Queer women are one of the most highly codified social demographics to have ever existed on film. In comparison to their male counterparts, the lesbian image is years behind in terms of realist acceptability among mainstream American audiences. In most cases, a lesbian who appears on screen and is not depicted as sexually active appears as butch. Meanwhile, a lesbian who does appear sexually active on screen is highly feminized. This latter variety is often depicted as two femme’s, whose appearance caters to the heterosexual male idea of fetishized lesbianism as exemplified by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). These tactics polarize the lesbian community into two separate parts, and each part is void of any sort of character dimension as pertaining to their sexuality, thusly informing the popular consciousness that this plastic approximation of lesbianism is in fact realistic.
In 1973 film critic Joan Mellen wrote, at the height of America’s New Hollywood, in her book Women & Their Sexuality In The New Film that lesbians were predominantly depicted as predatory characters. In the course of the chapter Lesbianism In The Movies she cites Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) and Robert Aldrich’s The Killing Of Sister George (1969) as just two of many films that support her thesis. Mellen writes “they (lesbians) appear either compulsively sadistic or masochistic, always possessive, jealous, hateful, and indeed ‘sick’ (page 74)”. She then singles out Radley Metzger’s Therese & Isabelle (1968) as a notable exception to this rule. Though Metzger does in fact strip his lesbian characters of their predatory nature, in contrast to the characterization of lesbians in his previous films such as The Alley Cats (1966), he does not stray away from the masculine gaze of his camera work nor the heterosexual fetishism of lesbian lovemaking.
The removal of this fetishistic approach to the depiction of lesbianism would come some five years after Metzger’s film in the form of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant (1973). What Fassbinder is interested in is not the sexual fulfillment that David Lynch and Radley Metzger derive from lesbian sex between two femmes, but rather he seeks to imbue his lesbian characters with a dramatic and intimate struggle for power over the other. Superficially this may appear to be a digression into the predatory characterizations of early films, however, Fassbinder does not polarize this characterization, Fassbinder is democratic, endowing every lesbian character equally with predatory traits just as he also permits his characters to exist with greater dimension than Metzger. Still, Fassbinder’s film is only capable of freeing his lesbian characters within an intimate setting in which these characters do not interact with the world at large. Lesbianism, even in Fassbinder’s hands, is still relegated to behind closed doors.
By contrast, the male homosexual dandy and comic relief of classic Hollywood was always out in the open. Though these characters were often not explicit about their homosexuality, they were permitted to move through a number of locales and were afforded a variety of different interactions with various characters. Homosexual filmmakers sought to liberate their subjects in a manner opposite to that of the lesbian image. Jean Genet’s Un Chant D’Amour (1950) was scandalized, was labeled pornography for its depiction of homosexual males interacting intimately, despite there being a literal wall between the characters in the film. As lesbians sought to move out of the bedroom and away from fetishism, homosexuals endeavored to move in. If one compares the visual langue of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s My Hustler (1965) with that of Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (1971) it is clear that in exterior shots the lesbians in Franco’s film are highly predatory, the total opposite of the passive flirtations in My Hustler. Likewise, Franco’s interior scenes of lesbian sex are essentially soft-core porn while My Hustler becomes intimate, real, and at times gentle in its depiction of male homosexuality.
The next step towards liberation for lesbians in film would come in the eighties and would be totally indebted to the feminist films of the seventies. Films like Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) and Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Germany, Pale Mother (1980) featured female protagonists who, when motivated by masculine suppression and societal mandates, rebel by running away, taking to the road as in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) in search of a better America and a truer self. German filmmaker Monika Treut transposed the aesthetic of Wanda and Germany, Pale Mother into the milieu of San Francisco lesbian counter culture in her film Virgin Machine (1988). What Treut does is realign the sociological components of these films to suit a lesbian protagonist. In her film it is fetishism that must be rebelled against as well as the two dimensional codification of femme or butch, and opened public spaces must be sought for non-predatorial acts of lesbian love. Virgin Machine is so successful in retaliating against the heterosexual control of lesbianism in film that it provided the blueprint for more aggressive homosexual male narratives in films by Todd Haynes and Gregg Araki.
Monika Treut’s Virgin Machine does not limit its concerns to the lesbian identity, cinematic or otherwise. On the contrary, Virgin Machine’s narrative deals with feminist issues of rape and incest that through the self-awareness of the film’s protagonist Dorothy (Shelly Mars), function as touchstones in the journey toward lesbianism. In this way Virgin Machine utilizes the journey from West Germany to San Francisco as a metaphor for the transition of self-identity, a metamorphosis into a state of sexual fluidity that eventually solidifies itself as lesbianism.
Monika Treut’s melodramatic minimalism and sociological interest in female sexuality and Virgin Machine’s philosophical notion of “Romance” are all hallmarks of the New German Cinema. Where Fassbinder was able to implement the New German aesthetic to humanize the homosexual, Treut successfully negates the binary impulse of the media in terms of sexual identity with the same aesthetics. But Treut belongs to the generation of filmmakers directly after what is popularly known as New German Cinema. Treut, like her more avant-garde counterpart Ulrike Ottinger and others of her generation, have a more overt political and sociological post-punk commentary in their films. Partly this is because the filmmakers whose hey-day came immediately before them were encumbered by the chore of re-establishing a German identity in film, and partly because the international export of foreign films called for, in the eighties, a cinema with a cut and dry intent. Treut is unique in this because, unlike her contemporaries, she was exposed more readily to the first works of the underground film movement known as Transgressive Cinema that had begun to take hold in the mid-eighties.
Transgressive Cinema’s importance to queer cinema is not due to its depiction of homosexuality; most of its subjects are heterosexually derived. Instead, this is due largely to the aggressive depiction of reversed and inverted sexual images. For instance, Richard Kern’s film Submit To Me Now is about a man who visits his girlfriend. This girlfriend and her roommate then dress him as a woman and proceed to penetrate him in both his anus and mouth with large strap-on dildos. These images signaled a move away from the strict binary impulses of cinema at large, and provided a means with which filmmakers such as Monika Treut and Todd Haynes could reclaim their sexual identities in the cinema. During and immediately after the Transgressive Film movement there is a marked increase in narrative films made by queer filmmakers that endeavor to originate a filmic vernacular unique to the sexual identity of the author of a film. The most significant result of Transgressive Cinema is, of course, the New Queer cinema of the nineties.
The New Queer Cinema has had a long lasting impact on the cinema at large in a number of ways, but in terms of its sociological advocacy it is rather singular in impact. What New Queer Cinema did was present a number of films that served one function, and that was to transport its homosexual protagonists, male and female, into scenarios and narratives where they were not codified as fetish properties or marginalized as cult figures. All of the instances of lesbianism listed above in which the film humanized its lesbian characters are particularly insular in the cinema, the exception rather than the rule. For lesbians, New Queer Cinema marks a distinct move away from, and opposition to, the fetishistic portrayal of lesbians in mainstream cinema that is the direct result of heterosexual codification derivative of the assumption of a sexual binary in Western society.
New Queer Cinema followed Treut’s model of de-fetishizing the lesbian, in one major instance, by utilizing close-ups of the lesbian characters’ faces during intercourse that were emotive rather than signifiers of carnal pleasure. This tactic contradicts the mainstream tendency of a film like Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1982), which utilizes mostly wide-shots during its scene of lesbian intercourse. The wide-shots Scott uses fetishize the bodies of the lesbians (Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve) by insisting that the audience remain at a distance where their entire bodies are more clearly visible and their emotive powers as actors are weakest.
Though such tactics in the New Queer Cinema were affective, they never crossed over into the mainstream. In fact, by the time New Queer Cinema began to dissipate in the mid-nineties, Queer films themselves would begin to move away from the radicalism it learned from Monika Treut, Transgressive Cinema, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. By the 2000s, lesbians in film and television would again conform to the fetishistic parameters of predator versus prey and the assumptive sexual binary.
