Opengender

Formulaic hybrid-generic productions quickly become repetitive. TV networks monitor numbers of queer plotlines and characters to avoid saturation, and Hollywood quickly moves on to fresh fields for exploitation. Queer males were already becoming passé. New Black Cinema was also hitting the doldrums of repetition. But lesbians were riding high by the mid-1990s. Black women — and especially black lesbians — still represented a minimally tapped market. So, almost inevitably, Hollywood hybridised New Black Cinema with the girl-buddy-actioner, throwing in a lesbian character for good measure. Hey presto — Set It Off (1996)! In comparison with Bound, released in the same year, Set It Off was barely noticed by the British lesbian press (a trawl of British gay and lesbian press review pages as well as relevant film sites on the internet garnered nothing at all). Mainstream reviews were both routine and carefully neutral.

Black-female-cast popular films from the independent sector such as Just Another Girl on the IRT and Mi Vida Loca reworked the successful formula of the black 'ghetto aesthetic' rather than white female-buddy forms. The use of this generic convention did not appear to produce the smallest frisson of lesbian eroticism. This may well be due to the heterosexual coding of the visual relay and narrative which is typical of the these feminist adaptations of the 'ghetto' genre. Set It Off seemed to be looking to broaden the potentially marketable appeal both of feminist-buddy actioners such as Thelma and Louise and Bad Girls and the highly successful ghetto aesthetic of New Black Cinema. In contrast with Thelma and Louise, Bad Girls, and Bound, however, Set It Off makes relatively little deconstructive use of point-of-view editing. This, together with its present day, urban, setting gives a degree of narrative omniscience which is very different from the implication of the spectator's gaze in the intra-female exchange characteristic of white female buddy films.

Set It Off, with its group protagonist and limited use of point-of-view editing, limits the homoeroticising production of fetishistic or voyeuristic effects. Although considerable intimacy is built up by the frequency with which the women are framed together, they are rarely shown to exchange looks. Consequently, the cinematic potentiality of a lesbian-erotic exchange of looks is shut down. This is probably due to the commercially motivated deployment of the omniscient visual structure characteristic of the 'ghetto aesthetic'. On the other hand, it seems politically important that representation of black women should be contextualised in a (popular) black generic tradition — the choice of which is limited by the commercial constraints placed upon black indie filmmaking. The 'ghetto aesthetic', however, has marginalised women and tends to deploy a detached omniscience which, at the same time as it apparently impartially glorifies black masculinity, interpellates the spectator to a critical assessment of the conditions which it represents (Wiegman, 1993). Ignoring feminist agendas such as the gender-exclusivity of the relay of the look is also one of the genre's salient characteristics. It is probably an accidental effect that its omniscient narrative strategy tends to close down the homoerotic potentiality of the pronounced homosociality of the genre, which otherwise does not appear to encode awareness of the possibility that the male gaze may become homoeroticised (that is, it takes no discernible evasive action).

It may be the case, as argued by Wiegman (1993), that such conventions are, in any case, specific to the coding of white masculinity and a white feminist discussion of their effects:

Placing the question of the male gaze within a historical context and subsequently differentiating the possibilities of spectatorship along lines other than gender begins to suggest a necessary paradigm shift for feminist film theory [...] the voyeuristic pleasures of cinema, however wrought through a system of identification based on white modes of masculinity, are seemingly denied almost wholly to African American men. (Wiegman, 1993: 178)

Wiegman argued against the conflation of race and gender which has so often resulted in the situating of black masculinity in 'the feminine':

For the African American male is not a symbolic woman, no matter how intense the process through which a chain of social and specular being is inscribed along lines provided by sexual difference. If lack must be consigned, if the black male must be physically, psychologically, and/or symbolically castrated, then his construction in the guise of the feminine evinces not simply an aversion to racial difference but a profound attempt to negate masculine sameness, a sameness so terrifying to the cultural position of the white masculine that only castration can provide the necessary disavowal. (Wiegman, 1993: 178-9)

On a terrain of masculine difference, the feminist insistence on masculinity as 'an economy of the same' is thus radically repositioned. Masculinity is inevitably coded differently in New Black cinema.

[T]he logic of the gaze as the primary articulatory mechanism around which sexual difference is understood as encoded in filmic production needs to be suspended, so that other formations of gender (and other deployments of the discourse of sexual difference) can be more fully explored. (Wiegman, 1993: 180)

Contrary to the generality of critical accounts of the genre, Wiegman suggested that New Black cinema is not marked by an unmediated sexism but instead seeks to subvert or deny the "paradigmatic exchange of activity for objectification" (182) characteristic of representations of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s. (Also characteristic of pre-second-wave lesbian practice, and still clearly an element in contemporary lesbian re-coding practices.) The formal strategy sets up a different coding of "recognition" for the black, male, gaze. Boyz N the Hood opens with [...]

[...] two full screen statements: first, 'One out of every 21 Black American males will be murdered [...] Most will die at the hands of another Black male,' followed by the camera's rapid focus on a Stop sign. In this half minute, the film [...] establishes a significatory framework through which those who contribute to this cultural undoing are targeted as the primary audience. (Wiegman, 1993: 183)

White lesbians have traditionally located themselves in white female buddy narratives not only by deploying lesbian recognition codes but also through a lesbian-productive estrangement in the male-coded relay of the lesbian spectator's gaze. In the light of Wiegman's analysis of New Black Cinema, this mode of spectatorial engagement with female protagonism or bonding now appears as white-specific. That this lesbianising effect is limited in Set It Off is probably not a deliberate political statement on the part of the film's producers (who clearly grasp the representational techniques of segmentation) but, nevertheless, the centrality of cinematic point of view to lesbian interpretative strategy is clearly opened to question by this re-contextualisation of its modality. Bound's reflexivity to the classical noir genre would, on the contrary, foreground the eroticism of the noir genre's classically voyeuristic construction of visual space by the substitution of a female protagonist. Much of the fetishising effect in western buddy genres results from an accentuated focus of the culturally male-coded gaze onto the male (or phallicised-female) body. Bad Girls' and Thelma and Louise's western origins (realist, and predominantly offering fetishistic and narcissistic, rather than heterosexual voyeuristic, pleasures) do not, however, prevent these texts from self-reflexively drawing attention to the visual relay and the subversion of its generic scopic structure. Considerable use is usually made of point of view editing to emphasise the phallic control of the action-hero/ine which is absent in Set It Off's omniscient mode.

Set It Off, however, also draws on several other genres. Waiting to Exhale, the first black-cast female-buddy film, was a more melodramatic narrative. Melodrama had already been mixed into the girl-buddy genre in films such as Beaches and Steel Magnolias. The director of Boys on the Side, Herbert Ross, also directed The Turning Point, one of the 1970s' New Women's buddy films, and also Steel Magnolias, a more traditionally 'feminine' weepy. Portrayal of the group bond in Boys on the Side oscillated between boys road movie and the women's weepy in that it "is Robin's illness, rather than the forced togetherness of the journey, which peels back the layers of this new 'family'" (Powell, 1995: 24). The success of lesbian romances such as Desert Hearts, and the economic viability of indie lesbian lites and noirs, opens another point of entry to the mainstream market. Whilst the lesbian lites addressed a 'niche' market, the more recent inclusion of one overtly lesbian character in the girl-buddy-road format in Boys on the Side, and now in Set It Off, indicates that there is an awareness of a marketing 'window' here. Nevertheless, as in the case of advertising, producers have seemed careful to corral representation of lesbianism off from association with other female characters. Goldberg, who played the black lesbian character in Boys on the Side, had previously complained about the marginalisation of the lesbianism of her character in The Color Purple. Her character's sexuality in Boys on the Side also seems marginal, being confined to a single encounter which is set aside from her bonds with the other, heterosexual, main characters. Set It Off follows this tendency to tokenise one of its characters as the lesbian.

This confinement of homoeroticism to a specified lesbian character also differentiates Set It Off from Thelma and Louise, Bad Girls and Bound. Set It Off's narrative has many of the same elements as its female-buddy antecedents, however. The first equilibrium of oppression references not only class and gender, but particularly foregrounds race. Specific events of racist/sexist oppression set off the initial rebellion which moves the women outside the law. Rape ends an equilibrium of domestic and economic oppression in both Thelma and Louise and Bad Girls. In Set It Off, however, events of racial, economic and sexual exploitation disrupt not only an oppressive equilibrium, but the aspirations of some of the women: Frankie's white-collar job, and Stony's professional ambitions vicariously lived through her brother. This engenders a second equilibrium (not so much on the road as on the edge) in which the women come to depend on each other rather than male figures. This is disrupted by a second disaster — the classic theft of the escape money with which the women hoped to build a more satisfactory equilibrium. As in Thelma and Louise, there is a sympathetic policeman and sympathetic heterosexual experience — no doubt in a (probably doomed) attempt to head off heterosexual male angst at being marginalised or excluded — as much as in disavowal of lesbian potentialities (or perhaps this actually comes to the same thing).

In Bad Girls the women innovatively survive the resultant orgy of violence. In Set It Off, only Stony survives. It is interesting to note that the only survivor of Set It Off's black female protagonism is the most middle-class aspirational of the characters as well as the lightest in complexion and the only character to demonstrate a successful heterosexual alliance with a middle-class (black) man. Set It Off thus exhibits a sound grasp of routes to privilege for women in general and black women in particular. The extent of rebellion against re-heterosexualising and re-racialising closure here is Stony's survival and her choice of loyalty to her women friends over a heterosexual relationship. Well, it's a start.

On the other hand, as with the hyper-violent black male figures of the fantasy ghetto, the wages of transgression for the women is a non-redemptive death. In Set It Off, the women do not even die together as the women do in Thelma and Louise. There is nothing about the representation of most of these deaths which might propel them into 'legend'. In fact, the violence of the deaths is represented with the visceral realism characteristic, again, of the 'ghetto' genre. This lingering representation of the women's non-redemptive deaths, one by one, takes up about a third of the running time. The 'diesel-dyke' Cleo's death is (in the terms of a white lesbian literary history, at least) butch-lesbianising in her self-sacrifice to save the heterosexual women. It also has a mythological quality of heroism, not least because of its sheer lack of plausibility in terms of this otherwise realist-styled narrative (Cleo seems to be going for the Indiana Jones award for oblivion to mortal injury!). Only Cleo's death has any legendary or heroic quality. Frankie's death is realistically harrowing, and is also the second police shooting of a loved one witnessed by Stony. These appalling deaths rather overshadow the women's rebellion with their distressing futility.

There is a further difference in terms of extra-textual 'knowleges' brought to readings of these two films. The formal citation of the 'ghetto aesthetic' overdetermines representation of the women's deaths with a non-redemptive narrative closure. The likelihood of two white, working-class, heterosexual women in a blue classic convertible speeding over the edge of the (mythic) Grand Canyon together pursued by an army of police is remote enough to be already somewhat mythical. It also recalls the resolution of classic nostalgic Westerns such as Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. Thelma and Louise's death can thus easily become 'legendary'. Police killings in black neighbourhoods in the US on the other hand are a much-publicised fact of life. However erotically mythologised 'gangsta-ism' may be in the formations of black popular culture most commonly circulated in the mainstream, such mythologising is tempered by the urgency of a very real crisis of intolerable stress caused by levels of violence in and against urban black communities. This very different contextualisation of violent female protagonism thus seems to produce very different effects. The women's deaths would seem to resist positive resignifications by and for (any) women, except insofar as any reading deprioritises such specificities. The women's resistance is represented as futile. New Black Cinema's hail to the black male spectator to 'stop!' what he is (un)doing can hardly transfer, since black women are not, in any history of the present, characteristically engaged in intra-black-female violence which they could choose to 'stop'. More characteristically, black women are represented as helpless onlookers unable to influence the behaviour of their male relatives.

Set It Off often gets lost in competing discourses accessed through its hybridity but also in the diversity of extra-textual histories which may be brought by a diversity of spectators to whom it is apparently designed to appeal. The urban landscapes of the 'ghetto aesthetic' can also signify as an eroticising fantasy wilderness for white audiences, whilst simultaneously addressing itself to specific 'minority' markets. The stereotypical association of young black men with violence and criminality is problematic for the African American community (and the Afro Caribbean community in Britain also) in a way that it is obviously not for white audiences. I have already cited a debate on the unacceptable effects of romanticising black male violence and criminality (not to mention heterosexism) by black male cultural producers. On the other hand, 'cleaning up' representation of black communities can be seen as a misrepresentation of the realities of oppression. For representation to focus instead on the black middle-class may be seen as directing black aspiration in conformity with the aspirations of the dominant culture at the expense of more specifically African-American cultural values (which, just to thicken the plot, are very variously defined). Set It Off clearly tries to get around such problems through multiple protagonism, attempting to cover all bases by diversifying characters' situations, discourses and aspirations. The result seems overly fragmented rather than successfully segmented.

Cleo, the lesbian character in Set It Off seems, surprisingly in some ways, quite popular with cosmopolitan lesbians of whatever cultural identification (if oral feedback from lesbian friends, students, and film organisations, is to be relied on). A great deal of her popularity stems from her characterisation by Queen Latifa (about whom lesbian gossip already circulates) as exuberantly and self-confidently 'butch'. (Although in terms of a white lesbian discourse, she rather stereotypically outdated — her considerable screen presence and noble self-sacrifice on behalf of the more feminised protagonists recalls fictional butch heroism of the homophilic 1920s (for example in The Well of Loneliness and Pandora's Box).) Her popularity seems to be based on her 'out-dieselling' the Elvis-androgyne style which seems to mark the limit of white butchness in mainstream cinema. It is also interesting that Hollywood seems to be able to accept a much greater degree of 'feminismo' in representing black lesbianism — which, perhaps, harks back to a de-feminising of black femininity characteristic of a racist representational order.

Cleo's lesbian sexuality is marginalised by the text. Her lipstic-femme lover is represented as external to the primary group of heterosexual women and the lesbians have only one sexual encounter. The femme appears only in relation to Cleo and is clearly signified as having no relationship with any of the heterosexual protagonists, with whom she is actively unpopular. This primary group is generally framed together so as to maximise representational intimacy whilst minimising eroticisation of the women as an effect of their appearing diegetically in each others' points of view through eyeline matching or by drawing attention to the relay so as to foster awareness of the extra-diegetic female-to-female gaze. This largely omniscient mode thus avoids editing any heterosexually identified woman into the point of view of another. It is only for the signification of a thus emphasised lesbian sexuality that the spectator is ever estranged by a non-heterosexual relay of the gaze in this text. During their sex scene, a fetishisingly low angled take of Cleo's fetishistically-clad lover is matched to Cleo's voyeuristic point of view. Controlling power is thus attached unequivocally to Cleo's gaze, the inversionary lesbian eroticism emphasised by the fetishisation of the image of the femme. The near-absence of eyeline matching to produce any other protagonists' views of each other effectively forecloses any eroticising of the other women for each other elsewhere in the text — and thus also for the extra-textual lesbian spectator. The combination of these features effectively displaces homoeroticism from the relationships between the protagonists and contains it within a demarcated visual space designated as lesbian. During Stony's heterosexual encounter, the use of (objectifying) point of view editing is, on the contrary, avoided.

Point of view editing is also used to represent the characters' experiences of oppression (and some of their deaths). Cleo's, interestingly, is the only point of view which is not given cinematically during the establishment of characterisation, status quo, and complicating factors at the opening of the narrative. The initial robbery scene takes place in Frankie's point of view. We are given Stony's more than that of any other character — on her brother's death, on her exploiter as she prostitutes herself, and later on her boyfriend. Tejana's is given on the white social worker who takes her child. We are, on the other hand, introduced to Cleo through an alignment with the intra-diegetic gaze of the male neighbourhood on her, teasing her about her 'lack' (of big wheels that pump up(!).)The narrative (though not necessarily the meta-narrative) point of view is thus established as shared by black heterosexual women and black heterosexual men. Moreover, Cleo is represented as the only woman who is already involved in the criminal (male) activities of the 'ghetto' setting at the start of the narrative and whose criminal acts are not propelled by narratively specified events. Narratively, the heterosexual women are 'set off' into criminal activity through traumatic experiences of racial and sexual oppression.

In the dialogue, Cleo articulates an identification with the ghetto against Stony's middle-class aspirations stating that the difference between Stony and herself is that she, Cleo, accepts "I'll never get out." The difference between Cleo and the heterosexual women is further emphasised as Frankie and Stony laugh at the (fetishistic) "funny underwear" which Cleo buys for her lover. Cleo's own point of view is thus effectively excluded both visually and narratively not only from heterosexuality, but also from femaleness. Heterosexual black feminism often seems critical of the masculine-exclusivity of the ghetto aesthetic (Jones, 1991). But this association of Cleo with the ghetto aesthetic, with wilful rebellion, perverse eroticism, and with loyalty to her working-class black community (which demarcates her from the aspirational feminisation of the heterosexual women) may actually be another source of Cleo's appeal to lesbians, many of whom were still associated with anti-capitalist sentiments.

In both Thelma and Louise and Bad Girls, the female protagonists (and spectators) enjoyed an excitement and freedom previously closed to them, as well as the pleasures of personal transformation in a growing intimacy. In Set It Off, the intimacy is signified as already in place prior to the narrative opening and there is no credible representation of progress or transformation in their relationships. Their actions register as desperate rather than liberating. Unlike Thelma's sexual awakening with the sexually ambiguous outlaw figure, Stony's heterosexual fling seems to evoke regret for an unattainable (middle-class) heterosexuality rather than a liberation from its confines. This, of course, evokes issues of 'misreading the (white, middle-class) map' covered in my earlier analysis of locative readings of Paris is Burning. In contrast to the lesbian sex scene, the heterosexual scene between Stony and Jeff self-reflexively avoids voyeurism. Their sexual encounter is shown through a fragmenting montage which disrupts identification with either diegetic point of view and also disrupts voyeuristic positioning of Stony in the relay. The scene is almost all taken up with a massage, thus shifting sensual focus from ('phallic') vision to ('feminine') touch. Both techniques originate in the deconstructionist techniques developed in the oppositional styles of lesbian and black filmmakers (for example Barbara Hammer, Spike Lee and Cheryl Dunnye). The differences between the cinematic construction of this scene and of the lesbian sex scene indicates an extremely sophisticated awareness of divergences between black and white, heterosexual and lesbian representational agendas.

It also seems interesting that Cleo's character is aligned not with a black lesbian subcultural matrix but with the heterosexual machismo of the 'hood boyz'. There are two lesbian individuals represented but the femme character appears out of nowhere without any kind of characterisation whilst Cleo's character is exclusively situated in the 'gangsta' sub-culture of the young neighbourhood men. The confinement of Cleo's lesbian point of view to her sexual activity and the one-dimensionality of her comic-book character combined with her identification by the narrative with the male culture of 'Black Sam' and his cohorts marginalises her in the matrix female homosociality. It could be that the filmmakers were unsure of how to code a specifically black lesbian environment. Even Cleo's mythic-heroic death occurring in the point of view of the police and of the 'hood boyz' (who watch on TV news and signify their identificatory involvement with her plight by remarks such as "That's fucked up, man!") aligns her with the protective-heroic fantasies of (black) men rather than with the other women. The heterosexual women, by contrast, die in one another's point of view. Frankie cradles the dying Tisean in her arms and then herself dies in Stony's point of view — which is then briefly transferred to a covert glance of mutual acknowledgement between Stony and the 'nice cop'. The nice cop quietly lets Stony go (sugar and spice). Still, Cleo certainly dies with her boots on and, on the whole, that is satisfactory enough for lesbians. On the whole, Cleo's sheer solidity seems to appeal to a lesbian 'will to substance.' Lesbians audiences seem willing to overlook — or perhaps are just not bothered by — the constant reiterations of her exclusion from the heterosexual female point of view.

Despite its facility with coding multiplicity, Set It Off doesn't really work — perhaps indicating a limit to the diversity of appeal possible within a single film text.