Women Filmmakers and Submission

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How women directors treat women's submission.
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DeniseNoe
DeniseNoe
46 Followers

"Wives, submit to your husbands, as unto the Lord," Ephesians 5:22, The Holy Bible.

"The wife should submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband," Southern Baptist resolution.

"I'm the only one who can make decisions," Giancarlo Giannini as Gennarino Carunchio in Swept Away.

Few questions arouse more hackles than that of whether women, simply because they are women, should allow men to have the final authority and decision-making power in intimate relationships.

Even some conservative commentators are unwilling to go back to the ancient rule that says females must obey males. The controversial conservative moralist, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, for example, says that when husband and wife come to an impasse and cannot reach agreement on a matter, they ought to simply let things stay where they are. Although she is outspokenly critical of the feminist movement, she does not simply say, "the man is the boss."

Other conservative women, however, are eager to return to the old rules in which women submit to men. Mona Charen, for example, praises old-fashioned ballroom dancing for its "clearly defined sex roles" in which "men lead and women follow."

During the early days of the women's liberation movement, I remember reading an article in an evangelical Christian magazine written by a married woman that praised women's submission to men. As I recall it, she wrote: "Women need to be liberated. They need to be liberated from the idea that submission is a bad word. Submission is a beautiful word! It is the turning over of one complete adult human being to another complete adult human being."

Interestingly, two women filmmakers both wrote and directed motion pictures in which men's dominance and women's submission is depicted in a positive light. This is especially notable because women filmmakers are rare and because these movies were made when there was an extraordinary public ferment about men's and women's roles.

The two films were The Night Porter, released in 1974, and Swept Away, which came out the next year.

To get a flavor for that time period, we need to recall that Helen Reddy's anthem-like I Am Woman was at the top of the charts in 1972, the Supreme Court both outlawed gender-segregated classified ads and legalized abortion in 1973, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act banned sex and marital status credit discrimination in 1974, and Harvard dropped its five-man-to-two-women entry ratio in 1975.

There was also a great deal of activity on the traditionalist front during those same years. 1973 saw the publication of Sexual Suicide, George Gilder's powerful polemic for traditional sex roles and, in 1974, Marabel Morgan published The Total Woman, a guidebook for submissive women. The Total Woman was the top non-fiction best seller that year. Moreover, like its popular predecessor, Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, it was connected to courses on submissiveness and domesticity to which masses of women flocked. Paul Anka's (You're) Having My Baby, a pop rock ode to women's role as mothers, became a hit in that same year. In 1975, the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated by legislatures in six states.

Of the two 1970s movies by female filmmakers which came out with strong man-as-leader, woman-as-follower messages, The Night Porter directed by Liliana Cavani and written by Barbara Alberti and Italo Moscati, is the most morally problematic. It depicts an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp named Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) as finding love with Max (Dirk Bogarde), one of her captors. Lucia is not Jewish but is in the camp because she is the daughter of a socialist. Many critics were understandably offended, even outraged, by seeing a prisoner of the Nazis fall in love with one of them and the motion picture was derided by some critics as "sleazy," "garbage in a fancy pail," and "romantic pornography."

Nevertheless, the movie was a box-office success and has had a lingering effect on popular culture. Years later, Madonna was to appear in a video with a Night Porter inspired cap on her head.

Much of The Night Porter is divided between its cinematic present in 1957 Vienna and flashbacks to the concentration camp period. When the story opens, Lucia is married to a concert conductor. Their union appears placid but passionless. Max is employed as the concierge at an expensive hotel. He is also part of a small clique of Nazi war criminals who conduct their own odd "trials" in an odd mimicry of the Nuremburg trials. At these mock tribunals, they attack each other and defend themselves in a manner one character calls "therapeutic." They also seek out and destroy incriminating documents. Still active murderers, they "file away" (kill) witnesses who might testify against them at genuine trials.

As Lucia checks into the hotel, she and Max spot each other. Both are obviously disturbed although neither says anything.

Each begins to think back obsessively about their love affair and we see several flashbacks. In the first flashback, Lucia is a frightened teenaged girl in a group of detainees. This appears to be the first encounter between she and Max. He films her and she automatically recoils from the camera. In another scene, Max films a group of adolescent females who are on swings attached to a carnival type of ride. In knee high socks, Lucia looks especially childlike.

In still another scene, Lucia and a group of other prisoners have been made to take off their clothes. Their forced nudity is humiliating and profoundly asexual. Again Max is filming and focuses on Lucia, a Lucia who appears anxious and embarrassed, holding her head down and folding her hands over her exposed genital area.

We see a flashback in which Lucia is bound, her hands in chains and the chains attached to the metal bars of a cot. Max slides his fingers into her mouth. In another scene, he deliberately wounds her arm, then kisses it. Her attitude is one of passive acceptance, an attitude that might be regarded as the essence of submissiveness. Her submissiveness is a perfect complement to Max's dominance and he appears entranced by it. When he hustles her away from her fellow prisoners, Lucia walks with a difficulty that suggests the malnutrition so common in Nazi camps.

There is a famous Night Porter flashback scene in which Lucia is dancing for her captors in what appears to be a small private bar. A still from this scene of Charlotte Rampling wearing a cap was used in advertisements for the movie and has been imitated by Madonna in the previously mentioned video. Lucia no longer moves haltingly but with grace. Her submission to Max and ability to entertain her captors has apparently brought her special favors that have restored her to physical health. Along with the aforementioned cap, she is attired in elbow-length dark leather gloves and a pair of oversized striped pants with suspenders. She is both barefoot and topless, showing Rampling's small, perky breasts to advantage. The exposure is no longer humiliating as was her nudity in the earlier scene as a detainee. Instead, it is the exposure of the stripper, paradoxically humble yet proud.

In the present, we learn from one of Max's war criminal friends that, during the war, Max "enjoyed playing at being a doctor" but that "none of his patients survived" except one whom we already know is Lucia. Thus, Cavani implies that female submission can be an effective survival stratagem.

But her submissiveness was not completely an act either for it is she who, in the present day, initiates their reunion. Max is confused to find her in his room and slaps her face several times but they are soon passionately kissing.

Both to her and to others, Max calls Lucia as "my little girl," indicating the parent-child or teacher-student relationship that is the paradigm for so many old-fashioned marriages and Lucia's increasingly childlike manner to some degree parallels the childlike behavior that Fascinating Womanhood and other traditionalist programs encourage women to display because many men are enchanted by it.

Overall, The Night Porter is a dark film in cinematography, plot, and spirit. Swept Away, both written and directed by Lina Wertmüller, is a brighter effort in all of the same respects. Moreover, its ideology of male leadership and female obedience is far more explicitly articulated. It is also an odd film, combining as it does a left-wing economic critique with a right-wing sexual analysis.

The film is divided into three parts. The first introduces us to the main characters, Raffaella Lanzetti (Mariangela Melato), a rich opinionated woman, and Gennarino Carunchio (Giancarlo Giannini), an impoverished communist man who works as a deckhand on a yacht. The second takes place when the pair is stranded on a desert island and the third part of the movie is about the aftermath of their rescue.

The heroine is an obnoxious woman who spends much of the first part of the movie stridently arguing for conservative political policies. She appears to depend on her husband's money and there is no indication that she is a feminist. However, she may be seen as one of those women who is, in Phyllis Schlafly's words, "a ripe candidate for the disease called women's liberation" since she "has too much time on her hands because of a successful and indulgent husband."

Once Raffaella and Gennarino are stranded on a desert island, they must depend on themselves or each other. Raffaella's ability to take care of herself in natural conditions is grossly inferior to sailor Gennarino's. Her lack of basic survival skills means that whether or not she lives depends on his good will. Thus, she is reduced to begging Gennarino for food. She submits to his wishes, washing his clothes, fetching his water, calling him "Mr. Carunchio" and kissing his hand. At first, she rebels against this submissive role even as she forces herself to enact it -- or is forced to enact it by Gennarino since his superior physical strength gives him a life and death power over her. "Woman serves man and not the other way around!" he declares.

Gennarino decides that "you're going to pay for everything" and gives her a slap across the face for every wrong he thinks has been done by the rich. (The dominant males of both Swept Away and The Night Porter do a lot of face slapping.) She tries ineffectually to flee and the result is a lengthy scene in which she repeatedly runs, is caught and slapped, and rolls helplessly over the sand. Toward the end of this scene, he tells her that they should "finish this off" with sex. Like the rapist of so many classic fantasies, he demands that she admit she wants it. Her response is ambiguous and it could be interpreted as indicating that she has been aroused by all those slaps. However, he then tells her he will not have sex with her until she asks him and runs off from her.

She soon does. After seeing him kill, cook, and eat a rabbit, she bows down before him, kissing his foot. The film cuts to a scene of the pair passionately making love. "My master, my lord," she moans, "hit me, kill me . . . " But then Raffaella says something Gennarino does not like. He disciplines her with a slap across the face. This does not stop their lovemaking or even elicit an objection from her.

In the scene after this one, Gennarino awakens to find that Raffaella has sewn a garland of flowers together and placed them around his genitals. "For my lord and master, Mr. Carunchio," she explains and goes on to rhapsodize about how she feels "primeval sensations" and is "totally overcome." He instructs her that, "women are objects of pleasure."

Raffaella submits completely to Gennarino and achieves a new peace. As Gennarino notes, "you never looked so happy on the yacht."

Female fulfillment through submission is one of the main points of the film and one that was willfully and perversely obscured by feminists who wanted to like the movie because it was written and directed by a woman. The Ms. Reviewer wrote that, while on the islands, "class roles and sex roles peel away." In fact, however, class roles peel away so that old-fashioned sex roles can be clarified and Gennarino can become, as Raffaella admiringly says, "what man was like in nature."

The third portion of the movie finds our castaways back in civilization. To Gennarino's disappointment, Raffaella cannot resist the lure of her husband's wealth and social status. However, hers personality has changed; she is more subdued and unlikely to return to her previously demanding and arrogant ways.

Tammy Faye Bakker once said, "I love being under submission to my husband." Swept Away's Raffaella, powerfully echoes her sentiments when happily calls Gennarino "my lord and master." The Night Porter's Lucia echoes them by her actions in returning to Max's domination.

Perhaps, as noted by a writer commenting on public reaction to the Southern Baptist Convention's resolution, submission will continue to be to many people "the dreaded S-word." However, to others, amongst them two of our most prominent women filmmakers, it is a most beautiful word.

DeniseNoe
DeniseNoe
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fourthwirefourthwireabout 15 years ago
Submission in the 21st century

Denise, thanks for writing this particular essay. I have not watched either of the two films that you mention, however I would like to point out a couple of relevant issues worth mentioning:

- Dr. Laura Schlessinger recognizes the harm done to our society by hardcore feminism from the perspective of her own involvement in feminism during her younger years.

She recognizes that hardcore feminism is not fighting for equality if it ever was.

The movement is now attempting further domination of rights, privileges, and entitlements, while avoiding equivalent responsibilities for women.

- Paul Anka was harassed by feminists in the seventies until he changed the line in his song that you mentioned to "Having our baby...." from "Having my baby".

Many American women, even many Western women bridle at the mere hint that they ought to be submissive, which is not particularly surprising since they have been brainwashed into believing that they were "oppressed" before womens' liberation freed them from the jaws of the evil patriarchy.

That two female filmmakers wrote and directed films where female submissiveness was shown in a positive light does not particularly surprise me.

And I'm not certain why you find this noteworthy except perhaps as a counterpoint to the numerous films created that show women resisting submissiveness to men with this resistance shown in a positive light.

At any rate, thanks for once again dissecting someone's creative work, and analyzing it for us. You are really rather good at it.

AnonymousAnonymousover 15 years ago
The dark side of sexuality

Thanks for the reviews, Denise. I found them, like the subject matter, thought-provoking. I remember reading an explanation, by a writer in this site, on the joys on sado-masochism, submitting to another completely; the trust that that involved and the sense of freedom that it provided. I was not convinced, but came out of it with a better knowledge and understanding of our psyche and sexual nature; how we as humans are good at glossing over the darker side of out humanity with a veneer of respectability.

The films looked at how average people react when place in extreme situations, devoid of society’s mores. It’s all about survival and, with a few exceptions, in the animal world males rule. The real twist is how these same people react once they’re back in “normal” society.

Cheers,

Ange

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