Note: This article has been divided into two parts: Part 1 and Part 2 (including notes).
Copyright is retained by the author
If the above characteristics merely suggest an appeal to a non-dominant/‘feminine’/‘unmasculine’ spectatorship, however, A Room and Maurice also share an important characteristic - both unusual and transgressive in mainstream cinema - which seems likely to require such spectatorship, and which contains the potential to make the films uncomfortable, displeasurable viewing for the dominant ‘masculine’ spectator. Where the British anti-heritage critiques characterise the Merchant Ivory films’ visual pleasures in terms of their display of inanimate objects, a distinctive trait of both films is their unembarrassed, unprurient and paradoxically innocent display of the spectacle of the male. While the discreet display of young men in Maurice is no surprise, the insertion of the same display into A Room’s nominally heterosexual romance has additional and very interesting implications - more so given A Room’s widespread circulation and popularity among mainstream audiences beyond the art cinema.
As Richard Dyer has observed, when we look at images of men that are offered as (sexual) spectacle, various instabilities are produced:
‘On the one hand ... these men are there to be looked at ... On the other hand, this does violence to the codes of who looks and who is looked at (and how), and some attempt is instinctively made to counteract this violation.’ (28)
Also relevant here are the insights offered by Steve Neale. Neale argues that, as suggested by D. N. Rodowick, (29) male spectatorship always involves an oscillation between identification and homoerotic contemplation. However, because ‘in a heterosexual and patriarchal society the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look, that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed’ (30) Citing Paul Willemen’s work on the spectacle of the male body in Anthony Mann’s westerns and the sadism and mutilations Mann’s films visit upon it, (31) Neale suggests that the sado-masochistic themes of so many ‘male’ genres and films are precisely ‘a means by which the body may be disqualified, so to speak, as an object of erotic contemplation and desire,’ while simultaneously becoming the object of a repressed homoerotic voyeurism. (32)
In mainstream cinema even today, it will be apparent that the objectification of the female body and corresponding strategies to disavow the male body as object of the desiring gaze continue to be the defining norm. (Consider, for example, the elaborate steps always taken in sexually explicit Hollywood ‘erotic thrillers’ such as Basic Instinct to conceal the male organ, and such films’ gendered hierarchies of sexual attractiveness: Sharon Stone versus Michael Douglas). While Maurice and A Room don’t overtly display the male body as a film specifically targeted at a gay male audience would do, the strategies for retaining male power while sexually on display described by Dyer, and the violent or sado-masochistic precautions against the homoerotic male gaze described by Neale, are essentially absent. In instructive contrast with, say, the Warner Brothers’ publicity portrait of the young Humphrey Bogart reproduced in Dyer’s article, in which the feminising effects of Bogart’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ are combated by a hysterical excess of phallic props, the males in the Merchant-Ivory films are surrounded by visual pleasures of landscape, architecture and period objects which affirm a context of ‘feminine’ or feminised display. Moreover, the diegetic emphasis on the gaze itself provides an entirely non-violent pretext for looking guiltlessly at the male. Perhaps it is little wonder that male British critics object so strongly to the period spectacle on display in these films, and focus their critique so insistently on the inanimate objects in the mise-en-scène, if the primary ‘period spectacle’ on display is in fact that of the male.
At the same time, the unthreatening nature of this display and its ‘mainstream’ context make these screen males equally available to the female gaze, thus offering rare pleasures of active straight female looking. A number of articles have appeared in the British press in recent years which support the hypothesis that these pleasures play a considerable role in these films’ popularity with female audiences - but they are always, significantly, written by female journalists and consigned to the women’s or features pages (in contrast with the serious news or arts space accorded to stories constructing the films as ‘British successes abroad’ or heritage embarrassments).
The camera’s gaze on the clothed male body is, however, a minor matter compared to the other taboo which the two films break so nonchalantly regarding the display (or rather, the conventional cinematic absence) of the male genitals. In the context of mainstream movie norms, A Room’s uninhibited display of penises in a film which, even under the illiberal British certification system, a child of any age can see - surely counts as something of a cinematic landmark. Within the film’s wider sexual subtext, the nominally innocent comic horseplay of the film’s famous nude bathing scene does nothing to disavow its homoerotic implications but, on the contrary, endows it with a codified suggestiveness. This homoerotic reading is, of course, intensified by knowledge of Ivory’s intended duplicate casting of A Room and Maurice: the two young actors cavorting in the water with the famously gay Simon Callow, Julian Sands and Rupert Graves, were originally cast by Ivory in the later film as Maurice and his seducer Alec Scudder, a piece of intertextual mischief which was spoilt when Sands dropped out of Maurice shortly before shooting began.
But, more than this, I want to suggest that these films may also construct a gendered spectactor at the structural level of narrative and film form.
Certain formal characteristics of the heritage films tend to be cited by their detractors in the attempt to show that their fetishistic focus on period spectacle - rather than narrative, character, etc. - is what holds their audiences rapt. An informal poll of male friends which I carried out during my 1994 research in an attempt to discover why they disliked heritage films (they all did) yielded a similar emphasis on film form: the Merchant-Ivory adaptations were accused of being ‘uncinematic’ and of having no grasp of film language. The question of which qualities are deemed to be ‘uncinematic’ - and why formal characteristics that offend the male cinéphile seem not to worry the heritage film audience - is an interesting one with implications for the gendering of theoretical spectatorship.
Andrew Higson has gone further than most critics in attempting to identify the heritage film’s generic formal characteristics; moreover, A Room and Maurice are his central illustrative examples.(33) If we edit his list to abstract his findings from the explanatory framework which treats them as merely devices for the seductive display of the mise-en-scène, the resulting list of purely formal characteristics being attributed to the films makes interesting reading. The main points can be summarised as follows:
I would argue that, although a ‘crisis and resolution’ macro-narrative structure can be identified in the heritage films, the progression from the former to the latter is achieved cyclically and unevenly rather than directly; it is for this reason that the narrative appears ‘slow’, ‘undramatic’ and lacking in ‘action’. It is not that the narratives lack event - they are event-full - but this event is likely to be dispersed, and cumulative in its power, and hence may well appear not to be goal-directed. What can be further surmised from examination of A Room and Maurice is that the ‘action’ driving their macro-narratives is social, psychological and emotional rather than physical. The concern for ‘character, place, atmosphere and milieu’ is in keeping with both the cyclical, episodic structure of the narratives - it is character, particularly, that motors their cyclical progression - and their social/psychological preoccupations.
But, more than this, point 2 can be read as a definition of a ‘female’ narrative structure as opposed to a ‘male’ one. Many of the qualities the heritage films are identified as lacking - goal-orientated action, rapid cutting, extensive use of close-ups - are precisely those commonly attributed to the classic film genres generally identified as ‘male’ : the gangster movie, the western, the action movie.
Of course, the labelling of particular narrative structures as ‘male’ or ‘female’ is not without its problems, not least in its binarism; in using such labels, my intention is not to deny inevitable ‘impurities’ (cyclical tendencies within ‘male’ narratives, for example) or to force the multiple and cross-gender identifications offered by many ‘gendered’ genre films into a binary system. The validity of the ‘male’/‘female’ narrative dichotomy - and hence its usefulness here - lies in its analogousness to the ‘narrative’ of male and female (sexual) pleasure: the former goal-directed (building up to a terminal climax) and focused on a single site; the latter cyclical, oscillatory, multiple, dispersed. We know well, too, that the classical narrative of mainstream cinema is in precisely this sense ‘male’ - as Rick Altman puts it in his essay on the structure of the American film musical, ‘when we speak of a plot, we usually mean the hero’s trajectory from the beginning to the end’.(34)
If we consider the low cultural status historically afforded to ‘female’ narrative forms - soaps, romances, costume films, historical novels, melodramas, ‘women’s weepies’ - in patriarchal western society (and in its male-dominated critical context), it is clear, too, that the ‘femininity’ of these narratives is defined and affirmed negatively by the displeasure they arouse in the dominant ‘masculine’ spectator. In the case of the heritage films, the roots of this displeasure in film and narrative form seem to be confirmed by the language of disparagement applied by their critics - ‘uncinematic’ meaning upsetting the expected linear trajectory of male narrative, undermining the the goal-object of its desire, diffusing its polarisation towards a single pleasure. (35) And, being of low/feminine cinematic status, heritage films are sneered at for their supposed - ‘self-improving’ - aspiration to ‘high’ cultural values: ‘literary authorship’, ‘the trappings of classical art’, ‘the display of good taste’. (36)
If points 1 and 2 affirm the heritage films as ‘feminine’ texts offering feminine narrative pleasures, points 3-5 raise the question of spectatorial identification. Where for the anti-heritage critics, the films’ dearth of close-ups and - especially - their use of ‘self-conscious’ shots divorced from character point of view and their visual preoccupation with props and settings are merely proof of the spectator’s festishistic/consumerist relationship with the period commodities displayed on screen, these formal traits are in fact open to other interpretations. I have argued that, far from being ‘unmotivated’, shots of the kinds describe in points 4 and 5 frequently contribute to the accumulation of iconic signifiers through which the protagonists’ emotions and states of mind are frequently expressed. Indeed, in the context of the inner/emotional events which constitute much of the films’ ‘action’, I have argued that a number of ‘unmotivated’ shots which are not marked by the conventional means as character point of view can neverthless be identified as the most personal kind of subjective shot of all, the mindscreen. (37)
As pointed out earlier, the Merchant Ivory adaptations are characterised by ensemble (as opposed to star-focused) casting and acting. Indeed, a multiple focus on several central characters is a common characteristic of heritage films in general, and in such films, a group of characters/performers may even - to a greater or lesser extent - share the narrative agency with which a classical narrative film endows a single hero(ine)/star. Though there are exceptions to this rule, they are rare. To take two examples - the former famously commercially successful in the US after being critically ignored in the UK, the latter ambivalently received in both locations - Mike Newell’s Enchanted April has four simultaneously central female characters (played by Josie Lawrence, Miranda Richardson, Polly Walker and Joan Plowright), all of whom express their inner thoughts in voiceover, while Charles Sturridge’s Where Angels Fear to Tread features a shift from one ‘main protagonist’ (Lilia Herriton/Helen Mirren), who dies before the film is half over, to multiple narrative agency (shared primarily between Philip Herriton/Rupert Graves and Caroline Abbott/Helena Bonham Carter) which the film’s UK critics had difficulty dealing with.
As Rick Altman observes: ‘All our notions about narrative structure seem to support [the] proposition that a film always [has] a single central character, around whom all other activity revolves’. (38) From the above examples, however, we can see that the ‘feminine’ heritage-film narratives radically flout this assumption. While in terms of narrative agency Lawrence and Richardson can be identified as Enchanted April’s main protagonists, definitively naming one as ‘star’ over the other is impossible - our identification and empathy oscillate between them - and the intriguing sharing of verbal ‘point of view’ between four women by means of the shared voiceover suggests a still more complex pattern of oscillatory identification. In Where Angels..., a case can be made for Philip/Graves as a consistent, weak hero/anti-hero, but it is significant that such a reading eluded most UK critics, who instead turned to the higher extra-textual status of Mirren (or alternatively Bonham Carter) to help them identify a star.
In A Room and Maurice, this dispersal of narrative power away from a central linear drive is, on the one hand, lessened by the possibility of identifying a single central protagonist but, on the other, accentuated by the ensemble casting of star actors in ‘cameo’ roles and the use of ‘unknowns’ in the central roles. And, in terms of classical ‘male’ narrative, both Lucy and Maurice have certain disqualifications as ‘heroes’: she is a woman, his homosexuality may make him a highly problematic (and anxiety-producing) point of identification for the male-identified heterosexual spectator. If both films achieve closure by the function of ‘marriage’ in the Proppian sense, their ‘happy endings’ also violate the gender-specificity of the Proppian ‘marriage’ function as identified by Laura Mulvey (39) - hence also violating patriarchal gender relations.
Yet in the face of this seeming failure to offer the spectator a single strong point of identification, it is known that for those audiences who do take pleasure in them, these films are - often intensely - emotionally involving. In his recent article on the emotionality of British cinema, Richard Dyer cites ‘the glowing father/son relationship’ between Mr Emerson and George in A Room. Mark Finch and Richard Kwietniowski base a whole essay around a reading of Maurice as a ‘woman’s weepie’ - and one woman, Jane Beverley of Worksop, wrote to Film Review magazine five months into the film’s UK release: ‘I myself have seen Maurice five times and never failed to be totally entranced and moved by it’. (40)
This availability of the pleasures of involvement and identification - for certain spectators and certain spectatorial subject positions if not for others - seems to me to be the most compelling reason to question claims that the heritage films contain little or no point of view. Rather, my examples suggest that these are texts whose narrative structures and formal characteristics may work to encourage multiple, oscillatory identifications on the part of the spectator. What is clear is that, by this means and others, they deny the classic ‘male’ spectatorial expectation of strong, monogamous identification with a single ‘hero’. For this male-identified spectator, the spectatorial options on offer - identification with a ‘disqualified’ hero/ine and/or enforced multiplicity of identification - may indeed feel like having ‘no point of view’. But for those of us viewing the heritage films from other positions, their mainstream popularity can be read as marking a salutary shift in the spectatorial gender-power status quo - away from the goal-orientation of the ‘masculine’ spectator, and towards a feminine spectatorship marked by the impulse towards multiple discourses, multiple identifications and multiple pleasures.
1. Luce Irigaray: The Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) pp.23-33.
2. The resulting dissertation, Sex, Politics and the Past: Merchant Ivory, the heritage film and its critics in 1980s and 1990s Britain (London: British Film Institute/Birkbeck College, 1994) should be available for reference via the British Film Institute library or education division. A paper summarising its core argument, ‘The British - heritage film - and its critics’, appears in Critical Survey, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1995, pp.116-124.
3. I am indebted here to Francis Mulhern for his reminder that the phenomenon of the BBC-TV Classic Serial dates back to the 1950s.
4. Post-presentation discussion at the Popular British Cinema Group, 16.7.96.
5. Cairns Craig: ‘Rooms without a view’, Sight and Sound, June 1991, pp.10-13; Tana Wollen: ‘Over our shoulders: Nostalgic screen fictions for the 1980s’, in John Corner and Sylvia Hardy (Eds.): Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture (London: Routledge, 1991) pp.178-193; Andrew Higson: ‘Re-presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film’, in Lester Friedman (Ed.): British Cinema and Thatcherism (London: University College, 1993) pp.109-129.
6. For a trenchant critique of Craig on these points, see Alison Light: ‘Englishness’ (letter), Sight and Sound, July 1991, p.63.
7. Richard Dyer: ‘Feeling English’, Sight and Sound, March 1994, pp.16-19.
8. Craig, 1991, op. cit, p.10.
Higson, 1993, op. cit., p.109.
10. Ibid, p.110.
11. Ibid, p.119.
12. Monk, 1994, op. cit., p.10.
13. Andrew Higson: ‘The heritage film and British cinema’, in Andrew Higson (Ed.): Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996), p.246.
14. Ibid, p.245.
15. Ibid, p.247.
16. Monk, 1994, op. cit, pp.10-11.
17. See, in particular, Sue Harper: Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London: British Film Institue, 1994) and Pam Cook: Fashioning the Nation (London: British Film Institute, 1996).
18. Higson, 1996, op. cit, p.245.
19. Monk, 1994, op. cit, Chapter 3.
20. Justine King: ‘Crossing thresholds: The contemporary British woman’s film’, in Andrew Higson (Ed.), 1994, op. cit., pp.217-219.
21. Dyer, 1994, op. cit.
22. See Richard Dyer: ‘There’s nothing I can do! Nothing!: Femininity, seriality and whiteness in The Jewel in the Crown’, Screen, Vol. 37, No. 3, 1996, pp.226-27; and Charlotte Brunsdon: ‘Crossroads: Notes on soap opera’, Screen, Vol. 22, No. 4, 1981, pp.32-37.
23. Dyer, Ibid, p.227.
24. The purpose of my tentative phrasing here is to indicate that the word ‘gendered’ is not being used reductively or deterministically. I am not arguing, in other words, that ‘certain readings of heritage films are only available to those who possess the subtle reading skills of a female spectator or ... a gay man’ (see Higson, 1996, p.246, my italics). My aim is not to assert an essentialist notion of privileged spectatorship (the word ‘privileged’ itself encapsulates what I find wrong with such a position). I do, however, aim to show that gender and sexual identities, and gendered spectatorial positions, have an important bearing on the reading of heritage films and that there is a certain dominant/masculine/heterosexual spectatorial position which seems blind to certain textual aspects of the films which are clearly present to other viewers .
25. For example, the dominant Right discourse has praised these films, in which sexuality and sexual politics are central concerns, for their sexlessness - c.f. the Daily Mail’s ludicrously selective claim that A Room’s ‘overt sex is restricted to a single screen kiss exchanged by fully clothed lovers’ (Usher, 1986), which ignores snogging between Italians, subliminally homoerotic naked male horseplay, heterosexual body-kissing in the final scene, and - in common with Maurice - a considerable amount of visual symbolism and double-entendre. The dominant Left discourse, correspondingly, ignores their sexuality, or delegitimises its discussion, seeing it as a distraction from the ‘real’ business of critiqueing the films’ bourgeois heritage characteristics.
26. Here, tourism literally proves to be voyeurism: the most compelling spectacle of the outward journey proves to be that of the handsome Italian carriage driver snogging with his beautiful girlfriend, and Lucy’s initiation into active looking/voyeurism - via, of course, Miss Lavish, whose binoculars enable her to covertly inspect the couple more closely - seems to instigate her pivotal sexual/sensual awakening by George Emerson’s kiss.
27. Mark Finch and Richard Kwietnowski: ‘Melodrama and Maurice: Homo is where the het is’, Screen, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1988, p.73.
28. Richard Dyer: ’Don’t look now: the male pin-up’, reprinted in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992) p.267.
D. N. Rodowick: ‘The difficulty of difference’, Wide Angle, 1982, p.8.
30. Steve Neale: ‘Masculinity as spectacle’, reprinted in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992) p.281.
31. Paul Willemen: ‘Anthony Mann: Looking at the male’, Framework, Nos. 15-17, 1981, p.16.
32. Neale, op. cit.
33. Higson, 1993, op. cit., p. 117.
34. Rick Altman: ‘The American film musical: paradigmatic structure and mediatory function’, Wide Angle, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1978, pp.10-7.
35. This male displeasure seems to me to be clearly distinct from Laura Mulvey’s notion of unpleasure: where the latter was conceived as an active weapon against the dominant cinema and rooted in the practices of the political avant-garde - and as such also has a certain historical specificity - the former is a reaction against (in Irigarayan terms, fear of being swallowed whole by) the female pleasure produced in (more or less) popular cultural forms, and has a longer history which can be traced back to (at least) the 19th century, when reading novels was considered a female vice. What is of interest with regard to the heritage films is the historically and geographically specific form this displeasure has taken in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, and the specific anxieties it has mobilised.
36. Higson, 1993, op. cit., p.113, p.116.
37. These ideas are argued more fully in Monk, 1994, op. cit., Chapter 4. The concept of the mindscreen is borrowed from Bruce Kawin; see his Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard and the First-Person Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
38. Altman, op. cit, p. 198.
39. Laura Mulvey: ‘Afterthoughts... inspired by Duel in the Sun’, Framework, Nos. 15-17, 1981, pp.12-15.
40. Dyer, 1994, op. cit.; Finch and Kwietniowski, 1988, op. cit.; Jane Beverley: Letter to Film Review magazine, April 1988, p.?.