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September 1998, Week 4

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Wed, 23 Sep 1998 11:48:24 -0400
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 i think ken is very shrewd   [aside: ken, i think you're very shrewd]   in
arguing against
lacanian glosses on robin wood's 1966 observations about the significance
of  miriam's eye-glasses in SOAT . . . which is not to say that the
lacanian reading is wrong, merely that wood could not have made this
argument in 1966 . . .
 
. . . what pleases me most about ken's argument is that it liberated me
from a sense that i didn't even know that i had but that nevertheless
inhibited my thinking about the film for manyu years . . . this was  a
sense that i somehow had to make peace with wood's claim even though it
seemed not at all congruent with with my understanding of the film itself
or of the whole  hitchcock oeuvre . . .
 
. . . freed from the burden of this presupposition  i now find myself
inclined to see the glasses as a version of the glasses worn by other
hitchcock women, most signally by midge in VERTIGO . . . midge's glasses, i
take it, work quite differently than as an "obvious sexual symbol" and in
fact seem designed to mark the woman as UN-sexualized, a marking that is
most obvious in the shot comparing midge and carlotta . . . in that famous
shot it is midge's eye-glasses that are the most blatant signifier of her
absolute inability to achieve the feminine sexuality [or sexualized
femininity] of which carlotta is the icon . . .
 
. . .  what distinguishes miriam from midge is that miriam is not willing
to do what the unsexualized woman is always supposed to do in the gender
economy of hitchcock's world: either to be subservient to men, or [as midge
does in her last appearance] to walk off into the darkness at the end of
the hall after [and as  sign of] recognizing her total inability to deal
with "real" [i.e. men's] problems . . .  instead miriam insists on fighting
for her "rights" and this makes her too dangerous to live . . .
 
 . . . of course the lacanian angle fits [even if anachronistically] in
that the eye-glasses [for both midge and miriam] signify the gaze, the
woman's readiness to look back at the man and thus to challenge him with
her own agendas as opposed to looking away or casting her eyes down, thus
making her always the object of his agendas . . . and in hitchcock's world
when the woman appropriates the power of pursuing her own agendas either by
looking back [miriam, midge] or in other ways [alice white, melanie
daniels] she has to be destroyed . . .
 
. . . by this reading miriam's glasses are not the signifier of female
sexuality, they are the opposite, the signifier of the danger of the  not
[or no longer] attractive woman who nevertheless puruses her own goals
rather than submitting to those of men . . . of course the sexualized
female is also dangerous [madeleine, marion, usw.] but that is another and
already very well known hitchcockian story
 
 . . . in sum, my thanks to ken for puncturing that baloon and allowing
these pieces to fall into place
 
mike frank
 
----
Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama.

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