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2 8 1 F rom the very outset, ἀ e Other Side of Midnight (1977) proposes the investigation of a woman’s guilt (“Innocent or guilty, Noelle?”) as the organizing principle of its dramatic world. The question is germane to melodrama, and not least to one of its most charac‑ teristic and durable narrative patterns: the tale of the innocent young woman lured into sex‑ ual transgression by an irresponsible seducer and subsequently visited with consequences— whether loss of social status, ostracism, loss of a child, or secrecy purchased at the cost of embitterment and rancorous obsession—from which the seducer is spared, temporarily or permanently, by virtue of his being a man with unimpeachable social credentials. Noelle Page (Marie‑France Pisier) obviously relates to this type, which has its forbears in such heroines of Victorian low and high culture as those of Way Down East (1920) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ἀ e Scarlet Letter, and Felix Holt. The 1930s “confession” cycle in Hollywood offers innumer‑ able variations, one of which—Robert Z. Leonard’s Susan Lenox (1931)—s trikingly anticipates ἀ e Other Side of Midnight’s theme of a woman who, abandoned (if for different reasons) by her lover, prostitutes herself in order to achieve a position of social power from which she can control his destiny and humiliate him. In the literal sense, of course, Noelle is innocent, but this“answer,”while crucially impor‑ tant—in that Constantin Demeris (Raf Vallone) is in a position to have her punished for a crime she did not commit—is subordinate to a rigorous critique of the terms in which the question is posed.The function of bourgeois law is to protect bourgeois property and the social relations which sustain it.The function of the language of bourgeois law is at once to universal‑ ize the social interests inscribed within it, which then appear as “the public interest” rather than the interests of particular groups and classes, and to extrapolate the action defined as criminal from its determinants: that is, to individualize it, so that it appears as a matter of per‑ sonal moral responsibility.This double movement—the universalization of interests,the hypos‑ tasization of actions—transforms a real question as to the determinants of an action and the interests which constitute its illegality into a mystified one—“innocent or guilty?”A preference for the first question over the second implies neither sentimental charity nor moral quietism, and ἀ e Other Side of Midnight, eschewing facile “exoneration,” is precisely concerned with the objective social forces acting on Noelle which lead her to behave in the way she does: social forces which both provide the conditions for her history and insist on reparation for it. Noelle,as we first see her,has been subjected to two contradictory sets of injunctions,both originating in her family and,specifically,her father.On the one hand,“You are a princess—you The Other Side of Midnight (1981) 17 Chapter 17.indd 281 1/17/12 10:51 AM 2 8 2 pa r t t w o : h o l l y w o o d m o v i e s are above the rest”; on the other,“You have beauty—it’s your only weapon of survival.” Each of these opposing principles fulfills needs of the father: respectively, the idealistic and the prac‑ tical. His insistence that Noelle’s “natural” rank is out of true with her social one allows him vicariously to transcend his own social position through her; she has been molded, as a result, as that type of frailty, vulnerability, and “innocence” which is (quite without her own volition) most inviting to exploitative advances and least able to cope with them. At the same time, he is quite willing to prostitute her to secure himself in a more material sense (“A few things to comfort me and your mother against whatever comes”), and he adjures her to pursue the same course (“End up in a yacht—in a villa!”). Both injunctions define Noelle in relation to men—romantically (“You are a princess” has its echo in Larry Douglas’s [John Beck] “You’re magnificent”) and cynically (you get on by using sex)—and it is crucial for our understanding of her subsequent trajectory that these apparently distinct imperatives, whose continuity she acts out, are articulated at this early stage in sexual and class terms: in terms of women “suc‑ ceeding” through men, and of the upward mobility of the petit...

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