Catherine Breillat's Romance and the Female Spectator: From Dream-Work to Therapy

Catherine Breillat's Romance and the Female Spectator: From Dream-Work to Therapy Ruth A. Hottell and Lynsey Russell-Watts CATHERINE BREILLAT has been keen to claim the label of pornography for her work,1 confounding attempts to argue that the film should not be classed as such.2 In this article, we have sought to reach beyond the debate on pornography which has to some extent limited responses to the film, engaging rather with the challenge to the cinematic apparatus Breillat presents through the "pornographic." This challenge is illustrated first of all through an exploration of the process governing identification in the cinema and Breillat's reconfiguration of the production of fantasy . The relation of the individual (female) spectator to the film is then focused upon, and the problematics of pleasure, directly confronted by Breillat in her encounter with pornography, are thus interrogated. These twin approaches, though both psychoanalytically influenced, are not necessarily compatible, and the aim of including them both here is to gesture towards the multiple possibilities opened up for the female viewer by Breillat's film. Transgressing Taboos: Romance as feminine dream-work—Freud's case studies commonly referred to as "A Child is Being Beaten" and "The Wolfman" have arguably functioned as the major influence on film theorists when describing the psychic phenomena at work in spectatorial identification with the images on the screen. That is, the child (in "The Wolfman"), confronted by the primal scene, represses the sight, yet it lingers in his unconscious , returning in various permutations in his dreams. In "A Child is Being Beaten," through the metonymical significance of the dream-work, the boy imagines himself at the center of the frame, repeating the scene again and again while playing the various roles possible in the scenario of a beating. He thus identifies alternately with the active subject (the beater), the passive object (the one being beaten), and the objective observer watching the scene. Part of the treatment is the reflection period in which the boy, the spectator, is asked to describe his reactions to the spectacle—the spectator then is brought to reflect on the viewing experience and, as such, to re-insert himself into the scene as at once an involved participant and an observer.3 Of course, Freud considered this spectatorial position from the male viewpoint only, particularly since woman, as the dark continent, was unknowable 70 Fall 2002 Hottell and Russell-Watts and therefore could not reflect on her position within the dream sequence. As numerous critics have pointed out, this exclusion of the feminine has translated into a relegation to object status in mainstream cinema.4 And what is possibly more constraining than the limitation of roles is denial of access to reflection. As Mary Ann Doane points out, mainstream cinema allows the female spectator only two choices: identification with the passive image of woman on the screen or a form of transvestite desire for the fetishized object of desire.5 This concept of desire is at the heart of production of meaning in film. As de Lauretis describes the link: ". . . cinema's binding of fantasy to significant images affects the spectator as a subjective production, and so the movement of the film actually inscribes and orients desire" (Alice Doesn't 8). Thus it would seem that to disrupt hegemonic control of the transcribed fantasy, the position of the spectator must be dislocated from the masculine trajectory. De Lauretis calls for a global approach to unlocking the restraints: ". .. the present task of women's cinema may be not the destruction of narrative and visual pleasure, but rather the construction of another form of reference, one in which the measure of desire is no longer just the male subject" (Alice Doesn't 8). Breillat's cinematic agenda would seem to be answering this call for another frame of reference, another measure of desire. And she has not opted for an easy genre to articulate differently, hurling herself instead headlong against eroticism and pornography, claiming the space between them for her own subjective expression.6 Seen in the context of the dreaming Wolfwoman, even the most oft-cited criticism concerning Caroline Ducey's passivity would add to the...