Opengender

Desperately Seeking Susan has been read as evoking a lesbian-eroticism (Stacey, 1987). In terms of Bailin's (1979) and de Lauretis' (1991) analyses, however, DSS would seem to be the kind of women's buddy film which actually effaces the lesbian implications of female bonding, and prioritises (hetero)feminine-identification in its mode of address. DSS does represent female friendship as a precursor to the successful heterosexual bondings by which the narrative is resolved. The two women do not meet until the last scenes and are thus shown in frame together only once and they exchange looks within the diegesis only once. The women are not given any independent goals and, apart from the sex industry, no visible means of support either. Unlike female buddy films of the 1970s, however, DSS does make frequent use of connective cutting. It is this point of view editing which might tend to invert the gendered gaze and arm the intra-female look with lesbian erotic potential.

DSS substitutes the character of Roberta in the position of the male protagonist who investigates the enigma of the woman — Susan. Roberta's gaze onto Susan would thus potentially map onto an inversionist model of homosexual desire. Stacey's analysis (1987) intended, however, to move beyond a gendered model of identification by arguing that the women are different from one another but also interchangeable. She located the reasons for the absence of an account of "the specifically homosexual pleasures of female spectatorship" in the theoretical absence of a female subject position in Mulvey's model of spectatorship and an "insistence upon a gendered dualism of sexual desire [which] maps homosexuality onto an assumed antithesis of masculinity and femininity" (Stacey, 1987: 48-53). Stacey's critical expositions of All About Eve and DSS focused, instead, on:

[T]he fascinations which structure both narratives [which] are precisely about difference — forms of otherness between women characters which are not merely reducible to sexual difference, so often seen as the sole producer of desire itself. (Stacey, 1987: 53)

The interplay of desire and identification thus opens out a female homosexual space denied by the parameters of psychoanalytic film theory.

De Lauretis dismissed such claims arguing that, in psychoanalytic terms, Roberta's "'childlike' wish is a kind of identification that is at once ego-directed, narcissistic, and desexualised, devoid of sexual aim" (de Lauretis, 1991: 260). Phallic desire wants to have its object, whilst feminine identification is a desexualised wanting to be the object of desire. For de Lauretis, Stacey was simply, once again, collapsing female desire into female identification. But if it is taken into account that a certain phallic eroticism conventionally attaches to the protagonistic gaze onto the woman in popular cinema, then Roberta's gaze upon Susan will inevitably become somewhat eroticised. However narcissistic the wish which drives the narrative, the foregrounding of the intra-female gaze must inevitably also generate a moment of phallic voyeurism (a wanting-to-have) in the relay of the female spectator's gaze through the female protagonist onto the female object of desire. This may remain within the inversionist terms of sexual difference, but it nevertheless suggests a moment of lesbian eroticism.

The psychoanalytic approach, however, also denies any incoherences in the discursive production of spectatorship. An interpretative shift induced by intertextual reference to the authorship of the text further inflects a motivated reading, as will extra-cinematic identifications brought to the text by spectators. From a lesbian point of view, the film seems not merely not lesbian, but positively anxious to distance heterosexual feminism from the 'spectre' of lesbianism which inevitably haunts the heterosexual feminist's effort to represent herself for herself in the realist text. The visual form and narrative of Desperately Seeking Susan clearly encodes critical awareness of such issues and a motivation to disorder or estrange the gendered coding of the heterosexual relay, whilst avoiding the invocation of 'inversionist' effects. The inversion implied by attaching the eroticising gaze to a female protagonist is simultaneously undermined by heterosexual-feminist-reflexive narrative construction.

In the classical relay, the male protagonist relays the gaze of the male spectator onto the female as erotic spectacle. In feminist work on the noir genre it was suggested that the covert protagonism of the femme fatale disrupts her objectification as feminine-erotic spectacle. In DSS, through a series of double-inversions, Roberta's passively-coded character (phallic-protagonistically) relays the (phallicised) gaze of the feminist spectator onto the phallicised-feminine character of Susan as erotic spectacle. It is the passive, feminised, character, Roberta, who initiates; and Susan, the rebel exhibiting her "phallic" competence and independence, who is initially the spectacularised object of Roberta's voyeuristic scrutiny. The subject positions of the two women are then inverted again through narrative twists which send the previously spectacularised Susan to investigate the previously protagonised Roberta. The film also runs an inter-textual critical commentary on gendered spectatorship in calculated references to feminist film theory. An example is the scene in which the stripper comes offstage, groping for her glasses, complaining that the manager won't let her wear them on stage, and quipping: "I don't wear them on my tits". This cites feminist critical discussion of the negation of the woman's own look in becoming the sexualised object of the male gaze. DSS, however, tends to stifle gender unease in a fantasy resolution, developing a discourse which estranges, revises, and then re-naturalises heterosexual femininity. Whilst the film does hint at more concrete threats and forms of control, Roberta's conflict is enacted and resolved in the realm of fantasy in which identification and object choice seem more plastic. The film sets out to subvert the notion of the sexually autonomous female as 'perverse;' unfortunately it does so at the expense of lesbianism.

Generically, the film is a romantic comedy of errors, driven by misunderstandings and confusion of characters' gender identities. This generic setting cites the discursive field of 'temporary transvestism' identified by Straayer (1992) which is, whilst being popular with lesbians and gays, ultimately normalising:

These films offer spectators a momentary, vicarious trespassing of society's accepted boundaries for gender and sexual behaviour. Yet one can relax confidently in the orderly demarcations reconstituted by the films' endings. (Straayer, 1992: 36)

Comedic sexual disguise can, nevertheless, be used to enable a self-reflexive approach to gendered representation:

On a cultural level, crossdressing may be understood as a mode of performance in which — through play on a disjunction between clothes and body — the socially constructed nature of sexual difference is foregrounded and even subjected to comment: what appears natural, then, reveals itself as artifice. (Kuhn, 1985: 49)

DSS very clearly sets out to foreground and denaturalise femininity, but it does not do so by the use of cross-gendered disguise. Its troubling of gender boundaries is carried out more at a formal level of the production of the visual ordering of gender in the film-text itself.

In DSS, there are two central heterosexual couples involved in echoing sequences of farcical misprojections. The narrative is very tightly and symmetrically organised as actions are repeated and reversed by the various characters, opening out representations of gender and sexuality, whilst moving the story to resolution. Roberta uses the time-honoured medium of personal ads to realise a sexual fantasy, but her desire is to become Susan (an object of desire en despére) and to be sought by an adoring lover. As such, this desire is identificatory. However, a different symbolic linkage between the two women is built up through connective cutting and narrative reversals, repetitions and mimicries between the two women's actions. These reversals and inversions temporarily destabilise the heterosexual relay of the gaze.

The film opens with the making up of Roberta's Barbie-doll femininity in a beauty salon with the song "It's in his kiss" on the soundtrack. The construction of Roberta's feminine image by men for men is immediately contrasted with an image of Susan lying on her back, taking her own photograph with a Polaroid camera (that clicking sound again!). In contrast with the passivity of the gaze's object, Susan struggles to control and project her own image. Roberta's characterisation as an ultra-feminised, passive, child-woman, as well as Susan's as the phallic-femme controller of the gaze are both undercut at the outset by the phallicising voyeurism of Roberta's protagonistic gaze upon Susan as desire-object. The voyeurism of Roberta's protagonistic, investigative, gaze is thoroughly emphasised by transferring Roberta's look to the threatening gaze of the villain through connective cutting; by Roberta's use of binoculars through which to observe Susan; and by the partial obscuring of Susan's image in the sequence in which Roberta "tails" Susan investigatively. To add to the voyeuristic effect, Susan is also initially unaware of Roberta's gaze.

The film's narrative is divided into three sections. In the first, Roberta, as protagonist, watches and investigates Susan through a series of clues. At the end of the first section, Roberta loses consciousness, and her identity (documents). Des, the projectionist, begins to project the mystery of feminine identity — Roberta's own fantasy self (Susan) — onto the amnesiac Roberta. The 'poor fit' of Roberta's usurpation of Susan's role as femme fatale foregrounds her (feminine) masquerade. Des and Roberta become lost and confused in shifting sexual identities but begin to fall really in love. Des is brought into the identity crisis and now his and Roberta's — rather than Roberta's and Susan's — actions begin to chime and echo. Roberta's husband, Gary, meanwhile, enters the rhythm of reversals as he starts seeking Roberta. He rhymes Roberta's poor performance in the scene at the night-club when he dances with Susan. He finds himself paired mistakenly with another man twice, as Susan leads him a merry dance. This scene is played for laughs — the gay people appear bizarre and alien, merely symbolic of displacement and sexual confusion. Cross-cut with the image of Susan, clad in boxer shorts, reading Roberta's diary and discovering Roberta's obsession with herself, Gary and his sister hysterically discuss Roberta — is she a lesbian and/or prostitute? This further disarms implications of lesbianism by parodying the assumption that lesbianism (or sexual excess) is the destination or 'meaning' of female autonomy. In any case, Roberta's heterosexuality is now indisputable — she is already Des' satisfied lover. In the final section of the film, the intra-diegetic configuration of the gaze is reversed. Susan, the object of Roberta's investigative gaze, now turns to investigate Roberta.

Although the shifting focus of the gendered gaze is foregrounded, the women's gazes never actually meet. Whilst Roberta 'stalks' Susan and watches her through binoculars, Susan is unaware of the gaze. Susan then becomes aware of Roberta's fascination with her, but before Susan and Roberta can exchange looks, Roberta has become unaware of Susan because of her amnesia. Susan takes over the activity of seeking Roberta — who is unconsciously masquerading as Susan — and Susan is therefore (narcissistically) seeking herself. This creates a very disordered distribution of gendered identification and desire throughout the text as a whole. Nevertheless, rather than constituting a homo-eroticised dissemination of desire through this fantasy scenario, the narrative constantly refers the spectator back to heterosexual attachments. At the very moment when Susan becomes aware of Roberta's inquiring gaze, Susan's eroticised gaze onto Roberta is transferred to Des by connective cutting. The point of view editing consistently refers the gaze of each women onto the other through the male character, Des.

When Roberta is knocked out a second time, the fantasy and 'real' worlds are brought back together. Gender/role contradictions are resolved by new heterosexual pairings. Finally, a cinematic image within the diegesis (a fantasy/sci-fi movie which Des is projecting) is disrupted as the couple kiss and (oblivious to the projected image) lean against the projector. The intra-diegetic cinematic image disintegrates, closing down performative space. This trope on the disruption of the relay signifies an apparently more 'natural' interaction between Des and Roberta — it's in his kiss. The final shot in the film signifies a refusal of marriage as the goal of heterosexual femininity. The active/passive, wife/whore polarity which the narrative constantly pointed up and disrupted is thus synthesised and resolved to a renaturalised, 'post-feminist,' heterosexual-feminine (desirable) identity.

Although they specifically concern cross-gender dressing, Kuhn's remarks on 'sexual disguise' may be relevant to this revision of the feminine masquerade:

In its performance aspect, clothing sets up a play between visible outward appearance — in this case, gender as signified by dress — and an essence which may not be visible but is nonetheless held to be more 'real' than appearance — here the gender of the person whose true nature may be concealed, both literally and metaphorically, beneath the clothes. (Kuhn, 1985: 54)

De Lauretis' (1991) assessment of Doane's theory of the feminine masquerade concluded that this reaction-formation is integrally male-addressed. Lesbian-feminine masquerade, on the contrary, denaturalises in that the masquerade is addressed to the (female) lesbian butch, and the butch's masquerade is not only pure performance but also female-addressed. Cross-gendered disguise retains a desiring distance because, although ironised, the gendered configuration of the relay remains unchanged. The divergence between performance of gender and its putative essence within the relay opens out a potentially homoerotic scenario. The comedy of mistaken identity in DSS deploys performativity in a comparable way — except that a disjuncture between 'essence' and 'performance' implied here is not cross-gendered. The 'difference' foregrounded by Roberta's and Susan's performances is not a gender difference, but a difference, or gap, between an implied feminine essence and the performance of patriarchally defined dichotomous feminine roles. It is the difference between Roberta's feminised compliance and Susan's feminist rebellion which is signified by clothing here.

The foregrounding of the women's interchangeable "masquerades" effects a fantasy space which does enable "a momentary, vicarious trespassing of society's accepted boundaries for gender and sexual behaviour" (Straayer, 1992:36). The penultimate scenario in which the intra-diegetic screen image collapses signifies the collapse of that ironising difference. Roberta has become what she wished to be — a heterosexually successful feminist. And through the narrative triumph of feminism, Susan's outlawed sexual excess has also become acceptably reframed. The women's intimacy remains abstract, however, composed of the polarisation of their respective relationships to femininity and to the film-text itself. Much of the comedy in DSS is based on the 'lack of fit' of the feminine ideal for 'real' women. The narrative resolution, however, reveals the naturalising assumption of a 'real' femininity underlying patriarchal projections. Heterosexual subjects, by definition, try to suppress or disavow the denaturalising appearance of any such disjuncture. In order to move beyond the terms of heterosexual gender, therefore, it is necessary to move beyond heterosexuality.