The film 40 Days and 40 Nights culminates in a rape scene. The protagonist, Matt Sullivan (Josh Hartnett), having gone nearly 40 days without masturbating or having sex, is tied to his bed in the hope that he can make it through the final, difficult hours. His ex-girlfriend enters, mounts him, and as he deliriously mutters “no!”, has sex with him. Two quick points: First, for most people, this doesn’t seem to register as rape, despite the fact that if the characters’ genders were reversed its classification as such would be unarguable. Second, the scene was intended to be, and for most people seems to be, funny. Having failed in his goal, Matt then is forced to apologize to his current girlfriend, for getting raped.
To backtrack, Matt’s goal is, effectively, to temporarily remove himself from the heteronormative order, to step back from our society’s near-compulsory, near-constant obsession with heterosexual sex. And this is continually reinforced in the film, with references to his upsetting the “natural” balance of power, with his friends’, coworkers’, and even his brother’s (who is a priest) constant attempts to reintegrate him into the sexual order. And just at the point where he has nearly reached his goal, he is raped, forced to apologize for it, and immediately reintegrated into society as a fully-fledged, though now perhaps monogamous, heterosexual.
The only interesting thing about this film is the reversal of gender roles, which effectively translate what would be a drama about rape and our society’s treatment of women into a romantic comedy about a man who finds himself and a new girlfriend. What is curious, and a little scary, is the ease with which this translation was achieved.
Filed under: Hitchcock, authenticity, film, heteronormativity, romantic comedies, sexuality
In films, there’s such a thing as spatial causation. Maybe ’spatial transference’ is a better term. Regardless, the ’spatial’ part stays, and is really just a metaphor anyway. Here’s how it works.
In a film, in a sense, there is a sort of secondary ’space’ whose ‘geography’ is made up of certain types of culturally important characteristics, placed, according to a film’s, and culture’s, logic, more or less close to one-another. So, instead of Canada butting up against the United States, you might have the unwed mother adjacent to the serial killer or something. These pseudo-spatial ‘locations’ can be read from the film through subtle causations, transferences of meaning, and odd shadings that just don’t make sense unless something is rubbing off onto something in an adjacent location.
Here’s my example, riffed off a reading I did a while back of North by Northwest (1959). The film’s spaces are divided primarily into the authentic, which is where every recoupable character ends up by the end of the film, and the inauthentic, which is where nearly every character starts out. Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), the film’s love interest, begins the film as a spy, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) begins as a dashing bachelor, and Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) and Leonard (Martin Landau) are the villains, involved in some sort of never-quite-explained espionage and, I argue, a sexual relationship. What I want to argue is that Leonard, Vandamm, Thornhill, and Kendall all begin much closer to one-another than is let on.
One scene in the film is the key to my argument: When Vandamm and Thornhill first meet there is a series of cuts which show Vandamm, more or less, checking Thornhill out and Thornhill becoming more and more uncomfortable. Having seen exactly this look a few times in my life, its something I’m quickly led to read as a sexual advance, and one involving recognition at that. Vandamm’s recognition of Thornhill here as someone to some degree like himself opens up the map of this film’s normative territory, and it is aggressively sexual.
Vandamm recognizes Thornhill as “like himself” because they both occupy the space of the sexually inauthentic (where the sexually authentic is a space in which only the heterosexual married couple can reside), and it is this recognition (note, the film is all about recognitions and misrecognitions) that sets in motion the rest of the film. What Vandamm recognizes is the geography of the space of inauthenticity in the film and both his and Thornhill’s positions in it.
So here’s the map: Vandamm and Leonard, gay men, are at the center of the field of inauthenticity, and they live their lives entirely within its space. Kendall, for her abuse of her sexuality for espionage, is also well within its space. And Thornhill, due both to his playboy lifestyle and his uncomfortably Freudian relationship with his mother occupies its periphery. He can move about in the space of the authentic, but as soon as he is mistaken for a spy, which can only occur because he is already so close to the space of the inauthentic, he is forced into that other, darker space. And everything in the film happens because of this arrangement.
One caveat, though: Never trust Hitchcock. This film is funny, and one of the reasons I suspect its humor works is because it plays on then-existing cultural beliefs in a way that makes them look ridiculous.
I just watched Stranger than Fiction, a really bizarre romantic comedy starring Will Ferrell, Queen Latifah, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Thompson, and Dustin Hoffman where Will Ferrell’s character discovers that he’s a character in a book that Emma Thompson is writing and that as she writes her book, his destiny is also written. When he learns that Thompson is planning to kill him off, Ferrell confronts her, she gives him a copy of her manuscript, and he in turn gives it to Hoffman, who plays a professor of literature. One of the stranger elements of the film appears when Hoffman insists that Thompson’s book is a masterpiece and tries to convince Ferrell to let her finish the book as she intends to, which would result in Ferrell’s death, thereby transforming Ferrell’s life from meaninglessness as an IRS agent to an embodiment of (Greek) tragedy. Although this theme isn’t explicitly described in the film as Nietzschean, it nonetheless sounds a criticism of the philosophy for life Nietzsche builds in The Birth of Tragedy:
The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctively unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images: the hero, the greatest phenomenon of the will, is negated for our pleasure, because he remains only phenomenon and the eternal life of the will remains untouched by his annihilation. ‘We believe in eternal life’, such is the cry of the tragedy; while music is the unmediated idea of this life.
Compare this to Hoffman’s injunction to Ferrell that he let Thompson kill him off so that his life can be invested with meaning and he can live on forever through literature. Ferrel reads Thompson’s book and comes to the conclusion that her creation is better for his death, and here again he appears as the figure of the tragic hero who, reminding “us of another being and of a higher joy for which with a sense of foreboding … prepares himself through his destruction rather than through his triumphs.” He offers his life to her in sacrifice for her art.
Until she was confronted with Ferrell, Thompson also embodied Nietzsche’s ideal of the tragic artist who “shares with the Appolonian sphere of art the full pleasure in appearance and in seeing, and at the same time … negates this pleasure and takes an even higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the visible world of appearance.” This game of pleasure in appearance and its negation breaks, however, when Thompson realizes at least one of her characters (and perhaps all of them) is real, that in killing them off (which she does in all her books), she is not destroying mere appearance but actual people, and here the film confronts Nietzschean ideology full on.
Nietzsche wanted us to adopt the life of the tragic hero as our own, to actually live as if our lives were Greek tragedy. The film explicitly rejects this ideology, however, when it portrays Thompson’s character as deeply disturbed by her game of appearances become reality, when she is unable to complete her book as intended after she realizes that doing so would result in actual death. She doesn’t, in the end, really believe in the tragedy she writes, because she can’t bring herself, given the opportunity, to make it reality. The tragic life, the film’s writer seems to want to say, looks fine on paper, but as a life lived is bunk.
Hoffman’s character expresses the view that literature can be divided into two types: tragedy and comedy, where tragedy embodies the Nietzschean ideal and comedy in terms of contemporary genres most closely resembles the romantic comedy. The film never strays from this characterization, and insofar as life resembles literature (an at least implicit, if not in-your-face explicit theme adopted by the film), therefore leaves us two models for the good life: tragedy or comedy.
Since it rejects tragedy, though, the film offers us only one option around which to structure our lives: Romantic comedy.
