Uploaded 30 June 2000

What gets people into the theatre to watch the rest of the picture? This scene [scene 176] does. The audience, knowing or unknowing, has been sitting waiting for it. We have to bring off the most erotic, provocative English-language sex scene that anyone has photographed. We have to bring it off truthfully. [1]

Theories of lesbian subjectivity in the cinema tend to focus on the early 1940s to 1960s Code films. What is theorised through these films is the “spectre” or ghosting of lesbianism, which, it has been argued, is the necessary condition for the representation of a lesbian subject. [2]  But what of the films that attempt to confront a sexual representation, the post-Code films of what critic James Arnold called the “perversion boom [3] “? Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George (USA 1968) might be the most notable representation of lesbian sex in cinematic history, albeit a negative and stereotypical representation. Not simply reflecting Aldrich’s desire to “bring it off truthfully”, this taboo-shattering representation of lesbian sex in the cinema sought to make homosexuality tangible for a largely homophobic audience. As the reviewer Joseph Morgenstein suggests:

Aldrich must have seen his chance to score an all-time Film First by putting a couple of ladies right up there on the silver screen – the younger woman and a Dracula-style heavy – and letting them go with smooching, caressing, perspiring, honest-to-goodness nipple-kissing, and then progressing to orgasm. Or was that a temper tantrum? [4]

An adaptation of Frank Marcus’ successful stageplay, The Killing of Sister George reworks the play through the inclusion of this scene (scene 176). As Aldrich argued, “unlike the stage version, the picture had to play out the betrayal”.[5]  The sexual betrayal of June Buckridge/George (Beryl Reid) is thereby “played out” by her lover, Alice/Childie (Susannah York), and her employer, BBC executive producer, Mrs Mercy Crofts (Coral Brown) in scene 176 of the film script. It would appear that by including the sexual betrayal depicted in this scene, Aldrich confronts the “rumour” of homosexuality in late Code or “social problem” films. Julia Erhart has argued that in “social problem” films, the reliance on “libel, slander and gossip” to avert a narrative recognition of homosexuality, in fact suggests the “difficulties of and skills necessary for identifying homosexuals”. In films such as The Children’s Hour (USA 1961), Victim (USA 1961) and Tea and Sympathy (USA 1956), Erhart suggests that “the moral and social rectitude of being homosexual, are displaced in favor of epistemology: how correctly to recognize and identify homosexuals.”[6]   While Erhart convincingly argues the lesbian subject isproduced through rumour and whispers in The Children’s Hour, The Killing of Sister George attempts to actively signify the lesbian’s sexual subjectivity. For it is precisely the sexual indiscretion of Sister George that brings about the signification of lesbianism in the narrative.

Much of the film’s critical attention to date pivots on the so-called negative lesbian representation, particularly within the “positive images” debate. While problematic in terms of its binding limitations, particularly insofar as it projects an either/or polarity, the positive images debate highlights the problematic relationship between negative images of homosexuality in the cinema and the production of cultural homophobia. As such, Aldrich’s attempt to explicitly sexualise the lesbian is an all but forgotten aspect of the film. I do not wish to valorise inappropriately the film’s largely homophobic representation, but instead, examine how Aldrich constructs a sexualised lesbian subjectivity. But, as I will explain, the epistemology of homosexuality that is evidenced in the late-Code films – how to detect and identify homosexuality – is rephrased: it instead becomes a question of how to detect and identify the female orgasm.

The focus of this paper is the way in which The Killing of Sister George, through the inclusion of scene 176, implies a sexual ontology of the lesbian and in doing so, presents a call to examine the cinematic and historical value of Aldrich’s film. By this, I am not suggesting that the film implies an essence or presupposed being to lesbian sexuality; on the contrary, the film has fuelled much debate surrounding narrative cinema’s inability to signify a (post-oedipal) lesbian subject. [7]  Nonetheless, it seems to me that the film is motivated by the ontological question “what is a lesbian?” This is formed by the narrative attempt to define lesbian sex through the female orgasm. Siting a lesbian fantasy scenario as the condition of the female orgasm in scene 176, as I will discuss, the narrative’s exclusion of a (post-oedipal) lesbian subject, in fact, is the enabling condition of the sexual representation. Scene 176, thereby, brings into focus a representational crisis: how to signify lesbian sex, and more specifically, how to represent the female orgasm in a lesbian fantasy scenario? Before looking at the scene in detail, however, it is first necessary to map the changing censorship codes and the predominant modes of understanding lesbian sexuality at the time of the film’s release.

The Killing of Sister George

The Killing of Sister George was released in the United States in December 1968 at New York’s Beekman Theatre. The timing of the film’s release is remarkable for two distinct reasons. Firstly, it marked the introduction, under the guidance of Jack Valenti, of the Motion Picture Producers Association’s (MPPA) classification code and ratings, signalling the end of 28 years of the Hays code. [8]  Secondly, it preceded the historic “Stonewall riots” of June 1969, which, subsequently, have been seen by some, however simplistically, to mark the beginnings of the gay and lesbian liberation movement. [9]

Ironically, at a time when the moral degeneration of lesbianism was highly questioned by gay and lesbian lobby groups, the MPPA maintained the moral disapprobation of homosexuality through the notion of “obscenity”. While purporting to be a self-regulatory code, the MPPA classification of films was regulated by the “code seal and rating office”. To accomodate “obscenity” in the cinema, Jack Valenti introduced the “X” rating. The “Standards for Productions Subsection” stated: “Illicit sex relationships shall not be justified. Intimate sex scenes violating common standards of decency shall not be portrayed”.[10] That “indecency” was associated with the representation of lesbianism is revealed in the reaction to The Killing of Sister George as, through the inclusion of scene 176, Aldrich violated the standards and the film received an “X” rating.

Of the 148 films reviewed by the Association between its introduction on 1 November 1968 and 31 January 1969, The Killing of Sister George was exemplary of the total of 5 films that received the certificate[11]  In addition to this, a subsidiary arm of the censorship body in the USA, the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (N.C.O.M.P.), classified the film “C” for Condemned. Critic Richard Corliss (a contributor to Film Comment, Film Quarterly and The Village Voice) stated that he “would not contest its C rating”. [12]  A nineteen-second deletion of “scene 176” where Mercy Crofts kisses Childie’s breast and brings her to orgasm was required by Valenti after what involved lengthy and costly court proceedings for Aldrich. Interestingly, it can be argued that Aldrich’s avid campaigning against the film’s censorship parallels his habitual publicity campaigning, which is discussed by Richard Maltby in this issue. Spending $US75,000 dollars of his own money in legal fees,[13] Aldrich sued the Los Angeles Times, seeking injunctions against “distortions of advertising” and issued a petition against KTLA-TV and radio KMPC for their refusal to air the film’s commercials.[14] In an ironic twist, the X-certificate was withdrawn by the MPPA and self-applied by the newly formed “The Associates and Aldrich Company”[15]

However, Aldrich critiqued the pejorative association of lesbianism and indecency in what was, for the most part, publicly argued in the pages of Film and Television Daily. He stated:

the false inference that an “X” rated picture is a “dirty” picture not fit for viewing by anyone, has gained undeserved but widespread acceptance…The Association’s failure to positively but vigorously clarify for the public and the industry the true significance of an “X” rating supports those who would restrict any treatment by motion pictures of adult themes and of serious psychological and social problems. [16]

Notably, Aldrich’s argument against the film’s classification rests on popular ideas of the psychological and social problem of homosexuality, prevalent in the late 1960s. Popular beliefs about the modern homosexual’s “illness” garnered attention through the public dissemination of psychiatric and psychological discourses that developed ideas of a distinct homosexual personality disorder: immature, jealous, aggressive, hostile, sadomasochistic, emotionally insecure and hysterical, a lesbian personality “type” or character signalled society’s decay. [17]  In his sensationalised case studies, The Lesbian, Frank Caprio argued that lesbianism was a “sociological problem”, however, ironically, he suggests that its “cure” relies on the lesbian’s will-to-heterosexuality: “Lesbians can be cured if they are earnest in their desire to be cured” [18] 8. In popular consciousness, however, the lesbian problem was effectively linked with moral degeneracy through an association with alcoholism, prostitution and civil disobedience. [19]  For although lesbianism in and of itself was not considered a sex offence, gender deviation furthermore warranted arrest. According to an article in The New York Times, “The woman homosexual”, in 1969 alone 49 women had been charged with “loitering…[for] soliciting another for the purpose of engaging in deviate sexual intercourse.” [20]

Aldrich’s critique appears to rework the moral problem of homosexuality in late-code films through the narrative concern with the lesbian’s psychology. The lesbian “problem”, in fact, finds its meaning in the narrative’s “unnatural love triangle”.[21]  The caption that accompanied the film’s advertisement – “The story of three consenting adults in the privacy of their own home” – was visually paralleled by a production still from scene 176 that depicts George, in the background, intruding upon Mercy and Childie in the foreground of the frame [http://posters.imdb.com/Covers/06/31/85.jpg]. This suggests more than a passing reference to reforms of the 1957 Wolfenden Report, which decriminalised “private, consensual adult homosexual relations.” [22]  Ostensibly “legalising” homosexuality, the notion of a “sex act” sought to bring homosexuality into a public domain, however, ironically through delimiting the spatial metaphor of “privacy”. While male homosexual acts – sodomy – were largely the focus of the Wolfenden report and sexual reform in general, the cultural erasure of representations of sex between women circumvented the construction of the lesbian as a sexual subject. Consequently, the definition of lesbian sexuality rested upon the notion of a psychological gender disorder. Not merely external signifiers of the lesbian’s masculinity, the inner psychological problem of gender disorder in effect, rephrased an interiority of lesbianism exemplified by earlier sexological and psychoanalytic accounts of bio-medical determinism.

By interiority, I am referring to the obsessive construction of the lesbian in terms of an essential and inner psychological state. While it has been theorised that sexology privileges the sign of masculinity, for Havelock Ellis, lesbianism, or congenital inversion, moreover signified a “trapped [male] soul”. [23]  On the other hand, in his “discovery” of the Oedipus complex, Freud theorised the female homosexual’s arrested (hetero)sexual maturation in terms of her identification with the “masculinity complex”.[24]  In the discursive tendency to represent the lesbian’s masculinity in terms of either sex role inversion or psycho-sexual identification respectively, it is possible to argue that the discursive construction of the lesbian in both sexology and psychoanalysis systematically employed a metaphor of interiority to define the lesbian’s sexuality. Although ostensibly considered an acquired disorder by the late 1960s – a sociological problem – lesbian sexuality was nonetheless predicated on the notion of a gender disorder, which effectively conflated gender and sexuality. In which case, the inner psychological workings of lesbian sexuality were once again reworked in the popular 1960s mindset.

The Killing of Sister George trades in this metaphor of interiority, in particular through George’s inner masculinisation. While the demarcation of public space succinctly identifies George’s “outer” masculinity, as George passes the lounge to enter the public bar of the Marquis de Granby, her representation reworks the notion of the interior realm of the lesbian’s gender disorder. In the lowering of her vocal register, George leans back on her barstool and in a close shot, mimics the British actor Sidney Greenstreet, saying “there’s not enough kindness in the world”. Through the lowering of her voice, as if to come from deep within her, George’s imitation suggests an inner representation of her masculinity. (Furthermore, George references her self as male in the narrative, as she says to Mercy after “assaulting” two novitiate nuns in a taxi, “I’m sorry, you know, if I’ve been a bad boy.”) While in the film’s tragi-comedy it is George’s cruel fate to be the victim of such unkindness – loosing Childie, and, more importantly, her character Sister George who is written out of the intra-diegetic television script, Applehurst – her representation ascribes an interior masculinity to the lesbian.

However, it can be argued that Aldrich employs a model of “privacy”, which publicly recognised male homosexual sex acts, “deviate sexual intercourse”, in an attempt to signal the lesbian as a sexual subject. In his signature psycho-dramatic style – gothic characters, expressionistic mise en scene and camera angles that he became famous for in What ever happened to Baby Jane (USA 1962)- The Killing of Sister George acknowledges the prevalent attitude towards homosexuality as largely a private matter. (The sex reform laws that advocated its “tolerance” in the privacy of the home, in fact, stress the notion of an interior seat of homosexuality.) Thus, while the expressionistic mise en scene invokes George’s inner turmoil, in the adaptation of the four-character stage play, for the most part, the narrative is set inside George and Childie’s apartment. While commonly viewed as Aldrich’s attempt to establish his newly acquired East Hollywood studio, bought with the proceeds from The Dirty Dozen, [25]  the narrative primacy of representing interior spaces neatly parallels popular ideas of the psychological inner workings of the modern homosexual. But, the narrational space also cites the prevalent notion of the “privacy” of homosexuality, which, however problematically, signalled the male homosexual as a sexual subject. While accounts of the lesbian were widely popularised in the 1960s, nonetheless there existed a problematic relation between the ontological claims of lesbianism and sexual representation. Couching the representation within a psychologically and spatially defined model – the inner “problem” and the “private” matter of the modern homosexual – the narrative formally signals the lesbian as a sexual subject.

That The Killing of Sister George uses a psychological ontology of homosexuality was widely accentuated by reviews of the film and pointed to the popular appeal of psychoanalytic and psychiatric “cure” of the homosexual problem.[26] Emphasising the lesbian’s gender disorder, Chris Jones in Films and Filming states that the representation of Mercy Crofts – her wide-brimmed hat, raised eyebrows and often downcast gaze at George – suggests that “she is the true deception. All the appearances of the very sophisticated ‘fem’ but with the animal instincts of the rougher ‘butch'”. [27]  In another example, the Times reconfirmed that Mercy Crofts’ “external priggishness cloaks a savage sapphic hunger.” [28]  The production of heterosexuality as both a natural and defining principle of sexuality is a legitimating factor of these reviews. Ironically, however, by actively signalling that the lesbian is situated “outside” of normative sexuality, the reviews reveal the workings of the definitive distinction between a natural heterosexuality and an unnatural homosexuality. As Elsie Hyslop Lewis reveals in her response to the film’s feature in the politically centre-right, Life Magazine, the notion of gender disorder could be harnessed to actively repudiate lesbianism: “What kind of world are you making? Some things are worse than death. Maybe the world ends not with a bang or even a whimper, but with the hideous, feeble, orgiastic grunt of piglike creatures who were once men”. [29] In addition, Flavia Wharton’s review in the Catholic magazine, Films in Review, equally produced the lesbian’s abject status:

Lesbians are so hateful to each other, so covertly malevolent toward society, so pathologically on the side of death, that their vice is one no healthy society has ever tolerated. It is not only tolerated in this film but is made to seem a [sic] peccadillo British society. [30]

Here the “spectre” of lesbianism, significantly, takes on a morphology: the descriptions of Mrs Mercy Crofts were framed by metaphors such as “crypto-lesbian studio executive” [31] , “icy lady TV executive” [32]  and “steely…BBC crypto-tribade”.[33]  On the other hand, what these analogies to a hidden, cloaked sexuality easily segued into was the contaminating lesbian body. As Hollis Alpert writes in the Saturday Review, “Beryl Reid spits her words like venom”([34] . These figures of speech, then, actively signify the lesbian as “outside” the normative heterosexual subject while making the very insides of the homosexual body tangible, and, in effect produce the lesbian’s abjection. In her book, Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler has theorised the abject in relation to the status of homosexuality within the formation of the (heterosexual) subject. The repudiation necessary to the formation of the subject, states Butler, “creates the valence of abjection and its status for the subject as a threatening spectre”. Actively inhabiting the abject, the infecting and contagious lesbian body presented by these reviews inadvertently brings to light the identifications and exclusions necessary to the formation of the heterosexual subject. As Butler asserts, “the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection”(emphasis added). [35]

What seems more indicative of “heterosexual panic”, however, is the requisite elision of the scene, which, ironically, actively signposts the production of a lesbian subject. In 1969, under the “obscenity act”, police were issued with a “search and seize” warrant for the screening of the unabridged version of the film in Detroit, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The legal confiscation of the film in Boston’s Cheri One theatre in March 1969 resulted in the arrest of the theatre’s manager, Joseph L. Sasso. Municipal Court Judge, Vincent Mottola, found Sasso guilty on 12 March 1969, after a two-day trial. In his ruling on the second trial, Municipal Court Chief Justice, Elijah Adlow, found Sasso guilty of violating the obscenity act, which resulted in a six-month prison term and $US1000 fine. [36] However, the Supreme Court granted an injunction against police seizure by Sack Theatre Lawyers. Pending the trial, moreover, theatre managers had to assure that the “scenes offensive to the police were deleted”.[37]

By comparison, in discussing the unabridged version of the film, Renata Adler of The New York Times states: “Miss Browne approaches the breast with a kind of scholarly interest, like an ichthyologist finding something ambivalent that has drifted up on the beach.”[38] Similarly, John Simon has suggested that scene 176 is “the most unnecessary obligatory scene in film history…[Coral Browne] probes [Susannah York’s breast] as though testing a particularly inscrutable cantaloupe for its ripeness. Had Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas been shown this sequence, it might have driven them screaming into heterosexuality”.[39] (In other reviews, the “poor lighting”, “lack of dialogue” and “menacing” camera angles, all worked to displace the sexual content.) In the refusal to identify any sexual significance to the scene, the direct association these reviews suggest is the discursive production of the lesbian subject, that is, in this case, it seems that through the deferral of the scene’s sexual content, the lesbian subject was made possible. In point of fact, in her reading of The Children’s Hour, Julia Erhart argues that while the word lesbian does not occur in the film, its’ rumours and whispers produce a fantasy scene, which can then be endowed with a lesbian significance. If, as Erhart suggests, it is possible to displace the signifier “lesbian” onto a fantasised scenario, which in turn can be endowed with a lesbian signified, is it possible that the displacement of the sexual significance of scene 176 by these reviews, in turn, can be endowed with a lesbian significance? The reviews’ ambivalence toward, at best, and, at worst, refusal of a sexual lesbian signifier can serve as grounds to argue that what was, at the time, epistemically known as lesbianism – gender disorder – holds little or no resemblance to any sexual representation of the lesbian. The ontological question that the scene brings into being – what is a lesbian? – is deferred and displaced in an effort to dispel any lesbian fantasy. However, rather than elide the sexual significance of the scene, these reviewers analogies produce a secondarisation, which, in turn, can be used to problematise the homophobic significance of the scene. Like the rumours and whispers that identify the lesbian in late-code films, contingent with the film’s censorship, the central absence of lesbian sex in the film’s reviews, ironically, demonstrates an identification necessary to elicit its sexual significance.

By contrast, gay and lesbian groups’ rejection of the film signified the recognition of a distinct homosexual identity. Rallying against such a representation, the assimilationist politics of homophile movements were marked by a new militancy in the late 1960s. The marginalisation of homosexuality was both marked and embraced by gay and lesbian groups’ adversity toward mainstream. As Vito Russo later argued, having been written out of the Applehurst script, Sister George reveals that for the homosexual, “the options are invisibility, assimilation or ostracism”.[40]

At a time when the collapse of gender and sexuality maintained the lesbian’s moral degeneracy and abjection – that is, a collapse that viewed lesbian sexuality, not distinct in itself but as the direct effect or expression of gender disorder – the negative exaggeration of the lesbian’s masculinity in the film amplified the construction of a self-motivated identity. In her review, Gene Damon states: “It will be years before we have a movie that honestly presents homosexual women…The Killing of Sister George, movie version, has almost as much relationship to the life of the ordinary lesbian, as Donald Duck has to the ordinary man.”[41] In the Daughters Of Bilitis’ publication, The Ladder, James Colton’s article, “The homosexual identity” called on its readers to rally against the stage version of The Killing of Sister George:

Write a letter to your local paper about it, get your objections to the management of the theatre that brought it to your community. Refuse to accept without a murmur a presentation that is going to confirm the general public in its outdated and patronizing, if not hostile, conception of lesbians. Do your single, individual best to right wrongs and set people’s thinking straight. A picket line at the theatre would be even better. [42]

In a reader’s response column, Sterling Monahan states “I remember challenging the validity of The Killing of Sister George and calling for a realistic view of lesbian life”.[43] The advent of a distinctly self-motivated identity actively repudiated representations of butch-femme subculture, and an essentialist politics took hold. For lesbian and feminist activists, lesbian “visibility” was associated with a “mannish-ness” and as such, the lesbian’s gender disorder.[44] Rejecting these stereotypes, the masculinisation of the lesbian was thereby countered by the notion of the “ordinary lesbian”.

While the parallel discourses of censorship and the recognition of gay and lesbian identity developed concurrently, in looking at the reactions to The Killing of Sister George, it is also possible to suggest their interimplication. For, while the film’s censorship was based on the abjection of lesbian sex, suggested by the assumption of the lesbian’s psychological and psychiatric illness, the rejection of the film signified the gay and lesbian liberationist groups’ challenge to the psycho-juridical construction of the “privacy” of homosexuality. As such, through the public recognition of a homosexual identity, the notion of “coming out” and “consciousness raising” developed alongside gay liberation. The internalisation of psychoanalytic concepts characteristic of the predominant understanding of lesbianism at the time, were thereby revealed to internalise a self-loathing and debasement which, it was believed, were ameliorated through the process of redefinition exemplified by the slogan, “Gay is good”. [45]

Dolls and horses

Before turning to the scene, I want to briefly outline recent theorisations of The Killing of Sister George in relation to lesbian subjectivity. Chris Straayer has argued that, contrary to the negative stereotyping of the film within the positive images debate, the recuperation of butch/femme representations impacts on the film’s political significance. She states that:

Without a doubt, the belief that all lesbians want to be men (despite Childie and her doll collection) is a stereotype: but whether or not it is deemed negative depends on one’s political agenda. For assimilationist lesbians, the accusation of not being a real woman is slanderous. For queer lesbians, claiming the “cigar” is fashionably “in your face”.[46]

What Straayer insists on is that the signifier “male” can be resignified lesbian, particularly by queer viewing subjects. However, it could be argued that the iconography of masculinity in the mise en scene – George drinks White-horse gin, collects horse brasses, while the figure of a horse looms over Childie’s doll collection in the apartment – tangentially resignifies the masculine within the frame. Contrary to Straayer’s claim, the active reappropriation of the symbols of masculinity that occurs within the frame – the iconography of dolls and horses – suggests that it is in relation to Childie’s feminine signifiers that George resignifies the masculine as lesbian.

Alternately, in stressing the validity of the film’s butch-femme images, Andrea Weiss has argued that the negative associations of Sister George’s butch stereotype “could be reworked in the minds of lesbian spectators in the 1960s, for whom ‘butch’ and ‘femme’ had a central place (and very different meaning) in the lesbian subculture.” [47] This reworks the rhetorical figure of the “ordinary” lesbian in the positive images debate. In her book Screen Dreams: Fantasising Lesbians in Film, Clare Whatling lists the film on both sides of the positive/negative divide, she states that the film is “indicative of the contentiousness of the positive images debate”. Whatling importantly identifies that while the film remains an instance of negative lesbian representation, it nonetheless provides an “iconic” experience of lesbianism for the lesbian spectator. [48]

More recently, the film’s butch-femme imagery has gained currency in Judith Halberstam’s book, Female Masculinity. Halberstam uncouples the conflation of sex role and identity, which, she argues, has produced an oversimplification of the film’s negative stereotyping. Contrary to the film’s being a “show case for lesbiphobia”, Halberstam surfaces the film’s “confusion between theatre and life”, and suggests that the representation of the butch-femme dynamic has sexual significance for the lesbian spectator. She states “in the infamous cigar scene, George’s predations are part of an elaborate ritual played out between George and Childie…and it is a ritual, moreover, that is markedly sexual.” Recuperating the scene whereby George forces Childie to eat the butt of her cigar in an act of contrition, however, Halberstam overlooks explicit sexual representation between Mercy and Childie in scene 176. She states: “This magnificent film was made in England, and therefore the director Robert Aldrich was not so confined by the Production Code; however, when the film was released in America, the sex scene between Coral Browne and Susannah York had to be cut, and the film received an X rating”. [49] However, the film was produced by the US based Aldrich Studios and was predominantly shot in East Hollywood [50] . Moreover, the film’s inclusion of the scene marked the introduction of the MPPA’s self-regulatory classification codes that introduced the “X” certificate. That Halberstam neglects to examine the scene or its confrontation with the MPPA’s classification suggests to me that the re-evaluation of the film remains captive within a theoretical focus on the performativity of gender roles within a butch-femme iconography. What these recent reevaluations of the film establish is that any re-evaluation of the historical and social value of the film rests on the elision of any confrontation with the sexual representation of scene 176. The focus on the performativity of gender roles in the film subsumes any discussion of the explicit sexual representation of the scene. It seems to me that the marked neglect of critical attention to scene 176, either as an instance of lesbian gender performativity or as having an iconic significance to lesbian film history, maintains the homophobia implicit to the film’s sexual representation.

The recuperation of the film’s butch/femme identifications might acknowledge Aldrich’s attempt to represent “truthfully” the subculture, as indicated by his filming a scene on location at London’s lesbian club, Gateways: Aldrich used forty of the club’s members who were payed $US11.40 a day.[51] However, I suggest that this focus by contemporary theorists actively signals the dismissal of any serious discussion of Aldrich’s attempt to sexually represent the lesbian. It seems astounding to me that few criticisms attempt to either confront or embrace Aldrich’s direction of lesbian sex in the cinema, what he identified as “the most erotic, provocative English-language sex scene that anyone has photographed”. Assuming the lesbian representation through the butch-femme imaging in the film, it would seem that the collapse of gender and sexuality is maintained. By disarticulating the film’s representation of the sex scene from its butch/femme identifications and by putting aside the psychoanalytic paradigm that the film obviously portrays and partakes in, I want to examine lesbian sexuality through a direct confrontation with the scene. In so doing, I suggest that the narrow theoretical focus on the film to-date points to the gendered assumptions of representation in the theories of a lesbian subjectivity.

Scene 176

Scene 176 takes place in Childie’s/Alice’s bedroom. The sexual betrayal of the scene follows from the farewell to June Buckridge, Applehurst‘s Sister George, at the BBC studios. The scene establishes that Alice leaves George with Mrs Mercy Crofts, who rescues “the poor child” from George’s tirades; this is played out in the narrative/sexual climax. “We might have smelt a rat if we had been asked to go to Sweden”, states Coral Browne of what was said in the media to have been left unscripted.[52] However, according to Aldrich, Coral Browne’s reaction to the scene, “put it in the female perspective so that Susannah didn’t feel dirty…What she needed to sustain her through those embarrassing moments couldn’t have come from a man.”[53]

Under the guise of collecting her dolls, Childie lies on her bed. Returning from the living room, Mercy holds Childie’s coveted doll, Emmilene. She enters and stands in the doorway watching over Childie, who puts her doll, Jane, to sleep, whispering, “Why don’t you lie down for a little bit, just have a rest…” As she turns, Mercy stands unexpectedly over her. Addressing Emmilene, in a trance-like manner Mercy continues, “…you’re going to be very tired. I think you should go to sleep…” She sits on the bed, and, placing the doll beside the other, she says “close your eyes…” Brushing her hand over Childie’s breast, the sexual sequence is set in motion.

In Life Magazine Aldrich described scene 176:

Mrs Mercy puts her hand back there again. Alice takes it and moves it away. Mrs Mercy puts her hand back there the third time. Alice doesn’t do anything at all except unhook the blouse. She just says the ball is in your court. Mercy has been saying behind those cobra eyes…she’s either ten times smarter than I thought or else she’s dead and we’d better call the doctor. [54]

Under this pretence, then, Mercy brushes Childie’s breast, What ensues resembles a game of fort-da[55].. The music swells and, as stated, Mercy puts her hand back for a third time and Childie unhooks her bra, which is audible to the audience and precipitates the stark silence that follows. Highlighting Childie’s breast and erect nipple in the foreground of the frame, Aldrich intercuts the images of Mercy’s kissing her body and Childie’s response. The inter-cutting of the scene with the shot/reverse shot structure suggests the direct association of Mercy’s giving pleasure to Childie through the focus largely on Childie’s solitary orgasm.

The sexual significance of the scene is largely achieved through Aldrich’s directorial presence. Taken out of sequence, the representation of Childie’s orgasm- her flailing hand and head tossing – seems exaggerated, if not hysterical and illogical in the sequence. The sexual significance, as well as the surplus of representation, is signified through the filming of Mercy. Shot behind the balustrade of the bed, her face is half-shadowed as she watches Childie’s arousal. But, at the point of Mercy’s recognition, the high-key lighting represents Childie being in a state of orgasm, and signifies for the spectator the identification of female pleasure. In the reverse frame, the first frame without obstruction, Mercy gasps and her eyelids flutter. The discursive production of female pleasure is thereby cited through Mercy’s recognition. Childie pushes Mercy’s head to her breast in a sign of frustration, and while the aerial shot focuses largely on Childie’s pleasure, Mercy is presented as a novitiate, unknowledgable in the ways of lesbianism. It is important to note that the filming of this sequence reworks the necessary identification of the lesbian found in earlier code films. Mercy’s recognition of female arousal and female orgasm rephrases the identification necessary to the discursive production of the lesbian. Childie’s orgasm releases the shot/reverse shot structure as they kiss in a medium 2 shot, placing the women within the single frame. As if to supplement this, Aldrich imposes George’s unwitting recognition onto the scene. [56]  George is silhouetted at the door; an emblem of the spectator’s presence as her appearance weights the frame. She states, “what a perfect little gem for the Sunday press. Did it have to be here”. An extreme overhead shot signifies the cruel fate of George, not only the loss of her character but also her lover, Childie, to Mrs Mercy Crofts.

In this scene, Aldrich presents an iconic metaphor of the triangle, echoed by the repeated use of trios inside the frame – character placements, decorations, and repeated actions. The characters here invite parallels to Freud’s discussion of sexual inversion in women in “Three essays in the theory of sexuality” (1905). Significantly, Freud identified three types of lesbian – and, while this may be an attempt to obscure a defining principle of heterosexuality -the “absolute”, “amphigenic” and “contingent” lesbian resignified the lesbian’s masculinity within a heterosexual model of desire. While Freud later defined lesbianism within the terms of the “masculinity complex”, here the “absolute” takes sexual objects “exclusively of their own sex”; the amphigenic “may equally be of their own or of the opposite sex”; and the contingent, “under certain external conditions – of which inaccessibility of any normal sexual object and imitation are the chief” are “capable of taking as their object someone of their own sex”. [57]  While the absolute (George) and amphigenic (Mercy) types obviously signified the masculine, the enigmatic contingent invert, the feminine lesbian (Childie), was resolved through a masculine object choice. While I am not contesting that the narrative representation situates masculinity as defining lesbian desire, I want to direct attention to the implications of Aldrich’s representing these stereotypes within the one spatial geography. George’s double felling in the film – her “killing” in the television series and the loss of Childie – situates her in the regressive space of the frame; while positioned in the background, she is literally in the dark and “unwittingly” present to her betrayal. Using the Freudian paradigm, this works to shore up the idea that the “absolute invert” or masculine lesbian suggests the devolutionary process of lesbianism, the fall to a pre-oedipal identification with the phallic mother. The spatial metaphor captures the singular tragedy of the mannish lesbian, revealed not only through Aldrich’s use of the spatial field but also his camera placement. The aerial image and tripartite metaphor is again used at the film’s conclusion. Sitting in the empty BBC studio, three low angle freeze frames fix George’s empty, bereft figure as she moo’s, indicating her fall from popularity as Applehurst‘s Sister George to her diminished status as the voice over for the animated “Clarabell the cow”.

“Mummy’s going to be back”

In Childie and Mercy’s enactment of lesbian desire in this scene, Aldrich draws heavily on a lesbian-maternal metaphor. In such a metaphor, lesbianism becomes, according to Teresa de Lauretis, “a subset, a variation, or a component of female subjectivity”.[58] Most importantly, to contemporary theorists of lesbian sexuality, the mother-daughter bond subsumes lesbian desire and the metaphoric employment of the lesbian figure significantly locates lesbian sexuality within the narcissistic entrapment of the pre-oedipal. In effect this re-inscribes Freud’s psychoanalytic metaphor of lesbianism. In this case, as I have mentioned, the collapse of gender and sexuality is revealed through the child’s attachment to the phallic phase, reinscribing discourses of marginality of lesbianism (in relation to a true oedipal sexuality), and presenting a characteristic regression of the lesbian, the maternal metaphor is constructed as an effect of a heterosexual cultural symbolics.

By contrast, I will conclude by looking at the film from two different angles through the deployment of scene 176. First, I want to consider the film from the perspective of producing female pleasure and second, that this is constituted by the enactment of desire between Childie and Mercy Crofts: the lesbian-maternal metaphor. Leaving aside the psychoanalytic paradigm for the moment, the representation of Childie’s orgasm ensures the collapse of inner and outer frame as represented through Childie’s on-screen response, and Mercy’s off-screen arousal. Aldrich attempts to represent the unconscious fantasy of orgasm, which is resolved in the two shot in which they kiss. The collapse of unconscious and conscious representation, or fantasy and representation, is however previously suggested through Mercy’s extending Childie’s fantasy with the dolls. As she talks to Emmilene, Aldrich literalises the merging between reality and fantasy. (In point of fact, the principle theme of the film is that George is unable to separate her character from her life, exemplified in the mise en scene by the television that frames her persona, Sister George. For, in the empty studio at the film’s conclusion, George opens Sister George’s coffin, which falls apart as she yells, “Even the bloody coffin’s a fake”.)

However, Teresa de Lauretis has said that:

The work of unconscious fantasy, important as it is for our understanding of psychic contradiction and divisions in the social subject, cannot simply replace the complex intersections of conscious and unconscious processes in the subject of fantasy. Nor can a theory of film spectatorship, a theory of representation, collapse the social into the subjective by equating representation with fantasy. [59]

But to argue that the mother-daughter coupling in this film is simply derived from heterosexuality, or the collapse of representation and fantasy, fails to see precisely how the narrative re-deploys this collapse to signify a sexual subject. Contrary to the usual heterosexual symbolics of the mother-daughter dynamic, the relationship represented between Childie and Mercy can suggest a shift in representation that enables the lesbian’s sexualisation. In fact, regarding the mother-daughter relationship between Mercy and Childie within a heterosexual premise fails to acknowledge the attachment to, and a loss and refusal of, the figure of the daughter by Childie. The mother-daughter metaphor would assume (as their names suggest) that Mercy is the mother-figure and Childie the daughter. Yet, this would disregard the fact that Childie is also presented as a mother in the narrative.

Finally, the representation of the mother-daughter imagery recasts the lesbian metaphor and can suggest a lesbian fantasy: it is revealed in this scene that Childie forms her identification through her refusal to grieve for her “abandoned daughter”. In the threat of her own abandonment, George cries, “she’s got an abandoned daughter who’s almost old enough to be of interest to you Mercy dear!” Childie’s attachment to her dolls then exemplifies her loss. As she says to Mercy, “I always take them everywhere, well, Emmeline anyway, and Jane. And I get scared the others will get lost or stolen.” This suggests that Childie, representing the infant in the film – clad in doll’s dresses – signifies the possibility of desire for the child and, yet, in the disavowal of her loss, she excludes her child as a possible object of love. This brings into relief the theoretical assumptions of the lesbian-maternal metaphor.

In the fantasy of the lesbian maternal, Childie whispers to her doll, “I wouldn’t go without you Jane. You know that…Don’t cry then. You and Emmi and me are going away for a little journey…Sleep, dream a little, Mummy’s going to be back”. Childie’s representation then might signify the melancholic incorporation of the lost love-object, her daughter.[60] In displacing the erotic cathexis on Mercy, Childie’s melancholic narcissism signifies a disavowal of abandonment, and for Aldrich, the disavowal signifies the lesbian fantasy scenario. As in point of fact, before her entry into Childie’s room, the location of scene 176, Mercy holds Emilene to her chest and laments, “Oh what a shame, are you really so lonely?” Transferring the object loss (Childie’s daughter) into an ego loss (Mercy’s loneliness) in the scene (as we aren’t aware at this stage that Childie has an abandoned daughter), Aldrich presents a narcissistic lesbian fantasy scenario through scene 176. The pre-oedipal narcissism signified through the doll-play is transferred to the breast as symbolic of lesbian sexual gratification. While the visual coincidence between the dolls and the sexual enactment of desire within a maternal metaphor can indicate that a regression typifies a lesbian subject, ironically, it makes lesbianism, for the narrative, a necessary condition of the representation of female sexual pleasure. While the implication of this representation, again, might be to collapse gender and sexuality in the scene, inadvertently, Aldrich suggests that the possibility to represent female orgasm is reliant on a lesbian fantasy scenario of absence and loss.

The structure of the maternal metaphor in the narrative, like the use of dolls within the scene, suggests that a certain re-framing is necessary to the representation of a lesbian fantasy. While the notion of melancholy situates a defining loss and regression to lesbian desire, it also makes possible the representation of female pleasure. The derivative nature of lesbianism, then, the gender disorder that collapses gender and sexuality, is foregrounded by the enactment of lesbian sex through a maternal metaphor in the film and the reliance on dramatic parallel of the dolls. Because the film has only been considered through its butch-femme imaging, it has suggested the search for epistemological certainty – how to identify lesbianism – in the face of its contingent ontology. The representation of lesbianism in The Killing of Sister George, ironically, also signifies female pleasure. Aldrich’s scene 176 shores up the collapse of gender and sexuality while soliciting its collapse to formally represent the female orgasm.

Footnotes:
[1] Aldrich quoted in Richard Schickel, “Shock of a hidden world”, Life 65, no.18 (1968): 38.
[2] See, Rhona J. Berenstein, “Adaptation, censorship, and audiences of questionable type: lesbian sightings in Rebecca (USA 1940) and The Uninvited(USA 1944)”, Cinema Journal37, no.3 (1988): 16-37; and Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

[3] James W. Arnold, Seen any good dirty movies lately?: A christian critic looks at contemporary films (St Anthony Messenger Press, 1972): 84.
[4] Joseph Morgenstein, “Letting George do it”, Newsweek 72, no.26 (1968): 44.
[5] Aldrich quoted in Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev.ed., (New York: Harper & Row, 1987): 173.
[6] Julia Erhart, “‘She could hardly invent them!’ from epistemological uncertainty to discursive production: lesbianism in The Children’s Hour”, Camera obscura 35 (1995): 88.
[7] See Christine Holmlund, “When is a lesbian not a lesbian?: the lesbian continuum and the mainstream femme film”, Camera obscura, nos. 25-26 (1991): 151. See also Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientation in Film and Video, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). For a discussion of the necessity to signify the lesbian’s post-oedipal subjectivity, see Teresa De Lauretis, “The seduction of lesbianism” in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994): 149-202.
[8] See Gerald Gardner, (ed) The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays office, 1934-1948(New York: Dodd & Mead, 1987).
[9] For a discussion of gay and lesbian liberation movements see John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983). In relation to the “Stonewall riots” see also Andrea Weiss, and Greta Schiller, Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1988).
[10] James Robert Parish, “Regulatory codes history”, Gays and Lesbians in Mainstream Cinema: Plots, Critiques, Casts and Credits for 272 Theatrical and Made-for-Television Hollywood Releases, (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 1993): xxii.
[11] See William Tusher, “Valenti to ozoners: ‘ratings a success'”, Film and Television Daily 4 February 1969: 7.
[12] Richard Corliss, “Still Legion, still decent?” Commonweal, 23 (May 1969): 293. Corliss edited Film Comment through the 1970s and is currently a film critic for Time.
[13] See Edwin T. Arnold. and Eugene L. Miller, Jnr., The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1986) : 148.
[14] See William Tusher, “‘X’ film producers prepare to fight KTLA-TV ad ban”, Film and Television Daily 2 January 1969: 3. Aldrich’s appeal against the Los Angeles Times was upheld by the High Court. Federal Judge Warren J. Ferguson dismissed the action, upholding the newspaper’s right to regulate its contents. See Vance King, “Press has ad censor power: papers free to rule as they want, court sez in Aldrich case”, Film and Television Daily 7 May 1969:1. In a further note, in Australian releases of the film, the sequence was altogether deleted although it remained in promotional material. The following dialogue was censored: “You’d look cheerful too with fifty cubic centimetres throbbing away between your legs”; “oh bullshit”; “go screw yourself or better still go try Mrs. Crofts”; see Richards, Mike, “Dirty Pix”, Cinema Papers (April 1974): 112.
[15] Edward Lipton, “Certificate of rating ‘killed’ on George: challenge to system?”, Film and Television Daily, Wed 22 January 1969: 1; 4; “Sister George bows to censor”, The New York Times, 27 March 1969: 53.Pursuant to the code and rating withdrawal was a stipulation that the self-applied rating could not go higher than the rating applied by the Code and Rating Administration. In which case, receiving the X certificate, Aldrich had no option but to re-apply the classification which did not permit patrons under 17 years. Inasmuch as Aldrich ultimately challenged the rating system on the subsequent qualification of the “X” certification, that is, the implication that it meant “obscene”, this seems to me to suggest that Aldrich self-applied the certificate to bring legal action against the Association. See note 15.
[16] Aldrich, quoted in William Tusher, “Aldrich versus the system”, Film and Television Daily, 4 February 1969: 6. Aldrich filed two action suits against the MPAA with anti-censorship attorney Stanley Fleishman, for what he called a “censorship backlash” against the X certificate. However, he reinforces the lesbian’s degeneracy in the narrative as Mercy states that Sister George was dismissed from the series Applehurst because of her “complete inability to conduct [her]self in a decent manner”.
[17] See Frank Caprio, The Lesbian, (Whyteleafe: Gold Star Publications, 1970 [1966]). Anthony Storr, “Female homosexuality” in Sexual Deviation(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964): 70-80. Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality: disease or way of life? (New York: Collier Books, 1962). Irving Beiber, “Sexual deviations. II”, : 970-75.
[18] Caprio: 301. Caprio’s book was originally written in 1955 and republished four times alone throughout the 1960s.
[19] See note 18
[20] ii Enid Nemy, “The woman homosexual: more assertive, less willing to hide”, The New York Times, 17 November 1969: 62.
[21] The Age, 25 September 1969: 45.
[22] D’Emillio: 144. It is interesting to note that Aldrich transformed the stageplay’s Madame Xenai, a fortune teller, into the prostitute Betty Thaxter in the film. The Wolfenden report also included the liberalization of laws governing prostitution. See Morris B.Kaplan, Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1997): 22
[23] Although Havelock Ellis posited a scale of inversion up to the “actively inverted woman”, (Havelock Ellis, “Sexual inversion in women”, Alienist and Neurologist 16 (1895): 147-8), he stated that “the chief characteristic of the sexual inverted woman is a certain degree of masculinity”, which is otherwise noted as “part of an organic instinct” in Ellis: 152. See also Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (London: Wilson & Macmillan, 1897): 96-97. For a discussion of lesbianism and the sign of masculinity in sexological writings, see Esther Newton, “The mythic mannish lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the new woman”, in Duberman et al (eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past(New York: Meridian, 1990): 281-93.
[24] Sigmund Freud “The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman”, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud[SE] XVIII, James Strachey (ed) (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974): 145-72. This is previously indicated in a footnote to his original case study, “Fragment of analysis of a case of hysteria”, SE, VII: 3-122.
[25] See Alain Silver, “Mr film noir stays at the table”, Film Comment 8, no.1 (1972): 20. The Killing of Sister George was the first film made at Aldrich Studios and Aldrich stated that the censorship crisis surrounding the film was due to his independent status.
[26] See Albert Ellis, “The effectiveness of psychotherapy with individuals who have severe homosexual problems”, Journal of Consulting Psychology 20, no.3 (1956): 191-94 Edmund Bergler is also renowned for advocating the reversal of homosexuality, see note 18.
[27] Chris Jones, Films and Filming 15, no.9 (1969): 46.
[28] “What ever happened to Childie McNaught?”, Time 29, 20 December (1968): 57.
[29] Elsie Hyslop-Lewis, “Lesbianism”, editorial, Life 65, no.21 (1968): 32A
[30]( Flavia Wharton, “The Killing of Sister George”, Films in Review 20, (January 1969): 54.
[31] Renata Adler, New York Times, 17 December (1968): 58.
[32] Hollis Alpert, “The Killing of Sister George“,  Saturday Review, 11 January 1969.
([33] John Simon, “The Killing of Sister George“, in Movies into Film: Film Criticism 1967-1970 (New York: The Dial Press, 1971): 43.
[34] Alpert (1969).
[35] Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, (New York: Routledge, 1993): 3.
[36] “Launch battle over Boston seizure of Sister George“, Film and Television Daily,5 March 1969: 4; John Darnton, “Sex in film and play put to the courts: police in Connecticut order deletions in Sister George“, The New York Times, 26 March 1969: 37; Tusher, “Aldrich versus the system”: 6. Responding to a police complaint by vice squad captain Joseph Jordon, Mottola issued a warrant for Sasso’s arrest. See”Boston mgr. guilty in Sister George case; appeal filed”, Film and Television Daily 134, no.49, Thursday 13 March 1969: 1,4.
[37] “Launch battle over Boston seizure”: 4; “Boston newspaper hits police action vs. film”, Film and Television Daily, 19 March 1969: 4; “Boston police want Sister George Print”, Film and Television Daily, 19 March 1969:1, 4.
[38] Adler: 58.
[39] Simon: 43.
[40] Russo: 170.
[41] Gene Damon, The Ladder, 13, no.5/6 (1969): 45.
[42] James Colton, “The homosexual identity”, The Ladder, v.13, nos. 11-12, September (1968): 7.
[43] Sterrling Monahan, The Ladder, v.13, nos.3-4, Dec-Jan (1968-69): 38.
[44] See Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
[45] See Martha Shelley, “Gay is good” in Karla Jay & Allen Young (eds) Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation (New York: Douglas Book Corporation, 1972): 31. See also Lillian Faderman, “Not a public relations movement: lesbian revolutions in the 1960s through ’70s” in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: 191-95.
[46] Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes: Deviant Bodies: 276
[47] Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema (London: Jonathon Cape, 1992): 64.
[48] Claire Whatling, Screen Dreams: Fantasising Lesbians in Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997): 84.
[49] Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998): 197.
[50] In fact, Aldrich stated “If ever a picture was a natural to make abroad, it’s Sister George …But instead of shooting the works in Britain, we merely filmed exteriors in and near London”. Aldrich transported not only actors and actresses to his Hollywood studio but, as he stated, “chunks of an English pub, pieces of an English Ford truck and BBC-TV cameras and control panels” in Aldrich, Robert, “Why I bought my own studio”, Action, v.4, Jan-Feb (1969): 8-10
[51] John M.Lee, “Lesbians in film of Sister George“, The New York Times, 15 June 1968: 38. The article detailed Aldrich’s convincing the clubs manager, Mrs Gina Ware, to use the location and her choice of the forty volunteers to appear in the film. Also see note 51. Aldrich argued that the location “couldn’t be duplicated anywhere, regardless of cost”, Aldrich: 9-10. By contrast, however, this scene signalled a new gay and lesbian activism, for example, “The Gateways has made thousands of pounds out of women who come to the club [precisely how much money and publicity was gained from The Killing of Sister George?]…We are not sick and don’t like people who condescendingly treat us as such – especially when they are making a living off us” quoted in Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, rev.ed, (London: Quartet Books, 1990): 193.
[52] Coral Browne quoted in The Times, 26 March 1969: 10
[53] Aldrich continued, “Susannah was a bitch to her. But in this particular sequence, Coral really, really helped her and therefore helped the movie through a very rough time” in Arnold and Miller: 147.
[54] Aldrich quoted in Schickel: 38.
[55] In Beyond the Pleasure Principle(1920), SE XVIII, Freud theorised the child’s game of fort ‘gone’/da ‘there’, and in the disappearance and return of a reel of string attached a “greater pleasure”.
[56] Aldrich discusses his equation of ecstasy and pain through the representation of female orgasm in The Grissom Gang in Harry Ringel, “Up to date with Robert Aldrich”, Sight and Sound 43, no.3 (1974): 168.
[57] Freud, “Three essays on the theory of sexuality”, SE VII: 123-243.
[58] De Lauretis: 115
[59] De Lauretis: 148.
[60] To turn to Freud’s theory of melancholy: “the object-cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end. But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego”, “Mourning and melancholia” (1917), SE XIV.