by Marilyn C. Wesley

These theoretical trends have their counterpart in feminist literary works which employ film techniques, and here few contemporary American writers are more central or challenging than Joyce Carol Oates, whose novels and short stories are notable for their often violent depiction of the predicament of women in patriarchal culture. As Eileen Teper Bender observes, Oates's novels include cinematic narrative structure evident in such textual devices as fragmentary narrative, flash-backs, and freeze-frames (118, 63, 75, 76, 88-89) and plots that are based on characters' "celluloid fantasies" (49). In addition, Oates's fiction has received two film treatments: a 1996 version of her 1993 novel Foxfire and Joyce Chopra's 1992 Smooth Talk, an adaptation of the 1966 well-known story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Also demonstrating Oates's interest in how media representation operates is her own New York Times review of Smooth Talk in which she explains that the ending of her story is a "conclusion impossible to transfigure into film" because the "writer works in a single dimension, the director works in three" (72, 71).

In the following essay, I wish to explore the way that feminist concerns and film theory intersect in Oates's much anthologized 1974 short story, "The Girl" a work which depicts the brutal rape of a sixteen-year-old girl, and which by presenting this violence in the form of the filming of the event, functions as a parodic adaptation of classic cinema in keeping with Oates's general critique of American ideologies of feminine identity. One by one, Oates's most memorable youthful heroines endure destructive "salvations" in their attempts to achieve adult identities. Connie of "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Maureen of them, and Enid of You Must Remember This, to name only three, submit themselves to phallocentric culture, experiencing self-loss in the form of alienation, madness, and probable rape. The meaning of this predominant pattern is condensed in Oates's short story "The Girl," in which a young woman tries to find recognition by becoming the star of a movie in which she is quite literally almost obliterated.

As a short story, "The Girl" takes the form of the teenaged protagonist's disjointed memories of the events leading up to the making of the film in which she is raped, the film itself, and the aftermath of this event. In the plot of the story, the man whom the girl comes to know as The Director lures her into his truck with the promise of her participation in a film that he is going to make, and she drives with him, another man, and a boy, whom she also identifies by their roles in the film, to a California beach where the filming of the rape takes place. After the event, the girl recovers in a hospital, is questioned by the police, and later encounters The Director again. On this occasion, she is able to address her central concern, the fear that the rape was not actually filmed.

Although the girl's recollection may be occasioned by the inquiries of the detectives, the ten-page account is itself organized in five sections subtitled as stages of film production - I Background Material, II The Rehearsal, III The Performance, IV A Sequel, V The Vision. The format that Oates imposes on the story evokes the notebook-style observations of influential film theorists like Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim, and also the editors of Cahiers du Cinema (Mast & Cohen), suggesting that Oates is concerned with the story in the context of critical discourse about film. Because this narrative arrangement also has the effect of evading a clear chronological account of events and a coherent representation of characters, the girl and her experience seem less important than the film-making in which she participates. Indeed it is her fundamental lack of significance which motivates that participation. For the unnamed girl, film production is a way of structuring her experience, and one which is necessary because she seems to have no other means of identifying herself or ordering her situation.

When, for example, a detective asks the girl how may assailants there were, she is unable to formulate an answer; instead, she thinks, "I could describe the Santa Monica Freeway if I wanted to .... The reason I could describe the Freeway is that I knew it already, not memorized but in pieces, the way you know your environment" (12). This American teenager apparently participates in a culture which has provided her with no system to organize experience beyond the most elementary level of dissociated sensations.

.... "I mean look at her. Isn't she _____? Isn't it?"

"Perfect" Roybay said. (11-12)

Not only would film demonstrate her wholeness, her perfection, but her transformation could effect a public integration as well: "'Oh look at her, [The Director] said dreamily, looking at me, 'couldn't the world come together in her'" (14).

The girl's participation in The Director's film, he implies, will redefine her as a star whose ability to achieve and transmit the illusion of perfectibility will have a religious aspect. Commenting generally on this sacrilizing, Molly Haskell has observed: "The conception of woman as idol, art object, icon, and visual entity is, after all, the first principle of the aesthetic of film .... women in the movies had a mystical, quasi-religious connection with the public" (7-11). It is precisely this integrative reverence that the girl must hope to achieve through her participation in the film, but the anticipated conversion through image to idol also points to her function in a more complex ideological exchange.

"What is represented in ideology," Louis Althusser argues, is "not the system of real relations, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relation in which they live" (165). In Oates's story, the ideology of feminine representation not only substitutes for the girl's own formlessness; her transfiguration is also supposed to serve as the imaginary solution to real problems of masculine identity. In the girl's accession to The Director's implied promise of wholeness, there is barter afoot even more basic than the "sexual favors-for-stardom trade" that the story parodies; the further implication is that in exchange for the specious self-definition she will acquire through the film process, the girl will serve as the vehicle of illusory integration for the film's male audience.

It is the problematic nature of this exchange which produces a second principle of the film aesthetic. Psychoanalytically oriented film theorists Rosiland Coward, Christian Metz, Stephen Heath, and Claire Johnston have argued that cinematic mechanisms mimic those of the unconscious. For feminist critics, however, it is not the individual unconscious that is at issue but filmic reflection of the unconscious of "patriarchy in general" (Kaplan 34). In the movie of "The Girl" we observe this phallocentric unconscious in operation.

I am The Girl watching the film of The Girl walking on a beach watching the water. Now The Girl watching The Girl turning The Girl in black-and-white approached by a shape, a dark thing out of the corner of the eye. The eye must be the camera. The dark thing must be a shape with legs, with arms, with a white-helmeted head.... The Director calls to me, yells to me: Run. Run.... The Director is very close to us, right beside us. Turn her around, make her scream - do it like this....

The film is speeded up. Too fast. I have lost hold of it, can't see. I am being driven backwards, downwards, burrowed-into, like a hammer being hammered against all at once. Do I see noseholes, eyeholes, mouthholes?

Something being pounded into flesh like meat. (18-19)

The reversal of alternatives which has occurred in this sequence parallels closely Molly Haskell's view of how female characterization in movies involves the movement "From Reverence to Rape." The violence of this shift - from the girl's expectation of perfect integration to her vicious degradation - suggests the operation of two conflicting ideological codes which Oates dramatizes by juxtaposing the vocabulary of high art with the content of the porno flick. The Director insists that the film is "a work of art," but his intended audience may be assumed to have other expectations: "I know certain people who are going to pay a lot to see it," he declares (17). Although The Director speaks of "tragedy" and a "tiny eight-minute poem,' the girl is denied the transcendence of art; instead she is reduced to "reddened meat, scraped raw" (17, 19).

In "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), Laura Mulvey explains how the mechanisms of male esteem at work in classic cinema are related to the predominating "male gaze" characteristic of the medium (418). In Oates's story, the film of"The Girl" epitomizes the ideology of classic cinema and enables us to see the effect of the gendered perspective of that gaze in action. In the film sequence quoted above, the girl is being photographed, looked at by the camera (and the anticipated spectators of the film), but the apparent origin of this gaze is revealed as the "dark thing" that comes into focus as The Motorcyclist. Through his eyes, and those of The Director and The Cop who join him, we observe the girl as a sexual object who provokes group rape. This progression is accomplished by Oates's narrative replication of the "shot/reverse shot" technique of classic cinema, the "cinematic set from which the second shot shows the field from which the first shot is assumed to have been taken" (Silverman 201). Although, as Mulvey points out, in classic cinema the gaze actually consists of the camera, the audience, and the characters in the film, this narrative technique obscures the first two in favor of the fictive perspective of a man who is looking at a woman. In Oates's adaptation, for The Director this shift to the predominating male gaze is an inevitable, even mystical, result of the movie-making process: "I was imagining [the perspective on the action] in The Girl. But...it wasn't working" because the film must be "centered in the head of The Cop" later adding that "it's a vision, it can't be resisted" (17, 18, Oates's ellipses).

The suppression of the perspective of the woman in favor of that of the man contrived by the shot/reverse shot formation in classic cinema is detrimental to both men and women, although at first the positioning of the woman as sexual object appears to be a source of pleasure for the man. As much as the spectator may enjoy her eroticized display, and through identification with the male protagonist he may imagine his possession of her, there is psychological danger in the emphatic differentiation necessary to this process. At the same time that the woman, presented as vulnerable to domination, instigates the imagination of masculine power, her very vulnerability evokes fear of weakness. As Mulvey explains: "Ultimately, the meaning of the woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organization of entrance into the symbolic order" (421). Thus, the display of the woman may arouse the anxiety of the man, which, according to Mulvey, classic cinema tries to contain within two strategies, the glorification of the woman through fetishism or the disparagement of women through voyeurism.

The construction of the fetish works to offset castration fears because it glorifies the female object in such a way that she becomes "reassuring rather than dangerous." It is this operation which accounts for the attitude of "reverence" towards the female star. In voyeurism, the second principle of film aesthetic, a strategy of devaluation operates: "The power to subject another to the will sadistically or to gaze voyeuristically is turned on the woman who is the object of both" in an attempt to control or punish her (Mulvey 424). In Oates's story the rape in the film represents an extreme example of this second strategy. The Director, Roybay, and the school-boy cop, all marginal figures, seek the reassuring spectacle of female vulnerability. Her gendered weakness supports the illusion of their masculine power, but presents as well the unwelcome reminder of their own vulnerability. The psychoanalytic hint of castration that her image conveys is too close to their respective positions of social impotence. Thus the extraordinary violence of their assault on the girl is an attempt to destroy the trace of their "real relations" of powerlessness that her weakness makes present even during the very enactment of ideological power.

In Oates's story, not only does the predominance of the male gaze provoke the physical destruction of the woman, it also leads to her psychological obliteration. In the process of being filmed, the girl finally loses all control of her own perspective. By acceding to the process of the film, she literally relinquishes her image and her sense of self to the "eye" of the "camera." At first she is united with the image it portrays: "I am The Girl watching the film of The Girl...." But then she is forced to abandon the illusion of identification and power; she loses "hold of it, can't see." Her final vision of herself is not of integrated person but of decimated "flesh."

The dilemma of Oates's girl - who represents the generic female in contemporary culture - is her suspension between the ideological strategies of reverence and rape. Outside of cultural discourse the girl has discovered no means to the integration that The Director encourages her to imagine as positive transformation possible through participation in the order imposed by the film process. Instead her entry into the symbolic order dominated by patriarchal imperatives at work in the classic film produces the radical losses she experiences as rape. We may understand this effect as a dramatic example of Lacan's concept of aphanisis, "the fading of the subject's being in the face of its meaning" (Mitchell & Rose 15-16n2). For Lacan, the woman entering the symbolic order of culture necessarily suffers the loss of phenomenal identity to become the opposite and privative term which establishes a system of masculine power. The disparaged "passivity" and "self-abnegation" (Grant 28) of Oates's female protagonists may be understood as painful consequences of their attempts to position themselves within a sexist culture.

In "The Girl,' then, Oates seems to take us to the movies where we see the same old show: the necessary inscription of the woman by culture and its detrimental consequences. But is this really the effect of the ambiguous short story? Two opposing interpretations of the Chopra film based on the short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" articulate feminist alternatives that may also apply to the interpretation of "The Girl." Whereas B. Ruby Rich described Smooth Talk as a "pernicious" piece of formulaic propaganda discouraging feminine sexual exploration (141), Brenda O. Daly argued that instead of simply repeating "the horror formula at women's expense," the film broke "the silence imposed on rape victims" (148, 149). The issue at stake in this exchange and in turn in "The Girl" is Oates's relation to cultural discourse. Is she allied with patriarchal control of women or is she on the side of their liberation from evidently destructive roles? Oates's remarks about the differences between Smooth Talk and her own "where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" stress that the effect of story does not overlap with the effect of film. Similarly, we may understand the story of "The Girl" as resistive interrogation of the coercive implications of the film it contains.

While recognizing the significance of Mulvey's formulation of the dominant male gaze of classic cinema, recent feminist theorists have also attempted to describe ways of viewing that may empower women. Jeanne Allen, for example, argues that feminist experience can enable a spectator to construct an alternative position from which to enter the film discourse and reconceive the film text. As she sees it, the ideological inconsistencies and deficiencies that the female spectator notices may lead her to the completion of nascent strategies contained in the film or to the imagination of new ones to convert the "dominance/submission structures of interpersonal relations" structured by classic cinema "into reciprocal negotiation and empathic compromise" (43).

John Fiske, who also argues for alternative perspectives, contends that the device of excess - a form of exaggeration "which may approach the self-knowingness of 'camp'" (90) - may illuminate contradictions and inadequacies which activate subversive interpretation by an engaged feminist audience. In Oates's story, such excess is evident in the girl's extraordinary faith in the movie process, in her bizarre appeal for reassurance from her victimizer that there was film in the camera, and in the exaggerated disintegration of her character. Significantly, after the rape, the girl's normal condition of diffuse consciousness deteriorates to the point of linguistic aphasia: "I couldn't talk right. The man tried to listen politely, but here is what I said: '....rock-hand, two of them, birdburrow, truck, toy wheel, the arrow, the exit, the way out....'" (20, Oates's ellipses). This list of nouns does identify discrete units of perception of the events culminating in the rape, but her trauma is so severe that she has lost all grammatical means to connect them.

The story does, in fact, have a campy tone which is hard to account for on the basis of the violent events and the pathetic characters, except that the violence is so extreme and the characters are so inept as to suggest parody. Fiske theorizes that excessive proliferation of signs of "woman as victim" may lead to two different receptions by an audience: masochistic identification with the victim or "demystification of those norms of victimization which are usually naturalized and unnoticed, but which excess foregrounds, thus revealing their patriarchal arbitrariness" (193). To read Oates's story as parodic revelation is to read it as an occasion for recognizing the destructive expectations it presents.

By concentrating on condemnation of what Joanne Creighton has called "the unnatural adjustments that most of Oates' women make to their unliberated selves" (148), many early critics found cause for complaint in Oates's depiction of the feminine predicament. But my discussion of the film in her story argues that in many ways Oates's fiction and feminist film theory are posing the same liberatory questions: How is the woman being produced by culture? What are the psychological and social effects of that production? And how may this coding be resisted? Oates has defined parody as the "playing out of forms out of which life has disappeared" (The Edge of Impossibility 11). By writing "The Girl" as a short story about making a film, by presenting the campy excess of the protagonist's rape within and by the formula of classic cinema, Oates challenges the view that the myths of reverence and rape are a cultural necessity. As I have attempted to show, this story is a feminist revelation of the destructiveness of unexamined gender ideology. The parodic treatment of starmaking in the story implies the necessity of rejecting ideological assumptions that are both dead, that is figuratively outmoded, and literally deadening both to individuals and to the culture which reproduces them.

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MARILYN C. WESLEY is Babcock Professor of English at Hartwick College and author of Refusal and Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates' Fiction (1993) and Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women's Travel in American Literature (1998). She is currently at work on a study of violence in contemporary fiction by men, and serves as poetry editor for Phoebe: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory and Aesthetics.