- The subject of law as an emotional subject is receiving increasing attention in legal studies from a variety of perspectives: see for example, Lionel Bentley and Leo Flynn (eds), Law and the Senses: Sensational Jurisprudence, London: Pluto, 1996; Anne Bottomley (ed), Feminist Perspectives on the Foundational Subjects of Law, London: Cavendish, 1996; Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990; Peter Goodrich, Oedipus Lex, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Leslie J. Moran, The Homosexual(ity) of Law, London: Routledge, 1996; Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes The Law, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996; Shaun McVeigh and Peter Rush, ‘Cutting Our Losses’ in Peter Rush, Shaun McVeigh and Alison Young (eds), Criminal Legal Doctrine, Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1997, forthcoming; Carol Smart, ‘The Woman of Legal Discourse’ (1992) 1(1) Social and Legal Studies 29.
- Carol Brooks Gardner, Passing By, Berkeley: California University Press, 1995; Susanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation, Cambridge: Polity, 1986; Lynne Pearce, Woman/Image/Text, Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994; Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso, 1986.
- Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane (eds), The Spectatrix: Special Issue of Camera Obscura (1991); Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, New York: Routledge, 1993; Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984; Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, London: Methuen, 1988; Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) 16(3) Screen 6; Jackie Stacey, Stargazing, London: Routledge, 1994.
- Much of this work derives from Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, London: Peregrine, 1977; see Gail Mason, Hostility and Sexual Secrecy: Narratives of (Hetero)Sexed Violence against Women (1995), Unpublished PhD Thesis, La Trobe University; Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning, ‘Modern Private Security: Its Growth and Implications' (1981) 3 Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 193; Alison Young, ‘In the Frame: Crime and the Limits of Representation’ (1996) 29 Australia and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 1.
- Among the exceptions to this: Peter Goodrich ‘Specula Laws: Image, Aesthetic and Common Law’ (1991) II(2) Law and Critique 233; Peter Rush, Trials of Sex, London: Routledge, 1997, Ch.1; Renata Salecl, ‘Crime as a Mode of Subjectivization: Lacan and the Law’ (1993) IV(1) Law and Critique 3.
- Amy Taubin, ‘Killing Men’ (1991) 1(1) Sight and Sound 14, 16.
- For examples of the substantial literature on Psycho and Silence, see: Raymond Bellour, ‘Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion’ (1979) 3/4 camera obscura 105; Jonathan Carter, ‘Returning to Silence (1993) 6(2) Antithesis 91; Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, above n3; Diana Fuss, ‘Monsters of Perversion: Jeffery Dahmer and The Silence of the Lambs' in Marjorie Garber (ed) Media Spectacles, London: Routledge, 1993; Judith Halberstam, ‘Skin-Flick: Posthuman Gender in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs' (1991) 27 camera obscura 37; Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995; Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, London: Pandora, 1982; Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1993; Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, above n3; Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of ‘Psycho’, New York: Dembner, 1990; William Rothman, The Murderous Gaze, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1982; Taubin, above n6; Elizabeth Young, 'The Silence of the Lambs and the Flaying of Feminist Theory’ (1991) 27 camera obscura 5; Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry, London: Verso, 1991; Slavoj Zizek, Every thing You Always Wanted To Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock), London: Verso, 1992.
- Hitchcock reputedly wanted to make a film which would be more shocking than Les Diaboliques (1955, dir. Henri Clouzot) and also the first ‘1960s' film (see Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock, above n7); Silence has been claimed as profoundly feminist and ground-breaking cinema (see Taubin, above n6; Fuss, Halberstam, Young, all above n7).
- Gein did not stuff or flay, as Bates and Buffalo Bill do; rather he removed parts of his victims' skin and parts of their bodies. He was a necrophiliac, engaging in grave-robbing and postmortem mutilations. His victims were women; there appears to have been no homosexual, transsexual or transvestite aspect to his behaviour. The presentation of Bill's homicidal pathology in Silence as linked to both homosexuality and transvestism/transsexualism enraged the gay community in the United States and in Britain. Carter, above n7, 101, points out that such re-coding ‘softens the violence done to real women, drawing the result close to drag or an incoherent transvestitism’. On Ed Gein, see Harold Scechter, The Shocking True Story of the Original ‘Psycho’, New York: Basic Books, 1989. On transvestism in Silence, see Julie Tharp,'The Transvestite as Monster: Gender Horror in The Silence of the Lambs' (1991) 19(3) Journal of Popular Film and Television 106.
- Salecl, above n5, 15–6, emphasis in original.
- Ibid, 20.
- On Starling's tutelage, see Bruce Robbins, ‘Murder and Mentorship in The Silence of the Lambs' (1995) 1(1) UTS Review 30.
- It could also be said that the FBI represent rational cognition, which is overtaken in this instance by Starling's combination of intuition and dogged police-work. Discovery of the criminal becomes an arbitrary by-product of the tension between two modes of criminal investigation. On the arbitrary contingency of detection, see Russell Hogg, ‘The politics of criminal investigation’ in Gary Wickham (ed), Social Theory and Legal Politics, Sydney: Local Consumption, 1987, 120.
- On the sexualised hierarchy of the workplace and notions of advancement in Silence, see Robbins, above n12.
- The ending of Silence seems designed to create the possibility of a sequel—a series of films about Lecter, with the films thus mimicking the seriality of murder. No sequel has so far been made, however, whereas Psycho—despite its sealed ending with Norman facing indefinite detention—has seen two sequels made (Psycho II, 1983, dir. Richard Franklin; Psycho III, 1986, dir. Anthony Perkins).
- Birds have a significance in Hitchcock's films far beyond the confines of Psycho: see especially The Birds (1963).
- Bellour, above n7, 114.
- Note that some other films make this connection, albeit in a less stylish or sophisticated manner: for example, see Dressed to Kill (1980, dir. Brian De Palma). Dressed to Kill was also subject to condemnation by the gay community for its linking of transvestism to homicidal pathology.
- Bellour, above n7, 115.
- Ibid, 116.
- The causal linking of a woman's sexuality and death is a common trope in detective fiction and film noir. Sometimes the woman's sexuality causes the death of another: for example, see the novels of Raymond Chandler (each of which features a highly sexualised woman who will be linked to murder), discussed in my Imagining Crime, London: Sage, 1996, ch.4. Alternatively, the sexualised woman may be constructed as bringing about her own death, usually by provoking a male character to kill her (a film such as Double Indemnity exemplifies this).
- The punning similarity in these two versions of ‘coming on to’ her is suggested in Young, above n7.I will note in passing the impossibility of analysing Silence without reference to its countless puns (also noted by Halberstam, Skin Shows, above n9, 179). Names are particularly important: in being sent to Lecter, Starling is a bird on his table (a cannibal, Lecter is always figured in oral metaphors in the film). On the puns around orality, see Fuss, above n7; and Young, above n7; for the latter, Lecter has an ‘edible complex’. ‘Lecter’ can be read as ‘reader’ and ‘law-maker’; when investigating a storage unit, Starling has to use a jack to prop the roller door open. As she squeezes under, she cuts her inner thigh This may be the only trace in the film of the erotic attachment between Starling and Jack Crawford which makes the book a more conventional romantic narrative (see Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs, New York: St Martin's Press, 1988).
- Their exchange goes as follows. The entomologist asks: ‘What do you do when you're not detecting—ever go out for cheeseburgers and beer? The amusing house wine?’ Starling responds: ‘Are you hitting on me?’ He answers: ‘Yes!’ No outcome of this is shown immediately, but the viewer can deduce at the end of the film that these advances were better received than those of Dr Chilton: the entomologist accompanies Starling to her graduation.
- Young, above n7.
- Jacques Lacan ‘Anamorphosis’, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London: Peregrine, 1979, 86.
- For example, see Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, London: MacMillan, 1983; Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Cinematic Apparatus—Problems in Current Theory’, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, above n2; Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, New York: Routledge, 1992; Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible, New York: Routledge, 1996; Zizek, Looking Awry, above n7.
- Jacques Lacan, ‘The Eye and the Gaze’, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, above n25, 74.
- Cf. Zizek, Looking Awry, above n7, 117–8. Zizek here notes that the gaze is an empty subject. However, as my formulation indicates, the subject of the gaze is not so much empty as symbolic and impersonal. It is the material space of the house that looks.
- Thomas Harris, Red Dragon, New York: St Martin's Press, 1986.
- Lesser, above n7, 52.
- Lacan has described the process of identification as ‘the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’: see Jacques Lacan, Ecrits. A Selection, London: Tavistock, 1977, 2. For further commentary, see Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1996, 81: ‘to “assume” an image is to recognise oneself in the image and to appropriate the image as oneself’.
- The spectator rarely shares the visual field of the victim; however, as time is running out before Catherine Martin—the next victim—will be killed, some shots are filmed from her point of view in the basement pit. This however does not construct her as a subject for the spectator's identification but rather as a mirror reflecting the horrifying quality of the killer. In other words, the victim provides a site of identification with the killer.
- See for example: Bellour; Kuhn; Zizek; Creed, all above n 7.
- Kuhn, above, n7, 105, points out that Marion showering is filmed in a highly sexualised manner, drawing an associative line between femininity, fluidity and sexuality. On the history of the repression of the link between femininity and fluids, see Luce Irigaray, ‘The “Mechanics” of Fluids’, This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1985, 86.
- Bellour, above n7, 116.
- Zizek, Everything, above n7, 229. In filming this scene, Hitchcock insisted that the entire shower space be built so that the murder could be filmed simultaneously from all angles and then later edited and spliced together into the fragmentary close-ups of the sequence.
- Note that recent TAC advertising campaigns about road safety function along a similar dynamic: the spectator watches knowing that something terrible will happen to the occupants of the car or the small child playing at the roadside (in the same way that the cinema audience anticipates what will happen to Arbogast—see discussion below). In the advertisement which features a car running off the road as the driver falls asleep, the same dynamic makes the disappearance of the car and the re-surfacing of the driver (as the others presumably drown) horrifying. Horror should always be understood as a combination of desire and revulsion. (See Philip Brophy, ‘Horrality: the Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films' (1986) 27(1) Screen 2; Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992; Halberstam, Skin Shows, above n7.)
- Zizek, Everything, above n7, 230.
- Ibid, 231.
- Henry makes a similar claim: a family is killed and videotaped by Henry. The cinema audience gradually discover that they are watching the video along with Henry and his accomplice Otis. As Otis rewinds and watches in slow-motion, the audience is forced to compare their behaviour—in going to see the film—with that of Henry and Otis in watching the tape. Critics have pointed out that the film is not entirely successful in evading any charge that it glories in its violence along with its protagonists: see Taubin, above n6, 17.
- Bellour, above n7, 115.
Australian Feminist Law Journal
Volume 8, 1997 - Issue 1
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