Horror Heroine DEUX
July 13, 2008
In the lexicon of horror films that dot the storied galaxy of this film industry, the presence of positive female imagery is almost nil. In one way or another, either as victim or perpetrator, the inarguable traits that characterize females and femininity are used to incite fear, revulsion and carnal bloodshed in audiences. The audiences for horror films (and any unqualifiedly chick flick) have always been assumed by marketing managers to consist of males, age 18-34. These are films made by men, for men, at women’s expense; THEY WERE (are) EXPENDABLE.
FAT GIRL, French title A Mon Soeur, by director Catherine Breillat is as close an approximation of a feminist horror film to be conceived to date. It pointedly refutes the feminist film theory put forth by Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” that determined a Lacan/Freudian interpretation domination of film criticism since its publication in 1975. The persistent reliance on this particular psychology might be viewed as flawed in itself since feminist film theory has been evolving for nearly forty years. Is it still necessary or even feminist to interpret every film in this way? A system that is reliant on a male theory that assumes films inherently possess a male gaze? As women, a minority majority, is this viewpoint ingrained or has it been indoctrinated? Regardless of its relevancy it is necessary to use this theory to posit FAT GIRL as a feminist horror film because it is the widely regarded standard bearer of feminist criticism.
FAT GIRL would not typically be categorized into the horror genre. Superficially it might be considered a coming of age drama yet, typical of Breillat, it revels in raw depictions of female sexual declaration and perversion. Twelve year old Anais lolls her portly visage about the gray seascapes at her family’s beach house while observing the gradual corruption of her lustful yet innocent older sister Elena. Anais’s physicality is instrumental to the film’s classification as a feminist horror film. She is for most of the film, wholly asexualized. Too young to be respectably objectified, too overweight to be idealized, too naive with which to be identifiable, the male gaze has no outlet on which to project itself. Elena serves as the representative of a traditional horror film victim: classically beautiful, promiscuous, and egotistical. Men want to be her and do her but because she is female, this simultaneous identification/objectification is also threatening. She thus must be destroyed.
This resolution manifests with the introduction of the character Fernando, a law student who’s additional purpose seems to be to exacerbate the mutual contempt residing beneath the surface of sisters’ relationship. Fernando sees the girls for nothing but their sexuality, Elena, and lack thereof, Anais. Anais bears witness to the her sister’s deflowering and all it’s twisted logic and anatomical tug-of-war power-plays.
She is now the voyeur. She has overtaken, or taken back?, the gaze from the presumptive male. We the audience must see from this moment on the events of the film through her eyes. Because she is disgusted and rendered sagacious by this scene of corruption, we may now admire and thus identify with her as a powerful character/heroine.
The stage is set, rockets boosted, for a third installment of this venture into FAT GIRL’s subversive charms. For now, let’s all go see THE LAST MISTRESS, the most recent film by Catherine Breillat, in theaters now.
