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Notes
1. Maternity and lesbianism are both made complex by unexpected representations in the film, as well as squeezed back awkwardly into more typical social presuppositions of what it means to be a mother or lesbian.
2. Jane Gaines's term “looking relations” (pp. 322–329) helps to expand the possibilities of specularity identified in Laura Mulvey's landmark work, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Screen.
3. Jonathan Ned Katz reminds us that heterosexuality also “comes out” in the 20th century; with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, there is a marked increase in references to the word. See his The Invention of Heterosexuality. The world of Notes on a Scandal emanates a heightened sensitivity to such terms of sexual identification, with Barbara more attuned to some earlier era in which such terms did not have to be enforced, such as the Elizabethan or modernist era.
4. For more on the female friendship film, see Karen Hollinger, In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films. Hollinger points out how female double films of 1930s and 1940s “present two women, one good and one bad, who embody oppositions or contradictions within female nature” (p. 31). I see Notes on a Scandal as skewing these expectations, for Barbara might be seen as the “bad one” versus the amiable and desirable “good” Sheba. Ultimately, neither woman is “good,” which is both liberating in the sense that women are not held to some angelic standard, but disheartening in that they seem to be locked in a world that does not offer sufficient freedom. Hollinger's chapter five, “The Erotic Female Friendship Film: Lesbianism in the Mainstream” examines Fried Green Tomatoes. Hollinger notes how this film “suggests, instead, in the tradition of the social female friendship film, that the niches the women carve out for themselves do not so much lead them into the larger society as provide them refuge from the outside world of male abuse, hostility, and neglect” (p. 161). It is interesting to observe that Heller's novel concludes with the sense of Barbara and Sheba also finding refuge in each other from such a patriarchal world; the film version denies the duo that refuge.
5. Aaron goes on to observe,
The female buddy film disavows lesbianism: it demands its denial while at the same time depends upon it for its appeal. The disavowed lesbianism is essential to the creation of danger and also to the erotic charge that this danger elicits. [Lynda] Hart quite rightly identifies the exploitation of [the] lesbian-effect [emphasis added], the implicit lesbian codings, for the purpose of male fantasy within the representation of violent women. (p. 73)
Some mainstream films that draw on this effect are Thelma and Louise and Fried Green Tomatoes (this latter tries both to imply and elide cleverly the lesbianism explored in the original novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg.
6. The film draws on a familiar motif of the lesbian as criminal outsider, but subverts this theme further through the eroticization of the female friendship. As Lynda Hart, among others such as Caroline Sheldon and Aaron, has pointed out, the cinematic lesbian is frequently cast as the criminal outsider; conversely, too, women who break the law suggest lesbianism:
the expectation for lesbianism between women who violate the law is so strong that the film works overtime to disavow it. If the lesbian has been constructed as the manifest figure of women's “latent” criminality, we can expect that representations of violent women will be haunted by her absent presence. (p. 75)
7. Indeed, cruelly in this scene Sheba also accuses Barbara of being a “vampire”; the lesbian innuendo of this insult is even more explicit in the novel, where the term used is “incubus,” described by the Oxford English Dictionary as “A feigned evil spirit or demon (originating in personified representations of the nightmare) supposed to descend upon persons in their sleep, and especially to seek carnal intercourse with women.”
8. Hanson, Lesbians Who Bite. Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, pp. 192–193.
9. For another examination of a female view or gaze in film, see Catherine Summerhayes' “Who in Heaven?: Tracey Moffatt: Men in Wet-Suits and the Female Gaze” (Journal of Narrative Theory). In Moffatt's film Heaven, the conventional concept of the male gaze is subverted by a documentary hand-held style of shooting by a female director of Australian aboriginal ethnicity. In several ways Heaven radically moves into the realm of performance art. By contrast, Notes on a Scandal does not seek to break down the artifice of the fiction film situation.
10. For a variation of monstrous censored femininity, see my discussion of Viktor Erofeev's novel Russian Beauty.
11. Almond draws on clinical case histories as well as the realms of literature and popular culture. She shows how maternal ambivalence functions as the “dark side” of motherhood (The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood, xiii).
12. Ibid., p. 4.
13. Jane Ussher, in Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body, argues that a “set of ‘truths’” has emerged:
about normal and abnormal female sexuality that have varied across time: the sexual woman pathologised in the nineteenth century; the asexual woman pathologised today; lesbians positioned as perverse or ill in the early twentieth century; as example of emancipated womanhood, or as making a sexual choice, today. The function of this surveillance and regulation is to render the female body passive and docile, in order to manage the experience and expression of female sexuality, thus annihilating threat. The same practices can be observed in contemporary medical surveillance of the reproductive body—where the taboos and rituals which positioned the menstruating woman as polluted, dangerous and abject are transformed into medical, legal or scientific truths. (p. 16)
14. Silverman, in Masculinity at the Margins, explains:
What Lacan designates the “gaze” also manifests itself initially within a space external to the subject, first through the mother's look as it facilitates the “join” of infant and mirror image, and later through all the many other actual looks with which it is confused. It is only at a second remove that the subject might be said to assume responsibility for “operating'” the gaze by ‘“seeing’” itself being seen even when no pair of eyes are trained upon it—by taking not so much the gaze as its effects with the self. However, consciousness as it is redefined by Lacan hinges not only upon the internalization but upon the elision of the gaze; this ‘seeing’ of oneself being seen is experienced by the subject-of-consciousness—by the subject, that is, who arrogates to itself a certain self-presence or substantiality—as a seeing of itself seeing itself. (p. 127)
15. Greven, “Contemporary Hollywood,” p. 34. Greven arrives at this discussion via Theodor Reik:
As Theodor Reik wrote, ‘masochism is never a sign of narcissism, but an expression of its being damaged and of an attempt to restore it.’ In Hollywood films, the situation is somewhat different—the masochist, having realized that narcissism is a state of being he can never enter and the narcissist a figure whom he can never possess, attempts to damage and destroy the narcissist. (p. 43)
For an expansion of Reik's comment, see Reik, Love and Lust: On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sexual Emotions, pp. 88–89.
16. See footnote 14.
17. McGowan, “Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and Its Vicissitudes,” in Cinema Journal, pp. 28–29.
18. Manlove, “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey,” in Cinema Journal, p. 90.
19. Doane further considers what happens when the woman takes on the male role of viewership, including how the woman can be punished for assuming this inquiring capacity. See her “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” in Screen. Meanwhile, Judith Halberstam offers another possibility for the queer woman's look which she terms the “transgender gaze” For a full discussion, see “The Transgender Gaze in Boys Don't Cry.” Halberstam claims that in the film Boys Don't Cry (1999), Director Kimberly Peirce “very self-consciously constructs what can only be called a ‘transgender gaze” (p. 278). The spectator is at times required to adopt Brandon's point of view; this gaze “reveals the ideological content of the male and female gazes and it temporarily disarms the compulsory heterosexuality of the romance genre” (p. 278). This gaze disappears with Brandon's death. Halberstam wonders whether the inability to “sustain a transgender gaze opens up a set of questions about the inevitability and dominance of both the male/female and the hetero/homo binary in narrative cinema” (p. 278). She offers some distinctions between a “female gaze” that explores fantasy, utopian vision and a male gaze, which remains a scrutinizing gaze of science—as the men search Brandon, for example (pp. 278–279). While these meditations deserve further investigation (and may necessitate a replacement of “look” for “gaze”), I find this film makes several concessions to heterosexual romance and gender typing. It is also hard to separate Brandon's transgender identity from his possible transgender “gaze;” following that reasoning, as there is no transgender character in Notes on a Scandal, it seems difficult to locate a transgender system of looking. I have noted that Barbara at times uses what has been commonly called a “male gaze” in her voyeurism of Sheba. But she also has female ways of looking, as I will explore. I have not encountered a study about a “lesbian gaze” or “look,” but suspect that it would lead to further parsing of the ways in which to play out a gender role, lesbianism having its own diversity.
20. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 152.
21. Ibid.
22. As has been well observed by now, lesbian film characters have often been demonized in either subtle or obvious ways. Several scholars have examined this recourse; see, for example, Aaron, “Til Death;” Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine,” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film; Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism; Fuss, Introduction to Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories; Hart, Fatal Women; Caroline Sheldon, “Lesbians and Film: Some Thoughts,” in Gays and Film; “Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film; and Williams, “When the Woman Looks.” In another respect, arguably the countercultural homosexual figure helps to contest the supposed normalcy of the heterosexual standards.
23. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing, p. 8.
24. While I see Notes on a Scandal toying with closeness and distance in the cinematic gaze, as well as maternal and female ways of looking and gazing and the powerlessness of looking, another critic has considered how the gaze may be possibly freed in a film that emphasizes a desire for power in Silence of the Lambs. Andrew Schopp writes in “The Practice and Politics of ‘Freeing the Look’: Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs,”
the more problematic statement might derive from the film's continual effort to strip away any easy possibility of gendering the gaze. The film suggests that the viewing subject wants the power inherent in the cinematic gaze so much that it will subject itself to the control of the gaze, abdicating pleasure and embracing a relentless visual exploitation. At the same time, the film destabilizes secure spectator positions by collapsing binary categories that delineate internal and external, male and female, self and other, monstrous and benign. These destabilized positions problematize, perhaps even efface, the potential for any gendered readings of the gaze and its power dynamics. (pp. 146–47)