Women, Pleasure, Film: What Lolas Want by Simon Richter (review)

Simon Richter’s Women, Pleasure, Film: What Lolas Want argues that “Lola”—who appears in 35 international films, including thirteen German ones, giving several of those their title—is more than a character’s name or an intertextual referent to adaptation or remake. According to Richter, films about Lola constitute “an anomaly in cinema history … a tradition or body of film … a genre in its own right,” what he calls “the Lola film” (2). In contrast to films about the femme fatale, the famous stock character of film noir, the narratives of what he defines as the Lola film do not punish their main characters for their claim to pleasure. Instead, Lolas self-confidently, unapologetically, and successfully embody female sexual pleasure.

Richter’s original approach to a character brings together familiar and less familiar texts. Situating them in this new paradigm allows him to forge innovative connections. Slightly irreverent, but thoroughly researched and with much attention to subtlety, Richter offers a tour-de-force through the different incarnations of the cinematic Lola. He sets the stage for his in-depth discussion of the genre’s diverse aspects in early chapters that outline his theoretical framework, provide a linguistic—phonosemantic—analysis of the name “Lola,” and offer a historical survey of Lola films. Richter recounts the precinematic history of Lola Montez who was born Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert in early-nineteenth-century Ireland and reinvented herself as a Spanish dancer for a scandalous life in Europe and the United States. Arguing that the Lola film relies on a mutually constitutive archetype and genre, Richter demonstrates that Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) inaugurated the Lola film. Marlene Dietrich appears as the uncontested Ur-Lola. Sixteen short chapters cover the intriguing dimensions of this genre, ranging from song and dance, the circus, legs, race and ethnicity, carousels and carnival, to color and time. These chapters, which follow the films’ leads into unexpected directions—for example, Spike Lee’s Nola Darling of She’s Gotta Have It as a variation of Lola—make this book an exciting discovery of the cinematic mise-en-scene for female pleasure.

The argument successfully intervenes in feminist film theory by offering the Lola film as an alternative to Laura Mulvey’s canonical model of two modes of looking that organize Hollywood’s representation of woman: sadistic voyeurism or fetishistic scopophilia. Mulvey exemplifies the former with Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre and the latter with Sternberg’s films. Richter emphasizes, however, that Mulvey refers to Sternberg’s later films made in Hollywood, precisely because the earlier The Blue Angel centered on Lola, the embodiment of female pleasure beyond either of these two psychoanalytic models advanced by Mulvey.

The implications of Richter’s claim regarding the Lola film-as-genre for genre studies are less fleshed out than its feminist contribution. Current scholarship debates the transformation of genres in the global marketplace, and in this context, the explanatory hold of the category of genre has become less stable than in its heyday of the Hollywood studio system. For example, Linda Williams has expanded melodrama to signify a mode of racial representation in the United States. Feminist discussions about the productivity of the women’s film have given way to research about the postfeminist chick flick; Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover have initiated scholarship on the global art film; and yet other scholars see contemporary Hollywood films as mostly hybrid. It is unclear how Women, Pleasure, Film positions itself among these recent debates and what its thesis contributes to the changing understanding of genre and the shifting landscape of genre studies. As the proclaimed Lola film has such diverse history, Richter might have pushed further about what it could teach us about how we think about genre in general and its relation to gender and pleasure more specifically.

In addition, in instances, the claim to genre might also impose a focus on the binary of commonality versus difference and a...