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.