used. Little and Big Edie are not transported to another place for interviews, the camera never again physically leaves Grey Gardens after the introductory contrast: the lingua franca is the space itself. 

Pictures of Ghosts (2023) is both more conventional and more personal than Landscape Suicide and Grey Gardens together. As the only film that makes primary use of archival footage, its treatise serves as a remembrance of the analog cinemas in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, which were key features of director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s youth and adulthood. He spent both periods in residence in an apartment owned by his mother in Downtown Recife, and after her death, by himself. In fact, the first half of the film centers on this apartment, viewed through the lens of the dozens of amateur, and, eventually, independent films he made there through university. We see decades of change wear away the neighbor's yard; then we see the house devoured by termites. Brick arches go up and walls come down, bedrooms change into media rooms, furniture rearranges and disappears. It’s evident that the apartment, much like Belén Vidals’s theoretical house, has “accumulated a particularly fierce and determined specificity” (Rhodes 86). This is in explicit contrast to the cinemas, which, as victims of the public economy of interest, are presently becoming abstracted—abandoned, transformed into churches and malls, or plainly demolished. Therefore, the footage Mendonça Filho has amassed, in its sheer volume and longevity, is an invaluable resource in the film language he sets forth. Spatial portraits of both locations would be fruitful alone, but forty years of change—especially regarding such a marked decline—transforms the spaces from topics to parts of speech in the type of communication Pictures of Ghosts is aspiring towards. Shots of the same buildings, chronicling apogee, to decline, to shuttering, to decay, crystallize time and its passage. The changes are gradual, but they are drastic, and the cinemas hold those memories diligently. Mendonça Filho is also an interlocutor: in one instance, with the support of footage from three different eras, he notes a plain red external wall of a former cinema palace that used to contain vitrines of posters and memorabilia. It is this kind of rumination—on what used to be, and what is now hidden or remiss—that makes Pictures of Ghosts an extremely compelling (and, due in no small part to its seven-year direct construction and decades of preparation, authorial) tributary to a cinematic language of space. Though subject to time and decay, Recife’s cinema palaces speak for themselves, embodying the spaces—past, present, and future—they occupy.

The documentary form must inherently accommodate space. For decades, documentaries have taken iconic spaces as subjects. However, as these films postulate, spaces are not only passive elements, alike to a stage or venue. Space is a language capable of communicating ethics, character, history, and time. Landscape Suicide circumvents documentary norms by using space to ethically and simultaneously interrogate genres and a subject characterized by polemia and hyperbole. Grey Gardens examines the house as a private and public subject, where space communicates institutionally (and societally) imposed right and wrong ways of being. Pictures of Ghosts sees space in dialogue with time, discussing the changes to downtown Recife, the Brazilian film industry, and the failures of their buildings themselves. These films are all also efforts in preservation. As Paula Rabinowitz has noted, filming an “essentially ephemeral event, a vanishing custom, a disappearing species, a transitory occurrence, is the motivation behind most documentary images” (120). This is true in the cases of many documentaries, but the efforts towards a spatial language in these films augment her argument: it is not just the filmed that is ephemeral, that is in need of preservation, but the act of filming itself. Spaces decay, but they do so in the labor of conveyance. Even the kind of space and the way it is depicted create meaning. 

The spaces of these three films are not only centered as agents of language, but possess a shared discourse on spaces in decay—what happens in order for, and after, a place’s ‘death.’ Landscape Suicide foregrounds the idea of topography itself being capable of murder. Benning is keenly interested in individuals as a born-in parts of the places in which they exist, and in the interconnectivity that arises from this relationship. Therefore, homicide, and especially serial homicide, is the most intimate and violent form of collapse: self-harm against the biblical clay from which we were formed. Landscapes abound; suburban houses and roads stand vacant and anonymous, yet this spatial language encourages the assumption that they are somehow relevant to the crimes that Landscape Suicide centers. An audience is encouraged to imagine how this place, despite its void of delivered context, is somehow liable for murder. Further, they are prompted to consider how these places have been abandoned, due to imprisonment, death, or other intentionally-undetermined exit. In many ways, Benning’s film is a cinema of the rapture. Dead air hangs over once-occupied scenes, landscapes that have caused their own death. A unique kind of rot is represented here: one that is not structural but spiritual, a para-natural abandonment that may one day lead to a collapse that has yet to occur. Perhaps refracted off of the condition of the film’s subjects—prison does not allow for itself nor its subjects to decay—Landscape Suicide sees collapse as a perpetually imminent consequence of the ruin we cause each other. Julian Ross cites Benning with the quote “I couldn’t get a sense of the murder, but the collective guilt still lingers” (271). Where this guilt lingers, out of the abstraction of the crimes themselves, is the locus of blame. For Benning, collapse is the inevitable aftermath. 

Meanwhile, Grey Gardens’ picture of dead space is very nearly an argument in the reverse. Big and Little Edie inherently exist as “victims of and subject to the house in which they live,” as they had two years prior to coming under scrutiny (Rhodes 87). Deterioration is the premise of their lives as they lived them at the time of filming: they are surrounded by the debris of memory, sleeping in piles of papers and photographs, a large portrait of a much younger Big Edie leaned against the wall near the door. Grey Gardens postulates that decay is not a consequence of abandonment, but instead of use: it is its tenured occupation by these two particular women, alone with each other for decades, that has caused the house to rot. It is the containment of these years that amplifies the spatial voice of this film; despite the fact that we are not actually privy to much of it. Despite the house boasting 23 rooms, we only see 5, imbuing the space with “potentiality [...] a kind of imminence” that promises new and unknown forms of collapse (Rhodes 87). The Edies seem very skilled at the compartmentalization required to cut themselves off from society and their squalor from themselves. The Maysles filmed two years after the surprise inspection, and two years after affluent relatives (including niece/cousin Jackie Kennedy Onassis) paid for renovations, including hygiene facilities and running water. The unknown of a prior, more dilapidated space is perpetuated in these unseen rooms. Space is being used to proliferate ideas of worst-case scenarios, made more voyeuristically taboo by how frequently the Edies speak from offscreen, or talk about going to (or having been in) rooms we never see. Little Edie searches for cats in the attic and references a maid’s dining room. Big Edie speaks of her bedroom as “concentrated ground” [01:12:12]. A misuse of the word, as one of the Maysles corrects, but nonetheless resonant with the course of collapse as it has taken throughout the house. The very variety of home that Grey Gardens is, or once was, is diametrically opposed to constant, continuous, concentrated occupation. Many (and at the time of its construction, most) of the houses in East Hampton were vacation homes: temporary residences for socialites affluent enough to shirk loyalty to spatial notions of permanent residence. Space speaks loudly of the ways the Beales have neglected to perform their station. 

Pictures of Ghosts uses its spatial language to resist collapse, likely because it has a long-lived and personal stake in the preservation of Recife’s movie theaters. The film is also acutely aware of its inevitability. Neither Landscape Suicide nor Grey Gardens visualize an end to their decay: American prison sentences for murder are synonymous with forever; the Beales will presumably always have relatives to bail them out of eviction. Menonça Filho is surrounded by the imminent demise of the cinemas he loved so dearly, thus the making of Pictures of Ghosts—with its years of footage—while these places are still discernible in the landscape. Mendonça Filho treats the past as a vision of transcendence, acting with a reverence for the unique temporal palaces of cinemas: inside, time stands still, but outside, the winds of time and socio-economic forces chip away at their grandeur. This is particularly emphasized by a remarkably tender interlude in material history where Mendonça Filho grinds to a halt to memorialize a projectionist and a dear friend, who worked in one of the once-many cinemas in Downtown Recife. Aside from the director’s own interjections (including his own voiceover), this is the most human that Pictures of Ghosts identifies itself to be. Cinemas and their magic, at least to modern audiences, have forgone the projectionist for many years. With the proliferation of digital cinema packages (DCPs) and the dwindling need to switch reels during a film, projection—a profession that already intentionally hides itself behind the image—has become personless, automated. It reminds that decay is not merely structural or ideological, but has direct ramifications on concrete modernisms: employment, industry, real estate. A limb of Pictures of Ghosts addresses a time during World War II when one of the once iconic, now defunct theaters was constructed as a UFA cinema, a way for the Nazi party to reach South America with propaganda pictures, and also to benefit financially from Recife’s rich moviegoing culture. This event predates Mendonça Filho, of course, but the history is not being conveyed by him (despite his voiceover). These spaces speak of their own histories, carried forward through time. Marquees here earn their own segment of the film: towering above masses of blurred people, their cinemas mark time in equal measure as they move through it. 

Despite disparate doctrines on what their shared filmic languages actually communicate, Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts raise a shared question: by whom did this occur? What accommodated for these images of decay? Who is truly to blame for these murders? Who allowed the Beales’ living conditions to become so unsafe as to be threatened with eviction? Who took these palaces and tore them down? Who is liable for the death of these places? The indictment is clearly institutional. Throughout a question and answer at AFIFest 2023, Mendonça Filho repeatedly cited one reason for the remaining cinemas’ marginal, but surviving, present condition: state funding and cultural preservation grants. He spoke of cinemas as an endangered species, of the extant few still in Recife as landmarks whose spaces are imbued with narrative. While the spatial filmic language of Pictures of Ghosts allows itself to meditate on theoretical concepts, the utilitarian purpose of the film is extremely clear. Because of this, in many ways, this film is by far the most conventional; and with evidently good reason. Neither of the two aforementioned have courses of action to offer; they do depict problems but are nonetheless without solutions. Interestingly, though, they agree with Pictures of Ghosts in placing blame. Landscape Suicide identifies failures in bureaucratic systems as much as it does in humanity. Collective guilt’ is an accusation towards things that can feel guilt, certainly; but it also speaks towards the judicial verdict. Hinted at with its presentation of public ‘landscapes’ in schools and roads. Grey Gardens, interestingly, finds fault in both the Village of East Hampton and in the distant relatives that merely sent money for minimum repairs and did nothing to ensure the wellness of the Edies, nor the soundness of the house. Spatial language is a particularly effective medium for conversations on negligence: nothing bears accusations of decay like a rotting house, an abandoned building, or an empty street. It is infinitely more possible to defend oneself against a person than an empty room. 

And yet these interpersonal defenses abound. Grey Gardens’ human protagonists insist on their lifestyle; Big Edie “thrives” on the smell of her room (which, if the length of the film is to be considered, is a combination of cat food, urine, food waste, and body odor), and both of the Beales defend their lifestyle vehemently [01:12:08]. Little Edie refers to the Village’s surprise inspection as a “raid” [00:01:51]. Concerns regarding the mental wellness of the two are what sparked much of the film’s initial controversy, but ultimately they are adults who manage a daily life, feed and clothe themselves, and seem, though occasionally cantankerous, ultimately content. An element of resignation colors Pictures of Ghosts as well. For many of these lost cinemas, there is no way to bring them back: the camera meditates on vacant lots where demolition has befallen a theatre; abandoned implements of construction hang like tissue and jut like bone in other half-augmented structures. It’s only natural that these places would not last centuries; the social mode and cinemagoing culture specific to Recife that enabled their renaissance certainly didn’t. Projectionists aren’t expected to live forever; neither is film stock. As intrinsic as time is to space, ephemerality inevitably wins out with decay. For its ideas of shared culpability and shared place, Landscape Suicide occasionally errs to apathy. If we, and all of our loci, are all guilty of every murder, then there is no authority to define or prosecute these crimes. There is no space to hold perpetrators of a crime that is not itself a criminal. 

With a range of concerns, and a wider range of tactics, Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts are all collectively laboring towards an alternative film language, one that centers space as dialogue, as mediator, as lingua franca. Benning’s ethics of duration indict the collective American occupation of land as complicit, our violent crimes a product of our landscape, images of shared guilt echoing through our foundations. Our decay is spiritual, he posits, an internal rot that threatens to erode our structural selves. The harm we do to one another is reflexive; auto-desecration. Grey Gardens speaks in terms of spatial otherness, presenting the Beales in contrast to their neighbors and their estate as defiant of its governing bodies. Space is the mouthpiece of the eponymous house and its turbulent relationship with its occupants, as much as it is their defender. It is what drew the filmmakers to the topic and is what attracts their camera throughout the film. Pictures of Ghosts, in all of its conventional structure, perhaps allows space to speak the loudest. With images spanning a lifetime, these cinemas become familiar, if not trustworthy. They contain iterations of appearance, of use, of structural stability. They accumulate in a demand for continuous support that simultaneously accommodates understanding of the reason for their decline. Documentary cinema’s ability to chronicle environments, locations, landmarks, and even the anonymity of indeterminate places is deeply charged and deeply effective for the thrust of these films. Throughout Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts, silence speaks louder than words, for it is then when space is permitted to speak for itself.

Works Cited

Abbott, Mathew. "Grey Gardens and the Problem of Objectivity." Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience. Berghahn Books, 2021.

Directed by Benning, James. Landscape Suicide, performance by Anonymous , 1987.

Cole, Jake. "Review of Landscape Suicide." , 2022.

Luca, Tiago d., and Nuno B. Jorge. "Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas." Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Directed by Maysles, Albert, and David Maysles. Grey Gardens, performance by Anonymous . Portrait Films, 1975.

Directed by Mendonça Filho, Kleber. Pictures of Ghosts, performance by Anonymous . CinemaScópio, Produções Ancine, 2023.

Rabinowitz, Paula. "Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory." History and Theory :Studies in the Philosophy of History, vol. 32, no. 2, 1993, pp. 119-137. CrossRef, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2505348, doi:10.2307/2505348.

Rhodes, John D. ""Concentrated Ground": "Grey Gardens" and the Cinema of the Domestic." Framework, vol. 47, no. 1, 2006, pp. 83-105. CrossRef, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41552449, doi:10.1353/frm.2006.0006.

Ross, Julian. "Ethics of the Landscape Shot: Aka Serial Killer and James Benning’s Portraits of Criminals." Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Herself or Her Self?: Visual Design and Mirrors in Cléo from 5 to 7

By Sophia Fijman, Edited by Bridget Zhang

It is not physically possible for a person to see themself, with the naked eye, as they appear to the rest of the world. A mirror’s image, though it shows life in real time, is reversed and will therefore never truly show our bodies as others view them. Mirror images tend to stand, then, as mere symbols of others’ conceptualization of a person and pursuing that will inevitably cause the loss of an actual sense of self. Renowned for her work as a pioneer of and often referred to as the “mother” of the French New Wave, filmmaker Agnès Varda wrote and directed Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962) as her second feature film (Vincendeau). It chronicles almost the entirety of 2 hours of a young French singer’s life as she is forced to confront her sense of self, one that is informed by her occupation as a performer and identity as a woman. Throughout the film, Cléo (Corrine Marchand) is accosted by mirrors as symbols of her progressive self-actualization. By physically framing Cléo in mirrors placed deliberately throughout the film, Varda engineers the audience’s perspective so that it is Cléo’s. She uses the visual symbolism of a mirror to indicate the way in which Cléo sees herself – that is, through a patriarchal gaze which gradually deteriorates. The presence of a mirror provides a visual representation of that transformation. Cléo initially has no sense of self but, rather, is incessantly enraptured by the mere image of herself. As her journey (and the film) progresses, she is freed of her own gaze and embraces her truer self via introspection as her identity collapses and is rebuilt. In turn, mirrors placed in visual design thread together the viewer’s perspective with Cléo’s own so that the audience might be fully enveloped in the gaze employed in Cléo from 5 to 7 as it changes.

The strategic use of mirrors is not uncommon in film. A well-known, more pop-culture famous example of such is Jack’s interactions with mirrors in The Shining (1980). Ironically, in horror, mirrors tend to symbolize another self. In general, they are often used in moments of reflection or to show that something is not what it seems. In Cléo from 5 to 7, they are assets to both. Mirrors point to how Cléo figuratively sees herself the way other people do. Toward the beginning of the film, she can’t help but identify with the image in the mirror and the perception others have of her – she has no individualized perception of herself. Her lack of any self-examination makes it all the more difficult for her to change as a person, for her own self-image must be broken down first in order to do so. Mirrors frame Cléo, quite literally reflecting her arc as she comes to view herself in a way that aligns more with a feminine gaze, rather than the masculine one. Coined in 1973 by theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the ‘male gaze’ has become a pillar of film theory and analysis. In the simplest of terms, it is a lens through which cameras frame women – one which sexually objectifies them to be looked at and exhibited. As a performer, Cléo’s story is driven by the plight of being constantly on display. When the film begins, she is in desperate need of severing herself from the male gaze as it is ingrained into both her own self-perception and the image of herself presented to others.

When first introduced, Cléo has a tendency to objectify herself, though she doesn’t seem to know it. In fact, one of the first things she does is look in a mirror (4:37). Barely a minute later, she does so again, this time with a mirror behind her as well; she is physically encompassed by multiple versions of herself. In a shot utterly encapsulating of the first half of the film, “Cleo pauses before a hallway mirror which (...) offers a seemingly infinite reiteration of her image” (Flitterman-Lewis 272). In discussing woman-as-image, author Sandy Flitterman-Lewis highlights the “contrasting functions of mirrors in the first and second halves of the film” as they are initially used for the purposes of vanity, and then as visual representations of Cléo’s reckoning with her identity (272). It is not the mirror itself that does this, but rather the character’s interaction with it as an object. Cléo does not become woman-as-image because she glances in a mirror; she plays into this concept by staring into mirrors frequently and for extended stretches of time. This, ergo, is notable because the story of the film happens, for the most part, in real time and the viewer is therefore much more aware of just how much time she spends in a mirror. In many scenes in which Cléo interacts with a mirror early in the story, the camera doesn’t directly show her face, only reflections of it. In a technical sense, this orients viewers and places them in a position of power so that we gaze upon Cléo as she gazes upon herself. This marks Cléo as something framed and displayed, something objectified. She is, as such, fully visually enveloped in the masculine gaze – so much so that she sees herself that way.

The mirror is a lens through which the viewer sees Cléo in her most vulnerable moments, before she fully steps out of the masculine gaze. After leaving the fortune-teller, Cléo visits a cafe. Inside, she spends an extended period of time looking again in a mirror, worried her illness is visible on her face. Though they are conversing and there is quite a bit of implied activity going on in the cafe, the camera shows the audience almost solely Cléo and her maid, Angèle (Dominique Davray). The focus is entirely on her, underlining Cléo’s self-centered perspective and how she makes her way through the world early in the narrative. Throughout this first half of the film, Cléo checks her appearance in almost every location – the cafe, the hat shop, her bedroom. She says that, if her illness is visible on her face, she “might as well be dead already” (7:49). She is absolutely intoxicated by her own reflection, as obvious only a few moments later in the hat shop where she claims that everything suits her (13:01). At home, she is constantly surrounded by multiple mirrors even when she isn’t looking in them. The set design encloses Cléo with them, leading the viewer to surmise that Cléo wants to be able to stare at herself frequently, as they are furniture in her own apartment. In an enlightening rehearsal, she seems to cave in on herself, becoming suddenly aware of and able to understand a feeling of exploitation as a performer. Afterwards, she simplifies her outfit, as if to mourn herself prematurely. Removing her wig and donning a simple black dress, Cléo’s exaggerated, commodified idea of femininity – that which “Joan Rivière called ‘womanliness as masquerade’” (Ezra 178) – is suddenly absent. In discussing objectification in the French New Wave, Elizabeth Ezra states that, “As a star, Cléo herself is commodified, her humanity objectified in the mechanical reproduction and dissemination of her image” (183). Cléo’s decision to change her hyper feminine outfit, though it appears dramatic, catalyzes the long overdue disintegration of her self-perspective: her internalized masculine gaze. In doing so, she begins to physically break down her own image, thus marking the pivotal midpoint of Cléo’s arc.

In the second half of the film, mirrors are more significant in the lack thereof; Cléo interacts with them only a few times. She transitions gradually from being guided by the image of ‘herself’ (appearance according to others’ perspectives) to leading with a renewed sense of ‘her self’ (identity and psyche). Once she leaves her apartment, Cléo does not look in a complete mirror for the rest of the film. As Flitterman-Lewis explains, “The first mirror she encounters in her flight from the apartment is one whose surface is disturbed,” and to lose an unobscured mirror is, to Cléo, to lose “a reassuring image of coherence” – one which previously provided her with “a sense of her own being” (273). It’s here that Ezra as well comments, mentioning that Cléo observes herself, realizes that her own gaze is narrow, and internally monologues “I'm not looking at anyone but myself. It's tiring” (43:23) (180). Throughout the second half of the film, Cléo’s lack of identity is apparent, which in fact makes space for her to self-evaluate. She returns to the cafe around 44:27. However, this scene is starkly different in visual design compared to her earlier visit – unlike the first cafe visit, the camera is not static and does not focus on framing Cléo – as a result, there is a related and obvious change in Cléo’s perception of the world around her as it broadens. As opposed to the first cafe scene, Cléo does not try to catch her reflection at all, instead focusing on the people around her. The camera pans smoothly, showing the viewer her point of view. While the first scene “offers the busy social milieu of the cafe as mere background to Cleo's self-absorption,” this one provides the cafe as a vessel for Cléo’s observation (Fitterman-Lewis 274). She plays one of her songs on a jukebox, then checks thoroughly to see if anyone has noticed. As the camera merges with Cléo’s vision, the audience is practically forced to see things as she does, to notice what she does and, when she eventually sits next to a pillar with many small mirrors, Cléo looks past it and at the people instead. The combination of the presence of mirrors and Cléo’s lack of interest in them in this scene indicates that, while she has not fully transformed yet, she is capable of change.

Cléo from 5 to 7 challenges its protagonist’s comfort by revoking her of the ability to constantly reassure herself via mirrors. Until they’re obscured and then gone, Cléo’s voiceover thoughts are often vain and shallow. However, when there are fewer mirrors, Cléo mentally reflects as she stares at her physical reflection. This is best represented by Cléo’s interactions with her friend Dorothée (Dorothée Blanck), who acts as a sort of guide for Cléo. Dorothée, who poses as a nude model, is happy in her body, while Cléo expresses that she would feel exposed doing the same, “afraid people would find a fault” (52:32). Though both characters are gazed upon, their occupation separates them. Cléo’s “commodified status is the inverse of the sculptures that her friend Dorothée poses for, which comprise a range of original representations of a single referent, rather than the multiple copies of Cléo's hit single” (Ezra 183). Dorothée’s impact in Cléo’s transformation and the audience’s understanding of Cléo’s own gaze is supported by yet another mirror. While with Dorothée, Cléo drops a mirror, notably beginning another chapter. Dorothée immediately moves to clean it, yet Cléo’s hand is frozen in the shot and on the ground, not attempting to pick up the shards. Though Dorothée reassures her and tells her it’s “like breaking a plate,” Cléo believes it is an omen for death, explaining that she’s “overcome with fear” (1:03:16). Entranced by the shards, Cléo stares at her now fragmented reflection. This physical destruction of Cléo’s ‘identity’ severs the tie between the way she sees herself and the person she’s becoming. More specifically, the broken shard she looks at centers her eye in the middle of a crack, emphasizing how her self-perception breaks down, drawing the viewer’s eye. The shard as a symbol entwines her patriarchal gaze with performative femininity, then leaves both behind as Cléo walks away from her shattered self-perception. It’s also worth noting that this happens while she’s with Dorothée, who is exemplary of a kind of feminine empowerment because she is not commodified and resold as Cléo is. As a result, she is more in touch with her self, and her presence is significant as Cléo’s transformation comes to fruition. As they leave, Cléo drops the few shards she’s attempted to pick up, but glances back at them in a moment of self doubt. About a minute later, a reflective glass window is shown broken – a man has been killed and Dorothée says that the omen Cléo believes in must have been for him. This shot (1:04:04) of the broken window is the final time she looks into a reflective surface, confirming that Cléo’s development is solidified; the dismantling of her internalized masculine gaze is now irreversible. Flitterman-Lewis explains Cléo’s arc simply: it “hinges on the turn of phrase: ‘How do I look?’,” yet the phrase’s meaning shifts from a “passive, objectified meaning (‘How am I seen, how do I appear in the eyes of the world?’) to its active complement (‘How do I see, how is the world viewed by me?’)” (269). In short, Cléo cares more about what she sees than how she is seen, her gaze switching focus from image to the world as she experiences it – an embraced yet empowering feminine one.

Varda’s strategic use of mirrors as visual design functions as underscore, as if to say that Cléo’s perception of herself was never truly her self at all – it was reversed. The film employs gaze theory in a bit of a self-referential way – it engineers how the audience sees how Cléo sees herself. Any progressive intent this film has is a staple of the French New Wave, yet its overall theme keeps it poignantly relevant over 60 years after its release. Woman-as-image spurring woman in crisis is ever-present in film, as are mirrors as visual representations of gaze styles. Mirrors are not able to show us our true selves as others see us, yet it is when one separates physical beauty from one’s sense of self that progress is possible. A bit of an ironic motif, it is the destruction of that which allows Cléo to see her body as physically unaltered that motivates her to introspect and ‘see’ her self.

Works Cited

Ezra, Elizabeth. “Cléo’s Masks: Regimes of Objectification in the French New Wave.” Yale French Studies, no. 118/119, 2010, pp. 177–90. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41337086. Accessed 24 Feb. 2023.

Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. “From Déesse to Idée: Cleo From 5 to 7 .” To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, Columbia University Press, 1996.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 198-209.

Cléo de 5 à 7. Directed by Agnès Varda, Ciné-tamaris, 1962.

Vincendeau, Ginette. “La Pointe Courte: How Agnès Varda ‘Invented’ the New Wave.” The Criterion Collection, 22 Jan. 2008, www.criterion.com/current/posts/497-la-pointe-courte-how-agnes-varda-invented-the-new-wave. Accessed 3 Nov. 2023.

Cinematic Dreams: Wish Fulfillment and Visual Pleasure in Paprika

By Bridget Zhang, Edited by Alison Church

In KON Satoshi’s Paprika, chaos ensues when the world of dreams merges dangerously with the real world, causing reality to begin to fall apart. The 2006 Japanese animated film speculates about the future of psychiatric treatment, where a device called the “DC Mini” allows psychiatrists to access their patients’ dreams. The film opens with doctor CHIBA Atsuko using the device for a session with detective KONAKAWA Toshimi, assuming her alter-ego “Paprika” inside his dream. This use of dreams in therapy recalls Freudian psychoanalysis, brought to prominence by his seminal text The Interpretation of Dreams, which gave rise to a new understanding of the unconscious and the meaning found within dreams. Most importantly, he proposed that, “the dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish” (Freud 45). According to Freud, the manifest content of a dream is what we are able to perceive, while the latent content is the hidden meaning behind those images, of what was once recognized by the conscious mind but has now been pushed to the unconscious and suppressed. Paprika explores these ideas through its characters, showing how their dream selves are expressions of their repressed desires, serving as wish fulfillment. The overlapping qualities of dreams and the cinematic experience are expressed aptly through the medium of animation, with the entire film ultimately serving as a wish-fulfilling dream for the audience, and perhaps for Kon himself. 

The main recurring dream sequence in the film, the aforementioned opening scene, belongs to Konakawa, in which he chases and is chased by mysterious entities (Paprika, 00:27–03:24). This series of scenes initially appears to be linked to his detective work but is ultimately revealed to be an expression of the wish he once had to become a filmmaker. It begins with a mission to look for a suspect during a crowded circus show, in which he is magically teleported into a cage and targeted by members of the audience who disturbingly all bear his face. The idea of entrapment is evident here and the duplication of his own image would be the first sign of his captor being himself. He sinks through the cushioned ground as a visual representation of him going deeper into his mind, and moves through three dramatic scenes as if playing film roles: Tarzan swinging on a vine, a man getting strangled in a train cabin, and a photographer documenting a brawl. These each act as intertextual references to the films Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), From Russia with Love (1963), and Roman Holiday (1953), emphasizing the connection between his dream and cinema. Finally, he chases his suspect into a long physics-defying corridor and witnesses a murder, helplessly letting the perpetrator get away. He ends the dream screaming and just before regaining consciousness, a voice shouts, “What about the rest of it?” Freud delineates three classes of dreams and this would fall into the third, where the dream contains repression that is not or just barely concealed. A feeling of dread causes the dream to end, whereby “what is now present as intense dread in the dream was once desire, and is now secondary to the repression” (Freud 29). The reference to “the rest of it” could be about his failure to catch the suspect, or it could be evoking a sense of dismay at seeing a film with an incomplete ending—this entire dream as a film, as we will come to see. 

In the next iteration of this dream, instead of transitioning directly into Tarzan, Konakawa ends up in an elevator with Paprika where he watches the film-like scenes play out instead (Paprika, 39:00–42:00). As the doors open at each floor, Paprika points out the corresponding film genre of each scene: adventure, suspense, romance. Therefore, in her role as his therapist, Chiba/Paprika is helping him make sense of his dream sequence as having a close relation to films and filmmaking, compared to his earlier insistence that he did not like movies and that the dream’s content was influenced by his ongoing homicide case instead. They come closer to the repressed truth when they reach the “special section” marked as Floor 17. He assumes the role of the perpetrator and turns around to see that the victim has his face, leading to his bewildered conclusion of “I killed myself?” This statement begins to make sense later in the film when Konakawa recalls his memories of making a police movie with his friend when they were seventeen (Paprika, 59:50–01:02:35). Floor 17 is thus a displacement of the age when he first repressed the desire that has since been haunting him. The two friends shared a dream of becoming filmmakers, but Konakawa gave it up and left their movie unfinished. Given that Konakawa refers to his friend as “the other me” and that this entire revelation happened in the dream world, it is possible that he and his friend refer to two sides of himself. The part of him that decided to become a detective symbolically killed the part of him that wanted to go to film school. From then on, he repressed any desires related to film, including going to the movie theaters as a spectator. His youthful wish became “forgotten” and relegated to the realm of the unconscious, hidden in his dreams as a recurring nightmare. When he finally reconciles with this old desire and its associated regret, acknowledging those feelings and no longer pushing them away, he is once again able to walk into a movie theater in real life and enjoy the art form that he loved so much. 

In the other characters, we can also see how the dream space provides wish fulfillment for repressed desires. Chiba in the real world is rigid and solemn, while Paprika in the dream world is cheeky and playful—they could not be more different while being the same person. Perhaps like the detective who gave up an artistic career and pursued a more practical path, Chiba’s way of giving in to societal expectations was to repress her lively nature, to fit the image of a female scientist who wanted to be taken seriously. Only in the dream space can she express her other side, and thus it is only when dream and reality collide that she finally reconciles the two. In a short but pivotal exchange between Chiba and Paprika, the two disagree on who should be taking the lead. While it may seem that Chiba is the primary personality who inhabits the conscious mind, and Paprika is her secondary personality in the unconscious, Paprika herself remarks, “Have you ever thought that maybe you are a part of me?” calling this hierarchical relationship into question (Paprika, 01:15:00). It is at this juncture that Chiba begins confronting the repressed part of herself, which has also suppressed her romantic interest in TOKITA Kōsaku, the inventor of the DC Mini. He is regarded as a genius but child-like, with the film also emphasizing his size in the introductory scene where he is seen physically stuck in an elevator and has to be pulled out by Chiba. Tokita can be compared with OSANAI Morio, another colleague of theirs who is ultimately revealed to be one of the villains, but whose appearance ironically conforms to the filmic stereotype of a handsome male love interest, unlike Tokita. Osanai shows obsessive interest in Chiba and his villainous side is emphasized in a scene where he lays Paprika on a table like a specimen and violates her by reaching in and pulling her apart to reveal the body of Chiba encased within. In an interview with Kon by Mark Slutsky, he explains, “this reflects [Osanai’s] selfishness of not accepting her entire personality but only picking out what he finds favourable [sic]. That’s why he doesn’t desire the Paprika-Atsuko personality as a whole, but lusts the Atsuko part, resulting in him extracting Atsuko from Paprika’s body” (Kon). Compare this to Tokita when he is stuck in his robotic dream-form, who swallows Chiba and finds the taste in need of a little spice, a little Paprika. His words serve as a metaphor for how he recognizes both sides of Chiba and how “he accepts Paprika and Atsuko as a whole,” unlike Osanai (Kon). While Osanai may seem like the more socially-acceptable romantic interest, appearance-wise, the film shows how it is Chiba and Tokita’s acceptance of each other deep down that makes them suitable partners. The film therefore ends with an announcement that hints at their marriage and at Chiba’s acceptance of both sides of herself in the real world.

The desire for another self is also embodied by the chairman of the Institute for Psychiatric Research, INUI Seijirō. While he uses a wheelchair in the real world, his dream self has grown tentacle-like tree roots to replace his legs, using them to move about freely and maliciously, chasing Paprika through his dream (Paprika, 53:45–54:45). Unlike Konakawa and Chiba who embody the liberating effects of reconciling with one’s repressed desires, Inui exemplifies the dangers of conflating dream and reality. For Inui, it is in the dream world that he has the power to obtain what he cannot have in the real world—as he says, “there are no boundaries in dreams” (Paprika, 55:25). With the DC Mini, reality has entered the realm of dreams and is able to influence it, with the opposite being true too. Inui thus steals the device to initiate the overspill of dreams into the real world, where his power will become boundless and allow him to control both the physical and metaphysical worlds. The irony lies in how he claims to be “the guardian of dreams [whose] duty is to mete out justice to terrorists like [Paprika]” (Paprika, 53:45), when he is the one taking away people’s autonomy, and Paprika is instead helping them. Wish fulfillment for him lies in his delusion of doing good for the world, when he is the real terrorist, a fact which he has evidently repressed. 

To a certain extent, there is a parallel drawn between Chiba and Inui. Under different circumstances, Chiba/Paprika could very well have become the “terrorist” that he claimed her to be, for she had easy access to the DC Mini and could have misused it if she had intentions beyond conducting treatments with private patients like Konakawa. During the dream-reality spillage when Chiba demands that Paprika follow her decisions, Paprika remarks, “To think that you can control yourself and others. You’re just like an old baldy I know” (Paprika, 01:15:10). While the emphasis is how Chiba has partitioned away a part of herself and tried to exert control over it, there is again a parallel between Chiba and Inui, the only difference being the scope at which this control operates: Chiba over the two sides of her self, Inui over the entire world. It is therefore fitting that ultimately, Chiba-Paprika, having let go of the need to control her desires, becomes the one to defeat the giant malignant form of the chairman. 

Liberation for Chiba is envisioned through rebirth, whereby a gigantic version of herself rapidly goes through the growth phases from baby to adult, rivaling the form of Inui and swallowing—therefore killing—him. It may be tempting to assign a Freudian reading to this turn of events too, particularly in relation to his interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, but it seems that Kon’s intention is instead to subvert the Freudian theory. To be sure, there is a return to childhood as a method for overcoming repression to reach the hidden truth, and the slaying of a male “father” figure as per the original tragedy of fate. The film indeed contains many visual references to the tale, with paintings of the Sphinx and Oedipus seen in an office at the institute and at the chairman’s home (Paprika, 31:45 and 54:37). The proliferation of this imagery points to its significance, with six paintings and two statues in one room at the chairman’s home, as if the tale is an obsession for him. If any, it is an ironic obsession, for Oedipus may have obtained kingly power through solving the Sphinx’s riddle, but it only contributed to his fulfillment of the prophecy where he marries his mother after killing his father, pushing him towards a tragic fate that he could not control. In this sense then, Inui is positioned not as the father figure but as Oedipus. He thinks he has “defeated the Sphinx,” or unfolded the mystery of cosmic power with the DC Mini as his key to access it. Yet for all of his obsession with power and control, he is consumed by a greed that spirals out of control, terminated only by Chiba-Paprika’s literal consumption of him and his dream spillage. The additional departure from a Freudian line of analysis would be with Paprika as female “heroine” instead of “hero,” standing in contrast to the male-centered Oedipus tale and the derived Freudian complex. In spite of a few similarities, there are no grounds for an Oedipal reading of the climactic scenario – after all, Paprika is not the one trapped by a prophetic fate and instead frees the world from the tragedy imposed by Inui. It is clear that despite invoking dreams and the Oedipus tale (both of which hold important links to Freud’s theories), Kon’s film somewhat mocks the Freudian reading by positing its own alternative relationship to the Oedipus tale. 

In a broader sense, beyond looking at the characters, the entire film could also be viewed as a wish-fulfilling dream. Returning to our initial analysis of Konakawa, the film self-reflexively shows his dream as a video that can be played and stopped, emphasizing its filmic quality with transitions like the match cut (when Paprika swings down a briefcase that turns into a guitar) and freeze frame (when the guitar-slamming scene pauses just before Konakawa spots his suspect in the crowd). Dream is thus film-like and film is dream-like, a montage of fractured images, an escape to a world away from reality. This identification of the oneiric qualities of film and vice versa has had a long history in critical theory, beginning with a dispute that arose upon the invention of cinema concerning its paradoxical qualities of simultaneously reproducing reality and creating imaginary scenes recalling “magic and dream” (Rascaroli 1). Laura Rascaroli goes on to identify various theorizations on the filmlike nature of dream and the dreamlike nature of cinema, and of particular interest is her Freudian reading of Ronald Fairbairn’s comparison of film actors and dream characters. In a dream, the dreamer does not simply spectate but is said to narcissistically take on every role to also become the director and main character of their dream scenario, whereby the sensation of being a helpless spectator is simply a defense mechanism to escape responsibility for the dream content (Rascaroli 3). This again relates to Konakawa’s dream where he plays a multitude of roles, with his face duplicated as both victim and perpetrator, corroborating the earlier conclusion that his own repressed desires were responsible for his dream content. Expanding on this film-dream relationship for the movie spectator, the very experience of watching a film recalls the act of dreaming, both presented as bright projections in a dark space. While the hypocritical dreamer takes on the role of mere dream spectator as a defense mechanism, the actual spectator in the movie theater also assumes a level of hypocrisy in their seemingly innocent and passive watching of the film (Rascaroli 3). Rascaroli elaborates by saying that the film spectator is subconsciously identifying with the characters and fulfilling their unexpressed desires through them. This argument recalls Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory, which posits a narcissistic gaze where pleasure in looking comes from identification with the role of the actor on screen, as well as a scopophilic gaze where one treats the actor as an object of pleasure (16–18). Mulvey’s theory further emphasizes the un-passive role of the spectator, where the darkness of the movie theater additionally creates a layer of voyeuristic separation to fulfill the repressed fantasy they project onto the actor, in many instances seen in the objectification of Paprika by the characters who dream of her, and thus relationally by us, the spectators. Therein is how, as a film, Paprika inevitably serves as a wish-fulfilling dream. What is significant here is how the medium of animation emphasizes this dreamlike quality further. Even when the villain is defeated and everyone returns to the “real world,” it is still not reality as we, the spectators, know it. The malleability of animation adds to the power of film to create narratives and fulfill fantasies, having no boundaries as to what one can depict, just like in a dream. It is this quality that allows for the especially blurred boundaries between dream and reality in Paprika, because we move from one un-reality to another un-reality, stuck in an almost never-ending realm of wish fulfillment. 

Paprika has this unique, immediately identifiable relationship to oneiric qualities of film precisely because of its meta-engagement with psychoanalytic theory, as discussed above, and film history. We find many examples in Konakawa’s dream sequence, from the initial circus setting that recalls The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) at 0:50, to his rapid-switching roles in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) at 2:17, From Russia with Love (1963) at 2:24, and Roman Holiday (1953) at 2:33. These intertextual references, among many others depicted throughout the dream world, shows Kon’s attempt to place his film in dialogue with classic Hollywood films. On one hand, these are significant films for Konakawa, the character who had repressed his love for films, but we might equally say that Kon’s inclusion of these specific films suggests that he holds them in high regard too as a lover and creator of cinema. Since the existence of Paprika is itself a testament to the success that Kon has achieved in his career, we should consider the significance of the backstory that he has created for Konakawa, who failed to become a filmmaker and thereafter dreamed repeatedly of his traumatic separation with his once greatest desire. Perhaps this character is the imagined version of who Kon himself might have become had he given up on animation and filmmaking. However, there is another possibility linked to our discussion on film as a wish-fulfilling dream. After all, true wish fulfillment for Konakawa would have been if he once again picked up his camera to make a film. Instead, as partial fulfillment, he becomes a film spectator in a movie theater lined with the posters of Kon’s own films. Therefore, continuing with the meta-engagement, Kon’s making of Paprika can itself serve as wish fulfillment for the in-film unfulfilled act of making a film—perhaps Konakawa is walking into a screening of Paprika and the cinematic experience begins for him when it ends for us. 

Paprika is an imagining of a future where a physical device provides people with access to the world of dreams, forming a parallel to how Freud’s theories provided access to a new way of thinking about dreams. The film demonstrates Freud’s idea of dreams as wish fulfillment through the dream manifestations of the characters, offering a message where reconciliation with one’s repressed desires can lead to a liberating satisfaction with who they truly are and who they have become in the journey of life, as is the case of Chiba and Konakawa. At the same time, it cautions against confusing dream and reality, which could only lead to a disastrous destruction of both worlds and eventually of the self, distancing itself from a fully Freudian reading. The film’s oneiric qualities indeed emphasize how wish fulfillment does not end with the characters, but that the entire film serves as a wish-fulfilling dream. Therefore, Paprika may feel like a fantastical 1-hour-30-minute-long dream, but when the credits roll, so too must we remember to return to reality. 

Works Cited 

Freud, Sigmund. Dream Psychology : Psychoanalysis for Beginners. Translated by M.D. Eder, The James A. McCann Company, 1920. 

Kon, Satoshi. Something Good #28: Satoshi Kon - the Lost Interview. Interview by Mark Slutsky, 2007, markslutsky.substack.com/p/something-good-28-satoshi-kon. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023. 

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6. 

Paprika. Directed by Satoshi Kon, Sony Pictures Classics, 2007. 

Rascaroli, Laura. “Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory.” Kinema, Nov. 2002, openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/kinema/article/view/982/1053. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023. 

A Look in the Mirror: Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness

By Nathan Hubanks, Edited by Edith Zhang

Jeffery Cohen’s Monster Theory, broken into seven different theses, asserts in part that monsters are not individuals but rather cultural bodies. In essence, one becomes a monster by becoming part of a cultural group; it is not an individual themselves that is a monster but rather the group they find themselves a part of. The phenomenon is perfectly illustrated in the manner Ruben Östlund’s Best Picture Nominee Triangle of Sadness addresses social currency, arguing that amassing a wealth of social currency will inevitably corrupt an individual.  Following Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean Kriek), a young influencer couple, the film explores the ways in which owning a significant percentile of social currency monsterizes individuals throughout the couple’s journey on a luxury cruise that leaves them stranded on an island. In the film, many characters are elevated to or dropped down from a high social wealth and respectively corrupted or purified. It coincides with Cohen’s theory that the monster is not an individual but rather a “cultural body,” here being wealthiness in social currency. Unlike the monster of great power, which actively leads to oppression, the cultural monster of social wealth causes individuals to outright ignore the wants and needs of those around them. They only seek to actively harm others if their social currency is directly at risk. Östlund depicts these social currencies through three distinct mediums: monetary currency, bodily beauty, and, on the island, vital food, exhibiting how an accumulation of a significant amount of any of these goods will monsterize an individual with the aforementioned traits that come with social wealth. In Triangle, social wealth is a cultural body that will inevitably lead to the monsterization of a character within it, illustrated by the ways the different characters garner and relinquish the monster's characteristics by entering and exiting the cultural body.  

There is, in fact, a definite monster within Triangle of Sadness. Indeed, the most compelling evidence of its existence comes from the luxury cruise captain (Woody Harrelson)’s explicit mention of one: “There are very few people that look at themselves in the mirror and say ‘The person I see is a savage monster.’ Instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do,” (1:23). Therefore, not only is it evident that a “monster” exists in the film, but the monster can be classified as a group of hypocritical “they”s that create “constructions that justify what ‘they’ do.”

This description calls for an investigation of what group of “they”s the captain's words are referring to. Such an investigation would only find that the cultural body in question is that of the socially wealthy because, in Triangle, they frequently use a “construction” of the false idea of equality to “justify what they do.” Throughout the film, multiple socially wealthy bodies triumphantly proclaim “we are all equal” whilst showcasing that they are evidently not: the monetarily wealthy Russian aristocrat tells it to an overworked service worker, and the rich in beauty runway models use it as their tagline as they showcase themselves to an average looking audience. Here, the socially wealthy have used the “construction” that ‘everybody is equal’ to “justify” their monstrous behavior; the monstrous behavior in question revealed earlier in the cruise captain's monologue: “While you’re swimming in abundance the rest of the world is drowning in misery,” (1:19). In essence, the monstrous action of the socially wealthy is their lack of any while “the rest of the world drowns.” Thus, Triangle characterizes the group as entirely indifferent to the wants and needs of others, only giving them attention if their own wealth is in danger. 

Some monsters in the film enter the cultural body of social wealth via monetary currency. Yaya in Part One can be used as the earliest example. Yaya’s monstrousness is first seen when she has dinner with Carl at the beginning of Part One. During their date, she forces him to pay for her expensive meal despite the fact he never agreed and likely makes, according to the film’s opening monologue, just ‘a third of the money’ she does. When Carl protests, Yaya intentionally throws a conniption that attracts the attention of the other guests, leaving Carl no choice. Yaya later admits she’s “so good at being manipulative” (0:22) and knew exactly what she was doing. The dining interaction serves as an example of a monetarily wealthy individual protecting their own prosperity at the expense of another–a trait of the monstrous cultural body. Notably, Carl–who is not socially wealthy in monetary currency at the moment–does not exhibit any of these monstrous traits in Part One. For the rest of Part One, he argues that she and he “should be equals” (0:17); in other words, he wants to advocate for himself without bringing her down, demonstrating care for her needs, thus not showing the traits of a monster. 

The monetarily wealthy characters continue to categorize themselves as monsters by ignoring the needs of others in Part Two. The initial instance is that of the female Russian aristocrat who encourages, and soon outright “commands” (0:52) that a service worker enters a hot tub while in uniform, despite the worker’s many explanations that doing so would breach protocol. In the end, the worker enters the hot tub and the aristocrat receives no punishment. The sequence exhibits how the aristocrat is able to completely ignore the interests of those around her to get what she wants just because of her social wealth; she is “swimming in abundance” while everyone else “drowns in misery.” In addition, the wealthy’s ignorance of others’ needs are highlighted in Yaya and Carl’s dismissal of their housekeeper’s need to clean their room. Abigail (Dolly de Leon), the housekeeper, needs to do her job and stay on schedule, but Yaya and Carl have monetary wealth and are able to effortlessly demand she works around them–they are ignoring her needs while they “swim in abundance.” In fact, many of the monetarily wealthy characters on the cruise let others drown while partaking in their social wealth: the arms dealers show no qualms about manufacturing weapons that have killed millions, the rich Russian businessman hijacks the PA system to falsely inform everybody that the ship is sinking for his own amusement, and the elder lady demands that the crew to clean the sails of the ship despite the fact the ship does not have any. Consequently, the behavior of the socially wealthy aligns with the established traits of Triangle’s monster– further evidencing that the monster is a cultural body. 

The characters in Parts Two and Three without an abundance of monetary currency, including those who previously had one, exhibit none of the traits of the monster. At the start of Part Two, the head of the service crew instructs her employees to obey the guests regardless of their request–they are a non-wealthy group recognizing the interests of others. Throughout the film, the crew is repeatedly shown to genuinely follow through with the order, best exhibited when they clean up the mess caused by excessive vomiting. In Part Three, when the ship guests are stranded on an island, those same selfish guests are stripped of their monetary currency, and thereby, their social wealth, and they soon demonstrate that when no longer in the cultural body they do not express any of its monstrous traits. The formerly rich guests, including the PA hijacking Russian businessman, learn to support one another and look out for the interests of their group rather than just themselves–demonstrated by how they shave each other, hunt together, tell stories to one another, and support struggling members through tough times. Essentially, with no forms of social wealth, them as a group have been purified. This purification evidences that the monster of social wealth is a cultural body that one enters and exits–it is not an individual themself.

Nevertheless, gaining social wealth in beauty can equally monsterize an individual. To illustrate that beauty can be a literal form of currency, this essay highlights Carl’s proclamation that he and Yaya, two models, “mostly get free stuff” and that the “cruise was paid for [them],” (0:36). Quite on the nose, the Russian businessman responds that their “looks paid for the tickets” (0:36). Thus, it is clear that in the world of Triangle, beauty can be a form of wealth with equal power to purchase as monetary currency; and consequently, equal power to corrupt, as seen when Carl notices Yaya checking out a shirtless crew member. This crew member has jeopardized Carl’s social currency of beauty by stealing the attention of his girlfriend, thus, Carl becomes no longer indifferent to the crew member's needs–minutes later, he reports him for working shirtless on the job and the crew member is fired. The events illustrate that Carl, a member of the cultural body of social wealth via beauty, exhibits the monstrous trait of harming others to protect his own abundance of beauty. On the other hand, Yaya, equally wealthy in beauty, flirts with another guest despite her relationship with Carl, thereby ignoring Carl’s need for a stable relationship so she can indulge in her currency–her attractiveness. Yaya’s act further demonstrates that the socially wealthy ignore the needs of others while they “swim in abundance.” And yet, later in the film, Carl partakes in the exact same act when he and Abigail have a barter of their social currencies. Carl trades his exceptional beauty for Abigail’s resources, choosing to sleep with her for pretzel sticks despite the fact Yaya explicitly condemned the act. Because he ignored Yaya’s need so he could swim in his own abundance of beauty, Carl marks yet another character who exhibits monstrous traits when they enter the cultural body of social wealth. 

Finally, in Part Three, Triangle depicts a new type of social wealth that arises among the members stranded on an island: food. Similarly to the other social currencies, the characters who amass great wealth in food join the corrupt cultural body and become monsters. The phenomenon is best demonstrated when Carl, a handicapped woman, and a pirate find a large bag of pretzel sticks–simultaneously gaining a significant amount of social currency. At first, they attempt to only eat a few; but having temporarily entered the cultural body of social wealth, they become monsters and eat all the pretzel sticks without considering the needs of the rest of the group. The event exhibits that the monster is a cultural body, and thus, as soon as the body is entered one gains its monstrous traits. 

While the three characters immediately lose the status of social wealth upon eating all the pretzel sticks, Abigail, the housekeeper, is consistently the most wealthy in food on the island–and serves as yet another example of a socially wealthy monster. Before Part Three, as a housekeeper, Abigail showed none of the traits of a monster–coinciding with her lack of social currency. However, upon reaching the island, Abigail is quick to discover that she is the only one who can hunt, make fires, clean, or cook–allowing her to monopolize the group’s food. In doing so, Abigail enters the cultural body of social wealth and monsterizes herself, shown in how she keeps most of the food for herself and punishes those who do not obey her command. In addition to demonstrating indifference to the needs of others, Abigail also mimics the traits of a monster by going to extreme lengths to protect her own wealth. At the end of the film, Abigail and Yaya discover that the island they are stranded on has actually been a resort the whole time. In an instant, Abigail realizes that she will lose all her social wealth if the others find out–her monopoly on food has no value outside of their community. With her status in grave danger, Abigail protects herself and attempts to murder Yaya, sneaking up behind her while breathing and drooling heavily with dreary bloodshot eyes, running makeup, and an unwavering gaze– the appearance of a real monster. Although it is left ambiguous as to whether Abigail actually follows through, her attempt alone highlights her desire to protect her social currency–solidifying that the monster is a cultural body. 

Östlund argues through his film that left in a natural state, humanity is pure in nature, depicting the characters without social wealth as compassionate for those around them. In essence, the default state of humanity is love in Triangle. Nevertheless, the film warns that any individual, no matter their race, class, or gender, will lose that love by amassing social currency, as doing so creates greed, neglect, and sometimes, malice. Because characters enter and exit the state of monsterhood throughout the film, the monster must be a cultural body. It is a group. A state, one of wealth–that creates monsters, not any genetic trait or ideology. Thus, Östlund’s film teaches us to be wary of the monstrous traits brought about by social wealth in the real world. It outlines the dangers of unchecked social currency–ignorance of others and insecurity of its loss–and pleads with the audience to, as Woody Harrelson says, “look at themselves in the mirror” (1:23) because, maybe, the person they will see “is a savage monster” (1:23).

Works Cited 

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Östlund, Ruben, director. Triangle of Sadness. NEON, 2022. 

From “Sigh Guys” to Psychos: The Postwar Crisis of Masculinity in Hollywood

By Cami Ekstrom-Sakata, Edited by Alexis Lopez and Sophia Fijman

Western icon John Wayne once protested, “Ten or fifteen years ago audiences went to pictures to see men behaving like men. Today there are too many neurotic roles” (Kelley 139). Funnily enough, Wayne would go on to play the unmistakably neurotic Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956). Throughout the 1950s, not even the manliest of men in Hollywood were able to escape the postwar crisis of masculinity and the evolving ideas of what it meant to be a man. This shift was reflected most evidently in cinema, as filmmakers recognized increasing anxieties regarding identity, sexuality, and particularly masculinity. One of the most notable ‘masculinity in crisis’ films was Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The film follows Jim Stark, played by ‘sigh guy’ James Dean, a troubled teen who moves to a new town and befriends a troubled boy, Plato (Sal Mineo), and romantically pursues a girl, Judy (Natalie Wood). The sensitive, sympathetic male archetype on screen was later warped into a disturbed, unsympathetic man. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) epitomizes this shift. The film stars Jimmy Stewart as John “Scottie” Ferguson, an ex-cop who suffers from acrophobia and vertigo after a traumatic incident in the line of duty and is hired to investigate his friend Gavin’s (Tom Helmore) unusual wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak). In post-World War II America, the popularity of the sensitive, feminized ‘sigh guys’ in Hollywood such as James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause triggered homophobia and masculine anxieties thus resulting in the construction of the disturbed, unsympathetic man as played by Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo.

Following the end of World War II, passing anxieties about masculinity grew prevalent in American society. Professor Wendy Chapman Peek’s Cherchez La Femme: The Searchers, Vertigo, and Masculinity in Post-Kinsey America' explores the larger dialogue that surfaced regarding men, sexuality, and what it means to be masculine. Factors such as growing divorce rates, the tense public debate on homosexuality, and a new interest in psychoanalysis played a part in unveiling the faults of performative masculinity (Peek 74). Outlets such as Look magazine published numerous articles, for instance, “The Decline of the American Male,” while scientific studies like Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, pushed the boundaries of what constituted ‘normal’ male sexuality, as well as unearthed a shocking record of 50% of men who engaged in homosexual activity (Kelley 138). At the time, it was uncustomary for men to become objects of such scrutiny, especially in a clinical setting. Bringing public attention to these matters amplified masculine anxieties and fears as many attempted to reinstate the old distinctions between ‘normal’ heterosexuality and ‘abnormal’ homosexuality (Peek 77). Masculine achievement was once defined with a career and family, operating as a heterosexual performance that later proved insufficient after the Kinsey report came out. As Peek stated, “having guts and a girl are no longer the steady signifiers that they once were,” and heterosexuality became something that had to be performed rather than assumed (78). In addition, the practice of manliness did not reap sufficient rewards but rather led to psychological breakdowns among conformers. In Scholar Megan N. Kelley’s Projections of Passing: Postwar Anxieties and Hollywood Films, the evolution of masculine representation in 1950s Hollywood cinema is shown to reflect society at the time. The changing attitudes on masculinity were reflected in cinema with the emergence of ‘masculinity in crisis’ films starring ‘sigh guys’ such as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean. Both on and off-screen, these men exhibited conflicting ideas about sexuality and gender. These representations of ambiguous postwar masculinity were sympathetic, and a new kind of hero emerged. They were passive, emotional, and often in opposition to a male authority figure in their films; a masculine yet sensitive hero who took on the historically feminine characteristic of being both objectified and victimized. These personas resonated with cultural anxieties regarding the inherent instability of gender identities (Kelley 147). Rather than be defined by tough guy confidence and strength, these men were defined by sensitivity and alienation. 

Despite having only starred in three feature films, James Dean garnered cultural icon status for his representations of masculinity and postwar anxieties about identity in the fifties. In Professor Kenneth Krauss’ Male Beauty: Postwar Masculinity in Theater, Film, and Physique Magazines, Dean’s persona in the film Rebel Without a Cause is identified as one of the most significant performances of all time. With his sensitive, sexually ambiguous persona, Dean’s performances critiqued traditional masculinity while also personifying a contemporary counterpart (Krauss 176). As Krauss deduced, Dean’s failure to fulfill the rules governing manhood diversified his capacity for deep emotion, violence, tenderness, and even affection for other men (176). Often playing adolescents, there was a universal lack of identity in Dean’s characters. They were immature, lonely, isolated from others, and pitted against a patriarchal figure while finding solace in a female character. Rebel Without a Cause is no exception to these narrative elements. The film reveals the complexities and contradictions behind cinema’s representation of gender (Kelley 146). Jim Stark, played by James Dean, acknowledges how an individual’s personality is a complex construct, with a particular focus on how men perform masculinity. Dean’s youthful appearance enabled him to not only dissect and explore the complexities of gender but also maintain the image as an object of desire. Reinforcing the desirability of ambiguous masculinity in the film, Judy tells Jim that she wants “a man who can be gentle and sweet…someone who doesn't run away when you want them. Like being Plato’s friend when nobody else liked him. That’s being strong” (01:26:00). Crying out against the traditional enactment of manhood, Jim is placed between the masculine extreme of Buzz and the adoration of the sensitive and ostracized Plato. He maintains affection for Buzz but honors the very constructions that pit them against each other. To be viewed as men, they must remain competitive and distant. While Plato’s love for Jim is evident, Jim’s own sexuality is left as ambiguous as his masculinity is. The film places the majority of the blame for Jim’s actions on his parents, specifically his passive father who refuses to partake in performative masculinity. The plot resonated immensely with the youth of the time, with Dean's rebellion being emasculated by the regressive notion that strict authority can be a solution for a suffering adolescent’s search for identity (Krauss 195). Jim’s crisis of masculinity fit with postwar anxieties and, as Kelley stated, “None could claim, like James Dean in the fifties, to be speaking for and in the idiom of its own generation” (147). However, the idealization of the heroic, feminized masculinity represented by actors such as Dean did not last long. 

With men already insecure about their identities after the revelations of Kinsey’s report and public debate, there was an immense public backlash against such vivid depictions of the societal emasculation of men. According to Krauss, James Dean “would prove something of a threat to male spectators” (175). Anxieties sourced from perceived social categories resulted in physical overcompensation. As Kelley explained, “The more invisible the category of identity, the more intense the cultural desire to mark the body” (148). Actors like Dean posed a threat to male spectators who were familiar with actors that were not overly gorgeous such as John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart. Wayne and Bogart were desirable to women, but men were still ‘allowed’ to like them as performers without having to admit their desirability. The undeniable beauty of ‘sigh guys’ proved too threatening for the heterosexual male audience who, as a result, questioned actors’ masculinity and circulated rumors about their sexuality. To this day, discussions of these actors’ sexualities persist. According to a heterosexual male spectator’s logic, if an actor was considered too pretty and inevitably provoked an attraction within other men, then he could not be a real man (Krauss 174). ‘Crisis of masculinity’ films were initially portrayed with sympathy and the actors were heroes of these films, rather than victims of their own toxic masculinity. But by the end of the fifties, ambiguous identities and sexual fluidity began to be perceived as a sign of pathological disturbance and personal failure, rather than something that offered new prospects. By 1960, sympathetic representations of masculine anxieties had completely vanished (Kelley 164). The new heroic masculinity was restored as tough and stoic, as seen with Andy Whitfield’s performance as Kirk Douglas in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). Until then, postwar films consisted of groundbreaking and destabilizing representations of gender with sensitive men, masculine women, and even homosexuality (Kelley 151). Signaling a new representational shift, Alfred Hitchcock released Vertigo, starring everyman Jimmy Stewart. 

Stewart had maintained a secure masculinity and heterosexuality in the public eye, with his heroic war past and his marriage and children with the beautiful model, Gloria Hatrick Mclean. Stewart became the epitome of traditional masculinity and, taking advantage of this, Hitchcock warped him to become a symbol of disturbed masculinity in Vertigo, which reflected the changing attitudes towards the ‘sigh guys.’ Hitchcock made Stewart’s character so deranged that the audience was incapable of identifying with him. It was because Stewart had such a solid reputation of heterosexuality that he, like James Dean with his looks, was able to deconstruct and explore psychologically ambiguous roles. In Vertigo, Stewart’s character, John “Scottie” Ferguson, is restored from a ‘sick’ male spectator back to a healthy masculine man. He is depicted as disturbed by his desire to mold a woman into his psychosexual feminine ideal. From the very start, Scottie is feminized by his donning of a corset, his being unemployed, and having his friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) show him a bra that she’s designing (Peek 74). Early in the film, he declares that “tomorrow he’ll be a free man,” as he no longer needs his corset (00:05:35). Ironically, it is the next day that he enters Gavin’s scheme. He is also immediately deemed a failure as the audience witnesses a police pursuit that results in his inability to save a fellow policeman’s life and his development of acrophobia, all while the suspect evades capture. Scottie also struggles to fit into some sort of financially masculine category – he is not rich enough to be a playboy, but not poor enough to be a bum (Peek 75). This too poses the question of what defines a man, which Scottie attempts to answer through chasing a woman that he has constructed with his mind. As the truth unfolds, Scottie’s self-image declines, and his masculine anxiety skyrockets as he fails to find his masculinity through the pursuit of an idealized, misrecognized woman. His lack of identity and lapse in judgment then result in a woman’s death, which he bears responsibility for. His ‘nice guy’ persona drops and Scottie becomes an unsympathetic character due to his cruelty towards women, transforming from a broken man to a psychotic murderer. Through violence against women, Scottie achieves masculine freedom and drags Madeleine up a tower, only for her to accidentally fall once they get to the top. As Peek states, the film exposes “the violence necessary to sustain that old model of masculinity” (84). It is only through Scottie’s excessive measures that his masculinity is secured, at the expense of a woman. 

While Dean’s character in Rebel Without a Cause and Stewart’s in Vertigo are characterized by several aspects of the archetypal male pursuit of masculine identity, the two ultimately symbolize two different periods of masculine representation in cinema and convey the transition from the ‘sigh guys’ to the disturbed, unsympathetic man. Though initially received favorably, society’s growing anxieties about gender obliterated any sympathetic portrayals in films of vulnerable masculinity. To reflect the pathologization of the crisis of masculinity, filmmakers like Hitchcock unsympathetically portrayed men questioning their identity as disturbed. As Kelley put it, “Dean’s Rebel became Perkins’ Psycho” (164). It is safe to say that without Jim, there would be no Scottie. The audience over-identified with heroic protagonists, so Hitchcock ensured that the audience would not be able to see themselves in his twisted male characters. The gender ambiguity Jim expressed became a sign of personal failure as shown by Scottie. Regardless of the different periods that these two characters represent, both express the downsides of the traditional models of masculinity as well as the desire and search for a definitive answer regarding identity. The fact of the matter is, this search has no end, as the answer continues to evolve. 

Works Cited 

Kelley, N. Megan. Projections of Passing: Postwar Anxieties and Hollywood Films, 1947-1960. University Press of Mississippi, 2016.

Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia. W.B. Saunders Company, 1948. 

Krauss, Kenneth. Male Beauty: Postwar Masculinity in Theater, Film, and Physique Magazines, State University of New York Press, 2014. 

Rebel Without a Cause. Dir. Nicholas Ray. Perf. James Dean, Natalie Wood. Warner Brothers, 1955.

Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. James Stewart, Kim Novak. Paramount, 1958. 

Peek, C. Wendy. "Cherchez La Femme: The Searchers, Vertigo, and Masculinity in Post-Kinsey America." Journal of American Culture, vol. 21, no. 2, 1998, pp. 73-87. 

The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Perf. John Wayne, Jeffery Hunter. Warner Brothers, 1956.

Spartacus. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier. Universal Pictures,

1960.