Female Friendship, Idealisation and the “Need” For Violence In Crush

Abstract

This article develops a feminist critical approach capable of responding to the uniquely pessimistic portrayal of female friendship in Crush (Alison Maclean 1992, NZ). Crush questions the possibility of supportive or empathetic relationships, disclosing instead a powerful feminist “need” for violence, between women. This poses a challenge for feminist theory which has yet to be fully understood (it is the first aim of this article to remedy this). Secondly, the article uncovers the same pessimism at the centre of Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theories of idealisation, demonstrating the “negativity” of Klein's work and its value for feminist approaches to cinema spectatorship.

Keywords:

• Melanie Klein
• negativity
• feminist film theory
• female friendship
• idealisation
• violence between women
• female spectator

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England and to the Arts and Humanities Research Board, for granting research leave. Thanks also to the Gender and Culture Research Group at the University of the West of England.

Notes

 1. The “feminist psychodrama” is “closely allied to the psychological thriller but… [with a] heightened preoccupation with gender, especially gender… conflict” (Robson & Zalcock 1997, p. 8).

 2. Feminist film theory has addressed Kleinian psychoanalysis, but Klein's concepts are mostly read through the work of Joan Riviere and Julia Kristeva and the concepts “masquerade” and “abjection.”

 3. Crush is deliberately ambiguous about Lane's feelings, motivations, and her role in bringing help, although Angela accuses her of having left Christina to die. The accidental and the intentional are explicitly blurred, thus the possibility of an origin to violence questioned. Instead, violence is embedded within the identifications of friendship and the problems of identity this entails.

 4. Establishing the destructiveness of female friendship by confounding it with lesbian relationships (and then repressing the link) is a narrative worthy of Crush's Hollywood contemporaries: Hart explains the “displacement” of sexual desire between women and the focus on their violent hostility as a function of dominant cinema (1994, p. 173 n. 40).

 5. Derrida (1988) discusses the problem of the friend in this way in the context of the multiplication of the bond between men that underpins social relations.

 6. Radical (and cultural) feminists have been accused of idealising female friendship as a foundation for women's liberation. O'Connor (1992) criticises Raymond's A Passion for Friends (1986), for example. But Raymond reveals a complexity in her conception of ideals that O'Connor fails to recognise (1992, p. 12). Arguing that an ideal image of female friendship unites women, Raymond also puts centre-stage the difficulty of ideals for any socially transformative movement, identifying ideals as a cause of hostility between feminist women (1986, pp. 6–7).

 7. The assessment of “feminist” film cultures is likewise misleading. Both dubbed “feminist” because they present powerful bonds between women, Thelma and Louise (1991) and Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), provide more ambivalent representations than these appraisals suggest. Equally, the destructive consequences of mother-daughter intimacy represented in The Piano (1993) give an acute reminder of just how dangerous close female relationships can be.

 8. Hollinger argues that while Poison Ivy (1992) portrays women's relationships as fatal, it also acknowledges their central importance. Similarly, she explains that The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992) offers pernicious representations of hostility between women, and yet the central female characters are all “strong” women, not victims.

 9. Klein repeatedly affirms “the origin of idealization as a counterpart to persecution” ([1956] 1986, p. 218).

10. Klein later sanitises this narrative, describing omnipotent denial merely as a means of annihilating a persecutory object or situation ([1952] 1997, pp. 64–65).

11. This is Klein's description of the infant's response to the “good” breast: “the good breast tends to turn into the ‘ideal’ perfect and inexhaustible breast, always available, always gratifying” ([1952] 1997, p. 64).