From early instances of the silent-screen star as sexual ideal to contemporary same-sex romance, the movies have not only reflected Americans’ attitudes about sexuality but actively taught us what to believe, denounce, and accept. This course examines the capacity of American cinema to represent sexual norms, and just as characteristically and meaningfully, to subvert the normal, with particular emphasis on the profound historical and cultural influence of the Hollywood Production Code. Examples for study are screened in class and include representative works from genres such as melodrama, farce, film noir, horror, the western, and experimental and adult film.
Course Objectives:
§ To identify and investigate the historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic issues in the representation of sex and sexuality in the American popular film tradition.
§ To develop skills in the critical analysis of cinema as art, formulating and exchanging original responses to cinematic works based on identification and consideration of significant cultural and aesthetic issues.
§ To develop appreciation of the key questions in critical approaches to mass art, especially the genre approach to cinema.
The topic of sex in cinema is not only controversial but often confusing, in ways that may reveal the perplexing relation of sexuality to the life of our culture. It signifies at least three things:
1) The representation in cinema of all aspects of sexual life—from rituals of courtship to actual sexual practices—and the pleasures and anxieties society finds in these depictions.
2) The place of cinema as a social institution in the social and cultural history of sex—for example, the status of film stars as role models and ideals; cinema as a factor in the history of adolescent sexuality; and the immense influence of the adult film industry.
3) The special theses of depth psychology, especially the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, on the relation between cinema as fantasized experience and the libido in individuals—i.e., an understanding of cinema as a cultural institution built on a biological endowment of sexual instincts and a psychological foundation of sexual drives.
The particular areas of study and investigation in this course--aside from the pleasure of critically examining some great movies--are:
§ The social, historical, and economic factors in the development of the codes of representation in cinema, governing what may and may not be represented, and how it is to be interpreted.
§ Film genres as a crucial means by which cinema conveys ideas about sex, with special attention to the stock situations, settings, characters, and iconography associated with film genres.
§ The role of sexuality in a prominent but often despised mode of popular narrative and especially of American commercial film: melodrama.
§ And especially: the capacity of popular cinema (and media generally) to represent sexual norms—or more precisely, “the normal”—and just as characteristically and meaningfully, the subversion of the normal.
Course Schedule
Monday June 7
1. What do we talk about when we don’t talk about Sex?
Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
Introduction to course
What to Watch for When You Watch a Film
Film noir: The other side of the mirror
Tuesday June 8
2. Looking at the Invisible and Talking about the Unmentionable - The Hollywood Production Code
Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933); excerpts from Our Modern Maidens (Jack Conway, 1929)
It Started with a Kiss: Sex and Early Cinema - The Kiss (Edison, 1896), The Kiss in the Tunnel (G. A. Smith, 1899), Let Me Dream Again (G. A. Smith, 1900)
Read: Doherty, Pre-code Hollywood, 1-3, Appendices
Thursday June 10
3. The Erotics of Cinema – Overperforming Sex
Excerpts from films of Mae West, Busby Berkeley, and Betty Boop
Read: Doherty, 5, 7, 12
Mellen, “The Mae West Nobody Knows”; Fischer, “The Image of Woman as Image”
Essay #1 Due: On Double Indemnity or Baby Face - Sexuality on Screen
Friday June 11
4. More Than a Woman – Performing Gender as Sexual Spectacle
Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
Read: Dyer, “Monroe and Sexuality”
Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Monday June 14
5. Overcoming the Normal
Kinsey (Bill Condon, 2004) with Sex Ed videos: As Boys Grow . . . , How To Say No, Boys Beware, Am I Normal?
Read: Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, especially Parts One-Four (1-131)
Essay #2 Due: Some Like It Hot
Tuesday June 15
6. Family Melodrama – The Nineteen-Fifties as a State of Mind
All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
with excerpts from Rebel without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, Imitation of Life
Read: Singer, “Meanings of Melodrama”; Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”
Thursday June 17
7. Oedipal Fantasy - The Thing That Wouldn’t Die
The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984)
Read: Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality, esp. II. Infantile Sexuality and III. The Transformations of Puberty
Essay #3 Due: Response to Freud or All That Heaven Allows
Friday June 18
8. Double Feature: Can a Sex Comedy Actually Be More Bizarre and Grotesque than a Horror Movie?
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)
Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959)
Monday June 21
9. Is Race Sex?
Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975) with excerpts from Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915), King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933), Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
Read: Wood, “Mandingo: The Vindication of an Abused Masterpiece”
Essay #4 Due: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Pillow Talk, or The Terminator
Tuesday June 22
10. Cowboys Are Totally Gay
Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)
Read: Buscombe, “The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema”; Schatz, “Film Genre and the Genre Film”
Thursday June 24
11. Pornography - Everybody Gets It
Inside Deep Throat (Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, 2005)
with excerpts from Pornography: the Secret History of Civilization, Adult Stars
Read: Williams, Hard Core 1-5, Conclusion and Epilogue (1-152, 265-315)
Essay #5 Due: Response to Williams
Friday June 25
12. Experimentalism - Fantasy is Truth
Excerpts from films of Kenneth Anger - Fireworks, Scorpio Rising and Andy Warhol, - Kiss, Blow Job, Lonesome Cowboys, Trash
Read: Grundmann, “Introduction”
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