604
PARTISAN REVIEW
hostile portrayal?
It
may, in the feminists' judgment, be anyone of a num–
ber of things: the image of a hard-driving and professionally successful career
woman who is, as a result of her ambition, denied more intimate satisfac–
tions; or the portrait of an "empty, disintegrated and alienated" young
woman, "a part played frequently in recent years by Karen Black," Ms.
Mellen tells us; or, finally, the image of the mildly repressed and cautiously
accommodating figure whose attractiveness for men is a function of her
p,osing fewer emotional threats than her liberated sisters. For each of these,
and other types of the patronizing and hostile portrayal of women, Ms. Mel–
len has several examples at hand. Most of these are drawn from films familiar
to
people with an interest in cinema, and are therefore easily reevaluated in
light of Ms. Mellen's analysis. Her theory is that a negative image vividly
impressed is not a recognizable portrait of a human being. Any representa–
tion of women as flawed or otherwise unhappy people who fail to respond
to
their situations with anything less than militant and effectual rage will
tend to enforce acquiescence in that status as a given of the feminine condi–
tion itself. Since we know, or so the argument runs, that there is nothing in
femininity itself which requires that women be unhappy or passive or re–
pressed or alienated, why should film-makers represent them as such? Why
not show them as vital, positive, integrated? To do so will be not only
ideologically correct but realistic, for as all decent people know, real human
beings may always shape their lives in accordance with conscious desires.
The theory is feeble on many grounds:
1.
It
is notoriously imprecise. That is, it makes no distinction between
an intention
to
exalt women, albeit for "incorrect" reasons, and an inten–
tion to demean them, for the same reasons. A critical approach to serious
films would need
to
draw such distinctions very carefully indeed to do justice
to the complexity and ambivalence of feelings and structures of conscious–
ness illuminated in the film. Consider, briefly, Eric Rohmer's masterpiece
My Night At Maud's,
a film Ms. Mellen treats with some tolerance, even
grudging admiration. The film's protagonist is a male, but he moves be–
tween two life alternatives vividly embodied by women, one Maud, the
other
Fran~oise.
Ms. Mellen wants Jean-Louis to select Maud, but he chooses
Fran~oise
instead. What's wrong with
Fran~oise?
She is the type of the
mildly repressed and cautiously accommodating figure mentioned above.
Though pretty, she's in no sense as dazzlingly beautiful as Maud, and her
imagination is limited and sluggish by comparison with the older woman's.
Where Maud is openly sensual and challenging,
Fran~oise
is rather timid
and old-fashionedly introspective. Though as a student she can aim at all
sorts of professional goals,
Fran~oise
has decided to be a lab technician;
Maud, by contrast, is a doctor.
