Debra Winger

[bcholmes]

I was so interested in Debra Winger's role in Rachel Getting Married that I started re-watching some other Winger films. Of course, Searching for Debra Winger, a great documentary I picked up a few years ago. But I also ordered a copy of Black Widow (you can get some DVDs for really cheap these days!).

I saw Black Widow, probably back in 1988. I think that there's a lot about the film that I wasn't really able to get, then. But I've thought of it often because it's been referenced in a number of books I've read since then. Mostly while doing readings for film classes in the early-to-mid nineties.

As an aside, I just went through my book shelf trying to find the essays that I remembered reading. I originally thought they were in one of my Constance Penley books (I'm never able to think of Penley's name without imaging a k.d. lang singing out "Constance Penley... has always been." My brain makes weird associations). But, no, it was Judith Mayne's The Woman at the Keyhole and, especially, Valerie Traub's essay, "The Ambiguities of 'Lesbian' Viewing Pleasure: The (Dis)articluation of Black Widow" in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity.

Traub's essay is quite good -- possibly my favourite essay in the field of feminist film analysis -- in which she argues that lesbian subtext is both necessary to make sense of the film, but also most strongly demarcated by the absence of representation.

Such refusals to articulate are constitutive of the film as a whole. Black Widow is constructed around two mirroring incoherencies -- Reni's desire for Alex and Alex's desire for Reni -- and it is only within these gaps that the representation of anything "lesbian" can emerge. Moments of textual excess -- moments not required by the logic of the plot, but instead functioning to upset the coherency of the narrative -- instantiate "lesbian" desire in the film.

A lot of her essay reflects on two schools of thought in feminist film criticism: Mulvey's idea of the gaze and the central assumption that the gaze is male, and a more Lacanian reading of the text. There's something interesting, she argues, about what the text is mostly not saying (and occasionally broadcasting incoherently) and what the spectator is seeing and filling in herself.

It is not a matter, therefore, of arguing that Reni or Alex "is" "a" "lesbian" or Black Widow is a "lesbian film," but rather that both black widow(s) and Black Widow pose the problem of "lesbian" representation within a dominantly heterosexist and patriarchal system. Black Widow articulates "lesbian" desire, rendering it visible, only to reencode it as invisible, inarticulate.

A lot of this, I find fascinating to re-read, given my initial thought about how Winger's role in Rachel Getting Married is defined by absence. Edit: It could also be said that the essence of Searching for Debra Winger is to understand the meaning behind Winger's removal of herself from Hollywood.

So, now having watched the film again for the first time in twenty years, I just loved it. Firstly, I'm really interested in how strong the female characters are. I can't think of any recent film that has two strong female characters like that.

There's also something really remarkable about the queer subtext. At some level, it half-feels like it exists for a bit of girl-on-girl titillation. But, like both Mayne and Traub discuss, there does seem to be something more going on, in a way that seems to subliminally beg our attention as we try to make sense of the subtext. I guess it makes me think about the art of homo-erotic subtext and how uninteresting some representations of queerness have become now that queerness has moved from subtext to text.

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you for reminding me of this film. I saw it when it first came out and remember loving it; I've just added it to my Netflix queue to give it another look. And now I'll watch it with this post in mind, which should make it even more interesting.

[rbowspryte.livejournal.com]

I like her best as Wonder girl! Just kidding.

Only slightly related tonight we are wathing Desert Hearts.