Gender, Genre, and Excess
Linda Williams
Linda Williams categorizes out three different movies: horror movies with scary monsters who rip apart teenagers; sad movies that focus on unseemly emotions that remind people of their own powerlessness as a child; and movies with kissing scenes.
What they have in common is that these three categories all display a sense of excessiveness, and the kind of excessiveness can be interchanged within these three categories, despite the melodramas which are generally more identified with the excessiveness of gender and sex retained pathos and the naked displays of emotion. This article speculates the gross body genres on the bodies of spectators.
Classical realistic style of Classical Hollywood Cinema, studies by Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, is featured as straightforwardly progressive narrative line and a clear closure. Altman argues, instead, that within this dominant tendency, we also have some melodramaticality, like unmotivated events, rhythmic montage, highlighted parallelism, overlong spectacles which demonstrate the sense of excesses in the classical narrative system that alert us tot he existence of a competing logic, a second voice, a second system of the classical stories.
For these genres we can try to use the term Melodrama to indicate a wide range of films which has a large system of excess. A narrower sense of melodrama, together with pornography and horror films, can constitute a form of “the woman’s film” which often address women in their patriarchic status and their bodily illness status.
In these three categories, the sensationallity of the body spectacles are in different field: orgasm in pornography, violence and terror in horror films and weeping in melodramas. In order to portrait these inarticulate cries of pleasure in porn, screams of fear in horror, sobs of anguish in melodrama, the bodies of women functions as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear and pain, as Foucault said about how sexual saturation of female body can give most powerfull sensations to the audience.
This argument echoes Barker’s theory of film’s skin, muscles and viscera: in the viscera chapter she draws parallels between the cinematic and huan viscera, (For instance, Barker highlights the correspondence between cinematic movement and human movement, and the tension between perceived continuity and underlying discontinuity/intermittence in the cinematic context resonates deeply and sensually with our own bodily rhythms in ways that can be both pleasurable and discomforting.
Linda also focuses on the degree to which the audience’s bodily response to what is on the screen, for example, whether the spectator at the porn film actually orgasms, at the horror film shudders in fear, at the melodrama dissolves in tears.
But these women bodies in pleasure, fear or tear, cannot be concluded reductively as to please the male gaze. It is true that The power dynamics in the film bodies pornography’s appeal to its presumed male viewers would be characterized as sadistic; horror films appeal to the emerging sexual identities of its spectators would be sadomasochistic; and melodrama appeal to presumed female viewers would be masochistic. But even in the most extreme displays of famine masochistic suffering, there is always a component of either power or pleasure for the woman victim. Plus woman does not necessarily identify with only the suffering women, not even the male audience’s identification is fixed nor entirely passive.
The Barbarians is a 1987 American-Italian peplum film, directed by Ruggero Deodato. Like many of the peplum movies, the movie Barbarians features violence agains women because women makes the best victims, but the victimization and the spectacles of intense suffering and loss also suggest, at least for Ismene, success and pleasure.
At the beginning of the movie, Kadar wants the magic ruby, he ambushed the cirrus and kills many of them. When he wants to intimidate Canary, he spent a long time playing with the sword about Cara’s belly and finally stabbed her. This prolongation of his action even makes us want to see the end of his play and thus the desire of Kadar in away reflects our fantasy of seeing Cara being stabbed.
We also see a lot of suffering of Canary. When Kadar arrives the Forbidden Land along with Canary to find the ruby. Canary knowing that her time is at an end, calls upon the ruby's magic to make Kadar kill her. But still, this is a super strange scene, the only value of her death seems to upset Kadar. This logic might make the audience less identified with Canary anymore, because the audience tend not to mimic her actions anymore, their physical reaction of sadness does not coincide with her death.
Ismene, instead, provides the audience the pleasure which oscillates between identifying with the initial passive powerless of the abject, and terrorized girl-victim of horror and her later, active empowerment — when she becomes the new queen.
This complication and problematization of power and pleasure invite the audience to breakdown the rigid dichotomies of masculine and feminine, active and passive, even heterosexual and homosexual, even the male to male sex taboo.
The young orphans Kutchek and Gore, when Kadar wants to kidnap Canary, attack Kadar and bite off his fingers, but back at Kadar’s palace, when his evil sorceress wants to find out who is responsible for the biting, both of them step up for each other.
When Kutchek and Gore have grown up to big gladiators and escape into the woods, they are mistaken by their old tribemates for enemies and nearly hanged, Kutchek and Gore manage to save and help each other and reveal their true identities. When they find a secret passage to where Canary has been taken prisoner, in order to prevent being recognized, they even kiss each other, one of them is pretty enthusiastic another one reluctant.
This destabilization of of gender fixed and heterosexual couple fixed genre of peplum not only adds to the comic effect, allows a much more rich range of interrelationship within the movie, but also problematizes the gender and sexuality of the film bodies, making it possible for the audience to be identified in a fluid way.
