The Sunday Times (London)
December 6, 1992, Sunday
Sapphic designs
Stephen Amidon
Vampires and Violets Lesbians in the Cinema by Andrea Weiss, Cape Pounds 12.99 184pp.
Of all the minorities treated badly by Hollywood, it is hard to think of a group given a rougher ride than lesbians. Despite the blatant racism heaped upon blacks over the years, they can at least point to Sidney Poitier and Spike Lee; likewise, American Indians can take some comfort in Dances With Wolves. Even gay men have recently been given a fraction of their due. But lesbians remain a shadowy, derided presence in cinema. As Andrea Weiss points out in her study of the subject, Vampires and Violets, the reason for this goes far beyond simple prejudice it has to do with the very nature of the medium itself. When it comes to depicting the female body, the movie screen has always been for men’s eyes only.
Lesbianism made its first, tentative appearance on the screen in the 1920s, with a series of female boarding-school films. The most notable of these, The Wild Party, was, in fact, directed by an overt lesbian, Dorothy Arzner, whose sexuality allowed her to work in the boys’ club atmosphere of early Hollywood. Even so, her film lacked any clear lesbian character or message. As Weiss points out, the film is a standard melodrama undergirded by a ”subtextual lesbian dynamic” of longing gazes and practice kisses. It is one of the first coded ”Sapphilms”, from which lesbian moviegoers could abstract a hidden subplot.With the advent of a very different code in the 1930s, the Hays Code regulating morality in the cinema, this banishment of lesbian desire became more pronounced. This is not to say that it was altogether absent aspects of Garbo’s performance in Queen Christina, or Dietrich’s in Morocco, provided much-needed sustenance for hungry lesbian eyes. And while the stars may have had their own agendas in transmitting these signals, their male directors and studio bosses were more than happy to let them be sent. As Weiss points out: ”Hollywood marketed the suggestion of lesbianism, not because it intentionally sought to address lesbian audiences, but because it sought to address male voyeuristic interest.” A whiff of lesbianism was fine, just as long as it was cleared away by the cleansing breeze of a heterosexual resolution.
Weiss argues that this was a trend that has continued in mainstream cinema right up to the present, a pattern of innuendo and banishment that has consistently marginalised, even erased, lesbian desire as a viable element of a film’s plot. Whether she was a grotesque like Sister George, or a more sympathetic Martha (Shirley Maclaine in The Children’s Hour), the lesbian was allowed to strut and fret her hour on the stage only to be evicted, usually to the coffin, by the demands of ”normal” love. Even in films with otherwise sterling liberal pedigrees, such as Silkwood, the audience is left in no doubt that lesbian love plays an untuned second fiddle.
Nowhere is this process more radical than in the spate of vampire movies that came with the loosening of censorship codes in the late 1960s. Efforts such as Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers not only marginalised lesbian love, they cast a shadow of evil over it, with virginal young women threatened by the vagina dentata of the female vampire. Not surprisingly, the good and the straight would inevitably win out, although only after much bare-breasted grappling and bloody penetration.
Weiss’s study is often insightful and well researched, but there is a nagging sense that it raises more questions than it answers. A more detailed discussion of the mechanics and pathology of male titillation is certainly called for: just why is it men get off on watching lesbian sex? For every tasteful depiction there are hundreds of female sex scenes in pornographic films. Maddeningly, Weiss seems to take for granted that the reader knows this fact and the psychology behind it.
The author also engages in some bizarre film interpretation, nowhere more so than in her viewing of Woody Allen’s Manhattan. She claims that the scene where Isaac (Allen) jokes that he tried to run his ex-wife’s female lover over with a car, reinforces ”the belief that lesbians somehow deserve violence because implicit in their choice of women is a rejection of men, and that rejection warrants punishment”. Weiss further claims that the film is framed in such a way as to make the male audience identify with Isaac’s alleged violence. Well, this male viewer actually gets the joke Isaac is a schlemiel, his desperate action a sign of impotence rather than power, another bell in his fool’s cap. Men may laugh, but they’re laughing at him.
The book’s other shortcoming and this is no fault of Weiss’s is its later chapters, which detail contemporary efforts to create an accurate screen grammar of lesbian desire. With the exception of Desert Hearts, Working Girls and the wonderful documentary Before Stonewall (which Weiss researched), the examples she presents make a problematical list. One has a woman repeating a phrase of French feminist theory over and over, another presents grainy home movies from the director’s youth, over-dubbed with ironic commentary. Weiss acknowledges the inadequacies of this sort of experimentation, claiming that lesbian filmmakers are having difficulty coming up with a visual grammar that won’t be co-opted by the male viewer (one director refuses to show her films to men). Garbo whispering from inside the closet continues to make better cinema than her granddaughters’ shouting from without. Could it be that once the code is no longer necessary, the message might be even harder to send?
