Harmony H. Wu: Harmony H. Wu is pursuing her doctorate in the Division of Critical Studies in University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. Her dissertation is on international horror hybridity and the intersections of genre, gender, sexuality and national identity.
Rhona Berenstein begins her study on gender and classic horror films made between 1931-1936 with a close analysis of a familiar face: Fay Wray, in a production still from KING KONG, staring off frame, eyes wide at the unseen terror beyond the borders of the image. ATTACK OF THE LEADING LADIES: GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND SPECTATORSHIP IN CLASSIC HORROR CINEMA is in many ways a book-length interrogation of this single, iconic image—the image of female fear that is shorthand for a whole genre. Consistent with recent trends in cinema studies, however, Berenstein is not interested in simply raising and then condemning such apparently retrograde visions of gender. Rather, like Carol J. Clover in her important work on male spectatorship and the slasher film, MEN, WOMEN AND CHAINSAWS, Berenstein seeks to unravel traditional assumptions about the gendered nature of the genre. Instead of the division of gender roles that has males as monsters, viewers and heroes, and females as screen victims, Berenstein asserts that in both viewing practices and narrative trajectories, classic horror offers a more blurred vision of sexual “labor.” Like Clover, Berenstein extends NARRATIVE gender-crossing into the realm of SPECTATORIAL gender-bending, which she suggests often results in a homosexual viewing position, one that is in fact encouraged by textual and promotional discourses in and around the films. The success of this project lies in Berenstein's methodological approach, which combines sound historical research with perceptive close textual analyses and a solid use of sometimes heady theory.
The introduction lays out the basic premises of the book: the classic horror genre offers a site where the “usual” binaries, particularly those of gender and sexuality, are subverted and blurred. While a horror film's monster's attack on screen women is usually understood in terms of displaced heterosexual violence, Berenstein points out that using such categories is problematic, since classic horror monsters are almost never “human.” Human categories of male/female, heterosexual/homosexual are ALREADY troubled by the monster's status as not-quite-human. The monster thus opens up a site of potential subversion of such heterosexual and patriarchal binaries. Yet it is not only the monster that questions normative patriarchal heterosexuality in these films: Berenstein shows, through a discussion of MAD LOVE and DRACULA, how the so-called heroes of horror are effeminized through their inability to neutralize the monsters and how the heroine-victims' gendered and sexed status, in their alliance WITH the monsters in their shared position of powerlessness in patriarchy, is also under question. The horror film then, is a site of multiple gender and sexual ambiguities.
The most theoretically informed chapter, titled “Spectatorship-as-Drag,” is concerned with exploring how the textual ambiguities of gender and sex spin out in the field of viewing practices. Though careful never to equate screen gender-play with viewer adoption of such play, Berenstein still contends that “it is unrealistic to assume that horror's investment in a multiplicity of roles does not resonate with spectators” (38). In a survey of major feminist works on film spectatorship from the heterosexually informed Laura Mulvey to more recent conceptions that foreground notions of spectatorial “bisexuality” (Linda Williams, Mary Anne Doane, Tania Modleski), Bernstein exposes their reliance on conventional patriarchal binaries of male/female, hetero-/homosexual. The trap represented here is that “despite good intentions…they confirm heterosexual desire” (49). Berenstein attempts to correct this theoretical pitfall by skillfully weaving together spectator theory with queer theory's contributions to notions of gender performance, with particular emphasis on the work of Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler. Classic horror films, she persuasively suggests, encourage a mode of viewing she calls “spectatorship-as-drag,” wherein audiences are invited to take on and discard different performative identities through identification with AND rejection of the various roles—conventional and transgressive—performed on screen.
The chapter “Horror for Sale,” uses historical research into the urban reception of horror films, primarily through censorship documents, studio marketing strategies and contemporaneous film reviews, to support the theoretical claims of the previous chapter. The intriguing discovery is that, contrary to popular opinion, studios were overtly concerned with courting a female audience for classic horror films: romantic tales were explicitly woven into the horror narrative. This desire to appeal to as many potential viewers as possible resulted in the sometimes comically schizophrenic advertisements: a poster for DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE reads, “Paramount brings out the THRILLER OF ALL THRILLERS!-plus a great love story!...Mystery and Horror! Heart-warming romance and intense drama! Everything! Its appeal is unlimited” (69). Berenstein also explores the centrality of female performances of fear in marketing gimmicks, such as the studio-planted woman in the audience whose staged screams of terror were meant to incite and excite similar affect in the other viewers. With its conceptual basis in chapter , “Horror for Sale” represents a convincing marriage of theory and historiographic research.
Subsequent chapters explore in depth specific inflections of the horror cycle—the hypnosis film, mad doctor movies and the jungle-horror film. Berenstein persuasively teases out the ways that her previous discussions of gender blending and performances play out in specific films. The woman's alignment with the monster and monstrosity is given a more subversive twist in the hypnosis film, where the woman's gaze is invested with power and desire. Mad doctor movies explicitly play with gender norms with their portrayals of homosocial bonds between men; these films also reveal how performances of female fear are used to mask “frightening” specters of male masochis and eroticism. The jungle-horror film illustrates the degree to which white women are used both to allay and traffic fears of the other: as the interstitial link between “jungle” otherness and the white world, white woman is the site of white male anxiety over whiteness generally, and white masculinity specifically.
This division of the book into more theoretical approaches and discussions of classic horror films themselves makes ATTACK OF THE LEADING LADIES a paradigmatic case for the appeal of scholarly film studies across traditional boundaries of academia and movie fandom. While Berenstein's survey and extension of the major theoretical works of film spectatorship is both useful and provocative to cultural and film studies scholars, the final three chapters are firmly situated in the film texts themselves, making them accessible to the less theoretically-inclined horror film buff. At the same time, Berenstein's skillful application of the theoretical groundwork to the specific films anchors the abstractions of theory in a way that is helpful to the film scholar and highlights the limitations of other theorists who seem to have never actually gone to the movies. For the scholar of the gay male and lesbian's place in cinematic history, Berenstein provides a historical link missing in so many discussions of the “queer” spectator—her research into the marketing and reception of the film as well as the films' modes of narrative address do great work in historically and concretely situating a gay and particularly a lesbian spectator. For both horror film fans and scholars interested in gender and sexuality, spectatorship and genre, ATTACK OF THE LEADING LADIES is a significant work and an essential read.
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