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EXPLOITING
FEMINISM
Two women -- one white and blonde, the other black and wearing an
Afro -- are harnessed to a plow, struggling to move forward through
thick muck. Glistening sweat slides through their exposed cleavage and
down their taunt, muscular thighs. Their expression is at once determined
and humbled. They are dressed in tight cut-off jeans, halter tops tied
off at the midriff, no bras and no shoes. Behind them, a man snarls,
driving his human "cows." This disturbing image is the core icon on the advertisements for Terminal
Island. In the same ad, we see a stereotypical image of the black
"buck," his broad chest bare, crushing a black woman's head
into the dirt with his foot, "Welcome to Terminal Island, Baby!"
The promotional campaign for an exploitation film characteristically
reduces the movie to its most sensationalistic images, images that make
its desired audience want to see more. Terminal Island is being
"exploited" as a film where one can see beautiful women "put
in their place" by powerful men. Another image circulates around Terminal Island -- the only
photograph I have been able to find of its director, Stephanie Rothman.
Rothman, an attractive young woman with flowing black hair, is directing
an early scene set in a television studio control-room. Her look is
passionate, her expressive hands stretch wide, as she is delivering
instructions to the actress who plays a documentary film maker in the
movie. The actress bears more than a passing resemblance to Rothman
herself.(2)
As a result, the image takes on a reflexive quality -- the woman director
as artist producing an image of the woman director. The caption alongside
this Omni magazine article reads:
Omni identifies the elements in Terminal Island
and the other Rothman films, such as Group Marriage (1972), The
Velvet Vampire (1971) and The Working Girls (1973), which attracted
feminist interest.
Omni's juxtaposition of these two images leaves unreconciled
two contradictory accounts of the film's politics and its audience appeals.
Images of women as chattel compete with images of women as artists.
Appeals to fantasies of male control compete with appeals to fantasies
of "equality and harmony." Any film which negotiates between
these two competing discourses warrants closer consideration. Such films
may help us to better understand the ideological fault-lines within
the popular cinema. As Christine Gledhill suggests, the political commitments of filmmakers
often have to get "negotiated" through generic traditions
for constructing stories and marketing appeals which sell those stories
to demographically desirable audiences. Such "negotiations"
produce ideological contradictions within the texts being sold, contradictions
which, in turn, get "negotiated" by viewers seeking certain
kinds of pleasures from going to the movies. In Rothman's case, a further
series of "negotiations" occurred amongst feminist critics:
after an initial flurry of articles advancing her case as a feminist
filmmaker, references to Rothman all but disappeared. A generation of
critics schooled in Screen theory and in Laura Mulvey's assault
on "visual pleasure" found it difficult to resolve the ideological
contradictions surrounding a feminist exploitation filmmaker. They stopped
looking for signs of feminist resistance in such an unlikely place and
recoiled with puritanical discomfort over her eroticized images. Rothman's
Terminal Island suggests the complexity of the "negotiations"
which occur between feminist politics and popular entertainment within
the marginal commercial space of the exploitation cinema. As more recent feminist critics have sought a more complex account
of the pleasures of popular culture, a reconsideration of Rothman seems
in order. Re-examining Rothman in the 1990s seems of critical importance,
since the issues she poses are closely related to those raised by a
whole range of contemporary Hollywood films which similarly seek to
insert feminist politics into commercial genres (Aliens, Blue
Steel, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma and Louise, A
League of Their Own). Many of these films were either directed by
veterans of the exploitation cinema or were strongly influenced by its
legacy. To fully understand the complex ideological negotiations within
these equally "corrupted" works, we need to reclaim both the
progressive generic traditions upon which they build and the critical
tools by which an earlier generation of feminist critics sought to interpret
and evaluate those traditions. This essay examines what may be at stake
for feminism in the exploitation cinema, using Rothman and Terminal
Island as a point of entry. My hope is not simply to reclaim a feminist auteur, though that would
be a worthy goal, but to re-open exploitation cinema for feminist exploration,
to suggest that its politics and pleasures may be far more complex than
knee-jerk dismissals might suggest. Rothman "exploits" the
progressive potential already embedded within the exploitation genres
to get her liberal feminist messages to a larger viewing public; Roger
Corman's New World Pictures "exploits" the topicality of feminism
in the early 1970s and the volatile emotions which surround it to attract
an audience of men and women filmgoers. Emerging in this context of
negotiation and exploitation, Terminal Island will be analyzed
as a "partially corrupted" film, one which resists placement
in a simple ideological category but which never-the-less shows the
possibility of expressing resistant politics within mainstream genres. ROTHMAN AT NEW WORLD A graduate of the University of Southern California cinema program,
Rothman was one of a number of "film school brats" hired by
Roger Corman to make low-budget exploitation films(4).
Starting as a personal assistant to Corman, she became one of the core
directors for New World Productions and later helped to establish her
own production company, Dimension Pictures(5).
Her independently-produced films largely follow the conventions of the
exploitation genres at New World. Unlike many of the other male directors
who worked under Corman's production supervision, such as Francis Ford
Coppola, Peter Bogdonavich, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard,
John Sayles, James Cameron, Jonathan Kaplan, and Joe Dante, Rothman
was never able to move into mainstream Hollywood filmmaking(6).
She left the movie industry following the collapse of Dimension pictures
and has not made films since. Rothman was one of a number of women who Corman employed during the
1970s and 1980s, directors like Barbara Peeters and Amy Jones, producers
like Barbara Boyle, Gail Ann Hurd and Julie Corman, and scriptwriters
like Rita Mae Brown. Corman offered them a chance to make movies at
a time when the Hollywood establishment was still almost impenetrable
for women. Corman's motives were far from altruistic(7).
Having nowhere else to go, these women would work long hours for little
money, hoping to get the film credits needed to break into Hollywood.(8) Corman offered his young directors a straight forward deal: he would
finance their films, albeit on low budgets and two-week production schedules,
and insure their distribution into the theaters. The film's promotional
campaigns, which depended upon highly charged elements such as sex,
drugs, violence, nudity, and countercultural politics, were developed
before the script was. Films were to be made according to his formulas.
Jonathan Kaplan, one of Rothman's contemporaries at New World described
the formula for the working girl comedies, a sub-genre centering around
the professional and romantic exploits of school teachers, nurses, or
stewardesses:
Within those terms, the filmmaker was free to experiment with alternative political perspectives or new formal techniques, as long as the picture came in on time and on budget. At the same time, Corman's recruitment of women was consistent with
his self-perception as a liberal, "socially conscious" independent
producer willing to "take chances" that the majors rejected.
Enthusiastically displaying May 1968 political posters on the wall of
his office, Corman saw himself as providing a home for those with "leftist
anti-war sympathies." New World solicited the market of disaffected
youths who were rejecting the mainstream films of the period. Reworking
tired mainstream genres through gender-reversals, New World's films
characteristically focused on the actions of strong-willed and independent-minded
women. Corman articulated those ideological commitments in specifically
economic terms:
Rothman worked within -- and to some degree, against -- the generic space Corman provided, both building upon the liberal potential already in place at New World and posing an internal critique of its own "exploitation" of women. EXPLOITATION CINEMA
AS COUNTER-CINEMA Rothman's feminist politics, so visibly pushing the limits of the exploitation
genres, made her an interesting test case for the women's "counter-cinema"
discourse advanced by British feminist writers, such as Pam Cook and
Claire Johnston(11).
Rejecting the political and aesthetic pretensions of the art cinema,
the collectively-produced documentary or the political avant-garde film,
these critics identified ways that women filmmakers had operated within
the popular cinema, seizing its materials and reworking them to more
fully accommodate the possibility of female desire and feminist politics.
The commercial cinema could get images and messages into broad-circulation,
a possibility feminists ignored at their own peril; Johnston and Cook
were uncomfortable with feminist strategies which marginalized women's
voices and cut them off from mainstream audiences. As Johnston writes
in the conclusion of "Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema": "In
order to counter our objectification in the cinema, our collective fantasies
must be released: women's cinema must embody the working through of
desire; such an objective demands the use of the entertainment film."
While Laura Mulvey was calling for a rejection of pleasure as always
already corrupted by masculine fantasies(12),
Johnston was advocating a fuller dialogue between the entertainment
film and the political cinema: "ideas derived from the entertainment
film, then, should inform the political film, and political ideas should
inform the entertainment cinema: a two way process."(13)
If the commercial cinema required compromises, it might never-the-less
be important to see how far women could go in appropriating its borrowed
and tainted terms to speak in their own voice. Films by women's directors
like Rothman, Dorothy Arzner, and Ida Lupino, were contradictory and
often incoherent, since women lacked the power within the Hollywood
system to fully express their own visions. However, these films were
of "vital importance" for feminists hoping to find a new cinematic
language which might more fully express their ideological commitments.
As Cook explains, "While they [Rothman's movies] cannot in any
sense be described as feminist films, they work on the forms of the
exploitation genres to produce contradictions, shifts in meaning which
disturb the patriarchal myths of women on which the exploitation film
itself rests." (14) Cook's project was largely auteurist, building a case for a women director,
Rothman, as part of a larger project of feminist historiography. At
the same time, it points towards the emergence of a feminist genre theory,
one which would soon shift its attention towards film noir and melodrama.
The tension between authorship and genre is one of the most productive
aspects of her influential essay, "Exploitation' Cinema and Feminism."
Cook ends the essay by calling for closer work on specific Rothman works
which will help to resolve their relationship to "other films in
the exploitation field." I maintain that tension here. Without
devaluing Rothman's importance as a director, I want to situate her
within a broader generic tradition, to show both the possibilities and
limitations feminists encounter working within the popular cinema. PASSIVE VICTIMS, HEROIC
RESISTORS One of the two films Rothman directed at Dimension, Terminal Island
is set in a near-future society where the United States Supreme Court
has outlawed capital punishment. The state of California has voted to
establish a penal colony on an island, fifteen miles off its coast,
where convicted murders will fend for themselves. As the ad campaign
succinctly puts it, Terminal Island is "where we dump our human
garbage!" The film opens as a new prisoner, Carmen Sims (Ena Hartman), is brought
onto the island. Carmen, an angry black woman, embodies pride, strength
and resistance to male control. The first time we see her, she is punching
out the camera of a photographer who tries to take her picture. When
she arrives on the island, she finds herself in the midst of a ruthlessly
patriarchal culture ruled by Bobby Farr (Sean Kenney), a vicious psychopath.
Bobby sees her as "the new bitch" and sends his right-hand
man, Monk (Roger E. Mosley), to "break her in." Monk appraises
her sexual capacity, concluding "you look you could take on three
or four right off." When she resists, growling, "I don't get
down on my knees to nobody," he overpowers her and crushes her
head into the ground: "Welcome to Terminal Island, Baby." Despite her cries for help, the other women watch the scene with cold
disinterest, having already been taught "their place." Even
after this public humiliation, Carmen continues to resist Bobby's orders,
"nobody's gonna run me." We watch her get slapped, beaten,
and harnessed in front of the plow, yet she still refuses to bow and
scrape. Alone, with the other women, Carmen demands answers: "What
kinda bastards have you got here anyway?" The language is crude agit-prop, yet it articulates the film's fundamental
concerns: a struggle between men and women, the experience of being
oppressed by a more powerful force, the reduction of women into domesticated
beasts. The women pull the plows, they muck in the dirt, they prepare
the meals, and they service the camp's sexual needs. As Carmen grumbles
as she dishes out food, "Great! I've got tits so I have to play
Betty Crocker." Writing for Omni, Rothman describes the women as
"doubly enslaved, forced to work like beasts of burden by day and
sexually service the men at night, which sounds to me a lot like a job
description for the position of traditional wife in any patriarchal
society."(15)
These images seem profoundly ambivalent. They do not seem designed
for women's pleasure and they are often hard to watch. Separated from
their narrative context, run as elements of pure spectacle, as in the
ads or trailers for the film, these images of women being treated as
chattel offer sadistic pleasure and erotic fascination, reflecting a
masculine backlash against the growing prominence of the feminist debate
in the early 1970s. Yet, placed in their narrative context, these images
invite melodramatic identification with the suffering women and their
hunger for freedom and self-respect. For the most part, these women
do not suffer quietly, and Rothman allows them to voice their anger
over their treatment by the men. Their anger evokes, albeit in simplified
terms, feminist categories of analysis: the subordination of women as
property within economic and social exchanges between men, the linkage
of biological traits ("tits") with socially assigned responsibilities
("playing Betty Crocker"), and the possibility of revenge
or revolt. In a particularly vivid moment of rage, Carmen vows to "smash
his balls until they turn into jello," hardly words calculated
to comfort the film's male audience members. Such direct expressions of feminist rage were rare in mainstream American
cinema in the early 1970s, a period when, as feminist historians and
critics note, Hollywood dealt with its uncertainty about how to respond
to changing gender roles by retreating from the representation of women
altogether(16).
In the exploitation cinema, however, such an exclusion would be counterproductive.
The erotic display of women was a central market appeal. No women, no
"tits." At the same time, Corman's focus on the drive-in market
meant a solicitation of "couples" as "date movies"
rather than simply appealing to male grindhouse viewers. Cook clearly
over-states her case when she asserts that exploitation films were "produced
exclusively by men for a male market."(17)
Rather, Corman's films needed to appeal to mixed audiences by offering
differing points of entrance for male and female spectators. Rather
than ignoring the topic, the films exploit anxieties and uncertainties
about shifts in gender roles and sexual politics. The New World films
were structured around the actions, desires, goals and interests of
women, albeit women who were often constructed within the terms of previously
male-centered genres(18).
Terminal Island wasn't The Turning Point (1977) but then,
precisely because it operated as part of a "trash" culture,
it could pose blunt questions that middle-brow films had to dodge. Women were to be simultaneously the objects of erotic spectacle and
the active subjects of melodramatic plots, a double function aptly summarized
by the ad campaign for Barbara Peeter's Bury Me an Angel (1971):
"She's the Beauty and the Beast." The accompanying images
showed the film's "biker chick" protagonist, Dag Bandy, holding
a shot gun, confronting a cop, kicking a male assailant in the mouth,
and taking a nude swim in a lake. Dag is described as "red-hot
passion and cold steel anger all rolled into one explosive six-foot
frame -- a howling, humping hellcat with a major score to settle."(19)
Caught between conflicting audience desires and expectations, the "positive-heroine
figure" in New World films holds a contradictory status. On the
one hand, as Cook suggests, this stereotype was "based on the idea
of putting the woman in the man's place," with the female protagonist
still defined through "male characteristics" and a mastery
over "male language, male weapons." She is an embodiment of
"male phantasies and obsessions," rather than speaking for
"women's experiences and desires." In many cases, the "bitchiness"
of the female protagonists was build-up for a patriarchal pleasure in
their abuse and humiliation. At the same time, such dominatrix-like
figures could trigger male masochism, a fantasy of being dominated and
controlled by powerful women. Despite their obvious ties to masculine
erotic fantasies, Cook sees a "polemical" possibility in the
image of female revenge, of "turning the weapons of the enemy against
him."(20)
Such films do provide images of resistance to patriarchal authority,
be they in the form of women taking up guns (as occurs in any number
of films about female gangsters or women's prisons) or simply turning
aside sexist comments with quick wit (as occurs in the working women
comedies associated with Rothman's early career.) Such films open a
space for women to play with power, a space traditionally reserved for
men, even if they do not allow women to fully reclaim and redefine that
space on their own terms. Female protagonists often break down under these contradictory and
irreconcilable impulses, torn between the needs to fit within the framework
of conventional genres and to articulate their particularity as women.
Typical of the female protagonists in the New World films of the period,
Dag's actions are motivated both in traditionally masculine terms ("revenge")
and in feminine terms (defending her family)(21):
She wants to gun down the man who shot her brother and, along the way,
to protect and defend the two child-like men who have joined her on
the adventure. Peeter's persistent focus on her motivations, her angst-ridden
dialogue and flashbacks, contrast sharply with the treatment of male
"angels" in other films in the same series. Male bikers' interest
in riding the open road is taken for granted.(22)
Even Peeter's attempts to situate Dag within a larger community of women
pose questions about her motivations. Bury Me an Angel includes
several scenes centering on the emotional anguish and domestic isolation
of Dag's mother or on the spiritual wisdom of a friendly "witch,"
both warning her against revenge. Their inclusion pulls the film from
motorcycle action towards domestic melodrama. Dag's encounters with
these women question the validity of her actions and the "eye-for-an-eye"
logic of the genre. At the same time, both the language and images surrounding
her violence eroticized it; the logic of the film demands that we see
not only her "naked fury" but her naked body, and that she
ultimately shed her rage long enough to find love in the arms of a man.
When the time comes, however, she breaks off love-making and bolts from
his house, panicked by her loss of control, unwilling to allow anything
to distract her from her narrative goals.(23)
As the film progresses, she moves from victim to hero to erotic "beauty"
to blood-thirsty "beast," never able to fully or comfortably
reside in any role for long, since the film can not fully resolve how
it feels about her core goals. Terminal Island adopts a different strategy for dealing with
the contradictory expectations surrounding exploitation film heroines.
Rothman's films characteristically center less on an individual protagonist
than on a community of women. Each woman embodies alternative stereotypes;
each shifts between erotic spectacle, suffering victim, and empowered
hero. Some of the women, such as the long-suffering Bunny, are cast
as pure victims, subjected to endless humiliation and abuse. In true
melodramatic fashion, Bunny is mute to voice her protests. An oddly
passive character, "Bunny" has been unable or unwilling to
speak since the murder of her parents. "Bunny" is framed as
the ideal sufferer. Bobby uses her as "bait" to lure the guards,
dispatched periodically to drop shipments of food on the shore. He ties
Bunny spreadeagle between two stakes, ripping off the back of her shirt,
and whipping her until bloody welts are visible on her bare flesh. Bobby
casts Bunny as the ideal melodramatic spectacle of violated innocence,
a spectacle "nobody will be able to resist." The other women
maintain a more heroic posture; their sufferings are temporary, their
strength never fully crushed, and in the end, they get their violent
revenge. Carmen's character is associated with raw courage, uncontainable
rage, and pride in her race and her gender. Lee (Marta Kristen) combines
revolutionary politics with intellectual skills and knowledge. Joy (Phyllis
Davis) knows how to use her earthy sexuality to her own ends. PLAYING WITH STEREOTYPES From the outset, Rothman acknowledges that the film is involved in
a play with stereotypes. The film's prologue deals with a female director
putting together a television documentary on Terminal Island.
Her discussion of the elements required to tell a compelling narrative
constitutes a reflexive commentary on the exploitation film genre itself.
A male producer, standing in for Corman, advocates the economical re-use
of found footage, suggesting that the "dummies" in the television
audience "can't remember what they saw five minutes ago."
The characters are first introduced as mug shots, as the producers look
for appropriate figures for the news report. Each is identified according
to his or her offense and fit within conventional understandings of
popular crime: the punk (Bobby) who killed his partner after a successful
robbery; the revolutionary intellectual (Lee) who accidentally killed
the night watchman when she blew up a bank; the middle-class black man
(A.J.) who killed a cop and the more street-wise black (Monk) who gets
flipped past without a second look; the sweet young girl (Bunny) who
murdered her parents; the "doper-biker-rapist" (Dillan); the
beautiful woman who poisoned her husband (Joy); the tragic handsome
doctor who may have been falsely accused (Milford), and the "maniac"
and mass murderer (Roy Teele). The producers peg Joy as offering sex
appeal and Milford as "something for the bored housewife"
before identifying the recently-convicted Carmen as "our star." If the documentary's narration describes the criminals as "all
convicted of the same crime," murder, Rothman wants to draw distinctions
between different kinds of murders and different kinds of characters.
If she wants to depict a penal colony as a microcosm, she must create
moral distinctions. Within this moral economy, all of the women are
already read as innocents, while some of the men (A.J.) show the capacity
for change and others (Bobby, Teele) are beyond all redemption. As the
film progresses, the characters are never allowed to escape those stereotypical
characterizations and achieve more complex motivations. As Richard Dyer
suggests, "the role of stereotypes is to make visible the invisible,
so that there is no danger of it creeping up on us unawares; and to
make fast, firm and separate what is in reality fluid..."(24)
All myth depends upon the creation of moral distinctions through the
manipulation of stereotypes. The making of a new myth, a feminist counter-myth,
which challenges the dominance of patriarchal values depends as much
on the creation of order through stereotyping as does the myth-making
process which holds the old order in place. The question is what stereotypes
are evoked, whose interests do they serve, and what conception of the
world do they shorthand. Pam Cook sees this foregrounding of stereotypes as among the most "subversive" aspects of the exploitation cinema, since it rejects the "naturalization" of ideological norms characteristic of more classical films. As Cook argues, "the overt manipulation of stereotypes and gender conventions allows us to see that language is at work; myths are revealed as ideological structures embedded in form itself."(25) Exploitation films were "potentially less offensive than mainstream Hollywood cinema" because they "offer the possibility of taking a critical distance." Rothman, thus, both needs the stereotypes as the most efficient means to morally identify her complex cast of characters and parodies the exploitation cinema's dependence upon such stereotypes. THE WOMEN'S PRISON
GENRE Terminal Island's dominant stereotypes can be traced to the
women's prison genre, one of the core New World formulas of the early
1970s. Starting with Jack Hill's Big Doll House in 1971, many
of New World's biggest successes fell into this genre, including Women
in Cages (Gerry De Leon, 1972), The Big Bird Cage (Jack Hill,
1972) and Caged Heat (Jonathan Demme, 1974). These films spoke
to fairly reactionary and voyeuristic fantasies (the image of semi-clad
women being tortured, the staging of scenes in women's shower rooms,
the casual lesbianism that emerges in a single gender settings.) At
the same time, the genre allowed for the expression of feminist rage
over rape and sexual domination (recurring themes in these films) and
for the climactic images of women taking up arms to end their oppression. As in Terminal Island, the films most often open with the arrival
of a new prisoner, through whose eyes we observe the repressive institutions
and the social practices of everyday resistance. Through this figure,
the film initially maps out the different moral distinctions between
the various women and their crimes. Stereotypically (and the films almost
invariably follow stereotypes), the women in a prison film will include:
The four women in Terminal Island can be seen as fitting within
this same set of stereotypes: Lee is the revolutionary, Bunny the victim,
Carmen the tough soul sister (who also functions as a source of identification),
and Joy the middle-class woman. For the most part, the women's crimes are those against the patriarchal
order -- killing unfaithful husbands or using violence to stop a rape
or engaging in prostitution out of economic necessity. There is a constant
suggestion that their victims deserved what happened to them or that
the female prisoners have been unjustly sentenced. In other cases, however,
the women are hardened criminals, who know how to use violence to resist
authority but who are unwilling initially to contribute to the group
effort. The confession of crimes is closely related to the moral redemption
of the characters, so that as we get to know why they are in jail, we
come to see them as fellow victims and potential allies in the struggle
against institutionalized oppression. In prison, they face endless humiliations: in Big Doll House
(Jack Hill, 1971), the prisoners are subjected to body cavity searches,
get groped by the sleazy men who come to deliver them food and are tortured
by the sadistic warden; in Caged Heat, the prison authorities
subject the unruly women to electro-shock therapy and lobotomy, while
the doctor fondles and photographs the drugged women's bodies. As one
female prisoner grumbles in Caged Heat, "If I ever get out
of this hole, I'm gonna write my life story -- All men are shit."
Her summary is largely accurate: the male prison authorities are frequently
portrayed in grotesque fashion -- fat, porcine, sweaty, dirty, unshaven,
sex-crazed, and stupid. In most cases, the authority in the prison resides
in women, who are portrayed as sadistic lesbians or as sexually repressed
and emotionally crippled. The contrast between these "fat pigs"
and the "caged birds" makes the films "morally legible"
in the classic melodramatic tradition. The focus on multiple female protagonists allows a multiplication of
abuses, a succession of melodramatic excesses, building towards the
women's final revolt against the system and their attempt to escape
from prison. In Caged Heat, for example, Pandora, the black soul
sister, is unjustly punished for her possession of a pornographic photograph
and locked away, nude, in solitary confinement for a week. Her close
friend, Belle, devises a bold scheme to steal food from the prison staff's
refrigerator and smuggle it into her. Later, when Belle gets caught
and framed for murder, she is subjected to the whims of the crazed doctor,
who both molests her and prepares to lobotomize her. Pandora devises
a scheme to smuggle a knife into the clinic and help her escape. The
two women, portrayed as passionate friends, shift between the roles
of eroticized victim and heroic rescuer, suggesting the fluidity in
character relations characteristic of the genre as a whole. The women's prison films tell stories of female victimization, radicalization,
and empowerment. For those familiar with the genre, the sequences of
melodramatic torture and abuse are necessary build-up for the women's
heroic resistance. The women in The Big Doll House initially
try to work through the system, appealing to the idealistic young prison
doctor for help. When he is unable to elevate their situation and in
fact, inadvertently identifies the resistors to the sadistic warden,
they must take matters in their own hands(26).
The outcome of this rebellion varies from film to film: The Big Doll
House ends pessimistically with most of the rebel women killed and
the final escapee discovering that she has hitched a ride with a prison
guard; Caged Heat, on the other hand, ends with all of the women
still alive, taking off down the open road. When you consider the controversy surrounding Thelma and Louise's
representation of armed women locking a cop in a car, shooting a rapist,
and blasting off the tires of a truck some two decades later, the radical
potential of these films seems clear. Here, as in Thelma and Louise,
female protagonists break out of legal institutions to challenge their
treatment at the hands of patriarchal authorities. Their actions range
from comic reversals, such as making the leering guards drop their pants
(Caged Heat) or forcing a man to sexually perform at knife-point
(The Big Doll House) to the more over acts of violence, shooting
it out with machine guns. At the same time, a series of displacements works to contain the films'
most radical implications. First, the prison authorities are most often
portrayed as women. If the dialogue situates the events in a larger
framework of male abuse, we are drawn most directly towards acts of
revenge against other women. Being a woman in charge seems to have left
these women emotional, and sometimes, physical cripples and to have
warped their sexuality. A stock scene involves the commandant's attempts
to establish a romantic relationship with the prison doctor, often with
discomfort, embarrassment, if not overt humiliation. Secondly, the radical
potential is contained by locating the action in the third world, in
contrast to male-prison films which typically occur in an American context(27).
Rothman's film involves a similar displacement, situating it within
a near-future society which closely resembles, yet is marked out as
separate from, our own. UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES Fantasies of resisting or transforming the social order are not restricted
to the women's prison genre. Corman's films are preoccupied with images
of the apocalyptic destruction of old societies and the emergence of
new social orders. Drawing on the work of E.R. Leach and Mircea Eliade,
Paul Willemen argues for a recognition of Corman's "millenic vision,"
which he identifies as operating in films as generically diverse as
Teenage Caveman, The House of Usher, The Last Woman
on Earth and The Trip(28).
As a director and as a producer, Corman consistently examined the process
of social degeneration and regeneration; his films almost always center
upon alternative communities existing on the edges of the social mainstream.
As the focus of Corman's work shifted to embrace the 60s counterculture
both as a subject matter and as an audience demographic, this utopian
impulse took on new importance. In Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha
(1972), we are presented with two conceptions of the utopian community
-- the union of working men which David Caradine's character is working
to achieve and the outlaw band which forges together the fortunes of
"a Bolshevik, a nigger, a New York jew, and a whore." New World's communities are almost obsessively multi-racial and multi-cultural,
reflecting the identity politics of the civil rights era and responding
to the urban base of their exhibition. At the same time, targeting the
interests of their drive-in audiences, the films frequently incorporate
representations of the working class south. The result is an imaginary
resolution to the racial conflicts of the period, as urban blacks and
rural whites find a common ground in resisting forces of exploitation
and oppression. While the economics of the blaxploitation market, which
centered on inner-city theatres, pushed towards images of racial antagonism,
the economics of New World's distribution encouraged a politics of reconciliation
and racial interdependence. Following Corman's influence, Rothman also
constructs utopian images of alternative communities: the circles of
women friends in The Student Nurses and The Working Women,
the beach bums in It's a Bikini World, and the radical social
arrangements in Group Marriage. Terminal Island represents a specifically feminist inflection
of New World's "millenic vision," closely tied to the images
of social transformation found in 1970s feminist utopian novels, such
as Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Joanna Russ's The
Female Man or Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. These
novels, according to Peter Fitting, construct utopian societies based
on "non-hierarchical and non-oppressive social and sexual relationships,"
contributing to feminist politics by helping us to understand what a
"qualitatively different society" might look like(29).
Such narratives differ in significant ways from the broader tradition
of utopianism in science fiction in their focus on the politics of the
personal, the sexual, social and economic relations between men and
women rather than (or in addition to) large scale technological or political
change. According to Fitting, these novels "depict society in process,
straining to come into being and open to change." Rothman describes her film in remarkably similar terms: "Terminal
Island is not the story of a utopian community built on a bedrock
of ideology, but of how a group of antisocial people rediscover their
own social needs, needs for companionship and cooperation that exist
within us all."(30)
Its opening images -- a series of man-in-the-street interviews responding
to the Terminal Island "experiment" -- invite us to
understand the story in a broader political context. Again and again,
the central question becomes what kind of society will the prisoners
create for themselves. One person suggests, "let them fight among
themselves if that's what they want to do," while another proposes
more optimistically, "maybe they can get together and make a better
life for themselves." Rothman constructs two different answers
to that question: one, the society which Bobby and his henchmen creates,
is profoundly dystopian, where the worst tendencies of traditional society
emerge unchecked by any civilizing influences. The other, a tribe of
outcasts and freedom fighters who have broken with Bobby and are fighting
to survive on their own, seems equally optimistic, a utopian transformation
of a repressive society. Bobby's culture is authoritarian and the division of labor is rigidly
structured: he gives the orders and the others obey. Those who disobey
or challenge his authority are punished and usually killed. Bobby shares
his plans with no one, not even Monk, his most loyal friend. He constantly
feels threatened, needing to strike out with more and more ruthlessness,
until by the end of the film, he has few loyal men left. Not surprisingly,
he is afraid of the dark. Ruling by terror means that he lives in fear.
The patriarchal domination of the women, then, fits within a larger
critique of Bobby's authority as crushing and unproductive. Midway through the film, Carmen and the other women are "liberated"
by A.J. (Don Marshall) and his followers. At first, the women are suspicious
of what is expected of them in the new community. Shortly after their
arrival, one of the men asks A.J. whether he's going to just let the
women "run around loose." Refusing to accept subservience
to another group of men, Carmen grabs a knife and threatens A.J., who
explains that he will need the full cooperation and participation of
everyone if the group is going to survive. This "new society"
is free, democratic, and equalitarian. The leadership structure is fluid,
with everyone contributing to the group's plans, based on what they
know. One group member knows how to brew mead; another how to make gunpowder;
Carmen draws on her grandmother's voodoo magic to make poison darts.
Together, the group will survive, not by fixing everyone into prescribed
roles, but by liberating everyone to achieve their full potential. As
Rothman explains, "Since they are so few, the nomads can't afford
the wastefulness of strict sex role divisions. With more hands to share
the work, and share it more equitably, life becomes easier for everyone."(31)
Terminal Island traces the group's "political education"
and its victory over Bobby and his hordes. In the process, Rothman shows
us stories of personal redemption through incorporation into the alternative
community -- Carmen lets down her defensiveness and distrust; Dillon,
the convicted rapist, must be taught how to respect women; the drugged
out doctor (Tom Selleck) kicks the habit; Bunny learns to talk again
as she tries to communicate with her new "family". Rothman's primary images are sexual. In Bobby's totalitarian society,
women's sexuality is alienated labor. Monk comes into their tent at
night and reads off a duty roster, assigning them to satisfy specified
men. When Carmen protests that she is tired after a day's field work,
Monk grunts, "all you got to do is lie back and take it. Nobody
ever said that you got to stay awake." In A.J.'s more democratic
society, sexual relations are freely chosen and in this context, romance
blossoms. Joy unleashes a playful sexuality that is full of laughter,
while Carmen's clinched teeth give way to a smile, as she expresses
tenderness to several men. Spontaneous, playful, sensuous sex is seen
as the hallmark of an equalitarian society, with pleasure freely given
and accepted between independent men and women. In that sense, Terminal Island is closely related to Rothman's
Group Marriage. This farcical film proposes a radical reconstruction
of family relations and traces the process by which the various characters
overcome their jealousies and find happiness in communal relations.
In Group Marriage's final scene, the characters go before a justice
of the peace, three grooms, three brides, all to be married to each
other. In the spirit of social transformation through sexual liberation,
they have included their gay neighbors as yet another couple formed
outside the established order. As a country-western love ballad plays
on the soundtrack, we watch them all being driven away in police cars,
ready to stand trial for their alternative lifestyles. Terminal Island's community seems all encompassing, accepting
into its ranks anyone who will contribute actively to its survival and
embrace its ideals of personal freedom and sexual equality. In Group
Marriage, however, the limitations of this utopian community are
more clearly stated. When the couple runs a classified ad in an underground
newspaper, searching for a new member, they are shocked and bemused
by a succession of applicants clearly marked as inappropriate -- a bisexual
man, a dominatrix, a nudist, a voyeur, an underage girl, and a man with
a pet sheep. More strikingly, as the social ties within the community
strengthen, they find themselves unable to contain one of the original
members, who insists on her rights to have sex with people outside their
core group. Earlier in the film, Rothman parodies the arbitrariness
of conventional sexual morality through the figures of the gay neighbors
who ironically express discomfort with the "disgusting," "perverse"
and "unnatural" behavior of the polygamists. However, the
film ends up setting equally arbitrary limits on acceptable and unacceptable
forms of sexual expression. Such limits point to the blind spots and contradictions within the liberal middle-class politics that Rothman embraces, blind spots which will be the central focus of debates within the feminist and queer communities in the coming decades. Rothman does question many of the double-standards which ascribe fixed social roles to men and women on the basis of their gender. Women are allowed more active roles in the struggles for social transformation; images of professional or professionally-trained women abound in her comedies, where almost every women seems to be a lawyer or an artist or training to become one. Men are similarly challenged to accept a softer, more tender form of sexuality. Yet, the stratification of her couples according to race and the introduction of limitations on community membership based on sexuality pose the issue of who her feminism speaks for. More broadly still, one must ask what kinds of utopian politics it is possible to express within the exploitation film genres. There is, after all, a central paradox about using genres based on the exploitation of sexual differences to speak towards a politics designed to end that exploitation. TRANSFORMING EROTIC
SPECTACLE So far, in focusing on issues of narrative and characterization, we
can see that the conventions of exploitation film genres foreground
women as active agents and construct narratives of exploitation and
resistance, social oppression and social transformation. Yet, people
don't typically go to the drive-ins to watch a story. They go to see
moments of spectacle, particularly erotic and violent spectacle, which
are the chief elements marketed through newspaper ads, trailers, movie
posters, and video boxes for these titles. As Robin Wood notes, the
danger is that these genre expectations will totally overwhelm the utopian
politics. The danger and potential of spectacle is that it does not
depend upon narrative. If, "sometimes, a cigar is only a cigar,"
a bare breast is always a bare breast and always subject to erotic
fascination. Yet, feminist critics in Mulvey's tradition sometimes assumed
that this erotic fascination was open to simple ideological analysis
and was necessarily complicit with the patriarchal order. Increasingly,
we have come to see spectacle as more polyvalent, as holding radically
divergent potentials for pleasure and fantasy. Such work may help us
to re-assess the erotic politics of these films. Rothman and the other
New World directors are fully compliant with audience and producer demands
to present a certain number of naked female bodies on the screen. At
the same time, they adopt a variety of strategies to subvert or disclose
the politics of erotic spectacle.(32)
Nude scenes are frequently the most reflexive moments in these films.
In Terminal Island, Rothman links our desire to see female nudity
to the most oppressive and hypocritical aspects of traditional patriarchy.
Bobby orders the mute Bunny to undress and she complies, facilitating
a soft-focus display of her nude body glowing in the candle-light. However,
as we watch her undress, we are also listening to Bobby's taunting words,
"Of course, if you don't want to, just say no." Through this
running monologue, the film poses questions about the possibility of
sexual consent within a male-dominated culture. We become progressively
uncomfortable with the forced display of Bunny's body as we are unable
to separate the audience's demands and Bobby's. He both speaks the spectator's
desires and renders them base and hypocritical. Something similar occurs in Rothman's Working Girls. A destitute
young woman orders a big meal at a restaurant, consumes it, and then
announces to the leering manager that she is unable to pay. The cigar-chomping
man suggests not so subtly that she might be able to work off her debts
through sexual favors after closing hours. Calling his bluff, she proceeds
to undress in the middle of the crowded restaurant ("Why wait?
Now or never") until the flustered man orders her to leave in order
to avoid public scandal. If Bunny's passive compliance creates viewer
discomfort in Terminal Island, the woman's too eager compliance
in Working Girls can be read as an act of defiance, taking charge
of the conditions of display and using them towards her own ends. Later in that same film, a second female character, a young woman taking
small jobs to work her way through law school, gets bullied into trying
out as a stripper. The film works to de-glamorize stripping, seeing
it as a business transaction and a form of alienated labor. As the older
stripper who trains her explains, "When I perform, my mind's somewhere
else. Tonight, I thought of a new way to arrange my patio furniture."
As she is performing, she recalls her friend's advice that she overcome
her nervousness by imagining the audience naked. Her nudity is accompanied
with the absurd image of a room full of fat men sitting around naked.
Again, then, the presence of a diagetic stand-in for the male film audience
creates discomfort and embarrassment over the presentation of the eroticized
female body. We are invited to share the uncomfortable experience of
becoming a spectacle. Rothman also adopts more aggressive or assaultive approaches, linking
images of female nudity with images calculated to produce male anxiety
and disgust. In Terminal Island, for example, an extended sequence
deals with Joy's revenge on Dillan for his attempted rape. She learns
that "royal jelly," a form of beeswax, can be used to attract
agitated swarms of bees. She conspires to have Dillon stumble upon her
while she is bathing naked in the lake, allowing for one of the film's
few soft-core sequences. She seduces him, getting him to undress and
spreading his cock with the royal jelly which she promises will make
it especially "tasty." The seduction sequence, with its exaggerated
eroticism, ends with the image of the bees stinging Dillon's bare ass
and him racing away in pain while the others laugh. Similar juxtapositions
of erotic and painful images occur in The Velvet Vampire. In
one sequence, Rothman cuts between the images of Diane, undressing and
making love, and images of a rattle-snake sliding up a sleeping woman's
legs. The scene ending upon her cries of help, the husband's combat
with the snake, and Diane's slicing of her leg to suck out the poison. To call such devices distanciation is to deny them their own emotive
power(33).
We do not so much adopt a critical distance from such images as feel
assaulted by them; they kick us in the groin, the very place where our
arousal had resided only moments before, and it is through the juxtaposition
of these two rather different genital sensations that Rothman sends
a clear, if not especially subtle, message to her male viewers. To say
that these competing discourses of pleasure and pain, or of a male privilege
to look and a feminist critique of the patriarchal exploitation of women,
overpower the conventional erotic possibilities of these images would
be equally false. Clearly, there are some men who get off on these movies,
and the generic framework of the exploitation film may allow them to
look past devices designed to problematize our relationship to these
images. Yet, such images point to a struggle over meaning, a conflicting
set of desires and expectations, which are characteristic of feminist
attempts to operate within the genre. Rothman's films are not, in any simple sense, anti-sexual or puritanical. Rothman's films offer plentiful images of a "free," "natural," "spontaneous" sexuality, one which allows men and women to take pleasure through mutual arousal and satisfaction. Participants in the feminine sexual revolution of the early 1970s, Rothman's female protagonists are sexually active and often comfortable having sex with a variety of men. Broadening the range of available erotic representations, Rothman's films include soft-porn shots of male nudity. These images are sometimes treated as comic (as in Working Girls, where a man walks nude out of the bedroom holding a piece of fruit and asks the gaping woman, "haven't you ever seen a banana before?) or as highly eroticized (as in the slow-motion shots of a muscular life-guard jogging nude on the beach, his penis bouncing up and down in the bottom edge of the frame). As Rothman explains:
The eroticization of male bodies represents an acknowledgment of feminine
lust, suggesting that women, no less than men, take a pleasure in voyeurism.
Rothman's female characters openly assert their own sexual appetites,
be they the woman in Group Marriage who programs the computer
at the rent-a-car place where she works to keep up with the details
of her love life or the artist in Working Girls who always seems
to have a naked male model on hand even though her paintings are non-representational.
Yet, in balancing the representation of male and female nudes, Rothman
rejects conventional structures of objectification and exploitation
in favor of reciprocal sexual attraction. Her films embody progressive
new attitudes towards human sexuality, attitudes consistent with her
liberal feminism. Sex has consequences in the exploitation cinema of
Stephanie Rothman, be it the debates about abortion in The Student
Nurses or the images of social transformation in Terminal Island.
Women have historically had to pay the price for sexual freedom, and
so, a feminist eroticism requires a recognition of both the costs and
the benefits of sex. Her films reject the alienated sexuality of prostitution
and sexual exploitation; her women don't want to "just lie back
and take it," as Monk describes their sexual services in Terminal
Island, nor do they want to have to focus on patio furniture, as
the stripper advises in Working Girls. Sex is not to be treated
as part of a system of economic exchange, but rather to be part of the
regeneration of the social order. The transformative potential of erotic imagery is suggested by another
scene from Working Girls. The manager of the strip club complains
that the sexual revolution and the casual acceptance of public nudity
are cutting into his business, "Who's gonna pay to see Katrina
strip when the whole family can picnic on the beach and see the same
thing for nothing." The student explains, "people aren't ashamed
of their body anymore," to which the caustic manager explains,
"good for them -- bad for me." The emergence of healthier,
mutually accepting attitudes towards sexuality, the creation of a utopian
community based on the interdependence of men and women, will result
in an end of exploitation, the death of the exploitation film genres.
Working within the exploitation film tradition, Rothman wants to transform
its imagery, to instruct its audiences in new ways of taking pleasure
in sexual looking and new ways of thinking about the desirability of
the human body. Her fascination with the possibility of feminist eroticism
points towards the more overtly pornographic films of Candida Royalle
and Annie Sprinkle, films which have been embraced by contemporary feminists
as holding radical possibilities for women. CONCLUSIONS Rothman's politics are nowhere more utopian than when they deal with
the erotic material that is at the heart of the exploitation film and
this may explain why she chose to continue to work within these genres,
even when she gained control over the mode of production at Dimension
Pictures, the studio she co-founded with her writer-producer husband
Charles Swartz. Rothman's engagement with the exploitation genres was
a tactical one; she agrees to follow certain formulas and produce certain
images, in order to gain access to systems of production, distribution,
and exhibition. Working within the popular cinema, she will reach a
broader audience than a political avant-garde filmmaker; Terminal
Island can be found at my local Blockbuster, while Lizzie Borden's
Born in Flames does not. The exploitation cinema demands that
she work with certain exploitable elements, yet she finds ways to redefine
those images to speak to alternative pleasures and politics. At the
same time, the exploitation cinema holds progressive potentials, facilitating
stories with strong female protagonists, stories of exploitation and
resistance, victimization and empowerment. Rothman borrows these stories
from Roger Corman and from the broader generic history of New World
and she seeks to render these stories meaningful to women. She does
not fully control the promotion and reception of her films; she can
not fully prevent those images and stories from being used in a reactionary
fashion. Yet, for these very reasons, their radical potential takes
on new importance. The people who go to see Born in Flames probably
already have a solid commitment to feminism; the people who go to see
Terminal Island probably do not. If most of her feminist politics
falls on deaf ears, some of it probably gets heard, and in being heard,
creates an opening for change where none existed before. The vexing complexities of this situation may account for why Pam Cook's
persistent attempts to claim Rothman for feminism have not had the impact
of her similar arguments on behalf of Dorothy Arzner. Arzner's oppositional
and marginal position as a lesbian woman operating within the classical
Hollywood system could be taken for granted. Arzner's radical difference,
her disruption of the codes of classical cinema and her exposure of
the mechanisms of female spectacle, can be read against a shared understanding
of the classical Hollywood cinema as allowing only limited space for
female expression. Rothman's "counter-cinema," on the other
hand, occurs against the backdrop of a producer (Corman) and studio
(New World) already associated with leftist politics and within genres
already seen as outside dominant film practice. The exploitation cinema,
paradoxically, displayed the most reactionary and patriarchal tendencies
of the commercial cinema and at the same time, an already partially
realized radical potential. Rothman can be seen, then, as working both
within and in opposition to the exploitation film, a complex set of
"negotiations" which allow no simple labeling of her films.
Her cinema is "partially corrupt." This is its curse and that
is its power. Rothman's example bears continuing relevance for contemporary feminist
discussion. The case which Anna Powell makes for Kathryn Bigelow in
a 1994 Screen article, for example, bears a striking resemblance to
the arguments Cook marshaled on behalf of Rothman two decades earlier.
Bigelow, like Rothman, is cited as "one of the few successful women
directors in Hollywood," praised for having "produced a sufficiently
substantial body of work to have now reached auteur status." The
demand to reclaim women directors as auteurs remains a historiographical
imperative, given the systematic exclusion of women from most film history
courses. Bigelow is identified in terms of her creation of strong, unconventional
female protagonists within traditionally masculine genres and her ability
to mix genres and manipulate stereotypes in unexpected, defamiliarizing
ways. Powell writes:
She could just as easily be describing the "positive-heroine figures"
in Demme's Caged Heat, Rothman's Terminal Island or Peeter's
Bury Me an Angel. A similar displacement of the exploitation
film as a potentially progressive generic tradition occurs in work on
Thelma and Louise which does not make mention of a whole body
of female outlaw films(37),
work on Silence of the Lambs or Aliens which fails to
mention their directors' important links back to Corman and the New
World period, or Yvonne Tasker's Spectacular Bodies which makes
no link between the female action heros of the 1980s and their predecessors
in 1970s films(38).
Most of these books and essays are rich and interesting on other levels, but one can't help being frustrated in watching these critics re-inventing the wheel. In ignoring Rothman, we have cut ourselves off both from earlier film makers who sought to reconcile the competing and often contradictory demands of feminist politics and popular culture. In ignoring Cook, we cut ourselves off from models of critical practice which might help us better account for these films' political complexity. NOTES 1. Daniel Kagen, "Corman's 'Slightly Corrupted' Fare," Insight, April 11 1988, p.61. For a useful discussion of the play between commerce and art in Corman's career, see William A. Routt, "Art, Popular Art," Continuum:The Australian Journal of Media And Culture, v.7, n.2, 1994, pp.2-3. 2. Recent feminist criticism has made much of Dorothy Arzner's "mannish lesbian" appearance in photographs, as signaling her subcultural identifications and her exclusion from the dominant culture of Hollywood. See... A similar reading could be made of Rothman's image, the fact that she looks so much like the women in her films, that she fits within a certain conception of feminine attractiveness and glamour, as suggesting a more comfortable fit with the conditions of exploitation film production, as signaling the heterosexual assumptions behind 1970s liberal feminism. Rothman is as femme as Arzner is butch, and that difference speaks to some of the differences in how feminist critics have taken up the two "cases" of female authorship. 3. Stephanie Rothman, "A New Beginning on Terminal Island," in Danny Peary (Ed.), Omni's Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies: The Future According to Science Fiction Cinema (Garden City: Doubleday, 1984), p. 142. 4. For a useful overview on Rothman's career, see Terry Curtis, "Fully Female," Film Comment, November-December 1976, pp.46-52. 5. For background on Dimension, see Fred Olen Ray, The New Poverty Row: Independent Filmmakers as Distributors (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1991), pp.149-174; Ed Lowery, "Dimension Pictures: Portrait of a Seventies Independent," The Velvet Light Trap. n. 22, 1986, pp.65-74. 6. For useful discussions of Corman's role as a producer, see David Chute, "The New World of Roger Corman," Film Comment, March-April 1982, p.27-32; Dave Kehr, "B+: Four Auteurs in Search of an Audience," Film Comment, September-October 1977, pp.6-15; Michael Goodwin, "Velvet Vampires and Hot Mamas: Why Exploitation Films Get to Us," Village Voice, July 7 1975; Jim Hillier and Aaron Lipstadt, BFI Dossier No. 7: Roger Corman's New World (London: BFI, 1981); Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood (New York: Holt, Rinehardt and Winston, 1979); Kim Newman, "The Roger Corman Alumni Association," Monthly Film Bulletin, November-December 1985; Jim Hillier and Aaron Lipstadt, "The Economics of Independence: Roger Corman and New World Pictures, 1970-1980," Movie, Winter 1986. 7. Pam Cook, "Exploitation Films and Feminism," Screen, 1976, pp. 122-127. 8. Dave Chute, "The New World of Roger Corman,"
Film Comment, March-April 1982, p.27-32. Corman's comments are typically
double-edged, since there were not many more women operating 9. J. Philip DiFranco, The Movie World of Roger Corman (New York: Chelsea House, 1979), p. 55. 10. Roger Corman and Jim Jerome, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (New York: Delta Books, 1991), p. 11. For key works in this tradition, see Claire Johnston (Ed.), Notes on Women's Cinema (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973); Claire Johnston (Ed.), Dorothy Arzner: Towards A Feminist Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1975). Cook has re-introduced debate about Rothman in these terms multiple times since the publication of her initial 1976 Screen essay, op. cit. See, for example, Pam Cook (Ed.), The Cinema Book (London: BFI, 1987), pp.199-200; Pam Cook, "Exploitation Films" and "Stephanie Rothman," in Annette Kuhn with Susannah Radstone (Eds.), The Women's Companion to International Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp.139-140; 347-348; Pam Cook, "The Art of Exploitation, or How to Get Into the Movies," Monthly Film Bulletin, v.52, n.623, 1985. 12.Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Bill Nichols (Ed.) Movies and Methods II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp.303-315. 13. Claire Johnson, "Women's Cinema as Counter-cinema," in Bill Nichols (Ed.), Movies and Methods I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p.217. 16. See, for example, Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Penguin, 1974), for what was probably the earliest account of how women disappeared from 1970s films in response to the rise of feminism. Haskell, however, completely ignores the exploitation cinema. 18. "I think it is noteworthy that no one else at the time was making action pictures with female leads. In all the stories we tried to make the women genuinely the protagonists in that they initiated the action." Roger Corman, as quoted in di Franco, p.162. For similar claims, see Gary Morris, Roger Corman (Boston: Twayne, 1985), p. 147. 19. Quotes taken from the video box, Bury Me an Angel New World Video, 1985. 21. The same double motives surface in James Cameron's Aliens, where Ripley both wants to protect society from the monsters and to assume maternal responsibility for Newt, the orphaned girl. The introduction of more traditionally feminine motives for her actions has been the subject of controversy given the allegedly asexual and degendered construction of Ridley Scott's Alien. Constance Penley argues, "What we get finally is a conservative moral lesson about maternity, futuristic or otherwise: mothers will be mothers, and they will always be women." Constance Penley, "Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia," in Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom (Eds.), Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p.73. I read the film somewhat differently. While it is true that the instabilities and contradictions of Ripley's character are consistent with the problems surrounding the exploitation film heroine, Cameron situates her within a world of androgynous possibility, where all of the characters mix and match traits associated with femininity and masculinity. The characters who survive till the end are those who are comfortable with that mix, who have achieved some balance between the two (specifically Ripley, Newt, and Bishop) while those who die are most often the hypermasculine women (Vasquez) and the hyperfeminine men (Hudson). Signs of traditional femininity mean something different, I would argue, in a world where gender is shown to be a construct which can be freely manipulated, and where sex, itself, is seen as socially constructed (since characters are identified as having naturally or artificially determined sexes.) 22.See Marty Rubin, "...," Film History, 6:3, Autumn 1994, pp. . One striking difference between the exploitation film heroines and their counterparts in more recent examples of popular feminist cinema is that the exploitation heroines largely operate outside and in opposition to the dominant order, while the new heroines are frequently cast as defenders of the existing order. See, for example, the protagonists of Blue Steel and Silence of the Lambs. Thelma and Louise is a notable exception, while Ripley in the Aliens films and Sarah Conners in The Terminator films bridge the gap between the two. 23. Similar images of emotional and psychological instability surround the female protagonist in Cameron's Terminator films and have been the source of much debate by feminist critics. 24. Richard Dyer, "The Role of Stereotypes," in The Making of Images: Essays on Representation (London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1993), pp.11-18. 25. Cook, 1976, pp.124-125. Cook's account of the exploitation film was influential in the development of arguments within the "progressive genre" debate. See Barbara Klinger, "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism Revisited: The Progressive Genre," in Barry Keith Grant, Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 74-90. 26. A similar structure occurs in the other New World genres: The female outlaw films, such as Bloody Mama, Boxcar Bertha, or Crazy Mama, often open with moments of victimization and trauma, though here, the proportions are different. The process of victimization dominates the women's prison film, while the process of rebellion and resistance dominates the female outlaw films. 27.Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat is a notable exception and a film well worth further consideration on multiple level. Itself a progressive intervention within the genre, Demme focusing specifically on abuses within the American prison system and on the plight of women within our society. Demme refuses even the characteristic demonization of the female prison warden, offering up scenes which cast her in a more sympathetic light, and at one striking point, making her a mouthpiece for his feminist critique of the sexual exploitation of women. 28. Paul Willemen, "Roger Corman, The Millenic Vision," in Paul Willemen, David Pirie, David Will and Lynda Myles (Ed.), Roger Corman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1970), pp.8-33. 29. Peter Fitting, "So We All Became Mothers: New Roles for Men in Recent Utopian Fiction," Science Fiction Studies, v. 12, 1985, pp.156-183. 32. One might usefully compare the remarkably similar representation of strip tease in Rothman's Working Women and Dorothy Arzner's Dance Girl Dance, since both invite us to experience the burlesque audience from the performer's vantage point and to think about the economic and professional stakes in female erotic display. 33. It is important to stress that while such devices are more common in Rothman's films than in most other exploitation movies, similar attempts to question the politics of female spectacle or to discomfort the male spectator occur in other New World productions. Jonathon Demme's Caged Heat, for example, includes a number of uncomfortable jokes involving castration, impotency and the mutilation of penises; a running debate about the double-standards surrounding male and female access to pornography (which culminates in the scene of a topless woman protesting the confinement of a woman in solitary confinement for possessing a photograph of a naked man); and a bizarre dream sequence in which the warden warns women that sexual injustice placed them behind bars. 35. Anna Powell, "Blood on the Borders -- Near Dark and Blue Steel," Screen, v.35, n.2, Summer 1994, pp.136-156. 37. See, for example, Sharon Willis, "Hardware and Hardbodies, What Do Women Want?: A Reading of Thelma and Louise" and Cathy Griggers, "Thelma and Louise and the Cultural Generation of the New Butch-Femme," in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (Eds.) Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York: AFI/Routledge, 1993), pp.120-141. 38. Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre
and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993). |
