Cultures of Fetishism (13 page)

and voice—achieve the two opposing but reciprocal psychological functions that are characteristic of the fetishism strategy:—concealment and revelation.
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In proposing these reciprocal functions for the body of a woman in films,

I am also proposing a method of film interpretation derived from clinical experience with the fetishism strategy. Fetishistic transactions are desperate, fixated, ritualized, repetitive. They preoccupy a patient’s life and seek to occupy the total space of the psychoanalytic therapy. Similarly fetishistic transactions in film are those that occupy the center or foreground of the visual field and thereby preoccupy the conscious attention of the audience to the detriment of some other less conscious or unconscious theme. Whether in life, in an analysis, or in a film, these efforts to dominate and preoccupy the conscious field of experience are designed to push the trauma or traumatic elements to the background or margins of experience. Thus whenever images of a woman’s body are a hyperconscious, dominant focus of a film, we must suspect the fetishism strategy at work, rendering other aspects of the film unconscious. Nevertheless, the body of the actress also serves an opposing or reciprocal function, which is to undermine foreclosure and disavowal by exposing an unconscious theme that has eluded the many persons engaged in the manufacture of the film.
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Not every film calls for interpretations informed by the foreground-back- ground strategy of fetishism. Moreover, even when a film is clearly structured along fetishistic lines, that is, even when there is a conspicuously vivid, preoccupying foreground, the dynamic reciprocities between foreground and marginal texts are not easily discerned. They must be interpreted. Therefore, I am not suggesting that psychoanalytic interpretations of films should eliminate the central or foreground text in order to arrive at some
true
unconscious marginal or background text. The crucial factor that must be discerned and interpreted is the discordance or discrepancy between a foreground statement and those elements that have been cast into the margins or background.

I begin with an image that once was, and still is, dramatically present in the popular imagination: the bodily presence of Marilyn Monroe—a bodily presence that both exposed and screened out the catastrophic traumas of her life both in and out of films. Norma Jean Mortensen alias Norma Jeane Baker alias Norma Jeane Dougherty alias Marilyn Monroe was then (and is still now) an American icon. Marilyn Monroe was the fabricated cultural commodity.
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But where is Norma Jeane? The virtual annihilation of the abandoned child who was Norma Jeane is the pre-condition and prerequisite for the manufacturing of Marilyn Monroe, the sex goddess.
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Even after we know and acknowledge what happened to Norma Jeane, we go on worshipping the goddess; we go on worshipping this glittering image of womanly womanliness to repress any knowledge of the range and com- plexity of actual female sexuality. We shall be seeing how Monroe’s films exploit the glittering white light of her body and how that fetishistic device serves to obscure the deceptions and lies of the American social order.

However, the sad, hurt eyes and trembling baby voice of the lost Norma Jeane defeat the exploiters. The eyes and the voice transmit the ways in which the body was exploited. The lies are exposed. All we have to do is bring them out of the shadows and there they will be—right before our eyes.
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To illustrate, I will outline the plots of the two films that generally serve as the markers for the official beginning and official ending of Monroe’s stardom:
Niagara
(January 1953), in which she was given her first major role, and
The Misfits
(February 1961), her last completed film. As in
The Misfits
, the central or foreground plot of
Niagara
unfolds against a background theme of redemption through a reunion with Nature.
Niagara
opens with a visual display of Niagara Falls and the voice of a narrator contrasting the torments of the mind with the peaceful certainties of Nature. As the narrator describes the universal longing to find peace in the embrace of Nature, Niagara Falls fade into the background and the human story begins.

In
Niagara
, Monroe was cast as Rose Loomis, the dark woman, the wicked seductress, whose corrupt and unruly sexuality provides a stark visual contrast to the innocent boundlessness of Niagara Falls. Rose Loomis repre- sents the untrustworthy, tricky, manipulative, seductive aspect of the hysterical female. Her bodily presence is employed as the corrupt counterimage that will reinforce and enhance the background theme of redemption through a return to Nature.

Rose leads her latest lover, Ted, to murder her husband, George, played by Joseph Cotton, whom she manipulates into alternate fits of sexual ecstasy and insane jealousy in order to lure him to the scene of his murder—the Niagara Falls. When Rose explains to Ted, “There’s always a way to get around George,” the viewer knows she is referring to unmentionable sexual acts. Rose gets around George but, within minutes afterwards, George reverts to his paranoid suspiciousness as he watches Rose getting all dolled up “to go shopping.” He discovers the plot to murder him, murders Ted instead, disguises himself in Ted’s clothing, and then stalks and lures Rose to the Niagara Tower, where he strangles her.

Rose’s corpse stretched out, back-arched in the generic
opisthotonic
posture against the striped shadows of a corridor within the Niagara Tower mimics the hysterical bodies illustrated in the Charcot painting. The sensational image of her
opisthotonic
corpse marks the midpoint of the film.

The second half illustrates George’s redemption and cure, which he achieves first through a good woman and then through the natural goodness of Niagara Falls. The good woman, Polly Cutler, played by Jean Peters, is the loyal wife, the nurse-mother, who is properly indignant when her newlywed husband, Ray, invites her to contort her trim body into a seductive pose á la Rose Loomis. By rescuing Polly from drowning and allowing his own body to sink into the swirling waters of Niagara Falls, George’s tormented soul finds peace in the embrace of Nature.

Aside from a few minor scenes in a souvenir shop and a hospital room, the entire film takes place in three settings, the Niagara Tower, the motel over- looking Niagara Falls, and the motor launch that carries Cotton and Peters

into the currents leading to the falls. George’s emotional switch from the corrupt, amoral, seductive Rose to the honest, supermoral, proper, asexual Polly is crucial to the plot. Rose is the hysterical, childlike woman whose unruly sexuality threatens to undermine the sanctity of marriage. Polly is the motherly redeemer whose kind nursing, empathic listening, and compassionate attunement to George’s emotional plight initiate the process of psychological redemption that will ultimately lead George back to the body of the primal mother.

Monroe would never again undertake a role that entailed the blatantly corrupt, blatantly seductive actions of Rose Loomis. Nevertheless, while
Niagara
was in the public eye, she went along with the publicity that required her to engage in and cooperate with crude exploitations of her body. She went everywhere clad in the skin-tight, body-revealing dresses appropri- ate to a seductive manipulative woman. Joe DiMaggio was outraged and refused to accompany her to these highly publicized spectacles. The Hollywood gossip columnists described her as a vulgar exhibitionist. Joan Crawford shook her finger at the shameless Monroe for conduct unbecom- ing an actress and a lady.
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In her last film,
The Misfits
, written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston, Monroe is cast in the mythic form that had became her trademark— sexual availability filtered through a glow of innocence. Still an exploitation, but a more subtle and deceptive one. Huston invented and developed the mythic Monroe image when he directed her in her first serious role as Angela in
The Asphalt Jungle
. His direction and Hal Rosson’s camera work filtered Angela’s voluptuous bosom, thighs, and buttocks through the soft focus of Monroe’s glow of innocence, as if to state that Angela was a victim of the Jungle and not one of its predators. Despite his honorable artistic intentions, Huston did not hesitate to exploit her body in that early film or in
The Misfits
. Miller had worked for three years, transposing his short story
The Misfits
into a screenplay as a “valentine for Marilyn.”
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By the time the film went into production, Monroe had had two miscarriages, her marriage to Miller was over, her affair with Yves Montand was petering out Miller’s valentine love had so frequently alternated with anger that his ambivalence had tilted over into a palpable, barely disguised hatred, which Monroe must have sensed and responded to with a certain mistrust of valentines. Despite her wariness of Miller, she still trusted Huston. Besides, she was desperate to do another movie and therefore desperate to go ahead with the filming—no matter what. The film was a disaster. Monroe was blamed for everything that went wrong. All her emotional problems were exaggerated to cover up Huston’s gambling debts and the huge squandering of money on the production.
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Monroe was always late and always demanded infinite retakes. Clark Gable, one of her costars, complained, “I damned near went nuts waiting for her to show.” When he died shortly after the film was finished, gossip had it that the

strain of working with Marilyn had contributed to his untimely death.
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In
The Misfits
, Monroe is cast as Rosalyn Tabor, a childlike vagabond. The opening scenes portray a Rosalyn who is always memorizing her grown-up

lines and looking to find herself in a mirror. Rosalyn is the shyly seductive, uneducated but intuitively knowing, sensitively sweet, malleable little girl with a woman’s body, whose glowing innocence captivates Guido (Eli Wallach), Gay (Clark Gable), and Perce (Montgomery Clift), the three misfit cowboys, who are meant to symbolize all the physically powerful but socially castrated Men of America. Miller’s cliches inhabit and pervade the movie and assign to Monroe the most vivid expressions of his customary bland, less-than-thoughtful liberalism.

Rosalyn is the nurse-redeemer who will attempt a cure and rescue of the cowboys by restoring them to the bosom of Nature. As Rosalyn conceives of her mission of redemption, she must relieve the cowboys of their hard-edged, upright (phallic?) defenses by inspiring their softer, feminine, caring natures. However, Rosalyn is an unbelievable redeemer. Miller has given her the men- tality and lines of a four-year-old. Unlike an actual four-year-old, Rosalyn is depicted as an adult imitating a child who is imitating an adult.
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Rosalyn the redeemer is indistinguishable from the cowboys’ broken bodies and souls, the trampled lettuce, hunted rabbits and the lassoed wild mustangs she is striving to save and protect. As a child might do, Rosalyn hugs a tree and watches her garden grow and plays house first with Guido and then with Gay. To win the rodeo money for Perce, Rosalyn plays paddle ping-pong in a skin-tight, low cut, polka dot dress. Her buttocks and bosom shake convul- sively as Perce and the crowd of men at the bar frantically place their bets, as they count out how many times she can hit the ball.

For another pivotal scene, Huston and Miller collaborated on acting direc- tions. The scene is meant to represent Rosalyn’s quest for wholeness. “She flies into a warm, longing solo dance among the weeds, and coming to a great tree she halts and then embraces it, pressing her face against its trunk.”
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A few days later, Rosalyn and the three cowboys set out for the desert, where the men will be trying to recover their good old days by capturing wild mustangs and selling them to manufacturers of dog food. As they are riding toward the desert, Rosalyn is thinking of the journey as a return to Nature, while the men are thinking only of proving their manhood. When Rosalyn realizes that she has been duped and that, furthermore, she is helpless to stop the cowboys from their ghastly mission, she turns away from the men and strides off into the desert in a fit of rebellion. When she is some forty feet away from the cowboy trio, Rosalyn swerves about and enacts what Miller’s screenplay demands of her: “she screams, her body writhing bending over as though to catapult her hatred. . . .‘You liars. All of you.’ Clenching her fists she screams toward their faces, ‘Liars!’ ”
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“Man, Big Man. You’re only living when you can watch something die. Kill everything, that’s all you want.”
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The conclusion of the film, which comes soon after Rosalyn’s hysterical fit, is arbitrary. In order for things to fit together in proper Hollywood style, mis- fit Rosalyn had to be matched up with one of the misfit cowboys. As Rosalyn and Gay (Huston and Miller had first considered Perce, and then Guido) ride off in the pick-up truck, she speaks of creating a baby who will be brave from

the beginning, and Gay points to a distant star of hope. As Miller’s script reads, Rosalyn and Gay have found their true selves in their newfound capa- city for intimacy. However, by the time that last scene was finally filmed, Monroe and Gable were emotionally depleted and the emotional space Rosalyn and Gay inhabit is dead and emptied of all desire.

Monroe was not oblivious to her exploitation. She particularly resented “having to throw a fit,” instead of being given words of reason. “I guess they thought I was too dumb to explain anything, so I have a fit—a screaming, crazy fit. I mean
nuts
. And to think Arthur Miller did this to me. He was sup- posed to be writing this for me . . . and Huston treats me like an idiot.”
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The fits, contortions, quivers, and gyrations assigned to Monroe’s body, the four-year-old level of the supposedly intuitively intelligent dialogue written just for her by Arthur Miller—in other words, the
way
her body and mind were exploited by the director and writer and cameraman—functioned as unconscious counterforces to the conscious messages of the film The fetishistic uses of Monroe’s body undermine and sabotage the film’s con- scious messages of humanism, naturalism, and the transcendence of Nature. The celebration of a salvation through a return to Nature is exposed as a flimsy lie—a cover-up for the traumas of every misfit, male or female, who has been deprived of the Word.