Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” 1991. Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 140-158.

This essay explores the notion that there may be some value in thinking about the form, function, and system of seemingly gratuitous excesses in these three genres [Porn, Horror, and Tear-Jerkers]. For if, as it seems, sex, violence, and emotion are fundamental elements of the sensational effects of these three types of films, the designation “gratuitous” is itself gratuitous. 141

Altman argues that Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, who locate the Classical Hollywood style in the linear, progressive form of the Hollywood narrative, cannot accommodate “melodramatic” attributes like spectacle, episodic presentation, or dependence on coincidence except as limited exceptions, or “play,” within the dominant linear causality of the classical. 141

…thus makes a strong case for the need to recognize the possibility that excess may itself be organized as a system. 141

Pornography is the lowest in cultural esteem, gross-out horror is next to lowest. Melodrama, however, refers to a much broader category of films and a much larger system of excess. It would not be unreasonable, in fact, to consider all three of these genres under the extended rubric of melodrama. 142

I shall limit my focus here, however, to a narrower sense of melodrama, leaving the broader category of the sensational to encompass the three genres I wish to consider. Thus, partly for purposes of contrast with pornography, the melodrama I will consider here will consist of the form that has most interested feminist critics—that of “the woman’s film,” or “weepie.” 142

I am expanding Clover’s notion of low body genres to include the sensation of overwhelming pathos in the “weepie.” The body spectacle is featured most sensationally in pornography’s portrayal of orgasm, in horror’s portrayal of violence and terror, and in melodrama’s portrayal of weeping. 142

Visually, each of these ecstatic excesses could be said to share a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm—of the body “beside itself” in the grips of sexual pleasure, fear and terror, and overpowering sadness. Aurally, excess is marked by recourse not to the coded articulations of language but to inarticulate cries—of pleasure in porn, screams of fear in horror, sobs of anguish in melodrama. 143

Looking, and listening, to these bodily ecstasies, we can also notice something else that these genres seem to share: though quite differently gendered with respect to their targeted audiences—with pornography aimed, presumably, at active men and melodramatic weepies aimed, presumably, at passive women, and with contemporary gross-out horror aimed at adolescents careening wildly between the two masculine and feminine poles—in each of these genres the bodies of women figured on the screen have functioned traditionally as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain. 143

There are, of course, other film genres that both portray and affect the sensational body—e.g., thrillers, musicals, comedies. I suggest, however, that the film genres with especially low cultural status—which have seemed to exist as excesses to the system of even the popular genres—are not simply those that sensationally display bodies on the screen and register effects in the bodies of spectators. Rather, what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen, along with the fact that the body displayed is female. 143

Whether this mimicry is exact—e.g., whether the spectator at the porn film actually experiences orgasm, whether the spectator at the horror film actually shudders in fear, whether the spectator of the melodrama actually dissolves in tears—the success of these genres seems a self-evident matter of measuring bodily response. 144

We feel manipulated by these texts, an impression that the very colloquialisms “tearjerker” and “fearjerker” express—and to which we could add pornography’s even cruder sense as texts to which some people might be inclined to “jerk off.” 144

Mary Ann Doane, for example, writing about the most genteel of these jerkers—the maternal melodrama—equates the violence of this emotion to a kind of “textual rape” of the targeted female viewer, who is “feminized through pathos.” 144

Robin Morgan’s famous slogan “Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice” is well known. 144

The aptly named Twitchell thus describes a kind of erection of the hair founded in the conflicting desires of “fight and flight.” 144

“Torture the women!” was the famous advice given by Alfred Hitchcock. 144

Many feminists have pointed to the victimization of the woman performers of pornography who must actually do the acts depicted in the film as well as to the victimization of characters within the films. Pornography, in this view, is fundamentally sadistic. In weepies, one the other hand, feminists have pointed to the spectacles of intense suffering and loss as masochistic. 148

While feminists have often pointed to the women victims in horror films who suffer simulated torture and mutilation as victims of sadism, more recent feminist work has suggested that the horror film may present an interesting, and perhaps instructive, case of oscillation between masochistic and sadistic poles. This argument, advanced by Clover, has suggested that pleasure, for a masculine-identified viewer, oscillates between identifying with the initial passive powerlessness of the abject and terrorized girl-victim of horror and her later, active empowerment. 148

Pornography’s appeal to its presumed male viewers would be characterized as sadistic, horror films’ appeal to the emerging sexual identities of its (frequently adolescent) spectators would be sado-masochistic, and women’s films’ appeal to presumed female viewers would be masochistic. 149

The subgenre of sadomasochistic pornography, with its suspension of pleasure over the course of prolonged sessions of dramatic suffering, offers a particularly intense, almost parodic, enactment of the classical melodramatic scenario of the passive and innocent female victim suffering at the hands of a leering villain. 149

It worth noting as well that nonsadomasochistic pornography has historically been one of the few types of popular film that has not punished women for actively pursuing their sexual pleasure. 150

The point is certainly not to admire the “sexual freedom” of this new fluidity and oscillation—the new femininity of men who hug and the new masculinity of women who leer—as if it represented any ultimate defeat of phallic power. Rather, the more useful lesson might be to see what this new fluidity and oscillation permits in the construction of feminine viewing pleasures once thought not to exist at all. (It is instructive, for example, that women characters in the new bisexual pornography are shown verbally articulating their visual pleasure as they watch men perform sex with men.) 152

For fantasies are not, as is sometimes thought, wish-fulfilling linear narratives of mastery and control leading to closure and the attainment of desire. They are marked, rather, by the prolongation of desire and by the lack of fixed position with respect to the objects and events fantasized. 153

Each of the three body genres I have been describing could be seen to correspond in important ways to one of these original fantasies. Pornography, for example, is the genre that has seemed to endlessly repeat the fantasies of primal seduction, of meeting the other, seducing or being seduced by the other in an ideal “pornotopia” where, as Steven Marcus has noted, it is always bedtime. Horror is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat the trauma of castration, as if to “explain,” by repetitious mastery, the original problem of sexual difference. And melodramatic weepie is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat our melancholic sense of the loss of origin, the impossible hope of returning to an earlier state that is perhaps most fundamentally represented by the body of the mother. 154

Italian critic Franco Moretti has argued, for example, that literature that makes us cry operates via a special manipulation of temporality: what triggers our crying is not just the sadness or suffering of the character in the story but a very precise moment when characters in the story catch up with and realize what the audience already knows. We cry, Moretti argues, not just because the characters do, but at the precise moment when desire is finally recognized as futile. The release of tension produces tears—which become a kind of homage to a happiness that is kissed goodbye. Pathos is thus a surrender to reality, but it is a surrender that pays homage to the ideal that tried to wage war on it. 155

However, one thing already seems clear: these “gross” body genres, which may seem so violent and inimical to women, cannot be dismissed as evidence of a monolithic and unchanging misogyny, as either pure sadism for male viewers or as masochism for females. 156

Genres thrive, after all, on the persistence of the problems they address; but genres thrive also in their ability to recast the nature of these problems. 156