A Freudian reading of Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' and Jeunet's 'Alien Resurrection.&#3

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Psychoanalysis does not simply provide an explanation of how we come to be masculine or feminine. It implies that normative gender is the result of socially acceptable psychopathology. Discuss.

We shall explore the idea that normative gender is the result of socially acceptable psychopathology through Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection and Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The fact the two films are from different genres and periods reveals universally disturbing, pathological elements of gender formation.

The definition of psychopathology is ‘abnormal psychology; an abnormal psychological process or state’ (OED). ‘Normative’ on the other hand denotes that which is usual, common and healthy. So to say that normative gender is the result of psychopathology initially sounds like a fundamental contradiction in terms. However, psychoanalysis has produced models to explain how gender identification arises, and these explanatory ‘stories’ which ‘provide an explanation of how we come to be masculine or feminine’ can seem very unusual upon first encountering them. Incestuous and homosexual feelings are commonly seen as ‘abnormal,’ and therefore pathological, but because the theory says they are features of a developmental stage all children unconsciously go through, they are also normal. As to whether such psychopathological behaviours are ‘socially acceptable’ it is useful to look at the start of social gendering, in toys and clothes chosen for children. The division created by conferring either pink or blue, dolls or guns is actually a bizarre phenomenon when given closer thought because babies of both sexes initially look and behave identically. But gendered behaviour, even when it is actually quite strange is usually perceived as ‘socially acceptable’. For example, a woman obsessed with shopping for clothes and make-up should ring alarm bells, signalling an addictive personality trait, possibly OCD should but it will often go unnoticed because it is a behaviour which coincides with society’s stereotype assumes women should be obsessed with their appearance. Similarly, in rape cases blame is often shifted to a woman who dresses provocatively because a man of course cannot help his violent sexual urges, an act of rape which should be seen as pathological behaviour is played down as an inevitable consequence of his gender.

The foundational psychoanalytical model of gender formation is Freud’s Oedipus complex, which describes the stages a (male) child goes through in reaching his identity. To summarise briefly, the mother starts out as the primary love object, and as such the boy becomes jealous of the father as a rival for his mother’s affection and comes to fear that the stronger, older male will castrate him for his desires. Eventually, the boy overcomes these issues by aligning his identity with his father and transferring his love to a safer love object in the form of another woman. It was only much later in his career that Freud explored the female equivalent of Oedipus complex in girls, sometimes referred to as Electra complex or penis-envy crisis, supplying an explanation as to why women have a harder time fixing their gender identity. Not only do they have to transfer their love to another object, they also have to swap the gender of the object. As this crisis is much more complicated than male Oedipus complex, success fluctuates widely and the varying degrees to which girls overcome this unconscious crisis results in three types of women according to Freud. There are those who upon discovering their castration feel unworthy of love, and opt out of sexuality altogether to become perpetual virgins (resulting in the nun or spinster aunt); there are the girls in denial who continue to value the clitoris as equal to the penis (giving a girl a ‘tomboy’ personality and an inclination towards lesbianism or feminine men); and lastly ‘real’ femininity (Minsky, 1996, p.57). This involves trading of the mother as love object for the father and again later to a male partner, having given up the fantasy of having a baby with the father. (A fantasy Ripley plays out in Alien Resurrection when she literally becomes pregnant with the alien queen by the hand of the Father). This transition is easier if a girl realises that while she lacks a penis, and therefore what she requires in order to fulfil her mother’s desires, she comes to accept that one day she will develop the breasts and womb that will allow her the creative energy to become a mother herself, giving herself the chance, in conceiving a son, of surrogate ownership of a penis. Lacan and Freud have been criticised for being so ‘phallic centric;’ Call’s line that announces ‘Father’s dead asshole’ is in the vein of feminist criticisms of psychoanalysis placing too much emphasis on the role of the father in the development of femininity.

Even if a woman accomplishes these tasks however, Freud still held that heterosexual “femininity’ is rarely completely achieved’ because of the complexity of gender crisis, all women retain a bisexual element of their personality (Minsky, 1996, p.49). This links well to theories of media that explore why female protagonists are so popular in film and advertising – a female body is attractive to both genders (whether homosexual or heterosexual) in a way the male body is not. This is because while men have ‘male gaze’, women embody both male and female gaze – they look in the mirror and look for both female and male approval. As such, woman can ‘never be narcissistically whole because she always also includes the masculine gaze that makes her other than herself’ (Bronfen, 1992, p.282). Irigaray explains how this is physically expressed by the fact woman has ‘two lips touching.’ But psychologically, she also explores how woman is always dual because she contains two halves:

‘One related to the mother and women as themselves, and one related to men who have abandoned their projections onto women.’

(Minsky, 1996, p.198).

The eighth Ripley clone takes such dualism to an extreme; she is masculine and feminine, human and alien, young and old. What is more is that this woman is very comfortable with such a fluid, contradictory identity, as seen in her decisive posture and speech. In Vertigo again it is the woman Judy who is sure of herself, able to play other parts without losing her true self – in contrast to Scottie who easily becomes confused in his gender role. His masculinity takes a bashing not only from his phobia and the loss of his manly job as policeman but by his becoming too interested in clothes and hair himself – the shop assistant comments on this twice.

Power and freedom become key defining feature of the masculine in Vertigo, we hear how ‘a man could [abandon a woman and take her child] in [Carlotta’s time]…they had the power and the freedom.’ A rather dim reading of this however is that masculinity entails a pathological capacity to be cruel as a result of power and freedom. The male scientists of the Auriga also share this capacity, in their torturing of the aliens and their indifference towards their fellow humans who are used as fodder for alien breeding.

With freedom placed at the forefront of masculinity, it is not surprising then to find Scottie’s horror at having to be physically restricted, ‘it’s this darned corset – it binds.’ He also worries over the feminine connotations of corset wearing, needing to be reassured that other men do this too to reduce feelings of emasculation.

‘Scottie is placed in the…position of enforced passivity…a position that the film explicitly links to femininity and associates with unfreedom.’

(Modleski, 1988, p.90).

In Alien Resurrection too men are often presented in confined situations, reinforced by tight framing, for example when the soldiers get frozen. The character Vriess is confined to a wheelchair and this leads to him being valued less than other survivors. His helplessness comes to a zenith when he is strapped to the back of a fellow crew member during a confrontation with the alien. However, these instances are more about building tension in the horror genre than any real comment on masculinity.

Stalking and voyeurism also becoming entangled with the idea of masculinity, the fact most of Vertigo is from the male perspective reinforces this. Scottie’s voyeuristic stalking of Madeline was partially acceptable in the role of detective but his later hounding of Madeline look-a-likes goes beyond this. The cold scientists in Alien Resurrection also enjoy visual ownership of Ripley, her failed clones and the aliens, which is why they are all placed behind glass. The traits of voyeurism and stalking can be traced back to romances where this was role of heroes. This vision of masculinity is predatory then – Johner is a far more extreme embodiment of this idea than Scottie though. In fact, his sexual pursuit seems neurotic. The predatory sexual desire of Johner seems foolishly out of place in a film where intercourse has become frightening and the desire to procreate is personified through the aliens as being mad and destructive. But Ripley and the Alien Queen are also predatory; does this undermine the idea of it being a male trait?

As we shall see, the ‘men are strong’ stereotype is challenged in Vertigo and Alien Resurrection: man is the weak policeman, the ‘cripple’ in the wheelchair whereas the women we meet are a clever actress and female hybrids who save the day.

As Irigaray’s quotation suggested above, feminity can be seen as male construct – even the bra Midge talks about has been designed by a man. Elster and then Scottie create Madeline. Men literally create Ripley and the Queen. In Vertigo, it becomes clear that women are made from make-up, clothes and hair colour rather than any intrinsic personality, or at least from Scottie’s point of view. Recognising outer aspects of sexuality only, Scottie equates the coat and car with Madeline; he keeps seeing her everywhere because his ideal woman is composed of mass producible, cosmetic elements.

There is the necklace in Vertigo, the necklace that the false Madeline was wearing and which persists as the only object in the second half, worn by Judy Barton, that completely different woman who is nevertheless the same – the object that is the core of her identity, her ‘material equivalent’, the little-bit-of-Real.’

(Dolar, 2002, p.45).

To disagree with Dolar, Judy’s real identity has been there all along but Scottie was unable to cope with her raw personality - the necklace is not the ‘core of her identity’, just the outward token Scottie identifies because it is a symbol of the world of male-constructed feminity, a literal chain which enslaves Judy/Madeline to feminity without which he does not recognise her.

Precisely because virtually nobody fits the definitions of male and female, the categories gain power and currency from their impossibility. —Judith Halberstam

( Battis, 2007, p.65).

When the disorganization and disaggregation of the field of the bodies disrupt the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence…the regulatory ideal is then exposed as a norm and a fiction that disguises itself as a developmental law regulating the sexual field that it purports to describe.

(Butler, 1990, p.136).

These extracts make it clear that there is no such thing as ‘normative’ gender, that gender is an impossible, constructed ideal. Not natural but a fiction psychologically internalised. Call is not a real woman but she passes for feminine because she is stereotypically caring and ‘fuckable.’ But Call shows how feminity is unattainable because when taken to the achievable extreme, like Madeline, it actually reveals the sham of the concept.

Madeline’s attraction is that she is a perfect woman, but of course this does not exist – she is purely a construct, Scottie never even meets the real Madeline, her identity has no ‘original’ so to speak, she is a signifier with no signified in structuralist terms. If we consider Carlotta the ‘original’, with her hysteria and unquenched motherly love, is Madeline the perfect woman because she has all the beauty of Carlotta and the helplessness that attracts a man’s protection without the connotations of motherhood? An even bleaker reading is made if we assume man’s desire to ‘protect’ has little to do with love and more to do with ownership and the desire to invade. The ‘original’ Madeline might not exist but Scottie becomes infuriated by multiple, hyperreal representations of her, in Judy’s first performance and secondary recreation, in the women he sees on the streets and so on.

As part of playing the perfect woman of masculine imagination, Judy as Madeline plays up the fact she is hysterical, mentally ill and has delusions of grandeur – these pathological tendencies are what makes her so convincing as a perfect woman, womanhood has been defined as suffering from socially acceptable pathology since Freud’s studies on hysteria. The idea that feminity necessitates psychopathological behaviour can be seen in Johner’s comment that Ripley’s destruction of her clone siblings ‘must be a chick thing’. His explanation is that women are mysterious and such behaviour can be dismissed as hysterical symptom. This kind of reaction to women often means that age, race and other factors contributing to someone’s mental health are played down in favour of trivializing labelling as a hysterical woman.

Stacey’s essay builds upon Creed’s ‘theories of the abject with respect to the horrors’ of Alien Resurrection found in The Monstous Femini: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (2003, p.252). Both are concerned with the way in which the repressed, usually the Other in the form of the alien, returns in each instalment of the Alien franchise. However, Resurrection stands out because it frequently lets in the abject without the familiar, cathartic casting out of the Other the audience has come to expect. Instead, the abject qualities of the Other come to stay in the space that was previously marked as the safe, individual body. The alien is not banished, it becomes part of the human. In this film especially that means the monstrous feminine and motherhood return and cannot be expelled (Stacey, 2003, p260-261). This is particularly important as both Freud and Lacan place the separation from, and therefore the repression, of the mother as a definitive point in developing the separate ego. In order to create our own identity we must build a mental wall between ourselves and our mother, this is far more important for men in finding their gender roles than women.

This Alien trilogy addresses the effects of feminism on patriarchy and male sexuality… it is now (White) male sexual culture that feels threatened…Reproductive technology is here, man has made it and as such threatens women’s reproductive rights.

(Hayward, 2000, p.317 citing Kuhn and Radstone, 1990, p.356).

So despite Freud’s speculation that it is women who have more difficulty developing gender characteristics, these two films illustrate an opposite disposition. Modleski cites Hitchcock’s films as revealing ‘a fascination with feminity that throws masculine identity into question and crisis’ (1988, p.87).

Scottie returns to re-enact the scenes which epitomise the failing of his masculinity (a combination of failing to save Madeline and his colleague) in an attempt to reverse their outcome. This plan proves to be ultimately flawed as rather than banishing the abject failings of his masculinity, he invites back the repressed abject in but instead of concurring it, by this point has so effeminised himself there is no safe wall of masculine identity to hide behind anymore, and as such he fails again. This is a uniquely masculine crisis of identity because, as Freud and Irigaray outline, a woman will never have such a problem as she never completes building a wall around her identity in the first place and remains fluid.

An opening or credit sequence can function metonymically for the whole of a film (the shots refer to the unravelling narrative to come) – for example, the credits and opening sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

(Hayward, 2000, p 229).

The credits pre-empt Scottie’s dream, head (as centre of logic and male ego) has been transported into a swirling world which puts his identity into crisis, especially when we keep in mind that it is ‘Madeline’s’ dream he is living through – he has unexpectedly starting seeing from the female perspective, experiencing vividly the state of hysteria. The swirling motif is an emblem of feminity as it reminds of water and woman’s fluidity. This fluidity represents the way women stay interconnected and men isolate themselves. Compare Scottie’s disembodied head to the bonds between Judy, Madeline, Carlotta and Midge or Call’s ability to connect with the computer, Ripley’s connections to her previous life, clone sisters and the aliens themselves.

Not only are women prone to being dual and bisexual in their identity, they have the best of both worlds because “Masculine’ women can have babies but ‘feminine’ men cannot’ (Minsky, 1996, p,97). As such, misogyny has often been linked to womb-envy and creative jealousy in men. In Alien Resurrection this takes the form of male scientists who hark back to various ‘homunculus’ narratives, including Frankenstein and Pinocchio but also science fiction films such as Blade Runner. Does Scottie also suffer from womb-envy? He does seem to relish creative power in recreating Madeline.

This envy of the womb of course may be omnipotently denied and projected onto women so that only woman’s penis-envy is acknowledged as a possibility. In this way womb-envy disappears from patriarchal view.

(Minsky, 1996, p.96).

One of the fantasies of homunculus narrative is the adult human born perfectly complete in vitro, which we see in Alien Resurrection – there is one shot in particular in which navel almost invisible, removing the physical mark of the mother from the body (Stacey, 2003, p.265). Unable to perfectly procreate without a woman, the scientists are left with the clone Ripley as ‘meat by-product’ of their need to create, a reflection on women in societies where they are given minimal human rights but tolerated as an unwanted necessity because of the need for sons. Not only is Ripley made a mother against her will, but vaginal (or chest-bursting) birth is replaced by caesarean – this is particularly nasty as in the male construction of feminity, motherhood was the best status a woman could achieve and even that has been taken from Ripley (Minsky, 1996, p.55).

Disavowal of the mother’s role, an omnipotent fantasy of procreation without the mother, enabling science, as Sarah Kember has argued, to fulfil the desire to father itself.

(Stacey, 2003, p.259).

This marginalising of the mother figure explains why Midge is ‘too prosaic’ to be attractive to Scottie (Modleski, 1988, p.88). The mother must be denied; the male has repressed his incestuous urges and does not want to be reminded of them. The mother is also frequently denied despite her symbolic presence on screen in the Alien films. The alien/human baby acts out an extreme reaction to Oedipus complex by literally killing its birth mother to sevre its ties to her. The ship computer in the first film is called Mother but by Alien Resurrection Mother has been lost and only Father remains – and he is in control of breeding (Robb, 2001, p.23). Although symbolically useful, the gendered labelling of computers also highlights again the arbitrary nature of gendering – people and computers alike only become feminine or masculine because of how others brand them.

The psychopathology involved in creating gendered identities seems to be a problem caused by masculinity’s own ‘wall-building’ tendency which he needs in order to separate himself from the mother. Masculinity desires to map out womanhood so that it is manageable and inconvenient elements suppressed. Masculinity creates feminity so that it can control it, even to the extent of invading the field of procreation. This process is of course ‘socially acceptable’ while culture is dominated by the male hegemonic.

Does the rise of feminism mean masculinity is now in danger of becoming the constructed gender at the hand of feminity? Probably not as feminity was only a male structure, masculinity need not fear being constricted but will have to face its walls being dissolved to become part of a bisexual, homogenous fluid which is the gender women naturally revert to: Scottie does not have to live in a corset but does have to live in a fluid dream where only hybridism survives. The ending of Alien Resurrection complicates this resolution however - although the hybrid heroines survive, the very personification of hybridism, the alien/human baby (who was originally designed to be explicitly hermaphrodite) dies while the ultra-masculine Johner survives (Jeunet, 2003).

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