Williams, Linda. “Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography.” Representations. 27 (1989): 37-65.

Yet elsewhere in his writing Bazin has celebrated documentary realism in fictional contexts, and he is honest enough here to acknowledge “a critical contradiction,” which he notes “without resolving.” 38

Our complicity as viewers of the act is different from what it would be if we were actually in the room with the “object”; it is connected to the fact that we are watching (whether with fascination, pleasure, horror, or dread) an act that seems to be really taking place but with which we have no spatial or temporal connection ourselves. 38

-proximity / distance = greater distance because we know there’s a frame, greater proximity because it’s often presented in an unmediated way. Might want to look at Wood’s article on art vs. exploitation.

[about Snuff]: Nevertheless, added signals of documentary evidence—the director’s speech to and “look” at the camera, the indication of film “run out,” the shocking transition from sex scene to violence—all operated to convince some viewers that if what they had seen before was fake violence belonging to the genre of horror, what they were seeing now was real (hard-core) violence belonging to the genre of pornography. 41

. . . especially in the context of the hard-core genre’s perpetual quest for documentary evidence of involuntary pleasure in female bodies that do not give as ready evidence of this pleasure as male bodies. 41

. . . perverse pleasure of witnessing the involuntary spasm of death. 42

Snuff probably became the “case” that it did because it did not, like the horror film, simply displace the sexual desires of characters onto violent acts; rather, its mix of soft-core sex and sexual desires of characters onto violent acts; rather, its mix of soft-core sex and violence was more messy, interrupting expectations for pleasurable sex with violence and vice versa. Snuff, both the film and the idea, exists at the contradictory intersection of the spectacle of pleasure (generally assumed to be real in hardcore pornography) and pain (generally assumed to be faked in horror films). 42

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

Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” 1983. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 15-34.

Like the female spectator, the female protagonist often fails to look, to return the gaze of the male who desires her. In the classical narrative cinema, to see is to desire. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the “good girl” heroines of the silent screen were often figuratively, or even literally, blind. Blindness in this context signifies a perfect absence of desire, allowing the look of the male protagonist to regard the woman at the requisite safe distance necessary to the voyeur’s pleasure. 15

But even when the heroine is not literally blind, the failure and frustration of her vision can be the most important mark of her sexual purity. 16

The bold, smouldering dark eyes of the silent screen vamp offer an obvious example of a powerful female look. But the dubious moral status of such heroines, and the fact that they must be punished in the end, undermine the legitimacy and authentic subjectivity of this look, frequently turning it into a mere parody of the male look. More instructive are those moments when the “good girl” heroines are granted the power of the look, whether in the woman’s film, as discussed by Mary Ann Doane, or in the horror film as discussed below. In both cases, as Doane suggests, “the woman’s exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimization.” The woman’s gaze is punished, in other words, by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy. 17

I hope to reveal not only the process of punishment but a surprising (and at times subversive) affinity between monster and woman, in the sense in which her look at the monster recognizes their similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing. 18

First, Nina’s look at the vampire fails to maintain the distance between observer and observed so essential to the “pleasure” of the voyeur. For where the (male) voyeur’s properly distanced look safely masters the potential threat of the (female) body it views, the woman’s look of horror paralyzes her in such a way that distance is overcome; the monster or the freak’s own spectacular appearance holds her originally active, curious look in a trancelike passivity that allows him to master her through her look. 18

Thus her look [in The Phantom of the Opera, 1925] occurs after the film audience has had its own chance to see him—they are framed in a two-shot that has him standing slightly behind her; only when she turns does she see his masked face. 18

The audience’s belated adoption of the woman’s point of view undermines the usual audience identification and sympathy with the look of the cinematic character. But it may also permit a different form of identification and sympathy to take place, not between the audience and the character who looks, but / between the two objects of the cinematic spectacle who encounter one another in this look—the woman and the monster. 19-20

Clearly the monster’s power is one of sexual difference from the normal male. In this difference he is remarkably like the woman in the eyes of the traumatized male: a biological freak with impossible and threatening appetites that suggest a frightening potency precisely where the normal male would perceive a lack. 20

It may very well be, then, that the power and potency of the monster body in many classic horror films . . . should not be interpreted as an eruption of the normally repressed animal sexuality of the civilized male (the monster as double for the male viewer and characters in the film), but as the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality (the monster as double for the women). 20

The male look expresses conventional fear at that which differs from itself. The female look—/a look given preeminent position in the horror film—shares the male of the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. For she too has been constituted as an exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of the male. There is not that much difference between an object of desire and an object of horror as far as the male look is concerned. 20-21

The strange sympathy and affinity that often develops between the monster and the girl may thus be less an expression of sexual desire (as in King Kong, Beauty and the Beast) and more a flash of sympathetic identification. 21

Laura Mulvey has shown that the male look at the woman in the cinema involves two forms of mastery over the threat of castration posed by her “lack” of a penis: a sadistic voyeurism which punishes or endangers the woman through the agency of an active and powerful male character; and fetishistic overvaluation, which masters the threat of castration by investing the woman’s body with an excess of aesthetic perfection. 22

According to Lurie, the real trauma for the young boy is not that the mother is castrated but that she isn’t: she is obviously not mutilated the way he would be if his penis were taken from him. The notion of the woman as a castrated version of the male is, according to Lurie, a comforting, wishful fantasy intended to combat the child’s imagined dread of what his mother’s very real power could do to him. This protective fantasy is aimed at convincing himself that “women are what men would be if they had no penises—bereft of sexuality, helpless, incapable.” 23

For, looked at from the woman’s perspective, the monster is not so much lacking as he is powerful in a different way. The vampire film offers a clear example of the threat this different form of sexuality represents to the male. The vampiric act of sucking blood, sapping the life fluid of a victim so that the victim in turn becomes a vampire, is similar to the female role of milking the sperm of the male during intercourse. What the vampire seems to represent then is a sexual power whose threat lies in its difference from a phallic “norm.” 23

The vampire’s insatiable need for blood seems a particularly apt analogue for what must seem to the man to be an insatiable sexual appetite—yet another threat to his potency. So there is a sense in which the woman’s look at the monster is more than simply a punishment for looking or a narcissistic fascination with the distortion of her own image in the mirror that patriarchy holds up to her; it is also a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to a vulnerable male power. 23

Helen’s [in Peeping Tom, 1960] refusal of narcissism also turns out to be a refusal of the only way patriarchal cinema has of representing woman’s desire. If she has the power to recognize and refuse the mirror-trap, it is because she is portrayed as ignorant of sexual desire altogether. She is like the one virginal babysitter who survives the attacks of the monster in Halloween (1978), or like Lila, Marion Crane’s “good girl” sister in Psycho, who survives Norman Bates’s final attack, or even like Helen’s blind mother in Peeping Tom who immediately “sees”—in the tradition of the blind seer—the turbulence in Mark’s soul. In other words, in most horror films the tradition of the power of the woman “pure of heart” is still going strong: the woman’s power to resist the monster is directly proportional to her absence of sexual desire. Clarity of vision, it would seem, can exist only in absence. 27

Psycho has been the model for the new form of the “psycho at large” horror films that began to emerge in the early 1960s and which now dominate the market. There is no more convincing proof of the influence of this model / than de Palma’s flagrant imitation of it in Dressed to Kill. 27-28

We have seen that in the classic horror film the woman’s sexually charged look at the monster encounters a horror version of her own body. The monster is thus one of many mirrors held up to her by her patriarchy. But, as I have tried to suggest, she also encounters in this mirror at least the possibility of a power located in her very difference from the male. 31

Ebert points out that in these films we rarely see the psychopathic murderer whose point of view the audience nevertheless adopts. This “non-specific male killing force” thus displaces what was once the subjective point of view of the female victim onto an audience that is now asked to view the body of the woman victim as the only visible monster in the film. In other words, in these films the recognition and affinity between woman and monster of the classic horror film gives way to pure identity: she is the monster, her mutilated body is the only visible horror. 31

In this light, Bobbie’s vengeance on Kate [in Dressed to Kill, 1980] can be viewed not as the act of a jealous woman eliminating her rival, but as acting out the male fantasy that woman is castrated, mutilated, “what men would be if they had no penises—bereft of sexuality, helpless, incapable.” 32

The horror film may be a rare example of a genre that permits the expression of women’s sexual potency and desire and that associates this desire with the autonomous act of looking, but it does so / in these more recent examples only to punish her for this very act, only to demonstrate how monstrous female desire can be. 32-33