Mabel
Longhetti’s desires were simple: she
wanted to singlehandedly karate-chop Brecht’s fourth wall.
Living in
a post-Vietnam era in-between Nixon and Ford, the soft sell of the “sexual
revolution” having replaced political gains for American women (the Equal
Rights Amendment failed to pass in 1982) before their (re)immersion in the workforce,
Mabel, the female protagonist of A Woman
Under the Influence (1974) had few outlets for expressing herself and
finding solidarity with other women as a LA suburban housewife.
As the postwar boom ended and the national
recession fueled the Western adoption of neoliberal public policy modeled after
laissez-faire capitalism and classical liberalism, the shift from the collectivism
practice of Keynesian-managed capitalism to a focus on individual (market) choice
was mirrored in Mabel’s private isolation (the hallmark of American exceptionalism).
John
Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence,
alongside Ingmar Bergman’s Persona,
Robert Altman’s Images, and Richard
Benner’s Outrageous, makes a muse out
of female psychosis: Mabel’s “hystericized”
body is the cinematic corps-sujet of
the 20th century, as a sustained projection of repressed trauma and
the volatile libido of supercapitalism’s dawn.
The Western
regulation of female hysteria was first codified in the 19th century
by Jean-Martin Charcot, director of the Parisian clinic La Salpêtrière: Charcot classified Grand Hystérie as a four-part neurological degeneration triggered
by physical shock, from paralysis to epileptic fits.
According
to Christina Wald, the discourse and treatment of hysteria in European medicine
occurred alongside “theatricalized hysteria” by solo women performers (Ida Brun
in Denmark, Henriette Hendel-Schütz in Germany) in 18th century Europe,
at such performance spaces as Chat Noir
and Folies Bergère in Paris, the histrionics
(eye rolling, fainting, hysterical laughter) of actresses such as Sarah
Bernhardt appearing as “semiotically indistinguishable” from hysteria.
20th
century feminists who theorized the performative malady of hysteria included Luce
Irigaray and Julia Kristeva: Irigaray sought
to feminize hysteria, positing hysteric body language as a “genuine female
alternative to phallogentrism,” and Kristeva warned against a championing of the
mute, insane hysteric as a feminist icon outside the signifying order. Wald cites Grand Hystérie as a concrete illustration of Judith Butler’s gender
performativity: not as deliberate
staging of consciousness but a stylization of the body, acting within a rigid
regulatory frame that produces the appearance of substance, not “being” itself. [1] For Wald, the revolutionary power of “hysteria”
is not in its subverting of logos, however, but in the self-awareness of the
woman “acting out” (or working through, in psychoanalytic terms) the hysteric’s
social “roles”: female castrato, ventriloquized
body, or victim of trauma or abuse. [2]
The
staging of Mabel’s psychic disintegration is domestic, as with Charlotte Gilman
and Bertha Antoinetta Mason in the 19th century novel, and the
prototypical “madwoman in the attic” described by Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar: the authorial “double” haunting
19th century women writers’ texts as a failed escapee from “male
houses and male texts.” [3] H.D., Mina Loy, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf,
and Anne Sexton are among female authors of the 20th century who
wrote about or succumbed to extremes of depression or jouissance. Confinement to the domestic sphere even for a
writer is inimical to development, especially when one is limited to an
expressive repertoire that doesn’t include political consciousness, social
critique, or rage: Shoshana Felman
defines madness as the “impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning
has deprived of the very means of protest or self-affirmation.” [4]
What is so
unique about the character of Mabel (Gina Rolands), her relationship to her
husband Nick (Peter Falk), her children, and herself, is that she is not that
of one of society’s castaways: (fallen female
or unassimilable “other”): the mother of
three children ensconced in middle-class domesticity (Nick is a construction
foreman), Mabel appears to be a happy-go-lucky woman devoted to her family
while the outside world comes apart at the seams. Yet, upon scrutiny, Mabel’s personality is not
marked by mature, socially pro-adaptive behavior, but by childlike naïvete,
irrational thinking, and sexual impulsivity:
signs of her stunted growth and lack of autonomous possession of her mind
and body.
Her cheery
façade belies an unstable faultline: early
in the movie, after Nick calls to say he has to break a date with Mabel due to
a busted water pipe at work, Mabel, feeling driftless, heads to a local bar,
chats up a stranger, and ends up taking him home and sleeping with him. Nick’s conversation with one of his crew
members after he calls home establishes Mabel’s subsequent pathologization: “Mabel is a delicate, sensitive woman,” Nick
says in response to his co-worker calling her “crazy.” Nick goes on to “verify” Mabel’s sanity
through her domestic labor: “Mabel’s not
crazy; so don’t say she’s crazy. This woman cooks, sews, makes the bed, washes
the bathroom. What the hell is crazy about that?”
Mabel’s
emotional lability as a creature of circumstance, seeking constant stimulation
by her immediate environment, takes the form of excessive displays of affection
toward Nick and the kids, following by periods of withdrawal or neglect, and
always accompanied by a psychological state of inner questioning (she
frequently talks out loud to herself) and attempts to turn the script of
bourgeois ideology into Artaudian theater.
At a spaghetti dinner with Nick’s co-workers at their house, Mabel implores
one of the guests to sing opera until Nick finally explodes; later, during her
hosting of a children’s party she encourages the children to dance naked and
feign “dying” for Mr. Jensen, an unamused neighbor, to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
In these scenes,
Mabel attempts to overcome her own learned passivity, a Herculean task marked
by the uncertain role of women in American culture between the 50s’ cult of domesticity,
the Kennedy era, the return of women to the workplace in the 80s, and the
concurrent movements of feminism’s first and second waves, by using her body as
a communicative organ in replacement of logocentric speech (which Mabel never
acquired, unlike Ophelia, whose articulations were reduced to asemic babble by
Hamlet’s gaslighting).
When Nick
expresses concern over her behavior Mabel turns docile, offering up her own
powers of self-representation: “I’ll be
whoever you want me to be.” (Nick’s
responds by encouraging her to “be herself.”)
Unable to construct a stable subjectivity within a domestic context, and
shielded from the rigors and self-realizations found in employment and public
life, her speech (bursts of commentary and overtures of emotion) remains a transitive
repertoire of gesture and incident divested from discursive logic (“I have five
points, Nick,” she manages before being taken to the psychiatric hospital near the
film’s end). Nick, while integrated into
the labor force, is also inarticulate and prone to erratic behavior, yet his
speech is marked more by cliché and his actions, by attempts to institute domestic
normalacy, such as his beach outing with the kids while Mabel is hospitalized (a
painfully awkward scene evoking the forced brio of post-WWII “planned leisure”
activities).
During Mabel’s
off-camera six-month hospitalization we learn that she underwent electroshock
treatments, an aggressive anesthetizing treatment in accord with the historic
European treatment of hysteria: according
to Elaine Showalter, the reformed Victorian asylum (which in 1871 admitted
1,182 female patients to 1,000 male), like other Victorian institutions
(penitentiary, workhouse, factory) was part of the paternalist tradition in
which psychological domination and strict ordering of activities guaranteed deference
from the female patients, whose minds were already atrophied by a lack of
educative, cultural, and political stimulation. [5]
Mabel’s glossolaliac
cries mark her language as “other” to the Eurocentric masculine order: “Through reintegrating the mind and body into
a single ontological, psychosomatic verity, hysteria undermines the masculine
Cartesian project that provided a justification for the subjugation of women.
Rather than utilizing the symbolic, verbal, masculine language of reason,
hysteria instead expresses itself via the pre-symbolic chora of the body to
articulate female experience.” [6] Hysteria
provides a “convenient” diagnosis for women whose rejection of or mastery of symbolic language destabilizes
the binaries of the logos: a threat
requiring the empiricist “treatment” of medicalization, from psychological manipulation
to tranquillizers, shock treatments, and hysterectomies: “Physicians . . . were less inclined to
accept the veracity of purely mental phenomena owing to the difficulty of their
measurement, quantification and authentication . . . this created a culture in
which women suffering from mental anxiety were forced to invent or
disproportionately emphasize physical symptoms.” [7]
Historically,
according to Showalter, the medical myth that the female nervous and
reproductive systems made women more “vulnerable to derangement” than men was also
used as justification for barring women from the professional class, denying
them political rights, and keeping them under the control of the
husband/father/state. [8]
Dora, like
Mabel, was hystericized by a male authority, rather than hysterical herself, the
authors of The Hysterical Male point
out, calling Dora “the first of the existentialists” for reporting her
condition not as unleashed emotion, but “nausea and disgust” for being
surrounded by and forced to caricature repressed hysterical men. [9]
Mabel’s desire
to live and perform from beyond programmatic scripts echoes Cassavetes’ own
directorial aim. According to film
critic Inge Fossen, the accumulative power of Cassavetes’ work stems from his jettisoning
of plot-based film structures, and the elevation of his performers to “co-auteurs.” The improvisational “feel” of the movie is a
result both of extreme directorial care (what Cassavetes calls the transition
from enthusiasm to craftsmanship) and creative licensure of the actors as a
form of “actor-centered subjective realism.” [10]
Perception
is a physical affliction in cinema, according to Steven Shavio: an “intensification and disarticulation of
bodily sensation” rather than a process of naïve (ideological or Imaginary)
beliefs or ideas. The cinematic body as
scapegoat can be seen in the films of male directors such as George Romero,
Jerry Lewis, and David Cronenberg, and Fassbinder’s film Querelle, based off Jean Genet’s novel Querelle de Brest: Shavio
describes Genet’s Lysiane (the sole female character) as designating the “outer
limit” of the cinematic field of male homoerotic fantasy, a masculine project
of “inventing the woman” by expelling actual women and appropriating their
images. Querelle de Brest narrates the process by which Lysiane is “frozen
out of the action,” culminating in a film-still of her anguished, isolated
figure as a “negative reference point”:
femininity must first be projected upon Lysiane in order for it to be
drained from her. [11]
The viewer
is also implicated: projecting her own
fragmentation onto the cinematic body, a lost sense of wholeness is reconstituted
cathartically through witnessing the decomposition and punitive “treatment” of the
hysterical subject. [12] Sexual difference, according to Grosz, is a
double-bind: a framework that must
disappear in the codings that constitute sexual identity, sexual difference is
the horizon that is implied but cannot “appear” except as the very possibility
of an entity, identity, subject, or “other.”
The transgressive body of the other (of “difference”) can easily be
controlled in cinema through what Laura Mulvey defines as the fetishistic gaze. [13]
For Marina
Abramović, performative power is located on
the occupied site of her body, in real time, rather than “in” linear narratives
or iterable texts. In the frontispiece
of a March 2011 retrospective of her career (featuring fifty sound pieces,
video works, installations, photographs, and collaborative performances) at
MOMA, entitled “The Artist Is Present,” Abramović sat in immobile silence for
736 hours and 30 minutes in the museum’s atrium, while spectators took turns
sitting opposite her. Jeff Dupre’s 2012
documentary includes extensive footage of the performance: as if facing, a stilled Narcissistic pool, the
sitters who filed into to sit before Abramović experienced a variety of
reactions, from hostility to tenderness, while Abramović’s face remained an
open field, accepting their projections with only the occasional betrayal of
emotion or exhaustion.
The 2011 3D
documentary film Pina, a
retrospective of German contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch’s career, also
provided an international audience for the work of an artist whose medium (Tanztheater,
or “dance theater”) explodes traditional representations. Staged in and around Wuppertal, Germany in
indoor and outdoor spaces, and ranging from violent explorations of the
“natural” in gender relations (“The Rite of Spring”) to the colorful spectacle
of Kontakthof (German for “contact”
and “courtyard”) featuring dancers ranging in age from teens to dancers over 65,
Bausch’s work explores the motivation for movement rather than the form (individual,
dyadic, collective) that movement takes.
Bausch’s
work and that of other experimental or post-avant female artists (Chris Kraus,
Cindy Sherman, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen) raise the question of whether
“relational aesthetics” (Nicholas Bourriand’s term to define art of the
technological age that de-privatizes the encounter between a collectivized
beholder and the artwork, and positions the artist as peripheral to the experience)
is a de-subjectivization of aesthetic practice of little practical use to female
artists of the late 20th and 21st century, whose public
self-representations of cogito, body, and self are historically
unprecedented. The question for any
female artist of how to write on, about, or perform a non-essentialized “body”
remains usefully problematic: “Is the
body a source of subversive practice, a potentially emancipatory vehicle . . .
or a source of repression and suppressed narrative? What regulatory actions of the body politic
impinge on the deployment of the autobiographical body? How to experiments enable her to evade
“narrative fixture” in “official scripts of the universal subject”?” asks
Sidonie Smith. [14]
In Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (a pastiche of
lyric and epic poetry, parable, translation, correspondence, catechism) the
body is presented not as a commodity offered for consumption but “stubbornly
unreadable,” according to Elisabeth A. Frost:
the autonomy and materialization of the “body politic” is figured in the
exilic text through the fate of individual female bodies such as Yu Guan Soon,
a Korean woman executed under colonial domination for refusing to speak (the
sacrificial body’s political agency representing the “ultimate form of
signification”). [15]
Whether
collective, such as Oulipo poetics or the Tahrir Monologues (a women-directed
theater performance centered in Cairo that recreates revolutionary moments in
Egypt) or individual, works that theatricalize the Cold War binary between
politics and aesthetics present models of multiracial, multinational,
multiethnic, and polysexual representation.
This is the brutal freedom of improvisational art, whose epigonal subjects
reject the compulsion to perform scripts of domestic bondage or neoliberal
market commodification: instead opting
to participate in the economic and cultural market volitionally, celebrating somatic
(or choreographed) movement, natural (or recited) speech, and the pleasures of
self-fashioning that threaten, by their very excess (or restraint), the miasmic
données of screen, stage, and
law.
[10] Inge
Fossen, “A Woman Under the Influence,” Senses
of Cinema, March 13, 2012. Web.
