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May 2001, Week 2

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Subject:
From:
Jans WAGER <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 14 May 2001 17:43:25 -0600
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Regarding Shadow of the Vampire

As a Weimar film scholar, I certainly anticipated enjoying the film, as many who have commented here obviously managed to do.  And I was rewarded with a certain amount of visual and narrative pleasure--with shots, scenes, and characters that paralleled Nosferatu as well as a fun and fantastical take on the making of the film.  (While we, as scholars and critics, have to think about how movies change history, can we really ask movies not to reflect some version of some history?  I don't think so.)  But the film puts all of us in a difficult position, and as a gender scholar and female spectator, I have to comment specifically on that.

We are asked to buy into a narrative that hates its female characters so much that it asks us to prefer the death of a script girl to any man's demise, and to enjoy the complete sacrifice of a woman for the sake of...art (?) (a strictly male domain?)!  Her uselessness and objectification is made manifest by her drug use--not that she's alone in that; her monomania--again, she's not the only monomaniac; and her complete physical objectification--we need to see her breasts in the overdose scene.  I really hate to pay too high price a price for my pleasures.  In the case of Shadow, being asked to despise  all women and love men who, whether vampires or filmmakers, are more worthwhile than any woman made the price much too high; I didn't like the film.  The femmes fatales of film noir represent a much better deal.

As an aside, I suspect the reason this bothers me so much is my next book (Dames in the Driver's Seat, projected title), deals with the same issues in retro-noir (films made currently but set in the classic noir period).  It seems all 'retro' films feel free to express a misogyny that otherwise remains less overt.  So maybe that's the silver lining?  At least it's obvious??




Jans B. Wager, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Literature
Utah Valley State College
800 W. University Parkway
Orem, UT  84058-5999
(801) 222-8340
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