Revisiting Eyes Without a Face at Horror 101

I was invited on to my friend Aaron's Horror 101 pocast again to talk about one of my very favorite films. How favorite? I named myself after a character in it. I've written about it on multiple occasions, and I've reproduced the essay I wrote about it for the old Muriel awards a few years ago below the jump.

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The Grant Mystique: Dream Wife (1953)

Some years ago I complained that once World War II ended, Cary Grant was content to settle into inane sitcoms rather than the kind of sparkling entertainments he made during his first golden era (roughly 1937 to 1942). Whatever their virtues, films like The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer or Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House domesticated the Grant persona for a post war audience of war veterans moving to the new suburbs on the GI bill. I use the word "sitcom" with malice aforethought. Grant had become conservative with his choices. He would stretch his persona only very occasionally. One of his co-stars during this period described Grant as "the most nervous actor I ever worked with." It seems that the shadow of Archie Leach, the nobody, dogged Grant to the end of his days. The nadir of Grant's post-war artistic conservatism is Dream Wife (1953, directed by Sidney Sheldon). Sidney Sheldon is a name that should be familiar to audiences of a certain age. He is best known as the creator of the television sitcoms, The Patty Duke Show and I Dream of Jeannie. Certain elements of Dream Wife show up in I Dream of Jeannie, as it happens. Its conception of the Princess Tarji (Betta St. John) in particular is the template for Barbara Eden's Jeannie. Sheldon was very successful as screenwriter, as a television writer, and as a producer. He was even more successful later in his career as the writer of trashy romantic suspense novels with titles like Rage of Angels and The Other Side of Midnight. Sheldon had been successful working with Cary Grant before, having written the screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. That script won him an Oscar. Dream Wife, alas, was NOT a success for Sheldon and it nearly ended the career of its star. After the film failed to recoup its costs--a rarity for any film starring Grant during his major stardom--the actor considered retirement. He went so far as announcing his retirement in the press. He wouldn't make another film for two years. Dream Wife was a disaster for everyone involved. It's also a dreadful film.

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Hard Femme

When first we see Jen, the heroine of Coralie Fargeat's blood-soaked rape/revenge fantasy, Revenge (2017), she's the very picture of a sex kitten, done up like Sue Lyon in Lolita and sucking provocatively on a lollipop. Just a few minutes later comes a scene in which she goes down on Richard, her rich, married boyfriend. And then further scenes of her playing the cocktease to Richard's hunting buddies, who have shown up a day earlier than expected. Jen is high femme, dressed in crop tops and sexy underwear and a dress that is cut down to her belly button and gaudy star-shaped earrings. She is an avatar of the kind of girl/woman our culture expects to be raped. Our culture despises what she is: a construction of girly femininity that's designed to titillate the male gaze. If the rape in this movie had played out as it might in "real" life, the defense attorneys for her rapists might have asked, as a legal defense, if she was asking for it and a jury might have decided that, yes, she was. Women like Jen aren't allowed to say no.

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Life Among the Nerds, and Short and Sweet

I spent five days in Chicago at the World Science Fiction Convention this past weekend. I'm not much of a con-goer, even though I've had an interest in science fiction, fantasy, and horror all my life. I get bored at cons. I don't drink, so the room parties don't appeal to me, really, and while I like talking shop with writers and artists, I find that I can do that with less awkwardness on the internet these days. From all this, you might assume that I had a bad time, but I didn't. I had the opportunity to meet some people in meatspace with whom I've had long internet correspondences, and meeting people in meatspace is a rare pleasure. You get more of a person's overall presence when you share air and space and elevators with them.

There was also the vendor's area, a cavernous hall at this convention located somewhere beneath the convention center (a significant portion of Chicago appears to be underground, by the way, and I half expected to run into the mutants from Beneath the Planet of the Apes at any time). Various booksellers tormented me with collectible books. I've never seen so many $300 and up books in one place in my life. I'm poor right now, but if I had money to spend, I would have spent it. Probably for the best.

I had a good time, too, at the ceremony where the Hugo Awards were presented. I was a Hugo voter this year, and I was pleased to see that my own tastes aren't totally out of step with the rest of the world. Of the four main literary awards, I picked three of the winners, with my second place pick in the novella category taking the fourth. I was especially happy with the diversity of the winners. Genre fiction has well and truly broken the rule of straight cis white dudes. At the risk of indulging in identity politics, the fact that there's a trans woman with a literary Hugo award right now makes me squee a little inside. The fact that this level of diversity was acknowledged in the opening remarks by the event's emcee, writer John Scalzi, was flabbergasting in itself. I'm much more predisposed to loving science fiction fans this week than I was last.

Anyway...

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Ungendered*: Fassbinder's A Year of 13 Moons. A Dialogue

This was originally published a couple of years ago on another blog. I still haven't gotten around to seeing the film again.

So, I finally got a round to watching Fassbinder's A Year of 13 Moons. It was recommended to me on the IMDB's Classics Board earlier this spring after I was outed as a transsexual. Well, not recommended, per se, but I was asked what I thought of it. Here, many months later, is the conversation I've been having about it. The asterisk in the title of this post? To remind me to give apologies to Julia Serano.

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My initial, knee-jerk reaction:

I'm still sorting out my reaction to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons (1978). It's been a while since I was more conflicted over a movie. On the one hand, the cineaste in me recognizes a keen cinematic intelligence behind the film. But another part of me, the transsexual who is completely fed up with the way transsexuals are depicted by cisgender media, is completely appalled by it. I mean, DEEPLY offended by it. She wants to take the cineaste part of my mind, tie her to a chair and make her watch Jess Franco movies A Clockwork Orange-style as penance for even suggesting that this is a worthwhile movie. Well, you can see my dilemma. I'm sure I'll have a LOT more to say about this when I actually sit down to write an in-depth analysis. I'm going to watch it again, first. But for now, I have this to say. First: while it's striking from both a cinematic and symbolic standpoint, this film's tour of a meat packing plant is probably what most pissed me off. The suggestion is that our heroine--if you can call her that, rather than "our object of pity"--is a piece of meat, not a human being, mutilated by her desires and ultimately disposable. That the film ends the way that it does reinforces this idea. Frankly, this sucks on so many levels that it has an event horizon. Second: I can see this film's influence on European cinema's depictions of transsexualism ever since (which is NOT a good thing). Three: when I was sorting through critical reactions to the film, I stumbled across Ed Gonzalez's review of the film for Slant. I rarely agree with Gonzalez under the best of times, but he's never written a review that actually offended me before: from his occasional tendency to put the words "she" and "her" in quotation marks, to his egregious use of the phrase "she-male" (which is more or less equivalent to the "N" word when you're talking about trans people), to his condescending sympathy with our object of pity, this is the work of someone who has bought in to the kinds false truths Fassbinder arrives at by setting up a false set of conditions under which to examine his characters.

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