Female Masochism in Film by McPhee Ruth

Author:McPhee, Ruth.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2014-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Cinematic Self-mutilation: Typical Themes

Honing in from cultural conceptions of self-injury more broadly to cinematic representations in particular enables the further exploration of some of the most pervasive narratives and structures of signification that surround these practices and bodies. Incidences of self-mutilation in cinema have become increasingly prevalent and varied in form, from the exceptionally graphic close-up of Gainsbourg snipping off her clitoris in Antichrist to the bizarrely hilarious adverts for specially designed cutting tools in a futuristic world where self-mutilation has become endemic in Japanese horror/exploitation film Tokyo Gore Police (‘Let’s go stylish with wrist-cutting!’ squeal three Japanese schoolgirls at the camera. ‘The blood gets tastier!’). These examples are more extreme and unusual in their manifestation, but as in other films featuring self-harm such as Girl, Interrupted, Thirteen, and The Piano Teacher and Secretary, it is used a shorthand for dysfunction whether sexual pathology, individual mental illness in teenage girls, the dysfunction of an entire corrupt society or the apparently inherent madness of the female gender (von Trier once again displaying his zeal for the fetishization of suffering). A further commonality in these recent cinematic examples is that they typically reflect the wider cultural narratives about self-mutilation that have been constructed within institutional and theoretical discourse and often serve to reaffirm dominant understandings of these practices. Despite this affirmation, some of these films still indicate the potentialities for the self-injured body and particularly the masochistic self-injured body, to act as a site for the disruption of pre-established systems of signification and to encourage us to think our relationships to embodied alterity anew.

What are these dominant narratives, and how do they manifest themselves cinematically? The first, apparent in several of the films already mentioned, is the stereotypical image of the ‘self-harmer’ as white, teenage (or at least, young) and female. This stereotype demonstrates clearly that the specifically corporeal and spectacular nature of this ‘identity’ is not neutral but caught up in a network of cultural ideas about how the female body should look, function and behave. Barbara Jane Brickman observes that although sustained studies demonstrate that those who self-injure are not just female, may be a variety of ages and ethnicities and from a variety of backgrounds, nonetheless, a ‘typical’ model of the self-harmer and specifically the ‘cutter’ has emerged within both popular culture and medical discourse. This model has proved remarkably persistent: ‘A cutter profile was created by the first confluence of psychiatric interest in a “delicate” form of self-mutilation: the delicate cutter is typically a white, adolescent girl … The white, suburban, attractive teenage girl persists as the face of self-mutilation’ (Brickman 2004: 87). ‘Delicate cutting’ is defined as superficial wounds to the skin of the body, frequently on the arms and legs, and relies on a particular notion of femininity that has been developed in psychiatry and medicine as well as in representational discourses such as art, literature and cinema, in which the feminine subject position is equated with masochism, passivity, and the infantile or primitive. This ‘delicate

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