DOUBLE OR NOTHING:

10 JULY 2002

Doubling-a term that can describe either the enactment of more than one role by a single performer or the enactment of a single role by more than one performer-functions generally to fasten our attention onto two vectors of recent theorizing: subject formation and looking practices. For purposes of this inquiry, I have chosen to interrogate those dynamics in two widely released movies from the dominant cinema of the 1980s, The French Lieutenant's Woman and Kiss of the Spider Woman. Both films use doubling as a strategy for foregrounding performance inside and outside of multiple, conflated diegetic spaces. These instantiations of doubling, including their production of the surplus bodies of the performers, inflect subject formation and position identity as an unstable, shifting construct, contingent upon certain expediencies related to (contrived) material and (contrived) ideological conditions as well as to its producers (watched subjects) and consumers (watching subjects). In the end, doubling spins a circulation of othernesses and elsewheres into a Derridean whirligig of appearances atop a quicksand.

Both films deploy doubling as a reflexive articulation of gendered narrativities that persist in the production and consumption/reception of stories. Production itself is an explicit subject in both films. A meta-movie, The French Lieutenant's Woman simultaneously mounts and dismantles a conventional Victorian love story by "unmasking" the components of master narrative, revealing them as technologies of performance and willful contrivance-the effects of acting and cinematic apparatus. Similarly, in Kiss of the Spider Woman, the latent ideologies of narrative cinema and its material practices are inflected-in this case by intercut parodies of a Nazi propaganda movie and a Hollywood thriller/romance, envisioned distinctly by two cell mates who use the process to negotiate their relationship and subjectivities. Through both films' compositing of historicized cultures, sexualities, and artistic conventions-especially insofar as these are marked on and by the body of the double-gendering becomes phantasmagoric: a construction and an encryption of obscured socio-ideological practices.

The narrative performativities of looking practices related to male gazing and male desire received instructive attention from feminist theorists working at the time these films were made, in the late 1970s and 1980s. Arguing that narratives construct their readers as male-identified, they noted that the pleasures of legibility were accessible only if mediated by a male gaze that renders women objects in a male-governed field of signs, and that male desire operates to inscribe women in accessory roles, obscuring their subjectivity. Particularly in film studies, the confounded and compounded effects of these dominant conventions have been widely scrutinized and debated. Annette Kuhn (Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, 1982) identifies "the fundamental project of feminist film analysis" as centering "on making visible the invisible," echoing Laura Mulvey's 1973 call for attention to the entire cinematic apparatus in its capacity for constructing meanings and ideologies disguised by a presumption that cinema is "a neutral means of communicating already-constituted significations." In a 1988 number of The Drama Review, Elin Diamond reviewed the situation of feminist film theorists and linked their project with the aesthetic/political program of theatre theorist, Bertolt Brecht:

Demystifying representation, showing how and when the object of pleasure is made, releasing the spectator from imaginary and illusory identifications-these are crucial elements in Brecht's theoretical project. Yet we feminists in drama and theatre studies have attended more to the critique of the gaze than to the Brechtian intervention that signals a way of dismantling the gaze. Feminist film theorists, fellow-traveling with psychoanalysis and semiotics, have given us a lot to think about, but we, through Brechtian theory, have something to give them: a female body in representation that resists fetishization and a viable position for the female spectator.

Brecht's attendance to the relationship between the spectator and the spectacle, his program for loosening sutures by foregrounding the apparatuses of production, have proved useful as solutions to the predicaments of theorists and makers of feminist films.

The two films I shall address in this essay are among several "major motion pictures" released since Mulvey's doctrine that unravel the bond between spectator and male-identified looking practices and might be seen as responses to her plea. Both films employ Brechtian strategies of distanciation in order to foreground the apparatuses of their production and to re-situate the spectator in relation to the "story." In both, male desire is problematized by its troubled presence in the nexus of diegetic and extra-diegetic discourses and by its absence as a fully functional trajectory toward closure, plainly unmasking mimesis as constitutive in both production and consumption. Doubling-in both cases a filmic conceit contrived in the process of adapting the source novels into screenplays-performs key operations in this disruption.

The French Lieutenant's Woman, a film based on the novel by John Fowles and released in 1981, is the first of two freighted titles I confront in this essay. As adapted by Harold Pinter and directed by Karel Reisz (and, no less, as originally written by Fowles), both title and designation of "the French lieutenant's woman" are baldly exposed as a false construct that is dismantled in various ways by the entitled work, itself. In the first place, the story of Sarah (the so-called "French lieutenant's woman") reveals that she herself has fabricated this apparent explanation of her nonconforming behavior in order to trap others in a set of expectations that allow her to act freely: by falsely inscribing herself as a culturally codified object (the victim of an absent man), she creates her own agency and subjectivity; she slips her story from their story. A less conspicuous deconstruction of the title, however, occurs on other levels of the narrative and exemplifies the role of doubling in "making visible the invisible."

Although the Fowles novel makes sport of its own disruptive discourses-and these clearly inspire Pinter's adaptation of the work for film-I shall restrict my arguments in this essay to the destabilizing effects produced by doubling in the film. In its filmed version, The French Lieutenant's Woman is fundamentally reflexive: a movie about making a movie. Pinter's conceit for converting the novel's narrative misgivings, diachronic viewpoint, patchwork texts, and multiple endings into the medium of film results in an exemplary foregrounding of apparatus. The movie is precisely about its own production; mimesis becomes its subject not only within the story of Sarah's story-making, but also through its flagrant exhibition of its own storytelling artifices. By intercutting the scenes of (familiar, but defamiliarized) Victorian romance with modern day scenes that trace the concurrent lives of the "film actors," Pinter focuses our attention on acting, faking, and posturing as a reiterated discourse. Not only do the two stories predict, contradict, and interdict each other, but also they qualify each other by pointing at material codifications such as costuming, set dressing, and camera situation. In this way, the film moves toward deconstructing its own discursive formations, toward dematerializing the ideology of material reality, in the manner invited by Mulvey and Kuhn.

Habitual looking practices are dismantled both by the intercutting of stories and by other frustrations of identification with "hero" Charles's point of view. Male narrativity, elucidated through Charles's mistaken presumptions about Sarah ("a fallen woman must keep on falling") and "actor" Mike's insistence that "actress" Anna conform with the patriarchal expediencies of Victorian fiction, is fraught with peril on all levels of this film. Our composite hero, Charles/Mike (surplus body of Jeremy Irons), is manipulated and marginalized by his own narrative desire in such a way that we spectators are expelled from identification with his subjectivity. He becomes the victim of his own master narratives in both periods of the film. Sarah/Anna (surplus body of Meryl Streep), on the other hand, enacts a dialectic (within and between each character) in which she is repeatedly fetishized and defetishized (e.g. Anna cursing at "Sarah's" corset), so that any inscription of her as an accessory or object always renders itself an illusion. As a figure of enigma who reveals others, who is a cipher of their fears and desires, and against whom they define only themselves, Sarah's (affected) opacity survives the film unchallenged, untamed, unfetishized, untragic.

Except for Sarah, who consistently reinscribes her own subjectivity and elusive agency-and who remains, nonetheless, a figure of persistently obvious fiction, who at times even sketches masks of her own face-each of Pinter's characters, Victorian or modern, is plotted on narrative routes toward entrapment. Although the dynamic between Pinter's diachronic plots retrieves and enriches many of the novel's techniques and concerns, its foremost achievement lies in its approximation of Fowles's alternative endings. Both writers, by means of similar pretexts, imply that perfect endings are the stuff of fiction. When Fowles withdraws his "narrator" and when Pinter withdraws his "script," the stories conclude otherwise, accentuating the ideologies of (persistent) narrativity and stability. Through this device of contradictory endings, both Fowles and Pinter extend the condition of inconclusiveness beyond the internal action of the story, referring the problem of closure, in all its dialectical complexity, to the reader or spectator. Thus, when Mike, detained by social obligations, searches for Anna he duplicates Charles's route to Sarah in the final scene of the fiction. Upon reaching her dressing room, however, he finds only her wig; she has changed from her Victorian costume and left. The final shot of the screenplay shows him at the window of his room in which their fictional reunion had transpired, watching her car disappear. His imperative shout, "Sarah!" reverberates as a demand that life imitate (phallocentric) art and as a lament over the impossibility of this prospect.

Doubling relegates Charles, Mike, Sarah, Anna, and all of the other doubled characters (and by inference the performers themselves) to the labors of "self"-production. The layered performances create a vortex of enactments that simultaneously produces and consumes subjects. Everybody is always-already marked as somebody else. Subjectivities ("self"-hoods) are little more than strategies, tweaked for advantage in two periods that are explicitly framed by practices of Darwinism, raw and cooked. However much the film elicits facile, conventionalized readings of gendered essences and the persistence of types (women, for example, who are obscure, fallen, or whores), it unravels these readings at every turn of plot and mode of presentation. To the extent that doubled characters contain traces of type or other, these function ironically to diffract subject formation as an effect of performance in relation to material conditions. A moment in which we may be tempted to lose ourselves in the seamless gestalt of Sarah exists only as a trap to be sprung by subsequent (or sometimes preceding) attribution to performance, whether by Sarah's wiles-such as when she lays out her costume and props for the ensnarement of Charles at the Endicott Hotel-or by Anna's interventions and preparations. If Anna (or Meryl Streep, for that matter) disappears completely in Sarah, the moment is contrived only so that we may marvel at its techniques and technologies. Subject formation as a project of enactment-writ large by the effects of doubling and exhibited in all its discursive intricacy-saturates production of the film.

At the site of reception, intercutting of the diachronic storylines and foregrounding of artifices such as acting and mise-en-scène intervene between spectators and conditioned looking practices, causing-at least ideally-acute awareness of agency in the production of verisimilitude. This intervention between viewers and their desire to suture themselves blindly to the obscured ideologies of master narrative is cleverly gauged for effectiveness, although it might not be entirely successful against the powers of our cultural regime. When I taught The French Lieutenant's Woman five years after its release to a large group of M.A.T. students, several of them had previously seen the film, but none had any memory of doubled plots or performers, recalling only the Victorian love story.

A similar seduction-based arguably on spectator practices that produce a conditioned desire to elide distractions from mimetic (versus constitutive) narrative-laces (/unlaces) narrative iterations in director Hector Babenco's film of Kiss of the Spider Woman. As with The French Lieutenant's Woman, the movie is an adaptation of a multi-texted novel with a pitfall title. Both Manuel Puig, who wrote the novel, and Leonard Schrader worked on the screenplay for the film, which was released in 1985. The novel and film versions of both works are reflexive efforts to historicize story-telling by counterpointing the narrative conventions of two periods. In all four cases-both novels and both films-the counterpoint reveals not only the persistence of privileged fantasies, but also the distinct hegemonies that are served by them as well as their postmodern infection by malaise. Babenco has called his work on Kiss of the Spider Woman "an exercise in lying in two styles."

If the Fowles novel moors itself on an immanent time/space continuum that is imbedded in geologic and man-made vestiges-an authenticating discourse that repeats in the film-then Puig's novel, which includes substantial footnoting of constative documents that serve inversely to cast doubt on authenticating discourses, equates that continuum with fanciful (if deadly) contrivance. Neither is authenticity secured by the body of the "performer," as we might argue it to be in the reflexive performances of The French Lieutenant's Woman film, because Sonia Braga, the only doubled actor in the Kiss of the Spider Woman film, appears exclusively as a figment either of retold movies or memory. The Spider Woman's kiss, which promises deliverance from web-less, existential monotonies in several dimensions of the film's discourses, slips assignments of gender, agency, and perfidy, confounding facile legibilities.

Central among the film's explorations is the question of gendering-what constitutes a "real man" or a "real woman?" The narrative's consummate inflection of Truth's constructedness is reified in its re-presentations of gender. Along with subject formation, gender is radically destabilized not only through the conspicuous effects of queering, but also through referral to the ideological operations of appellation. The two cell mates, Molina (William Hurt), a gay window-dresser who has been imprisoned for having sex with a minor, and Valentin (Raul Julia), a political prisoner, explicitly interrogate markers of gender as they inscribe themselves through accounts of movie plots and revolutionary postures, respectively. Other than a couple glimpses of Molina's nonspeaking mother and one of Valentin's "girlfriend-in-the-movement," Lydia, the film depicts women only as ciphers. The marker for femininity rests with Molina and with Sonia Braga's recurrences in camped-up roles that mirror and produce the subjectivities of the two prisoners. Braga becomes the obscure object of desire through her dreamworld elusiveness in the roles of a duplicitous femme fatale in a Nazi propaganda movie, an ambivalized spider woman in a horror flick, and a gauzy memory of Valentin's forbidden middle-class fruit (thereby establishing that we see the movies told by Molina through the eyes of Valentin).

Throughout the film, subject formation is unremittingly buttressed on fantasies produced by cultural regimes. The campy movies-within-the-movie blatantly foreground propaganda and hegemony in the portrayals Jews, Nazis, ingenues, heroes, and heroines-alerting us to the possibility of less obvious constructions in the more familiar mise-en-scène of the main plot, which (of course) replicates (and queers) the storylines and subject positions from the movies. Webs of intrigue and specters of betrayal saturate the texts across the whole map of the film, so that one instantiation of insidious subjectivity is evoked by the film's entrapment of spectators in unwarranted suspicion of Molina's perfidy. As we noted in The French Lieutenant's Woman, doubling reinforces assaults on subject stability both through reflexive subject formation and through undoing of looking practices.

Braga's disappearance into phantasm through the effects of her doubling is but one marker of unstable subjectivity in the film. The switched fates of Valentin, who ends in a delirium of morphine-induced Hollywood fantasy, and Molina, who is shot to death by members of Valentin's revolutionary cadre in the midst of foiled heroics, also underscore this instability. Although engaged activism and escapist epicureanism appear to satisfy our conditioned desire for opposing stances, the ground between the two subject positions erodes throughout the film. Neither position, however, acquires any durable taint of condemnation; both characters seem to be improved by their merging of webs. Only the prison staff - those who enact cultural taxonomies, lock up the cells, and patrol the borders - emerge as villainous. The narrative, a sprawling web of jumbled texts, merging subjectivities, and elusive cultural boilerplates, defeats our efforts to organize it along typical (and elicited) morphologies of dualism and conflict.

Both of these films might be prized for challenging certitudes that predicate facile taxonomies and subjectivities, such as those marketed by the Bush administration. (I feel some urgency to justify my preoccupation with this essay in the context of larger exigencies.) By querying subject formation through assignment of it to performance-an effect that doubling instantiates-the two films portray subjectivity as a technology, revealing the efficacies of hegemony, for better or for worse. Subject formation is, of course, reciprocal and produced by a circuit among subjectivities that includes, in this case, not only those within the diegetic space of these films, but also those who produce meanings by watching them. Doubling assists interventions by both movies in our calcified looking practices, expelling us from the cheap comforts of uncomplicated consumption and relocating us in a geography of uncharted possibilities.

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