Note this article has been divided into two parts: Part 1 and Part 2 (including notes).
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‘Woman ... finds pleasure almost anywhere ... The geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined ... [Women’s] desire is often interpreted, and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity which will swallow you whole. Whereas it really involves a different economy more than anything else, one that upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of a desire, diffuses the polarization towards a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse ...’ Luce Irigaray (1)
This paper occupies transitional territory in my work so far on British heritage cinema. In part, it revises - and brings into wider circulation - provisional work on the formal characteristics of key British ‘heritage’ films and the possible implications of these for gendered spectatorship and consumption which I undertook when I began researching 1980s and 1990s British heritage cinema in 1993-94 as part of the British Film Institute MA programme. (2) But, for me, it also constitutes a bridge between this initial - text-based and contextual - work and my current PhD work-in-progress on the relationship between (culturally) British heritage films and their British-based audiences. As the empirical audience-survey element of this ongoing project is, at the time of writing, in its early stages, this paper therefore represents work towards clarifying an important theoretical component of my current project - namely the address, construction and putative identity/ies of the theoretical heritage-film spectator(s). I would welcome feedback and dialogue from other researchers engaged in related areas.
My initial text-based work focused particularly on the 1980s Merchant Ivory Productions E. M. Forster adaptations, A Room With A View (1986) and Maurice 1987). Above all, it sought to analyse and critique the concept/construct of ‘heritage cinema’ and the discourses which had emerged around it (as much as around specific film texts) in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the media and (later) academic domains, and to locate the emergence of these discourses within the viciously combative Thatcherite political, ideological and cultural climate of the time.
Given that these - overwhelmingly pejorative and censorious - discourses treated the ‘heritage’ films as ideologically complicit with aspects of the Thatcherite ‘project’ and saw them as vessels of a complacently bourgeois (and literary) notion of quality and of a triumphalist English cultural imperialism, it may be useful at this point to say something about my personal motives for engaging in this field. Since it is (I hope) apparent from my earlier contributions to the heritage-film debate that my interventions are not being produced from a politically Conservative or class-blind position but (loosely speaking) from the feminist, anti-authoritarian Left, my desire to (to put it simplistically) ‘defend’ some (if not all) so-called ‘heritage’ films may seem dubious, or insufficiently self-reflexive, to those who want to slot the films and their consumption into a Left/Right, working-class/bourgeois binarism in which old class politics and allegiances have explanatory primacy. As a member of the post-punk, fanzine-writing generation with typically eclectic film tastes and modernist/avant-garde (rather than nostalgic) acculturation vis à vis art and design, this pleasure in the 1980s Merchant-Ivory adaptations was, on one level, a surprise to me. On another level, however, it was not surprising at all, being rooted in a well-established (not to mention gendered and educationally determined) disposition to enjoy costume drama literary adaptations (dating, in my case, to my pre-teens in the 1970s) which, logic suggests, must be common currency among more than one generation of the post-war BBC-viewing classes and probably beyond. (3) Others, including Robert Murphy, have mentioned their surprise at enjoying particular heritage films, (4) and I want to suggest that this phenomenon of surprise enjoyment itself speaks of a fracture between the extra-textual (promotional as well as critical) discourses around the films and the subjective experience of viewing them.
My own sources of enjoyment in the films include their wit, humour and irony; their elements of romance and melodrama; the catharsis of heightened emotion which costume drama and film can somehow facilitate; and most of all, the appeal of the screen personae of particular actors and the (frequently ironic) intertextual pleasures of reading these personae across, between and against the various heritage film texts. My response to the first negative early-1990s academic critique of heritage cinema I encountered (Cairns Craig’s ‘Rooms without a view’, Tana Wollen’s ‘Over our shoulders’ and Andrew Higson’s ‘Re-presenting the national past’ (5) are the other most indicative examples) was consequently one of irritation, anger and, most of all, frustration. These critiques either treated the films monolithically, or (particularly in Craig’s case) produced near-parodic descriptions and readings which seemed a distortion of what I had seen in the cinema. Most problematically, their lofty, top-down dismissal offered no real insight into what the films’ appeal to audiences might be. (6)
My driving motive in critiquing these three early-1990s critiques of British heritage cinema, therefore, was to find an alternative critical approach (or set of approaches) to the films which would take acccount of their pleasures, and wider questions of audience pleasure, rather than being produced from a narrowly censorious position of displeasure. My feeling was that this censoriousness had, paradoxically, produced a sweeping and theoretically inadequate account of ‘heritage cinema’ which was more likely to hinder understanding of the films than to advance it.
While I shared the position of opposition to Thatcherism embraced by these early-1990s critics, there was much I wanted to question in their methodology; their account of heritage cinema as a cultural product of Thatcherism (and indeed as a cohesive concept and category); and their monolithic, undifferentiated account of the films themselves. Most of all, I wanted to question their strange silence on questions of sexuality, gendered spectatorship and gendered texts which I felt had considerable importance in explaining the films’ popularity. In contrast, my own work has focused on heritage cinema’s instability, disunity and blurred boundaries as a category, and its problematic claims to ‘genre’ status. Given its origins as a critical rather than industrial/production term, whose use is almost always, by definition, ideologically pejorative, I argued that it was more usefully understood as a discursive construct rather than as a genre. Despite the rather obvious ‘bourgeois’ preoccupations of the films, I also took issue with the reductionism and fundamentally über-textual character of an account which insisted not only that Chariots of Fire and A Room With A View were core films of the same genre, but that differences between their respective ideologies and values were either non-existent or irrelevant.
A particular consequence of this reductionism was that the early-1990s critiques allowed no space for the ambiguity and polysemy of heritage film texts. Produced in a context not particularly informed by spectatorship theory (their primary - and fully acknowledged - influence was, after all, Patrick Wright’s writing on the broader phenomenon of heritage culture) the early-1990s critiques by Craig, Wollen and Higson marked a regression (I suspect unconscious) to the determinism of 1970s theory in which the spectator was held to be monolithically ‘positioned’ by the film text. Thus they constructed a monolithic heritage-film spectator, but did so tacitly, without any real discussion.
This unacknowledged monolithic spectator was rendered still more problematic by the early-1990s critiques’ most distinctive characteristic, namely their condemnation of the films’ rendering of ‘the past’ as mere period spectacle. In an argument embryonically in evidence in Craig and most fully developed by Higson, the films’ particular mode of display of the properties of the bourgeois past (described by Richard Dyer as a ‘museum aesthetic’) (7) was held to stitch the spectator into a rapt, uncritical, consumerist relationship with the lavish visual feast on screen. This preoccupation with display not only led to the films being dismissed as ‘film as conspicuous consumption’ (8) - as if visual pleasure were inherently suspect - but was held to neutralise or override (that is, to have more effect than) other (particularly ironic, progressive or critical) elements in the texts. The central argument of Higson’s 1993 article was precisely that in the heritage films, ‘the past is displayed as visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively’. (9) Thus while Higson’s article admitted the heritage films’ ambivalence, their frequent proposal of ‘liberal-humanist visions of social relations ... at the level of dialogue and narrative themes’, (10) it ultimately argued that ‘even those films that develop an ironic narrative of the past end up celebrating and legitimating the spectacle of one class and one cultural tradition and identity at the expense of others’. (11)
The difficulty with this critique lay in its binarism - we were offered an either/or choice between the seduction of visual spectacle and an ‘authentic’, critical view of history - but also in its reinforcement of the implicit vision of a unified, overdetermined spectatorship. In contrast with the more complex work on consumption taking place in cultural studies and sociology, its puritanical model of consumption and visual pleasure seemed to imply a passive spectator who was uniformly acted upon by the films’ spectacular reconstructions of the bourgeois past: helplessly in thrall to the spectacle of the text rather than an active producer of meaning. This spectator is thus ‘implicitly conceived as other than the academic critic, incapable of enacting the same critical decodings’, or of ‘looking through’ the period spectacle to discern the ironies of narrative. (12)
It was this unsatisfactory conceptualisation of the heritage film spectator - and its distance from my personal experience of the films concerned - which led me to conclude that further work was needed on (theoretical) heritage-film spectatorship and (empirical) heritage audiences. Andrew Higson’s 1996 revision of his 1993 position - in which he admits the possibility of multiple readings of the heritage-film texts and concedes that his 1993 essay ‘does tend to advance my reading of the films as the correct reading,’ (13) - unsurprisingly leads him to a similar conclusion. His revised account does, however, still argue for a hierarchy of heritage-film spectatorships conditioned by some contextual cultural-political conditions more than others. Thus the kind of ‘heritage’ reading of the films produced by Higson in his 1993 essay - and conditioned by the promotional and critical discourses which construct the films as a phenomenon of ‘heritage culture’ - is still presented as the dominant form of heritage-film spectatorship, while spectatorship of the films as woman’s films or queer melodramas is assigned only marginal status, the core argument here being that ‘films like Howards End are promoted and circulated within the culture precisely as heritage films, and not as woman’s pictures or queer dramas’. (14) Indeed, Higson argues:
Both positive and negative critics of the films have treated them as paeans to a particular vision of England: this is the dominant view of them that has been circulated in print and on television. In other words, my reading of the films does have a certain cultural status, even a quasi-official status, and it is important to take that cultural status seriously. (15)
While this view is understandable and, in part, valid, I nevertheless want to suggest that giving primacy to this ‘official’ reading of the heritage films passes over aspects of the films’ textuality and issues around their spectatorship which cannot simply be dismissed as marginal. In particular, I want to suggest that prioritisation of an ‘official’ reading (or dominant cultural understanding) of the films may offer little insight into questions of audience pleasure and fragmented - particularly gendered - spectatorship, may limit the richness of our investigation and may lead us to premature conclusions.
The remainder of this paper sets out the theoretical (text-led) case for regarding some of the best-known British heritage films as gendered texts and for approaching heritage-film spectatorship as a gendered phenomenon. My intention is not to suggest that the gendering of heritage cinema and its consumption automatically precludes or disproves the possibility of conservative spectatorship of the films or conservative elements in certain heritage-film texts - nor to suggest that all films regarded as ‘heritage films’ are also ‘woman’s films’ (Chariots of Fire being an obvious counter-example). What I do want to suggest, however, is that the monolithic dismissals of heritage films as overridingly ‘conservative’ produced in the early 1990s were achieved and were only achievable by silencing questions around the gendering and sexuality of the films, their appeal and their consumption. Insofar as these questions also inflect our understanding of the ‘heritage’ character of the films, their consignment to the margins in Higson’s recent revised critique while the films’ ‘dominant’ context of (a de-gendered conception of) heritage culture takes centre stage, continue, I would argue, to be problematic.
As I have observed in the past, (16) the gender-blindness of the dominant British critical approach to heritage cinema is sufficiently strange as to seem almost wilful, given the historical associations of femininity with a (culturally constructed) disposition towards the pleasures of the (popular and literary) novel; the costume film; (17) female-centred narratives and ‘female’ genres such as romance and melodrama; and, last but not least, the pleasures of consumption. The passive, uncritical, consumerist heritage spectator tacitly constructed by the early-1990s critiques thus served to affirm the ‘feminine’ cultural status of heritage-film spectators and texts. I will now examine in more detail the sites at which a feminine/non-masculine and - with some political significance - non-dominant spectator can be said to be constructed and addressed by these texts.
It seems to me that there are good reasons why the argument that the films under discussion are predominantly manifestations of heritage culture and are primarily received as such except by marginal fragments of the audience because they ‘are promoted and circulated within the culture precisely as heritage films, and not as woman’s pictures or queer dramas’ (18) should not be treated as a final answer. For one thing, when Higson writes about ‘promot[ion] and circulat[ion] within the culture’, his examples indicate that he primarily means dominant media (critical and promotional) discourses around the films. The assumption here seems to be that these ‘quasi-official’ (professional) media and critical discourses have a certain authority and transparency as indicators of public (‘amateur’) responses to the films (whether by reflecting audience reception or conditioning it); but of course, this may be far from the case. As a journalistic practitioner myself, I would add the (fairly obvious) point that critical and journalistic texts, like films, require close reading. Their industrial and cultural conditions of production mean that they cannot be regarded as offering direct access to the subjectivity of the critic, let alone that of the paying audience; and, as I tried to show in my own study of reviewing practices around the 1980s British-based Merchant Ivory films, (19) critical and promotional texts may be receptacles for all manner of contradictory discourses, many of them quite independent of the film text or the perceptions of its audiences.
Secondly, cultural product(ion)s which were heavily gendered in their appeal but were not explicitly promoted and circulated as such were far from uncommon in 1980s Britain. Though I don’t wish to suggest that this was a phenomenon unique to the 1980s, such product(ion)s could be seen as characteristic of a post-feminist advanced capitalist era which sought to stratify the consumer population by ‘lifestyle’ rather than according the old categories of gender, ‘race’ and class. The quintessential 1980s style magazine The Face (which many would see as the aesthetic and political antithesis of heritage cinema) and the weekly music press which spawned it have never called themselves ‘young men’s magazines’; but their advertising demographics (and close attention to their editorial content and address) confirm that that is exactly what they are. (The same is true, incidentally, of most of Britain’s monthly film magazines. This is not to say, of course, that these publications are not read or enjoyed by women; but they are not primarily targeted to appeal to women.)
In the context of dominant discourses around British cinema as a ‘national’ cinema, moreover, there may be additional reasons why the female address and appeal of certain 1980s and 1990s British films has been disavowed and subsumed beneath other generic labels at the sites of promotion and critical reception. Justine King argues that in the mid-to-late 1980s, a whole cycle of British films which combined popular feminism with the defining characteristics of the classic woman’s picture (the diegetic and spectatorial privileging of female point-of-view structures, and thematic concerns designated as ‘feminine’ within a patriarchal culture) were subsumed under other generic labels in precisely this way. (20) Though King is concerned primarily with a cycle of woman’s films which circulated as comedies (including Educating Rita [1983], A Letter to Brezhnev [1985] and Wish You Were Here [1987]), she also cites a number of films circulated as heritage films, including Dance With A Stranger [1984] and A Room With A View [1985]). Her explanatory reiteration of Richard Dyer’s observation that the ‘official’ characterisation of British cinema as ‘restrained’ has virtually precluded acknowledgement of its propensity for melodrama or emotionality (21) - thus making the very concept of a British woman’s film seem alien and contradictory - seems particularly pertinent to the case of the heritage films, given the dominant culture’s persistence in locking them within the discourse of ‘national cinema’.
If we take the ‘woman’s film’ characteristics identified by King as a starting point, and consider also the conventional cultural designation of talk, costume/fashion and the domestic sphere as areas of female competence, (22) it is clear that a considerable number of the best-known heritage films qualify as ‘feminine’ texts on the thematic, diegetic and aesthetic levels. While the ‘feminine’ competences and pleasures of costume and domestic furnishing could be said to be pre-inscribed in the ‘heritage’ aesthetic, I have argued that the films’ thematic focus on psychology, morality and communication also equates with contemporary (and ‘middle-class’) ‘female’ cultural competences discernibly related to the cultural re-formations taking place among women over the past two decades.
In his recent article on The Jewel in the Crown, Richard Dyer names an interesting additional sense in which Jewel (and, I would argue, many other post-1979 TV and cinematic costume screen fictions) might be said to specifically address a female audience which could be said to be particularly relevant to debates around heritage cinema:
Jewel may be seen as addressing women in its liberalism. A liberal position is not necessarily or exclusively feminine, but it is often thought so. Such a view is expressed by several characters in the serial ... invoking the liberal female type central to the literary tradition to which Jewel belongs. (23)
This focus on liberal issues at the level of narrative, and on female characters as vessels of a liberal position, is, of course, a common characteristic of many heritage film texts from Enchanted April to Howards End. The salient point here is that where the early-1990s heritage-film critiques cast the films’ heritage visual pleasures in opposition to these diegetic liberal critiques, Dyer’s comments highlight a sense in which both the films’ liberalism and their supposedly conservative visual pleasures may be part of the same appeal to female audiences (or, at least, to ‘feminine’ spectatorship). As his example shows, in many cases we may find this liberalism ultimately inadequate; but we can also see here how a focus on gender and femininity might offer the potential for a more enlightening analysis of the appeal of heritage screen fictions freed from the binary oppositions of the early-1990s critiques.
Merchant Ivory’s two 1980s adaptations from E. M. Forster, A Room With A View (1986) and Maurice (1987) provide instructive case studies for several reasons. On the one hand, they belong to the small group of undisputed, central rather than marginal, heritage-film texts: while attempts at the abstract definition of heritage cinema remain problematic and the category’s boundaries remain contested, the working consensus that the Merchant Ivory adaptations are its defining exemplars is sufficiently strong that the brand label ‘Merchant Ivory’ has become virtually a synonym for ‘heritage’. Both films nominally operate within mainstream narrative and representational conventions. At the same time, A Room (the archetype) and Maurice (its implicit, and instructively problematic, ‘sequel’) are set apart from their higher-budget successors (Howards End [1992] and The Remains of the Day [1993]) by narratives which are centrally organised around themes of sexuality, gender and identity. More than that, their narratives are organised around the personal journeys (towards psychic and erotic self-knowledge and sexual agency) of, respectively, a very young - indeed, teenage - woman (Lucy Honeychurch/Helena Bonham Carter in A Room) and a gay man (the eponymous Maurice/James Wilby). The fact that these are hardly protagonists designed to appeal to dominant ‘masculine’ spectatorship as classically conceived by 1970s theory suggests both that the kind of spectatorship being encouraged by these films is in some sense ‘non-dominant’ (I will be exploring this point further shortly) and that there will be a differentiation in spectatorial responses to them which we might validly call gendered.(24) Indeed, the blindness to certain aspects of the films in evidence in the dominant (and predominantly male) positive and negative critical discourses around them, and certain disparities between ‘official’ discourses around the films and the pleasures seemingly found in them by audiences, seems to confirm this.(25)
There are other thematic and representational reasons to regard A Room and Maurice as woman’s/women’s films. Given the anomalous status accorded to active female spectatorship in Mulveyan 1970s feminist film theory, and the fact that such active female spectatorial/erotic pleasures continue to be only rarely catered for in mainstream movies in the 1990s, A Room is particularly astonishing for its repeated representation of active female looking on screen, and its central diegetic thematisation of female looking and female pleasure. Indeed, the events played out through the narrative progression of the protagonist Lucy - from repression, via a mistaken engagement to a snobbish and implicitly sexually unsuitable fiancée to final marriage to the socialist, more passionate, and sexually compatible George Emerson - explicitly encourage us to equate the ‘room with a view’ of the title with the sensually gratified female self. As George’s father Mr Emerson states early the film, ‘Women like looking at a view. Men don’t.’ In contravention of the usual rules of mainstream cinema, looking is presented as a specifically female pleasure. More than this, the film advocates the right to look/right to pleasure of those groups of women patriarchy most despises, namely spinsters (Miss Lavish, Charlotte Bartlett) and the elderly (the Miss Allans). (Charlotte Bartlett’s repressive and interfering behaviour are cumulatively readable precisely as a symptom of ungratified desires.)
Moreover, female voyeurism - female looking of the most covert and yet overt kind - is a recurring theme in A Room, and is rapidly established as such in the film’s early (Italian) scenes, primarily via the persona of ‘the lady novelist, Miss Eleanor Lavish’ - a character whose very profession sanctions voyeurism, and whose gaze (at once disguised and doubled by her use of a monocle) is fixed on both sexes. Additionally, female visual/erotic pleasure is equated with tourism or travel, an equation whose implications are systematically played out in the central sequence in which the English tourists in Florence are driven to Fiesole ‘to see a view’. (26)
Where the diegetic sexual politics and politics of representation that mark A Room as a ‘women’s film’ are played out (generically speaking) via comedy and romance, Maurice mixes liberal-reformist gay sexual politics are played out as melodrama: in this sense, it is more a woman’s film than a women’s film. The case for Maurice as a ‘woman’s weepie’ was laid out very entertainingly by Mark Finch and Richard Kwietnowski shortly after its UK release, and I don’t intend to repeat their arguments here; but it is worth noting that their response, like my own, was characterised by surprise:
We expected the film to treat homosexuality as a rather ungainly grand piano around which character actors and vintage cars would gather. Although both remain (to the point of excess) we were surprised by the degree to which the film utilises a number of key constructions from Hollywood’s most ambiguous site of wish-fulfilment, the melodrama: absent fathers, denial, alteration, illness, hysteria, tears, unrequited love, isolation, paranoia, entrapment, duplicity, false closure. (27)