Political Animals by Mayer Sophie;

Author:Mayer, Sophie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4444059
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2016-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Fig. 19: Frankenstein, UNBOUND

Child shoots the vignette in black and white, pastiching James Whale’s 1931 adaptation (a history queered in Gods and Monsters [Bill Condon, 1998]). Her work has a long-standing fascination with pastiche and quotation of film history, and particularly its dramatization of embodiment, such as the play with silent melodrama in ‘Perils’ (1986) and the reappropriation of a silent lesbian porn film at the end of ‘Mayhem’ (1987), parts four and six respectively of her series Is This What You Were Born For?, a title that clearly tips its hat to de Beauvoir. Her micro-Frankenstein feels like another entry into the series, inquiring into what it means to be born into a society that genders you female, and renders that gendering monstrous. Rather than rocking the vote or campaigning for wage equality (although Child also made B/Side [1996], a documentary in solidarity with urban homeless people in New York), Is This… inhabits Jacqueline Rose’s ‘modern feminism [which] mess[es] with the idea of a cleaned-up politics by bringing sexuality to the table’.7 For Rose, the unconscious is political, disrupting conventional politics’ insistence on the rational, visible and recordable.

Sleeping Beauties (and Beasts)

Child’s witty, disturbing short ‘Subtalk’ (2002) exactly takes on Rose’s ‘task… of exposing everything that is darkest, most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle for the better political futures we want’.8 In Child’s words, the short ‘documents the heavy post-9/11 police presence in New York’s subway system and imagines the [Metropolitan Transit Authority]’s “Subtalk” PSAs supplanted by Gertrude Stein’s [memoir of living in Occupied France] “Wars I Have Seen” ’.9 Her gesture is an uncanny precursor of Jane Campion’s use of the MTA’s ‘Poetry in Transit’ placards to give voice to Franny’s post-9/11 unconscious in In the Cut. In Child’s work, as in Campion’s, ‘confronting dark with dark might be the more creative path’.10 Just as Child shows Shelley bringing her nightmare into her waking life and making art from it, Campion’s film is about waking up but not forgetting the dark.

In the opening scenes, as Franny is half-sleeping, a petal shower in the garden outside her window prompts a recurrence of her dream about how her parents met. This romantic fantasy, in which her father proposed to her mother while skating on a pond, is repeated throughout the film, varying as Franny comes to understand the disturbing implications of his behaviour: dumping his fiancée for a woman he had just met; coercing her into marriage on his whim; abandoning her. Unlike her father, who repeats his behaviour endlessly with other women, Franny is able to perform what Luce Irigaray calls mimesis, or repetition with a difference, to work through and wake up from the nightmare of patriarchy that she had thought was a blissful dream.11 While Sue Gillett has expertly unpacked many of the interconnected mythic and fairy tale female personae who appear throughout the film, she leaves aside the film’s references to Sleeping Beauty.12 Franny may fall into a dazed sleep beneath the killer’s dead body, but she awakens herself, and then goes to wake her lover Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) with a kiss.

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