"Yeah, well at least I'm not ugly."

My post’s title is a quote from American Beauty, in the scene where the sensitive emo artist and his quirky rebel girlfriend renounce the self-absorbed cheerleader. As Jane (Thora Birch) dismisses her, Angela (Mena Suvari) throws out the worst and most hurtful insult her value system can conceive of “yeah well at least I’m not ugly!” Clearly, this is the facile gambit of a superficial and insecure teen, and the film’s ethos makes us understand that Jane, the intelligent iconoclastic, is the superior character. However, there is the inescapable reality of female beauty on screen, and in that sense, Angela, with her conventionally good looks (pouty lips, big blues eyes, blond hair) is the most attractive and magnetic figure, which complicates the moral reading in this scene: yes, it’s great to be interesting, but in the celluloid world, isn’t it better to be pretty? For me, this line articulates the overwhelming currency of female looks on film, which constitutes the basis of the makeover narrative.

Now that’s what I call psychoanalysis

In my discursive, somewhat synoptic exposure to high theory over the last few years, I’d assumed that I had feminist psychoanalytic theory down with decent conversance: camera as patriarchal investigatory gaze, how to neutralize castration anxiety in 2 easy steps etc. etc.—most of my exposure to psychoanalysis and Freud have been second-hand through the appropriation and redeployments of later scholars (Mulvey) or in the critical reassessments of those works (Jane Gaines, Patricia White, Kaja Silverman et al). I’m rarely confronted with the thing itself, so actually encountering the density of true, undiluted, hard-core psychoanalysis with the Riviere piece was a bit shocking—I had a similar reaction a few weeks ago in Priya’s historical film class when we read excerpts from Freud’s dream work. In the diction, the analysis, and the conclusions, I can’t get over the tone of authority and incontrovertibility in these seminal texts—there is seemingly no space left for alternative positions, and we are constructed as being helpless under the implacable weight of pathologies.

There is something so invasive about Riviere’s “Masquerade” piece, even though it’s written by woman; it feels cold, probing, judgmental—not on our side. I wonder if Riviere’s very detached tone and lack of empathy (as opposed to the very personalized, engaged styles we will see with feminist writers) was her form of masquerade. By adopting the paternalistic, almost condescending and highly rational lexicon of her male counterparts and mentors, was this her method of disguising her "masculine" qualities (i.e. her intelligence, her professional eminence, her acumen). Not that I expected her to devolve into the language of feeling, and risk becoming the over-present female who is too emotionally involved with her patients and subject of study, but she seems to betray no concern for womankind, for being inscribed in this apparently unalterable state of compensation, fear, and falsity. You wonder what was a stake for her as a woman writing this, and if she had to subsume her personal interest in favor of a medicalized, institutional gloss that would allow her entrance into the big boy’s arena.

Daddy’s girls, Doctors, and a sick symbiosis

Extending again into Riviere’s personal life, I think it’s significant that Heath opens up with some biographical speculation about her and her possible entanglements with the men in her life, “The situation thus created is common enough in the early years of psychoanalysis, with Freud and a forceful male disciple exchanging a woman for analysis in a complex erotic imbroglio” (45)—I found the acolyte-master triangle very unpleasant, as well as the men’s comments and assessments of her being a fine companion but not a sexual attractant. There is a sense of her being their commendable, trick-performing, dream-analyzing pet. This ties into her observations about a woman’s minimizing herself when confronted with representatives of institutionalized patriarchies, “She feels herself as it were acting a part, she puts on the semblance of a rather uneducated foolish and bewildered woman." While “potentially hostile father-figures” (39) can be any official with authority, I think the doctor is a particularly troubled icon.

In terms of women's calculated diminishment, I think at some point in our lives we’ve all adopted a manner of submission, deference, feigned cluelessness or generalized cuteness when dealing with a man (if you haven’t, kudos I guess). This will vary person to person, but I’ve definitely had instances where I’ve raised my voice several octaves when dealing with a man in a superior (if only temporary and circumstantial ) position. This could be as mundane as the cable installer—I may outmatch him on many levels, but in his métier I am helpless and have to play the supplicant. Similarly, when I’m at the doctor’s, I slip into complete deferral mode, even when I suspect I should speak out. The idea of women shrinking or becoming demur in the presence of Dr. Daddy (and all the Freudian connotations of what a male doctor represents to woman) is so disturbing to me.

Note the moment in Now Voyager, when the spinster-version of Charlotte briefly becomes possessor of the gaze as she watches Dr. Jaquith, armed with her glasses and enhanced vision, which Doane will sight as an almost transgressive accessory for the pre-made over female, “The intellectual woman looks and analyzes, and in usurping the gaze she poses a threat to an entire system of representation” (27). She stares at Jaquith with what looks like a mixture of lust, admiration, and gratitude. She tells him “I should think you were the least clumsy person I’d ever met” when he admires her scrimshaw skill and deprecates his own lack of dexterity, and when she offers him one, “You may keep one if you like, ” there is a definite sense of sexual offering. I’d never seen the film and I thought this sudden attachment would go deeper, but it actually never resurfaces—he becomes a mentor, friend, and sparring partner, but I don’t think the suggestion of her sexual attraction to him manifests in the film. However, in this scene she is like a starved animal—perhaps it is only because a man has entered her sanctum of repressed imagination and dried up hopes, or perhaps it is his authority as a man of medicine, but there is this intense look where for a moment he becomes the object of her desire.

Ugly Ducklings and Swans

In “Film and the Masquerade, “ Doane quotes Charles Affron’s analysis of the cinematic and psychological impact of the post-makeover reveal, “The viewer is allowed a different perceptual referent, a chance to come down from the nerve-jarring, first sequence and use his eyes anew,” (20) and this attention to the formal techniques and tropes of the make-over is key, since it will crop up in so many films. The cinematic makeover itself is frequently achieved through montage, and in more playful films, it often has a music video style in terms of editing and tone, with closeups of the sites of transformation (Tai’s makeover in Clueless is a good example); then the reveal itself has an established cinematic syntax such as using camera movement like a upwards pan to reveal the transformation from feet to head; or languorously showcasing the physical change with a slow-motion entrance, typically accompanied by appreciative or surprised looks. The movie makeover, in all its variations, has become so familiar that it can be achieved through a filmic shorthand of cinematic techniques, even to the point of cliché and parody—Not Another Teen Movie has some particularly apt satires, including the “makeover” consisting of taking the nerdy girl glasses off (and suddenly she’s super-hot), of having the newly transformed girl fall down the stairs in the middle of her slow-motion-camera-panning-up-her-body reveal.

Moving beyond the formal to the psychological, I think there is also a great sense of satisfaction, pleasure, and even relief in the makeover scene. I don’t know if anyone else felt this but during the powerful reveal shot in Now Voyager, I felt this immense sense of relief, like a tension had been lifted: I thought, “Ok, there’s Bette Davis, now I can look at her again, now things will be ok, no matter what emotional trauma the narrative may bring, her eyebrows will never revert to that bushiness again..." The expected image and star persona was finally and appropriately returned to its natural state. Perhaps that’s why “ugly” roles that last the entire film garner Oscar nominations—its seems somehow more arduous or courageous. Interestingly you don’t see “makeunders” or reversals if the makeover is deemed successful by the films logic, i.e you won’t see the swan return to being an ugly duckling. The only time a character may eschew her newly acquired accoutrement would be if the film posits the transformation as some how unethical, undesirable and ultimately false, i.e. if she’d lost a part of herself or her values , renounced something dear to her, became a bad person through the change etc. We see subtler forms of this in movies like Mean Girls (Lindsay Lohan ditches the mini skirts and labels for “nice girl” jeans and Ts) but it's usually not a full scale reversion to ugliness or plainness— more a softening or toning down of the exaggerated qualities, But Now Voyager is the classical makeover approach and we know that once reintroduced as glamorous Davis with her familiar star persona in tact, she will remain true to that image.