Cultures of Fetishism (14 page)

As Monroe played out the repetitions of the type to which she had been assigned, the stereotype that became the mirror where she sought to find herself, her life was robbed of the diversity and vitality that allows an actress to grow into a believable womanly presence. And she was smart enough to know how she was being exploited. After the filming of
The Misfits
, she said, “All my life I’ve played Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe. I’ve tried to do a little better, and find myself doing an imitation of myself.”
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Monroe’s creative growth was stunted and betrayed by the stereotypes of wom- anhood she eventually succumbed to in her desperation to find herself. Monroe composed a lyric, “Help, Help, Help, I feel life coming closer . . . When all I want is to die.”
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Julie Suks, another would-be poet, described Monroe as a child playing statues, pleading, “Find me. Find me. Complete this form.”
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But no one ever did find her. Not the several therapists and analysts who treated her, nor the psychiatrists who ministered her a jumbled assortment of medications that were bound to exacerbate the severe depressions that assailed her.

Norma Jeane, the abandoned child, had discovered a self-cure for the depressions, and it was the only cure that seemed to work—at least for brief periods of time. Indeed, it was Norma Jeane’s self-cure that had collaborated in the manufacture of the sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe.

Norma Jeane’s body knew how to make love to the camera and the camera loved making love to her. While she was never entirely certain of “who or what she was,” the camera assured her that her body was beautiful and sexually alluring. Later on, the perplexities of “who or what she was” still spoke in Monroe’s mournful eyes, imparting to her sexuality the childlike innocence that became her trademark. When all else failed to confirm her

identity, Monroe could rely on her body and the powerful effects she could achieve through an exhibition of her body. Finally, though she had longed to find herself in a different kind of mirror, Monroe only felt alive and real when she was the sexual object of a powerful and prominent man.
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She was desperately “feminine,” treating her body as if it were a container on which she or her retinue of hair-dressers, costume designers, voice and body coaches, directors must inscribe the designs of femininity. And as any female impersonator, male or female, will tell you, these bodily inscriptions are designed to produce a caricature of femininity.

And, if these female, female impersonators, like Marilyn Monroe, are our designated sex goddesses, we must also wonder if they are not the glaring white lies that distract us from the potentially traumatic knowledge of the actualities of female sexuality. While not exactly the “dark continent” that haunted Freud’s studies of femininity, to most men and women, the vitalities of actual female sexuality are still thought of as enigmatic, ambiguous, unpre- dictable, difficult to pin down, and therefore dangerous. The justification for these attributions is that the female’s sexuality is internally located and poly- morphous, not centered on any single erotic zone. While these justifications do have some basis in actual anatomy, it is not the whole story by any means. It is as if any knowledge of female sexuality must be continually re-repressed and disavowed, as if we have some stake in thinking of it as an unmapped continent.

Marilyn Monroe, the manufactured sex goddess, is an obvious and vivid example of the fetishism strategy that is symptomatic of the corruptions in our social institutions of medicine, art, psychology, politics, and religion. What is being concealed but also revealed in the exploitations of Marilyn Momroe is a latent text on the cultures of fetishism that collaborate in a perpetuation of the traumas of a Norma Jeane. Moreover, our worship of the sex goddess is tan- tamount to a disavowal and repression of the knowledge of female sexuality. As I pondered the puzzles embodied in the exploitations of the body of Marilyn Monroe, my mind was automatically carried to
Thelma and Louise
.

What do we make of
Thelma and Louise
, a film that consciously focuses on the sexual exploitations suffered by women, a film in which the social corruptions are being exposed and revealed? What is being disavowed in such a film? In
Thelma and Louise
the disavowal is to be found in the discordance between the traumas of sexual abuse and violence suffered by the heroines and the subtext of their flight from the corrupt city toward a rebirth and magical reunion with Nature.
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Caution filmgoer: Always watch out for the return to the embrace of Mother Nature—a device of the fetishism strategy designed to deny the traumas implicitly and explicitly displayed in the film. What had been repressed and disavowed in
Niagara
and
The Misfits
returns in
Thelma and Louise
, where once again the promise of a mystical reunion with Nature attempts to bleach out the blood of trauma.

It would constitute a symptomatic narrowing vision to focus exclusively on the manifest violence in the film and thereby overlook the themes of intimacy

and emotional transformation. There is a discordance, however, between the overall violence of the first half of the film and the journey toward a mystical reunion with Nature in the second half. This discordance should alert us to the fetishistic strategy. In order to animate the full text of the film and bring it into full focus, it is essential to discern and interpret the discordance. To attempt to mask a trauma of loss and despair by counterposing an experience of grandiosity and elation is a device of the fetishism strategy, a device that enhances and perpetuates the repression of trauma—which then will always return, perhaps the next time in a more devastating form.

With the trauma still repressed and unconscious, the enigma of female desire was as confounding in the 1990s as it was in Charcot’s 1887 clinic. Now, in the twenty-first century, as we look back at
Thelma and Louise
, let us think about the two heroines by first returning for a brief moment to Charcot’s clinic. Hysterics were said to be impressionable, malleable, coquettish, seductive, lazy—the epitome of femininity. However, the hysteric is also irascible and violent, she recriminates with bitterness, gives herself over to scenes, tears, and extravagance, makes a show of her passions. She is untruthful, unladylike, willful, troublemaking, rebellious—almost virile in her masculinity.
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And perhaps, although the doctors seldom thought to mention it, those lit- tle trinkets and ribbons that the hysterics often stole were used as fetishes when they masturbated. The hysterics were female fetishists. Unheard of and unthinkable in those days, even though four out of the ten cases of fetishism analyzed by Charcot were females. The dominant idea then, which upheld the gender mythology of the day, was that males were fetishists and females were hysterics.

Thelma and Louise
opens with two women imprisoned by a social order that exploits, demeans, and abuses women. Louise (Susan Sarandon) who was once raped by a man she hardly knew, is no longer an impressionable innocent. She has found a self-protective solution in a conformist rebellion of passive-aggression and social isolation. In the early scenes, Thelma (Geena Davis) is a guillible, malleable innocent who submits to the bullying of her hus- band. However, all this changes after Louise gives up her passive-aggressive defense and responds directly and aggressively to Thelma’s rape with a gun- shot that kills the rapist. At that point, the gullibility and malleability, the docility and suggestibility of Thelma commences the predictable tilt into will- fulness, troublemaking, rebellion, recalcitrance—the other face of the repre- sentations of the hysteric. And much like the recalcitrant hysterics who faced a life sentence in Charcot’s clinic, the now rebellious Thelma and the no longer
passively
aggressive Louise are undone by the forces of law and order. But, before they can be caught, Thelma and Louise take a magical journey that returns them to the bosom of Mother Nature.

Why am I so condemning of themes that pose Mother Nature as a redeemer? There have been two fundamental flaws in the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference—the writing out of the mother in classical psychoanalysis
and
the disavowal of female sexuality. In recent years, psychoana- lysts have consciously tried to rectify the first of these oversights by stressing

the role of the mother and the crucial significance of the earliest mother-child dialogues. Unintentionally, I contributed to that psychoanalytic trend with
Oneness and Separateness
, my 1977 meditation on the vital importance of the infant’s relationship with the mother.

However, as I have since come to appreciate, in the process of resurrecting and elevating the mother, we seem to have entombed the sexual woman. The glorification of the maternal principle has had the indirect effect of further obscuring the intricacies of female sexuality.

Surprisingly, but also expectably, this same obfuscation usually occurs in most actual lives. The idealized, unconditional love attributed to the primordial relationship with the active, caregiving mother is lost in the discovery of the reality of the mother’s sexual and procreative powers. Indeed, the later knowledge of the mother’s sexuality threatens the image of the mother as redeemer. One outcome of this threatening near-knowledge is an attempt to reduce the sexual mother to a breast, a haven of milk and honey. With this disavowal of the mother’s sexuality, the idealization of some, largely mythical, earlier unconditional love is preserved. Thus the image of the all-good, all- embracing mother is a retroactive fantasy created in the wake of disillusionments and anxieties that arise in connection with the traumatic vision of the erotic powers of the sexual mother.

With this retroactive fantasy in mind, I think again of
Thelma and Louise
and reflect on the heroines’ journey away from the corrupt city and back to Mother Nature. A full analytic reflection requires that we explore the dynamic relations between pre-oedipal and oedipal, between redeemer mother and sexual mother, between foreground and background. The purpose of scrutinizing and animating the margins or background of a film is not to discover the real and true meaning at the margins but to open up a new dimension of meaning. This new dimension can only be discerned by exposing the problematic discordance between the central text (the foreground), which in the instance of
Thelma and Louise
is about sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, violence, and counterviolence, and a marginal or background text—in this instance the emotional transcendence of the mother-child couple, the reunion with Mother Nature.

In
Thelma and Louise
, clearly, but also in
Niagara
and
The Misfits
, a world destruction fantasy is countered by a fantasy of rebirth. Most people have no trouble equating world destruction fantasies with an apocalypse. However, it is usually more difficult to think of the fantasy of a return to Mother Nature as apocalyptic. Apocalyptic fantasies have two aspects; one of destruction and another of redemption.
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As the psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostow depicts the traditional form of the apocalyptic fantasy: after the scenes of destruction some sort of messianic rescue or magical journey brings the individual into a paradise, which is often recognizable as “a representation of the interior of the mother’s body.”
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Viewed from the perspective of an apocalyptic narrative, the dominant film plot of
Thelma and Louise
concerns the return to mother, and everything else that occurs in the film is a treacherous hazard that obstructs the magical

reunion. Thus primal scene renditions of a violent and corrupt sexuality and disturbing issues of sexuality and genital difference are brought into focus (foregrounded), merely as obstacles to the journey back to paradise. Like the winged creatures in biblical renditions of apocalypse,
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the motor launches (
Niagara
), pick-up trucks (
The Misfits
), the enchanted convertible in
Thelma and Louise
, or any other moving vehicles that regularly appear in contemporary apocalyptic narratives, such as the amazing, technologically proficient, digitally created space-ships designed for
The Matrix
and other sci-fi films, represent a “method of escape from a scene of destruction” and on to the path to the Elysian fields or safe havens that represent the tender mother.
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In the second half of the film, Thelma and Louise climb into their magical convertible, and the film switches gears and moves into a dream realm that brings them into a reunion with Mother Nature. The discordance between the first half of the film (the world destruction fantasy) and the second half (the redemption), needs to be discerned and interpreted. To simply celebrate the illusion of rebirth as a solution to the plight of Thelma and Louise is a symptom of the fetishism strategy. The body of the hysterical woman is one conventional disguise for the potentially traumatic sexualties of the female. Yet another disguise is the fantasy of a reunion with Mother Nature. In many films whose structure is regulated by the fetishism strategy, images of the body of a woman collaborate with themes of redemption to bleach out the traumas depicted in the background. It is always an abortion of a full reading of a film, to interpret the illusion of redemption and rebirth as a solution to the traumas of loss and world destruction.

In
Eyes Wide Shut
, writer/director Stanley Kubrick caught the essence of the apocalyptic fantasy. In the first half of the film, Dr. William Harford, played by Tom Cruise, wanders about in an unfamiliar, surreal world of necrophilic sexuality, violent sexual couplings, sexual exploitation, and social corruption. In the second half of the film Bill finds his way back home to a reunion with the redeeming mother, his wife Alice Harford, played by Nicole Kidman, Cruise’s then real-life wife. But, in contrast to the Monroe films and
Thelma and Louise
, the reunion and redemption scenes that conclude
Eyes Wide Shut
acknowledge the traumas and affirm the sexuality of the “good mother.” As she speaks the last lines and last word of the film, Alice demonstrates the qualities of an ordinary devoted mother, a forgiving wife, and a candidly sexual woman.