Italian Cinema

Italian Cinema Gender and Genre Maggie Günsberg Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre Also by Maggie Günsberg: PLAYING W...

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Italian Cinema Gender and Genre

Maggie Günsberg

Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre

Also by Maggie Günsberg: PLAYING WITH GENDER: The Comedies of Goldoni THE EPIC RHETORIC OF TASSO: Theory and Practice GENDER AND THE ITALIAN STAGE: From the Renaissance to the Present PATRIARCHAL REPRESENTATIONS: Gender and Discourse in Pirandello’s Theatre

Italian Cinema Gender and Genre Maggie Günsberg Professor of Italian University of Manchester

© Maggie Günsberg 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–75115–9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Günsberg, Maggie. Italian cinema : gender and genre / by Maggie Günsberg. p. cm. Includes filmography. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-333-75115-9 1. Sex role in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures–Italy–History. I. Title. PN1995.9.S47G86 2004 791.43′653–dc22 2004050020

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is dedicated to my mother, Ruth Fornelli-Günsberg, and to the memory of my father, Luitpold Günsberg.

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Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1 Domestic Bliss: Desire and the Family in Melodrama Mater dolorosa Family romance

19 28 46

2 Commodifying Passions: Gender and Consumerism in Commedia all’italiana Comic consumption The price of marriage

60

3 Heroic Bodies: The Cult of Masculinity in the Peplum Negotiating gender, sexuality and race Homosociality vs gynosociality

97 104 119

4 Looking at Medusa: Investigating Femininity in the Horror Film The threat to masculinity Femininity divided

133

5 The Man With No Name: Masculinity as Style in the Spaghetti Western Masculinity as masquerade Sadomasochism, race and sexuality

173

Notes

215

Filmography

222

Bibliography

226

Index

234

vii

68 84

142 159

182 199

List of Illustrations 1. Matarazzo’s Catene (1949)

50

2. Matarazzo’s Tormento (1951)

52

3. Risi’s Una vita difficile (1961)

80

4. Risi’s Poveri milionari (1958)

94

5. Francisci’s Le fatiche di Ercole (1958)

127

6. Francisci’s Ercole e la regina di Lidia (1959)

128

7. Freda’s Lo spettro (1963)

146

8. Ferroni’s Il mulino delle donne di pietra (1960)

171

9. Leone’s Per qualche dollaro in più (1965)

189

10. Corbucci’s Il mercenario (1968)

viii

203

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the University of Manchester for leave awarded to complete this book, and to members of the Department of Italian for shouldering the extra teaching burden which this entailed. Christopher Wagstaff and Richard Dyer allowed me access to their film collections – no small matter in a study of this nature. Christopher Wagstaff also made useful suggestions on the original proposal, while his special expertise in the workings of the Italian cinema industry has been a constant point of reference. Conversations with Zygmunt Baran´ski helped to keep my ideas on track as the book progressed. Spencer Pearce offered insights into Church-related issues. Margaret Littler generously provided both intellectual and physical nourishment at crucial times. Thanks for support in a variety of areas go to Rose Almond, Zygmunt and Maggie Baran´ski, Jefferson and Sue Collard, Daniela De Vido, Robert and Monica Hastings, Helen Hills, George and Betty James, Gill McGlade, Steve Parker, Spencer Pearce, Karen and Brent Prior, Sue Robson and Lyn Thomas. The production company Titanus, under Goffredo Lombardo, has kindly given permission for the reproduction of stills from Matarazzo’s Catene and Tormento, and Risi’s Poveri milionari. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

ix

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Introduction

This book explores gender representation in a set of key Italian film genres from the late 1940s to the early 1970s: melodrama, commedia all’italiana, peplum, horror and the spaghetti western. The area under scrutiny is therefore the interface between ideology and cultural production, with overarching patriarchy as one of the major ideologies informing mainstream cinematic output in Italy. The central focus is on an analysis of gender as portrayed through the formal properties of cinema, an analysis informed by feminist theory. Cinematic genre properties shape gender representation. They do so according to an interacting series of factors, which shift and change over time: first, historical, political, topographical and socioeconomic context affecting patterns of cultural production and consumption; second, the status of film as commodity (rather than ‘art for art’s sake’) produced by the Italian film industry for a highly competitive, profitoriented, international market; and third, formal cinematic properties in areas of iconography, narrative and soundtrack, contingent on technological innovation, funding, production values, directorial taste and target audience. Working in conjunction with these factors, the basic characteristics of the cinematic image as surface, and of the screen as mirror and at times also shop window, bring into play gender-related issues of spectatorial identification involving dynamics of desire, voyeurism and fetishism. The notion of surface invoking these dynamics is fundamental to imaging the body, itself theorized in terms of surface in contemporary debates on gender, performativity, subjectivity and multiple identity politics. Following the influential work of Judith Butler (1990), and in line with feminist opposition to patriarchal ideologizing of gender as a biologically determined inner essence shaping a 1

2 Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre

stable, unified identity, gender is currently conceptualized as a process (rather than as a fixed given) and as performative. In terms that resonate particularly with the performance arts, gender is constituted by being repetitively performed on the body-as-surface and in a public forum. The element of process is foregrounded by the moving medium of cinema, or motion pictures, while the screen-as-surface provides a key parallel to the body-as-surface upon and through which gender is performed. In the repetitive production and reproduction of gender as it materializes and is negotiated on screen, the fixity desired by patriarchal ideology unravels as signification itself is displayed and deconstructed as process. At the same time, the patriarchal drive towards fixed, hierarchical gender identities is also apparent. This book centres on the tension between these two gender constructs, a dynamic which is at its most obvious in those genres dealing with body-spectacle (peplum, horror and spaghetti western). In these genres the focus is on the boundary between genders, often as this interacts with boundaries between sexualities, races, classes, ages, nationalities, life and death, the human and non-human. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the emphasis in these kinds of mainstream film, differentiated and grouped as they are of necessity by fixed characteristics, appears to be on signification and classification not as fixity, but as process. Visual pleasure in particular is often generated by the spectacular dissolving and merging of boundaries that are usually reassuringly firmed up and reinstated by the film’s closure. Linked to this apparent paradox is the tension in the concept of genre itself between its classificatory meaning (in which sense it is used as a marketing and analytical tool), and its greater flexibility and permeability in practice in terms of the characteristics of individual films. In relation to this last point, films embodying hybrid genres are common, a production strategy aimed at wider audiences often when the marketability of individual genres is seen to flag. In effect, films participate in, rather than belong to, genres (Neale 2000, pp. 24–5). The role of the audience as consumer is central to the notion of genre as a matter not just of production, but of spectatorial expectation (Neale 2000, p. 31). This has its roots in classical rhetoric and poetics, with Aristotle’s belief in the necessity of audience-friendly verisimilitude, and, especially pertinent to spectacle, his notion of vividness as the convincing placing of events before the eyes of the audience. Definition and classification of film genres are still the subject of a Hollywood-focused debate that has become increasingly open to wider

Introduction 3

and, as Neale puts it, more ‘multidimensional’ definitions, pointing up the tension inherent in the term itself (Hutchings 1995, Altman 1999, Neale 2000). While genre as a classificatory term has been used in cinema criticism since Bazin’s use of it in relation to the western in the 1950s, films have always been categorized into groups for marketing purposes from the early days of cinema. However, particular periods of success in the cinema industry as a commercial, profit-oriented business are associated with peak genre production, distribution and exhibition. In this context, genre cinema is often taken to refer to popular genre productions, in the sense of commercially profitable films that pull in mass audiences. Unlike auteur or art cinema, this type of film involves the use of stars and high production values, expressly aimed at maximizing box office takings in eras of cinema-going as a major form of mass entertainment. The first such peak period of popular genre production took place in Hollywood from 1930 to 1948, the heyday of the studio system. This was geared to mainly repetitive formula, stardominated cinema, much of which was distributed and shown in Italy. Eight Hollywood studios between them produced an array of genres (Hayward 2000, pp. 363–75). In Italy it was not until the late 1940s that the first popular genre productions, in the sense of commercial productions for mass consumption, appeared. In the immediate postwar period, 1945–53, most films shown in Italy were genre productions from before the war (comedy, historical drama, romance, thriller), with only 259 out of 822 feature films by directors associated with the auteurist art cinema of neorealism (Forgacs 1990, p. 117). Of all postwar production, such as cineopera, it was the domestically popular melodramas of Matarazzo (chapter 1) that shifted genre production into a higher gear from 1949. However, the peak popular genre period for Italy in terms of profit, and including production for export (a necessity given the small domestic market), began at the end of the 1950s. At this point, in conjunction with the economic miracle of 1958–63, an array of genres was produced. Set in this period, classic satirical commedia all’italiana (chapter 2), like the melodramatic genre from which it took over, proved successful with Italian audiences. However, in terms of both export as well as domestic success, genre production was dominated by the peplum, also from this era (chapter 3), and the spaghetti western which succeeded it (chapter 5). As far as classic horror (chapter 4), similarly coinciding with the boom, is concerned, neither criterion of domestic success nor huge export profits qualify this genre for inclusion in this study. However, there is a


recognized, well-defined corpus of films that has also gained cult status internationally (especially around the British actress Barbara Steele), and offers its own variant of the Hollywood and British Hammer genre. As can be seen from the genres selected, this study is restricted to the peak period of popular, commercial Italian genre production, in other words, mainly the 1950s and 1960s. From the 1950s Italy became mainly an exporter of genre cinema, and by the mid-1960s export earnings equalled domestic receipts (Wagstaff 1995, p. 106). However, it is important to remember that Italian genre production itself pre-dates this popular, commercially successful period. Epic spectacles such as Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) were already being produced and exported at the beginning of the century, while nearly two-thirds of Italian cinema production during the period 1935–7 (52 out of 82 films) consisted of genre films (particularly romantic comedy and semi-dialect farce) (Forgacs 1990, p. 77). Some critics argue that all cinema, including art or auteur cinema, is essentially a form or genre of cinema, and Wagstaff draws attention to Farassino’s observation that Italian cinema has always been genre cinema, for a time ‘swamped’ with the style of neorealism (Wagstaff 1996, p. 226). This study does not intend to rehearse the genre debate in all its complexity, but takes Tudor’s standpoint of genre as a set of cultural conventions. In other words, ‘genre is what we collectively believe it to be’ (Neale 2000, p. 18). This analysis of gender representation in the various genres is set in the context of Italian genre cinema as an industry, a brief summary of which now follows. The history of this industry is a shifting scene shaped by historical and political, as well as economic and cultural factors, affecting both the production and consumption of film as it develops into a mass medium. Most notable of the factors are: the disruptive effects on the industry of two world wars, including German and then American occupation; Fascist financial and strategic underpinning of the industry; postwar state protectionism in the form of tax rebates and screen quotas aimed at ensuring a specific proportion of Italian films on the domestic cinema circuit, followed by inducements encouraging US investment in the Italian film industry; State and Church censorship, a combination further facilitated from 1948 by the coming to power of the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats) as ruling party of the new Republic; the economic boom of 1958–63 and the consequent increase in South to North migration, both entailing significant cultural shifts in value-systems and traditions; an almost constant diet of US (as opposed to Italian national) films, apart from

Introduction 5

during the Second World War; the advent of television in 1954 and the consequent fall in cinema audiences as its increasingly widespread use affected the distribution and exhibition, and so also the production, of film; the effects on production of a recognition on the part of the industry of changing audience composition, expectations, and reception strategies; and the withdrawal of US investment in the 1970s. Given the market context of cinema in general and Italian genre cinema in particular, account must be taken of various changing commercial factors as well as simply of the type of films made in Italy. Crucially, the production side of the industry (the genre of films made, how films are even defined as ‘Italian’ in cases of cross-national coproductions, whether they are aimed at the domestic or export market), is governed by macroeconomic (state- and market-led) and microfinancial constraints (Wagstaff 1995, p. 98). Positive commercial outcomes are the profits resulting when income at the distribution, exhibition and consumption end of the industry exceeds initial expenditure, in a commodity production sector of high original, first copy cost, but relatively low unit, or future run, cost (Forgacs 1990, p. 3). Profits take effect at the level of domestic and export markets, the most successful outcomes being achieved in cases of vertical integration, when production, distribution and exhibition are managed by the same or affiliated companies, as was the case in the Hollywood studio era, but rarely in Italy. Two important and related issues for the commercial outcomes of Italian genre cinema, then, are the composition of the domestic market for Italian films in relation to imported (mostly US) films; and the changing size of the export market for Italian films in relation to the domestic market (if imports of foreign films exceed export of Italian films, the industry suffers a deficit). Crucially, higher profit margins mean greater investment at the production end of the industry; in other words, films can be made in greater numbers. For our purposes, it is important to note that contextual commercial and market factors impinge directly on the production of a film: on the diegesis, the iconography of stardom and mise en scène, the look and sound of genre films and, within this ambit, on the way the films portray social categories such as gender, class, race and age. To flesh out further the role of Italian genre cinema in the domestic and export market, Wagstaff identifies a trend in Italy’s move in 1950 from being a producer and exporter of art films (a type of film with which Italy has been traditionally and over-exclusively associated), to one of popular genre films, which profited from critical acclaim for neorealist films (Wagstaff 1995, p. 106; 1998, p. 81). He notes that popular


genres were deliberately used by the industry to entice the Italian domestic public away from American film imports (for which Italy gradually replaced the UK as largest European market), citing particular genres: musicals, melodrama, comedy and adventure (under which latter heading can be situated the peplum and the spaghetti western) (Wagstaff 1998, p. 76). Maximizing the domestic market for Italian films was crucial in providing a base for an export market, because the home market was too small to provide sufficient receipts from Italian films to cover the costs of production. At the same time, Italy’s cinema attendance figures, comparatively high within Europe, created a central market for imported American, French and UK films, a factor damaging to the Italian cinema industry. However, the balance between imported foreign films and exported Italian films did improve in Italy’s favour for a time.1 It did so directly in line with the production and, importantly, co-production of popular genre films.2 The number of Italian films shown in Italy exceeded US films between 1961 (213 Italian vs 144 US) and 1965 (182 vs 140), with a high point in 1964 (315 vs 152) (Monaco 1966, table 4). These were the years of the peplum and the beginnings of the spaghetti western. By the late 1960s Italy was making more films than Hollywood, at a rate of 300 per annum (dropping to only 100 in 1995) (Wagstaff 1996, p. 228). By the early 1970s, which marked the beginning of the demise of the golden era of the spaghetti western, the export market for Italian films was collapsing as the US withdrew investment (Wagstaff 1995, p. 114; 1996, p. 220). Key to achieving a more favourable position for Italian films in the domestic market, which in turn led to a re-opening of the export market for Italian productions, had been protective legislation in 1949, with the Democrazia Cristiana supporting popular genre production (Forgacs 1990, p. 121). The key director of the regime in this period was Matarazzo, with his melodramas. His films saw the beginning of a period of popular genre film-making: melodrama, comedy, musicals, romance, spy and adventure (culminating especially with the peplum and spaghetti western from the late 1950s to the early 1970s) (Wagstaff 1995, p. 110). Again, it is important to bear in mind that Italian genre films had experienced some export success from 1947, well before the peplum and spaghetti western explosion, but not to the same degree. The post1947 genre repertoire also included pre-war productions exported in the wake of critically acclaimed neorealist films, the most successful of which incorporated genre elements (like Roma città aperta, 1945, and Riso amaro, 1949) (Wagstaff 1998, pp. 78–80). Looking back even

Introduction 7

further to before the First World War, by 1912 Italian films were enjoying a thriving, world-wide export market for epic, historical genre spectacles (a market subsequently diminished by American protectionism) (Forgacs 1990, p. 51). A revival of this successful genre would take place in the late 1950s with the second peplum cycle. Focusing now on the composition of the domestic market for Italian genre films, particularly in terms of the size, class, topography and gender composition of film audiences, the scene is a shifting and variegated one, both over time and in the sense that there is not a homogeneous audience, but rather a heterogeneous set of audience groups. It is, of course, unrealistic to attempt to draw a direct correlation between audience characteristics and precise details about spectatorial consumption of gender portrayal in the films. However, some contextual factors are worth noting. First, deliberate audience targeting by the industry in areas of production, distribution, marketing and exhibition; second, the notion of genre as a matter of spectatorial expectation; and third, evolving preferences on the part of audiences over periods of marked historical, political, demographic, social, cultural and religious change. Since the beginning of cinema, the country has experienced colonial aspirations, two world wars, Fascism, foreign occupation, unemployment followed by a boom and economic miracle variously affecting different classes in different regions, the advent of television, advancing consumerism available to some classes, falling birth rates, the women’s movement, and changing gender relations at home and in the workplace ratified by laws on adultery, divorce, abortion, family matters and pay.3 These issues impact directly on the production of the genre film in various ways corresponding to the industry’s need to stimulate the domestic market in a changing sociocultural climate. This entails responding to change, for example by providing disadvantaged classes with cinematic experiences that are reassuringly reactionary, escapist, pre-capitalist and based on traditional gender, race and class values (as in the peplum and the spaghetti western), or, as Gundle suggests, the films may use satire to reassure through scepticism those unable to access galloping consumerism (as in the comedies). In terms of stardom, a classic feature of the genre system, escapism is provided with the glamour of foreign, and particularly US, stars (as in the peplum and spaghetti western), a glamour to which Italian audiences were already well accustomed (Gundle 1990, p. 203). Specifically affected by contextual issues of spectator expectation are details of narrative, such as the balance of formulaic, expected repetition, and


novel, unexpected variation, the precise iconography of stars and the mise en scène, and use of soundtrack, all of which inflect the portrayal of gender. Catering for the export market also affects production strategies for genre films. In terms of stars, the use of US stars obviously works well for the US market (the major target export market for Italian films) and other English-speaking markets like the UK. From a technical point of view, high production values competing with Hollywood are a feature of genre films aimed at both the domestic and export markets. Dubbing of genre films for mass foreign audiences (as opposed to sub-titling for art films) becomes an issue from 1951, when dubbing into English began (Wagstaff 1998, p. 80). A crucial element for a foreign market such as the US and the UK is the Italian exoticism of the product, with the peplum in particular often celebrating Roman history and mythology. The spaghetti western, on the other hand, provides an Italian-style makeover of the classic US western genre achieving worldwide success with, at its high points, groundbreaking iconography and soundtrack. A guiding concern throughout this study is the role of gender representation in the Italianization of pre-existing genres, such as the rooting of the film in contemporary Italian settings (superficially in melodrama, more pointedly in commedia all’italiana), or in the Formalist mechanisms of alienation, or ‘making strange’, whereby Italian cinema creates its own genre versions (such as the parodic element of excess in the peplum, horror and spaghetti western).4 There now follows an overview of the domestic market in terms of interlinking factors of size, topography, class, gender, and genre reception. In terms of size, there was a pre-war rise in ticket sales from 344 million tickets in 1938 to 470 million in 1942, attributable to the cheapness of ticket prices (Monaco 1966, table 1; Forgacs 1990, p. 93). Figures rose even more sharply after the war, from 417 million in 1946 to 819 million in 1955, with the period 1945–55 the golden age of cinema-going in Italy and encompassing the successful era of melodrama (Monaco 1966, table 1). This rise was facilitated by an increase in the number of cinemas after the war, many financed and managed by the Church, whose control over distribution allowed it powers of censorship over production and exhibition. These Church cinemas (cinema di parocchia or sale parocchiali) were set up, often in rural and peripheral urban areas, with the support of the Christian Democrat Party. During the postwar period 5,000 of these small cinemas were established (Forgacs 1990, p. 50; Wagstaff 1995, pp. 113–14). By 1953 there were 7,000, accounting for over one-third of all cinemas in Italy

Introduction 9

(Forgacs 1990, p. 121). With 2,755 sale parocchiali recorded in the North in 1954, the majority by implication were located in the South (Ginsborg 1990, p. 31). Prior to 1945 there had been no rural network, with cinema-going mainly a city centre pursuit of the piccola borghesia. The resurgence of postwar cinema, from which melodrama profited, was due in large part to the establishment of these rural and periferal urban cinemas featuring terza visione (third-run) films, which accounted for 70 per cent of receipts (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 71).5 From a pre-war figure of 5,500 cinemas, by 1953 the total number of cinemas had risen to 15,000 (Forgacs 1990, p. 121). By 1965, however, there were several thousand fewer (11,616), a decline that would become more severe in the next decade (Monaco 1966, table 20). The relationship between numbers of cinemas and spectators is particularly germane to the shortfall facing domestic exhibition income. In comparison with other countries, Italy’s many cinemas did not generate as high a number of ticket sales because of the smaller size of the population. So while Italy’s 11,616 cinemas sold 675 million tickets in 1965, America, with only just over 11 per cent more cinemas (13,000) sold 2,288 million. Similarly, whereas Italy had almost six times as many cinemas as England (which had 1,995), Italian spectators numbered only just over twice as many as English spectators (675 vs 327 million) (Monaco 1966, table 20). None the less, at the end of the Second World War the public’s expenditure on cinema in Italy exceeded that on all other leisure pursuits taken together (Wagstaff 1998, p. 219). By 1954 cinema was the second largest industry in Italy after the construction industry, representing almost one per cent of total net income, and employing one worker in 200 (Wagstaff 1995, p. 97). The centrality of cinema-going in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s is attributed by Gundle to its relative cheapness in relation to expensive consumerism, high levels of poverty and low levels of development (Gundle 1990, p. 202). Despite the popularity of cinema-going in the 1950s, and boom attendance in 1955, cinema receipts began to fall in 1956, for the first time since the war. This was partly because of the advent of television in 1954, with nationwide coverage by 1957, and partly because of sharp ticket price increases (Forgacs 1990, p. 126). A steady decline can be traced from 1956 (790 million tickets) to 1981 (215 million), with the 1970s seeing a worldwide fall in cinema audiences because of the spread of television. The period 1975–80 marked the demise of the Italian terza visione rural and provincial exhibition sector as a result of withdrawal of American investment, a factor in the decline of the spaghetti


western (Forgacs 1990, p. 147, Wagstaff 1995, pp. 113–15). Comparing television spectatorship with that of cinema, in 1956 the number of television sets in Italy numbered 366,000, rising steadily to 6,417,000 in 1965 (with each set obviously capable of attracting large numbers of viewers, especially in bars where television was first available) (Monaco 1966, table 22). Cinema spectators, on the other hand, showed a drop in number from a peak of 819 million in 1955 to 675 million in 1965, although this was still sizeable in relation to other European countries (Monaco 1966, table 1). In the long term, film as opposed to cinema audiences in Italy, as elsewhere, were not lost, but simply recaptured by changes in distribution, exhibition and sales outlets (Forgacs 1996, p. 283, Wagstaff 1995, p. 115, 1996, p. 220). These outlets sought out audiences away from cinemas, with films sold for home viewing to television (deregulated in 1976) and to video companies, with VCR sales increasing dramatically in the 1980s (Forgacs 1996, p. 283). By 1965, at the point when the spaghetti western was taking over from the peplum in the adventure strand, the average number of films watched on television per annum exceeded those watched in the cinema by a ratio of three to two (Monaco 1966, table I). By the late 1980s, television and video provided the cinema industry’s most lucrative outlet, while the 1990s saw a boosting of retail points for pre-recorded cassettes (in the period 1988–92 these rose from 744,000 to 12.4 million) (Forgacs 1996, p. 283). New trends in film consumption have therefore been, and continue to be, shaped by fast-moving technological development (most recently DVD), rather than being instigated by the cinema industry itself. This summary of the size of film audiences has treated Italy as a whole. However, topographical distinctions apply which also interact with audience differences in class, gender and genre reception. Forgacs specifies differentials regarding the topography of the ‘spaces of culture’, such as cinema. First, that between the more affluent industrial North-West and Centre (Rome), and the underdeveloped, mainly agricultural regions of the mainland South, the islands, and the NorthEast; and second, cutting across this differential, that between urban and rural, and, in the case of main cities like Rome, central-urban versus peripheral-urban (Forgacs 1990, p. 15). In terms of maximizing the domestic market, the key issue for the Italian cinema industry was the expansion of audiences from the wealthier, industrialized urban centres of the North-West and Centre, to include the poorer, rural areas of the South, the islands and the North-East.

Introduction 11

In other words, cinema-going had to shift from the pre-1945 situation of being mainly a leisure pursuit for the predominantly northern urban petty bourgeoisie (Wagstaff cites students, shopkeepers and bank employees), to become a mass, cross-country, cross-class leisure pursuit, including the urban working classes and agricultural workers (Wagstaff 1996, p. 218). This affected the type of film made, with art films directed at prima visione cinemas in urban centres, while the peplum and spaghetti western, for example, often went straight to terza visione cinemas. In an overview of this shift, Gundle observes cinemagoing in Italy to have been a mainly urban pursuit in the 1930s and 1940s, expanding to include rural areas and small towns from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, followed by a shrinking back of this latter type of audience in the 1980s, after which urban and metropolitan centres once again become the major locus for cinema-going (Gundle 1990, pp. 199–203). As noted earlier, during the course of postwar expansion and massification of the cinema market, a rural and provincial network of cinemas was established by the Church, particularly in the South. Forgacs records that, among the southern regions, Calabria experienced one of the highest growth rates in expenditure on cinema-going during the period 1952–8, with 1958 seeing nearly 40 per cent of Calabrese comuni provided with cinemas (Forgacs 1996, p. 278). This is significant when compared with the pre-war period when Calabria, along with Basilicata, showed the lowest national per capita expenditure on cinema-going in an era when this was low-cost entertainment (Forgacs 1990, p. 22). In relation to class inequality as measured in cultural terms of literacy, use of standard language as opposed to local dialect and access to formal education, Calabria also manifested the highest rates of illiteracy (Forgacs 1996, p. 278). The link between illiteracy and the appeal of sound (as opposed to silent, inter-titled) cinema, as requiring not literate, but visual skill, is self-evident. The same can be said of television (initially labelled the cinema dei poveri), the cross-country spread of which by the late 1950s coincided with the period when cinema had reached all areas and all classes. Only a decade later, the smaller local and rural cinemas providing the industry with important third run venues for Italian films, and the poorer classes with cheap tickets, began to close (Wagstaff 1996, p. 218). The terza visione cinema circuit was replaced by television, showing an average of 5,000 films, both art and genre, per annum (Wagstaff 1995, pp. 114–15). With regard to the types of film seen by Italian cinema audiences, a major factor is the dominance on Italian screens of films from another


nation and culture: the US.6 This has implications for traditional perceptions of Italian cinema as wholly and integrally Italian, a perception that fails to distinguish between the production and exhibition sectors comprising the industry, as well as not accounting for the workings of the industry in the world market. From 1916 to 1965 Italians saw primarily American films, but chose increasingly to see Italian films in the 1950s and 1960s, the period covered by this study (Wagstaff 1995, p. 108, 1996, p. 219).7 The 1950s and 1960s are two relatively unique decades during which cinema itself occupied a singular position in popular leisure, not least in its social role of helping to ease the processes of economic transformation for the less well-off, and is also a period when US cinema was marginalized (Gundle 1990, p. 221). The particularly successful era for Italian cinema from the late 1950s to the end of the 1960s is represented by the big export genres (the peplum and spaghetti western), and art films by directors like Antonioni and Fellini. As far as genre films are concerned, the expansion and massification of the cinema market in Italy by the late 1950s was marked by films overtly directed towards the South, with box office returns for Italian films in Northern urban areas matched by those from the provinces and rural areas (Wagstaff 1996, p. 218). Genres like melodrama, comedy, peplum, spaghetti western and spy all figure importantly in this 1950s and 1960s scenario of expansion. In relation to topography and audience preference, it seems that comedy, the peplum and spaghetti western were particularly popular in the South (both provincial and rural areas); erotic and spy genres fared better in the North; while melodrama did well everywhere (Spinazzola 1974, Wagstaff 1996, pp. 224–5). A class and culture divide also exists, unsurprisingly, in that genre films were popular with ‘ordinary’ cinemagoers, while critics preferred neorealism and art films (Wagstaff 1995, p. 110). In the 1960s the genres were infused by the increasingly popular erotic genre, or sexy documentary, which took off at the beginning of the decade with films whose titles included terms like notti, neon, nudo and proibito (Spinazzola 1974, pp. 318–36, Gundle 1990). This development led to the eroticization of every genre in Italian cinema from around the mid-1960s onwards in the industry’s frantic efforts to recapture audiences (a phenomenon not unique to Italian cinema, with UK films of the late 1960s and 1970s also marked by eroticization). This is an important consideration, particularly for the horror genre, already inherently sexual prior to any contemporary erotic overlay, as well as the peplum, commedia all’italiana and some

Introduction 13

spaghetti westerns. The market for erotica has always traditionally been male (a gender-specificity now no longer recognized to be the case). This raises the issue of audience composition in terms of gender, topography, class and viewing preferences. Data gathered in 1956 have been used to assert that in Italy more men than women, uniquely among the advanced industrial nations, went to the cinema (Pinna et al. 1958, p. 61). This may well have been the case, given the severity of patriarchal surveillance of female movement, especially during a period in which erosion of Catholic family values had not yet taken effect, as would be the case once television became more widespread and social changes like migration began to make an impact on traditional customs. However, Pinna’s study is based on provincial Sardinia (Thiesi, with a population of only 3,500) and provincial Italy (Scarperia, a predominantly rural centre of 7,000 inhabitants some 30 kilometres from Florence), both areas likely to be more conservative in the gender formation of its cinema audiences than large Northern cities featuring prima visione cinemas. Moreover, as the 1960s progressed, increasing numbers of women entered the labour market, gaining correspondingly more disposable income, as well as greater freedom in public space (at least in the major urban centres of the North and Centre). Commedia all’italiana already includes independent, mobile career women in contrast to melodrama from the previous decade, in which work is depicted as a prelude to marriage. Even in the early 1950s, melodrama was clearly targeted at a predominantly female fotoromanzo readership tranformed into cinema audience. It is also difficult to believe that the targeting of dive (female stars) and their fashions at female audiences has ever been less than in other cinema-going countries, even if female cinema attendance was more tightly regulated. Cinema basically became a mass medium by the 1950s, with the composition of the audience increasingly characterized thereafter by a broad base in terms of gender, class and topography. The issue of consumption as the final step in the cinema industry cycle, following production, marketing, distribution and exhibition, is currently a site of contestation, with the influence of cultural studies leading to consumption-led, rather than text-led analyses of spectatorship (Mayne 1997). After many years in which the film-as-text has dominated as the focus of theoretical attention, with the emphasis on methodologies such as psychoanalysis and deconstruction accounting for the construction of spectator positions from within the film, a more recent cultural studies approach has addressed issues geared more to


the consumption of the film. This move away from theory as a production-led method, to an empirical approach that is consumption-led, has not been unproblematic. Difficulties remain with the empirical research required by the cultural studies approach, such as the availability and subjectivity of data, and, not least, the pitfalls of data analysis itself (Stacey 1994). In particular, data on Italian audience composition in terms of gender, class, age and response to individual genres are patchy. Pure theory, on the other hand, runs the risk of leaving out vital issues such as historical, political, social and cultural context. In its investigation of gender representation across the genres, this study attempts to plot a path through these conflicting approaches, following a text-led approach informed by the notion of spectatorship linked to multiple identity politics and involving active negotiation of meaning and desire. In other words, the focus will be on the formal properties of the film-as-text – a text, however, that is regarded as a cultural product shaped by the various contexts and conditions of its production and consumption. Arguments concerning the strategies of audience consumption of gender representation on screen remain speculative, using data when available, but generally taking the form of hypotheses informed both by the social and cultural climate in which the films were viewed, and contemporary theories of spectatorship as fantasy-work involving shifts between various identities. Properties specific to the construction of the cinematic image and soundtrack are crucial in shaping strategies of spectatorship, with point of view directed by the camera eye through an array of different types of shot (such as panning, long shot, extreme and medium closeup, shot-reverse-shot), lighting and editing styles. Consumption of the screen image also offers participation in a dynamics of desire set in motion by the various mechanisms of identification, scopophilia (pleasure-in-looking), voyeurism and fetishism, and the sheer complexities of the gaze in a cinematic context (Gamman and Marshment 1988, Cowie 1997). The dynamic of desire is particularly relevant to the phenomenon of stardom so integral to popular genre cinema, in what has been called the industry of desire (Dyer 1987, 1998, Gledhill 1991). Germane to these textual issues, which are discussed in more detail alongside the film analyses, are the specific formal properties of genre films in general, and of individual genres in particular. These formal generic properties shape the way gender is portrayed. Basically, genre films are formulaic, catering to audience expectations, so that the

Introduction 15

balance between repetition and variation of formal properties is crucial (the dichotomy of the unoriginal, repetitive and familiar versus the original, varied and unexpected mentioned earlier in relation to market strategies for maximizing audience numbers). As Warshow states: ‘originality is to be welcomed only in the degree that it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it’ (Cawelti 1976, p. 9). Repetition takes place in terms of stars, plot elements, sets, costumes, shots, scenes and soundtrack motifs, particularly in the series formation of genre cinema. As Brunetta explains, the specialized characteristics developed by stars forge identities not differences, allowing the industry to market the star-as-commodity according to staridentification practices (Brunetta 1993, I, p. 76). On the other hand, as far as variation is concerned, this can, and indeed must, take place to a degree in some or all of these areas. Of interest for our purposes is the way in which repetition and variation shape gender portrayal. The formal properties subject to repetition and variation in genre films can be categorized into three areas: narrative, iconography and soundtrack (the last including diegetic and extradiegetic speech, and musical and non-musical motifs). While all genres may have some formal properties in common, individual genres are often additionally characterized by special inflections of particular properties in these groups. In the case of narrative, genres feature variations of realist narrative structures basic to classic cinema (as opposed to non-narrative art cinema). These structures take the form of stasis, disorder, the overcoming of obstacles, dénouement and closure, accompanied by the restoration of law and order, and, in a gender context, restoration of patriarchal law (Neale 1996, pp. 20–30).8 As regards iconography, each genre features different variations regarding the basic mise en scène (in terms of the relationship between framing of shots, setting, lighting, colour, costume and actors’ movements), types of shot, editing style or montage, use of stars, costume and couture, colour, degree of exposure of the body, skin and hair colour, and the overall presence or absence of the spectacular (Neale 1996, pp. 20–30). Use of shots is particularly interesting in terms of genre specificity. Wagstaff records the pioneering use of the tracking shot with a moving camera in the silent peplum Cabiria in 1914, with all spectacular events taking place in one shot before the camera. Melodrama favours the reverse-angle montage of close-up revealing emotion, and the medium close-up two-shot focusing on couples, whereas comedy prefers the more distancing effect of the mise en scène, with the entire scene on view (Wagstaff 1996, p. 222, Giannetti


1999, p. 11). The close-up is a shot also used to record terror in the horror film, while the spaghetti western’s inflection of the American genre features the inclusion of extreme close-up in a way hitherto uncommon in an action genre. These formal properties of narrative and iconography, complemented (rather than contradicted in genre cinema) by the soundtrack, together determine the ways in which gender is portrayed on screen. While narrative remains an essential ingredient of genre (as opposed to some art) cinema, the technological form of the cinematic medium dictates a special emphasis on the visual and therefore iconographic. Unlike its predecessor, the theatre, with its life-size actors and no equivalent of shaping audience vision through a camera eye, cinema technology allows its audience the experience, however illusory in the last resort, of proximity to massively enlarged images and close-ups of performers. As Brunetta points out, technological advances in filmmaking used by genre cinema focus attention to the body in all its details as primary object of the camera eye. As he puts it: ‘a single face, body, or detail, acquires a new capacity to concentrate meaning in a narrative context’ (Brunetta 1993, I, p. 73). The sensation of proximity on the part of the audience to the stars on the screen feeds the processes of identification, leading to imitation and reproduction of body language, hairstyle and fashion observed in the films. The body, in all its details of gender (biological and social), sexuality, age, class and racial manifestation, whether in action (the peplum and spaghetti western), on display (the peplum), in disintegration (horror, spaghetti western) or in emotional turmoil (melodrama), becomes a major eroticized focus for the audience, whose scopophilic identificatory drives and desires are stimulated. The key gender issues to be addressed in the five chapters are as follows. Chapter 1, ‘Domestic Bliss: Desire and the Family in Melodrama’, examines melodrama from 1949 to 1955 from the viewpoint of cinematic representation of the excess of (illicit) female sexual desire and the consequent punishment of femininity in its motherhood. Desire in the family is also explored through the family romance, especially the dynamics of infantile oedipal and pre-oedipal desire, in the context of the processes of spectator desire. Chapter 2, ‘Commodifying Passions: Gender and Consumerism in Commedia all’italiana’, focuses on the genre’s satire, in films from 1958 to 1964, of the deleterious effects on the family of an increasingly materialist culture, notably in the form of conspicuous masculine consumption, and the shift by masculinity from relating to others on a human level

Introduction 17

to interrelation through things. The comic book-style extremes of signification and overt preoccupation with gender boundaries in relation to the muscleman make chapter 3, ‘Heroic Bodies: The Cult of Masculinity in the Peplum’, the place for the key exposition of theories of spectatorship as a process of negotiation of gender, sexuality and race, involving cinematic mechanisms of identification, fetishism and desire. Primary issues under scrutiny in peplum films from 1957 to 1965 include licit and illicit male heterosexuality, homoeroticism, and the threat of female sexual desire as well as of the racial other. The underlying dynamic of homosociality as heroically opposed to gynosociality is also explored. Chapter 4, ‘Looking at Medusa: Investigating Femininity in the Horror Film’, continues the examination of the threat of female desire to masculinity, and particularly masculine identificatory fears and desires relating to loss of the ideal, unified ego through incorporation by the feminine. Issues relating to fetishism, sadomasochism, oral sexuality, the imaginary and the abject also arise in the era of classic horror films from 1956 to 1966. Chapter 5, ‘The Man With No Name: Masculinity as Style in the Spaghetti Western’, addresses the ways in which masculinity, in this genre as in its predecessor, the peplum, fights to define itself in a particularly violent rejection of the domestic, the familial and the civilized, all traditionally associated with femininity, in films from 1964 to 1974. Notions of surface and fetishism are explored in the context of the iconography of identity construction, especially in relation to the repetitive performance of masculinity-as-style or masquerade. The spaghetti western continues the excessive affirmation of homosociality, using aggressive (sadomasochistic) or prohibited (homoerotic and homosexual), as well as inter-racial, male-on-male dynamics to direct attention away from its celebration of the patriarchal baseline of homosocial bonding. This study follows feminism’s critique of the ideological tendentiousness of binary oppositions favoured by patriarchy, with an emphasis on interdependency rather than separation of opposites, and on the fluidity of boundaries and classifications. In terms of the cultural debate of high culture versus low or mass culture, art or auteur versus genre cinema, it counters the elitist belittling of popular culture as one of many manifestations of hegemonic control maintenance on the part of dominant power groups. In this context, the view is taken that Italian genre cinema cannot be regarded as necessarily devoid of artistic content (take, for instance, Bava’s photography in some of the peplum films, and Morricone’s soundtrack to Leone’s spaghetti westerns). Nor can it be said to lack auteur figures (Matarazzo for melodrama, Risi and


Monicelli for commedia all’italiana, Francisci and Cottafavi for the peplum, Bava and Freda for horror, and Leone for the spaghetti western). Looming large here is the thorny issue of aesthetics, which invites and assumes a binary opposition between the artistic as opposed to the commercial and therefore non-artistic. It is true that many of the genre films, often towards the end of the period of greatest success for the genre, are not convincingly constructed. However, these are not the films which established and maintained the genre, but, rather, marked its low point. Research and teaching on Italian cinema has predominantly followed the elitist pattern of concentrating on individual arthouse auteurs, and on films in the the neorealist style, as constituting the traditional canon, thereby ignoring not only most of Italy’s film production, but also the viewing habits of the greater part of Italian cinema audiences. This is not to say that there has been complete critical silence. Neorealist critique of genre cinema (notwithstanding the incorporation of genre elements in some neorealist films) gave way to more constructive critical attention with the success of Matarazzo’s melodramas in the early 1950s. Renewed interest was sparked by a French revival of his films in the 1970s (Brunetta 1993, III, pp. 538–44), while French critics contributing to Cahiers du cinéma in the 1960s expressed enthusiasm for the peplum. More recently, important work has been done on various Italian genres, and on their role in the cinema industry. However, as Gundle saw fit to comment in 1990, Italian genre cinema has been, and remains even now, a neglected field relative to that of neorealism and individual arthouse directors; and, more recently, Wagstaff has noted the limitations of research on Italian cinema (Gundle 1990, pp. 196–7, Wagstaff 1996, p. 221). In its exploration of methods of analysing gender in Italian genre cinema, this study represents an attempt to help correct this imbalance.

1 Domestic Bliss: Desire and the Family in Melodrama

Introduction Gender representation in postwar Italian melodrama from 1949 to 1955, the golden era of the genre, is shaped by a preoccupation with the patriarchal family and especially with motherhood and childhood. Heralded retrospectively as Italian cinema’s first national mass genre in an industry moving towards internationalization, the melodramas of this period are seen as successfully tapping into postwar desire for a return to stability in the private sphere of everyday family life. At the same time, the sheer excesses of the genre in portraying the family under threat from female sexuality, together with the heavily didactic and anachronistic fixation of femininity within the domestic sphere, point to a fantasy genre of the emotions in the service of patriarchal and Catholic ideologies. With female desire forceably subsumed into procreation (rather than recreation) within marriage, and female economic desire diverted away from the possibility of autonomy through work outside the home, domestic bliss is presented by the melodramas as the only legitimate goal for femininity. In the words of the Church, which wielded immense influence in all areas of Italian life during this period (in its affiliation with the postwar government led by the Christian Democrats, its role as arbiter of social and moral values, its provision of family welfare and its powers of film censorship), the ideal film should represent woman ‘dedicated to the home and its intimacy, because she knows that is where her entire happiness lies’ (Valli 1999, p. 125, emphasis added). In accordance with the ambivalence of melodrama towards femininity, the films lay bare the family as site of oppression and suffering for femininity, but at the same time posit this social unit 19


as its only viable context, apart from the centuries-old option of the convent. The source of oppression within the family is represented in the first instance by an idealized form of masculinity, epitomized by the husband and father as the family’s patriarchal head. In some films, on the other hand, the oppressive functions of surveillance and containment are interestingly displaced on to a phallic matriarchal, matrilineal figure. Portrayed as solid, dependable and hardworking, most of all the husband is implacable, Southern Mediterranean-style, in matters of ‘honour’ relating to his wife. Crucially, he is practically omnipotent in his rights over his wife and children, and the family home. Children are central in these melodramas, with the enforced separation of mother and child a standard organizing trope of the genre in its Italian manifestation. Dynamics of loss and desire contribute to the playing out of the psychoanalytic paradigm of the family romance, in all its oedipality and intergenerational conflict. The focus on motherhood, with the passive, fatalistic character of the mother, places these melodramas in the category of maternal melodramas of the sacrificial rather than resisting type (Kaplan 1992). In this sense the films share a certain common patriarchal ground with many Hollywood melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s, and the 1950s revival with directors like Minnelli, Ophuls and Sirk. The genealogy of postwar Italian melodrama can be traced back to a variety of sources, such as the popular Neapolitan films produced in the 1920s by Lombardo, and the commedia sentimentale of the 1930s, while melodrama in Italian theatre has a long tradition dating back to the eighteenth-century bourgeois family dramas of Goldoni. A more contemporary spur to the production of postwar cinematic melodrama was provided in print by the hugely successful fotoromanzo (or cineromanzo if a film was serialized in print form) published in magazines such as Grand Hotel, Bolero, Sogno, Tipo and Novella Film (Spinazzola 1974, Grignaffini 1988, Forgacs 1990). Launched on 20 June 1946, Grand Hotel began with weekly stories illustrated with drawings, switching to photographs from 1950. Technological development made photography more widely available. The popularity of family photos in particular ties in with the emphasis on family in melodrama, and is especially reflected in closure shots depicting the newly constituted or reconstituted family unit. These magazines continued the revival in Italy of the popular nineteenth-century romanzo d’appendice (novels by writers like Carolina Invernizio also serialized in newspapers), a revival already in progress

Domestic Bliss 21

in the 1930s in the visual format of the Intrepido comic strips (Aprà and Carabba 1976). The inaugural edition of Grand Hotel included the first instalment of a fotoromanzo entitled Anime incatenate, which added to the romanzo d’appendice elements that were to become features of cinematic melodrama. Carabba notes separations, reunitings of good but unlucky couples, and children unaware of their paternity, all portrayed through repetition and in surroundings that appear historically realistic, but are unconnected to the story of the couple (Aprà and Carabba 1976).1 Crucially, an important link exists between the literary romanzo d’appendice and film melodrama in the form of the centrality of female characters, and particularly female desire. Given the lack of one main genre with which to corner an Italian cinema market dominated by the influx of US films after the war, the immense popularity of magazines like Grand Hotel, with its melodramatic fotoromanzi, prompted action on the part of the production company Titanus. The invitation by Gustavo Lombardo, its founder, to Raffaello Matarazzo to direct Catene in 1949 (its reference to chains echoing Anime incatenate in Grand Hotel), inaugurated the first of his series of eight melodramas from this period. These established Matarazzo, previously associated mostly with comedy and cineopera, as the key director of the genre as well as of the regime (Aprà and Carabba 1976). Some twenty other directors (such as Brignone, Costa, Bonnard, Chili, Coletti, Cottafavi, De Santis, Genina, Del Colle, Germi and Lattuada) included melodrama in their repertoire, with Brignone specializing in film versions of romanzi d’appendice by Invernizio (Sorlin 1995, p. 355). As Wagstaff points out, it is Matarazzo, however, who was responsible for launching not just melodrama, but the entire phenomenon of postwar genre production, as evidenced by the filone, or formulaic film (Wagstaff 1996, pp. 224–6). Key formulae that characterize Italian melodrama, and genre production generally, are repetition with variation, condensed narrative, and character simplification.2 One of the most striking areas of repetition in these melodramas affecting a range of visual, aural, character and narrative fields is the recurring use of the same pair of actors, Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson, as the unfortunate couple in Matarazzo’s Catene, Tormento (1950), I figli di nessuno (1951), Chi è senza peccato (1952), Torna! (1953) and L’angelo bianco (1954). The same child actors also appear in several of his films (Rosalia Randazzo in Catene, Tormento and I figli di nessuno, Maria Grazia Sandri in Torna! and Vortice, 1954). Writing in L’Unità in 1955, Ferretti identified the genre’s regular appeal to morality, mother love, revenge and honour. To these, the director


Comencini (L’Unità 1956) adds popular sentiment favouring conjugal fidelity and faith in ‘providence’ (Aprà and Carabba 1976, pp. 81, 84). Variation, on the other hand, is to be found in the mise en scène (an area of cinematography regarded as particularly allowing for individual directorial creativity), plot outcomes such as the death or survival of the child or mother, and the portrayal of different classes to which the couple belongs from one film to the other. In this context, the male half of the couple has greater access than the female to the landowning higher class in the melodramas. Nazzari’s family owns a marble quarry in I figli di nessuno and L’angelo bianco, a shipbuilders in Torna! and a horse farm in Ti ho sempre amato, none of which is matched by the birthright of Sanson’s characters in the same films. Also recurring in the films are short, common Christian names (Pietro, Guido, Carlo, Luisa, Maria) and similar-sounding surnames (Fanti, Forti, Canali, Carani), allowing for a homogeneous and easily recognizable universe, yet with a degree of variation (Brunetta 1993, III, p. 559). Language is standardized for the entire Italian market in that it is non-dialectal, rather than region-specific, and follows that of the fotoromanzo in its use of limited semantic fields, a preponderance of exclamations and interrogatives, and short sentences akin to those inside the speech-bubble of the fotoromanzo (Brunetta 1993, III, pp. 559–60, Forgacs 1996, p. 280). Comencini’s analysis also draws attention to the conventionality of the genre as one full of commonplaces expressed through rhetoric and sentimentalism. These are served up through characters and plots structured to take immediate hold with the audience by virtue of being boldly, rather than subtly, drawn, and condensed rather than expanded. For character, this means the easily recognizable extremes of the good, the bad and the victim. In plot terms, crucial to the genre’s success is the fact that it tells an eventful story that is easy to follow, rather than merely portraying situations (Aprà and Carabba 1976, pp. 82–4). In this sense, then, Italian melodrama shares the conventions associated with the genre internationally, as characterized by Neale’s Manichean structures, thrills and suspense (Neale 2000, p. 202). One might add that exaggerated, simplified depictions of characters, their actions and emotions expressed not in lengthy dialogue, but through the mise en scène, shot selection (extreme or medium close-up, shot-reverse-shot) and editing style, reinforced by an emotive soundtrack, all contribute to the excesses of the genre which evoke a physical audience response. Melodrama, or the ‘weepie’, has been included in the category of body genres (a term first used by Clover in relation to

Domestic Bliss 23

horror), precisely because of the effect of pathos and excessive display of emotion on the body of the spectator (Williams 1999). However, it is arguable that, for the audience to have tears wrung out of them, some element of realism and familiarity also had to be present, and Italian melodrama draws in many ways on the neorealist style and movement with which it was contemporary, and which it then superseded. This can be observed generally in the use of everyday settings, and specifically in the mirroring of certain situations (as in the case of the boy-worker alongside his mechanic father in the opening scenes of Catene, echoing Bruno and Antonio in De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette, a year earlier in 1948). At the same time, many neorealist films, including Ladri di biciclette, incorporated melodramatic features in their focus on family issues. Melodrama also drew on the familiarity and sentimental fantasy of popular song (true to its etymology, with the Greek melos meaning melody), usually diegetically in that the songs are sung by a character on screen. However, the genre used this key aspect of popular national culture for distinctly unrealistic, emotionally and ideologically manipulative ends. The melodramatic soundtrack particularly exploited the capacity of song for nostalgia and evocation of loss, to provide an extra, and usually superfluous, illustration of the emotions of a character which are already obvious both visually and in plot terms. In I figli di nessuno, for instance, the song Mamma son tanto felice celebrating the mother–child bond contrasts pathetically with a weeping Bruno searching for his lost mother, and emigration songs lamenting loss of the motherland highlight the sense of isolation of the Italian in America in Catene and Chi è senza colpa or Canada in Disonorata senza colpa. Italian melodrama is associated with the specific use of the term ‘melodrama’ to signify films concerned primarily with the private sphere of the family (in contrast to another use of the term to denote action films, in the sense that these contain high drama). This postwar set of melodramas constitutes a distinctive corpus in the genre, but it is always important to bear in mind that genres are not watertight, and that many of the melodramatic features present in this corpus are not unique to it, but can be found merging into other genres (historical films, comedy) and styles (neorealism). In its preoccupation with the family, and particularly the prescribed role of femininity within it, melodrama is often ghettoized, in gender terms, as ‘women’s’ film. It is also in this context of women’s emotions that the pejorative adjective ‘melodramatic’ is often used to mean overreaction or excessive emotional response. ‘Melodrama’ (or melodramma) was not the only term


used to refer to the Italian corpus of tearjerkers (others are strappalacrime or lacrimogeni), although this is the term by which they are mostly known today. In the 1950s and later, other terms were used: cinema nazional-popolare, neorealismo popolare, neorealismo rosa, neorealismo d’appendice and black telephone films (in opposition to the white telephone comedies of the 1930s). Matarazzo voiced his objections to what he considered reductive references to his melodrama as cinema feuilleton, fumettone (lit. ‘big comic’) or romanzo d’appendice, insisting, moreover, that his films, unlike the feuilleton, do not exploit the calculating device of a sudden and unexpected emotional shock, but develop the emotional landscape from the onset (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 46). He attributed the popularity of his films to the fact that they deal with issues of relevance to most people, namely events rooted in the concrete existence of everyday life, social injustice, and resignation when confronted with the unexpected, cruel workings of ‘blind destiny’ (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 70). In gender terms, of course, destiny, like Comencini’s providence, is not a predetermined, ahistorical essence, but takes the specific sociopolitical form of relentless patriarchal containment of femininity in a particular historical, economic and social context. The popularity of Matarazzo’s melodramas has also been attributed to the consolatory function fulfilled by the typical gearing of commercial cinema in Italy during this period to audiences who were poor and lacking in prospects of improvement (Gundle 1990, p. 213). His films therefore tend to elicit commiseration rather than envy, celebrating the final return of the (female) protagonist to the status quo of (mere) stable family life (Spinazzola 1974, p. 72). The melodramas particularly targeted female audiences, as in the case of the readership of the fotoromanzi (Liehm 1984, pp.145–6, Spinazzola 1974, p. 75). Novella Film, for example, attracted an almost exclusively female readership numbering two million in 1948 (Grignaffini, 1988 p. 119). Importantly, female audiences were already drawn to the cinema for reasons directly related to patriarchal surveillance of their movements. For women in 1950s Italy, cinema-going in groups provided ‘the most popular permissible means of getting out of the house’, with the cinema a centre for social encounters, ‘the place to be seen in public, to meet members of the opposite sex’ (Grignaffini 1988, p. 118). The centrality of female characters, their desires and their predicaments within the patriarchal structures of melodrama, as in the fotoromanzi, together with focus on the glamorous couture worn by Yvonne Sanson, were some of the attractions serving further to engage female

Domestic Bliss 25

audiences already attending the cinema for other, social reasons. In the more theoretical context of spectatorship and subjectivities, the matter of gender in audience reception of the films is of course more complex, going beyond the concepts of biological sex and unified identity of the spectator, to denote femininity and masculinity as gendered subjectivities shared by female and male spectators alike in the constitution of their identity. Gender also intersects with other subjectivities such as individual life history, sexuality, age, race, familial belonging, work status and class, in the complicated dynamics of film reception taking place at both the conscious and unconscious levels. Spectatorship is further influenced by viewing conditions: whether the film is watched with friends, whether viewing is continuous or, as was particularly the case in Italian cinemas in the 1950s, constantly interrupted by spectators moving around and chatting (Grignaffini 1988, p. 118). Matarazzo’s melodramas proved highly popular, penetrating all levels of the market and all areas of Italy (unlike other, more regionspecific genres like erotic and spy, which fared better in the North, and comedy and peplum in the South) (Wagstaff 1996, pp. 224–5). The fanbase of Yvonne Sanson, however, was to be found predominantly in the South (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 89). The popularity of these films across Italy was made possible by the postwar expansion of cinemas, many owned and run by the Church, into rural and peripheral urban areas. This led to a more widespread cinema audience, both geographically and in terms of class. Audiences in big cities, however, continued to prefer American films (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 61). Despite protective legislation introduced in 1949, Hollywood took three-quarters of annual ticket sales during the first half of the 1950s (with the exception of 1956, when Italian films cornered over 40 per cent of receipts) (Micicché 1998, pp. 33–4). In other words, even during the heyday of Italian melodrama, American cinema continued to dominate (Sorlin 1996, p. 107). In terms of individual film receipts, on the other hand, Liehm states that ‘no American film ever grossed as much as Matarazzo’s movies’ (Liehm 1984, p. 146). Indeed Pandolfi, writing about Sicilian audiences in 1953, notes a certain disconnection from US films and a preference for Italian films (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 73). Matarazzo himself believed that an Italian audience found less to identify with culturally in Hollywood cinema than in his films, with their ‘storie nostre, vive, vere’ (‘our own living, true stories’) constituting a truly national cinema (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 70, emphasis added). In effect, with the majority of melodrama not exported, its popularity was restricted


predominantly to the home market (Bondanella 1996, p. 87). There it came top in the list of audience preferences, followed by comedy, adventure (such as cloak and dagger), musicals (opera productions, biographies of famous musicians, canzoni sceneggiate), and finally patriotic films (on the First and Second World Wars) (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 76). Postwar melodrama also coincided with the second half of the socalled ‘golden age’ of cinema-going in Italy, with 1955 the peak year preceding the onset of decline as television took over. As Matarazzo pointed out to critics who devalued his work, by the end of that year a total of 37 million people out of a population of 46 million had seen his films (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 69). High audience numbers combined with relatively low production costs meant huge profits and soaring ratings. Matarazzo’s first trio of films scored highly. Catene, released in the season 1949–50, made 735,000,000 lire (thereby making the fortune of Titanus), and came top of the list of Italian films. Tormento (1950–1) made 729,600,000 lire and came second, and I figli di nessuno (1951–2) made 946,000,000 and came third (although rising ticket prices also helped to account for increased income) (Aprà and Carabba 1976, pp. 86–7). As was often to be the case with Italian genre production, such success lasted only for a limited period, and for melodrama it tailed off after about 1955. The genre, with its particular mode of gender representation, was associated with postwar Italy, prior to the economic boom and the changing values and technologies that accompanied it. By the late 1950s, the increasingly widespread use of television, as well as emigration and internal South-to-North migration, brought access to a widening sphere of culture and social behaviour, with the correspondingly failing influence of the values extolled by the Catholic Church and its emphasis on the family as traditionally defined. Changes in Italian genre production in these later years also meant a more outward-looking stance in terms of greater internationalization, as co-productions with countries like France became standard practice, thereby shifting and in many ways diluting the full-blooded ‘Italianness’ characteristic of melodrama as a national genre. The cultural, social and economic context in which this corpus of melodrama was rooted therefore disappeared.3 Italian cinematic melodrama is a genre exhibiting many features of italianità, or features distinctive to Italy, one of the factors which made it less exportable than some of the genres that were to follow (like the peplum, horror and spaghetti western). As will be explored in more

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detail in conjunction with the film analyses, various aspects of italianità impact directly on gender portrayal in melodrama. These relate to social, demographic and economic issues specific to Italy in the postwar decade: the status of the family, both idealized and real, in the aftermath of war and foreign occupation, involving separations, illegitimacy, single motherhood and abortions; the position of women within the family and in the workplace; the law and dominant perceptions regarding the family and working women; the effect of emigration and internal migration on families; and, last but not least, the central role of the Catholic Church in areas of welfare (orphanages, reformatories for single women), censorship of cinematic production and exhibition, and general reinforcement of patriarchal morality. The films also draw on the national cultural context in their regular use of Italian, and especially Neapolitan, popular song, with Italian music in its classical form already a vital component of the cineopera of the immediate postwar period. In Chili’s Disonorata senza colpa (1953), for example, the main female character has inherited the talents of her parents, renowned for singing at the Piedigrotta festival in Naples and in prisoner-of-war camps. The choice of stars also compounded Italian cultural and gender stereotypes, in stark contrast to subsequent genre production in the realms of the peplum and spaghetti western, for instance, whose exportability as well as domestic success were maximized by the use of American actors or Italian actors with anglicized names. By the time the Sardinian-born Amedeo Nazzari appeared in Matarazzo’s melodramas, he had been an icon of Southern Italian virility espousing traditional values of honour and duty for well over a decade (Spinazzola 1974, p. 79). Gundle notes that ‘the cult of virility, of exaggerated masculinity, which permeated much public and even political discourse before 1945 (and which, in degenerate form, persisted long after) contributed to a situation in which there was a high degree of gender differentiation in star personas. In particular, conservative/traditional ideas about masculinity exercised a very long-lasting influence’ (Gundle 1996, p. 312). Nazzari’s star status was not mirrored by that of his co-star, Yvonne Sanson, according to Spinazzola, who argues that melodrama sported no female stars despite its focus on femininity as the centre of events, with the male character as ‘dynamic agent’ and the actions of the female character apparent only in their effects on the husband (Spinazzola 1974, p. 83). However, as Michel Foucault has shown, it is precisely in its effects that power actually lies. As the Achilles’ heel of patriarchy, female control over and knowledge of paternity make


female desire a threat to patrilineal hegemony. It is the exercise of female desire, whether real or suspected, that is responsible for prompting male action and indeed activating the plot, as the source of disorder which must be dealt with so that the patriarchal order may be re-established. The very real popularity of Yvonne Sanson, with her loyal fan-base, is to be read in the context of female stardom in Italy at the time. Although she was of Greek origin, moving to Italy at the age of seventeen, and, according to Nazzari, spoke Italian badly, her physical features meant that she represented a Southern Mediterranean ideal of femininity in an era when, as Gundle records, lower-class audiences especially were more responsive to non-American models of female stardom of lower-class origin. Gundle draws attention to the qualities of Anna Magnani in this context, including being dark-haired (rather than bleached-blonde), natural-looking, not young or particularly slim and, importantly, maternal (Gundle 1996, p. 316). Sanson shares these qualities, and interestingly most fan letters addressed her using the familial terms of ‘mother’ and ‘sister’, referring to her ‘goodness’ and asking for advice and even money (Aprà and Carabba 1976, pp. 89–91). Unlike Magnani, she did not star in a variety of roles and her fame did not endure as long, but her fan-base none the less remained constant for several years even after she had stopped starring in melodramas. With motherhood the key to Italian melodrama, it is with her maternal role as fertile, reproductive femininity endangered by her own sexual desire, that Sanson, and the central female protagonists she portrays, are predominantly associated.

Mater dolorosa The mother–child bond in Italian melodrama has a culture-specific resonance, celebrated as it is in Roman Catholic theology and iconography. It was also a central concern of various contemporary welfare groups: the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI), set up in 1944, the Centro Italiano Femminile (CIF), a Catholic splinter group of UDI established in the same year, and the 1950 revival of the Organizzazione Nazionale Maternità ed Infanzia (ONMI), set up under Fascism in 1925 and in abeyance from 1943. Maternity is also the focus of protective legislation for working women passed in 1950 (Caldwell 1991, pp. 48–9). Yet, despite the cultural embedding and recognition of the mother–child bond, under law the mother had no rights over her children until the Reform of Family Law in 1975, two decades after the

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waning of melodrama as a popular genre. Under Catholicism the bond is portrayed as a source of suffering. The mother will lose her son, whom she has borne not for herself, but for a ‘higher’ patriarchal religious purpose; in other words, so that he may die prematurely, at the height of manhood. Any visual representation of Mary and her infant therefore embodies not simply an idealized mother–child dyad, but also one destined to be violently torn apart. Motherhood in Italian melodrama is similarly portrayed as the ideal state of womanhood, and, importantly, the melodramatic mother is invariably also a mater dolorosa. Her role in the films is to suffer being parted from her child, usually for a dishonourable sexual act which may or may not have taken place either during or prior to marriage. Public suspicion alone is enough to ruin not just her reputation, but that of her family. In this culture, the matter of honour is less about woman as an individual, and more as the repository of honour as indicator of the status of male family guardians (father, husband) (Filippucci 1996, p. 55). Asexuality is a precondition of patriarchal motherhood, as in Catholicism with Mary’s virgin birth. Sexual desire is deemed to be incompatible with motherhood, and in the films carries the penalty of losing the child, if not always permanently, as a lesson. The films therefore function much like religious morality tales reminiscent of the exemplum, told from the pulpit. Motherhood is also the most popular visual image of femininity in Catholicism. Iconography evoking female desire (Eve), let alone prostitution (Mary Magdalene), is much less common. Motherhood rather than, for instance, autonomy is underlined by patriarchy as the main objective and defining feature of adult womanhood, and is duly idealized as the norm. The major female protagonists in the melodramas are all mothers, and it is no accident that successful Italian film actresses of the time, like Magnani and Sanson, exhibited maternal rather than sexual characteristics. It is of course the case that the mere fact of appearing on screen produces a degree of eroticized glamour at odds with maternal asexuality. At the same time, the glamour of Sanson’s couture costume in films like Torna!, for example, is very much in line with respectability and elegance, rather than emphasizing her sexuality in a revealing manner (as do the clothes she wears when, somewhat exceptionally, playing the sexualized double of her usual maternal role as a dancer in L’angelo bianco). Iconographically Sanson’s dark-haired, Southern Mediterranean, maternal voluptuousness of shape contrasts with the blonde, Northern European slimness and sharp features of Enrica Dyrell, who plays


unmaternal or bad maternal desiring characters to whom Sanson is repeatedly counterposed in both visual and narrative terms.4 As Viviana in Torna!, Dyrell plays a single woman who not only deploys her sexuality for recreational rather than procreational purposes outside marriage with Giacomo, whom she has met in unrespectable fashion in a public place (the casino at Monte Carlo). Spurred by jealousy, she also sets in motion Roberto’s (Nazzari) actions of revenge against his wife Susanna (Sanson) by making him believe that she is having an affair with Giacomo, and that the latter is the father of Susanna’s daughter. In Chi è senza peccato, Dyrell as Laura plays a married women who tries to seduce Stefano (Nazzari) away from the virtuous Maria (Sanson). Dyrell is also contrasted with Sanson in I figli di nessuno. Although a wife and mother in this film, Elena (Dyrell) is negatively portrayed as a bad mother-figure behaving, moreover, in anti-patrilineal fashion. She keeps secret the true identity of young Bruno, in reality the son of her husband Guido (Nazzari) by his lost love and true mother-figure (the bearer of sons) of the film, Luisa (Sanson). She also destroys her mother-in-law’s new will in favour of Bruno, to subversively redirect the inheritance matrilineally to her daughter. Bruno dies in the marble quarry, where he would not have worked had his identity been revealed earlier, and in the follow-up film, L’angelo bianco, Elena is punished. Now separated from Guido, she drowns with her daughter in an attempt to avoid him taking custody of the child, thereby terminating the matrilineal line. The strict location of motherhood within marriage, and under the surveillance of the patriarchal family head, is observed as the norm in the melodramas. Single motherhood, while in reality on the increase as a result of postwar emigration resulting in fathers setting up new families abroad, is not portrayed as an option (Caldwell 1995, p. 154). In Tormento, the Church-run riformatorio delle pentite (lit. ‘reformatory for repentant women’) or casa chiusa (‘closed house’) is where Anna is driven by her stepmother after she gives birth to an illegitimate daughter (and despite having married the father two years later). Her extramarital motherhood and subsequent marriage to a man sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment rule out any respectable status for her. However, in its pro-life stance regarding the children of rape during the German occupation in Matarazzo’s Guai ai vinti (1955), the Church is portrayed as preferring single motherhood to abortion (although an angry patriotic mob ensures the mother does not survive, while the baby barely escapes death). Similarly the words of the title of Chi è

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senza peccato are spoken by a priest in defence of the mother of an illegitimate baby against an unsympathetic older female congregation. In some cases marriage to the father recuperates single motherhood (with its potential for further unregulated desire) into the standard patriarchal family unit, and thereby makes the child legitimate (Tormento, Disonorata senza colpa, Ti ho sempre amato). Fertility is assumed in the melodramas, thereby denoting maternity as both automatic and primary function of femininity. Diegetic fulfilment of pre-marital sexual desire almost always leads to pregnancy, thereby ruling out sex for recreation only (Tormento, I figli di nessuno, Chi è senza peccato, L’angelo bianco, Disonorata senza colpa, Ti ho sempre amato). The youthful romances of Rosa and Emilio in Catene and of Susanna and Giacomo in Torna!, both occurring not within the diegesis but in the antefact of the films, do not produce children, but serve to provide the problematic desire which returns to disturb the later married lives of the female protagonists. Viviana’s unhappy affair with Giacomo in the latter film does not produce offspring either, with this ‘unrespectable’, unmaternal character punished for her sex-forpleasure life-style by her lover’s continued attachment to the fertile, maternal, married Susanna (a punishment so severe that she attempts suicide). Children of female protagonists married from the outset of the film, unlike those who are born as a result of pre-marital desire, conveniently come into existence without obvious sexual activity (Catene, Torna!). In these instances, when the children are those of a legitimate family relationship, the desire of an earlier, youthful romance returns, like the return of the repressed, to haunt the present-day family life of the wife and mother. Female desire, and specifically the threat of the autonomy it poses, is the driving force behind these maternal, and therefore purportedly asexual, family-based melodramas. The threat to patriarchy relates ultimately to knowledge of paternal identity on the part of the mother, while the only identity the father can be certain of is that of the mother. Given that patrilineality, or the inheritance of economic and social power via the male line or male groups, is in constant conflict with the forces of matrilineality (a feature which some of the films explore), this vulnerable area of patriarchy requires constant surveillance if the status quo of the gender hierarchy is to be maintained. This surveillance takes place within the basic social micro-unit of the patriarchal family, and in the context of a political and socioeconomic macro-system denying female autonomy through work and legal


rights. Attempts are made to restrict femininity to the domestic sphere of child-rearing within marriage, to maintenance of a male workforce (in a working-class context, as in Catene) or promoting leisured femininity as status symbol of middle-class masculinity (as in Torna!). However, while control of female productive power is possible, female reproductive power is not so easily regulated, even within the structure of the family, with its curtailment of privacy and individual freedom. The melodramas explore the conflict between female desire and the repressive, ascetic, asexual family, through the figure of the mother, while also figuring other repressive macro-institutions like the prison and the convent (Disonorata senza colpa, L’angelo bianco) and the closed house (Tormento). Female desire in the melodramas is not always represented straightforwardly, and is at its most fascinating cinematically when its portrayal is oblique. There are several ways in which desire is relocated away from its main location (the words and actions of the female protagonist), for example, into the mise en scène, a contradiction producing tension and suspense. As Elsaesser argues in his work on the melodramatic mise en scène, such displacement can lead to pathos, offering the spectator an opportunity for critique (Elsaesser 1994, pp. 66–7). In terms of the mise en scène of the Italian melodramas, desire can be found redirected into flowing water, hairstyle and costume. Water is used as the classic, safe representation on screen of sexual intercourse, an act, usually leading to pregnancy, intimated when visuals and soundtrack shift away from the characters and on to crashing waters denoting passion and plentiful, fecund ejaculation (waves on the shore in Chili’s Disonorata senza colpa, 1953, a waterfall in Costa’s Ti ho sempre amato, 1954). Female hairstyle is a key denoter of levels of desire in the films, with hair bearing cultural and iconographic significance, both in terms of colour (dark or fair) and how it is worn (tied back or loose), and, together with costume, is a central, gender-specific element of the mise en scène. Hair has historically symbolized female sexuality and desire, especially when worn long and loose. It is therefore shaved off and the head covered with a wimple in total denial of sexuality on becoming a nun and bride of Christ (a transition to asexuality depicted in I figli di nessuno). The situation of the wife and mother midway between these two extremes in the melodramas is often indicated by the restriction of hair in a bun. Interestingly from an iconographic viewpoint, even when worn loose, hair is usually only around shoulder length in this postwar genre of repressed desire, and is never long and flowing as in

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the peplum and horror films from the 1960s, a decade of greater sexual freedom. Costume in these 1950s films is another key area for the redirection and absorption of desire, with the nun’s asexually wide, figureconcealing habit and veil again set against secular female clothing of varying degrees and styles of sexual adornment. Second, in addition to the mise en scène, female desire can be found redirected into the soundtrack in the form of the diegetic songs that are a feature of the italianità of these films. Third, areas of narrative and characterization see desire relocated from the present into the past, or from the central female protagonist onto another character who embodies her desire. These displacement methods of representing desire allow for its inclusion (given that the main drive in the films is the antagonistic relationship between female desire and the patriarchal family), while at the same time ensuring that it is safely detached from the wife and mother, rather than dangerously positioned as integral to her. Catene, the film inaugurating the melodrama cycle, displaces female desire into all these three areas (mise en scène, soundtrack, narrative). While Rosa appears reluctant to spend time with her ex-lover, Emilio, in the street celebrations in Catene, the mise en scène and soundtrack tell another story. Fireworks explode and music blares out in a temporary carnivalesque externalization and expression of forbidden libidinal desire as Emilio tries to lure her back into the crowd. When Rosa leaves this festive, public, outdoor scenario to return to the context of private family asceticism, her hair, worn down for the party, is again tied back and up, and her flowery dress replaced by more austere clothing. Similarly in Torna!, Susanna wears her hair down until marriage to Roberto, and motherhood. At this point she styles it in a bun, but wears it loose when meeting Giacomo, her childhood sweetheart. At the same time, haute couture relocates desire into glamorous apparel for Susanna, couture which, for once, could be appreciated by the audience in full technicolour (most of the melodramas were in black and white). In particular, the characteristic 1950s monocoloured tailored jacket and pencil skirt designed by the French fashion house Schuberth for Sanson in this film can be seen to represent the compression of femininity and desire into the sharp, constricting, hip-hugging lines of costly tailoring, contrasting with more free-flowing, flowery styles (Rosa’s dresses in Catene) and sexually revealing cuts (Lina in L’angelo bianco, Maria as a dancer in Ti ho sempre amato). In class terms, the obvious expense of haute couture in films like Torna! and Chi è senza peccato is indicative of the leisured status and wealth of middleclass femininity, and, together with lifestyle details (furnishings, cars),


provided aspirational fantasy material for female spectators and their male providers at a time when the Italian economy was regenerating after years of wartime and postwar hardship. Relocation of desire into the soundtrack in Catene takes place when a song is introduced as the gateway to a flashback to Rosa’s past romance with Emilio.5 Her desire is thereby displaced away from her married present and into the narrative past, as the audience shares her reminiscences. Particularly ironic use is made of the romantic song Amore, portami tante rose (‘Love, Bring Me Many, Many Roses’), sung by Lucia near the beginning of Disonorata senza colpa. The rose motif is reiterated much later in the convent where she has become a nun, when an orphan child (her son, unbeknown to her) asks her for a rose, and on their reunion at his sickbed calls her ‘la suora delle rose’ (‘the nun of the roses’). The rose motif here functions to collapse romantic and maternal love together as part of the genre’s denial of female sexual desire by subsuming it into maternal love (the rose she gives her son is white, the colour of purity, rather than red, the colour of sexual passion). Moreover, in the reunion scene the Church makes sure to reunite the mother and child first, rather than the woman and her lover, in order for her to decide whether to take the veil or return to worldly life. In fact, Lucia is so engrossed in her rediscovered son that she is completely unaware of the presence of his father, the lover she has not seen for many years. This pointed negation of romantic love in favour of all-consuming maternal love provides the moral at the end of the tale, which sees the constitution of the chaste nuclear family. Rosa’s revisiting of her past romance in Catene, both via the mise en scène and the flashback triggered by the song, is contradicted by her actions and verbal denials thereafter. As Emilio intensifies his efforts to lure her away from husband and family, she counters him at every turn. In narrative terms, he can be seen as the embodiment of her desire, which, as a return of the illicit repressed, must be forced back into a state of repression if it is not to engulf the ego-ideal represented by her marriage and family. This is achieved by the superego in the form of her husband, who shoots Emilio, whose death, like that of parallel embodiments of returning repressed female desire in Torna! (Giacomo in relation to Susanna) and Disonorata senza colpa (Sergio vis-à-vis Lucia), makes him a type of homme fatal. Like the dangerously sexualized femme fatale of film noir, a Hollywood genre from the mid-1940s and still popular at the time, the desire embodied by these hommes fatals threatens the family unit and ultimately proves fatal to the character himself.

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The illicit nature of this desire, with the femme fatale characteristically on the wrong side of the law (usually using her sexuality to lure a flawed hero into criminality to fulfil her economic desire) is further mirrored in Emilio’s case by his criminal associations. In similar vein, Giacomo in Torna! is a gambler who earns his living in an unrespectable manner incompatible with family life. In Disonorata senza colpa the traditional patriarchal medicalization of female desire as illness finds expression in Sergio’s fatal heart disease.6 The case of Sergio also differs in that his machinations displace the illicit nature of female desire from sexual treachery in a familial context to treason, as his response to her rejection of him is to frame her as a spy in a film set initially at the entry of Italy into the Second World War. This displacement serves to indicate the magnified importance accorded by patriarchy to female desire, which is here made the repository not just of family honour, but of the welfare of the entire nation, as well as feeding the stereotypical fear of femininity as dangerously duplicitous and untrustworthy. Before dying from heart disease, Sergio confesses all to a priest, thereby freeing Lucia from prison and finally allowing mother, child and father to reunite. The deathbed confessions of both Sergio and Giacomo, the latter admitting that he has not been having an affair with Susanna and that Roberto is, after all, Lidia’s father, together with the demise of all three hommes fatals, allow for the constitution (Disonorata senza colpa) and reconstitution (Catene, Torna!) of the nuclear family, now purged of female desire. As for the female protagonists, Lucia, Rosa and Susanna are all ‘liberated’ from the ‘chains’ (Catene) of desire and free to be purely wives and mothers. The narrative embodiment of the desire of the female protagonist takes the form not of a male character, but of a sister, in Chi è senza peccato, in that Lisetta, Maria’s sister, gives birth to a child out of wedlock. Significantly, the first indication of her pregnancy occurs during Maria’s (Sanson) wedding, when Lisetta faints. The machinations of the father’s mother, the Countess, result in the innocent Maria being reputed to be the mother and imprisoned for attempted infanticide in abandoning the baby in a church (an action carried out by the Countess’s maid). The Countess writes to Maria’s husband, Stefano (Nazzari), now working in Canada, telling him that his wife has had a baby by another man, as a result of which he seeks an annulment. Meanwhile, Maria’s displaced desire is eradicated from the narrative (the Countess orders her maid to allow Lisetta to die of anaemia after the birth). When Maria is released from prison she takes the child, Nino, from the orphanage and becomes his mother. Stefano returns to


Italy a rich man and the three are eventually united as a family, once he is satisfied that Maria had not committed adultery after all (he overhears the repentant Countess telling Nino that he is not Maria’s son, but Lisetta’s). However, both Stefano and Maria lie to Nino, assuring him that they are his parents. On one level, then, the family constituted as the happy ending of this melodrama is not the conventional biological family, but a social family under the guise of biological parenthood (Maria is Nino’s aunt, Stefano is not related to him at all). However, this lie can be read as an acknowledgement of the displacement strategy whereby Lisetta represents Maria’s desire. In these terms, Nino really is Maria’s child, the result of (adulterous) desire, all unrepresentable except indirectly. The displacement is in effect eradicated at closure by the assumption of biological parenthood on the part of Maria and Stefano, and the erasure of Lisetta from the scenario. Importantly, Maria’s desire has been clearly marked throughout as, first, detached from her (embodied by the unfortunate Lisetta) and second, dispensed with (Lisetta’s death), leaving Maria simply with its fruits (Nino) and a motherhood unsullied by desire. Another variant of relocated desire via narrative embodiment takes the form of character doubling. In L’angelo bianco Sanson plays both the sexualized Lina, a dancer who mesmerizes Guido (Nazzari) with her likeness to Luisa, his first love from I figli di nessuno, and Sister Maria, in reality Luisa who has taken the veil. This doubling of femininity represents the stereotypically patriarchal extremes of whore and madonna, and is reproduced iconographically in the mise en scène by opposing settings of public space for Lina (the stage, cafés, trains), as opposed to the private space of the convent for Luisa, together with contrasting costume and hairstyle (Lina’s sexually revealing clothes and loose hair as opposed to Sister Maria’s nun’s habit). This doubling also works through the narrative, in that Lina embodies the desire which Luisa has denied by becoming a nun, and as such must be erased from the text. In plot terms this takes place shortly after she has given birth to Guido’s son in an emergency operation necessitated by a vicious attack by her fellow inmates in the prison where she is serving a sentence for forgery (like the classic femme fatale, she is on the wrong side of the law, and, in keeping with patriarchal constructions of femininity, is associated with falseness and surface appearance). Unlike other films, however, the excision of female desire from the narrative cannot lead to the constitution or reconstitution of the nuclear family. Luisa, as Sister

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Maria, has finalized her religious vows, and cannot rejoin Guido and ‘their’ new son, also called Bruno, who replaces the child they lost at the end of I figli di nessuno. Her instructions to him to marry Lina before her death, together with her miraculous saving of the baby from the clutches of the female prisoners, ensure the survival of widower and son in a respectable and suitably heart-rending melodramatic closure. This particular closure does not allow for motherhood in the worldly life of the patriarchal family, but offers the other viable context for a femininity voided of desire, namely the cloistered existence of the convent under the surveillance of patriarchal Catholicism. The displacement in melodrama of female desire away from the central female protagonist contrasts with its depiction in relation to the femme fatale in film noir, in that melodramatic femininity never uses sexual intercourse for economic purposes. Opportunities to use the body in this way to redeem a dire financial situation are always turned down by the unmarried female protagonist (Anna refuses the advances of the restaurant manager and loses her job in Tormento, Luisa rejects Anselmo’s offer to move in with her and loses her home in I figli di nessuno, the lawyer tries unsuccessfully to lure Maria into an affair and she is forced to sell the family shop to pay for debts in Chi è senza peccato, and although reluctantly going on stage as a scantily clad assistant to Giorgio in order to earn a living, Maria rejects his advances and as a result loses her job in Ti ho sempre amato). Nor does the married female protagonist seek to fulfil her desire as an end in itself (Rosa rejects Emilio in Catene, and Susanna is anxious to keep her romance with Giacomo firmly in the past in Torna!). However, while she remains blameless and without desire in overt narrative terms, the relocation of this desire elsewhere (mise en scène, soundtrack, its embodiment by other characters) leads to tension and paradox. The desire which provides the main focus in these melodramas is female desire, represented obliquely, explored in all its danger to the family and excised by the end of the film. This raises theoretical issues in a cinematic context when compared with the depiction of male desire. At the heart of male desire, it has long been argued, lie the mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism, to which correspond the female positions of exhibitionism and objectification. The convergence of these mechanisms with the processes of cinematic spectatorship itself, in terms of identification and desire through the look, lead to one definition of mainstream, male-dominated cinema as the exclusive representation of male desire. However, voyeurism and fetishism are also displaced forms of desire. Voyeurism engages desire not through


direct engagement with its object, but further stimulates it through scopophilia, or the compulsion to look, unseen, at the object (on the part of the camera eye, the on-screen character and the spectator in the audience). For the spectator, the voyeuristic process offers apparent proximity to the characters/stars on screen, but this proximity is of course illusory. Spectatorship necessarily takes place at a distance from the stars both on screen and in real life (stars remain two-dimensional for their audience, whether on screen or in photographs in magazines and posters). The desire stimulated by the processes of cinematic spectatorship can never be satiated, and the distance crucial to the existence of desire can never be closed down. The dominant, defining sensation is therefore that of loss, reviving infantile anxieties of separation from the original desired object (the breast). At most, spectatorship can offer fleeting identification with certain positions in desire. In this sense, then, spectator desire actually appears to mimic that of patriarchal femininity in that it cannot, and indeed must not, be fulfilled. Fetishism is also a displaced form of desire, away from the female genitalia and on to a contiguous, sexually suggestive object, as a result of the fear of castration set in motion by the paradoxical response of acceptance and disavowal at the first perception of the mother’s phallic lack (Freud, ‘Fetishism’, 1984). This fear also leads to the compulsion to look, to keep checking for lack, and so to overcompensation through fetishism as excess which reassures against lack. The compulsion to look is particularly stimulated by the dynamics of cinematic consumption. Given the sizeable female audience for melodrama, as well as the role of femininity in the multiple-identity model of spectatorship, the status of the female spectator in relation to desire and pleasure needs to be addressed (as first argued by Mulvey in 1975). Female fetishism has since been added to the agenda (Gamman and Makinen 1994), and in the context of Italian melodrama can be found, for both femininity on-screen and in the audience, in the displacement of desire on to hair and haute couture. However, this merely continues the historic patriarchal identification of femininity with the body, with sexuality and with surface. From a gendered ideological, rather than simply gendered psychoanalytical, point of view, this displacement continues the disempowerment of femininity, rather than enabling it to take possession of sexual and economic autonomy directly by using the patriarchal power tools of speech and action both in everyday life (where Foucault’s effects of power are ultimately situated) and at the basic level of the law.

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Indirect, displaced representation of female desire leads to a scenario whereby the female protagonist herself does not speak, but is spoken for, with all the wider ideological and political implications of ventriloquizing and muting the female voice (Harvey 1992). This is taken to extremes in Guai ai vinti with the muteness of a young girl as a result of her mother’s rape by German soldiers, one apotheosis of the exercise of power by patriarchal masculinity over femininity. Her inability to speak signals the forced confinement of femininity in the pre-linguistic, essentialist language of the body, a disempowered language with no voice, speaking only in the psychosomatic terms of the sick, hysterical body. In the Italian melodramas the female protagonist suffers in silence as a result of her desire. She fulfils the stereotype of the mater dolorosa, of motherhood-as-suffering, portrayed as subject to the vengeful whims of the patriarchal head of the family, and glorified deterministically in the films as the embodiment of the ideal quality of resignation to the workings of destiny. Desire regularly leads to the punishment of the female character. The case against married female protagonists in these 1950s films would have been strengthened by the law on adultery, dating back in the first instance to the Fascist Civil Code of 1942, which reinforced patriarchy by recognizing female but not male adultery. This law would not be changed until 1968, almost a decade after the peak of melodrama’s success. Pre-marital sex, on the other hand, went against the code of respectability and the religious sanctity of marriage. In the films the indulgence of desire and ensuing pregnancy can lead to institutionalization in Church-run reformatories for the woman (while the father of the child carried on his business uncensored), together with separation from the illegitimate child, which often ends up in a Church-run orphanage. What both types of female protagonist in the melodramas, whether married or not, have in common, is the fact that it is in their motherhood that they are punished for their desire. This is particularly significant in a decade when the bond between mother and child was emphasized as a source of power for the mother (Caldwell 1995, p. 156). The mother–child dyad is split apart by the forces of patriarchy in the films, with the mother spending most of the film agonizingly separated from her offspring. Much of the suspense in the films is in fact generated by the question of the reunion of mother and child. This takes precedence over the reunion of the mother and alienated father, so that motherhood, or mother-love, effectively supersedes romantic love on the narrative agenda.


In Catene Guglielmo evicts Rosa from their home and forbids her to see their young children again. He learns later that she has falsely admitted to adultery in court in order to reduce his charge of murdering Emilio to one of a crime of passion. Rosa’s false testimony is key to the resolution of the plot into a happy ending. Guglielmo seeks her out just in time to prevent her from committing suicide and returns her to the state of domestic bliss in the patriarchal home with her children, which, as the film teaches, is the only true locus of feminine fulfilment. The final shot is a medium close-up two-shot of Rosa and Angelina, the classic mother–daughter dyad. However, the lesson is problematic. The plot resolution serves to deconstruct rather than reinforce the hearth as ideal base, because the basis of the return to this ‘true locus’ is founded on an untruth. Rosa’s false testimony not only signals the unconvincing foundations of the home as ideal. At the same time, it provides the thread which, when pulled, unravels patriarchy’s unreal version of femininity. In other words, the femininity that is so crucial to the maintenance of the patriarchal gender hierarchy cannot, in reality, be trusted, a suspicion that has long informed patriarchal constructions of femininity as mysterious and duplicitous. Interestingly, the Church’s severe censorship of Catene as immoral (the film was given an ‘E’ for ‘escluso’, excluded for all ages of audience, and banned from the circuit of parochial cinemas) was based on the false testimony which the defence lawyer persuades Rosa (in the words of the Church, ‘an honest woman, a wife and mother’) to give, testimony which, moreover, dealt with the taboo of adultery (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 22).7 The Church was also, rather curiously in the context of its support of the status quo, critical of the fatalism and lack of will in some of the scenes (Aprà and Carabba 1976, pp. 22–3) (while as far as Catholic doctrine is concerned, lack of will is of course considered a serious flaw). Like Guglielmo, Roberto in Torna! deprives Susanna of their little girl, declaring this an appropriate punishment for (presumed) adultery. As in Catene, the husband’s rights are unquestioned, and much suffering ensues on the part of both mother and child. Susanna, unlike Rosa, however, suffers in style, a mater dolorosa clad in a range of specially designed Schuberth costumes. A lawyer tells Susanna that Roberto has no right under the law to deprive a mother of her child. However, until the Reform of Family Law in 1975 recognized equal rights and duties towards children on the part of both parents, and deemed property to be held in common in recognition of domestic labour, a father in practice had superior rights over wife, child and home. These paternal

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rights were not based on law but on the customary lack of implementation of the equal rights actually accorded both spouses under the 1948 Constitution of the new Republic (Article 29 of the Constitution clearly states that marriage partners are equal within the family) (Passerini 1996, pp. 145–7). The lawyer in Torna! appears exceptional, then, in implementing the 1948 Constitution. As a rule, practice generally reverted to family law as laid down by the Fascist Civil Code of 1942, which underlined the patriarchal structure of the family with the dominance of the father (Caldwell 1991, Passerini 1996). Susanna’s recourse to the law is unusual in the melodramas, whose female protagonists generally follow a fatalistic approach in accepting the decision of the husband to separate them from their children, and, as in Catene, even from the family home. It was not until the reform of family law that juridical intervention became available in cases of disagreement, with families during the era of the melodramas still expected to be self-regulating. The Church, which plays a key role in many of the films, always saw the family as its territory, rather than that of the state.8 A certain paradox regarding the Church emerges in the melodramas, mirroring that in real life. On the one hand, the Church, in a reflection of its dominance in postwar family welfare, offers crucial, life-saving help to the increasing numbers of single mothers (Caldwell 1995, p. 154). This takes the form of reformatories, strictly run institutions but which at least gave the women a roof over their heads (Tormento, Ti ho sempre amato), and orphanages and colleges where not only orphan children but also children of single mothers with limited means were brought up and educated (Tormento, Ti ho sempre amato, Chi è senza peccato). On the other hand, the Church’s views on the family, femininity, sexuality and, crucially, contraception and abortion, were central in perpetuating the moralistic context giving rise to the social stigma with which these female protagonists find themselves associated. The link between the prohibition of contraception with (illegal) abortion, as well as with the institutional Riformatorio delle pentite filled with ‘guilty’, stigmatized single mothers, was not lost on left-wing campaigners in the early 1950s. In 1953 attempts were made to close the reformatories and to rescind the law forbidding pro-contraception propaganda on pain of imprisonment for up to a year. Meanwhile, abortions took place clandestinely on a vast scale during the 1950s, numbering on average 800,000 per annum across all classes (Chianese 1980, pp. 106–7). As far as cinema of the period was concerned, however, the idealization by the Church of the traditional family


(expressed in terms of an earthly paradise in its address to cinema organizations on the ideal film on 28 October 1955), can be said to have found its apotheosis in the melodramas (Valli 1999, pp. 115–28). In Catene and Torna! the separation of the mother from her children is dictated by the father. However, in other films dealing, in the first instance, with unmarried mothers, an insidious strategy sidesteps the husband or prospective husband as punitive bearer of patriarchal law. This role is allocated, instead, to another woman, postmenopausal, asexual and older than the central female protagonist-victim against whom she acts on behalf of patriarchy, whose interests she represents. She is the classic bad phallic mother-figure, who in these melodramas derives her power from property and uses her economic autonomy against other women. A different inflection of the conflictual phallic mother–daughter dyad, following psychoanalytic paradigms, can be found developed in the horror genre of the following decade (discussed in chapter 4). In the melodramas, however, the power differential operates most visibly on a materialist axis and in the context of social mores. In Tormento Matilda is married to Anna’s weak, ineffectual father, and plays out the fairy-tale topos of the wicked, witch-like stepmother who derives her power from her ownership of the house and all its contents. As she points out, it is she, and not Anna’s father, who would provide a dowry for his daughter, whom she summarily turns out of the house accusing her of loose morals even when Carlo (Nazzari) declares his intention to marry her. (Dowries would be abolished by law two decades later.) When Anna later comes to her for help with her sick child, Matilda agrees on condition that Anna never sees her daughter again, and that she spends the rest of her life in a Church-run reformatory. In this film, then, it is the bad phallic (step)mother who operates patriarchy’s policing of female desire, punishing the (step)daughter in her motherhood by separating her from her child as well as condemning her to a life of confinement. In order to achieve her goal, the stepmother disempowers the true patriarch of the family, denying him knowledge (of his daughter’s whereabouts) and taking control of the written word (she intercepts Anna’s letters to him), crucial strategies which recur in other films. The father of Anna’s child has been absent and, like Anna, institutionalized (he is in prison on a false charge of murder). It is only when he is released after five years and ascertains that his wife’s stay in the reformatory was unjustified that the stepmother’s power is defused and the nuclear family reconstituted.

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In I figli di nessuno and Chi è senza peccato the bad phallic mother is not middle class, but an aristocrat. In I figli di nessuno the Countess is propertied, owning a marble quarry which her son, Count Guido (Nazzari), helps to run. She pre-empts his cross-class marriage to Luisa (Sanson), the daughter of the quarry watchman, by sending him abroad on business and intercepting his letters to Luisa, who has fallen pregnant before his departure. The Countess denies him knowledge of the birth of his son and punishes Luisa in her motherhood by stealing the child, who is brought up not knowing his parents, only to die shortly after Guido, now married to Elena, has learnt of his identity. The Countess in Chi è senza peccato similarly interferes with her family’s patrilineal order to prevent a cross-class marriage between her son and Lisetta, whom she calls a peasant, even though Maria, her sister, runs a shop (which makes the family lower-middle class). Class interests here outweigh any notions of female solidarity, thereby reinforcing patriarchy’s strategy of divide and conquer in relation to the subversive, subordinate gender. Like other bad phallic mothers, the Countess separates mother and child, and then murders the mother. She denies her son his identity as a father, thereby preventing his fulfilment of the oedipal trajectory. She also disrupts the marriage of the central couple. Knowledge of parental identity is similarly concealed by the bad phallic (step)mother in Disonorata senza colpa. The film opens with Lucia living alone with her stepmother, who owns the home after the death of her husband. Her every movement is policed, as in the case of Anna and her stepmother in Tormento. When Lucia gives birth to a son in prison, her stepmother takes the child, vowing that he will never know his father or mother, thereby punishing Lucia for dishonouring the family name through both her desire and her conviction as a spy. Policing and surveillance, culminating in separation of mother from child, make motherhood a particularly dolorous feminine state in the films. Property ownership and financial security, whether in the case of patriarchal husbands or (step)mothers on behalf of patriarchy, play a significant role in sustaining a power differential allowing for dominance over a non-autonomous, dependent femininity. While many of the central female characters work, this does not bring them independence. Unlike property ownership and income as a result of inheritance, work outside the home is not represented in the films as a route to autonomy for femininity (while for masculinity, with men’s wages regularly higher than women’s, it is of course the norm, ensuring the status of head of the family). Income from the types of job available to female characters in the films is not as a rule sufficient to do more than


rent lodgings, rather than set up a permanent home alone. This is in line with the postwar phenomenon of discouragement and reduction of the female labour force in areas of industry and agriculture where women had worked during the war, with no corresponding increase in female workers in the tertiary sector (Chianese 1980, p. 106). Domestic space continues to be emphasized as the rightful domain for women, an ideology mirrored in the melodramas, with femininity remaining economically dependent on the family. Like female sexual desire outside marriage, economic desire through work outside the home as a route to autonomy is given a place in the melodramas, only to be punished, proved to be ineffectual, or ceasing on marriage. Cottafavi’s Una donna libera (1955), with its promising title, exceptionally features a qualified female interior designer. However, her pursuit of this career is blocked, as the only apparent route to finding clients is to be sexually available. In the end she marries one of her clients, her professionally designed home becoming her domestic domain as a leisured wife. In Ti ho sempre amato, Lucia’s proclamation that work brings independence from men also appears promising at first sight. Moreover, female solidarity, rather than competition and antagonism, marks her relationship with the central female character, Maria, whom she finds in a destitute state, and helps by sharing her lodgings and finding her work as a shop assistant in the department store where she herself is employed. However, after an initial phase of lighthearted, independent living rare in melodrama, Lucia reverts to dependent feminine stereotype by leaving her job and running off with a man who then deserts her. Subsequent attempts to find work prove unsuccessful, and Lucia has to rely on Maria, herself in financial jeopardy after falling pregnant. Their jobs as shop assistants reflect the contemporary situation of women working at the lower end of the tertiary (public and service) sector, with Maria also having worked in domestic service as a maid and as a cleaner in a cinema. It is her job as scantily clad assistant to a magician, female performance work traditionally associated with sexual availability, which leads to her vengeful seduction, impregnation and abandonment by her erstwhile betrothed, Massimo. After a happy period of combining economic independence with laudable old-style feminine qualities (Massimo initially compliments her on the fact that she speaks little, rarely goes out and does not smoke or drink), Maria ends up an unemployed single mother, dependent on Massimo accepting that she has not had a sexual liaison with her employer, and promoting her and the child to the safe, dependent family roles of wife and daughter.

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It is not only performance work that implies dishonour for femininity in the films. Even work that does not entail exposure of the body is portrayed as indicating sexual availability at worst, and, at best, places femininity at risk from the ‘natural’ desires of masculinity. Anna’s work as a typist in a newspaper office in Tormento elicits the accusation of prostitution from her stepmother (even though women already dominated this area of the tertiary sector, however small, in the 1920s). 9 In her next job washing up and then as a cloakroom attendant in a restaurant, Anna is aggressively propositioned by the manager, at which point the film cuts to her child, whose health is deteriorating (a characteristic cinematic signal that sexual and economic desire are incompatible with motherhood). It is at this point that she is punished and separated from her sick daughter, whom she hands over permanently to the care of her stepmother, and agrees to move into a reformatory to repent. Women, and especially mothers, who work in the melodramas are not successful, often experiencing some form of disaster in the workplace. They are open to propositioning (Tormento, Chi è senza colpa) and even rape (Ti ho sempre amato), framed as a spies (Disonorata senza colpa) or simply cannot manage their business and inexplicably fall ill (Chi è senza colpa). This all chimes with the view of the Church on women working outside the home, expressed by Pius XII in 1945 with an emphasis on the dangerous stimulation of sexual desire as follows: ‘Women who do go out to work become dazed by the chaotic world in which they live, blinded by the tinsel of false glamour and greedy for sinister pleasures’ (Caldwell 1991, p. 22). In terms of legislation, Article 37 of the 1948 Constitution prioritized family responsibility over paid labour for women (Caldwell 1995, p. 152). The perspective of these melodramas on women working is encapsulated by the exclamation: ‘Tu lavori, tu?’ (‘You’re working, you?), uttered by a disbelieving Carlo when Anna tells him of her job with a newspaper in Tormento. In other words, women do work outside the home in the films, but this still sits uneasily with traditional views on femininity. Although not a major element in the workforce during postwar reconstruction, women in the 1950s were still a significant part of the labour force in this period (in 1951 they constituted a quarter across all sectors). The decade even saw agitation for improvement in the law regarding working mothers, with the campaign for paid maternity leave and the repeal of the 1934 law on working mothers originating in the textile industry, where women provided three-quarters


of the workforce (Caldwell 1991, p. 111). Even though, as Caldwell points out, this militated against the employment of women in the first place, as well as spurring the introduction of protective legislation allowing for the dismissal of women once marriage banns were announced, it was symptomatic of a change in the perception of the role of women in society. She observes that the decade was poised between two societies, and, although it saw no specific changes in the law, ‘it established conditions through which a different model of the family was argued about and campaigned for in the 60s and legally endorsed in the 70s’ (Caldwell 1995, pp. 151–4). The 1950s, then, remained characterized by ‘a lack of change in the expectations and experience of families’ (Caldwell 1995, p. 156). This feeds into the resignation to fate which is such a feature of the long-suffering young mothers in the melodramas. While they are shown working outside the home, they are not allowed sexual or economic autonomy, and despite, or perhaps because of, the beginnings of social change taking place in Italy, they celebrate the values of traditional femininity with marriage and motherhood as their sole legitimate preoccupation.

Family romance The centrality of the idealized, closed world of the family in Italian melodrama, with its focus on young mothers who are still sexual, accounts for the fact that the films often display familial dynamics consonant with the oedipality of what Freud described as family romance. While Freud’s ideas on family romance have provided a fruitful methodology for the study of Hollywood melodrama (De Cordova 1994, Nowell-Smith 1994), they are particularly useful in the context of Italian melodrama. This is in part because of the intense atmosphere of nostalgia and loss in the films. Similar to Jung’s predominating feeling-tone, rather than content, which he believed characterized dreams, the films elicit strong emotions relating to a lost object of desire. They do this through the fantasy of excess in terms of familycentred narrative events, character actions and reactions, composed visually through specific editing styles highlighting emotional response (cross-cutting, extreme and medium close-up, shot/reverse-angle shot), and underscored by an evocative, often sentimental, soundtrack using popular songs. While the sense of loss is initially linked to heterosexual passion in the narrative, this soon gives way to maternal and filial desire after

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the separation of mother and child which is such a feature of Italian melodrama. The predominating feeling-tone of nostalgia and loss evoked in the spectator relates mostly to the mother–child dyad, with the suspense in the film located in the anxiety-inducing question of their reuniting, the resolution of which often forms the closure of the film. In a period which saw many families deprived of at least some of their members during the war, the reliving of loss and nostalgia for the stability of pre-war family life would have had particular relevance. At another, more basic psychic level, the emotion of loss in the spectator constitutes a re-experiencing of desire for, and painful separation from, the mother in the oedipal phase. This is a re-experiencing, or more precisely, layered growing of awareness through time, of the emotions involved in the oedipal phase of childhood, a process Freud calls Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, pp. 111–14). The oedipal scenario, moreover, has special relevance in the Italian context of mammismo, the term for the excessive attachment felt by Italian males for their mothers, in a culture which accords the mother central importance (albeit only in the domestic sphere, rather than in terms of any real, political power), and which is shot through with the sexual repression of Catholicism. The oedipal dynamic is played out quite clearly in Catene. In a letter to the newspaper L’Unità of 18 December 1955, Matarazzo himself refers to oedipality in the film, ‘which brought to the screen the drama of a young boy who intuited, and became disturbed by, a love story involving his mother, still young and beautiful, and, with his unconscious, exploded with jealousy’ (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 69). 10 When Tonino bends down innocently to pick up a ball, he notices his mother, Rosa, secretly holding hands under the table with Emilio. This is followed by an extreme close-up of his distressed face as he uncovers his mother’s desire. He subsequently spies on her, his voyeurism an act of objectification, and tries to prevent her from leaving the house to meet Emilio. His jealousy expresses itself in rudeness to her, and when he refuses to apologize, his father slaps his face. The father subsequently enforces the separation of Tonino from his mother. These key moments signal the revival in Tonino, who is on the threshold of puberty and acting the ‘little man’ working in his father’s garage, of the Oedipus complex (originating between the ages of three and five), with the surfacing of desire for the mother accompanied by dismay at what he interprets as her infidelity to him.


Tonino’s sudden realization of his mother’s desire acquaints him abruptly with her sexuality, reviving ‘memory-traces’ of his own infantile desire: he tells himself with cynical logic that the difference between his mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing. The enlightening information he has received has in fact awakened the memory-traces of the impressions and wishes of his early infancy, and these have led to a reactivation in him of certain mental impulses. He begins to desire his mother herself in the sense with which he has recently become acquainted, and to hate his father anew as a rival who stands in the way of this wish; he comes, as we say, under the dominance of the Oedipus complex. (Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’, 1984, p. 238) The father’s slap acts as a prohibition of his son’s oedipal desire, with the threat of castration one of the reasons for the imminent entry into latency of the complex. Tonino has discovered that his mother ‘has transferred her love and solicitude to a new arrival’ (Rosa’s preoccupation with Emilio) (Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, 1984, p. 315). Rosa’s apparent infidelity to him fulfils the most preferred of oedipal boyhood fantasies upon recognition of the mother’s desire (‘phantasies of his mother’s unfaithfulness are by far the most preferred’) (Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’, 1984, p. 238). In ‘Family Romances’, Freud states: ‘The child, having learnt about sexual processes, tends to picture to himself erotic situations and relations, the motive force behind this being his desire to bring his mother (who is the subject of the most intense sexual curiosity) into situations of secret infidelity and into secret love affairs’ (Freud 1984, p. 223). Interestingly, the father’s sexual relation to the mother, central to Freud’s theory, is sidelined in Catene. His function in this context is taken over, or at the very least shared, by Emilio, so that this aspect of familial desire (mother–father) is reassuringly, if only partially, displaced by the presence of an outside lover. The role of Emilio, rather than the father, as Tonino’s overt sexual rival also fulfils the boyhood fantasy of maternal infidelity to the father, in other words, with someone who is not the father, someone with whom the boy can identify as he fantasizes sexual relations with his mother, and who is not, like the father, in a position to threaten castration. According to

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Freud: ‘the lover with whom she commits her act of infidelity almost always exhibits the features of the boy’s own ego, or more accurately, of his own idealized personality, grown up and so raised to a level with his father (Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’, 1984, p. 238). Read from Tonino’s viewpoint, then, and in line with his fantasies which see Emilio as the embodiment of his oedipal desire for his mother, the film depicts a family blown apart by his oedipal trajectory. The father kills Emilio and then evicts the mother, forbidding her access to either of her children. The children are separated from their mother for most of the film, and Tonino continues his rejection of her, until closure depicts the long-awaited reuniting of the family. Indicatively, after a short embrace between Rosa and Tonino, the final scene settles on father–son and mother–daughter pairings followed by a close-up of mother and daughter, reinforcing the prohibition of the mother–son dyad (Figure 1). Tonino’s newly learnt place in the family requires distance from the mother. He can now move towards completion of his oedipal trajectory,

Figure 1 Domestic bliss: the reconstituted family at the end of Matarazzo’s Catene (1949), with Yvonne Sanson and Amedeo Nazzari.


which will eventually entail transference of his desire to another woman outside the family unit (the minimal factor differentiating culture from nature, according to Lévi-Strauss). As the hostile episode with his father indicates, the Oedipus complex also involves intergenerational conflict, as a result of which the son acknowledges the power of the father in the family. Freud opens his account of the family romance as follows: The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development … indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. (Freud, ‘Family Romances’, 1984, p. 221) The physical struggle between Bruno, who is also on the threshold of puberty, and his newly discovered father in I figli di nessuno, similarly resonates with oedipal father–son opposition. However, Bruno has not grown up in a family context, but in an institution, having been stolen from his mother shortly after his birth by the bad phallic (paternal grand)mother, the Countess. He has therefore not experienced a pre-oedipal, dyadic relationship with his mother, with whom he is never knowingly reunited. Their paths cross once in a mistaken identity scene. The scene is laden with pathetic irony as the spectator, but not the characters, realizes that they are related, and is prompted to experience corresponding feelings of loss and nostalgia. In the context of the child’s unawareness of the identity of its parents, some films develop another key aspect of family romance, namely that of childhood fantasies of ambition in questioning parental origins, as we shall see later. The pre-oedipal mother–child dyad sets up the later, triangular oedipal dynamic, when the retrospectively idealized relationship with the mother is threatened by a third party, the father (on occasion displaced, as we have seen, by a bad phallic mother-figure). It is this dyadic phase, rather than the later conflictual, prohibitive oedipal trajectory of puberty, which takes centre stage in many of the melodramas in relation to girl children. In other words, the films (Catene, I figli di nessuno, Chi è senza peccato) follow the classic Freudian oedipal trajectory, with its emphasis on the older male child, while female children are usually younger, and still in a dyadic, pre-oedipal relationship. The focus in this context is repeatedly on separation anxiety and psychosomatic illness when the little girl is denied access to the mother

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for a prolonged period. Thus whereas Tonino’s drama in Catene involves overt sexual jealousy followed by the entry into latency of his oedipal desire, his younger sister, Angelina, is less advanced in her oedipal trajectory. Crucially, however, it is she, and not Tonino, who shows her father the letter from Emilio, which Rosa has hidden. The little girl’s illicit access to and (mis)use of the symbolic (the letter) precipitates not only her father’s shooting of Emilio (the daughter’s rival/the embodiment of her mother’s desire for another), but also her punishment, with subsequent separation from her mother at the hands of the father. This separation is characterized by scenes in which Angelina and Rosa are linked by mirroring behaviour as each stares out of a window (the classic feminine pose of passivity signalling powerlessness in the outside world). The little girl also falls ill, a form of hysterical, psychosomatic response whereby inability to alter an unpleasant situation expresses itself in physical symptoms, with her feverish hallucinations of her mother signalling that separation from her is the cause (Showalter 1987). Tonino’s stage in the oedipal trajectory, on the other hand, means that he turns away from his mother when she arranges a desperate surreptitious visit. When the father seeks out the mother to bring her home, he finds her about to throw herself from the window. Separated from her daughter, her maternal desire is denied. Indeed, without her family Rosa has no position in society, and in that sense she has ceased to exist. However, the cathartic ending which the film has been building towards means that she is pulled back from the brink of non-existence, and the final reuniting of mother and daughter closes the film, with the father allowing resumption of the mother–daughter, but not mother–son, dyad. A variation of this mother–daughter scenario takes place in Tormento, which echoes the dynamics of Catene, made one year earlier, in its use of the same actors for mother, daughter and father. This time the father is already (wrongly) in prison when the little girl is born, with his prohibitive function in the family taken over by Anna’s authoritarian, phallic stepmother. The fact that the mother has left her child to work outside the home is combined with her desire/sexual availability, as represented by her sexual harassment at the hands of the manager, and leads to her daughter’s illness. A cross-cut from a sexually charged scene in the restaurant between Anna and the manager to a domestic scene in which the doctor pronounces that her little girl is in a state of general decline links Anna’s work/sexuality/absence/bad motherhood with the poor state of her daughter’s health. Anna’s temporary absence


then becomes total separation, the only condition under which her stepmother agrees to care for the little girl. Bars replace the windows of Catene, as Anna gazes powerlessly from the reformatory (Figure 2). The sense of loss is reinforced by a following frontal medium close-up showing her unhappy face, while in the next shot her little girl is pictured against the bars of her bed pining for her mother. Anna falls ill, and by the time the father is released from prison to reunite the mother–daughter dyad, she is confined to a wheelchair. Separation from her daughter has finally taken its toll on her body. A parallel scenario takes place in Vortice, with Elena, falsely imprisoned for the murder of her husband, missing her young daughter, refusing to eat and staring out through the bars. The little girl, now in a Church-run orphanage, is also pining, neither eating nor sleeping, and develops a fever which is cured only when mother and daughter are reunited. In Torna! the mother–daughter dyad is roughly turn apart by the father, for whom the little girl has become the signifier of his wife’s

Figure 2 Anna (Yvonne Sanson) in the Church-run Reformatory in Matarazzo’s Tormento (1951).

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illicit desire. Believing Lidia to be Giacomo’s daughter and not his, he wrests her from her bed one night and drives her into the country to the house of an old couple. The house is promptly buried in a landslide, but Lidia escapes, only to be mistaken by a ‘mad’ woman for her own child, lost in a similar natural disaster. The loss of her daughter has driven Lilliana mad, in parallel with other young mothers in the films whose separation from young children leads to symptoms that are either psychological (Rosa’s suicidal intentions in Catene, Elena’s in Vortice, those of Luisa until she discovers a convent and takes the veil in I figli di nessuno) or physical (Anna’s debilitating illness in Tormento). The lawyer in Torna! comes close to enunciating the fantasy of anxietyinducing separation played out in the films when he uses the phrase ‘brutto sogno’ (bad dream) to describe the experience of Susanna, now bedridden with grief in the belief that her daughter is dead, as he prepares her for the final scene in which she is to be unexpectedly reunited with Lidia and her father. It is not unusual for the cinema industry to be referred to in terms of a ‘dream factory’, and these melodramas indeed operate like bad dreams, their intensely unpleasurable feeling-tone derived from separation anxieties which sometimes have a happy resolution (Catene, Tormento, Torna!, Vortice), but not always (in I figli di nessuno the child dies upon being reunited with his father, prompting an attempted remedy in the follow-up L’angelo bianco, where Bruno is ‘replaced’ by a new baby). While the dynamics of family romance clearly operate in these childcentred films, the oedipal trajectory does not always end with childhood. In the context of mammismo, adult male characters who still live with and depend on their mothers can be observed to be diverted for most of the film from fulfilling this trajectory by a phallic motherfigure. This is the case of Guido in I figli di nessuno and both Carlo and Stefano in Chi è senza peccato. Guido’s mother prevents him from completing his oedipal journey (achieved by setting up a new family unit) by sending him abroad, ostensibly on family business, intercepting communications between him and Luisa, and above all keeping from him the knowledge that Luisa has borne him a son. Carlo’s mother in Chi è senza peccato similarly sends him abroad to prevent him from marrying Lisetta, who meanwhile gives birth to his son. The oedipal trajectory of young adult female characters in the films is particularly interesting. For the woman the successful completion of the trajectory, in the patriarchal context of normative heterosexuality and compulsory motherhood, similarly requires the formation of a new family unit with an opposite-sex partner outside the family.


She, of course, has an extra step to take compared to the male adult, who simply turns away from his mother to another woman outside the family. However, she must first transfer her desire away from the mother to the father, from whom, according to Freudians, she initially desires the phallus/a baby. Second, she has to shift her desire outside the family and to another man. Her situation is also more complex in that she shares the same sex as her initial object of desire, unlike the male child, who is never connected to his father in the same way. This leads to greater difficulties of differentiation, and turning away of her desire, and to the possibility, especially in light of the girl’s longer dyadic involvement with her mother, that the daughter never fully separates from her (Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 1984, p. 372). What is significant in the films, in the first place, is that the young mothers on whom the plot centres either have no parents at all, or lose a remaining parent during the course of the narrative. The men whose children they bear, on the other hand, usually have a parent (with the familyless Stefano in Chi è senza peccato an exception). Rosa in Catene lives with her mother-in-law, and there is no reference to her own parents. The parentless Susanna in Torna! has lived with her uncle until his death. Maria in Ti ho sempre amato is an orphan who has been brought up in Church-run institutions and is disparagingly called ‘figlia di nessuno’. Lucia in Disonorata senza colpa has lost her father and lives with her stepmother. Elena’s father attempts suicide at the beginning of Vortice, and although he survives, he does not reappear in the film, and the fathers of both Anna in Tormento and Luisa in I figli di nessuno die during the course of the film, with all these daughter–father relationships voided of oedipal significance while the father is alive. Maria’s mother (who never appears on screen) dies during the course of Chi è senza peccato. Adult daughter–father, and especially adult daughter–mother, oedipality, is therefore sidestepped in these films, unlike adult son–mother and son–father oedipality. In other words, while the films show preoedipal bonding of the mother–daughter dyad, narrativization of the subsequent oedipal trajectory in female characters appears to be denied from the outset. We only ever see them as mothers with young children of their own. However, adult daughter and replacement motherfigure dynamics are repeatedly implied, and these are invariably hostile, taking the form of adversarial relationships between young adult women and bad phallic (step)mothers (-in-law) (Tormento, Disonorata senza colpa, Catene).

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There are several possible reasons for these negative ‘mother’–daughter dynamics. One is the playing out of patriarchal strategies of divisiveness, working against female cooperation and community in order to safeguard femininity’s role in the affirmation of masculine identity and patrilineal interests. Alternatively, these dynamics can be read as reflecting mother–daughter relations which are in fact inherently problematic in that the daughter experiences difficulties of differentiation in a situation of merging with and incorporation by the ‘same’. These relations can be improved only, as Irigaray argues in ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’, by a mother who is not just a mother, as patriarchy has constructed her, but a woman to whom the daughter can relate autonomously, on a woman-to-woman basis (Irigaray 1981). Ultimately, what is significant in these melodramas is that women very often have no family or social identity until the final step of what would have been their oedipal trajectory is taken, with marriage and motherhood (at which point, of course, they begin to participate in pre-oedipal dyadic relations with their own children, both as maternally desiring and as objects of desire). The maternal imperative dominates these films to the exclusion of post-childhood stages of the female oedipal trajectory which, on the other hand, finds a place in the case of young adult males/fathers. The prohibition of bad phallic mothers regarding the fulfilment of the son’s oedipal trajectory notably includes class as a motivating factor, as we saw earlier. This brings us to the second major aspect, also erotically charged, of the Freudian family romance scenario, that of the fantasized ambitions of the child regarding its parental origins. This fantasy, which Freud explains only in relation to the male child, is rooted in the child’s feelings of being slighted by his parents, and involves the child pretending to himself that he is adopted. The search then begins for his ‘real’ parents, who are invariably of higher social status. This estrangement takes place first as child’s play, and then in the period before puberty it ‘takes over the topic of family relations’ (Freud, ‘Family Romances’, 1984, p. 222). It takes place initially in the form of daydreams, to continue, significantly, into adult life in dreams. The ‘dream factory’ of Italian melodramatic cinema, with its focus on illegitimacy and the importance of origins, replicates these fantasies. Freud distinguishes between an asexual and a sexual phase within this ambitious, class-based aspect of family romance, a distinction mirrored in the films, as we shall see shortly. In the first, asexual phase, the child aims to replace both his parents with others ‘of a higher standing’. The second, sexual phase, which takes place after the child’s


introduction to sexual difference, sees only the father replaced. At this point Freud uses legal terminology to describe the child’s new awareness regarding his origins, namely that, while the identity of the father is always uncertain (‘pater semper incertus est’), that of the mother is ‘certissima’ (Freud, ‘Family Romances’, 1984, p. 223). It is during this second phase that the boy’s sexual fantasies about his mother take place, as we saw earlier in Catene, in his substitution of his father by another man with whom the boy can more easily identify. It is in this second phase that we find clues to the recurring motif of the absent father in the films. In Catene the father escapes to America, where he is apprehended and brought back to Italy to face imprisonment. Prison is also the place where the father in Tormento resides for most of the film. Paternal absence is only ever temporary, but none the less lasts for most of the film. It is often for melodramatically ‘unjust’ reasons (the criminalized fathers in Catene and Tormento are both wrongly imprisoned, while Guido in I figli di nessuno and Carlo in Chi è senza peccato are sent abroad by their bad phallic mothers). In Chi è senza peccato the substitute father-figure (Stefano will become Nino’s father as a result of Carlo’s death in Buenos Aires) has to emigrate to Canada for work, while in Disonorata senza colpa he leaves for war and is interned in America. Absence of the paternal figure of authority, especially if he is outside the law, allows the child/spectator freedom to fantasize about replacing the father and having undisturbed access to the mother, in a return to the dyadic idyll. Absent fathers are also explicable in terms of melodrama’s focus on the private, domestic sphere, an unsuitable locus for masculine action, which requires a public arena. Importantly, the absence of the father also frees up the fantasy of finding a father who turns out to be high class. Focusing on the class aspect of origins in the family romance is particularly productive in the context of melodrama. As De Cordova points out, a fantasy of ideal parents who are of high social standing clearly indicates the influence on oedipality of factors outside the family; in other words, issues related to ‘the historical reality of class’, a link which Freud intimates, only to efface (De Cordova 1994, pp. 256–7). Like the playing out of separation anxieties discussed earlier, the exploration of origins in terms of illegitimacy and orphanhood in Italian melodrama not only resonates with family-centred psychoanalytical structures, but also reflects the contemporary historical situation of postwar Italy. From an authorial viewpoint, the fact that Matarazzo himself had first-hand experience, in reality rather than merely in fantasy, of being orphaned as a child after the death of his

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father in the First World War, may also have had some influence on his treatment of this issue in his films. Postwar levels of illegitimacy in Italy were high, after war and occupation (as depicted, for instance, in Guai ai vinti). Internal migration and emigration of the male breadwinner also worked to split the family, with the wife left behind for years on end and not always willing to remain chaste (a scenario intimated in Chi è senza peccato). Major effects of migration on the family in the 1950s (separations, annulments, new unlegitimated unions of separated individuals who were still legally married, mothers abandoned by husbands who set up new families elsewhere) impacted severely on children of first marriages, who were denied legitimation and so lost their rights to property and maintenance. Cerroni notes an annual population of illegitimate children of around 20,000 during the period 1952–60, of whom only 3,000 a year (a mere seventh) were legally recognized by their parents (Caldwell 1995, pp. 154–5). The role of Church welfare, aided by the postwar state and Marshall Aid, was crucial during this period, notably in the early 1950s, which saw 25 per cent of families on the poverty line (Caldwell 1995, p. 156).11 The importance of Church welfare is repeatedly reflected in the melodramas, especially in the form of orphanages and aid given to single mothers. It was not until the Reform of Family Law in 1975 that illegitimate children would be legally recognized in the context of equal parental rights and duties in respect of both legitimate and illegitimate offspring (Passerini 1996, p. 147). While illegitimacy was therefore prevalent in Italy, it none the less carried great stigma in a culture predicated on masculine ‘honour’ which was seen to reside in the female body, and which was ever under threat from the reality that ‘pater semper incertus est’. It comes as no surprise, then, that the films often rehearse variations on Freud’s observation regarding the child’s fantasy ‘in which the hero and author returns to legitimacy’ (Freud, ‘Family Romances’, 1984, p. 224). In the films the ambitious replacement of the father, which is sought on the narrative basis of being either apparently or in reality illegitimate or orphaned, is developed predominantly in relation to male children. This is in line with patrilineality, according to which inheritance of property follows the male, and not the female, line. Unusually, the feminine form of the key phrase ‘figlio di nessuno’ (lit. ‘nobody’s son’) is used of the adult, orphaned Maria as an insult in Ti ho sempre amato by her higher-class rival for the propertied Massimo’s hand in marriage. However, Maria’s illegitimate baby by Massimo is


not only female, but also remains in the pre-speech stage throughout the film, so that any possible issues of inheritance are pre-empted. Bruno, on the other hand, in a key film in this context, as the title I figli di nessuno implies, is of an age to ask who his parents are and to run away from boarding school to find them. The 1921 film I figli di nessuno by Ubaldo Del Colle, produced by Gustavo Lombardo, founder of Titanus and producer of Matarazzo’s melodramas, shows that the interest of Italian cinema in issues of illegitimacy was not new to postwar melodrama. Bruno is stolen from his unmarried mother shortly after birth at the behest of his bad phallic paternal grandmother and brought up at her expense (class interests drive her prohibition of any marriage between her son, a count, and Maria, the daughter of a worker). After being called ‘figlio di nessuno’ by the other boys, he decides to investigate his origins, seeking out his mother, whom the narrative has debased in class and sexual terms (she is both lower-class and a ‘fallen’ woman) according to the sexual and ambitious oedipal phase (the boy’s perception of the mother as a sexual being coincides with his convenient debasement of her, enabling him to indulge in erotic fantasies). Bruno unwittingly encounters his mother on the road, and ends up working in the marble quarry which happens to be owned by his father, a count. However, the fantasy does not end positively with a return to legitimacy, as Bruno dies in an explosion as he tries to save his father’s property from destruction by the workers. Bruno is denied his aristocratic heritage and his place on the patrilineal ladder, although the follow-up film L’angelo bianco ensures that his ‘replacement’, a baby also named Bruno and born to the same father and a lookalike of his mother (both played by Yvonne Sanson) will do so in his place. Nino in Chi è senza peccato is similarly separated as a baby from his mother by his paternal grandmother, the Countess, to be brought up by nuns in an orphanage. After the age of one and a half, he is brought up on and off by a struggling Maria, the aunt whom he believes to be his mother, and whom he finally joins at puberty, together with his ‘father’, to form a family unit. Nino fares better than Bruno. He becomes legitimated, in that he now has a wealthy father and a mother and will receive his aristocratic birthright. The Countess, mother of his dead father, has repented (as does the Countess, albeit to no avail, in I figli di nessuno), and will leave her estate to him in a return to patrilineality from its ‘wrongful’ matrilineal deviation. However, he lives in false consciousness, believing Stefano and Maria to be his biological parents. The resolution of the question of origins is also the final reward

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for the young male child in Disonorata senza colpa, reunited with his biological father and mother at the end of the film after having been denied knowledge of his parentage by his step-grandmother, and brought up in an orphanage. Centring on illegitimate and orphaned children, on single, abandoned mothers and absent fathers, Italian melodrama explores the heart-wringing dispersal of family members. The films often end with the reuniting of the family unit, with the final scene, as in many of the contemporary fotoromanzi, akin to a family photograph displaying reassuring membership and generational continuity of a social unit essential to both patriarchy and capitalism. In this the films reflect the family’s contemporary historical context, with its postwar social and economic problems, enmeshed with psychoanalytical family-centred dynamics which are particularly well foregrounded by the processes of cinematic spectatorship. Embedded in this specific historical and socioeconomic context, the genre thrived until the changing climate leading to the economic boom began to affect the experiences and expectations of spectators in all aspects of their identity, including that of cultural consumer. Stefano’s triumphant return to Italy in a cabriolet at the end of Chi è senza peccato is not only emblematic of a new era of prosperity, it also points forward to the car as key icon of consumerism in the genre which, in a sense, took over from melodrama, namely commedia all’italiana.

2 Commodifying Passions: Gender and Consumerism in Commedia all’italiana

Introduction Comedy as a genre has long been linked to sex and materialism. This can be traced back to Aristotle’s ascription to comedy of everyday concerns in lower social groups, going on to find expression in Italian commedia dell’arte and Renaissance theatre’s earthy focus on goods, sexuality and the business of marriage in an era of nascent capitalism. On a continuing trajectory through Goldoni’s eighteenth-century bourgeois comedies of socio-sexual manners, fashion as sex and status symbol, and marriage brokerage, to the adoption of comedy by cinema from its beginnings, sexual and material desires have inevitably been twinned. The apotheosis of this link can be found in the golden era of commedia all’italiana (1958–64), produced in the context of Italy’s economic miracle following postwar reconstruction, which culminated in the boom of 1958–63. As the economy rapidly urbanized and industrialized, the sizeable rural base of 42 per cent of the population working in agriculture in 1951 fell to 29 per cent by 1961. Taking over from heavy wartime industry for national use, light industry with a focus on export (especially white goods, office furniture and textiles) and the service sector (such as office work) prospered. The national income doubled in the decade 1952–62, and personal expenditure increased as consumption beyond mere subsistence became a reality (Gundle 1986, pp. 570–1, Ginsborg 1990, pp. 210–53).1 The transformation of mere consumption into the beginnings of a consumer culture in the 1930s and 1940s now blossomed into the cult of consumerism, spurred on by advertising and the prevalence of television from the late 1950s (Forgacs 1996). Television advertising in 60

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Italy was initially contained by Catholic concerns about consumerism, and, unlike American or other European formats, did not punctuate films and other transmissions, but in the beginning was limited to brief programmes devoted to advertising, such as Carosello, launched in 1957 (Gundle 1986, pp. 584–5).2 However, for many, the ability to participate in the pervasive culture of goods lagged behind a growing desire to do so, a gap seized upon to great comic and satirical effect by commedia all’italiana. In effect, unemployment was high, with considerable migration to the cities of the North for work, and wages remained the lowest in Western Europe (Giacovelli 1995, p. 43). This meant that while all classes may have aspired to consumerism, the lower classes often remained excluded, their bungled attempts to join in explored in films like Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (1958) and Loy’s Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (1959). Even the middle classes experienced problems, begging the question of who precisely benefited from the boom, as in De Sica’s Il boom (1963), and casting doubts on its salutariness, a major theme in Risi’s Il successo (1963), both films made towards the end of the period as the economy was beginning to falter. The films are themselves, of course, luxury products consumed by the ticket-buying spectator, with cinema from its beginnings already preparing Italians for consumerism in the purchase of tickets as nonessential goods (Gundle 1990, p. 203). The melodramas, which kickstarted genre production, had increasingly showcased cars, haute couture and a middle-class lifestyle, with Cottafavi’s Una donna libera, at the end of the golden era of the genre in 1955, featuring a female interior designer. There is a longstanding link between the screen and the shop window, enhanced by press-books and posters, with the construction of the spectating self mirroring the appearance and lifestyle of the stars in materialist terms of buying clothes, cosmetics, cars and furnishings. This runs alongside the more unconscious, psychical identifications of spectatorship, identifications made possible once the distancing theatrical gesturing of early silent cinema had given way to the more subtle, realistic acting style required by the cinematic closeup (Matthews 2000, pp. 74–82). The socioeconomic context of the boom resulted in a sharp focus in commedia all’italiana on the relationship between people and goods, and also, in particular, on the way goods mediate in relations of gender and class. In this context of intensified commodification of social relations, the subversive possibilities inherent in the comic genre, and the social progressiveness encouraged by the spread of the globalized medium of


television, rub against the status quo of patriarchal ideology, which continues to construct femininity as arena for relations between men, with the commodification of female sexuality as the basis of these relations. Subversive tendencies and comic focus find themselves as a rule subsumed by the male-dominated nature of commedia all’italiana in terms of actors, directors and plot trajectories. This results in a general marginalization of femininity and a closing down, with few exceptions, of the possibilities for anything other than the reinforcement of traditional gender roles and relations. However, it is in these exceptions, as we shall see, that a new, contemporary femininity can be observed quietly emerging at the margins to deconstruct patriarchal norms and unbalance traditional gender expectations with a newfound economic independence through well-paid careers (Risi’s Il sorpasso, 1962, Il successo, 1963, Il giovedì, 1963). This contrasts with melodramatic working femininity, for whom work is scarce, poorly paid, at times filled with danger and given up on marriage. Anarchic, carnivalesque transgression, in the form of the reversal or taking to extremes of social norms, is usually the domain of male protagonists in a comic genre that can be characterized as (male) comedian comedy. Commedia all’italiana continues the tradition of Italian cinematic comedy centring on particular star comedians, a dynamic already at work in sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte theatre, with its plays improvised around characters famous comic actors had made their own. While Isabella Andreini is one celebrated actress synonymous with commedia dell’arte, it is more difficult to identify a dominant comic actress in boom-time commedia all’italiana four centuries later. Despite the fact that the phenomenon of cinematic stardom originated in Italian opera with female, rather than male, stars, the history of Italian comic cinema is a role-call of male actors: in silent cinema, Leopoldo Fregoli from 1898 to the early 1900s and Cretinetti from the 1910s to the mid-1930s; after the coming of sound, Macario from the 1930s to the 1940s, and Totò from the 1940s to the 1960s. Key to the golden era of commedia all’italiana are Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Alberto Sordi and Ugo Tognazzi, with the ubiquitous Marcello Mastroianni including comedy in his range of acting roles during this period. While these actors are perceived as embodying an Everyman-type Italianness of undoubted humour and often hilarity, their various ostensibly ungendered Everyman images do not include ‘woman’. On the contrary, they serve to ensure that masculinity and its interests dominate the screen, to the exclusion of the feminine point of view.


Of the 65 actors listed by Giacovelli in his history of Italian comic cinema, only 20 are female, while the difference in the category of director and scriptwriter is even more extreme: 58 men and one woman, Lina Wertmüller (Giacovelli 1995, p. 288). The career trajectory of Monica Vitti as, according to Giacovelli, Italy’s only comic actress in the cinema, typifies the patriarchal emphasis on how women look, rather than on what they do, as well as male dominance in cinematic production. A successful stage actress, Vitti was initially excluded from the screen because of her unconventionally long nose and unfashionable body shape. Her first involvement in cinema was behind the scenes, in dubbing, after which a few minor comic roles led to her career launch as a dramatic film actress at the hands of her future partner, the director Antonioni. Another male director, Blasetti, opened the door to comedy in 1963 (in other words, only at the end of classic commedia all’italiana period), giving her a central role in Le quattro verità (Giacovelli 1995, p. 273). As Risi, one of the foremost directors of commedia all’italiana, observed in an interview, his work was centred primarily on ‘a cinema of actors’ and on ‘masculine cinema’: I’ve spoken of actors because I’ve usually always made masculine cinema, a cinema of actors. Of course, I’ve also directed actresses and developed a good rapport with some of them. The female roles in my films, the films that I’ve made, it’s true, have always been a little ‘on the side’… I had these four actors whom I worked a lot with, Sordi, Gassman, Tognazzi, Manfredi and also Mastroianni, these five actors. The first four appeared in almost all my films and so the stories centered around male characters. They were the heroes. Women were always slightly in the background. (Gili 1998, pp. 87, 89) The 1958–64 period of commedia all’italiana was generally characterized by films whose plots centre on the concerns and predicaments of Italian masculinity, with a predominance of male characters, whether in groups (I soliti ignoti), pairs (Il sorpasso) or on their own (Il boom). Even when their predicaments involve relations with femininity, it is the masculine viewpoint that prevails. For example, in Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana it is Mastroianni’s scheming to rid himself of his wife which, however ridiculous and unsympathetically portrayed, is the central focus because of his ever-present, fantasizing voice-over, while the spectator is never privy to her inner thoughts. Similarly, even


though in De Sica’s Matrimonio all’italiana Sofia Loren and Mastroianni both have a flashback, Loren’s is considerably shorter. It is also through his eyes that we are acquainted with the twenty years of antefact to the film’s narrative opening. Giacovelli notes that the most popular comedies figured central male roles, with the somewhat exceptional corpus of commedie al femminile by Pietrangeli (Nata di marzo, Adua e le compagne, La parmigiana, La visita, Io la conoscevo bene) and the occasional such film by Salce (La cuccagna), Puccini (L’attico) and Comencini (La bugiarda), which not only are less comic, but also invariably show unconventional female protagonists coming to a bad end (Giacovelli 1995, pp. 88–9). This ‘feminine’ corpus is one of several strands into which commedia all’italiana can be divided. Comedy as a generic category is extremely broad, with comic elements also to be found running through and refreshing other genres through parody, often when the genre in question appears to have run its course commercially. In addition to the strand of commedie al femminile, Giacovelli identifies commedie giallorosa (the thieving comedies, including I soliti ignoti, Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti, Il mattatore), historical comedies set in various periods (I compagni, La grande guerra, Tutti a casa) and commedie antimatrimoniali (the most famous being Divorzio all’italiana, Matrimonio all’italiana and Sedotta e abbandonata). The commedie antimatrimoniali and the commedie al femminile are in turn two gender-specific strands of a broader subset which he calls commedie di costume, or comedies of manners. A further division exists between comedies specifically about the boom and those simply made during the boom. However, considerations of gender, while most apparent in the commedie antimatrimoniali, cut across all the strands.3 The term commedia all’italiana itself is open to different interpretations. In this chapter it refers to the 1958–64 corpus regarded as encapsulating its heyday, but it is also taken by some to indicate a longer period, 1958–80, or even to indicate all Italian comic cinema. For some the term is derogatory, while for others it is merely a way of distinguishing Italian comedy from other national, and particularly Hollywood, comedies. Like Hollywood, Italian comic cinema began with physical slapstick inherited from music halls and clowning at fairs (much like American vaudeville and burlesque), popular cultural activities that continued alongside cinema until the 1940s in the form of the avanspettacolo, short variety acts performed on stage preceding the film. This transition to the new, but initially also popular cultural medium of cinema was followed by the move from theatre to


cinema of more dialogue and narrative-based, and so ‘higher’ cultural, forms of comedy. In Italy, as in Hollywood, comedy developed throughout the 1920s to blossom in the 1930s and 1940s, with Camerini a major director of the era. Wagstaff identifies two main strands of comedies produced during and in consonance with the Fascist regime, namely commedia brillante and commedia sentimentale (featuring the Cinderella motif and the reform of the ‘shrew’, respectively) (Wagstaff 1996, pp. 225–6). Direct antecedents to boom-time commedia all’italiana, via neorealismo rosa (a more light-hearted form of neorealism from the late 1940s and 1950s, with films like Zampa’s L’onorevole Angelina, 1949, and Castellani’s Due soldi di speranza, 1951), were the rustic comedies (such as Comencini’s Pane, amore e fantasia, 1953, and Risi’s Poveri ma belli, 1956), which gave way to the urban settings and values characteristic of commedia all’italiana. With the mid-1950s the highpoint of Italian cinema audience figures, and the 1960s seeing domestic production rise to an all-time high (300 films per annum by the late 1960s), commedia all’italiana was centrally placed, alongside money-spinning peplum co-productions, in terms of the economic success of the Italian cinema industry, which by the mid-1960s was in profit for the first time since the war (Wagstaff 1995, p. 97). Italian audiences increasingly opted to see Italian films in the 1950s and 1960s, and of the rise to 700 million lire per annum in ticket sales, more than half came from Italian films – albeit often made with US investment (Wagstaff 1995, p. 108, 1996, p. 228). The italianità of commedia all’italiana, with its all-Italian cast and plots firmly rooted in an Italian historical and socioeconomic context, meant that, like melodrama, and unlike the peplum, the comedies did not export well. However, some of the comedies achieved international critical acclaim, especially Il sorpasso, and with I soliti ignoti and La grande guerra nominated for an Oscar. Domestic cinema audience figures, however, remained high (675 million in 1965), despite the spread of television into the home after the mid-1950s (Monaco 1966, table 1). Comedies continued to flourish, particularly in seconda and terza visione cinemas in rural and peripheral urban areas. While major commedia all’italiana directors such as Risi, Monicelli, Comencini and Germi dominated in a prima visione context with their serie A productions of occasional international renown (and with Risi’s Il sorpasso the top earner in 1962), a new set of custom-made serie B and serie C comedies fed 1960s demand, alongside peplum films, outside urban, primarily middle-class centres. Directors like Bruno Corbucci, Marino Girolami and Lucio Fulci (later


renowned for slasher-horror films), and actors like Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, made comedies specifically for the peasant and proletarian market. These audiences continued to frequent the cinema and generated huge profits for the cinema industry: films cost on average 100–120 million lire to produce, but could net more than 1 billion lire at the box office (Giacovelli 1999, pp. 104–9). A focus on serie A commedia all’italiana from the perspective of class difference in audience reception shows a combination of the visual gags conventionally, if rather stereotypically, considered to appeal to lower-class, popular tastes, in a society where illiteracy was still prevalent. Comic dialogue and narrative complexity, on the other hand, have been ascribed more to the middle classes, while the play on dialect in films like I soliti ignoti and Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti would presumably have had cross-class appeal. From the point of view of gender and sexuality the position is more complicated, especially in terms of gender as performance. As a result, the current model of the spectator not embodying a fixed identity, but moving unconsciously, during the masquerading, transvestite processes of spectatorship, between the poles of femininity and masculinity, and along the axis of sexualities, implies spectatorial identities and subjectivities in a certain amount of flux. In this sense the comedies, and indeed any genre that tends to marginalize femininity and non-heterosexuality as these comedies do, might be considered to offer a means of identification for the female spectator at the level of her masculinity, while temporarily inhabiting the traditional position of male desire whatever her sexuality. However, the question still remains: what is there for the female spectator of this genre of traditional comedy oriented primarily towards masculine, homosocial identities and concerns? After all, for the female spectator to put her femininity aside in order to masculineidentify would be to perform an act of spectatorial transvestism only too consonant with patriarchal imperatives to put masculinity first, with femininity as the subordinate other. In particular, such transvestism would accord with patriarchy’s masculinizing of subjectivity, the ‘I’, and, in a cinematic context, the camera eye and voice-over. In terms of comedy, this transvestism reinforces the misogynist gender fit between the cinematic apparatus and the structure of the joke (as explained by Freud), whereby the feminine is situated both as the object of the camera eye/spectator gaze, and as the butt of the joke shared by at least two men (the originator and the laugher) (Rowe 1995, pp. 6, 68–9). The path to transvestism of the female spectator of


commedia all’italiana, and the concomitant acceptance of an excluded or marginalized femininity, had of course been laid before the film begins. Building on her experiences in other cultural, socioeconomic and political areas, this masquerade is her ticket to comic response, albeit vicariously from a feminine standpoint. This raises the question of what would define a feminine-oriented comedy, or at least a comedy more evenly balanced between feminine and masculine concerns, along with a more realistic and more historically flexible feminine and masculine standpoint than the definitions made normative by essentialist patriarchal ideology. The transgressiveness of such comedy from a patriarchal viewpoint would not be out of place in a genre characterized by a potential for subversiveness (while in any genre the forced match between the patriarchal template and social reality means that a degree of mismatch and slippage can serve to deconstruct the tendentiousness of patriarchal ideology). In terms of a female comedic role, this would step outside the stereotypical binary, sexually-based poles of madonna/victim (such as the mother with female desire correctively removed in melodrama) and whore/threat (as in horror). Such a role would allow for a female hero and plot not inevitably tied to marriage, family and the domestic sphere. This subversion of the norm would be predicated on feminine subjectivity and agency, full entry into the symbolic and, from an economic viewpoint, access to the labour market at all levels. As Rowe states, in cinematic terms it would involve returning the male gaze by instigating a female gaze/camera eye (and, one might add, voice-over) (Rowe 1995, p. 12). Rowe maintains that the female performance strategies of purity and conformity found in melodrama (radical negation, silence, withdrawal, invisibility) could be replaced by the ‘unruly woman’s’ strategies of danger and transgression inherent in comedy and its play on liminality (laughter, anger, parody, masquerade), to set up a questioning of normative gender categories (Rowe 1995, p. 5). However, these are hypothetical scenarios as far as commedia all’italiana is concerned, useful only as a means of comparison in order to situate actual constructions or marginalizations of femininity in the genre. As Risi says of his films: ‘the stories centered around male characters. They were the heroes’ (Gili 1998, p. 89). The traditional element of laughter itself is not always assured in these comedies. Giacovelli entitles his chapter on boom-time commedia all’italiana ‘riso amaro’ (literally ‘bitter laugh’). He points out that, unlike other forms of comedy, this corpus of films is not always comic, even in the sense of providing a happy ending, but tends to the dramatic and even


tragic (Giacovelli 1999, pp. 77–8). Death is not unusual (occurring in I soliti ignoti and Il sorpasso), and black humour often sits alongside or replaces comedy, overlaying it with darker implications of alienation, from both the self and others. In the context of heightened consumption, the commodification of social relations, not least in the realms of gender, is undoubtedly a contributing factor to the bitter underside of comedy in many of the films in this genre.

Comic consumption One basic locus for the production of gender relations is that of relations of production and consumption. A decisive shift took place during early capitalism’s move away from cottage industry, when masculinity became associated with production outside the home, and femininity with (re)production and consumption inside the home. With the growth of wage labour for profit came not only a separation between labour and capital, but also the gender-linked split between public and private, work and home, and, importantly, production and consumption. With bourgeois ownership of capital and a readily available servant class came the status symbol of the leisured, nonworking wife, soon to become stereotypically associated with a form of parasitic consumption which drained her productive husband’s assets (Hamilton 1980, pp. 42–4). Playing on the centrality of women to Catholic family ideology, market competition for consumers in 1950s and 1960s Italy targeted the woman in the household (wife or mother) as the ‘angel in the house’ able to divert the man’s spending power to goods for the home (refrigerators, washing machines, furniture) (Gundle 1986, pp. 582–3). The negative effects of the household angel of consumption on masculinity contribute to a shift from the ambitions of melodramatic masculinity to acquire social status through marriage and as head of a family, to the frantic attempts of comic or satirized masculinity to keep up with the consumerist demands of marriage in a new economic era (De Sica’s Il boom, Risi’s Una vita difficile and Il giovedì), to develop a preference for acquiring status by setting up a different, consumerist relation to sex (Risi’s Il successo) or to avoid this commitment altogether (Risi’s Il mattatore and some of the commedie antimatrimoniali examined in the following section). Despite the traditional association of consumption with femininity, the predilection of commedia all’italiana for male protagonists means that the comedy of consumption centres not on female characters, but on the effects of


feminine consumer demands on masculinity (especially when the wife does not work, as in Il boom and Una vita difficile) or on the dynamics of masculine internalization of a competitive consumerist ethos independent of the influence of femininity. Consumption was initially defined as the point of exchange or purchase which transforms a product, or human labour made material, into a commodity (Marx 1974). It is now recognized as involving not merely exchange, or even material use after exchange, but also the socio-psychic process of consuming signs and meanings along with products (Dant 1999). In other words, the purchaser also buys into what the product signifies in terms of status in areas such as gender, sexual potency, class and lifestyle, in an overall context of the self-creation of identity. In periods of rapid economic development, such as the boom period of classic commedia all’italiana, consumption is taken to excess as consumerism, with the car a particularly central fetish and icon of successful masculinity in the comedies of this era. As product-based sign systems, multiplying with the proliferation of manufactured goods, mediate more and more in human communication, traditional social relations, as well as the creation of an ostensibly ‘individual’ identity through consumerism, become increasingly commodified. Alongside the production of identity, Williamson cites the need for control as a driving force of consumerism in a culture in which ‘the only legitimized form of control’ is ownership, itself more likely in the area of consumption rather than production. As a consequence, the ‘conscious, chosen meaning in most people’s lives comes much more from what they consume than from what they produce’ (Williamson 1986, p. 230). However, unlike ‘controlling products from the other side’, namely production, satisfying the need for control through consumerism can only ever be illusory: ‘underlying both struggles is the need for people to control their environment and produce their own identity; it is just that the former, if won, could actually fulfil that need while the latter ultimately never will’ (Williamson 1986, p. 231). The difficulties of attempting even minimal control over production in a working-class context is illustrated in Monicelli’s I compagni (1963). The film depicts an unsuccessful textile workers’ strike for better working conditions in late nineteenth-century Turin, but the parallel with labour problems in the 1950s and 1960s is clear, with strikes becoming increasingly militant and the state ever more represessive in the 1960s (Caldwell 1978, p. 79). Exploitation of the workforce in the film with a 14-hour day including only half an hour’s break, together with low wages and poor living conditions, signal the


capitalist commodification of people through their labour.4 The workers are valued only for their products, or their labour-made material, by the owners of the means of production. In other words, they are valued exclusively in terms of the amount of profit, or surplus value, they can produce, with limitless profit growth a foundational principle of capitalism. More comic are the efforts of masculinity to avoid the production process altogether. The final scenes of Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (1958) show two male characters escaping from the police by merging with a crowd outside the factory gates, only for one (Gassman) to be swept along inside with others desperate for work, while his older companion congratulates himself on his escape when he is thrown out. The film, regarded as initiating the classic era of commedia all’italiana, is the first in a series of thieving comedies featuring masculinity reluctant to do the work of production, a theme also running through many of the other comedies. The male characters are, however, eager to do the work of consumption, ‘required and mobilized as worker at this level too’; as Baudrillard argues, ‘perhaps as much today as he is at the level of production’ (2002, p. 84). They perform this work of consumption by attempting to obtain goods by theft. By stealing products, rather than earning money to buy them, they subvert capitalism, both sidestepping and diverting the ‘correct’ flow of capital from labour power to consumer power. No labour, in the strict sense of the term, is involved on their part (although much time and effort are expended in planning and executing the ‘job’). The only true labour in question is that made material in the products they steal, so that their subversion of capitalism is at the same time also theft of workers’ labour. Their thieving does, however, obey the capitalist, consumerist compulsion for things. While it is true that many of the protagonists live on the breadline, and are in and out of prison, they still fantasize beyond fulfilling basic needs, and promote the consumerist ethos with dreams of iconic, status-conferring products, most notably the ridiculously big car ‘lunga quindici metri’ (15 metres long) (I soliti ignoti and the followup Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti by Loy in 1959). Comic effect is achieved by focusing on the gap between these dreams and their fulfilment. I soliti ignoti opens with the attempted theft of a car, which is thwarted by the alarm being activated, the police arriving and the thief running off without his coat, which is trapped in the car door, in order to make good his escape. In other words, not only does the theft fail, but the would-be thief sacrifices one of his own possessions in the


attempt. A later scene reveals that prams have replaced cars as objects of theft because they, at least, are not alarmed, while another scene shows the characters driving not 15-metre-long cars, but dodgems. The latter image illustrates the reduction of the aspirational car to a childsize, joke car temporarily driven at the fair, and the predilection of the characters for play, rather than work, while both the pram and the dodgem link the men with childhood rather than adulthood. Childhood is a notable period of lack of control, whether over others, the environment or oneself, and the desire for control singled out by Williamson as driving consumerism is not fulfilled by the thieving attempts of masculinity here either. The main plan of the all-male group is to steal from a jewellers by entering from an empty adjacent apartment through a hole in the wall. However, they break through the wrong wall and into the kitchen of the apartment they are already in. They end up seated round the kitchen table eating, their lofty consumerist aspirations reduced to primary, infantile-level consumption of food. The comic association of masculinity with childhood in a number of the comedies, especially in its propensity for play rather than work, and in its toying with consumerism, might be taken as an indication that Italy was not ready to deal with the rapidly spreading consumer culture. Toy cars reappear as part of planning the heist of lottery money in the follow-up film, Loy’s Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (1959), a ridiculously intricate job that eventually nets a vast sum of money: 80 million lire. Gassman plays a central role in the theft, as in I soliti ignoti, with his reluctant involvement in the work of production at the end of the first film concluding, again through forces beyond his control, with the closure of the building yard in the second film. The thieves are again incapable of making use of the money in order to proceed to the ultimate stage of consumerism. None of them is willing to take (adult) responsibility for the suitcase of money, which is left under a bench, and the film ends with Gassman’s arrest not for theft, but on the petty charge of jaywalking. As in I soliti ignoti, consumption remains limited to meeting infantile needs, rather than reaching the giddier heights of adult consumerism. The oldest of the thieves reverts to primary consumption, using 10,000 lire of the booty quite literally to eat himself sick in a restaurant, to the point that he is hospitalized. Whereas the groups of male characters in these two films are from the lower class, with the oldest appearing to belong to the underclass, the central protagonist in another thieving comedy, Risi’s Il mattatore (1960), has progressed to a higher class, and partakes in a more sophisticated


form of consumer culture as a result of a long series of varied and clever thefts carried out not in a large group, but with just one or two partners. The reluctance of Gerardo (Gassman) to work is underscored by the visual gag of his slapstick efforts to thwart his girlfriend’s attempt to find him a job in a china shop (he breaks several valuable pieces).5 The film centres on Gassman’s many fraudulent crimes, involving more visual gags in the form of disguises (including a policeman, a general and Greta Garbo), which enable him to enjoy periods of comfortable lifestyle. All his tricks except one are shown through his flashback, which, accompanied by his voice-over, takes up most of the film and narrates its antefact. This narrative is framed by the elaborate trick he plays on Annalisa, now his wife and relegated to the kitchen during the flashback told to another male character. The film opens with Gerardo returning home from work, not in his own car, but on the bus, and dropping apples all over the street as he alights (an early visual omen that domesticity, or mere primary-level domestic consumption of buying fruit, is not his forte). As he sits down to a jovial meal with Annalisa, a symbolic ritual of domestic consumption, they are interrupted by what appears to be a conman, whom Gerardo engages in a conversation leading to the flashback during which he narrates all his criminal exploits. At the end of the flashback the conman declares he is a policeman, thanks Gassman for his confession and arrests him, leaving Annalisa distraught. Outside, in a waiting car, the two men congratulate each other and set off, the wife having been well and truly conned. Gassman’s apparently heartless action is ostensibly vindicated by the fact that the wedding ceremony he had participated in, believing it to be part of a ruse to defraud a jeweler’s shop, was in fact genuine, with Annalisa having secretly arranged for it to be celebrated by a real priest. Gassman’s aim, however, is to sidestep both marriage and the work of production (or, more precisely, an office job paying only 90,000 lire a month), and return to the more lucrative work of obtaining the means of consumption illicitly. Gassman’s consumerist urge for more than the bare essentials is, crucially, not aimed at investment in the home, but is located outside marriage and the family. The sheer excess of his consumerist aspirations, which require the theft of no less than the British crown jewels from the Tower of London, points, like the 15-metre-long car, to the fantasy element of desire activated by the culture of consumption. Consumption, rather than production, and rather than marriage and reproduction, has become the locus, in films like Il mattatore, for attempting the satisfaction of needs, with


consumerism stimulating, and promising the fulfilment of, non-essential needs such as social status and recognition through luxury items. The survival and growth of capitalism are dependent on forever stimulating, but never wholly fulfilling, needs in the form of desires. The system is also perpetuated by promoting consumer goods as disposable and needing to be replaced in a context of ever-changing fashions in cars, clothes and life-style, so that any fulfilment of desire can only be temporary, expenditure experiences growth and industry continues to profit. Some understanding of the mania for consumerism regularly exhibited to comic excess by male (rather than female) protagonists in commedia all’italiana can be arrived at by a brief recapitulation of desire in the context of this particular cinematic genre. As a form of consumption, cinema offers the spectator overlapping fields of desire. In conjunction with desire associated with the identificatory processes of cinematic spectatorship in areas of sexuality (voyeurism, fetishism) and identity (the screen as mirror offering images of a unified self), the screen as shop window also advertises and stimulates desire for alternative scenarios of identity and belonging that appear attainable simply through consumer products associated with the stars and their lifestyles.6 As discussed in chapter 1, desire is theorized in psychoanalysis as founded on lack, and consists of the endless and ultimately fruitless quest for a universal long-lost object. This object has left behind in its empty place an unbearable sense of loss, and it is this sense, specifically in relation to the mother, that provides the dominant feeling-tone of Italian melodrama, with its theme of lost children. The sense of a lost and then sought-after object is variously theorized as dating back to the trauma of separation from the mother at birth, with physical reactions to this providing the model for all later anxieties; to breast-feeding followed by weaning and loss of the mother’s breast, providing a basis for later fears of castration; and to fear of castration derived from the fear of losing the penis, the primary form of incest prohibition threatened by the father (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, p. 58). While any of these various distant and embedded mother-based sources of the ultimate lost object may be the locus for the primary stimulus for desire in both melodrama and commedia all’italiana, Lacan’s emphasis on the symbolic provides particular insights into the workings of consumer desire in the comedies. According to Lacan, lack underlies all existence, to become specifically associated with a fear of castration not merely in relation to biology, but rather to language and subjection to the symbolic codes of culture. It is therefore in the symbolic that the


desire to fill lack locates its search, with identification with the phallus (the sign of power in a patriarchal context) allowing an image of empowered unity, if only as a gesture against the awareness of the real void or lack underlying all existence (Wright 1992, p. 43). Crucially, consumption operates according to a symbolic code of signs and meanings (attached to objects and products according to the culture), and offers a place for desire endlessly to seek the filling of lack. In the concluding words of Baudrillard’s The System of Objects: The systematic and limitless process of consumption arises from the disappointed demand for totality that underlies the project of life. In their ideality sign-objects are all equivalent and may multiply infinitely; indeed, they must multiply in order at every moment to make up for a reality that is absent. Consumption is irrepressible, in the last reckoning, because it is founded upon a lack. (Baudrillard 1996, p. 205) The psychoanalytic foundation for these workings of consumption had been established by Freud in 1912: Psychoanalysis has shown us that when the original object of a wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression, it is frequently represented by an endless series of substitute objects none of which, however, brings full satisfaction. This may explain the inconstancy in object-choice, the ‘craving for stimulation’ which is so often a feature of the love of adults. (Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, 1985, p. 258) With the ‘endless series of substitute objects’ we are in the realm of fetishism and its function of continuously attempting to fill lack with objects attributed a value beyond their original utility, an attribution that is essentially arbitrary and culture-specific, as is the basic production of signs. Three types of fetishism have been identified, with anthropological fetishism or totemism in primitive societies as the original locus for the study of the process of over-valuation of objects. This process was adapted by Freud as sexual fetishism in analysing psychic attempts to compensate for lack in the context of castration fears, and as such forms an integral part of cinematic spectatorship as shaped by the fetishizing camera eye. Important for our purposes is the development, with industrialization, of primitive anthropological fetishism into commodity fetishism, which reaches its apotheosis


during periods of expanding capitalism, like the boom era during which commedia all’italiana was produced.7 First theorized by Marx, commodity fetishism is the attribution of extra, specifically social, value to commodities. This follows on from the valuing of commodities in terms of exchange rather than use. These processes are rooted in the commodity defined as ‘value relation between the products of labour’ produced for circulation in a system of exchange, governed by relativity, rather than simply for use in its specificity. This type of relationship in the material sphere between products, or embodiments of labour, conceals and mystifies the social relationship between the producers of labour by transposing it to the level of things, or reifying it: There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the valuerelation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connexion with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things … This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. (Marx, Capital, 1974, I, ch. 1, iv, p. 77) This fetishism, resulting from the act of exchange, leads to a dialectical form of ‘material relations between persons and social relations between things’: [T]he labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. (Marx, Capital, 1974, I, ch. 1, iv, p. 78) The commodity fetishism at work in social relations of production is mirrored in those of consumption. For ‘producers’ we can substitute ‘consumers’ in the following conclusion by Marx that fetishism of commodities results in social action not ruling things, but being ruled


by them: ‘To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them’ (Marx, Capital, 1974, I, ch. 1, iv, p. 79). The extent to which commodity fetishism contributes to, rules or even replaces social relations in this way in commedia all’italiana determines the degree of comedic or more serious satirical approach to the portrayal of consumption in the films. Fetishism itself is indeed a matter of degree. In his discussion of sexual fetishism, Freud argues that ‘a certain degree’ is ‘normal’: ‘a certain degree of fetishism is habitually present in normal love, especially in those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented’. However, fetishism taken too far becomes abnormal, or pathological. He continues: The situation only becomes pathological when the longing for the fetish passes beyond the point of being merely a necessary condition attached to the sexual object and actually takes the place of the normal aim, and, further, when the fetish becomes detached from a particular individual and becomes the sole sexual object. (Freud, ‘Fetishism’, 1984, pp. 66–7) A parallel can be drawn here with commodity fetishism, or the reification of social relations, a perversion in which, Marx argues, ‘All forms of society, in so far as they reach the stage of commodityproduction and money circulation, take part’ (Capital, 1974, III, ch. 48, pp. 826–7). In periods of accelerated capitalism, such as boom-time Italy of the commedia all’italiana era, commodity fetishism is taken to excess as a highly consumerist form of consumption, with the complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production and the concomitant reification of social relations. The representation of consumption in the comedies can be explored in the context of this reification of social, and particularly gender, relations, as well as in terms of whether commodity fetishism, in Freud’s words, is merely a ‘necessary condition attached to’ the material object, or whether it ‘takes the place of the normal aim’ of social relations. The portrayal of consumption in the films takes place in the realm of things and activities. In thieving comedies such as I soliti ignoti, luxury goods, and specifically jewellery, are to be stolen for the purpose of immediate exchange for money, rather than for use. Use-value is incidental (like the cine-camera stolen by Mastroianni for use in planning the crime) or comically accidental (the final booty cannot be exchanged for large sums of money for further exchange purposes, but


consists of a meal to be used up). Mastroianni’s wife, in prison for selling cigarettes on the black market in order to supplement her family’s income, has procured the cigarettes not for use but for exchange. In Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti, money, the basic means of exchange, is itself the objective, with the car and lorry stolen for temporary use during the theft, while Gassman in Il mattatore targets mostly money and jewellery. Exchange-value in these films resides in money, and in the transformation of goods into this primary exchange medium. In other films, however, the value of commodities can be seen to reside much more in the social values the goods signal, linked of course to their purchase cost, but of greater significance in terms of social, and often gender, status; it is in this facet of use-value that the commodity fetishism inherent in consumerism lies. Exemplifying the commodity in commedia all’italiana is the car, produced in a growing variety of makes and sizes during this period, each connoting relatively greater or lesser degrees of arrivismo and virility, and constituting a primarily masculine fetish object.8 Many commodities feature in the films, from food, drink, clothing and jewellery to white goods (washing machines, refrigerators) and electric goods (televisions, tape recorders, portable radios), apartments and land, and private transport (cars, motorboats). Of all these, the car is perhaps the most versatile and amenable to the filmic process, in both visual and narrative terms. In particular, it figures as a key iconic indicator of the commodification of social relations achieved through various means in the films, where it is omnipresent. The car was already potent as a signifier of wealthy masculinity in early 1950s melodrama, such as Matarazzo’s Chi è senza peccato (1953), with the cabriolet bringing Nazzari back as a rich man from the New World to his impoverished wife at the end of the film. It functions similarly in Don Domenico’s flashback showing off his new cabriolet to his prostitute girlfriend in De Sica’s Matrimonio all’italiana (1964). Mass-production in 1955 of the first economy car, the Fiat 600, followed by the 500 in 1957, made four-wheel private transport accessible to the less wealthy, leading to a massive rise in car ownership from 342,000 vehicles in 1950 to 4.67 million in 1964 (Ginsborg 1990, p. 239). At the same time, this smallest and cheapest of all cars spoke volumes about the financial and social status of its driver, and it is in this context, rather than in that of its utility, that the car signifies in its central role in the commodification of social relations in the comedies. Specifically, the car as status symbol becomes a standard means of commodifying the self and others in the reification of social relations.


Utility is sacrificed to status in Risi’s Il giovedì (1963), with an unemployed father turning down the hire of an economical Fiat 600 in favour of a large, petrol-swilling American cabriolet, in order to impress his estranged young son on their day out (the ‘Thursday’ of the title). His choice of an American car adds kudos, and is one of many indications in the films of the Americanization of consumerism in Italy. To cite just a few examples: American music in Risi’s Una vita difficile (1961), cigarettes and Coca Cola in Loy’s Il marito (1958), whisky and, more pointedly, the contents of the American fridge in Risi’s Il successo (1963). The latter, according to Gassman’s character, always contains chicken legs, information doubtless gleaned from American films, while his offers only a shrivelled lemon. 9 There is also the matter of the long history of imported American films themselves. Il giovedı` contains a pointed allusion to the deleterious effects of the growing dominance of the Italian 1960s ‘sexy’ film on family cinema outings, compared with the American western as longstanding, wholesome family entertainment. Father and son go to the cinema together to see Ford’s western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, only to find it has been replaced by an Italian sex film, which they cannot watch together. As far as the desire of the father to impress his son in Il giovedı` is concerned, the intricacies of the American car hood unfortunately prove to be beyond him. The car also repeatedly runs out of petrol, having to be pushed to the petrol station and finally abandoned as he has no money to run it. Along with the car, he is gradually forced to abandon his façade, which his son has already seen through, in the manner of the perceptive child so commonly portrayed in Italian cinema, and which works, conversely, to endear him more to his father. In reality, the father’s only money comes from handouts from women – his mother, herself poor, and his live-in girlfriend, who, unlike him, is content to drive a Fiat 500 on her salary of 180,000 lire a month. This girlfriend, a minor character in terms of screen time, is one example of the empowered career woman who inhabits the margins of some of these films. She offers a quiet critique of comic male convolutions and discomfort in the face of a new consumerist era, with its growing opportunities for women and pressures on traditional, bread-winning masculinity. Having rejected the job she has found for him, which pays one-third of what she earns, the end of the film sees him agreeing, albeit unconvincingly, to take it. The comedy of his consumerist fantasies and pretensions, epitomized by his choice of the cabriolet to symbolize his


value, together with the ensuing mishaps on the road, is darkened by the pathos of estranged family relationships which his consumerist fantasies attempt to rectify. The father–son relationship is highly emotive and restricted by limited access, which the father tries to enhance with a day out in a big, foreign car, a symbol of potent masculinity shared. His relationship with his impoverished mother, whom he rarely sees, is distant, and made more poignant by his insistence on relating to her solely through what he perceives as her feminine consumer desires (for a television, a fridge and a washing machine), items which he promises, unrealistically, to buy for her.10 The fact that he does not even have the taxi fare home serves to underline further his failure to acquire status, even vicariously and temporarily through hire, rather than ownership, of a powerful car for a day. Her provision of his fare home and his girlfriend’s subsidy of the day out, together with the obvious affluence of the all-female environment to which he returns his son at the end of the day (his estranged wealthy wife and a Swiss nanny in a classy hotel), show the potency of masculinity severely undermined by femininity from a materialist angle. The film’s satire exposes commodity fetishism taken to the point where social, and in particular family, relations are reduced to communication through objects by an impaired masculinity, with the car as central visual motif of masculine commodity fetishism. Sordi’s drunken, penniless journalist in Risi’s Una vita difficile (1961) spits and kicks at cars as they pass by in his defiant stand against consumerism. This follows a scene where he meets his separated wife, whom he was unable to support and for whose desire for ‘cars, flats and fur coats’ he was unwilling to compromise his journalistic principles. She is accompanied by a wealthy man with a white Mercedes, who has set her up in a fashion shop and escorts her to parties. The scene cuts from Sordi spitting and kicking at cars, to him ostentatiously driving up in a convertible at the funeral of her mother, but it might as well be the funeral of his principles (Figure 3). He now works as personal assistant for the newspaper owner he had previously rejected and dresses his wife in furs. At the end of the film Sordi reverts to his original, defiant stance against consumerism, represented by his rejection of its icon, the car. At the other extreme, Gassman’s land speculator in Risi’s Il successo (1963) ruthlessly sacrifices all his relationships to success, defined in consumer society by status measured in commodities. His attitude is typified by his embarassment at driving a mere Fiat 1100. Later, at a party, he is mortified when he overhears derisory comments about his car, which is presumed to belong to one of the servants. Talk


Figure 3 Turning heads with his new convertible: Alberto Sordi in Risi’s Una vita difficile (1961).

revolves around ownership of motorboats, mountain chalets, islands and racehorses. This is the lifestyle for Gassman, and to acquire it he commodifies his relationships. He does so by relating to friends, inlaws, father and wife, primarily in terms of how much he can, quite literally, capitalize on them as sources of investment for land and property speculation, which was rife during this era.11 In the first place, he commodifies his professional relationship with his employer in a construction firm by using information gained at work to buy land in Sardinia, on the basis that it will rapidly increase in value. Determined to raise the necessary 10 million lire, he plies his closest friend (Trintignant) with women (sampling them himself along the way) in an attempt to borrow money from him. When this fails, he approaches long-forgotten friends, including one now making a fortune in white goods, with hypocritical charm, and tries to cajole money from his brother-in-law, even trying to convince him that the money is owed him because of his persuasive powers in getting his sister to marry him. As Gassmann’s desperation increases, so does his commodification of those closest to him. In an tragi-comic episode, his father, a farmer, keeps chickens on the shelf in the small urban bedroom where his son has accommodated him after selling his farm from under his feet for 5 million lire. The father, a natural countryman, is clearly ill-at-ease in a city flat, but Gassman is relentless. His final feat is to use his wife to


ask a wealthy admirer for money, knowing that this places her in a position where she may have to provide sexual services in exchange. With the deal assured, a key scene takes place in the street between Gassman and, on his own admission, his only friend, Trintignant, the latter remarking that all Gassman talks about is business. Gassman replies that money is everything, and releases the brakes of his 1100 to send it crashing into a wall, while boasting to Trintignant about his new car. When he turns around, Trintignant has vanished, the end of their friendship coinciding with the demise of the old 1100. The next scene shows Gassman with everything he has aspired to, as he comes home in a Jaguar to a large house and swimming pool. He also has a new woman (his wife has left him) and the place is full of people partying. But he knows none of them and his girlfriend is more involved with her visitors than with him. He is surrounded by people, but does not relate to any of them. His commodity fetishism is not simply ‘a necessary condition attached to’ the material object, in Freud’s words, but has taken ‘the place of the normal aim’ of social relations. The partying which concludes Il successo is a regular pastime in consumerist commedia all’italiana, the shallowness often masked by this social leisure activity acutely observed in Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). The protagonist-observer (Mastroianni) in this art film is stunned by the suicide of his mentor and successful party host, who also kills his children to spare them the emptiness and lack of meaning behind the façade. If nothing else, hosting parties is a means of displaying commodities and a luxurous lifestyle. Importantly, the status acquired and internalized in commodity fetishism only gains meaning in a public context where it can be assessed and compared. One vital aspect of the work of consumption, then, is to perform it conspicuously (a feature of consumerism already apparent to Veblen in his The Theory of the Leisure Class of 1899). At the end of Il successo Gassman does not need to meet his guests. It is enough that they appreciate the conspicuous presentation of his new, high-status lifestyle, and he communicates with them only through his things in this sharp portrayal of the perfect reification of social relations that constitutes his long-awaited arrivismo. In the films much of the work of consumption is carried out publicly in leisure activities (partying, going for a drive, relaxing on the beach, dining and dancing, and even going to the cinema, although unsuccessfully in Il successo, and for ulterior motives in Divorzio all’italiana). Leisure activities fulfil the double function of advertising status in terms of having time and money to indulge in non-productive activities, as well as showcasing a variety of commodities.


Risi’s Il sorpasso (1962) depicts many of these leisure pursuits and is set not in work time, but during a bank holiday weekend. It features Gassman driving around aimlessly in his Aurelia Sport, a car which by this time had become a rather decrepit status symbol often favoured by an older masculinity attempting to appear younger (Giacovelli 1995, p. 151). His aggressive overtaking (‘sorpasso’) of other vehicles, his finger forever on his horn, is a brutish assertion of superior power, the utility of the car as a mode of transport taking second place to its function as a status symbol, and signalling the overtaking in social terms by the Aurelia owner of people who can afford only smaller cars. The episode ‘La strada è di tutti’ (‘The Road Belongs to Everyone’) in Risi’s I mostri (1963) satirizes the transformation of a pedestrian who tries to cross a busy road and rails at the drivers who refuse to stop, only to get into his own car and promptly almost mow down a mother and child at a pedestrian crossing. In Il sorpasso the car is also used as a projectile (Baudrillard 1996), but this time with fatal results. Gassman’s significant failure to meet with friends at the beginning of the film leads him to team up with a stranger, a reluctant young law student (Trintignant), whose thoughtful inner monologue voice-over throws into relief the brashness and thoughtlessness of Gassman’s character. Gassman is the ultimate consumer, eating up the miles, eating out, dancing and excelling at beach activities. Much of the action in this prototype male road-movie takes place in the Aurelia Sport, as Gassman takes Trintignant for a drive, at each stop trying to consume more than just food and drink. The comedy of his repeated and excruciating attempts to have sex, such as his propositioning of the waitress after the meal, and his following of two German girls in a car on to private property in the hope of an assignation, is put into context by a timid Trintignant, who is focused on one woman, the girl next door. Gassman, a man of his time, scoffs at the younger man’s commitment as a thing of the past (‘Who’d tie themselves down to one girl? We’re hardly in the Middle Ages’). For him, sex is simply another consumer disposable. The words of the contemporary pop song accompanying his flirtatious dance with a married woman say it all: ‘Per un attimo solo ti vorrei’ (‘I want you just for a moment’). Unlike his young companion, Gassman is instantly at ease with strangers, engaging with them like a long-lost friend. He develops a better rapport with Trintignant’s relatives, on whom they call, than Trintignant himself, only to depart immediately afterwards. He is a flâneur, a tourist in other people’s lives, relating to them superficially and briefly. As his estranged wife remarks, ‘You can get to know him in a day.’


Trintignant, ill-at-ease with the new consumerist lifestyle, and unable even to take off his clothes on the beach, finally succumbs to Gassman’s way of thinking. He urges him to drive faster, at which point, significantly, the car crashes on a bend. Gassman, as ever moving with the times, jumps free, but Trintignant is carried over the cliff in the car, now his coffin. His death is symbolic of the demise of traditional ways of relating, of pre-consumerist social relations, including committed relations between the genders. Gassman will go on to buy another car and find another ‘friend’ with whom to relate, not as an individual, an idealized identity ostensibly self-created by consumer choice, but as an atomized commodity fetishist alienated from his own self and from others. Along with the individual relating in unalienated manner with other individuals, community is lost as social relations are reified in consumption. Even the all-male group acting as a criminal team for mutual benefit in I soliti ignoti is not really a community. Their comic camaraderie conceals the fact that its members are together temporarily and only for self-interest. As they go their own way at the end of the film, the old Capannelle’s innocent question about when they will meet again is met with a brusque ‘never’ from Mastroianni. This bears out Hartsock’s account of community modelled on market relations: In a society modeled both in fact and in theory on the exchange of commodities, the attainment of a complex and deep-going series of relations with others is indeed difficult. Community itself is only a by-product of activities directed at other ends, and thus the social synthesis that results from exchange is one in which persons are in opposition to each other and associate with each other only indirectly, by means of the exchange of things passed back and forth on the basis of self-interest. (Hartsock 1985, p. 103) As regards gender relations in the context of the reification of social relations under accelerated consumerism in commedia all’italiana, the key factor is that of alienation. Dominant patriarchal gender norms already alienate both masculinity and femininity from themselves, namely from the many possibilities denied each sex by inflexible, normative definitions. This is taken to parodic excess in the films as they represent masculinity in the grip of a commodity fetishism used to display and reproduce masculine stereotypes. The alienation of the sexes from each other under patriarchy is exacerbated by the galloping consumerism and changing work patterns portrayed in the films.


In this context, the traditional patriarchal commodification of the female body in its sexuality, compounded by the filmic dynamics of this male-dominated culture industry, is augmented as new sexual ‘freedoms’ transform female bodies into just more consumer disposables. Commedia all’italiana would appear, then, to bear witness to the emergence of a new historical, and specifically consumerist, form of patriarchy. At the same time, however, a new and independent feminine voice can be heard from the sidelines of these male-centred comedies. These issues can be explored through the lens of marriage as portrayed in the films, particularly in view of changing values and expectations in a period leading to the Divorce Bill, finally passed in 1970 and fully ratified by referendum in 1974.

The price of marriage The stability of the institution of marriage, already undermined by the upheavals of wartime, and so providing a major goal for protagonists of postwar melodrama, was further shaken by the rapid social changes forced by the economic miracle. With the consumerist ethos of the boom creating expectations not always matched by income, the position of the husband as sole breadwinner could be problematic (as in Una vita difficile, Il boom, Poveri milionari, Il marito). Moreover, the entry of women into well-paid jobs during the boom, far from serving to augment the family income and happiness, seems, rather, to have had the effect of emasculating husbands by diminishing their social status, goading them into making money by dubious means (Il successo) or into assuming the façade of a high-powered consumerist lifestyle (Il sorpasso, Il giovedì). For the bourgeois husband, a key indicator of social and gender status remained, as in the melodramas of the early 1950s, a leisured wife who, if she had ever worked, would cease to do so on marriage. Sordi’s temporary ability to satisfy this criterion in Una vita difficile is epitomized by his wife wearing a fur coat, a luxury item of outdoor clothing almost the equivalent of the car as icon of masculine arrivismo, and a visible sign of leisured bourgeois feminine status. In great part due to Church influence, traditional, pre-capitalist ideals of marriage still predominated, with femininity exclusively as a reproductive, rather than a productive, force (Caldwell 1978, pp. 74–6). Under advancing capitalism the materialist side of the marital relationship became structured around relations of production and consumption. The wife performed the work of consumption in the home, while functioning as use value for the husband in her reproduction of the


family and servicing of its productive members working outside the home. Once her virginity has been traded in the marriage market as a key asset with exchange use, the wife becomes use-value, or, in the words of Irigaray, ‘private property, excluded from exchange’: As both natural value and use value, mothers cannot circulate in the form of commodities without threatening the very existence of the social order. Mothers are essential to its (re)production (particularly inasmuch as they are (re)productive of children and of the labor force: through maternity, child-rearing, and domestic maintenance in general). Their responsibility is to maintain the social order without intervening so as to change it. (Irigaray 1985, p. 185) Complementing the madonna-side of stereotypical patriarchal femininity is the prostitute, functioning this time as permanent exchangevalue, again between men. Contrary to the wife, whose exchange use has terminated on marriage, the woman in prostitution acquires exchangevalue on the basis of repeated use by more than one man. Irigaray defines prostitution in market terms as ‘usage that is exchanged’, adding: ‘The woman’s body is valuable because it has already been used. In the extreme case, the more it has served, the more it is worth. Not because its natural assets have been put to use this way, but, on the contrary, because its nature has been “used up”, and has become once again no more than a vehicle for relations among men’ (Irigaray 1985, p. 186). In other words, pre-capitalist, patriarchal constructions of stereotypical feminine sexuality (madonna–whore) are not removed, but merely given a new, historically appropriate gloss, as capitalism accelerates into consumerist mode. The early 1950s represent a transitional stage, in that the changing reality of postwar marriage and family life was not matched by reform in the law, let alone in Catholic ideology. However, economic development over the decade accentuated the need for less of a mismatch. While melodrama had depicted fatalistic resignation and acceptance of traditional family values in the first half of the 1950s, commedia all’italiana from the end of the decade onwards began to reflect changing expectations in the 1960s, a decade which culminated in greater parity for women under family law regarding adultery (1968) and in the legalization of divorce (1970). A trio of Southern Italian films from the early 1960s (Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana, 1961, and Sedotta e abbandonata, 1963, both set in Sicily, and De Sica’s Matrimonio all’italiana, 1964, set in Naples) overtly satirizes Southern gender norms based on honour. All three films feature recourse to the law, still enshrined in the Penal


Code established under Fascism in 1930, and still prioritizing family honour over the rights of the individual. The films bear out Togliatti’s view of retrograde ‘country’ customs regarding women in economic, civil and social relations which are transposed to the city, a process that increased with urbanization as the economic miracle drew the poor and unemployed from the countryside and the South to the cities of the North: The true cause of the backwardness of Italian women is to be found in the backwardness of economic relations and in the backwardness of civil relations that are in evidence in our country. This is true first of all for the countryside … The backwardness of women results from the fact that backward civil and social relations are transferred from country to city and to almost all the strata of the male and female population. They enter into the family and create there a particular atmosphere of inequality and oppression. (Caldwell 1978, pp. 85–6)12 The titles Divorzio all’italiana and Matrimonio all’italiana (divorce and marriage ‘Italian style’) foreground the problematic and peculiarly Italian situation regarding divorce (not yet an option in Italy, but long since legalized in France and England) and marriage (Catholic, traditional and based on Southern Mediterranean codes of honour). Divorce went against Catholic doctrine, but in France, also predominantly Catholic, it had been legal from 1792 to 1816, and again from 1884 onwards (while in Protestant England it was legalized in 1857) (Anderson and Zinsser 1988, II, pp. 360, 379). The Italian situation regarding divorce has been shaped by the immense political, economic and ideological power of the Church, with the political parties reluctant to introduce legislation which might lose them Catholic voters. As Christian Democrat votes fell from the end of the 1950s, and Church attendance dropped from 69 per cent in 1956 to 40 per cent by 1968, the decline of Church influence enabled Fortuna’s Divorce Bill, presented to Parliament in 1965, to be passed in 1970 (Ginsborg 1990, p 245). However, the subject of divorce was not new to the political agenda in Italy: as many as ten Bills had been presented between 1878 and 1965 (Clark et al. 1974, Caldwell 1978). In Divorzio all’italiana Mastroianni, with no recourse to divorce, resorts to calculated (mis)use of the law in order to murder his wife and remarry. His desire to remarry is important in the light of fears that divorce would spell the end of the family. In fact, the number of


marriages did not fall after the passing of the Divorce Bill, which allowed for the remarriage of separated persons, as well as for the legitimation of hitherto illicit separations and relationships resulting from migration in the 1950s (Caldwell 1978, p. 83). Following Article 587 of the 1930 Penal Code, which stipulates only three to seven years’ imprisonment for a crime of honour, Mastroianni turns his wife into an adultress to justify her murder as such a crime, and, after three years in prison, remarries. Until the reform of the law on adultery, his wife’s adultery was punishable by up to a year in prison, and would have given him legal grounds for separation. However, this is not enough for Mastroianni. First, the code of honour requires that his cuckoldry be avenged in a closely-knit community where all actions are public and reputation is everything. And second, separation would not have cleared the path to remarriage. His own adultery, on the other hand, would not have given his wife grounds for separation, and punishment would have been conditional on him moving his mistress into the marital home (Caldwell 1978, p. 77). While Mastroianni, the aristocratic baron, receives three years, the lowerclass wife of his wife’s lover is sentenced to the maximum of seven years after shooting her adulterous husband. Although Divorzio all’italiana began production as a drama about Sicilian honour, the influence of increasing freedoms elsewhere in Italy (exemplified by the showing at Mastroianni’s local cinema of the forbidden La dolce vita and its contemporary Roman laxities) soon turned it into a farcical satire of both pre-capitalist gender practices and the outdated legal system reinforcing them. Signs of new consumer products and changing lifestyles in the film are few but significant, such as Mastroianni’s use of a new technological product, the reel-to-reel tape recorder, as part of his old-fashioned scheming. A more potent signifier is his new young wife’s bikini, in which she sunbathes on the deck of their yacht in the closing scene of the film. A luxury item of clothing denoting leisure time fashionably spent tanning (with tanned skin no longer a sign of social inferiority and manual labour), the bikini is also indicative of new body freedoms for women no longer enclosed in the home, and is in diametric opposition to the black, baggy clothes which had for centuries enveloped them outdoors. Traditional patriarchal fears about femininity are heightened in this final scene. The film focuses on the exploits of the central male character, and, like Il mattatore, consists almost entirely of his flashback. The point of view of his wife, played by a beauty queen, a Daniela Rocca transformed into a monstrous, all-engulfing femininity, is never heard.


The film opens with Mastroianni returning home from prison on a train, and we share his fantasies and reminiscences about the events leading up to his imprisonment. The end of the film moves out of flashback mode to show his arrival and remarriage. However, the idyll of the final scene showing the newly-weds on the yacht is disrupted by a shot, for once out of view of Mastroianni and not in his control, of his wife playing footsie with another man. With this last shot, the audience is abruptly made aware of the precariousness of the masculine position. The exchange of a faithful, old-fashioned wife for a new, up-to-date model means that the patriarchal nightmare of cuckoldry will now begin in earnest. In terms of patriarchal capitalism, new freedoms for femininity spell more opportunities for masculinity to indulge in voyeurism and sexual gratification, and consequently also easier consumption and commodification of the female body and images of it. For the husband, on the other hand, it brings attendant problems of making female sexuality harder to police and keep out of circulation as use that is exchanged between men. In Matrimonio all’italiana the focus is traditional marriage. The city setting of Naples provides a less backward social context than the small provincial Sicilian towns of the other two films, but marriage is still based on pre-capitalist foundations, and particularly on the issue of paternity. In part this is due to the film’s origins in De Filippo’s play Filumena Marturano (1946), but the film takes the narrative beyond the immediate postwar period to complete the storyline in the mid-1960s. A television can be seen in the corner of a bedroom and in a glove shop, and buildings are shooting up, but Don Domenico (Mastroianni) and Filumena (Sofia Loren) are caught up in the ‘same old story’, as the former wryly observes. She has been trying to marry him for over two decades and he has resisted. Marriage in this film, as in many of the comedies, is the province of women. The opening shots show Mastroianni trying on the bride’s hat as he prepares for his wedding to another woman, immediately establishing the inevitable transvestism of masculinity, or the femininization of men, with marriage. With the news that Filumena is seriously ill, the narrative moves into a lengthy flashback as Domenico waits for the doctor, and recalls his first meeting with her during an air raid, and their subsequent affair over the next 22 years. The flashback ends when she sends for a priest and declares her dying wish to marry Domenico. Once married, she promptly gets out of bed and in a brief flashback reveals the motivation behind her deception to be the legitimation and guaranteed welfare of her three


sons through marriage. While her flashback is much shorter than Domenico’s, the fact that her point of view is given at all is exceptional. This can be explained both by the fame of Loren as a star in her own right by 1964 and by the fact that the play on which the film is based centres on her character. None the less, the main protagonist in the film is Mastroianni. Back in real time, he resorts to a law against entrapment to annul the marriage, only to remarry Filumena when she plays the paternity card (she tells him one of her sons is his, but not which one). As a clue she gives him a 100 lira note with the date of their son’s birth on it, a neat visual sign of her commodification in her career as a prostitute. The double standard which reinforces the patriarchal splitting of femininity into chaste, marriageable madonnas and sexual, unmarriageable Eves is also central to the Sicilian-based Sedotta e abbandonata. Having seduced the virginal, fifteen-year-old Agnese, Peppino refuses to marry her because she is no longer a virgin. Under the law he risks imprisonment if he does not marry her, because she is a minor. However, according to the code of honour on which the law was based, marriage was the legal ‘cure’ for rape, and, with female sexuality the repository of honour, served to reinstate the girl’s family in the public eye. Despite signs of the advent of new consumerism in the film (a television in the corner of a room, Peppino’s portable radio), society is still ruled by outdated laws and religious values (the family has regular recourse to a priest). Traditional pre-capitalist gender and family relations are still very much in evidence with the domineering presence of a violent patriarch, Agnese’s father. In this harshly satirical film, comedy derives from a generational difference in masculinity, with Agnese’s brother clearly not following in his father’s footsteps, and providing a token of hope for the future. A soundtrack of spaghetti western-style music (guitar and trombone) from a genre which took off in the same year (1964), dramatically accompanies the son, reluctantly following his family obligations to track and shoot down his sister’s seducer, in a sequence of shots underlining the absurdity of his mission. The importance of female virginity as a prize asset on the marriage market, with female reproductive power harnessed for patriarchal purposes, is central to the Sicilian practices that are the object of satire in this film. Close-ups of grotesque, ever-watchful faces (a type of shot also taken to parodic extremes in the spaghetti western) portray a community in which reputation is all. The commodification of the female body, already a characteristic of early capitalism, does not disappear as a result of social changes


accompanying advancing consumerism, an expanding media sector and urbanization. If anything, as suggested earlier, the new consumerist ethos combines with increasing feminine freedoms to create new means of commodifying the female body in its sexuality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in cultural production as exemplified by cinema, a medium particularly well equipped to exhibit and advertise the female body as a spectacle for voyeuristic consumption. With the transference of Church focus from cinema to television, the closing down of many parochial cinemas in the 1960s, the replacement of Pius XII in 1958 with the slightly more progressive John XXIII and the decline of Church influence generally came a degree of relaxation in film censorship from the end of the 1950s. This enabled the genre of the ‘sexy documentary’, with its token moralistic voice-over, to establish itself from the early 1960s. The floodgates were then open to overtly pornographic films and an unstoppable eroticization of Italian cinema generally, all of which would have been inconceivable in the early 1950s (Gundle 1990, pp. 218–19). Unlike the repression and displacement of desire into the mise en scène in melodrama, increased exposure of the female body and explicit sexual references are a feature of boom-time commedia all’italiana, with its strip scenes (Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti, Ieri, oggi, domani), bed scenes (Audace colpo, Il mattatore) and the ubiquitous depiction of trendy beach life populated by bikini-clad women (Il sorpasso, Il successo, the episode ‘Latin Lovers’ in I mostri). Of specific interest in this context is the exploitation by the genre of various aspects of the filmic process. The ability of film to play with time and movement, in itself not gender-specific, is basic to the workings of the camera eye, which is co-opted into patriarchal service and its normative, hierarchical gender agenda. In particular, freezing time, and so fixing spectator attention, is a feature of the still, and more characteristic of photography, the precursor of film. The opening titles and credits of Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti appear over stills including shots of parts of the female body. These stills advertise the film with the promise of explicit sexual content and more female exposure. While stills of the male characters show them fully clothed or in facial close-up looking away from camera, shots of Vicki Ludovisi, playing the stripper who joins the all-male team of I soliti ignoti, focus first on her bare torso, arms crossed to cover her implicitly bare breasts, and smiling alluringly into camera. Another medium close-up shows a back view of her right shoulder with black bra and white slip straps,


followed by a close-up of her thigh, and another of her legs in nylons, with tops showing. Interspersed with these shots of blonde, Northern Italian female sexual availability, is a medium, middle-body close-up of a woman in black dress and apron, with the focus on her hands mixing spaghetti in a bowl. This image of asexual female domesticity, functioning as diametric opposite, belongs to Claudia Cardinale’s darkhaired Sicilian character, preoccupied with housework and enclosed in the home by her brother. The title sequence of Il successo is made up not of stills, but of motion shots of fetishized female body parts. A panning point-of-view shot follows Gassman’s gaze as his eye travels up the back of a curvacious blonde woman in a shimmering, tight black top and leggings, the shiny texture contributing to the visual excess of the fetish. The camera then zooms into a close-up of her wiggling, glittering bottom as she walks in front of Gassman through the airport. She is unaware of his gaze, his voyeurism shared by other male characters and the cinema audience. The sexual content of this opening sequence is further compounded on a metadiscursive level in its parody of the arrival of Anita Ekberg (the epitome of blonde curvaciousness) at the airport at the beginning of La dolce vita, produced three years earlier and notorious for its sexual excesses. Gassman’s arrogant initial assumption that he, and not the woman, is the focus of media attention comically establishes him as a socially ambitious, sexual character. However, his transfixed gaze at her posterior does more than signal his sexual exploits in the rest of the film. Intruding on the parody in this sequence is overt sexual commodification of the female body as an image for audience consumption (both as ticket buyers and consumers of images). In Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti and Ieri, oggi, domani, similar masculine point-of-view panning and close-up shots show women sunbathing or stripping. These shots function to provide not just photolike stills, but, a voyeurist’s dream come true, lifelike sequences of the body in (sexual) motion. They commodify femininity specifically by fragmenting and objectifying the female body, focusing on body parts in a ‘“cutting up” of the body into partial objects (feet, hair, breasts, buttock, etc.)’, while, on a psychoanalytical plane, also fetishing them (Baudrillard 1981, p. 95). Commodification of the male body is, of course, also apparent in the films, but with the crucial difference that it is not commodified in its sexuality. In the context of marriage, with the male breadwinner as the traditional family head, masculinity is commodified in its labour power. The key film illustrating this is De Sica’s Il boom (1963). The


price of marriage for Sordi is literally a piece of his body. In order to maintain his wife and small son in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, he resorts to selling a one-eyed man one of his own eyes for 70,000 lire (this being the Italian equivalent of the metaphorical reference to things costing ‘an arm and a leg’). A psychoanalytical reading would, of course, locate the eye as distantly sexual in its relation to oedipal castration fears, for which it serves as a displacement from the phallus. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud analyses Hoffmann’s short story ‘The Sandman’, with its eye-fixation, in precisely this way: ‘A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated’ (Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 1985, p. 352). Such a reading would place the husband of Il boom in the position of being partially emasculated, not by a father-figure, but by femininity/marriage/the consumerist ethos. A rare case of overt sexual commodification of masculinity in line with that of femininity can be found in Loy’s Il marito (1958). In this film a wealthy widow who owns a construction company, and so the means of production as well as consumption, withdraws her offer to go into business with the married Sordi when he pulls out of their sexual liaison. Importantly, however, his commodification is neither successful nor depicted visually. Even in beach scenes of men with bare torso and legs, no panning or close-up shots ever draw particular erotic attention to male bodies. More commonly the comedies show masculinity making use of new feminine freedoms in order to have sex with different women, rather than having to wait until marriage or frequent prostitutes. This new practice adapts the sexual commodification of the female body to a function akin to that of the consumer disposable which can be frequently replaced. It is more like use which is exchanged (as in the case of prostitution) than the use-value of the wife. While the husbands in films like Una vita difficile and Il boom are not unfaithful, their devotion promoting the one-woman scenario of romance, other films derive comedy and satire from male characters showing trends combining consumerism with an anti-marital and nonromantic stance. With the price of marriage too high in terms of investment of productive power required to satisfy the demands of family consumption, together with easier access to the female body, the choice for masculinity seems clear. Mastroianni is happily married in I soliti ignoti, but a comic episode hints at the interference of the family with all-male activities, as his cine-camera footage, required to plan the jewel heist, is interrupted by


affectionate shots of his baby son, much to the annoyance of his colleagues. His family is replaced in the follow-up Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti by an unmarried couple fighting over custody of their son, while marriage to a girlfriend is sidestepped by one of the crooks with the promise of a fur coat instead. Gassman in Il sorpasso, as we have seen, considers commitment to one woman as outdated, preferring to move from one to the next as the opportunity arises. In Il mattatore Gassman prefers the company of women who are not interested in marriage, escaping from the marriage he was tricked into and returning to his easy bachelor lifestyle. Sordi in Il marito also takes time out from his marriage to go on the road as a travelling salesman, picking up women on the train en route, while the arch-consumerist Gassman in Il successo chooses serial sexual liaisons in preference to his marriage. The episode ‘Il sacrificato’ in I mostri features a male character driving from one ‘mistress’ to another, leaving whenever he wants to in order to return home to a fictitious wife whose (non)existence pre-empts the risk of him being lured into marriage. Avoidance of marriage and monogamy characterizes many of the films, with the car a key instrument in the flight from the domestic sphere. This is the main point made by the episode ‘Il vernissage’ in I mostri, in which a husband buys a Fiat 600 and immediately uses it to pick up a prostitute. The car provided a new area of private space which, unlike the home, allowed for mobile subjectivity and freedom from social constraints (Baudrillard 1996, pp. 65–9). The home, meanwhile, remained the traditional locus of consumption and femininity, and, in a period of advanced consumerism, exerted particular pressure on the head of the household to earn enough to pay for new products. These consisted not just of white goods, but also furniture and furnishings, for which Italian design and industry had become renowned on the international market (Sparke 1990). In 1958 it was estimated that Italian women were spending 4,100 billion lire a year (Valeri 1986, p. 141).13 Risi’s Poveri milionari of the same year aptly features the department store Grandi Magazzini as a central location to explore the home as place of consumption, and the role of femininity within it. The film is about two newly-wed couples struggling to set up home. Shortly after one husband (Renato Salvatore) is fired from his job, he is knocked down by a car, icon of the contemporary consumerist ethos, and suffers memory loss. In a perfect example of wish-fulfilment and self-creation of identity, he starts a new life with the owner of the car, the beautiful and wealthy Alice. The comic fantasy of this re-creation of the self is evident in the lifestyle of his new partner, who lives in a


mansion from wonderland with so many rooms she has no idea of their number. She gives away her fur coat to an incredulous waitress, commenting disdainfully that it is last year’s model. Crucially, she also owns Grandi Magazzini and appoints him as its director general. In other words, this sexualized fairy godmother allows him to be born again as a rich professional living in luxury, and cohabiting without having to marry. It is in his role of managing the pleasure palace of consumerism that he has the innovative idea of creating a living window display featuring a housewife in a fully-furnished bedroom and kitchen. As an exhibition of desirable lifestyle, this is a stroke of advertising genius. What makes it remarkable is the use of a live mannequin, in reality his own wife whom he does not recognize, as the ‘ideal wife’ in ideal, buyable surroundings (Figure 4). The window display attracts a crowd of male spectators who look on as, to Salvatore’s dismay, femininity ignores the script when the domesticated madonna suddenly becomes sexual. The ideal wife gets out of bed and, playing to her audience outside the shop (and in the cinema), slowly puts on her stockings. She then proceeds to the

Figure 4 Femininity on display: screen and shop window combine to advertise femininity and lifestyle in Risi’s Poveri milionari (1958), with Sylva Koscina.


kitchen, where she also subverts the ideal of the good housewife by accidentally dropping an egg on the floor and, having already undermined the fiction of the display by looking directly at her audience, completes the process as her clumsiness ends with egg splashed over the window. The shop window through which she performs reproduces similar dynamics of spectatorship to those of the cinema screen. As Bowlby observes: ‘As both barrier and transparent substance, representing freedom of view joined to suspension of access, the shop window figures an ambivalent, powerful union of distance and desire’ (Bowlby 1985, p. 32). However, there is a difference in that there is a real woman just behind the window. This classic scene encapsulates the objectification and commodification of femininity. Cinema screen and shop window are collapsed together as promoters of sexual and materialist desires that appear fulfillable by virtue of the apparent accessibility of the real woman behind the glass, and of the goods and lifestyle she advertises that can be bought inside the shop. The fantasy ends and financial problems return for Salvatore when he regains his memory and prior identity, and Alice strips him of the director generalship when he is reunited with his wife. While Alice as owner of a department store and provider of his fantasy identity represents the epitome of consumer culture, his wife represents traditional values (although the threat of a duplicitous, sexual femininity is of course never far away). His distaste for luxury food (he turns down the comically ridiculous number of little fancy dishes served him at great speed in Alice’s mansion for a plate of spaghetti) indicates a wholesome desire for tradition and simplicity rather than the proliferating choices of a new consumerist culture. However, setting up home in this era is difficult, and is depicted in the film as the business of adults. Salvatore’s accident takes place after a row with his wife when the beds he has ordered turn out, significantly, to be child-size. The other couple, in the meantime, live in a flat open to the street as they cannot afford to have windows fitted. Both couples have merely played house, and the film ends with them moving permanently back in with their parents. Apart from the shop window job, taken by the wife in a desperate attempt to make her husband recognize her, the wives in Poveri milionari do not work. It seems that the price of marriage is paid exclusively by their husbands. However, as we have seen, there are wives in other films who earn good salaries and share the cost of domestic consumption. In Il successo Gassman’s wife (Anouk Aimée) has a well-paid job in an embassy, drives a car and, importantly, is content with


married life. In Il giovedı` Gassman’s live-in girlfriend has a good salary, while he is unemployed and unwilling to pull his weight financially. Another minor female character, Gassman’s estranged wife in Il sorpasso, has a lucrative job in advertising, in other words, at the heart of the consumer industry itself. She can even afford to pay him to have their marriage annulled. What these female characters have in common is independence and poise, in sharp contrast to melodramatic femininity. They also provide, albeit from the margins, a serious foil to the comic desperation of male characters at the centre of the film. These are striking new depictions of contemporary femininity in a genre dominated by masculinity. Other depictions, however, continue the dominant cinematic tradition of femininity portrayed in its sexuality, in other words, how women look rather than what they achieve. Loren’s central role in Ieri, oggi, domani, for instance, is limited to motherhood in ‘Adelina’, adultery in ‘Anna’ and prostitution in ‘Mara’, her striptease in the final episode ensuring the box office success of the film. New material, on the other hand, is provided for the representation of masculinity by the pressures of the contemporary consumerist ethos on the traditional gender of productive power. The portrayal of the boom in commedia all’italiana centres on the satire of a masculinity which commodifies social relations. Meanwhile another, contemporaneous genre was striking a popular chord. This was the peplum, which fed fantasies of escapism in those whom the boom had completely bypassed.

3 Heroic Bodies: The Cult of Masculinity in the Peplum

Introduction The peplum is a fantasy genre celebrating musclebound masculinity in heroic action in the distant prehistorical, pre-industrialized past, and often in unidentifiable countries. Some 300 of these Italian spectacle films were produced between 1957 and 1965, the years when the genre was at its peak. This period coincided with the boom, from which the genre is regarded as providing escapism for those excluded from the new, increasingly industrialized base of economic prosperity.1 Classified as a sub-category of the adventure genre, the peplum sometimes combines with other genres, such as horror (for example, Gentilomo’s Maciste contro il vampiro).2 Overlap with comedy, as in Cerchio’s Totò contro Maciste, further accentuates the element of parody already inherent in the genre, an element impacting on gender portrayal, as we shall see. Also known as ‘sword and sandal’ or ‘muscleman’ films (and in Italy often as film storico-mitologico), many of them were co-productions, used an international cast and met with great commercial success both in Italy and abroad. Unlike melodrama and commedia all’italiana, the peplum is not steeped in italianità, a factor that helped to make it more suitable for the export market. The films are particularly renowned for their depiction of mythical (Achilles, Ajax, Hercules, Theseus, Ulysses), invented (Maciste), literary (Saetta, Ursus), historical (Spartacus, Thaur) or biblical (Goliath, Samson) apotheoses of the heroic male body. The genre was first labelled peplum in French criticism of the early 1960s, using this Latinized version of the Greek term ‘peplos’ to refer to the short skirt worn by heroes. The peplos was originally a voluminous piece of cloth worn floor-length by Greek women until the fifth century 97

98 Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre BC,

when it was replaced by the chiton, a woollen tunic worn long by the Ionians and short by the Dorians (Cammarota 1987, pp. 6–7). In the peplum films, female characters wear both long and short versions of this tunic, as do male characters. The focus in current critical work on the genre tends to concentrate on the exposed heroic male body in a short peplum or loincloth, and of course the high-profile muscle is hard to ignore. However, exposure of the female body is also a feature of the films, with censorship remaining an issue. The Maciste films, for instance, were forbidden to minors under sixteen years of age by the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (Cammarota 1987, p. 75). The cinematic genesis of the genre has its roots in the pre-First World War historical epic film spectacles on ancient Rome, which placed Italian cinema on the world map in terms of export (Brunetta 1993, III, pp. 538–604). On the heels of early films based on literature, notably Maggi’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (1908) (taken from Lytton’s eponymous novel of 1875), a first cycle of silent Italian muscleman films ran from 1913 to 1926.3 Also feeding into this genre were popular adventure and romance stories in feuilleton and comic strip formats (with fumetti, or comics, born at the same time as the first peplum series) (Cammarota 1987, p. 22). An influence of longer standing was the popular tradition of chain-breaking, fire-breathing strongman shows in public squares and circuses (Ghigi 1977, p. 733). The first cinematic muscleman was the literature-based Ursus, played by Bruto Castellani in Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? (1913) (taken from the eponymous novel of 1895 by Sienkiewicz). However, it was the invented Italian figure of Maciste, a freed slave from the Marche played by the dockworker Bartolomeo Pagano in Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), who really captured audience attention. The film was based on the novel Cartagine in fiamme (1908) by Salgari, a popular Italian writer of adventure stories, including westerns, which were in vogue at the time. The name of Maciste replaced that of Sidone in the novel, and was invented by Gabriele D’Annunzio, the decadent poet and novelist whose association with the film (renaming characters and writing intertitles based on the novel) gave it high cultural credibility. Pagano went on to play Maciste in a series of 18 silent films based on this figure from 1914 to 1926. Other heroes in this first cycle included Achilles, Hercules, Saetta and Samson. Isolated films with peplum elements continued to be made thereafter (Gallone’s Scipio l’Africano, 1937, Blasetti’s La corona di ferro, 1941, and Fabiola, 1949). In the 1950s Hollywood renewed its interest in epic spectacle, and the success in Italy of the American remake of Quo Vadis? by Le Roy in

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1951, as well as the popularity of the Italo-American Ulisse by Camerini in 1954, helped to stimulate production of the second Italian peplum cycle. Both Italian and Hollywood cycles of the 1950s and 1960s were produced in the peak period of technicolour, and their particular attention to production values reflected technological advances in the cinema industry. In the case of Italy, these were utilized in response to a crisis of falling audience figures attributed to competition from Hollywood imports and the spread of television (1956, the period when television was beginning to establish itself across Italy, saw a fall of 29 million in cinema audience figures, and a drop of 670 million lire in box office receipts) (Ghigi 1977, p. 735). As it developed, the Italian peplum cycle was characterized by the hybrid, cross-national nature of much of its production, partnerships motivated by reasons that were mainly economic (co-production with the US and France helping with the costs of making and distributing films, as well as expanding the export and exhibition sector). The Italian cycle was inaugurated in the late 1950s by a pair of lowbudget Hercules films directed by Pietro Francisci and starring Steve Reeves, an American bodybuilder of peasant origins who became Mr Pacific in 1946, Mr America in 1947 and Mr Universe in 1948 and 1950. Francisci had already made several low-cost films on mythical (La regina di Saba, 1952), ancient historical (Attila, 1955) and literary romantic (Orlando e i paladini di Francia, 1956) themes. The commercial success of the latter, which made almost seven times more in receipts than the 80 million lire it had cost to produce, spurred him on to the first Hercules production. The first film, Le fatiche di Ercole (1957), cost less than 300 million lire to produce, and grossed 887 million lire in little more than a season, outperforming all other contemporary films, including those by auteurs (Ghigi 1977, p. 736).4 Export success followed, with Joseph E. Levine of Embassy Pictures buying the rights for the film (dubbed into English as Hercules in 1959) to be shown in the US for a mere 120,000 dollars. The film made more than 18 million dollars in one year alone. Six hundred copies were made for simultaneous distribution in America, while barely thirty copies circulated in Italy. Francisci’s second peplum, Ercole e la regina di Lidia (1958), made 3 million lire more in its first season than the first film, and, dubbed into English as Hercules Unchained in 1960, became the biggest grossing film in England that year, showing in 4,000 cinemas. The scale of Levine’s advertising campaign for this film was unprecedented, with more money spent on advertising on television, in newspapers, posters and related merchandise, than was spent on


production costs. Peplum production, constituting only 4 per cent of Italy’s film production in 1958, rose to 13 per cent in 1961, and after a dip to 8 per cent in 1962, went up again to 15 per cent in 1963 and 1964. A drop to 8 per cent in 1965 signalled the demise of the genre, which gave way to the spaghetti western in the adventure strand (Ghigi 1977, p. 736). The peplum contributed significantly to film exports. Whereas in the 1940s and 1950s 75 per cent of films exported had been made up of art films, in the 1960s the peplum made up as much as 46 per cent of exported films (Wagstaff 1993). Other peplum directors in this second cycle included Mario Bava (also director of photography for Francisci’s Hercules films), Vittorio Cottafavi, Riccardo Freda and Sergio Leone, with Bava and Freda also associated with the horror genre, and Leone with the spaghetti western. The two main recurring male heroes in this cycle are Hercules and Maciste, each giving rise to a series of 22 and 26 films respectively (Cammarota 1987). Maciste was relaunched, on the heels of Francisci’s first successful Hercules film, in Campogalliani’s Maciste nella valle dei re (1959), starring Mark Forrest. For export, however, the Maciste films were retitled using a variety of more universally familiar heroic names. Hercules, on the other hand, is a well-known figure from Greek and Roman mythology. The third century BC Argonautica, by Apollonius of Rhodes, was used as a source by Francisci, this mythological context arguably providing the most interesting peplum hero of all, in that Hercules has a detailed history (even though the films often deviate from the original text to meet cinematic needs). The name of Maciste is linked to Hercules by its inventor, D’Annunzio, who cites it as an ancient appellation for the demi-god.5 The word itself originates in the Greek makistos, the superlative of makros, meaning ‘long’, or the Latin macis, meaning ‘rock’ (in several of the films Maciste claims that he was born from the rock). Other, shorter series feature Goliath, Saetta, Samson, Spartacus, Thaur, Ulysses and Ursus, with films made during the decline of the genre sometimes including combinations of two or more of these heroes. These heroes were initially played by a series of American bodybuilders and musclemen rather than professional actors, with Steve Reeves setting the trend. In so doing, Reeves brought the sport of bodybuilding to a wider audience, as well as initiating the American 1950sstyle greased hair quiff, imitated by other musclemen-actors (Farassino and Sanguineti 1983, pp. 87–8). At the same time, Reeves facilitated the entry of the classical body into popular culture (Wyke 1997a). His popularity established an iconic style for subsequent musclemen heroes, who were mostly interchangeable in their characteristics and

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narrative roles. In terms of domestic box office revenue, the use of American musclemen like Steve Reeves, Ed Fury, Mark Forrest, Brad Harris, Gordon Mitchell, Reg Park, Gordon Scott and Rock Stevens was designed to attract audiences addicted to Hollywood productions. However, the use of non-Italian stars was not in itself an unusual feature in postwar Italian cinema, being in part a response to the paucity of native male stars. As a result of this trend, Italian bodybuilders later acted under assumed American names (Sergio Ciani became Alan Steel, and Adriano Bellini called himself Kirk Morris).6 Postwar memory of the US liberation of Italy would also have added to the existing popularity of American male stars. Their use in the role of heroic protectors of the oppressed in the peplum films may have struck a positive chord in relation to these historical events of over a decade earlier (while, on the other hand, postwar dumping on the Italian market of American films under the US occupation caused serious damage to the Italian cinema industry). The composition of the peplum audience in terms of class, topography and gender is of relevance here. The peplum films produced by Romana Film, for instance, were specifically aimed at terza visione cinemas in Naples and the South, where these films were particularly popular, prior to the replacement of this circuit by television networks (Wagstaff 1995, pp. 112–13). The typical Italian audience of this peplum cycle was mainly lower class (proletarian and peasant), poorly educated (semi-literate or illiterate), and predominantly inner-city, Southern or provincial, viewing these films in seconda or terza visione cinemas with ticket prices under 300 lire (Ghigi 1977, pp. 737, 743, Wyke 1997, p. 64). This audience included children, with the peplum itself also interpreted by one of its directors, Domenico Paolella, as childlike, in that it depended on visual rather than literate culture, and was led by emotion rather than intellect (Paolella 1965). This is in sharp contrast to both the educated bourgeois audience of the earlier silent peplum cycle, who needed to be literate to read the intertitles, and the prima visione audience for 1960s auteur films in the Northern industrial centres (Ghigi 1977, p. 737). One successful precursor to the peplum cycle, Camerini’s Ulisse (1954), fared especially well in Sicily, grossing 10 million lire in both Catania and Messina (Ghigi 1977, p. 733). The fact that the strongman was part of rural tradition would also have helped predispose rural audiences to his cinematic variant, notably in an era of South to North migration of unskilled muscle power in the industrial context of the economic boom where this type of labour came a poor second (Dyer


1997a, pp. 168–9). In this sense, the heroic muscleman of the peplum offered reassurance to unskilled male audiences by validating muscle power over and above intellectual and other skills, a reassurance mirrored on the political plane by the hero’s status as man of the people, rather than ruler, a role he openly rejects. At the same time, the use of muscle in protecting the oppressed, often of another race and colour, conjures up links not only with the American liberation of Italy from the Nazis, but also with Italy’s own Fascist (and pre-Fascist) emphasis on colonial aspiration and Romanness, links which have been explored in relation to the whiteness of the peplum hero (Dyer 1997a). From the multiple identity viewpoint of spectatorship, identification can therefore be hypothesized as taking place with both the liberating hero (offering validation of outdated traditional male muscle power in an era of economic boom and industrial advancement) and the liberated (a reminder of being rescued in the specific historical context of the Liberation, but also feeding fantasies of powerlessness in line with masochism and infantilism). From a gender perspective, the role of musclebound liberator has of course traditionally been associated with masculinity, and the latter fantasies with femininity.7 However, in the context of multiple identity spectatorship, the spectator would shift at will in identification and fantasy work between masculine- or feminine-associated roles. In terms of gender-specific audience targeting by the peplum film market, not only men but also women were deliberately catered for by musclebound male bodies. Steve Reeves was chosen to portray Hercules for his appeal to women, an androgynous combination of ‘muscle and beauty’ (Farassino and Sanguineti 1983, p. 90, Wyke 1997, p. 66). As Ghigi puts it, he had the face of an angel on the body of Hercules (Ghigi 1977, p. 736), thereby departing from his mythological characteristic of mere brutish muscle power (which is how he appears in Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts, 1963) for broader audience appeal. Pagano and the strongmen of the first peplum cycle, unlike those of the second, were ‘rarely pretty’ (Lagny 1992, p. 171). Men were also catered for by the many exposed female bodies in the peplum, whether disempowered exposed female bodies in need of rescuing, or excitingly and dangerously empowered exposed female bodies expressing desire and autonomy. The spectrum of actual (rather than planned) appeal is of course broader. Sexualities other than licit heterosexuality are also provided for, with female eroticism feeding into lesbian and female bisexual fantasies, while the male bodies on show (as indeed the male bodybuilding cult itself) also cater for male homosexuality and bisexuality.

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The degree of planning for spectator appeal and identification is evidenced by a set of rules for the production of the peplum drawn up by Tessari (a director of several peplum films who later went on to direct spaghetti westerns), rules which also illustrate the formulaic nature of the genre. Rule three, for instance, specifies the significance of the colour of costumes in relation to audience response to individual characters: white or yellow indicate ‘good’ characters, black or red indicate those who are ‘bad’. Tessari explains: ‘The audience must recognize immediately which characters to side with’ (Ghigi 1977, p. 738). Of special relevance to gender portrayal are rules two and eight. Rule two relates to the number and gender of characters involved in the romantic side of the plot, and specifies at least three characters, the two competing ones being male rather than female (thereby reinforcing patriarchy’s insistence on male, rather than female, sexual desire and proactivity, as well as the Lévi-Straussian view of male competition for a never-sufficient supply of female bodies and chattels): ‘The love story should never be limited to only two characters. It is better to present one woman loved by two men than two women in love with the same man’ (Ghigi 1977, p. 738). In practice many pepla disobey this rule, mirroring the characteristically patriarchal splitting of femininity into asexual madonna/wife and sexual Eve/mistress. This split is regularly embodied by two competing female characters in the films (for example, Iole and Omphale in Ercole e la regina di Lidia, and Deianira and Hippolita in Gli amori di Ercole). An archetypally misogynous rule eight splits femininity into old and young, following patriarchy’s emphasis on the centrality of age in evaluating different life stages of femininity (an exclusively sexual evaluation applied to femininity but not masculinity) (Ardener 1978): ‘There should be at least two female characters: one old and cadaverous and one young, ingenuous and silly. At the end the evil one redeems herself by dying to save the young one’ (Ghigi 1977, p. 738). These rules underline the patriarchal thrust of the peplum in terms of representation of gender relations (while the final product in terms of the consumption of the film is, of course, more multivalent). Direction and production of the peplum were in all-male hands in an era which, with its sexist traditions, helped spur on the contemporary resurgence of the women’s movement in Italy. The distant, pre-industrial, rural settings of the peplum evoke an elemental period representing an early melting pot of gender relations and sexuality, as well as providing reassuring escapism from rapid industrial, consumerist development for those unable to participate. As far as gender portrayal in particular is


concerned, however, the patriarchal drive inherent in many aspects of the peplum’s portrayal of femininity is indicative of reassurance in the form of reaction. While Cammarota and Spinazzola may argue that historical reality is transformed reassuringly into metahistorical unreality in the peplum, the fact remains that social reality in terms of gender relations in these films remains securely anchored in the patriarchal status quo. The films ultimately propagate an essentialist version of gender and sexuality in line with patriarchy’s fundamentally unchanging inflection of these social categories. However, the film as vehicle for signification is multivalent, and patriarchal ideological tendentiousness conflicts with signification itself as process, and therefore as subject to negotiation. The filmic arena for signification includes both visual and sound elements, with the former particularly to the fore in genres like the peplum (allowing also for the use of American stars who spoke no Italian), as opposed to the more dialogue-based melodrama and verbal forms of comedy. The tendency of the peplum to prioritize the visual element over dialogue is captured in Tessari’s rule nine: ‘Much smoke and fire should be used: a brazier, a burning tent, or a flaming spear are worth more than any dialogue’ (Ghigi 1977, p. 739). The element of colourful spectacle and action as cinematic entertainment is very much to the forefront in the peplum, with the body-as-spectacle a major focal point. Importantly for our purposes, the visually simplistic, comic strip extremes of signification favoured by the peplum provide easily digestible fare.8 The peplum deals in visual superlatives and starkly differentiating characteristics inscribed on the body as a new technicolour landscape. The body in all its detail of contour and colour is available for close-up scrutiny and the negotiation of gender, sexuality and race, a process which is explored in the following section.

Negotiating gender, sexuality and race The specific qualities of cinematic discourse, in conjunction with historical, cultural and socioeconomic context, have a crucial bearing on the representation of gender, sexuality and race, and the way these are negotiated at the point of consumption. Properties specific to the construction of the cinematic image and its soundtrack are crucial in shaping the relationship between screen and audience, with point of view dictated by the camera eye through an array of different types of shot and editing styles. In particular, consumption of the enlarged cinematic screen-as-surface also offers participation in a dynamic of

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desire set in motion by the various mechanisms of identification, voyeurism, fetishism and scopophilia, all contributing to the sheer complexities of the gaze in a cinematic context. With its parodic extremes of signification, the peplum rehearses this dynamic in a particularly overt way. Identification with screen images of the body has been traced back in film theory to one particularly crucial stage in infantile psychosexual development (Metz 1982, Cowie 1997). This is Lacan’s mirror stage (occurring between the ages of six and eighteen months), entailing identification with the image of the self in the mirror, and the initial fulfilment of the phantasy of bodily unity (Lacan 1985). This phase is the matrix and first tracing of the future ego (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, p. 251). The mirror stage was theorized by Lacan as inaugurating, in the first instance, a pleasurable, narcissistic affirmation of identity, at the point when the self is perceived in the mirror for the first time as differentiated from the outside world and from its surroundings. No longer an indistinct mass of libidinal energies merged with the mother, the self is quite literally seen to take shape, a shape with which identification can take place as a result of the apparent correspondence of the mirror image with the imagined and desired unified image, or imago. Following on from this first phase of primary narcissism, a second, less pleasurable phase, situates this new, separate self among others, in a moment of socialization and recognition of sexual difference marked by entry into the symbolic, with language and naming taking over, but not obliterating, memory of the initial phase. Another, later stage in infantile identity-formation is Freud’s Oedipus complex (at its peak from the ages of three to five years), important in terms of further, particularly anxiety-inducing, perceptions of sexual difference (see chapter 1). Viewing images of the body on screen (and indeed in all subsequent mirrors) allows for reiteration of the first, narcissistic identificatory process, and the pleasurable sensation it generated, in a reaffirmation of identity and subjectivity in differentiation from the other and the outside world. The hyperbolically well-defined masculine body shape in the peplum particularly facilitates the re-enactment of the narcissistic recognition of the imago, or ideal ego of the unified, separate body (with horror and spaghetti western genres also playing out this desire for wholeness and separation, as we shall see in later chapters). However, there is a twofold downside. First, this pleasurable identificatory process is located only in an image, in the insubstantiality of surface. Second, there is a gap between this image and the


viewing self, a gap created by the doubling, splitting and distancing perceived between the self in relation to its image. The location of identification in a mere image or surface underlines the illusory nature of the entire process, while perception of the gap between the image and the self means that pleasurable feelings of autonomy and mastery in identification are offset by a sense of lack and loss. As a result, the image itself is already perceived as absence (Metz 1982). Importantly, it is in this gap that desire is located, with its defining features of distance, unattainability and lack. Attempts to satisfy desire, to bridge the gap, fuel the compulsion to look (a key component of spectatorship), while pleasure-in-looking (scopophilia) derives in part from narcissistic identification with the image, in other words, from the positive and empowering element of the identificatory process, however short-lived and ultimately illusory. Also feeding into the pleasures of the look are two anxieties rooted in the fear of powerlessness: anxiety about the fragmented body in relation to the mirror stage (Lacan’s corps morcelé), and anxiety about sexual difference compounded by the Oedipus complex. Both these anxieties result in the fetishism of body parts or objects representing them. Discussions of fetishism usually refer only to the anxiety of sexual difference associated with the oedipal phase. However, the role of the fragmented, incoherent body shape of the infantile stage, which precedes the Oedipus complex, cannot be ignored. Lacan’s corps morcelé refers to the infantile human body, which, compared to other animals, is born prematurely, and for a long period remains dependent on and psychically merged with the m/other. For both sexes, the anticipated sense of a separate, unified and coherent self begins to replace that of fragmentation and shapelessness during the mirror stage. Importantly, the anxiety relating to both fragmentation and separation continues in life as part of the ongoing process of identification. The oedipal phase, on the other hand, inaugurates anxiety about sexual difference located in fear of castration by the father on the part of the male child/spectator (that is, fear of loss of the phallus, or, specifically, what the phallus symbolizes in terms of power). The male child remains caught between opposing feelings of acceptance and disavowal on recognizing what appears to be his mother’s existing (and by implication, his own impending) castration. For the female child/spectator there is the realization, and after that reminder, of lacking the phallus. The search for reassurance leads to fetishism, or sexual over-valuation, of female body parts or their representatives (Freud, in his essay ‘Fetishism’, suggests the foot or shoe, velvet and

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fur) (Freud 1984, p. 354). It is on the female body as a whole or on its parts that the male-dominated culture industry of cinema generally focuses, with its male camera eye, to provide fetishistic appeasement for the prioritized male spectator. The entire female body or parts of it are objectified and given phallic status in a cinematic disavowal of difference which in fact comes full circle to undermine patriarchy’s hierarchization of the genders. In other words, by empowering cinematic images of women, especially in whole-body shots, with phallic status, the male spectator could argue as follows: women do possess/are the phallus, they have not lost it, they are no different from me, and therefore I, as a man, am also in no danger of losing mine/my (sexual) power. Fetishism of the female, rather than the male, body, then, dominates in cinema, resulting from anxieties concerning fragmentation and sexual difference rooted in basic fears of powerlessess. These fears are commonly relocated onto the female body, specifically the body of the m/other, separation from which is a vital part of individuation and recognition of a unified, independent self (a characteristic of horror, which rehearses male fears of helplessness and female incorporation). Extreme strategies of separation and individuation used by masculinity to define and differentiate itself against femininity can lead to misogyny, a trait running through many cinematic genres, often in ways specific to each genre (Benjamin 1990). As we shall see, fetishistic strategies aimed at allaying the various anxieties rooted in fear of powerlessness, are in part transferred onto the male body to provide the defining features of the cult of masculinity as embodied by the peplum hero (after which they are taken up and adapted by the spaghetti western). Taking the heroic male body as the point of reference, how does the peplum negotiate gender, sexuality and race? Starting with sexuality, this notion is taken to encompass both sexual desire and its object choice (opposite sex for heterosexuality, same sex for homosexuality and lesbianism, both sexes for bisexuality). Heterosexual activity in the peplum films can be further divided into the licit (procreational, domestic) and illicit (recreational, extra-domestic). In the two Francisci films that launched the second peplum cycle, licit, domesticated heterosexuality provides a framework for sexual desire (the relationship between Hercules and Iole set up at the beginning of Le fatiche di Ercole with their first encounter, and an early scene underlining their newly married status in Ercole e la regina di Lidia, both films also ending with their embrace). However, this framework is tokenistic and sketchy.


Between this beginning and ending, in other words, within a licit, heterosexual frame, the films explore other forms of desire for the audience to negotiate and position themselves in relation to, with episodes of illicit heterosexuality punctuating a homoerotic baseline. Even at the level of the framework, heterosexuality is constantly put on hold, denied and ultimately postponed until the final cursory moments of closure. Sexuality will be explored further in the next section, where it will be argued that underlying homoeroticism in the films is the powerful and fundamental dynamic of homosociality, or relations between men, on which patriarchy is founded. The term ‘gender’ has for some decades now been used in feminist theory to denote social gender in terms of femininity and masculinity as clusters of culturally determined attributes, and distinct from biological sex in terms of female and male. However, the sex–gender binary, with its biological versus sociocultural association proving indispensable in exposing patriarchy’s biological essentialism, may have outlived its theoretical usefulness and be in the process of being closed down. Gender is now perceived to include sex, with both terms connoting the social sphere. As Butler argues, the biologically-sexed body has limited use as a fixed, unchanging premise on which to base an economy of social gender, because it is in itself not ‘natural’, but, like gender, is also open to sociocultural readings (Butler 1993). The biologically malesexed, musclebound body on central display in the peplum is at the apotheosis of its muscular development and is very much a constructed, built body. To develop the body to this degree requires work, time, discipline and a certain degree of wealth (Dyer 1997a). In the process, the biological body is reshaped according to cultural definitions of ideal masculinity. To reiterate Butler’s view, it is not that the material (biological) body does not matter, but that the body inevitably signifies (Butler 1993). The (built) material body signifies according to historical, cultural and socioeconomic context. The musclebound heroic body, however pumped up, cannot exceed or escape from the process of signification of which it is a part. The excessive, overdetermined and parodic nature of the signifying properties of the heroic, built body, pulls away from the furthest opposite extremes of femininity, and of weaker, culturally determined inferior other male bodies. It is as racially inferior, often darker-skinned than the lightly tanned hero, more brutish, less hairy, strategically less intelligent and often on the side of ‘evil’ that other male bodies are lined up against the relative whiteness, competence and ‘goodness’ of the peplum hero, in the process of cinematic negotiation of racial hier-

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archy in visual and narrative fields. As Dyer points out in ‘The White Man’s Muscles’, the peplum made use of two black bodybuilders, Paul Wynter and Serge Nubret, but never as heroes, concluding that ‘the built body and the imperial enterprise are analogous’ (Dyer 1997a, pp. 148, 165). In terms of the gender hierarchy, both across the genders and within masculinity, the hyperbolic degree of differentiation from femininity and effeminate male bodies by the pumped-up male body results in what amounts to fetishism of the already potent phallus, with individual pectorals or biceps fragmented off and highlighted by the shot. When the body in its entirety is the focus of the camera eye, there is a reversal of fetishism’s common metonymy (a part for the whole). There is an obvious link between the pumped-up body and the erect penis, with the latter of course the biological base of the culturally symbolic phallus as marker of sexual difference within patriarchy. This fetishistic display of the male body may be read as indicating anxieties about both sexual difference and fragmentation of the body, under cover of excess and parody which function, like Freudian negation, to couch affirmation of an anxiety in denial. Crucially for the analysis of the negotiation of gender, sexuality and race in the peplum, the heroic body, in the process of signification taking place on screen, is necessarily linked to its opposites, to what it is not. The model of gender is therefore that of a social category which signifies as process rather than a given, and specifically in ways that are interactive and relational. In the process of its performativity, gender interacts with other categories of social identification: sexuality, race, nationality, class, age, familial role. Gender, like the other categories, is relational in that, as clusters of culturally determined attributes, masculinity and femininity are definable in relation to each other in a reciprocal way, but in a relationship determined by difference. This difference is both insisted upon and hierarchized by patriarchy’s heterosexual imperative. These modes of interrelation shift and change as the narrative progresses. Indeed, narrative itself could be read as a process, or series, of crystallizing points at which differences intersect and cohere. Cultural production, particularly of the fantastical variety, often toys with differentiation and liminality, such as the borderline between the living and the dead (in horror), between human and machine (in sci-fi), and between human and divine (in mythology), as in the case of the demi-god Hercules (son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene) who discards his divinity in Le fatiche di Ercole. Fantastical narrative explores and shifts boundaries, invoking the carnivalesque,


the world upside down, as it rehearses, reshapes and, above all, negotiates difference as a process, and not as a given. It is in this sense that gender is also performative, performed on the body-as-surface, and performed through repetition as process (Butler 1990). The ways in which the peplum as filmic text negotiates differentiation as a process in term of gender, sexuality and race generate viewing pleasure specifically in relation to desire and to identificatory fantasies. In terms of gender construction, the heroic, built, musclebound male body in the peplum is the site of representation of a particular idealized masculine physicality. In one sense this contradicts the usual patriarchal binary apportioning of gender characteristics whereby femininity, and not masculinity, is defined and circumscribed by the body, and masculinity is associated with the mind in a set of interlinking binary oppositions dating back to the Greeks (masculinity–femininity, mind–body, intellect–emotion, culture–nature, activity–passivity) (Maclean 1985). This contradiction, while revealing the incoherence of patriarchal ideology, can also be accounted for in terms of a class inflection of patriarchy. The appeal of muscular masculinity to a mostly lower-class audience (from strongman displays in circuses and town squares to cinematic peplum heroes) effects a valorization of the male body at the level of popular culture, while mind and intellect are the terrain of higher-class masculinity. Also feeding into this emphasis on the centrality of the body to masculinity are the twin anxieties of sexual difference and infantile body fragmentation, discussed earlier. At the same time, the erotic appeal of the semi-naked, pumped-up male body as object of desire knows no boundaries of class, gender, sexuality, race or age. Representation of physically heroic masculinity in the peplum is achieved by means of tactics of differentiation from femininity as well as from other masculinities regarding what the hero does and how he looks, rather than what he says (thereby allowing for little character development). This is brought about cinematically by varying combinations of narrative, visuals and soundtrack. The narrative, in the form of action scenes contributing to a plot, contrasts heroic feats with the lesser deeds of other male characters, or the ineffectual actions or inaction of other characters, male and female; in other words, heroic action that is effective enough to contribute to narrative progression and closure. Visually, the heroic male body is differentiated from other bodies using specific types of mise en scène, with scenes focusing on the muscular heroic body in action alongside or against other bodies which are iconographically marked as less effective or inferior. These

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markers may indicate gender inferiority (signalling femininity, or, in the male body, effeminateness due to youth, or to certain racial characteristics, such as long curly hair) or racial inferiority, as described above. Other types of mise en scène represent static scenes, straight from body-building, showing the pumped-up male body posing and on display outside the narrative, and in clear differentiation from other bodies (for example, the upshot of a fully pumped-up, posing Hercules in Le fatiche di Ercole, smiling as if to show an audience the effortlessness involved, and flanked by the shorter Castor and Pollox on a hillock). Alternatively, solitary poses of the hero, often on his first appearance in the film, are again shot from below to accentuate his height and importance, as in bodybuilding photography. As Dyer observes, these poses frequently take place near water to link the hero with the elements and a magical, superhuman birth (Dyer 1997a, p. 167). In Ercole al centro della terra Hercules (Reg Park) is first viewed from below in a shot panning up a waterfall whose source is situated at penis level, connoting ejaculation on a massive scale and hence super-phallic masculinity. In Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas, the upshot introducing Maciste (Kirk Morris) shows him high on a hillock overlooking a river, into which he hurls a spear to kill a monster. The setting of the heroic mise en scène, usually in natural, outdoor, public space, is a crucial element in the iconography of this form of idealized masculinity, for reasons which will shortly become apparent. As far as the soundtrack is concerned, in addition to sounds belonging to the diegesis, extradiegetic sounds (music, speech and other noises from outside the narrative) reinforce narrative and visual indicators of male perfection constructed and measured in relation to inferior versions. Examples are the recurring, grandiose brass fanfare motif whenever Hercules appears in Ercole contro Roma and, in Le fatiche di Ercole, the male voice-over extolling the abilities of Hercules as he poses alongside Castor and Pollox, and the supernatural, sci-fi-style sound effects accompanying his superhuman discus throw and defeat of the bull. In terms of differentiation and separation from femininity, the peplum hero appears to follow the hero of classical myth, who, as Hartsock argues, actively rejects the feminine, domestic, familial, heterosexual sphere, associated by patriarchy with passivity and inaction, and where life is created and preserved. Instead, he chooses to pursue death, rather than life, with a zeal which marks him out from others (Hartsock 1985). The peplum hero (as has also been observed of the contemporary Hollywood action hero) is generally placeless (Tasker


1993).9 Maciste, born of a rock rather than of a woman, has no fixed home and no tie to femininity. Hercules, on the other hand, comes from Thebes, and in myth had several wives, factors providing him with a putative place of return. More commonly, the hero is seen out of doors and on a journey (the element of travel associated with Hercules perhaps contributing to his popularity as the god of merchants). The setting of the heroic mise en scène (in public space, outdoors and on the move) serves to differentiate masculinity from domestic femininity positioned indoors, waiting and inactive in the private sphere. The hero is seen in open spaces (in the countryside or at sea), travelling in distant, foreign lands, setting up temporary, outdoor camps, or visiting peasant villages. Occasionally he is seen in council chambers, where important decisions of state are taken, or in prison cells from which he escapes. Even if he is married, as in Ercole e la regina di Lidia, he is rarely seen for long in a domestic environment. Domestic femininity, on the other hand, is associated with settlement, and as a rule remains firmly situated in private space, in rooms and adjoining terraces and gardens. When such female characters stray into public space, they often die (as in Ulisse contro Ercole) or have to be rescued by the hero (Le fatiche di Ercole, Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas). When they venture out of doors for prolonged periods, they take their homes and household retinue with them (Elena in Ulisse contro Ercole has a pavilion-style tent, and Delilah in Ercole sfida Sansone travels with a caravan). The hero, on the other hand, appears to live in fields and caves, with no luggage or home comforts, and is ever on the move in an endless and, for the cinema industry, profitable series of legendary journeys. The essence of heroism is to travel on quests seeking out risk, rather than staying at home safely preserving life. This is why Hercules, portrayed at the beginning of Le fatiche di Ercole as a divinity, and therefore immortal, makes a point of relinquishing his immortality. The preamble to the film states: ‘Huge and immortal was the strength of Hercules, as the world and the gods to which he belonged. But one day men crossed his path. They were ready to sacrifice their brief treasure, life, for knowledge, for justice, and for love.’ The definition of heroism as a rejection of the feminine domestic sphere where life is created and preserved, rather than risked and sacrificed, can also be read as part of the process of masculine separation from the feminine and the maternal. This has been theorized as a necessary step towards the individuation of masculinity in childhood, and continues, with

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varying degrees of intensity and violence, throughout adulthood (a violence that is key to the hero of both the peplum and the spaghetti western) (Benjamin 1990). The female figure of Iole, whom Hercules meets and rescues at the beginning of Le fatiche di Ercole, and with whom he departs at the end, represents the domestic, licitly heterosexual sphere on which he repeatedly turns his back as the narrative progresses through a series of action scenes or labours (‘fatiche’) associated with myth. On the first occasion, he storms out of the city to kill a lion, while Iole tries to stop him. His heroic departure results, significantly, in a family death. Her brother, Ephetes, pursues Hercules in order to outdo him and is killed by the lion. Yet, despite having killed the lion, Hercules is blamed for his death. This is explicable only in terms of the anti-familial, deathseeking significance attached to the heroic action of Hercules by both Iole and her father. Hercules is banished by this family unit, at which point he decides to relinquish his immortality, ostensibly in order to link up with the domestic sphere. Importantly, the first part of his request to the sibyl is none the less still couched in the discourse of heroism in terms of death-seeking action and the pursuit of honour as personal destiny: ‘But I want to love like other men, and to fight like them. I want to have a family, and see my children grow up.’ Once mortal, after a pseudo-baptismal drenching in a rain shower, he is able to achieve heroic status as a man (rather than as a demi-god) by risking death. His words again foreground the primacy of inserting himself into a community of men, and it is in this all-male context that his earlier reference to the feminine, domestic sphere of the family now transmutes into female sexuality as an arena for male competition, with no mention of family or children: ‘It will be a challenge to fight like men. Now I have battles to win, the woman I love to conquer for my own and my destiny to fulfil.’ Once briefly reunited with Iole, he turns his back on her a second time. Having returned with Jason to help him claim his throne, Hercules sets off again to accompany him on his quest for the Golden Fleece. Iole remonstrates: ‘Now you have another job to do, more glory to win, more victories for yourself, and more grief for me.’ To Hercules’ reply, ‘It is destiny’, Iole signals her exclusion from this masculine sphere of activity: ‘No Hercules, your destiny is not mine.’ The differentiation between the heroic masculine and the domestic feminine is also clearly drawn by a specific sequence of shots. The first shows Hercules aboard ship, men rowing and singing, with a soundtrack


expressing steadfast endeavour, and Ulysses commenting: ‘Women are a nuisance.’ This is followed by a scene showing Iole on her own on her veranda looking out to sea – the familiar, static mise en scène of abandoned domestic femininity of the peplum. The camera then cuts to an action scene with lots of movement, as Hercules and his comrades brave a storm at sea. This is the last we see of Iole until near the end of the film, as the narrative follows the much more exciting world of the action men. Narrative differentiation of heroic outdoor masculinity from powerless domestic femininity in need of rescue is underscored by differentiation in stark visual terms from the outset of the film. Iole is first seen in white, the colour of innocence and chastity, and one of Tessari’s colours for ‘good’ characters. Her chariot, drawn by white horses, is dangerously out of control at the edge of a clifftop as she runs into trouble in outside space, where, by implication, she should not be. Her fruitless cries of ‘Stop, stop’ and the wild sounds of the horses, accompanied by dramatic extradiegetic music, precede her appearance on screen as she disrupts the tranquil scene of a shepherd and his flock. Her rescue by Hercules is portrayed with a rapid sequence of upshots of heads which fill the screen, and whose stance is at once visually indicative of a set of gender-specific binaries (active–passive, powerfulpowerless). Shots of the upright heads of Hercules and the horses are tellingly interspersed with the dangling head of Iole, who has fainted and who is carried by the hero down to the seashore. Rescue of the hero by a female character is of course not on the agenda, as evidenced by the ineffectual attempt by Iole and her maid to free Hercules from imprisonment later in the film. They succeed in opening the prison door, but it blows shut, imprisoning them along with Hercules, who then proceeds to break free of his chains and escape by his own efforts. The hero’s mastery of nature and outside space, in contrast to the female character’s near-fatal ineptness in this sphere, is also underlined by the effects of his power, which precede his appearance on screen. The audience first sees and hears a massive tree trunk being uprooted, followed by a shot of the upright head and pumped-up torso of Hercules himself. Various exploits in this and other Hercules films, often originating in myth, further underline his mastery of outside space (trees, boulders, rivers) and its natural and unnatural inhabitants (lions, tigers, bulls and monsters). Heroic differentiation through rejection of the domestic, feminine sphere is also a feature of other films. In Ercole e la regina di Lidia, the follow-up to Le fatiche di Ercole, Hercules again leaves Iole, now his wife,

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behind. She is once more abandoned (‘I wish we didn’t have to separate’), and while the reason for his departure is again of greater importance than the private sphere (‘I have no choice, Thebes is in danger’), his return at the end of the film only signals future departures, as he indicates to Iole: ‘How much you have suffered, Iole. The gods have placed many obstacles against us, and there will be others.’ While domestic femininity depends on the return and presence of its patriarch, heroic masculinity defines itself in diametric opposition to and absence from the private sphere. The beginning of the film outlines the dangerously debilitating effects of domesticity on masculinity. As Hercules returns home with his new bride, he cannot stop himself falling asleep in the back of the cart, while Iole sings a love song. Even the threatening appearance of the giant Anteus fails to rouse him into action until some considerable time later. Masculinity is literally put to sleep by marriage. Spending time with a woman is similarly equated with inaction by Theseus in Ercole al centro della terra. When Hercules finds him in the company of his girlfriend, Theseus is only too eager to leave, saying: ‘I’m fed up with doing nothing.’ In this film, saving Deianira means leaving her behind (this time to seek out the golden apple from the Garden of Hesperides to cure her madness). Deianira is also abandoned in Gli amori di Ercole and in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, while Iole is yet again left behind in Ercole sfida Sansone. At the end of the film the hero either returns, briefly, to the domestic realm before, it is implied, leaving for the next quest (Le fatiche di Ercole, Ercole e la regina di Lidia, Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, Gli amori di Ercole, Ercole al centro della terra, Ercole sfida Sansone), or sets off alone for the next quest after refusing the invitation to remain and set up home (Maciste all’inferno, Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi, Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo), or, less commonly, tries to leave alone, thereby signalling his rejection of femininity, but is followed and joined by a woman he has saved from death (Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas) or from slavery (Le legioni di Cleopatra). Rejection of the domestic, feminine sphere as central to heroic masculine differentiation is, then, often clearly flagged at both beginning and ending of the film. This may well have had special resonance during the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time of migration of male labour from the South to the North when wives and children were often left behind, leading to the breakup of marriages and families (Caldwell 1995). Heroic masculinity in the peplum also constantly defines itself through differentiation from other types of masculinity. While the hero may be a man of the people defending the oppressed from


tyranny and violence, he none the less stands out, literally and physically, from the mass of common men. The hard, pumped-up musculature of the ever-victorious hero tested to his limits in a variety of activities (sport, fighting other men, animals or monsters, and classic weightlifting feats such as lifting rocks, moving pillars and holding up ceilings) is a key focus of close-up camera attention. While the Hercules series, with its roots in mythological narrative, often tends to slot these physical feats into a narrative context of events, other films whose heroic protagonist has no such reservoir of narrative detail to draw on, like the Maciste series, have a sparse narrative framework which clearly operates primarily as a setting for strongman performances. Freda’s Maciste all’inferno, for instance, soon leaves its Scottish 1622 setting of witchcraft and witchburning to plunge Maciste (played by Kirk Morris anachronistically still wearing the characteristic short peplum skirt) into Hell, where he begins a series of prolonged feats of physical strength with little narrative justification. The hard musculature is key in differentiating the hero from other men, who either have less or no muscle, or whose bodies are not exposed to the camera eye. Shots of the semi-naked hero, clothed in earth colours in keeping with his rural, peasant, rather than urban, belonging, and the common people he often defends (as in Ercole al centro della terra, and Gli amori di Ercole), and winning fights with soldiers fully clad and helmeted in metal and leather armour (as in La battaglia di Maratona), function on several gender levels, which are at times contradictory. The triumph of bare, hard muscle over the armour-clad bodies of soldiers suggests that the hero’s muscle is as impenetrable as metal, if not more so, and represents the apotheosis of invincible masculinity. In relation to separation from femininity as key to the individuation of masculinity, the impenetrability of muscle/metal precludes any possibility of merging, the state originally characterizing the period of infancy up to the mirror stage, which signals the first step in leaving the stage of being psychically merged with the body of the mother.10 At the same time, the juxtaposition of bare-torsoed, bare-legged male bodies with fully armoured, cloaked soldiers has the opposite effect of feminizing the former in a relation of apparent vulnerability to the latter, until bare muscle is seen to prevail. The suggestion of androgyny in the hero, already noted in the choice of Steve Reeves, remains in this type of scene. At other times it is dismissed visually in order to counter its challenge to gender boundaries. This is done by making male characters from other races the locus of effeminacy, which is then

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demonized or stigmatized. This is achieved, for instance, in terms of hairstyle, with the short, masculine cut, with or without a quiff, as the standard marker of heroic masculinity. By contrast, the evil Lico in Gli amori di Ercole has ringleted hair, while the Mayas whom Maciste helps in Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas, and who are therefore portrayed as ineffectual, have long hair, as do other Eastern races like the Persians (Dyer 1997a). The body cult distinguishing the peplum hero is presented in the allmale arenas of sport, military combat and feats of strength against forces of nature and the supernatural that baffle other men. Military combat is portrayed as the natural extension of sport in La battaglia di Maratona. In this film Philippides of Athens, played by Steve Reeves, is the champion of the games held every four years, winning at javelin, rock-throwing, swimming, wrestling and running (when he is not portrayed ploughing the land, muscles bulging with honest effort). His sporting prowess not only win hims a military position (chief of the Sacred Guard of Athens), but also saves the capital from defeat, as his run from Marathon to Athens enables him to transmit a vital message in the war with Persia. His body is shown sweating and pumped up as he runs and swims cross-country, master of all the natural forces he encounters. In relation to his rival for Andromeda, Theocritus, he shows more bare muscle, while phallic, semi-nude statues in the background complete the mise en scène of the body cult he embodies.11 While Philippides is human, the mythical Achilles, protected by the gods and played by muscleman Gordon Mitchell in L’ira di Achille, similarly wins sporting contests and is feared for his invincibility in battle. Sport and heroic feats characterize the hero in Le fatiche di Ercole, as we have seen. To set up the differentiation of heroic masculinity from other types of masculinity, Hercules is preceded on screen at the beginning of the film by a slender, young shepherd sitting on a rock playing pan-pipes. Despite the fact that he is the first to notice Iole’s plight, it is notably not he, but Hercules, who attempts her rescue. The frequent juxtaposition of Hercules with younger male characters who are of slighter build, palerskinned and therefore more feminine is a continual reminder of his exceptional manly prowess (Reeves was 32 when he made this film). In Le fatiche di Ercole he is accompanied by the younger, blonder, non-muscular Jason (the actual hero in Apollonius’ Argonautica), in Ercole e la regina di Lidia by a positively diminutive, eighteen-year-old Ulysses and in Ercole al centro della terra by the ‘immature’ Theseus. Theseus is described as not yet ready for marriage, unlike Hercules, and spends much of his time in what is portrayed as the the feminizing presence of girlfriends (with


rejection of the domestic sphere after marriage proving the true defining factor of masculinity). As if the relative shortness and inefficacy of Androcles, the younger quest companion of Hercules in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, were not sufficient visual indicator of his greater masculinity, a male midget accompanies the pair in this film (also fulfilling this role in relation to Mark Antony and Curidio in Le legioni di Cleopatra). The function of the midget as epitome of male powerlessness made comic (and thereby less alarming) is served homophobically by the highly camp, cowardly stooge to Herculean muscle power and valour in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide. The older, weaker and consistently comic figure of Ascalapius also provides a regular antithesis to Hercules in Le fatiche di Ercole, as do other older male characters whom the hero rescues (for example, the old man escaping from the mole men and rescued by Maciste at the beginning of Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo). While the hero towers over others, and often over entire races (like the Mongols in Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan), he also faces challenges from larger and more brute-like foes who sometimes serve to illustrate his cultural superiority in terms of linguistic powers, as well as his exceptional physical powers. These range from the bulky Anteus in Ercole e la regina di Lidia, a giant born of the earth (as Maciste is born of the rock) who is able to taunt Hercules verbally as well as physically, and the massive Goliath in Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas, almost prelinguistic with his sole utterance throughout the film of the word ‘Aloha’ (the name of the Queen of the Mayas whom he desires), to the brutish, non-speaking Cyclops who feeds on humans in Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi, and the grunting, gorilla-like monster in Gli amori di Ercole. This monster also serves to externalize brute desires with his impending rape of Deianira, thereby shifting the sexual heat from Hercules and his affair with Hippolyta, to the animal kingdom, and reestablishing the hero’s chastity. Races of animal-like foes vanquished by heroic human masculinity abound in the films (for example, the birdmen and the troglodytes in Ulisse contro Ercole, and the apemen in Le fatiche di Ercole), with feathers and large quantities of body hair contrasting vividly with the hairless golden skin of the white hero. The use of race is key in the construction of a superior heroic masculinity which differentiates itself not only from femininity and from other ‘inferior’ kinds of masculinity, but also from non-white, non-western masculinity also coded as inferior.12 In Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi, the black Paul Wynter, serving an alien race, loses a fight with Gordon Mitchell’s Maciste, while in Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo he

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continues doggedly with his slave mentality in relation to Mark Forrest’s Maciste, a mentality made more pointed by the latter’s liberal speech on freedom for all men early on in their relationship. While the camera focuses on Wynter’s black, shining, pumped-up muscle in the latter film, it is the white Maciste who saves the day. Other masculinities represented in the films may be wiser, politically more powerful, younger or older, but physical strength and bravery in the service of the extremes of good against evil are placed centre stage. The superlative pumped-up, tanned and oiled white body of the man of the people is ever on display, towering over other male bodies which are often less exposed, bared but less muscular, larger but not as toned and disciplined, or darker and brutish or slavelike, with pejorative racial implications. Importantly, Hercules is always part of a community of men. He literally stands out as unique among these male groups, the heroic individual against the unindividualized mass, with members of the male community providing constant points of reference and differentiation.

Homosociality vs gynosociality Crucially, the hero privileges homosociality, or all-male relations, over relations with women.13 Patriarchal society is founded on relations between men, whose exchange of women between different family or tribal groups in the form of exogamy (the incest prohibition) is basic to social organization (an exchange noted by the structural anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss). Women function within this system as objects or commodities of exchange, together with goods or chattels, and provide an arena for relations between men (whether those of bonding or of competition). Striking examples of theft, rather than exchange, of women as valuable possessions occur in Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas and Maciste contro i mostri. In both these tribal films women are stolen during a raid by one tribe on another, much like cattle-rustling, to be sacrificed, taken as slaves or used for procreation. In the first film, Aloha, Queen of her tribe, becomes a valuable commodity in the negotiation of an alliance with Goliath which would give one tribe considerable advantage over the other. In the second, three Mongol brothers compete for one woman, Bianca di Tudela, and the town over which her family rules. Heterosexuality is central to the workings of patriarchy, but, as Irigaray observes, functions as no more than an alibi for the smooth running of relations between men. The passage from nature to culture


effected, according to anthropologists, by the exchange of women, serves to establish the hegemony of ‘hom(m)o-sexuality’ (Irigaray 1985, p. 172). This key term indicates that the dominant, or indeed only, relations within patriarchy are those between men, whether sexualized (without the second ‘m’) or not, resulting in repression of female sexuality. Female desire is negated, along with genuine rather than tokenistic relations between men and women. Gynosociality, or relations between women, whether sexualized or not, is threatening to the hegemony of homosociality. Patriarchal privileging of homosociality is very much in evidence in the peplum. This genre frequently sidelines heterosexuality, whether licit or illicit, as the primary expression of heterosociality, or relations between men and women. As we have seen, it is against femininity in the context of licit, domesticated heterosexuality that the peplum hero often defines and differentiates himself in terms of masculine individuation from the familial/maternal other. This form of licit, family-oriented heterosexuality may well frame the narrative (explicitly in some of the Hercules films, implicitly via negation in the Maciste series), but it is cursorily dealt with in the peplum, and not portrayed as particularly erotic (the relationship between Hercules and Iole in Le fatiche di Ercole and Ercole e la regina di Lidia, for instance, is from the outset more companionate than sexual). Illicit heterosexuality in the form of non-procreative, extra-domestic sexual encounters in other countries, on the other hand, is given much more screen time, often providing a major obstacle to the hero’s duties, as well as furnishing highly marketable exotic and erotic spectacle. These encounters often form the heart of the film, which explores how the hero (and by extension, through wish-fulfilment, the male spectator) deals with illicit heterosexuality. He may correctly shun it, as in Le fatiche di Ercole, or be temporarily tricked into indulging in it, as in Ercole e la regina di Lidia, Gli amori di Ercole, and Le legioni di Cleopatra. Ultimately, however, it is usually rejected, either in a return to licit domestic heterosexuality, upon which he will before long again turn his back (Hercules), or a direct resumption of the journey to the next quest (Maciste). Illicit heterosexuality is often linked in the films to gynosociality, namely to communities of women (Irigaray’s ‘l’entre-femmes’, or women-amongst-themselves, as opposed to ‘l’entre-hommes’, or menamongst-themselves).14 In the peplum these matriarchal rather than patriarchal societies take the form of all-female communities ruled by a queen (the mythical Amazons in Le fatiche di Ercole and Gli amori di

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Ercole), or female rule of mixed-sex groups (Omphale, Queen of Lidia in Ercole e la regina di Lidia, and Cleopatra in Le legioni di Cleopatra, both historical figures, and the invented figures of Aloha in Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas, Queen Antinea in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, Queen Alismoya in Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo, and the Queen of the Bird-People in Ulisse contro Ercole). When at their most extreme, these queens are depicted as bad, sexually desiring women, who also covet power. Their dangerous twin desires are eroticized in the films as the antithesis to non-erotic, domesticated female heterosexuality which is procreative rather than recreative, and not linked to power in the public, sociopolitical sphere. These dominatrix-figures allow for spectatorial desire that goes beyond straightforward sexual titillation to accommodate fantasies of phallic motherhood, masochism and infantilism. However, having set up this dynamic, the films are ultimately careful to diffuse the threats of autonomous female sexuality and female political power. A variety of strategies is employed to this end. One is to reduce the female rulers to mere ‘women in love’. This tactic positions them firmly in romantic discourse, which renders female desire passive, and at the same time sidelines their political role. In other words, they may not have both. Cleopatra in Le legioni di Cleopatra declares her pleasure in posing as an ordinary woman and freely following her heart in the company of the hero, in a welcome interlude from her role as Empress of Egypt. Capis in Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi similarly declares: ‘I’m no longer a queen, I’m a woman.’ The power of Aloha is undercut at the beginning of Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas by her futile attempts to fight for her people when they are attacked by a rival tribe, and she is forced to flee the battleground by her male advisers. From this point on she becomes the victim constantly waiting to be rescued by Hercules, and enters romantic discourse by virtue of being defined solely by her desire for the hero to the exclusion of her role as leader of her people. In an unusual closure she leaves with Hercules at the end of the film (the hero commonly leaves alone), while at the same time her abandonment of her subjects in favour of fulfilling her sexual desire feeds into the romantic, patriarchally-correct choice of a relationship with a man over sociopolitical power. Another, more final solution diffusing the threat of female rule is to kill the queen, while ensuring of course that she does not die at the hands of the hero, who has usually enjoyed illicit sexual pleasure with her. The hero is never shown killing a woman, a task which is left to ‘lesser’ men, as in Ercole contro i figli del sole, and in Gli amori di


Ercole, where Hercules’ wife, Megara, is murdered by evil counsellers (in mythology Hercules himself kills her while under a spell). The representative of the gynosocial threat may be dispatched by a former lover whom she has turned, in Dantesque fashion, into a tree (Hippolyta in Gli amori di Ercole, again killed ‘unheroically’ by Hercules in mythology). Alternatively, she may die accidentally by falling from a waterfall (Alismoya in Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo), commit suicide (Omphale in Ercole e la regina di Lidia, Cleopatra in Le legioni di Cleopatra), or even meet a heroic end while shielding the hero (Capis in Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi). As noted by Wyke in relation to Cleopatra, the legendary history of this female ruler has long provided cinema with a closed narrative in which distant, exotic female desire linked dangerously to political power can be explored, and then dismissed, with the ‘factual’ event of her suicide (Wyke 1997, pp. 73–109). Alternatively, gynosocial communities can simply be left behind. Situated in distant lands across the sea, these all-female or female-dominated communities may be reduced to providing exotic, sexual, dominatrix-style thrills, while their distance poses no real threat to western ‘civilization’ (as in Le fatiche di Ercole). If female rule cannot be avoided in the films, then a male consort can be ensconced alongside the ruler as part of the (romantic) closure, thereby ensuring patriarchal control and containing the gynosocial threat (as in Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo). In Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan this strategy combines with white, western colonialism as the Oriental princess is finally married to an inexplicably European-looking Chinese consort, whose non-noble origins (he is a fisherman) and heroic deeds as a rebel against the Mongols do not manage to distract from the intertwining of dominant ideologies of gender (patriarchy), race (western) and colour (white) at work in the diffusing of the gynosocial threat. Another crucial strategy employed by the peplum in dealing with the conflict between homosociality and gynosociality is that of the classic patriarchal splitting of femininity into two opposing (stereo)types, manifested on screen in two very different female characters who both lure the hero towards heterosexuality. Patriarchy works to divide and conquer femininity, with this schizophrenic splitting into two types based on the relation of each to sexuality: the good, asexual madonna as opposed to the evil, sexual whore. The peplum regularly associates asexual femininity with the domestic sphere of the patriarchal, father or husband-led family, and sexual femininity with extra-domestic, non-patriarchal communities which are gynosocial, or female-led. The

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former, domestic type of femininity is disempowered and non-erotic, while powerful gynosocial femininity is deeply eroticized and demonized (to the point of equating female desire with witchcraft in Freda’s Maciste all’inferno, for instance). These opposing stereotypes of femininity compete with each other for the hero, with the latter, illicit, recreational, extra-domestic version of femininity acting as a ‘torpedo of domesticity’ (Wyke 1997, p. 89).15 Importantly, in relation to the growing resurgence of Italian feminism and women’s groups in the 1960s, the patriarchal thrust of the peplum isolates ‘good’, asexual femininity both socially and politically in the domestic space of the individual family. Gynosocial femininity, on the other hand, is portrayed as dangerously organized into communities, such as the Amazons. The isolation of the lone female character waiting in the domestic sphere for the return of the hero-husband, such as Iole waiting for Hercules in Le fatiche di Ercole, is mirrored by the recuperation of the female ruler (who is ‘bad’ simply because she has power), by means of her isolation and separation from her seat of power, a tactic that often turns her into an isolated victim in need of heroic rescue (Bianca in Maciste contro i Mongoli, Aloha in Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas). Italian feminism in the 1960s was characterized by an emphasis on relations between women, encapsulated by the term affidamento, meaning ‘entrustment’. This particularly Italian aspect of feminism of the period recognized patriarchal strategies for alienating and isolating women from each other in competition for men, and celebrated the positive, varied relations of difference between women that could be drawn upon to create empowering female relations.16 In other words, the static separatism of the domestic ‘woman’s world’ as a haven of peace was to be ousted by an emphasis on the dynamism of bonds and disparities between women (Bono and Kemp 1991, pp. 109–38). The aim was to replace the antagonistic inter-female relationship of competition, or passive, victimistic relationship of merging, encouraged by patriarchy, and ‘turn it into a generalized form of sociality between women’ (Whitford 1991, p. 194). The patriarchal isolation of women from each other is described by Irigaray as follows: ‘Our societies are built upon men-among-themselves (‘l’entre-hommes’). According to this order, women remain dispersed and exiled atoms’. She explores this difference in the context of what she calls ‘collective initiation rites for men’: These rites are perpetuated in socially and politically organized gatherings that are almost always mono-sexuate. Women’s rites reverted


to being individual centuries ago, and have remained so. They are initiations into puberty, marriage or maternity which, moreover, often have no rites. The little girl becomes a woman, a wife and a mother alone, or at best with her mother or a substitute. It is probably the economic conditions bound up with industry that have allowed us to come together again, provisionally. (Whitford 1991, p. 191, emphasis added) In the pre-industrial settings of the peplum films, the communities of women that would before long be envisaged and worked towards by affidamento, are demonized. The queen of such a community, or the female ruler of a dual-sex community, is highly sexualized, and placed in competition for the hero with his wife (Omphale versus Iole in Ercole e la regina di Lidia), or wife-to-be (Antinea versus Deianira in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, Hippolyta versus Deianira in Gli amori di Ercole). Antinea in Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide is especially transgressive as a queen who is also older, a mother, yet still sexually desiring. In the divisive strategy of splitting femininity into sexual and asexual opposites, the evil erotic temptress can be found in opposition to the good, victim-like female character, whom the hero rescues to ensure a romantic closure favouring the latter and the formation of a new heterosexual family unit, of which he himself is not to be a part. This takes place in Freda’s Maciste all’inferno, a film in which older femininity and witchcraft are warningly associated with potent female desire in the form of Marta, the old witch, who not only seduces Maciste in Hell in the guise of her younger self, but dooms the young, recently married but not yet ‘deflowered’ Marta (her namesake on earth but clearly representing her young self while still innocent) to being burnt at the stake. Following Tessari’s rule, the old witch is influenced by Maciste to sacrifice herself, and youthful domestic femininity survives. The good female character in need of rescuing may herself be a ruler (the Queen of the Light, opposed by Alismoya, Queen of Darkness, in Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo, or the queen-regent of the young king almost fed to the Cyclops by Queen Capis in Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi), whom the hero saves and returns to her male consort. In Gli amori di Ercole both sexual and asexual stereotypes of femininity are played by the same actress, Jayne Mansfield, a feature that highlights and exposes the artificial splitting of femininity as one of patriarchy’s divisive strategies. This strategy alienates the two female characters from each other in competition, and forbids both stereotypes within the same woman. The peplum hero repeatedly has to choose between these

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opposing types of femininity. As we have seen, in essence he rejects both, whether by not becoming involved with good domestic femininity (Maciste, born not of woman, but ‘of the rock’, and not linked to family of any kind), or temporarily returning to this licit form of heterosexuality only to leave it again (some of the Hercules films). Almost invariably, if only after a prolonged episode of heterosexual indulgence, he rejects illicit heterosexuality, which in some cases would even eventually kill him (Ercole e la regina di Lidia, Gli amori di Ercole). The most powerful imaging of the heroic rejection of heterosexual domesticity in favour of homosociality takes the form of the ship. The ship in these films can be seen in direct opposition to the feminine hearth as a privileged locus for all-male labour, comradeship and merriment, a male community on the move, with important tasks to perform in public, outdoor space, as opposed to the static, private, indoor sphere of everyday domesticity. It is on leaving ship in order to hunt and gather supplies on a distant island that the male community becomes involved with illicit heterosexuality in Le fatiche di Ercole. Far from civilization and the patriarchal hegemony of homosociality, the men encounter an all-female community in the form of the Amazons, ruled by Queen Antea. In Gli amori di Ercole Hercules again meets the Amazons, whose Queen this time is Hippolyta (her correct name, according to myth). The equivalent episode in Ercole e la regina di Lidia is the island ruled by Omphale, Queen of Lidia, to which Hercules is taken after being drugged while on a land mission with Ulysses. These three episodes feature as centrepieces interrupting the heroic quest. The Amazons function as warning and illustration of the dangerous nature of gynosociality, and Omphale illustrates the dangers of female rule over a mixed-sex community. The dangers of gynosociality to patriarchy are translated on to the plane of female sexuality. Specifically, sexual desire on the part of the Amazons and Omphale ensnares the men in illicit heterosexual activity, illicit because here female desire is not attached to domestic femininity. It is not procreative but recreative. Licit heterosexuality is depicted as working to restrain and diminish heroic masculinity (Iole’s attempts to prevent Hercules leaving in Le fatiche di Ercole, his dozing off in the back of their wagon and reluctance to fight the giant Anteus soon after they are married, and his joke that Iole has him in chains in Ercole e la regina di Lidia). Illicit heterosexuality coded as the femmes fatales of the female-dominated islands, on the other hand, actually proves fatal. The Amazons in Le fatiche di Ercole satisfy their desires with travellers, drug them and kill them. In Gli amori di Ercole former


lovers of the Amazon Queen are turned into trees. Omphale in Ercole e la regina di Lidia has her lovers stabbed to death by her male centurions and then preserves their bodies in various poses, exhibiting them in a subterranean cave. The castration symbolism of the huge circular doors to the cave, with their jagged, toothed edges closing shut to entrap the men, is painfully clear. Both episodes end with flight to the ship, a joyful reuniting and renewal of the male community after a lucky escape, and continuation of the heroic quest. The response of Hercules to illicit heterosexuality, and the threat of gynosociality with which it is made to appear synonymous, deserves close attention in that, while on occasion succumbing to it, he ultimately acts to forbid desire and protect masculinity from femininity. For instance, he does not become sexually involved with the Amazons in Le fatiche di Ercole. Whereas his comrades pair off with the women, with Jason partnering their Queen, the entrance of Hercules to the royal dwelling, by contrast, is preceded by screaming women whom he chases, scowling. As hero of the peplum, Hercules, as we have seen, never harms a woman. In myth, on the contrary, he kills the Amazons when he steals Penthesilea’s belt. Moreover, the hero-cult established in his name decreed that women and dogs, both signs of feminine domesticity, should not be allowed entry to his temples. This indicates a certain misogyny linked with his name, possibly due to his role in representing the apotheosis of a quest-bound masculinity (his story revolves around twelve labours) which could not risk being weakened by any association with femininity. While the other men are drugged by the femmes fatales on the island, it is Hercules who carries them back to the safety of the ship, four at time, indicating the extent of the danger they are leaving behind. When more men from the ship try to get to the Amazons, Hercules beats them with his club, a father-figure asserting his phallic dominance and repressing the desires of his sons. Once safely on board, the men row reluctantly away from the island, while the Amazons sing, siren-like, in an attempt to lure them back. Hercules urges the men to row and sing, beating time with his club with such ferocity that it breaks (Figure 5). His violent forbidding of illicit heterosexual desire is further reinforced by ridicule of this desire, carried out in such a way that it simultaneously denies homosexual desire. As the drugged men come on board ship, they lie embraced on deck, murmuring as if to their Amazon women, while the others look on and laugh, both at their comrades in each others’ arms and at the mistaken heterosexual fantasies allowing this homoerotic scene.

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Figure 5 Preserving homosocial integrity: Hercules (Steve Reeves) drowning out the Amazons’ siren cries with the blows of his club in Francisci’s Le fatiche di Ercole (1958).

In Ercole e la regina di Lidia Hercules is tricked into an illicit sexual association with Queen Omphale, losing his memory when he is given the waters of forgetfulness to drink. His involvement means that he is no longer the apotheosis of heroic muscular masculinity, as shown by his inability to bend an iron lampstand. Sleep is once again associated with the weakening, feminizing effects of sexual contact with women, with Hercules sleeping all day and, it is implied, having sex all night. At this point it is up to his male comrades to effect a rescue. Ulysses, who has pretended to be a mute servant of Hercules since capture by Omphale’s men, ensures that he drinks normal water, keeps reminding him of his name and organizes their rescue. In a classic repetition of the Lacanian mirror episode, Hercules looks in a mirror to see his image and the feminizing garland of flowers he has been wearing, while hearing in his head the earlier words of his rescuers reminding him of his name and heroic masculine purpose. Once reinserted into the symbolic in this way, he rejects the pre-oedipal


world of the imaginary and the libidinal, with its threatening connotations of the reigning phallic maternal, and fights his way back to his all-male community, out of the gloomy womb-like cave with its vagina dentata-style entrance, and into the sunlight and the sea (Figure 6). The mood lightens as the men swim out to the ship, Hercules carrying old Ascalapius on his back as the latter, in myth the god of health and healing, complains of rheumatism. The ascetic hero is again involved, against his will, in an illicit sexual episode in Gli amori di Ercole. Hippolyta (Jayne Mansfield), Queen of the Amazons, drinks a magic potion to make herself appear like Deianira (also Mansfield) and therefore appealing to Hercules. As Hippolyta, Mansfield’s highly sexualized screen persona comes into full force, now wearing red and with fiery red hair (as Deianira she has dark hair). The Amazon’s overt sexual advances in the guise of Deianira (a character change which Hercules neither notices nor questions) show illicit heterosexuality masquerading as licit domestic heterosexuality. Or rather, given the sexual Mansfield’s portrayal of both characters,

Figure 6 Defying the threat of the vagina dentata: Hercules (Steve Reeves) holding open the doors of Omphale’s cave in Francisci’s Ercole e la regina di Lidia (1959).

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sexual desire is intimated as also lurking even in licit, supposedly chaste and undesiring domestic femininity. Hippolyta’s trickery is revealed to Hercules by a subversive, quite literally philanthropic Amazon, and he leaves the gynosocial community unscathed before meeting the usual fate of the queen’s lovers and being turned into a tree. Duped by surface appearances and deception, defining features of femininity, any involvement in illicit heterosexuality on the part of Hercules is portrayed, quite simply, as not his fault. This apotheosis of masculinity is shown in the last resort to be beyond desire. In similar vein, while a hero like Maciste may facilitate the licit heterosexual bondings of others in the context of others, as in Freda’s Maciste all’inferno, he himself remains outside the debilitating, emasculating, feminizing family as a social unit by not marrying (or, as in the case of a few of the Hercules films, continually escaping from the domestic sphere once married). This feature of the hero is already present in Cabiria (1914), the first Maciste film in the silent peplum cycle, in which his function is to rescue Cabiria and unite her with Fulvio Axilla, the master he serves despite being a free man. He himself, on the other hand, is not involved in any love interest. This feature continues in the silent Maciste series, even when Maciste, played for many years by Bartolomeo Pagano, is no longer associated with Fulvio. In Brignone’s Maciste all’inferno (1926), the hero descends into Hell to fight the forces of evil so that the innocent Graziella and the philandering father of her illegitimate child can unite in matrimony. Maciste, who lives in chaste solitude, only becomes sexualized in Hell and, significantly, by feminine contamination, when he is kissed by the sexually voracious Proserpina, second wife of Pluto. As a result he is condemned to remain there. The underworld is associated with illicit heterosexuality and primitive desires, represented on a visual level by the replacement of Maciste’s contemporary 1920s clothes by animal skins. The hero is finally released not by his own efforts, but by the prayers of the child in the de-eroticized context of the nuclear family. The final scene shows Maciste with the family he has helped put together. This is mirrored at the end of Freda’s Maciste all’inferno (1962), from the second cycle, which sees Maciste (Kirk Morris) congratulate the newly wedded couple he has saved from death by burning at the stake, before leaving on his next quest. While Maciste usually travels alone, the Hercules films often show the hero returning to the journey for the next quest as part of a group of men. The hero’s predeliction for homosociality and the persistent visual focus on the male body in the context of all-male communities


and situations of physical, man-to-man combat, have invited discussion of issues of homoeroticism and filmic mechanisms of denial of homosexuality. In an exploration of the male body as spectacle, Neale suggests that making the male body (rather than the regularly objectified female body) the object of the gaze (also assumed to be male) introduces a discourse of homosexuality that must be suppressed and denied (Neale 1993). In effect, homosexuality must be denied despite, or because of, its closeness to homosociality, or Irigaray’s hom(m)o-sexuality. As Irigaray argues, overt homosexuality is forbidden in a system based exclusively on relations between men, and may exist only at the level of pretence, or risk lowering ‘the sublime value of the standard, the yardstick’. Her explanation also offers an insight into the role of the illicit heterosexual episodes in the films as distraction from male homosexual pleasure: ‘Once the penis itself becomes merely a means to pleasure, pleasure among men, the phallus loses its power. Sexual pleasure, we are told, is best left to those creatures who are ill-suited for the seriousness of symbolic rules, namely, women’ (Irigaray 1985, p. 193). Denial of homosexuality takes various forms in action genres like the peplum, including the displaced eroticism of male bodies in sadomasochistic combat, and the transfiguration of male narcissism by death as an identificatory viewing process. In particular, the gaze of the spectator at the male body on display is not direct, but mediated by the diegetic or on-screen male look, which is not marked by desire, but by fear, hatred or aggression, and by acts of violence and mutilation (Neale 1993). The peplum, like the spaghetti western, is one of a number of action genres open to exploration from this critical perspective. Of special note in this genre is the fact that it is not just homosexuality, or even the homoerotic look, that is being denied. Heterosexuality, both licit and illicit, is also brought into play, only to be deferred or disavowed by the heroic body, as we have seen. This amounts to more than just the token use of heterosexuality as a framework to legitimate or distract from homoerotic fantasies. The films fluctuate between varying sexualities, all of which are denied in some way. The crucial point is that the fundamental driving force of homosociality remains a constant (a dynamic also at work in the spaghetti western). In other words, the main agenda of these films is to reaffirm patriarchy’s baseline of homosocial relations, whether sexualized or not, in the face of fear of a gynosocial alternative (expressed in negative representations of female communities, female rule, and female desire).

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It is notable that critical works on the peplum often continue this process of affirming homosociality. The exposed male body is appropriated for the homosexual male gaze, while the female body continues to be appropriated for the heterosexual male gaze, resulting in a closed homosocial circuit. There are, of course, important political reasons for continuing with the former. But current debates on the complexities of viewing processes and pleasures, tied to theories of multiple identity, the performativity of gender, sexuality and race, and the notion of spectatorial drag, indicate that more fluid, as well as more varied, viewing processes are generated by the negotiating processes of the peplum. This is particularly the case in view of the penchant of this genre for comic strip-style extremes of signification and playing with identity boundaries. In this context, spectators cannot be classified according to one fixed identity (a specific gender, sexuality, race, colour, age or class). Instead, the individual spectator would shift in fantasy work between a variety of desires and experience the coming into being of multiple, intersecting identities through their negotiation on screen. To give one example, in Le fatiche di Ercole there is a scene with Iole watching male bodies in sporting action from her chariot. The prolonged look of Iole at Hercules and other sporting male bodies may well function to mediate an illicit homoerotic gaze on the part of the film’s male audience. Apart from her, the only spectators on screen are all male, so that her presence offers a more licit, heterosexual eroticization of the male body as spectacle for both the diegetic and extradiegetic male gaze. However, sharing her heterosexual female gaze may also generate in the spectator other fantasies of identificatory desire for the male body (namely, female heterosexual as well as male homosexual desire), or the fantasy of being desired by her (lesbian, female bisexual or male heterosexual desire). At the same time, Iole herself may generate fantasies of identification in terms of being her, an identificatory process encouraged near the beginning of the film by a flashback of her childhood for which she provides the voice-over. These fantasies of desire involve being desired by others, a position common to all the sexualities. Her role as rescued damsel in distress established at the beginning of the film, and her reactive state of foreover waiting for Hercules to return, might generate fantasies of helplessness (key in masochism and infantilism, for instance). Intersecting with fantasies of sexual desire and power relations are those of idealized, culture-specific positions. Iole as a young white princess offers a host of gratifying fantasies in the intersecting realms of gender, sexuality, age, colour, race and social status.


In terms of spectator pleasure, these spectacular peplum films offer fantasy images set in distant or mythical time and space that free up viewing positions between which the spectator can shift at will. These various identificatory positions and desires are generated by the peplum in its negotiation of social categories as performative, as a repetitive process of extremes of signification inscribed on the body as surface. It is in this negotiation that much of the pleasure of spectatorship in the genre can be located.

4 Looking at Medusa: Investigating Femininity in the Horror Film

Introduction The Italian horror film, like the peplum, is a fantasy genre particularly concerned with the body and the exploration of gender. The main focus of the peplum was on the well-defined, pumped-up male body as differentiated from femininity and other masculinities. The horror film, on the other hand, centres on the female body and the threat femininity poses to masculinity in terms of problems of differentiation and the dissolution of subjectivity through the invasion of boundaries, incorporation and castration. The films often investigate this threat through the opposing gothic dynamics of fear and desire as experienced by masculinity in relation to femininity.1 At the same time, some films posit problems of incorporation and loss of identity between female characters, using the dyadic, age-differentiated figures of the monstrous, archaic mother and the innocent, passive daughter (a variation of conflicts between older and younger femininity encountered in melodrama and the peplum). With both horror and peplum genres current in Italy at the same time (classic horror from 1956 to 1966, the peplum from 1957 to 1965), the horror genre provides an interesting counterpoint to the peplum from a gender perspective. The horror film takes the patriarchal dynamic of fear and desire in relation to female sexuality, desire and autonomy one step further, moving it out of the daylight, the world of the conscious mind and outdoor peplum heroics of superhealthy male bodies, and into the dark, underside realm of night-time sexual activity in dusty castles, the world of the unconscious and the oneiric, of death and unheroic bodily decay. At the same time it is important to bear in mind, as always, that genres are not watertight, 133


with films sometimes exhibiting traits from several genres. Maciste contro il vampiro and Roma contro Roma, for instance, are clear crossovers between peplum and horror. In Ercole e la regina di Lidia, photographed by the soon-to-become horror director Bava, the underground caves housing the Queen’s mummified male ex-lovers and featuring toothed doors, laden with castration symbolism, would be equally at home in a horror film, and are clearly susceptible to the psychoanalytical readings which particularly characterize critical approaches to the horror genre. As a modern extension of the mythical fantasy element in the peplum, sci-fi at times merges with horror (Caltiki, il mostro immortale and Terrore nello spazio). In particular, horror keeps one foot in the thriller genre, of which it can be classified as a subsection, and this helps to account for its investigative, problemsolving elements. Crucially, like another thriller variant, film noir, with which horror shares its powerful femme fatale figures, the problem under investigation is gender-specific, namely femininity itself. Femininity in the horror films is, of course, a patriarchal construction. The dominant gender-ideological context of the production and consumption of cinematic horror of this period, as of all the genres discussed in this study, is that of patriarchy. Consequently, the portrayal of femininity in horror reproduces traditional patriarchal strategies of problematization and containment, such as the reduction of femininity to the villified sexual or idealized asexual body, the obsessive stigmatizing of older as opposed to younger female bodies (especially when older femininity is sexualized), and the narrative splitting into stereotypical binary opposites represented by different characters, but sometimes tellingly played by the same actress (madonna–whore, angel–devil, passive victim–proactive monster). One major underlying strategy of containment is the frequent alienation and isolation of female characters from each other, whether in their antagonistic competition for men, or as unhappy wives alone in the rambling, haunted marital home. This can be seen to function at least in part to pre-empt any form of gynosociality. Concomitantly, femininity is restricted to the domestic sphere and excluded from the public world of work. Male characters, on the other hand, often group together in professional pairs or teams (medical, scientific, archeological, journalistic), usually to investigate the threat of femininity. Femininity has been singled out by critics as especially central to Italian horror. Hunt notes not just Italian horror’s interest in ‘a specific set of images of women’, but also how Italy ‘shifts the genre even more deliriously into the terrain of women’ (Hunt 1992, pp. 66, 71). It is to

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the central figure of ‘woman’ (as vampire, witch, femme fatale, victim), rather than the (male) monster or scientist, that Mora attributes the autonomy and expressive unity of Italian horror (Mora 1978, p. 292). The Italian version of the genre has even been described in terms of a ‘poetics of gynophobia’, traceable to the historical, oppressed role reserved for women in Italy as codified by medieval witchhunts. Particularly severe in the Papal Territories, these witchhunts aimed to pre-empt any attempt by women and other social groups to step outside their narrowly prescribed role (Troiano 1989, p. 96). Historical contexualization is crucial in evaluating the patriarchal agenda informing the investigation of femininity by Italian horror, and Troiano’s suggestion regarding the ideological, gendered subtext masquerading as religious persecution in the Middle Ages can be transposed to an examination of the patriarchal subtext of the cinematic portrayal of femininity in relation to the position of real women during the period of production and consumption of classic Italian horror from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. Taking economic independence as a key marker of improvement in the status of women in society, the period of classic horror coincides not just with that of the peplum, but also with commedia all’italiana, with its mainly contemporary settings. Unlike melodrama which preceded it, in some of the comedies we glimpse successful, autonomous career women, however marginalized in terms of screen time. This can be seen as a reflection of women working in the tertiary sector during the boom, as Italy, still predominantly agricultural in the early 1950s, experienced industrial, economic and trade expansion towards the end of the decade and into the early 1960s. Women’s participation in the labour market increased, although at the lower levels of industrial production they were either exploited, despite the law, or found themselves expelled from the ‘core’ to the ‘marginal proletariat’ (Allum 2000, p. 31). With the recession from 1963 to the end of the decade, there was an increase in the expulsion of women, particularly those over the age of thirty, from the labour market (Balbo and May 1975/6, pp. 87–8). While most other European countries saw an increase in the percentage of women working during this decade, in Italy their numbers fell from 36.7 per cent in 1960 (already one of the lowest rates in Europe) to 31 per cent in 1965, and 29.1 per cent in 1970 (Schioppa 1977, p. 19). Despite this, the effects of the earlier boom meant that the sociocultural climate of the 1960s was transforming irrevocably. This included factors such as the growth of female education, urban civilization and


the decline of religious values. As a result, women’s traditional perceptions of the family (still the dominant sphere for women as captured by 1950s melodrama) were changing (Caldwell 1995, Allum 2000, p. 31). Importantly, the trend for later marriages in favour of career development began, with consequent falling birthrates. At the same time, the Italian women’s movement, in evidence since the nineteenth century, gathered momentum through the 1960s to enter another of its highly proactive phases. It did so not as a separatist, intellectual, middle-class preoccupation, but, in the context of the revolutionary events of 1968, with mass support, especially for the first Divorce Bill in 1970, and for a general updating of the law. By the 1970s, Italian feminism’s emphasis on autocoscienza, the restructuring of an autonomous femininity based on difference, rather than mere emancipation, had taken shape. The late 1950s and the 1960s signal the onset of the final throes of a comparatively backward, traditional Italy, along with a period of accelerating pressure for improvement in the position of women in Italy. This provided a context conducive to cultural expression, still dominated by the patriarchal status quo, of suspicion and anxiety regarding the actual, historical threat of increasing female autonomy outside the domestic sphere. These cultural products, with their entrenched reactionary and, in the case of horror films, highly gynophobic positions, in turn undoubtedly helped to stimulate further feminist desire for change.2 Indeed, while other genres, such as melodrama, also concern themselves with femininity, horror can perhaps be said to represent one of its most aggressive and misogynistic forms of Italian cinematic investigation. The degree of gynophobia indicates the extent of the threat believed to be posed to the patriarchal order, whether sociopolitically or, as we shall see, to the psychoanalytical underpinning of masculine identity. In its centrality to Italian horror, femininity has been used to provide the key to the genesis of the genre at the end of the 1950s. Unlike the peplum cycle of the same period, Italian horror did not develop from a first cycle during the era of Italian silent cinema. Only one horror film has been recorded from this period, Testa’s Il mostro di Frankenstein (1920), with the Frankenstein story never taking root in Italy as elsewhere. Nor is there a tradition of Italian Gothic literature and theatre equivalent to that of Anglo-Saxon cultures, an absence possibly due to the dominance of Catholicism. The figure of the diva from early Italian cinema has been posited as the missing link providing continuity with powerful female characters in 1950s and 1960s horror


(Jenks 1992). In similar vein, horror has been traced via femininity to melodrama through the central melodramatic motif of feminine sexual culpability (Mora 1978, p. 292). However, while Italian horror undoubtedly trains a sharp focus on femininity, femininity has always formed part of this genre’s exploration of gender and sexuality (lesbianism, heterosexuality, homosexuality). This is the case particularly in its most enduring myth, that of vampirism, whether in literary, theatrical or cinematic form.3 Even the male vampire in Bram Stoker’s influential Dracula (1897) (on the heels of John Polidori’s story, The Vampyre, 1817) has been interpreted as a maternal fetish substitute (Dadoun 1989), while the horrors of female desire and its consequent phallic punishment by staking are embodied in the character and plot trajectory of Stoker’s Lucy. Two female characters in particular, Carmilla from literature and Countess Bathory from history, reappear in cinematic horror. Female desire in the context of vampiric lesbianism is the subject of Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story Carmilla (1872), together with Dracula the most filmed vampire text (and the basis for Mastrocinque’s La cripta e l’incubo, 1964). The sixteenth-century figure of Countess Bathory, who vampirizes young girls to retain her youth, is the basis for several films in the Italian horror cycle, including the first, Freda’s I vampiri of 1956. The first cinematic horror cycle was produced, on the back of the literary tradition of the English Gothic novel and the German Schauerroman, by German, predominantly Expressionist, cinema (Kye’s The Student of Prague, 1913, Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1919, and Murnau’s Nosferatu, 1921, which featured the first screen appearance of the vampire). This art cinema influenced future horror production, which was none the less classified as a cheap, low-culture genre production aimed merely at profit (Jancovich 1992, pp. 53–4). The involvement of German personnel, such as director of photography Karl Freund, in the first commercially successful horror cycle, produced by Universal Studios in Hollywood during the 1930s (1931–6), ensured a degree of Expressionist influence (Berenstein 1996, p. 14). This cycle was inaugurated by Browning’s Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi, an actor renowned for his role in the theatre version of 1924, and Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), with Boris Karloff as the monster. Despite the emphasis on male stardom in this cycle (Hunt 1992), feminist critics have drawn attention to femininity as a key concern (Berenstein 1996, Creed 1993).4 A similar argument may be made for the British Hammer horror revival (sparked by Fisher’s two films, The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957, with Peter Cushing, and Dracula, 1958, starring Cushing as Van


Helsing and Christopher Lee as the first of many Draculas). In the US a second horror cycle began in 1960 with The House of Usher, the first of Corman’s adaptations of Poe’s stories. Italian horror is credited by some with preceding the Hammer horror revival by one year with Freda’s I vampiri (1956), photographed and partly directed by Bava, who would become the most important horror and thriller director of this era.5 The film began as a bet that Italians, masters of adventure and melodrama, could also make horror films (Mora 1978, pp. 293–4). Italian audiences were not easy to convince, and after Freda had witnessed their reluctance to buy tickets for I vampiri in San Remo on the grounds that the director was Italian, he used an English pseudonym (Robert Hampton) for future productions. In terms of box office receipts, the film grossed only 125 million lire, ranking 75th out of the 125 Italian films released in 1956 (Troiano 1989, p. 95). It was another four years before the genre took off, although horror hybrids, undoubtedly influenced by Italy’s first 1950s horror film, were produced (for example, Steno’s horror-comedy, Tempi duri per i vampiri, 1959). The success of the Hammer horror film Dracula in Italy in 1957 fuelled Italian horror production, which built on Freda’s I vampiri with five films in 1960. The most well known of these is Bava’s La maschera del demonio, which inaugurated the British cultactress Barbara Steele in her first of nine Italian horror films from 1960 to 1968. These five films were low-cost, but produced only modest receipts (the highest ranked film, Ferroni’s Il mulino delle donne di pietra, came 100th, with 164 million lire, out of the 157 films produced in Italy in that year).6 Horror production continued sporadically until 1966, the year generally seen as marking the close of the classic Italian horror period, with Bava’s Operazione paura and Mastrocinque’s Un angelo per Satana. Classic Italian horror production from 1956 to 1966 never exceeded annual production of five or six films, totalled only around 30 films (similar to the Hammer output of the same period) and constituted just 0.97 per cent of Italian films produced from 1957 to 1970 (Mora 1978, p. 491). In comparison with the numerous and commercially successful peplum films (around 300 from 1957 to 1967, with Francisci’s Ercole e la regina di Lidia grossing almost five times as much as the most successful of the 1960 horror films), horror represents, both quantitatively and financially, a relatively minor facet of Italian genre production at this time (Wagstaff 1996, p. 224). However, this phase of Italian horror has acquired international cult status, especially around films starring Barbara Steele. A second, bigger and commercially more successful


horror-thriller cycle was inaugurated by Dario Argento with L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo in 1969, and still continues today. This chapter focuses on classic Italian horror, which has received comparatively little critical attention.7 Ignored by Italian critics until the mid-1970s, along with other popular genres, Italian horror has subsequently been accused of amounting merely to imitation of American models (Mora 1978, Brunetta 1993, III, pp. 585–6). It has also shared in the villification meted out to cinematic horror generally as, to use Hunt’s phrase, ‘bad object’ (Hunt 1992 p. 67).8 Already in the mid-1930s, the period of Universal’s successful horror cycle, Berenstein notes ‘growing international disdain for horror, especially its denigration of Christianity and its perverse representations of sex’, which, together with strategic protectionism of high-budget domestic production, led to an increasing rejection by foreign censors of American horror films (Berenstein 1996, p. 15). Some feminist critics have problematized the horror genre for its regular misogynist punishment of women who dare to look, both within the diegesis of the film and as spectators, while others highlight the performance aspect of gendered responses to horror and point to the focus on femininity as powerfully monstrous and threatening (Williams 1984, Creed 1993, Berenstein 1996). The notion of masochistic female victim-identification, rather than sadistic voyeurism, has even been put forward as the primary male spectatorial drive (Hutchings 1993). The development in American horror in the 1970s and 1980s of the female victim-hero into the victorious ‘final girl’, often with an androgynous name, has allowed for some recuperation of feminine power (Clover 1992). Italian horror, however, has come under particular attack as ‘bad’ horror, with an excessive, ‘unhealthy’ focus on taboos linked to sex, violence, sadism, bodily corruption and disfigurement, and has been characterized in gender terms, as we have seen, as particularly gynophobic (Troiano 1989, Hunt 1992, Jenks 1992, Brunetta 1993, IV). As far as cinematic expression of these taboos is concerned, however, some films in the Italian cycle, begun as imitation, have been credited with developing a degree of artistic autonomy in relation to their English or American equivalents (Troiano 1989). Using unusual camera angles and movements, prolonged shots and chiaroscuro lighting alternated with stark tonal contrast in facial close-ups, an Expressionist visual style privileges atmosphere over brisk, realist narrative progression, and situation over character development.9 This is especially the case in films by two major horror directors, both experts in the visual


arts: Freda, initially an artist, and Bava, who began his film career as an assistant cameraman to become Italy’s foremost director of photography. Also characterizing Italian horror from this era is the exploration of multiple faces of terror and fear, at times going beyond the traditional Gothic, the creation of an oneiric-nightmare atmosphere, and the introduction of parody (into a genre, one might add, with an incipient parodic thrust) (Brunetta 1993, IV, p. 409). Bava’s I tre volti della paura (1963), for instance, is a classic delineation of three different types of fear and methods of shocking based on irony, vampirism and sound, respectively. Parody in the form of Brechtian alienation concludes this film, with Boris Karloff’s exposure of props at the end drawing attention to the film as artifice. Parody also invades the serious world of vampirism in Polselli’s L’amante del vampiro (1960), in which characters comment cynically on vampire and ghost myths prior to one of them being vampirized. More subversively, an all-female dance group performs a routine parodying lesbian vampire activity. Lesbianism is introduced onto the agenda, whether as erotic spectacle for male voyeurism or for female audience identification. The element of parody contributes to the Italian stylization of the genre, and it is this, together with a major focus on femininity, that is key to the Italian inflection of the horror genre (with stylization also defining Italy’s version of the western, as we shall see in chapter 5). Classic Italian horror influenced later Italian genre production, as well as cinemas in other countries. Responsible for the fall of many taboos in Italian cinema, in the context of broadening cultural values, it promoted an interest in eroticism that fed into the ‘sexy documentary’ of the early 1960s, and paved the way from the middle of the decade for the intensification of sadomasochistic elements in the peplum and the spaghetti western. It opened the floodgates from the 1970s onwards to the violent splatter thriller-horror production of Argento et al., which took over from the spaghetti western on its demise (Brunetta 1993, IV, pp. 414–15). Classic Italian horror at times also anticipates Hammer films, most significantly in the case of Mastrocinque’s use of Le Fanu’s Carmilla story in La cripta e l’incubo (1964), reworked many times in the early 1970s by Hammer directors Baker, Hough and Sangster (Mora 1978 II, p. 292). Wells also notes the influence of Italian horror from this period on the emergence of the franchise film in the US, citing the effects of Bava’s Terrore nello spazio (1965) on the Aliens series (Wells 2000, pp. 70–1). Although its best examples privilege black and white over colour (thereby moving it into arthouse terrain, as well as augmenting the


distant, period feel of films set in the past), in other respects classic Italian horror exploits technological developments in the fields of visuals and sound. Sound has always been crucial to horror (the first fully spoken film, with no subtitles, was Del Ruth’s The Terror, 1928). Sound adds another dimension to atmospheric visual effects, and to the portrayal of female terror (Berenstein 1996, p. 2). In the creation of suspense, an important element in the thriller aspect of the horror genre, sound effects characteristically condition the spectator by preceding and working up to the visual shock (Mora 1978, II, pp. 123–4). It is especially in its use of the lingering close-up that Italian horror delineates the effects of terror on the face (for example, Dr Hichcock in Freda’s L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock) and directs focus onto the body, its decomposition and destruction (the various shots of Asa’s undead body in Bava’s La maschera del demonio, the accelerated ageing of Marguerite’s body in Freda’s I vampiri, the bloody, lacerated face of Charles in Freda’s Lo spettro, and the crumbling bodies of male and female vampires in Polselli’s L’amante del vampiro). Horror characteristically targets not only the body within the diegesis, but also that of the spectator. In genre terms ‘horror’, like ‘weepies’, refers to both what is on screen and to the bodily-emotional response of the audience.10 Horror spectatorship is to be situated within current theories positing shifting identifications which cross sexualities, classes, ages and races, as well as biological and social genders (as reiterated throughout this study). More specifically, recent theories on horror spectatorship have shifted Mulvey’s classic system of gendered visual pleasure, in other words, masochistic, passive female victim-identification on the part of female spectators, as opposed to the sadistic, voyeurist male position of identification with the active male oppressor (Mulvey 1975). Identification with the masochistic female victim position is now posited as the primary male spectatorial drive. A more radical, spectatorship-as-drag model would allow for a more wide-ranging set of identifications (as argued in the preceding chapter). As far as the typical horror audience is concerned, this is believed by many to consist largely of adolescent and cultish males (Clover 1992, Creed 1993, Hutchings 1993, Berenstein 1996, Pinedo 1997, Neale 2000). Key to identification is the gaze. It is generally accepted that three basic types of gaze characterize the film as medium: that of the camera eye at the pro-filmic event, that of the character within the diegesis, and that of the spectator. Because of its visual focus on bodily attack and mutilation, and its intrinsic investigative-thriller element, the


horror genre has a special relationship with the gaze, in both diegetic and audience terms. Close-ups of the face are often used to show the eyes either as a weapon of horror or as the most visually emblematic locus of response to horror (Clover’s ‘assaultive’ and ‘reactive’ looks, respectively) (Clover 1992). To these looks Creed adds Willeman’s ‘look away’, on the part of the spectator, which can also be extended into the diegesis with the look away on the part of the character (Willeman 1980, Creed 1993, p. 29). As well as being central to spectatorial identification, the gaze is also pivotal in psychoanalytical theories of identity-formation relating to the mirror stage and the Oedipus complex, as discussed in previous chapters. Integral to spectatorial identification at this deep psychic level is the unconscious re-checking of the basic security of identity as unified wholeness and separateness from others (going back to the experience of the mirror stage) as well as the security of sexual identity (relating to the Oedipus complex). Other, interconnecting areas of identification relate to sociocultural expectations and aspirations in terms of basic social categories of class, age and race. At the same time, just as there is no real presence on the screen, which functions only to show signifiers of absence and lack, and generate desire in the spectator, there is no real baseline for the spectator in terms of a fixed, unified identity either, but only subject positions in a variety of discourses. Subjectivities are therefore constantly shifting and under negotiation, especially in fantasy genres like horror. Partly due to Lacan’s rethinking of Freud to include the symbolic, in other words, discourse and therefore culture, psychoanalysis became an important part of film theory from the late 1960s, while its application to horror has ensured the genre a degree of cultural legitimation (Cook and Bernink 1999). Italian horror has even been divided into two distinct psychoanalytical phases, with the classic Gothic period characterized by pre-oedipal masochism, and the later, predominantly giallo (or thriller) phase, by oedipal sadism, a division centred on the male, rather than the female, oedipal trajectory (Hunt 1992). This chapter, however, takes femininity as its starting-point, tracing the exploration and exploitation by classic Italian horror of femininity’s threat to masculinity on both psychical and sociopolitical levels.

The threat to masculinity In terms of the psychical constitution of identity, femininity is the source of masculine anxieties in a patriarchal ideology that hierarchizes


difference and privileges the phallus. Masculine subject positions are consequently negotiated in terms of differentiation from femininity as m/other, a process that begins during infancy with separation from the maternal in both mirror and oedipal phases. As we will see in the next section, feminine subject positions, a contradiction in terms according to phallocentric privileging of the symbolic as masculine, retain the link with the maternal for a longer period (there is not the same need for differentiation to establish gender identity). Horror focuses on sexual difference in its concern with the role of the body in fantasies of identity. In classic Italian horror, masculine differentiation is explored most meaningfully in terms of anxieties regarding the body-in-pieces, separation, abjection and castration. While these identificatory anxieties underlie the masculine spectator position per se, these horror films manifest a special interest in male helplessness, incorporation by the archaic maternal and castration by a phallic, oral-sadistic, desiring femininity. Key patriarchal feminine topoi are used to embody these psychical threats (goddess, witch, vampire, the demonically possessed woman). These stereotypes situate masculinity in positions of both fear and desire in relation to maternal, reproductive, sexual femininity, which may incorporate and/or castrate. Masculine anxieties are expressed in stark visual terms reinforced by an often tense, atmospheric soundtrack, in conjunction with narrative progression usually following an investigative, thriller-style trajectory. Lingering close-ups of male reactive looks of horror at the sight of femininity often make masculinity, rather than femininity, the spectacle, which, as Mulvey argues, regularly halts the narrative for the purposes of gender exhibitionism (Mulvey 1975). In particular, these looks replay the reaction of fright which, according to Freud, ‘no male human being is spared … at the sight of a female genital’ (Freud, ‘Fetishism’, 1984, p. 354). The centrality of femininity to classic Italian horror, and to Gothic horror generally, is symbolized in architectural and spatial terms by the castle, its womb-like, subterranean crypt housing tombs and accessed by narrow, vagina-like passageways (Dadoun 1989, Creed 1993). Dark, dank and dusty, the archaic maternal feminine is associated in abjection with the shapelessness of decay, disintegration and death. The castle can be read as an extension, or intensification, of the home as traditional domain of femininity, except that femininity in this genre has not been domesticated, but lies in wait to incorporate or castrate. The castle represents a locus of feminine excess, the patriarchal nightmare of femininity as the feared and yet desired


place of origins, the maternal, procreative powerhouse of life and death, womb and tomb. This ostensibly dismal locus none the less inspires a powerful fascination on the part of masculinity, which is compelled to explore it in a desire for a return to a state of fusion with the maternal, the realm of the imaginary, and a plenitude with no need for desire. This, in retrospect, cosy phase of undifferentiation, precedes the clear-cut, formal phase of the symbolic, which brings with it the power of knowledge. But it is a type of knowledge that serves only to signal the onset of a lifelong set of anxieties concerning separation, the pre-unified body-in-pieces, helplessness and castration. Lacan refers suggestively to the ‘inner castle’ as a dream symbol of the libidinal drives of the unconscious (often feminized in patriarchal culture) to which the subject, constantly in formation, seeks access: ‘the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium – its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario) symbolizes the id in a quite startling way’ (Lacan 1985, p. 5). Another Gothic commonplace signifying femininity and featuring regularly in classic Italian horror is the female portrait in the castle (with male portraits used less often and less centrally in visual and narrative terms). As the mirror image of the other’s unified subjectivity, the female portrait functions to assuage anxiety about the body-inpieces, as well as fetishistically depicting fullness and the absence of lack or castration. At the same time, it reinforces the screen portrayal of woman-as-image with another, intradiegetic two-dimensional representation. However, the female portrait rarely manages to serve a reassuring function in the films, often providing a source of further horror for the protagonists (Asa’s portrait terrifies both father and daughter in La maschera del demonio, the apparent motion and glowing eyes of Julia’s portrait alarm Alan in Danza macabra, and Muriel’s staring eyes both horrify and fascinate Jenny in Amanti d’oltretomba). Femininity beckons threateningly from portraits, tombs and castles, embodying menacing psychical dynamics for both masculinity and, as we shall see, femininity. Three films by Freda (Caltiki, il mostro immortale, Lo spettro and L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock) elaborate a special concern with masculine anxieties. With the wheelchair-bound Dr Hichcock in Lo spettro, the fantasy of the body-in-pieces (Lacan’s corps morcelé) is played out in terms of male helplessness, a dynamic usually theorized in terms of


fetishism in film theory.11 Lacan explains the mirror phase in terms of a move from the phantasy of bodily ‘insufficiency’ to one of ‘anticipation’ of unity and wholeness, as first glimpsed jubilantly in the mirror (‘the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented bodyimage to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic’) (Lacan 1985, p. 4). Bodily insufficiency and fragmentedness manifest themselves in the ‘signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal months’ and stem from the ‘anatomical incompleteness’ and ‘prematurity of birth in man’ (Lacan 1985, p. 4). Importantly for our purposes, this psychical process is not only experienced during infancy. As Lacan explains, the phantasy of the body-in-pieces, together, presumably, with the associated and disquieting memory of motor uncoordination, can be relived in later life: ‘This fragmented body … usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual’ (Lacan 1985, p. 4). By extension, the phantasy, together with the anxiety it induces, can be found reworked in cultural production (Lacan cites the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch). Freud had already written in similar terms about helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) in relation to anxiety in his ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’ in 1926. The state of the human suckling, he argues, is one of complete dependence on others for the fulfilment of its needs, an inability resulting in internal tensions. Motor helplessness (the inability to undertake coordinated and effective action) increases the tension brought about by needs, an increase which the psychical apparatus is as yet unable to control, leading to psychical helplessness (‘the state of childhood, the period of life which is characterized by motor and psychical helplessness’) (Freud SE, XX, p. 167, Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, pp. 189–90). The situation for the infant is one of impotence, a fundamental experience which is relived in later life: ‘For the adult, the state of helplessness is the prototype of the traumatic situation which is responsible for the generation of anxiety’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, p. 189). The specific anxiety associated with the motor and psychical helplessness of Freud and Lacan is common to infants of both sexes. In Freda’s film, however, it is played out as a specifically masculine anxiety. Male helplessness is a sore point in a patriarchal context where masculinity dominates, fuelling negativity towards the feminine. In particular, the relation to the maternal feminine, on which the infant depends, is also potentially more problematic for the male than for the female, because of the necessity of differentiation for the constitution of a separate, independent masculine identity.


In Lo spettro (1963) Dr Hichcock is paralysed as the result of contamination during his work on the use of poisons and their antidotes to stimulate impaired limbs. He represents not just the unheroic masculinity which some critics associate with horror (Berenstein 1996), but a masculinity which is completely impotent in its motor incoordination and helplessness. Hichcock is physically dependent on two women, his housekeeper and his wife, Margaret (Figure 7). His relationship with her has shifted from a marital one to that of child and mother, with an early scene showing her putting him to bed. His summary of his situation, ‘I am just a living corpse’, indicates how his reassociation with maternal-style dependency also places him in a role of abjection at the point of classic horror liminality between life and death. Margaret’s maternal position is further enhanced by the adulterous triangle (Hichcock, Margaret, Charles) replicating the structure of the traumatic primal scene in which the infant witnesses its parents having sex (Hichcock sees Margaret and Charles making love in the garden).

Figure 7 Dangerous dependency: masculine helplessness at the hands of phallic femininity in Freda’s Lo spettro (1963), with Barbara Steele (Margaret) and Peter Baldwin (Dr Hichcock).


Hichcock faces more than mere physical incapacity. His identity has been returned to an indifferentiated state of abjection that is ‘opposed to I’, with the corpse as the ultimate ‘place where meaning collapses’ (Kristeva 1982, pp. 1–2). As a ‘living corpse’, Hichcock actually perceives the expulsion of his own ‘I’, his position at the border forcing him to confront what is ‘permanently thrust aside in order to live’ (Kristeva 1982, p. 4). He bemoans the early days of his relationship with Margaret, when he was a man ‘making a name’ for himself in the public sphere as a doctor, naming denied to Margaret, who was ‘a beautiful, penniless young thing’ before she took his name. With Hichcock the film reinforces the patriarchal coding of the ‘I’, and of naming in the symbolic, as masculine. Moreover, along the lines of Creed’s development of the role of the maternal in Kristeva’s notion of abjection, the archaic maternal body can be read as the abject waste (the corpse, Margaret) from which the masculine ‘I’ must work to separate in order to become coherent and unified (Creed 1993). The film plays out masculine anxieties about boundaries, the bodyin-pieces, helplessness and lack of differentiation from the abject maternal body, through the male character. His actions can be read as attempts to displace and dispel these anxieties. On its most overt narrative level, the film depicts the scheming of Hichcock against his wife and Charles, in a melodramatic plot of adultery and revenge combined with thriller elements (with Hichcock’s name a reference to Alfred Hitchcock, director of thrillers). Margaret, in the film noir role of femme fatale, persuades Charles to kill her husband for material gain, only to kill her lover when she believes he has robbed her. Her repeated slashing of Charles’ head with a knife shifts her violently from the maternal feminine to the castrating, phallic feminine, whose narcissistic, selfseeking material desire now exceeds her sexual desire (the classic configuration of the femme fatale). This transition also provides one of the film’s horror highpoints of gynophobia, underlined by facial closeups of Martha, the sinister housekeeper who watches the murder voyeuristically, thereby drawing in the spectator’s gaze. Horror also resides in the visual and atmospheric depiction of the ‘haunting’ by a now ‘whole’ and ablebodied Hichcock, who recovers from Charles’ attempt to kill him. However, it is the psychical dynamics concerning the feared association of masculinity with the helplessness of the bodyin-pieces and with abjection (the maternal/feminine, the corpse, blood, decay) which underpin and give extra resonance to the horror. Initially, Hichcock sees himself as helpless and as a living corpse. He then recovers his motor coordination, unbeknown to the couple. They


later see blood seeping through the bedroom ceiling, and Charles sees Hichcock’s hanging corpse, which then promptly vanishes. Hichcock also appears to Margaret with mutilated hands (symptomatic, in filmic terms, of castration). However, it transpires that he is wearing special gloves, the blood is not his own and he only pretends to be a corpse. In other words, after his ‘death’, his links with the abject and with castration are all faked (while as far as the spectator, as well as the haunted couple, are concerned, the fact that these links are merely performed is not revealed until the end of the film). Hichcock also manages, significantly, to displace his original condition of paralytic helplessness on to Margaret/the feminine, by poisoning the lock of the chest she then cuts her hand on as she greedily wrenches it open to gain access to his wealth. Margaret ends up in his wheelchair, about to drink from a bottle he has also poisoned, and masculinity briefly appears ensured, having survived castration, abjection and the helplessness of the body-in-pieces. Putting Margaret in a wheelchair makes anxiety regarding the bodyin-pieces a feminine concern and shifts the problem away from masculinity. This works in the opposite way to fetishism, which sets up the entire female body as a reassuringly whole and attractive phallic substitute to alleviate male castration anxiety. On the other hand, metonymic fetishism, with its fragmentation and objectification of female body parts standing for the whole, works on both levels, reverting femininity to the helpless body-in-pieces stage as well as turning each body part into a reassuring phallic substitute. This dynamic can be seen in films like L’ultima preda del vampiro and L’amante del vampiro, in which the camera fragments and objectifies the eroticized female, and usually dancing, body. In Lo spettro the battle against femininity is ultimately lost for both lover and husband. Hichcock mistakenly drinks the poison meant for his wife, who offers it to him as gin. As she laughs exultantly, both at him and the forces of law and order who carry her away, Hichcock, having enjoyed a brief period as differentiated, unified and ablebodied, suffers the final abjection of death at her hands. Masculine anxiety about separation from the archaic maternal/ feminine is played out in the nightmare horrors of incorporation and castration in Freda’s sci-fi horror film Caltiki, il mostro immortale (1959). A male voice-over opens the film in a documentary style befitting the tale of an archeological expedition to ancient Mayan ruins, and imparting a note of factual, scientific authenticity. The voice-over introduces Caltiki, represented by a female statue, as an underground


goddess whose hunger for blood led to the extinction of an entire civilization. However, Caltiki is later revealed to be a shapeless unicellular mass that is actually genderless. It is twenty million years old and grows in size when exposed to radiation, a critical factor due to the imminent arrival of a radioactive comet that passes near Earth every 1,632 years. The organism will therefore pose a threat of galactic proportions. The coding of Caltiki as feminine is significant in its sheer gratuitousness, as well as lacking scientific foundation, indicating that it is being used as a site onto which galactic-size anxieties about the feminine can be transposed. A similarly illogical encoding takes place in Roma contro Roma, in which an unseen evil force operating through a high priest, and represented by a giant stone face, is inexplicably described in the feminine as a goddess. The specific nature of anxieties regarding the feminine in Caltiki becomes clear with the characteristics of the organism. Caltiki’s extreme age places it in the terrain of the archaic mother, whom Creed distinguishes from the pre-oedipal mother, separating her from the phallocentric family dynamic by locating her further back in time. The archaic mother in this context is the generative, parthenogenetic mother of creation, the ‘originating womb’ celebrated in transcultural mother-goddess mythologies (Creed 1993, pp. 24–30). For Dadoun, on the other hand, the archaic mother is the pre-oedipal mother. His account of the ‘terror of fusion and shapelessness’ inspired by her ‘oceanic’ nature is suggestive of masculine fears of incorporation by the maternal feminine and matches the dynamics of Caltiki as an exploration of the ‘archaic aspects of identification’: Archaic identification comes long before the appearance of the father-figure. It is the figure of the pre-Oedipal mother that predominates, even though at this stage it is hardly possible to speak of a ‘figure’. The mother as a spatio-temporal form is dissolved. She is no longer there, no longer present or clearly delineated. She simply marks a time before, a previous state which is never named; and she is that in which everything becomes engulfed, the oceanic thing … that calls for fusion – thereby putting the subject in touch with his own terror of fusion and formlessness. (Dadoun 1989, p. 41) As Creed notes, the archaic mother is represented negatively in horror films as a womb that not only gestates new life, but also threatens incorporation and death. In a film addressing masculine anxieties of identity, Caltiki is, inevitably, a unicellular mass that incorporates and


digests only men (although it moves towards female characters, the plot does not allow their incorporation). This raises the recurring concern in horror for the safe constitution of the masculine subject, sharply defined from the maternal feminine constructed by patriarchy as necessarily abject and formless by comparison. While this concern can be seen played out in terms of a threat to the masculine, which fears loss of differentiation, desire is also present. This desire, as Creed remarks, is for a return to the mother/womb and to the original state of non-differentiation (Creed 1993, p. 28). These competing dynamics of fear and desire inform horror films and are particularly present in Caltiki. The team of male archaeologists is repeatedly drawn to the site of the archaic maternal, despite the disappearance of one member and the crazed state of another, whose close encounter with Caltiki has returned him to an infantile stage of physical incapacity and near-speechlessness (one of the few words he can say is ‘Caltiki’). In a variation on this theme, in Bava’s horror sci-fi, Terrore nello spazio, the crew of the spaceship Argo is drawn to a planet of aliens who, in a reverse form of incorporation, take over the bodies of dead crew members. Much is made of the threat this poses to identity through the loss of free will, while visual emphasis is placed on the abject, mutilated nature of the undead. This incorporating form of possession is again primarily a masculine issue in the film. Although the crew are both male and female, all the incorporations are male, until the end of the film. At this point the Earthbound Argo is revealed to be occupied by two incorporated crew members, one male and one female, together with one last ‘intact’ male who fails to sabotage the global threat of loss of identity. In Caltiki masculinity appears compelled to investigate the source of the horror, the effects of which are startlingly captured in the close-ups of reactive looks replicated in a film-within-the-film episode, in which a male character films his own response during the moments prior to his incorporation by Caltiki. These looks of horror, into both this intradiegetic camera and the camera shooting the main film, remain as a record of his confrontation with death, much like the reactive looks of the female characters about to be murdered by the camera-wielding Mark in the notorious British horror Peeping Tom, directed one year later by Michael Reeves. Crucially, the extreme reactive looks of horror in Caltiki are all male (those of the vanished photographer, the diver and Max). When the professor’s wife and daughter express fear as they run from Caltiki, they are only shown in full body shots, and not with facial close-ups. This focus on male horror in the face of femininity is a feature of many other Italian


horror films from this period while Argento’s thriller-splatter development of the genre from the 1970s onwards throws into ambivalence both the gender and sexuality of the threat) (Knee 1996). The (male) archeologists and scientists return repeatedly to Caltiki’s habitat, which also bespeaks the maternal feminine, taking the form of a womb-like cave with an underwater lake (the waters) containing death (skulls, skeletons, bones) rather than life. Access to the cave is through a new opening created by a recent earthquake, a vagina-like entrance from which the men are lucky to escape with their lives after tearing one of their number, Max, away from Caltiki, who has begun to absorb his arm. The professor, a typical presence in horror films representing the reassuring apotheosis of masculine authority and mastery of the symbolic, eventually ‘solves’ the ‘riddle’ of femininity with his superior knowledge. His quest is of course not without obstacles. He takes a piece of Caltiki away for research purposes, but when he irradiates it, the scene is set for further incorporations by the ever-growing archaic mother-mass that destroys rather than nurtures. The concept of incorporation as used in film theory derives from psychoanalytic theory, but often reverses agent and object. The tracing by Laplanche and Pontalis of the notion of incorporation in Freud’s work regularly ascribes the process to the infant or adult not as object, but as agent of phantasized incorporation (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, pp. 211–12). Originating in the linked pleasures of nourishment and sexuality during the oral stage of infancy (a link highly pertinent to vampirism, as we shall see shortly), incorporation is both an instinctual aim and a form of object-relationship involving the physical and psychical processes of the infant as agent. While the oral stage forms the prototype of incorporation, the phantasy is restricted neither to infancy nor to the mouth, but may also be lived out in adulthood and in relation to other erotogenic zones (skin, respiration, sight and hearing). Of special interest is ‘a genital incorporation that is most strikingly manifested in the phantasy of the retention of the penis within the body’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, p. 212). When the situation is reversed, in other words, incorporation of, rather than by, the male subject, then the phantasy of pleasurably incorporating becomes the fear of being incorporated. In the case of the retention of the penis within the body of another, the classic fear of castration borne of the oedipal phase is evoked with the fear, not of the castrating father who says ‘no’ to the son’s incestuous desires for the mother, but of female genitalia or the vagina dentata, which not only retains, but potentially amputates, the penis during intercourse.


The castrating mother who takes back the penis to which she has given birth cannot always be distinguished in horror films from the incorporating archaic mother (Dadoun 1989, Creed 1993, p. 27). This is the case in Caltiki. Snakes, symbols of sex with fanged mouths featuring on the head of Medusa, the mythological depiction of castrating, death-dealing femininity, appear alongside skulls and bones in Caltiki’s cave, dangerously associating the maternal feminine with the sexual feminine and with death.12 With castration represented cinematically by the loss of limbs (Hichcock’s deformed hands in Lo spettro), Caltiki’s absorption of Max’s arm, the flesh of which later withers away, adds another key feminine threat to that of incorporation (which is his fate later). The galactic threat is ultimately dispelled by the professor, who discovers that Caltiki, like another patriarchal variant of femininity, the witch, can be destroyed by fire (although, as La maschera del demonio, La cripta e l’incubo and I lunghi capelli della morte all show, a witch’s powers do not always perish with her body in the flames). A different aspect of incorporation closer to the original psychoanalytical definition, with masculinity as agent rather than object, surfaces in Freda’s L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock (1962). The horrible secret is Hichcock’s necrophilia, to which he is drawn by both fear and desire in relation to femininity. In order to satisfy his sexual desire, the doctor either places women under complete sedation, as in the case of his two wives, or has intercourse with female corpses in the hospital mortuary and in the crypt housing his collection of dead women. For him, sexual pleasure and the total disempowerment or destruction of the object are linked. This is one of the meanings of incorporation that gave rise to theories of oral sadism and is also central to the psychical constitution of vampirism: ‘During the oral stage of organisation of the libido, the act of obtaining erotic mastery over an object coincides with that object’s destruction’ (Freud 1920, SE, XVIII, p. 54, Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, p. 212). Hichcock’s necrophilia can also be read as the ultimate form of separation from the feminine in order to achieve differentiation. Several facial close-ups reveal reactive looks of horror combining fear with desire, as he approaches the dead or sedated female body before satisfying his lust in the ultimate voyeuristic act in which the spectator, by extension, is also implicated. This portrayal of male necrophilia was daring for its time, and attempts were made to mitigate it in various ways during the film. For instance, Hichcock’s first wife, Margaret, actually complies with his necrophiliac urges, allowing herself to be sedated by him to the point


when his ever-increasing doses finally kill her. She then returns throughout the film to haunt his second wife, both physically and with her omnipresent portraits, indicating also that femininity cannot easily be despatched. It transpires that she has become inexplicably vampirized, and that Hichcock, equally inexplicably and out of character, is in love with her, thereby partially redeeming his necrophiliac character as one ultimately motivated by romantic love. As a vampire whom Hichcock must service by providing fresh young female blood, Margaret has moved from masochistic partner in their sadomasochistic, necrophiliac sex games, to an oral-sadistic position of potential dominance. Vampirism represents a constellation of psychical dynamics (oral sadism, incorporation, castration, fetishism), and this perhaps accounts for its centrality as a horror motif, as well as for its folkloric importance. Around one half of classic Italian horror films include vampirism (I vampiri, L’amante del vampiro, La maschera del demonio, L’ultima preda del vampiro, Il mulino delle donne di pietra, La strage dei vampiri, L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock, I tre volti della paura, Danza macabra, La cripta e l’incubo, Amanti d’oltretomba). In some of these films, whether for reasons of censorship regarding transgressive sexualities or, in the case of female vampires, to reinforce the control of masculinity over femininity, vampirism is attenuated by the denial of actual biting. This is substituted by male-engineered scientific or medicalized forms of blood transfusion (I vampiri, Il mulino delle donne di pietra, Amanti d’oltretomba). However, L’amante del vampiro shows both male and female vampirism in action, while L’ultima preda del vampiro even shows a naked female vampire (the first in cinematic history). The psychical anxieties embodied by vampirism lead back, as ever, to femininity as threat. Biting and sucking in vampirism evoke oral-sadistic fear and desire harking back to infancy and the relationship to the mother’s breast (a key relationship in the post-Freudian shift of emphasis in Kleinian feminist psychoanalysis from phallic to oral, and from penis to breast, as initial and primary signifiers in psychic development) (Klein 1975, Irigaray 1985, Benjamin 1990, Wright 1992). Preceding genital awareness, access to the breast (leading to pleasure) and its denial (inducing displeasure linked to helplessness) form the basis of sadistic oral fantasies. The pleasurable nurturing component of orality also gives rise to a reverse fantasy, that of devouring, rather than nurturing, on the part of the maternal feminine. Cannibalism in ancient ritual lycanthropy (wolf worship) was the precursor of vampirism, and attenuated the eating of human flesh in these rites (notably prevalent in Transylvania,


home to the vampire myth) by replacing it with the drinking of human blood (Dadoun 1989). (Two films in classic Italian horror, Seddok, l’erede di Satana and Lycanthropus, focus on the wolf theme, with male characters metamorphosing into wolves that kill but do not devour.) As Dadoun argues, incorporation or absorption by the archaic, all-devouring mother in the fetishized, phallic form of the vampire, takes place at the oral-sadistic ‘moment of transubstantiation, when the vampire absorbs his (or her) victim by kissing him (or her), when both become one and the same in a kind of communal thing, outside time (eternal) and space (ubiquitous)’ (Dadoun 1989, p. 41). The archaic mother also threatens castration, as we saw in Caltiki. In the words of Dadoun: ‘she appears as a phallic woman, a woman with a penis, a murderous, all-devouring or castrating mother. She evokes the anxiety of castration in its primordial, founding intensity – more so than the father, with whom the son can struggle on equal terms as it were’ (Dadoun 1989, p. 50). As the fetishized embodiment of the maternal phallus, the vampire, whether male or female, in effect signifies as the maternal feminine. In this context, vampirism in the films can be read as a threat primarily to masculinity, with its special, heightened anxieties regarding castration, and loss of differentiation and identity, through the penetration of body boundaries. This threat is particularly overt when the vampire is female. It is of course important to distinguish at the narrative level between male and female vampires, while bearing in mind that the vampire basically signifies as the threat/promise of the maternal feminine. This is especially the case in relation to issues of sexuality (same or opposite sex vampirism), and the gendering of the subject or agent of desire. Desire is a crucial element in vampirism, continuing the link in infancy between sexuality and nourishment (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, p. 212). At this oral juncture the maternal feminine gives way to a sexually desiring femininity that can also potentially castrate, with a further castrating locus of orality in the form of the fanged mouth or vagina dentata. Classic Italian horror features both female and male vampires who prey on both female and male victims. However, there appears to be more of a focus, in quantitative as well as qualitative terms, on female vampirism as source of horror. It is notable that the films seldom feature a male vampire as the only vampiric character. If one classes medicalized female-to-female blood transfusions as a mediated form of female vampirism, then Marguerite in I vampiri, Elsie in Il mulino delle donne di pietra, Solange in Amanti d’oltretomba and Margaret in L’orribile


secreto del Dr Hichcock rank alongside the unmediated vampires Asa in La maschera del demonio and Leuba in La cripta e l’incubo as the only vampires in these films. Both female and male vampires appear in Danza macabra, L’amante del vampiro, I tre volti della paura, La strage dei vampiri and L’ultima preda del vampiro. Female vampirism is the key concern of the films. The female vampire is either the initial and dominating vampirizing force (Elizabeth in Danza macabra, Alda in L’amante del vampiro), or takes over the narrative trajectory and/or dominates visually in terms of camera time, often in a way sexually exploitative of the female body. While the Wurdalak in part two of I tre volti della paura is a father who initially vampirizes his entire family, it is his vampirized daughter who provides the suspenseful plot kernel with her exogamous vampirizing of the lovestricken visiting ‘hero’. Similarly in La strage dei vampiri a male vampire takes up residence in the cellars of Louise and Wolfgang’s castle, but the central narrative and visual concern becomes the erotic and dangerous behaviour of the women he vampirizes and attempts to control (Louise, Corinne), or nearly vampirizes (the little girl is saved at the last moment). While in L’ultima preda del vampiro Gabor’s male ancestor is the initial, and remains the main, vampirizing force, the film’s titillating agenda, clearly aimed at a heterosexual male audience in its frequent exposure of undressing or stripping dancing female bodies, soon redirects the focus from the male vampire onto the naked, vampirized Katya, who wanders round the castle looking for prey. The American title for the film, Five Playgirls for the Vampire, clarifies the exploitative agenda left unsaid by the original title (which translates as ‘The Last Prey of the Vampire’). Given the sexual nature of the vampiric act, and the implications for the type of sexuality invoked, the gender of the vampire in relation to that of her/his victims is of special interest. Male-to-male vampirism, implying homosexuality, was a clear subtext in some of the earliest vampire literature, for example with Lord Ruthven in Polidori’s Fragment, and in aspects of the relationship between Dracula and Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s Dracula. In classic Italian horror it is relatively rare, one fleeting instance being the male vampire briefly glimpsed bent over Dr Carmus in Danza macabra. Generally, male vampires choose female victims, thereby reinforcing patriarchy’s heterosexual imperative (L’ultima preda del vampiro, Danza macabra, L’amante del vampiro, La strage dei vampiri). The case of female vampiric object choice is more complex and will be dealt with in greater detail in the next section. Only sometimes does she


vampirize male characters (Danza macabra, I tre volti della paura), or attempt to (Louise and Corinne in La strage dei vampiri). More often, however, she chooses female victims, whether directly, as in La maschera del demonio and La cripta e l’incubo, indirectly, through a male vampire (L’amante del vampiro), or in mediated fashion through a male doctor or scientist (I vampiri, Il mulino delle donne di pietra, Amanti d’oltretomba, L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock). In her object choice the female vampire differs significantly from her male counterpart in that she does not follow the heterosexual route as frequently, but selects same-sex victims or partners. As objects of both female and male vampiric attention, female victims outnumber male victims in classic Italian vampire horror. This fits in with patriarchy’s idealized construction of femininity as castrated and not castrating, passive rather than active (while the female vampire represents the apotheosis of its unidealized opposite). When she is not killed (and there are many female corpses, often unnamed, in these films – six in the antefact to I vampiri), the female victim is often the rescued damsel-in-distress providing a future marriage partner for the male hero. He thereby successfully completes his oedipal trajectory with an exogamous, non-incestuous erotic object choice (the traditional heterosexual happy ending establishing a new patriarchal family unit). To this end Vera is saved by Gabor in L’ultima preda del vampiro, Cynthia is rescued by the male doctor in L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock, Jenny is rescued by the male psychologist in Amanti d’oltretomba, Katya is saved by the male doctor in La maschera del demonio, Laurette is saved by the male journalist in I vampiri, Luisa is saved by Luca and Giorgio in L’amante del vampiro, and Lotte is saved by her childhood sweetheart, Hans, in Il mulino delle donne di pietra. On another level, some of these films appear to follow not the licit trajectory out of oedipality, but the oedipal fantasy itself (Oedipus kills his father, Laius, and marries and fathers children by his mother, Jocasta). This can be seen in films showing the killing by the younger male ‘hero’ of an older male character, or father-figure, to get the ‘father’s’ wife (L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock) or the woman they both desire (L’ultima preda del vampiro). The oedipal fantasy lurks especially close to the surface in L’ultima preda del vampiro. Gabor kills his vampiric male forefather in order to save Vera, a reincarnation of the old vampire’s lost love, Margherita, and therefore also doubling as female ancestress/desired mother-figure. Significantly, he intends to live with her in another place. In a rare plot development in the films, Gabor means to sell the castle, his patronymic home and locus of his oedipal struggle.


As indicated earlier, female rather than male vampirism is more commonly the centre of attention in these films. As in the case of subversive femininity in the peplum, this brings female desire to the fore as a threat to patriarchal hegemony, while in terms of the cinema industry it allows for highly marketable, sexualized images of femininity as the 1960s unfold. As a result, a key plot development deals with the titillating transition from repressed to overt female desire through the device of vampirism. The female vampire in the films is usually the embodiment of intense, eternal sexual desire, whereas this is not always clearly the motivation of her male equivalent. The male vampire is at times either more pragmatic and intellectualizing, or romanticizes the process (Gabor’s vampiric male ancestor’s justification of vampirism as an intellectual advance in L’ultima preda del vampiro, or the male vampire’s speech about a life of passion in La strage dei vampiri). Latent female desire attracts vampirism, which in turn unleashes the full potential of this desire (the classic precedent being Lucy in Stoker’s Dracula). Creed points to menstruation and hymenal flow, the two periods of female blood-release signalling the onset of sexual femininity, as possible explanations of the vampire myth (Creed 1993, p. 66). In Mauri’s La strage dei vampiri (1962), a male vampire is drawn to a castle pulsating with repressed female desire (with the castle, in Lacanian terms, housing the libidinal drives of the id). This desire is repressed in the context of marriage, described by Creed as ‘the formal and highly symbolic relations of men and women essential to the continuation of patriarchal society’ (Creed 1993, p. 61). Louise wastes no time in leaving her husband to host the ball on his own, while she appears irresistibly drawn to her bedroom where she waits for the vampire in a nightdress. She also lets her hair down. However, unlike melodrama’s use of this part of the mise en scène for the displacement of female desire, in her case the iconography leads into and reinforces her fully-fledged indulgence of desire. Corinne, the governess, also waits in a state of obvious sexual arousal at her open window, her long hair loose. Both female characters, once vampirized, become sexually aggressive and wander about looking for men, who are thereby placed in the position of victim to a female desire portrayed as lethal. This desire is also a threat to licit, symbolic masculinity-as-husband, as Louise tries to vampirize her husband and draw him into her sexual world. In true patriarchal style, the male vampire prohibits the process, maintaining his position as sole male and head of the new ‘family’ he has reproduced. Female desire is eventually destroyed in the final slaughter of the vampires (a slaughter with which the film also opens,


as a warning, or pre-emptive reassurance, that the desire depicted will ultimately be dispatched). Female desire poses a threat to masculinity that is investigated not only in vampiric horror films, but also, for instance, in the context of pre- and post-death sadomasochism in Bava’s La frusta e il corpo (1963), and through the topos of demonic possession in Rondi’s Il demonio (1963). Female desire is the driving force of La frusta e il corpo. The film revolves around Nevenka’s desire for Kurt, who can be read as the externalized form of her desire (a strategy examined in relation to melodrama in the opening chapter). Kurt has returned on hearing of her marriage to Christian, and can be seen to represent the return or surfacing of female desire (they have previously had an affair) in a marriage marked by Catholic asceticism. Her husband is in love with another woman, the suitably asexual and moral Katya. Nevenka repeatedly denies her desire for Kurt, who is mysteriously stabbed to death. It eventually transpires that she herself wielded the knife. Haunted by his ghost, whom only she can see, she embraces and stabs the vision she believes to be him, killing herself along with the object of her desire, or rather, her desire itself. Nevenka is in a constant state of sexual arousal throughout the film, which investigates her desire using the mechanism of sadomasochism (the whip and body of the title). The extreme sadomasochism involved indicates the virulence of the film’s stance towards female desire. Nevenka’s urge to be whipped prior to sex does not involve the use of stop words on her part as the masochistic ‘bottom’ of the sadomasochistic pair. On the contrary, Kurt’s whip opens up bloody weals on her willing back, a dynamic more connotative of self-harming than controlled sadomasochistic foreplay. This opens up the dangerous scenario of women welcoming physical abuse as an ingredient of sex. As if this were not enough, the film ends with the death of the desiring female character, as well as of the embodiment of her desire (Kurt). The demonizing of female desire in Il demonio, with its possessed female character, similarly features extreme violence (a beating by the father) and sexual abuse (by a priest and a shepherd), prior to her seduction and murder by her lover. With female desire we are in the psychoanalytical terrain of phallic, castrating femininity, whose toothed mouths, both oral and vaginal, threaten masculinity. The autonomy implicit in female desire, betokening a female sexuality unregulated by masculinity and in charge of its own object choice, also signals the sociopolitical threat that femininity poses to patriarchy. At the micro-social level of the family, there are the paternity problems created for patrilineality. Most significantly, the


emergence of sociopolitical female autonomy and self-determination in the face of patriarchal hegemony interlinks with psychical feminine threats to masculine identity as constructed by patriarchal ideology. While the psychical feminine threat as investigated by horror is clearly, and by now in horror criticism quite conventionally, accessed by recourse to psychoanalysis, the sociopolitical feminine threat is by no means as overtly visible. For one thing, the films are not commonly situated in contemporary historical settings (L’ultima preda del vampiro and L’amante del vampiro are two exceptions). The films are also usually set outside Italy and rarely make open reference to political events. The horror plot as fantasy genre is normally situated within the closed, anonymous space of a castle, with its distancing connotations of the unconscious and ahistorical past. None the less, the threat of female autonomy in the sociopolitical sphere is apparent in the films, if only in the ways in which it is regularly pre-empted. The age-old patriarchal strategy of divisiveness in relation to a femininity that might otherwise become dangerously unified and empowered, is apparent in classic Italian horror and its workings against any form of female community, or gynosociality.

Femininity divided The films follow the divisive patriarchal strategy of splitting femininity in narrative terms into opposing ideal and unideal feminine positions that are allocated across different female characters. Doubling as a narrative strategy has long been a feature of horror and in the form of the Doppelgänger in German fantasy writing and cinema. It is also the basis of Stevenson’s oft-filmed novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where it is used to explore the human, rational and civilized as opposed to the bestial, instinctual, uncivilized aspects of masculinity (themes continued in Italian horror’s two wolfman films, Seddok, l’erede di Satana and Lycanthropus). However, patriarchal splitting of femininity in cultural production, and not least in Italian horror, has a more far-reaching agenda. Female sexuality and reproductive powers, and in particular the potentially subversive autonomy represented by female desire, have always troubled patriarchy, which, as we have regularly seen, divides femininity into ideal chaste, young and passive versus unideal sexual, older and proactive (the madonna–whore, angel–demon dichotomies). In this division of femininity, motherhood is split away from sexuality, resulting in a denial of maternal sexuality. Crucially in the context of horror, female doubling is frequently an issue of age, and specifically


ageing. Female desire is demonized, and older/undead femininity, often intensely desiring, is pitted unfavourably against a younger, chaste, victim-like femininity. This patriarchal divide-and-conquer approach of splitting the opposing gender into what are made to appear incompatible characteristics aims to ensure a fractured, uncohesive femininity. Such a femininity is unsure of its identity in terms of the individual. (Can a mother be sexual? Does ageing spell the end of feminine sexuality?) In the context of an insecure individual identity, femininity is unlikely to cohere sociopolitically as a group that is sufficiently empowered to challenge patriarchy. Of course, masculinity in the films can also be said to be spread across characters, for instance old versus young, upper-class versus lower-class, but, unlike femininity, it is not definable by sexual markers (while the class division also applies to femininity). Moreover, femininity is defined in the films solely in relation to masculinity rather than on its own terms, while masculinity relates primarily to itself. The opening scenes of Danza macabra, for instance, are set in a men-only club, from which the ‘hero’ sets out to spend the night in a haunted castle for a bet. Femininity is restricted to the castle and to the afterlife, with no female characters appearing outside these zones. Male anxiety, obsession and fetishism concerning femininity as horrific and castrating are signalled in these early all-male scenes by Poe’s narration of his discovery of one of Berenice’s teeth, and his realization of how her teeth (the instruments of castration) ignited his obsession with her. Male characters often work in homosocial fashion in teams or pairs to investigate the feminine threat and dispel it. They are also often professionals (doctors, scientists, journalists, artists, writers), with the doctors and scientists ‘secure’ in their knowledge, particularly about the workings of the female body and of basic life-forces. Femininity, on the other hand, is frequently divided against itself, with female characters isolated and alienated from each other in the domestic sphere that circumscribes them. This is apparent in class terms, in relationships between female characters of the same class, and those from different classes. The central, aristocratic or upper-class female characters are often portrayed alone and enjoy little contact with other women from their own class, apart from the social occasion of the ball (La strage dei vampiri, and, as relived in the afterlife, Danza macabra). Relations with lowerclass women, notably the female housekeeper, are often hostile (L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock), with the mistress at times in danger from financially grasping housekeepers who collude with husbands to kill them (Lo spettro). Solange succeeds in helping Stephen kill Muriel in


Amanti d’oltretomba, and in La vendetta di Lady Morgan Lilian hypnotizes Susan and leads her to her death in the hope of becoming mistress of the castle, alongside her master. The positioning of female characters in antagonistic relations with each other in the films, usually in competition for a man, is often along the age–youth axis used by patriarchy to define and categorize femininity (but not masculinity) exclusively in sexual terms. Femininity is thereby also divided against itself in generational terms, precluding the type of continuity and sociality enjoyed by patriarchy and its patrilineal, homosocial dynamics. The films portraying undead women are of special interest here, with the splitting of femininity into older/undead versus younger female characters. At the same time, the films play on shared identity in terms of physical resemblance between the two female characters involved, with the younger the descendant of the older (Katia and Asa in La maschera del demonio, Laura and Scina in La cripta e l’incubo), her younger sister (Jenny and Muriel in Amanti d’oltretomba) or her reincarnation (Vera and Marguerite in L’ultima preda del vampiro). Along similar lines to the peplum’s split portrayal of femininity that is both achieved and, crucially, exposed by the use of one actress, when two lookalike undead and living female characters are played by one actress in horror, the actual unified nature of femininity, with its shared identities, surfaces from behind the hostile relations foregrounded by the narrative (for example, Barbara Steele plays both Katia and Asa in La maschera del demonio, and both Jenny and Muriel in Amanti d’oltretomba). In these two films shared feminine identity is represented by the portrait of the dead woman, which bears a striking likeness to the living woman. The dramatic moment of recognition by the younger, living female character of what appears to be her own image in the portrait also raises interesting issues of identification, fetishism, the body-inpieces and spectatorship. In the first instance, her identification with the image, which is simultaneously hers but not hers, replicates that of the infantile mirror stage, in which the initial pleasurable, narcissistic recognition of the self in the mirror is followed by the unpleasurable sense of distance and unreality of the image. In terms of fetishism, just as the female body or parts of it may be fetishized on screen to allay male castration anxieties, so female castration anxieties (relating not to the mother’s castration, but to the daughter’s perception of her own castration) may be allayed by the narcissistic turning of the female character’s own body into the phallus via the portrait (Grosz 1991). The mirror image of the portrait, in its representation of the whole


woman, also allays anxieties about the body-in-pieces. For the female spectator, or the male spectator adopting the feminine position on screen, the interaction of the female character with her simulacrum in the portrait, as well as in the form of another, twin female character, presents a complex pattern of identificatory strategies. The patriarchal polarizing of negatively valued older femininity against positively valued younger femininity, and the consequent antagonizing of female relations, is at its most extreme when the undead female character, a vampire, is rejuvenated by means of young female blood. At issue for the female vampires is not just eternal life, but the regaining of lost youth. The difference in ages between the vampire and her female victim is most pointed when they look identical, but live in different centuries, and when focus falls on a portrait of the vampire in her youth (they always die young, and usually violently). Portraits of male vampires are not as frequent or central (there is one of Gabor’s look-a-like vampiric male ancestor, with both characters played by Italy’s first horror star, Walter Brandi, in L’ultima preda del vampiro, but it is Vera’s similarity to the portrait of the dead, rather than undead, Margherita, together with the suggestion that she is her reincarnation, that is the focus of attention). The matter of age is not foregrounded in the case of male vampires, who generally aim only at immortality and generating an undead family of usually female, but not male, vampires around them (for instance, L’ultima preda del vampiro and La strage dei vampiri, whose male vampires forbid the addition of another male, while the vampire in I tre volti della paura vampirizes his whole family). Interestingly Ermanno, the male vampire in L’amante del vampiro who vampirizes young women for Alda, his sixteenth-century vampire lover, is shown not becoming old, but rather monstrous, when in need of more (female) blood. For patriarchal femininity, old age is culturally coded not as a natural, biological development, but as a biological disease (Pilcher 1995). For example, when the elderly housekeeper Solange is rejuvenated with Muriel’s blood by her master, he refers to her ‘blood disease’, and the same terminology is used in the case of Elsie in Il mulino delle donne di pietra. Young female blood is the fountain of eternal youth, not just eternal life, for most vampires in Italian horror. Only when immortality itself is the aim (La vendetta di Lady Morgan), or coming alive annually to relive the moment of death (Danza macabra), is male blood as efficacious as female blood (in the former film it is an elderly male character, the unfortunate Uncle Neville, whose blood gives life to the spirits of his niece’s male and female murderers).


The vampirizing of a young female character by another older/ undead female character allows the latter to live through the former. Exceptionally, Vera in L’ultima preda del vampiro is not vampirized by Margherita, who appears only in portrait form. Yet the fact that the young dancer is the 1950s reincarnation of Margherita (she looks the same, instinctively recognizes items in the castle and falls for the descendant of Margherita’s lover) suggests that Margherita is living again through Vera. This is also Asa’s agenda in taking over the body of her descendant, Katia, in La maschera del demonio. Incorporation, discussed earlier in relation to male anxieties regarding the maternal feminine, and pitting masculinity against a feminine threat, is also in evidence in vampirism. When the films depict female objects of incorporation by female vampires, femininity becomes pitted against femininity. This acquires special resonance by tapping into patriarchy’s traditional villification of older femininity and by making the vampiric conflict specifically one of older versus younger femininity. The aggressive, incorporating figure of the female vampire combines with the cultural encoding of older, postmenopausal femininity as witch in the character of Asa. As the witch not quite destroyed by burning and facial spiking, Asa’s abject, eyeless sockets pullulating with insect life are brought to life by drops of blood from the hand of the doctor who investigates her remains. Asa’s aim is to live through Katia by taking over her body. The incorporation, or taking over of a young woman’s body and identity by an older/undead woman is verbalized in La cripta e l’incubo by the haunting voice of Sheena, Laura’s female ancestor: ‘I shall be her, and she will be me, and the centuries will be cancelled out.’ In Amanti d’oltretomba Jenny is taken over by her dead sister, Muriel, and begins to behave uncharacteristically, and, unlike her usually meek self, subversively, adopting Muriel’s habits of drinking brandy and laughing at her husband’s research. ‘It’s as if another person has taken over my mind and my body,’ Jenny says. This type of incorporation corresponds to the third definition of this psychic mechanism originating in the oralsadistic phase of infancy, namely ‘by keeping it within oneself, to appropriate the object’s qualities’. More precisely, the identificatory agenda of the female vampire or spirit ties in with the central role of incorporation in relation to introjection and identification: ‘It is this last aspect that makes incorporation into the matrix of introjection and identification’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1980, p. 212). This type of incorporation is never attempted by male vampires (Gabor’s vampiric male ancestor in L’ultima preda del vampiro ‘lives’ in his descendant’s


castle and looks exactly like him, but there is never any suggestion that he wants to live through Gabor or has vampirized him). This type of incorporation, attempted by a female ancestor on a female descendant (and by female vampires or spirits on young women generally), splits femininity against itself through what can be structurally termed as familial intergenerational antagonism. This brings to mind the intergenerational mother–daughter dyad, with its fraught dynamics around same-sex merging, particularly the daughter’s struggle against ‘engulfing symbiosis’ by the mother within a patriarchal context (Irigaray 1981, Wright 1992, p. 263). Antagonistic or divisive relations ensue because patriarchal ideology, as Wright argues, denies mother and daughter separate identities as women, perpetuating the ‘not a woman, but a mother’ syndrome that pre-empts a way of relating outside the role of mothering: ‘The establishment of symbolic mother-daughter relationships is essential to women’s autonomy and identity, as women and not just as mothers’ (Wright 1992, p. 263). The female vampire’s relationship with young female victims takes the negative patriarchal mother–daughter dyad to excess, and into the realms of horror. It also reinforces patriarchy’s hostility to a competing female or maternal genealogy. Divisive narrative strategies regarding femininity in the horror films, often following traditional patriarchal patterns, are at work in the social categories of age, the family and, as we saw earlier, class. Importantly, these strategies attempt to pre-empt a unified femininity on which a feminine community, a gynosociality with economic autonomy and political unity, can base itself. A female genealogy, such as that posited by Irigaray, is one of the building blocks of gynosociality (l’entre-femmes) in that it connects women with each other, particularly across the mother–daughter divide (Whitford 1991 pp. 75–97, Whitford 1991a, p. 192). This female genealogy would feature the female subject positions denied by patriarchy, subjectivities that would allow for genuine, rather than patriarchally-mediated, relations between women. When the mother–daughter dyad is also understood in broader, generic terms to indicate the generational chasm that divides women, promoted by patriarchy’s villification of older femininity, then the particular relevance of the representation of this dyad in the horror films, in the light of developing Italian feminism and its emphasis on affidamento (entrustment), a gynosociality across generations and classes, becomes clear. Classic Italian horror promotes a mother–daughter dynamic which, as we have seen, is not just conflictual, but positively dangerous for


younger femininity. Female genealogy interpreted as matrilineal, in other words, with specific emphasis on a female ancestor often in the context of aristocratic lineage, is also negatively portrayed. In Margheriti’s I lunghi capelli della morte (1964), the Karnstein family (like the Karnstein family in Le Fanu’s original story, Carmilla) is represented solely by women. The mother and her two daughters all have the long hair of the title (with long hair a signifier of female sexuality), and are associated with death, initially as victims, but, for most of the film, as implacable perpetrators of revenge. Years after the mother is falsely accused of murder and witchcraft, and burnt alive, and the eldest daughter, Helen, raped and murdered, the youngest daughter, Elizabeth, is forced to marry into the ruling family. This family consists only of men, whose patriarchal head was responsible for the deaths of her mother and sister. The murdered sister (Barbara Steele) returns and initiates the revenge plot. This culminates in the death of the patriarch (he has a heart attack when she appears in the doorway of the church) and of his son, Elizabeth’s husband, Kurt, the murderer for whose crime the mother was put to death. The real horror element in the film is the initial death of mother and daughter. However, the overt horror focuses on the vengeful actions of a team of female characters working together. The dead mother conjures up the plague (inexplicably and gratuitously making her a witch after all), Helen returns as Mary, her relentless plan for revenge culminating with the burning of Kurt inside a wicker man, and featuring his unforgettable reactive look of horror, all with the collusion of the female housekeeper, Grimalda. Attention is also drawn to Helen’s true abject nature as undead (emphasized by the contents of her tomb, an eye in the midst of a mass of hair). The film concentrates on a negative representation of what happens when women work together, showing the horrifying actions of a female genealogy after an initial attempt has been made at its destruction by a ruling, patrilineal family. As if finally to underline the impossibility of matrilineal dominance, the only surviving member of the ruling family, Elizabeth, is not empowered to rule, a role taken over at the film’s closure by a male elder. Sheena, the ancestress of the Karnstein family in Mastrocinque’s La cripta e l’incubo (1964), is regarded as the curse of the family by her male descendant, Ludwig. Condemned as a witch centuries previously, her powers live on by reincarnation (as Ljuba) and incorporation (Ludwig’s emperilled daughter, Laura). However, her powers are not aimed at destroying men, as in I lunghi capelli della morte, but specifically other women, both from her own family and outside it.


Whereas the female characters in I lunghi capelli della morte form a cohesive group threatening, if only temporarily, the patriarchal genealogy, in La cripta e l’incubo they work against each other. Female genealogy is similarly portrayed as inimical, rather than beneficial, to women, by the way that Asa, the witch-ancestress of Katia’s family in La maschera del demonio, attempts to use her incorporative powers against her young female descendant. This negative representation of a divisive vertical female genealogy (ancestress versus female descendant) is paralleled in Amanti d’oltretomba in the hostile horizontal female genealogy between two sisters, the undead Muriel and the sister she despises, and for a while incorporates, Jenny. A destructive female genealogy inimical not only to young female descendants but also to lower-class characters, and indeed the community as a whole, is developed in complex fashion involving two related female lineages in Mastrocinque’s Un angelo per Satana (1966). Belinda, Illa’s sixteenth-century ancestress, incorporates her in order to exact revenge on her cousin, Maddalena, Harriet’s look-alike ancestress, of whose beauty and attractiveness to men, particularly the young sculptor of Maddalena’s statue, she was intensely jealous. Her sexual desire and competitiveness for men had originally led Belinda to attempt to dislodge the statue from the parapet, but in her destructive embrace of Maddalena’s likeness she fell with it to her ‘death’ into the lake below. The possessed Illa (Belinda) uses the hypnotic powers of her lover to incorporate and manipulate his niece, Harriet. The plan is intended to end in her death at the hands of an enraged mob after the seductive femme fatale actions of Harriet (Belinda) lead to rape, murder and suicide. Belinda’s destructive desire in respect of Harriet is ultimately thwarted by Roberto, the young artist who has restored the statue and established a romantic relationship with its modern-day model. When he exposes her uncle’s hypnosis, the latter exposes Illa, who, after revealing herself to be the incorporated descendant of Belinda, repeats the fateful embrace of the statue and plunges into the lake. Professional, investigative masculinity reveals and curtails the destructiveness of female genealogy, fuelled across the centuries by female sexual desire with which it is made to appear synonymous. Female genealogy dangerously promoting a gynosociality that excludes masculinity altogether, in the form of lesbianism, is also promoted as destructive and dangerous in the films. In La cripta e l’incubo a female genealogy riven by fatal hostility (Sheena Karnstein/Ljuba versus Laura Karnstein) is already couched in lesbianism in the original story by Le Fanu. In Carmilla the Countess Carmilla/Mircalla/Millarca


Karnstein is a female vampire who feeds on the blood of non-noble young women and kills them, but appears to fall in love with her descendant, Laura, the narrator of the story who survived their encounter. Laura is descended through her mother’s line from the Karnsteins, a ‘bad family’, which has apparently died out (Le Fanu 1993, p. 305). Under the cover of a lesbian relationship barely couched in terms of an eroticized female friendship encoded as abhorrent, the beautiful young Carmilla moves towards her destructive goal that would mean Laura’s death after repeated vampirizations. Laura, the ‘I’ narrator, describes her feelings towards Carmilla as ambivalent: ‘I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust … I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence’ (Le Fanu 1993, p. 264). Carmilla makes no secret of her incorporative intentions, her expressions ambiguously matching those of the discourse of romantic love: ‘You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever’, ‘I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so’ (Le Fanu 1993, pp. 264, 274). According to the knowledgeable old patriarch, Baron Vordenburg, this passion (we might infer ‘lesbian’ passion) is not real, but only resembles that of love: ‘The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons’ (Le Fanu 1993, p. 317, emphasis added). Heterosexual romance (‘real’ passion) is markedly absent in the story, but is inserted in Italian films from this period dealing with female vampires or spirits in order to re-establish the patriarchal status quo of heterosexuality. There is no young male romantic-investigative hero to save Le Fanu’s Laura, who is rescued by a team of four ‘fathers’: the elderly doctor, the general, Baron Vordenburg and her own father. La cripta e l’incubo retains the eroticized relationship between Laura and Ljuba/Sheena (Le Fanu’s Carmilla), but adds the young male picture-restorer, Friedrich, as heterosexual romantic interest. At the same time that Friedrich tries, unsuccessfully, to court the solitary, unhappy Laura in the garden, Ljuba, like Carmilla in the story, makes a dramatic entrance as her carriage overturns. She takes up residence in the house, and the two women become inseparable. Laura is transformed by Ljuba’s presence into a lively, sexual being, declaring herself happy for the first time. However, the young male investigator into the Sheena–Laura genealogy unearths the missing image of Sheena, and together with Laura’s father opens her tomb to reveal first a sinister clawed hand and then a body that resembles Ljuba. As one Karnstein may not stake another, it


is, significantly, Friedrich who dispatches Sheena with the usual violent phallic penetration of the stake in the heart, at which point Ljuba disintegrates at Laura’s side. The final scene, also typical of horror closure, shows the hero, Friedrich, the rescued damsel, Laura, and her father leaving the castle of torments in an open carriage by daylight. What is interesting is the way Laura now looks at Friedrich, whose advances she had repeatedly spurned. Her look is best described as a sinister half-smile and is certainly not the desiring look befitting a happy heterosexual ending. Her look leaves open-ended the closure of the film in terms of sexuality. Like the ending of Carmilla, which finds Laura often starting from a reverie, as she expresses it, ‘fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door’, Laura’s final look in La cripta e l’incubo suggests that heterosexual desire may not have been successfully installed after all, and that, despite Ljuba’s death, lesbian attraction has not quite left the scenario. Lesbian sexuality is made especially overt in Un angelo per Satano, where it forms part of the destructive bisexual seductions of Harriet not as herself, the chaste heroine who will ultimately deserve the hero, but as her binary opposite, the sexually desiring Belinda. Lesbianism, together with heterosexual and autoerotic female desire, derives much of its negative representation through its association with Belinda. Like Laura on Ljuba’s arrival in La cripta e l’incubo, Harriet becomes sexualized only when hypnotized into becoming Belinda, the wicked woman from centuries earlier. In other words, female desire (belonging to any sexuality) is associated ‘safely’ with the past, with a woman who is really dead, and who will be dispatched yet again with the film’s closure. Each time she is hypnotized, when the clock strikes midnight, Harriet/Belinda first goes through a narcissistic, autoerotic phase during which she looks at herself in the mirror and becomes aroused. She then seeks out heterosexual pleasures (as the naked sadist who whips the retarded young Vittorio and promises herself to him if he will rape two of the village girls; as the seducer of her maid’s lover, the teacher Dario; as the provoker of desire in Carlo, the family man who later burns down his cottage with his young daughter in it in order to win her). To this excess of heterosexually fuelled destruction is added her lesbianism in a titillating seduction scene with her maid. Lesbianism is entirely relegated to the afterlife in Margheriti’s Danza macabra (1963). Femininity itself is only allowed a post-death existence in that all the female characters in the film are already dead. Lesbianism is investigated, but only between undead characters, in other words, as an already dead or impossible sexuality. It is also


portrayed as divisive of femininity (Elizabeth kills Julia). The audience is clearly meant to identify with the masculine, heterosexual position of the romantic ‘hero’, the young journalist Alan, as he wanders around the castle. We accompany him and share his gradually intensifying reactions as fear turns to horror. With the first appearance of Elizabeth as she lays a hand on his unsuspecting shoulder, femininity is supposed to inspire fear. Despite her first words reassuringly acknowledging the homosocial exchange of women (‘Did my brother send you?’), and again later in conjunction with traditional female competition for men (‘Julia must realize my brother sent you to visit me’), Alan’s reaction is one of fear. This is underlined by Elizabeth’s response, as she asks, laughing, if he is afraid of her, and then remarks: ‘Must I give you courage? It doesn’t seem right, a woman.’ As fear gives way to desire, and Alan sits next to Elizabeth on the bed, Julia appears on the scene to disturb the heterosexual scenario (‘You’ve come to make trouble,’ says Elizabeth). Remarks by Julia to Elizabeth are open to a lesbian reading (‘He might learn the secret’, ‘You won’t be happy with any man, you’re liable to be disappointed’). Julia repeatedly takes a (traditionally masculine) voyeuristic position as she spies from her portrait with glowing eyes, and through keyholes, as Elizabeth seeks a heterosexual resolution to her bisexuality. ‘You will give me (heterosexual) life,’ she says to Alan, while Julia mutters: ‘She’ll be sorry, pretending to be something she isn’t.’ As the plot unfolds, Alan learns that the undead (of both sexes) in the castle come alive annually to relive the moment of their death, with the blood of a visitor ensuring both that the process may be repeated the following year, and the enlarging of the undead community. His witnessing of these moments is mediated by Dr Carmus, who allows him to watch the final moments of Elizabeth, her husband, her male lover and her female lover, Julia. In this annual reliving of the boundary crossings from life to death to undeath, the characters also continually renegotiate sexualities and subjectivities. This is particularly the case of the bisexual Elizabeth, constantly challenged by Julia to yield to her lesbian side. Heterosexuality is ultimately reinstated, if rather unconvincingly, with a conventional romantic ending that sees Alan remaining with Elizabeth (who cannot leave the castle grounds). To her final observation: ‘You have stayed with me, Alan,’ he replies: ‘Yes, Elizabeth.’ He has done so, however, only because he has been impaled on the gates trying to escape from a place of shifting sexualities, and back into the homosocial normality of the heterosexual outside world.


In this film femininity and lesbian sexuality are sources of horror for a trapped masculinity, with many close-ups of Alan’s horrified reactive looks and actions. Femininity is accordingly also used, as ever, to provide reassuringly conventional sexual spectacle. For example, Elsie undresses down to her transparent crinolene prior to being strangled in a re-enactment of her final moments on her honeymoon visit to the castle. Although aimed at the male spectator, this would in reality, of course, also appeal to a lesbian audience. The erotic all-female dance parodying lesbian vampirism in L’amante del vampiro also provides sexual titillation, along with the subversive sexual agenda of lesbianism itself. Similarly, the female striptease in L’ultima preda del vampiro has more admiring diegetic female than male spectators, implying lesbian desire, while Vera, the heroine destined for heterosexual romance, pointedly detaches herself from the scene by leaving the room. Lesbianism and vampirism have always had a special connection in the cinema. Weiss notes that ‘outside of male pornography, the lesbian vampire is the most persistent lesbian image in the history of the cinema’ (Weiss 1992, p. 84). This image, which associates lesbian desire with horror as well as titillation, in a characteristically patriarchal perspective, is crucial in redefining as deviant all close female relationships, let alone all-female desire (Weiss 1992, p. 87). Together with sexual ‘deviance’, close female relationships and, by implication, female community in a politicized, gynosocial sense, are thereby also stigmatized. While the films discussed above investigate lesbianism, others clearly pre-empt any lesbian, and so potentially gynosocial, possibilities, by ensuring that female-to-female vampirism is not shown on screen, but is mediated by masculinity. In L’amante del vampiro Alda obtains fresh blood not by directly vampirizing young women, but by sending Ermanno to vampirize them and then sucking his blood in a sexual embrace. Asa in La maschera del demonio uses male characters to close in on Katia, but the necessary final coming together of the two women does not take the form of biting vampirism. Instead, wrist-towrist contact is meant to allow Asa finally to live through Katia’s body in a de-eroticized form of joining. This fails, significantly, as a result of Katia’s response of arousal. Female-to-female vampirism is also often desexualized, and any possibility of a bond developing curtailed, through medicalization. This takes the form of blood transfusions from younger to older/undead female characters, administered by male doctors and scientists. Marguerite’s vampirism of young girls is mediated in this way by the professor in I vampiri. Dr Hichcock promises to


feed Margaret’s vampirism in L’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock, and Solange relies on Stephen, her scientist master, for blood transfusions from Muriel and Jenny in Amanti d’oltretomba. Elsie similarly relies on her father, a professor of sculpture, and his accomplice, a doctor, in Il mulino delle donne di pietra. Gynosociality is pre-empted in these films, only appearing grotesquely and in post-death form in Il mulino delle donne di pietra, in the form of a carousel of stone women (Figure 8). These stone women are in reality the corpses of girls whose blood has been used to keep Elsie alive. Female community is portrayed as sinister in this reversal of the Medusa myth in which it is men who are turned to stone. Unlike the homosocial teams of investigators who successfully rescue the damsel in distress (as in Il mulino delle donne di pietra, I vampiri, L’amante del vampiro, La strage dei vampiri, La cripta e l’incubo), female characters are rarely seen working together to solve the mystery. When Francesca follows Luisa to the castle in L’amante del vampiro in an attempt to explore its secrets, there is a suggestion that between them

Figure 8 Post-death female community: the stone women in Ferroni’s Il mulino delle donne di pietra (1960).


they might prevail. However, she fails miserably, and it is left to two male characters to dispose of the vampires and rescue Luisa. Classic Italian horror investigates femininity as both a deep psychic threat to masculinity within a patriarchal framework, and concomitantly, though less overtly, as a gender that also threatens insubordination to patriarchal hegemony at a sociopolitical level. Using traditional strategies of dividing femininity, such as setting female characters against each other and splitting femininity into dichotomous opposites, and then exploiting this to portray femininity as horrifying in its duplicitousness, the films play out patriarchal nightmares of ‘what if’ scenarios. These are often, but not always, reassuringly resolved with closures re-establishing masculine supremacy, with ‘bad’ femininity dispatched and ‘good’ femininity ushered off into the domestic realm of a new heterosexual family formation. In contrast to the focus on femininity in horror, issues of subjectivity and sexuality remain resolutely attached to masculinity, with femininity marginalized, in the last genre under discussion, namely the spaghetti western.

5 The Man With No Name: Masculinity as Style in the Spaghetti Western

Introduction The spaghetti western is notorious for its memorable iconography of masculinity involved in sadomasochistic violence taken to surreal excess and displayed in close-up detail. Its homosocial and predominantly homoerotic base allows little room, as a rule, for femininity and heterosexuality (Landy 2000, p. 190). Films featuring central female characters are few, and even in these cases femininity is usually represented exclusively through sexuality, often directly through prostitution (for example, Leone’s C’era una volta il West, 1969, and Marcellini’s Lola Colt, 1967). A rare spaghetti western by a female director, Lina Wertmüller’s Il mio corpo per un poker (1968), centres on a female outlaw (the real-life Belle Starr), but even in her case emphasis is on her physical beauty, with sexual attractiveness remaining the dominant focus. In other words, it is how these women look, rather than what they do, that is crucial to their role, namely as token affirmation of male heterosexuality in a homosocial and homoerotic genre. Instead, given the paucity of central female characters, the positions of femininity can be seen taken up by the racial, rather than gendered, other of dominant white masculinity, and on occasion by feminized adolescent or homosexual masculinity. In diametric opposition to postwar melodrama, with its preoccupation with domestic, maternal femininity and contemporary Italian setting, the spaghetti western deals with the mythologized historical past of another nation whose films had dominated Italian screens from the mid-1910s. Taking its cue from the American western, it deals with the pre-civilized Old West and Mexico of the 1800s and early 1900s, an era not conducive to family stability and, by connotation, to the traditional, 173


domestic concerns of femininity. Hardy gun-toting women existed in the real West, like the bandit queen Belle Starr (Myra Belle Shirley) (Levitin 1982). In Corbucci’s Johnny Oro (1966), the sheriff’s wife even shoots expertly and fearlessly alongside her husband in a few scenes. However, the spaghetti western generally chooses to sideline this type of femininity, with few exceptions (most notably the female Mexican bandit/revolutionary). Instead, the genre centres on masculinity, taking over the generic adventure strand from the declining peplum in the mid-1960s and allowing the hero, now transformed into anti-hero, to continue a different quest in another, more pungent, parodic vein. This is not to say that an emotionalism equal in intensity to that evoked by melodrama is absent from the spaghetti western, a genre that has even been labelled male melodrama (Lusted 1996, Landy 1997). The Italianization of the American genre during this period characteristically involved accessing, through parodically extreme visual and aural means, deep-seated psychosexual dynamics generally contained in a more prosaic way by the narrative in the classic Hollywood western. The golden era of the spaghetti western, known in Italy as western all’italiana or western-spaghetti, is regarded as running from 1964 to the early 1970s. It was one of the most prolific of all the genres, with around 450 films produced from 1964 to 1978.1 Despite this high number of films, made by numerous directors, the genre is primarily, if not exclusively, identified with Sergio Leone, who revitalized an existing genre of some 25 films with his first of six westerns, Per un pugno di dollari (1964), and went on to gain auteur status.2 The film was made on a low budget, with the same sets and production team of Caiano’s big-budget western Le pistole non discutono, but had a much greater impact. Leone completed his famous trilogy with Per qualche dollaro in più (1965) and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966). His C’era una volta il west (1968) is held to be the apotheosis of the genre, while Giù la testa! (1971) and Il mio nome è Nessuno (1973) continue the exploration of masculine identities.3 Other directors include Ferdinando Baldi, Enzo Barboni, Sergio Corbucci, Damiano Damiani, Antonio Margheriti, Gianfranco Parolini, Giulio Questi and Duccio Tessari, to name but a few. The iconography and major characteristics of masculinity in the genre were established by Clint Eastwood (the American actor from the western TV series Rawhide), and perhaps most successfully imitated by Gianni Garko in Margheriti’s Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua morte (1968). Eastwood starred in Leone’s trilogy, mirroring the role of Steve

The Man With No Name 175

Reeves, who had set the template for musculinity in the peplum six years earlier. Other American actors were also used (among them Rod Cameron, James Coburn, Henry Fonda, William Holden and Lee Van Cleef), as well as Italian actors (Giuliano Gemma, Franco Nero), some with the by now standard custom of Anglicized or Americanized names for the home market (Mario Girotti as Terence Hill and Carlo Pedersoli as Bud Spencer). Among key nicknames of male characters used, after initial success, to promote series of films as a way of prolonging the genre were Django, Ringo, Sabata, Sartana and Trinity (with Django the most prolific in the re-titling of films for export).4 The withholding of genuine names, and even non-naming, as in the case of Eastwood’s character, raises interesting issues of gender identity in relation to the symbolic, as we shall see. Americanized pseudonyms were common for film personnel of the genre. Leone went under the name of Bob Robertson for his first western, after his father’s directorial pseudonym Roberto Roberti, reverting to his own name after his credentials had been established with Italian audiences.5 Even music composers did not use their own names, at least initially. Music, an important Italian national cultural medium, is key to the Italianization of the Hollywood western, its cinematic presence exemplified by the postwar cineopera (of which around 50 were produced in the late 1950s, just a few years before spaghetti western production began) (Brunetta 1993, III, pp. 544–9, Frayling 1998, p. 54). Musical elements were, of course, present in the American western from its beginnings (the live piano accompaniment to the silent westerns, with music used to create suspense, the repetition of motifs in the soundtrack to underline certain themes, the intradiegetic playing of instruments, and singing soldiers, cowboys and saloon girls). However, thanks largely to Ennio Morricone, the Italian western added a whole new dimension to film music, moving music out of the background by making it conspicuous, and often featuring an extensive musical score that led to the genre itself being described as operatic. The first featurelength Italian western, Koch’s Una signora dell’ovest (1942), was in fact based on an opera, the homonymous work by Puccini (1910). The inclusion in the musical motifs of unexpected instruments and sounds, in conjunction with characterization and stereotypical action scenes pushed to extremes, contributes to the parodic effect of the genre. The music thereby compounds the spaghetti western’s strategy of ‘making strange’ what is familiar (in line with the Russian Formalist definition of art in the 1920s), the Italianization of the genre in itself a form of defamiliarization in its playing with the conventions of the


American western. Parody, a key feature of the 1960s spaghetti westerns, was already in evidence in the 1940s with Ferroni’s skit on Koch’s film, Il fanciullo del West (1943). Both the parody western and its original were box office hits on domestic release. Crucially, the parodic style raises issues concerning the status of representation of gender stereotypes when these appear excessive and open to ridicule (as discussed in the chapter on commedia all’italiana). In tandem with highly stylized visual effects, music in the spaghetti western is often instrumental in establishing characterization, much like the use of the leitmotif in opera (for example, the recurring mischievous motif accompanying Eastwood’s antics in Per un pugno di dollari). Characterization, like plot, follows the genre rule of easy-tofollow simplicity and Manichean opposites, as in the peplum that preceded it, and the medium of the comic strip to which both genres are linked (and from which Corbucci, for example, borrowed cutting effects) (Frayling 1998, p. x).6 However, the use of flashback in many of the spaghetti westerns, unlike the peplum, offers insights into character psychology. Moreover, while a title such as Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo may appear simplistic, the parodic nature of the genre throws into question the meaning of these moralistic and aesthetic categories, especially in relation to their use by the American host genre. Differences between the Italian variant and the American original in terms of plot motifs have inevitably been the focus of study. Frayling adapts Wright’s oppositions (good–bad, inside society–outside society, wilderness–civilization) to the Italian western as follows: victim–executioner, gringo–Mexican, insider (local community)–outsider (local community), pro-faction versus anti-faction, family-oriented versus self-oriented, amity–enmity, money–commitment to a cause (Frayling 1998, pp. 50–1). Staig and Williams foreground spaghetti western characteristics of volatile emotionalism, violence, vendetta, family, ambivalence towards religion, all portrayed with a greater sense of realism as well as humour, the last central to Italian cinema generally and rooted in the tradition of Roman satire (Staig and Williams 1975, p. 33). In terms of plot variations, this prolific genre has been distilled into a variety of phases. Frayling, building on Wright’s structuralist analysis of the American western, divides the Italian variant into three plot phases: foundational (c.1964–7), transitional (c.1966–8) and Zabata-spaghetti (c.1967–71) (Frayling 1998, pp. 53–6). As far as gender is concerned, masculinity is a constant, with femininity appearing only under ‘whores’, ‘female friend’ and, presumably, under ‘family’ in the first variant, and not at all in the


second and third. For Wright, female characters feature as the prize for the lone hero of the classic plot defending family and community, while the professional plot (a scenario common in the spaghetti western), concerns itself with a male elite that rejects community and female company (Frayling 1998, p. 43). Brunetta distinguishes three plot phases: grand guignol, revolutionary and parody using the ‘eroicomico’, this last variant (represented by the Trinity films at the end of the cycle) recapturing family audiences alienated by the violence of the preceding types (Brunetta 1993, IV, pp. 46–7).7 Italian, and indeed European, interest in western themes dates back as far as the crystallization of the genre in America during the nineteenth century with dime novels (which included female characters), travel literature, drama and biography, all dealing with the West and its otherness (Buscombe 1996). A popular literary western tradition of novels, sometimes serialized in newspapers, and both in translation and homegrown (such as the novels of Emilio Salgari) already existed in Italy at the turn of the century. This tradition was particularly stimulated by the highly publicized Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill Cody, performed in Italy in 1890 and 1905 (Cristofori and Menarini 1986–7, II, Carloni 1993, Frayling 1998, p. 40). Dominated by the spectacular in terms of setting (the West), highly visual action drama (fights, robberies, kidnappings) and distinctive iconography (items of clothing, weaponry, horses), the western moved easily from the written word to theatre, comic strip and silent screen. Europe was open to this exotic cinematic genre from the beginning, in terms of exhibiting American westerns and producing Euro-westerns. Frayling even posits a European, rather than a US, market, for the earliest silent westerns, which made most profit in France (Frayling 1998, p. 99). Italy, Germany and France all produced westerns in the silent era. One of the first Italian westerns, La vampira indiana (1913), involved Leone’s parents (it was directed by his father, Vincenzo, and starred his mother, Bice Valeriano, in the title role) (Brunetta 1995, I, p. 95, Buscombe 1996, p. 119). After the sharp decline of the Italian film industry during the First World War, and coupled with the rapid growth in the US film industry (reaching a high of around 700 films produced in 1926), production did not pick up until the effects of Fascist protectionist measures and the building of the Cinecittà studios in the late 1930s had kicked in (Buscombe 1996, p. 427).8 This is the context for renewed production of westerns in Italy during the 1930s and early 1940s, culminating in Italy’s first feature-length western, made under Fascism in 1942 (Koch’s Una signora dell’ovest).


Few Italian, and indeed European, westerns, were produced during the period 1946–60 (the earlier part of which saw an end to protectionism with postwar American occupation, and the release of a backlog of thousands of Hollywood films onto the Italian market). However, Frayling draws attention to a series of particularly violent Italian Wild Bill Hikock copies of Hollywood ‘B’ movies in the early 1950s, of interest in that they prefigure the extreme use of violence in the spaghetti westerns a decade later (Frayling 1998, p. 33). In the early 1960s, Italian, German and Spanish producers were galvanized into financing Italian westerns, in the first instance by the European success of Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960), a film based on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954). This gave a fresh take on the standard western and was set in Mexico, a setting that was to be favoured by the spaghetti western. A few years later came the German Reinl’s Winnetou films, The Treasure of Silver Lake (1962) and Winnetou the Warrior (1963), the latter starring the American Lex Barker (of Tarzan fame), with both films highly successful in Europe, and especially Italy. These German films inaugurated the 1960s era of mainly co-produced, distinctively Eurostyle westerns, with the spaghetti western taking the lead role after the impact of Leone’s first film (Frayling 1998 pp. 113–15).9 Numerically, Italy’s 450 or so films represented a major proportion of the Euro-westerns (Weisser lists 558 for the period 1961–77) (Weisser 1992). Italian co-productions, already in evidence in the 1940s, would rise steeply during the peplum and especially the spaghetti western era.10 At the same time that the spaghetti western was thriving, box office success of Hollywood westerns had hit a low point.11 In Italy, production of spaghetti westerns, non-existent in 1958, rose to 25 from 1963 to 1964, after which Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari triggered production rising to 72 per annum by 1967 (Frayling 1998, p. 50).12 The success of the spaghetti western in Italy had some boosting effect on US production of westerns in terms of numbers, which rose into the twenties from 1964 (with Italy always an important market for US films, and in these years still boasting the highest audience numbers in Europe, despite a continuing downward trend).13 However, the major impact was in US investment in westerns made more cost-effectively in Europe (Spain and Italy), and in the feeding back into Hollywood westerns of aspects of the Italianized western (the example usually cited is Peckinpah’s excessively violent The Wild Bunch, 1969). Particularly notable is the role of Clint Eastwood, icon of the spaghetti western, in keeping the Hollywood western on the cinematic map into the 1990s, as both actor and director.


The profits realized by the majority of the Italian westerns, with high box office receipts and relatively low production costs, reinvigorated the Italian cinema industry after the fading out of the lucrative peplum, and came mostly from the domestic market, with only around 20 per cent of the films exported (Frayling 1998, p. 63).14 This would seem to indicate not just the continuing hold of US film genres on the Italian imagination, but also a predilection for a homegrown western that somehow resonated with the 1960s Italian social context. The commercial success of a genre with so little room for femininity, indeed the least inclusive of femininity of all the genres, invites a closer look at the workings of the home market. In this context Wagstaff draws attention to the central importance of class and gender difference between audiences of prima and terza visione cinemas. Firstrun cinemas were located in main cities, mostly in the more modernized North and Centre, and catered for a middle-class audience, which included women, especially from the younger generation. Third-run cinemas, by contrast, were situated in rural areas and provincial towns, mostly in the South, with a significant lower-class audience component from which, given only 30 per cent cinema attendance, women would appear to have been largely absent (Wagstaff 1992). Commercial success for the spaghetti western initially derived from prima visione runs, with high ticket prices enabling films in 1965 to make twice as much as any previous Hollywood western. But it was terza visione showings to a predominantly male, lower-class audience, paying cheaper ticket prices, that pulled in profits over a longer period of four to five years. In attempting to account for a lack of (hetero)sexual content in much of the genre, uncharacteristic when compared with other genres of the time, Wagstaff points out that this audience had not developed the consumerist attitute to sex of the more modern areas of Italy, where commedia all’italiana fared better and where the influence of the Church was on the wane (Wagstaff 1992). As in the era of the peplum, the industry was prompted to massproduce films for this male-dominated Southern market in a continuing climate of falling ticket sales, to the extent that 350 out of the 450 westerns made were produced for these cinemas (Wagstaff 1992). The gender and class constitution of this audience in some respects resembles that of the American series western of the 1920s and the similar ‘B’ westerns. These US westerns, shown mostly in rural areas and small towns, appear to have attracted mainly men and children, and to have been unpopular with women (Buscombe 1996, pp. 36–7). However, American female audiences for big-budget ‘A’ films were pulled in by


the use of female and male stars brought together in romantic plots, a phenomenon not generally mirrored by the spaghetti western. While the sheer number of spaghetti westerns produced, together with the immense profits they yielded, point to a certain popularity of this variant of the adventure genre, albeit, like the peplum, mostly among Southern, lower-class males, Wagstaff sounds a warning note in relation to the problematic nature of the notion of popularity. In particular, Italian cinema-going practices indicate not so much a choice of film as regular attendance at the same cinema, whatever film is being shown. The cinema was a social meeting place (crucially so for young city women, as discussed in the chapter on melodrama), and the film would not be watched intently from beginning to end, but only sporadically, in between conversations and at points of gratification (laughter, thrill, titillation) heralded by the music (Wagstaff 1992). However, it is indicative that box office success of the early spaghetti westerns took place in prima visione cinemas, which would have regularly seen female audiences. The situation regarding the question, already asked in relation to commedia all’italiana, of what might interest the female spectator in this maledominated genre, is also complicated by the contemporary view of spectatorship, reiterated throughout this study, as not simply a matter of female audiences identifying with female characters. Whatever the gender aspects of consumption, with the demise of the terza visione cinemas as prima visione cinemas once again took over, the Italian western, no longer prima visione material, began to fade out in the 1970s. Mass taste was becoming increasingly urbanized, and rising cinema-going has been seen as a reflection of rising incomes among the urban middle classes (Micicché 1998, p. 146).15 Other reasons given by Wagstaff for the demise of a genre so dependent on terza visione outlets, with their cheap tickets, are the quadrupling of ticket prices from 1964 to 1978 on the back of the 1973 oil crisis, inroads made by television as broadcaster of films resulting from the increase in numbers of television stations after the sector was deregulated in 1976, and the renewed presence of Hollywood in Italy, particularly in the distribution sector (Wagstaff 1992, p. 251). Other genres were also coming to the fore, such as spy thrillers, police and political films, while the by now entrenched ‘sexy’ documentary, in a climate of lessening censorship, contributed to increasing (heterosexual) sexploitation in other genres, including the spaghetti western towards the end of its major era.16 There is also the inevitable waning of genres when variation on repetition appears to be exhausted. Only a different era, with a different social context (or indeed a different national culture), can provide a new set of variations to


encourage a fresh genre lifespan. None the less, the golden era of the spaghetti western, lasting about a decade, in many ways outlasted that of other genres, even the preceding peplum run of six years. The spaghetti western provided the next step for directors and composers previously involved in other genres, particularly the peplum (Leone, Corbucci, Tessari, and the composers Rustichelli and De Masi). Many areas of continuity have been traced between these two adventure strands. From a gender standpoint, changing contextual social factors, in conjunction with the gender dynamics of production, distribution and consumption in an industry of continuing patriarchal hegemony, contribute, as always, to the cinematic celebration or demonization of particular forms of masculinity and femininity. As in the case of the popularity of the semi-naked musclebound male hero on the side of ‘right’ in the peplum, the subsequent emergence of an amoral or immoral excess of violence in the spaghetti western as a key function of masculinity has been theorized in terms of the social climate in contemporary Italy. As we saw in chapter 3, peplum masculinity functioned to reassure those sidelined by economic growth and prosperity in a fast but unevenly industrializing country, with the fantasy that traditional physical prowess (a form of displaced unskilled manual labour power) was still valuable and even heroic. It has been suggested that the peplum corresponds to the infantile tastes of a childhood Italy, where physical power can solve problems without recourse to technology, while the spaghetti western represents the adolescent tastes of a post-boom Italy in which use of technology is all-important (Paolella 1965). In other words, while the peplum, with its half-naked, musclebound heroes celebrates masculinity in its use of the body, the spaghetti western updates and ‘professionalizes’ masculinity with modern technology in order to feed fantasies of control over fastmoving industrialization and product development. The excessive violence of masculinity in the genre has been read as a sign of ideological and moral confusion in a period culminating in the 1968 crisis in values, while at the same time resonating, not with grandiose ‘frontier epic’ values, but rather with the everyday Italian ‘urge to overwhelm’ in order not to be overwhelmed (Micicché 1998).17 The mercenary cynicism of the spaghetti western has also been related to the ‘blind social materialism’ of the 1960s – a trait already exemplified in the commodification of social relations in commedia all’italiana (Brunetta 1993, IV, p. 406). The 1960s was also a period of increasingly militant Italian feminism, a factor difficult not to relate


to the sidelining of femininity by the spaghetti western and to the submersion of a token heterosexuality into the safe zone of homoeroticism and the ever-present patriarchal baseline of homosociality. Certain aspects of the spaghetti western have also inevitably been aligned with perceptions and representations of Southern Italian characteristics: vendetta, ‘amoral familism’, or privileging the family at the expense of others (Frayling 1998); volatile emotionalism, violence, brutality, criminality, the importance of landscape, demographic mobility, crumbling local communities, the ambiguous role of the Catholic Church (Landy 1997). In terms of Southern Italian cinema audiences, there is already a longstanding familiarity with American culture in general, dating back to the mid-nineteenth-century beginnings of emigration to America (both North and South) from the Abruzzi, Calabria and Sicily (Landy 1997). Even before the appearance of the violent spaghetti western, the more sanitized American western had long provided wholesome family entertainment for Italy as a whole, and, approved of by the Church, had proved a particularly popular genre in the 1950s (Forgacs 1996, p. 209). Wagstaff foregrounds the commercial imperatives at work in the making of the spaghetti western, and genre cinema generally, with films using pre-existing sets and clichés cobbled together around points of gratification. While this is certainly the case, the end result is not an abstracted, culturally aspecific jigsaw of haphazardly connected parts, as it could well have been, but a text embedded in, and imbued with, gender formations pertaining to the culture of the era and conditions of consumption. Of special interest is the outcome of this cobbling together in a preoccupation with exclusively masculine concerns represented by an emphasis on style and the interlocking dynamics of sadomasochism, racial difference and homosociality.

Masculinity as masquerade With parody a key feature of the Italianized western, masculinity takes on a highly stylized aspect that can be read in terms of masquerade, with all the implications of gender as performance. The visual focus on masculinity as style and surface leads to an intensification of the iconographic, fetishistic effect already an ingredient in the American western, and inherent in the cinematic medium itself. As a result, the external paraphernalia of masculinity (guns, boots, spurs, dusters, cigars, horses) acquires extraordinary significance over and in excess of narrative requirements.


The emphasis on clothing also goes back to the roots of the cinematic western in performance, notably its showmanship origins in the Wild West shows, where fantasy played as much a role as the reality of historical rangerider gear (Gaines 1996, p. 99). As Gaines points out, the clothing style of the silent cowboy films, in drawing on these shows, placed it already two steps away from the real West. In this context, the paraphernalia of cinematic masculinity in the spaghetti western is based as much on fantasy as on historical research into the exact details of clothing and weaponry. In other words, it is created to represent a specific iconographic variant of masculinity that appears rooted in reality, but which, to the expert eye, is at times anachronistic or historically incorrect, as in the case of Leone’s use of guns (Frayling 1998, p. 170). The rule of fantasy over reality in the iconographic sphere clearly also begs the question of the (patriarchal) fantasy nature of the masculinity thus represented. It has been suggested that one specific function of the focus on clothing in a genre dominated by masculinity is the deflection of male sexuality away from the body and on to the ‘hip and the heel, where the lethal concentration of steel and leather held in check the possibility that the male body might turn into pure spectacle’ (Gaines 1996, p. 99). This same danger of masculinity as sexual spectacle was even greater in the peplum, with its semi-clothed male bodies and huge, exposed muscles, worn like clothing and covering the ‘normal’ body beneath with their sheer excess, artificiality and unnaturalness. In the spaghetti western the emphasis on clothes may similarly serve to distract from the body beneath in creating distance between the masquerade and what it covers. In this context Gaines observes that western heroes sleep in their clothes, ostensibly so as to be ever-ready for action, but in effect also disavowing male nakedness. This custom, functioning also to preserve the association of masculinity with the outside world by bringing the outdoors inside, is illustrated in Leone’s first film of the genre, as Silvanito draws attention to Eastwood’s fully dressed body in bed with the question: ‘Is this how you go to bed?’ In Per qualche dollaro in più, emphasis is again drawn to Eastwood’s body, this time by the fact that he does not wear underwear (unusually, according to Gaines), as he throws down a pair of longjohns after the terrified Mexican he has evicted from the hotel room he wants to occupy, with the words: ‘I don’t wear em.’ Ultimately the denial of male nakedness through gratuitous emphasis on clothing, much like Freudian negation, actually achieves the opposite effect. It draws the gaze to Eastwood’s body, and not just the


gaze of the desiring female spectator within the diegesis of this film, namely the voluptuous wife of the hotel owner observing the longjohns incident, and the female spectator of the film whom she implicates. More transgressively, the denial attracts the gaze of the male spectator of the film, thereby inducing a homoerotic dynamic. Indeed, as Gaines argues elsewhere, western attire (leather on skin, the steel of spurs) lends itself exceptionally well to the iconography of gay pornography (Gaines and Herzog 1998, p. 179). Focus on the male body, then, while forever denied, is a constant side-effect of the masquerade, also veering into sadomasochistic violence in the denial of homosexuality (Neale 1993). With femininity largely displaced, masculinity becomes the main object of both the diegetic and the film spectator’s look. On occasion masculinity even fills the screen with just one part of the body, with extreme close-ups of the face featuring almost from the outset of Per un pugno di dollari, together with the ground-breaking close-up eyes sequence of Eastwood and Volonté in the shootout at the end of the film. Leone’s characteristically huge, prolonged and repetitive closeups of the face, accompanied by Morricone’s musical score beginning slowly and quickening in pace with the ever-faster sequence of shots, were to set the pattern for the preliminary part of the shootout in future films. This extreme use of the close-up, a shot associated, rather, with horror and melodrama, was virtually absent, as Bazin observed, from the American western (Bazin 1972, p. 147). Neale singles out Leone’s characteristic use of the close-up as a means of mediating the gaze of the male film spectator, whose direct gaze at the male body is diverted, with the intradiegetic look, moreover, one of hatred rather than desire (Neale 1993, p. 18). With the duration of the close-up progressively lengthened in the drawn-out three-way shootout in Per qualche dollaro in più and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, and the shot held to maximum duration at the beginning and end of C’era una volta il West, this inflection of the close-up became a defining feature of the genre. As a result, timing becomes a central element in creating the style of masculinity. Prolonged close-ups open up a space for contemplation, and particularly fetishization, of a fragmented part of the male body, a fragmentation traditionally more characteristic of the cinematic female body. In addition, from a pragmatic, consumer point of view, these prolonged close-ups and the dramatic music accompanying them, galvanize spectator attention and allow Italian audiences time to settle back into an imminent action scene in between socializing.


Masculinity in the spaghetti western takes up the traditional position of femininity on the screen as style and surface, in terms of the style versus content, surface versus substance, oppositions. As Doane summarizes, femininity is ‘more closely associated with the surface of the image than its illusory depths, its constructed 3-dimensional space which the man is destined to inhabit and hence control’ (Doane 1991 p. 20). The western, with its panoramic outside space characteristic of the adventure strand (as in the peplum) is dominated by masculinity, its wide open landscapes more suggestive of three-dimensional space than the (however equally illusory) indoor domestic scenario traditionally associated with femininity. Masculinity is mobile rather than static, moving around and almost permeating a space with no boundaries (walls, national frontiers). Eastwood’s illicit entry into the home of the Baxters in Per un pugno di dollari, for instance, appears osmotic, as do the border crossings in the films (for example, those of Ringo in Johnny Oro). Masculinity controls modes of transport, mounting and dismounting at will, usually horses, but also trains (Mortimer forces the train to make an unscheduled stop at Tucamcari in Per qualche dollaro in più, Frank gets on and off Morton’s train whenever he feels like it in C’era una volta il West, and Nobody easily hijacks a train for his own purposes in Il mio nome è Nessuno). Any enclosure (trains or hotel rooms) is only ever temporary. The enclosing, domesticating effects of femininity are to be avoided by free-moving masculinity if the ‘hero’ is to remain at liberty to ride into the open landscape from which he often emerged at the outset of the film. In terms of Eco’s superman, he must not ‘consume’ himself with the finite domestic resolution of marriage, but remain available to reemerge from the landscape for his next quest, possibly in the next film of the series (Eco 1981). Although, as we have seen, there has been speculation on the reasons for the marginalization of femininity in the spaghetti westerns, linked especially to the Southern Italian, predominantly male market for the genre, in a sense this marginalization merely represents an overt and conspicuous return of cinema to its traditional patriarchal baseline, where only masculinity is validated. However, as far as distribution was concerned, femininity, or rather femininity in its reductive form of female sexuality, was used to market the films whenever possible. The advertised presence of a female character in any western promises some sort of sexual content, however fleeting and minor this turns out to be (while in the case of publicity posters highlighting Marianne Koch in Per un pugno di dollari, this also reflects the use of the famous German star as a condition of German financing for this co-production).


The representation of femininity in American westerns is constructed according to the traditional patriarchal madonna–whore divide (mother, wife, sister, daughter, school marm versus saloon girl/prostitute). In other words, although femininity is portrayed in the host genre (and is certainly more prominent that in most spaghetti westerns), it can be argued that its presence functions merely as a foil to masculinity, with women used ‘only as signs, ciphers, markers of the boundaries of the masculine’ (Kirkham and Thumim 1993, p. 20). In the spaghetti western the predominance of male characters means that they tend to act as a foil to each other, rather than the more usual use of female characters as arenas for homosocial relations. Femininity generally appears in much reduced form merely to establish masculinity as heterosexual, as evidenced by the saloon girl as its most common, and exclusively sexual, representation. Femininity defined by family belonging is less prevalent, and professional femininity, like Janet in Killer calibro .32, trained by her father as a bank accountant, is an exception (the hero observes: ‘strange, isn’t it, a girl who keeps books’). The ostentatious masquerade of femininity in the ornate, highly coloured costumes of the saloon girl (especially in Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua morte, where they contrast with the general drabness of the scene) only ever provides temporary distraction from the genre’s central concern with masculine masquerade. In foregrounding masquerade and performance, parodic representation of masculinity in the end leads to an exposure, or ‘making strange’, of patriarchal masculinity, which manages simultaneously to glorify and ridicule it, while revealing its inherent contradictions (especially the precarious nature of masculine possession of the phallus). As suggested earlier, this dual action of parody works on the spectator rather like Freudian negation. In other words, while masculinity as unbelievably phallic and potent is taken to absurd lengths and so parodied, or made to appear a ridiculous impossibility, at the same time the fantasy of omnipotent control over others and over events is actually envisaged. While gender as performance, rather than as innate, essentialist biology, was discussed in relation to the semi-naked, primitive muscular male body relying purely on physical strength in close combat in the peplum, the notion of masquerade or mask is particularly fitting in the context of masculinity in the western, a genre equipped with, and actually defined from the start by, a powerful and specific iconography of clothing and weaponry that defeats from afar (guns, cannon, dynamite, grenades). The terms masquerade and mask draw attention to the outer signs and accoutrements of gender performance, as well as


suggesting concealment of, and so distance from, another reality beneath. Both terms were first used in relation to women by Joan Rivière, in her article ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (1929), to refer to the compulsion of an intellectual, and by her definition therefore masculine, female patient, to hide this masculinity by ‘assuming’ and ‘wearing’ womanliness ‘as a mask’, and indulging in ‘compulsive ogling and coquetting’ with older male members of her audience after delivering her lectures. This foregrounding of the feminine side by professional women would feature the ‘feminine interest’ of attention to ‘personal appearance’ (Rivière 1986, p. 36). In particular, ‘When lecturing, not to students but to colleagues, she chooses particularly feminine clothes’ (Rivière 1986, p. 39). Elaborating on the notion of what is ‘beneath’, conjured up by the notion of the masquerade as womanliness that is ‘worn’ in order to ‘hide’ the possession of the phallus, Rivière shifts the metaphor of the masquerade, thereby exposing it as metaphor, to explain that it is not a question of separation between the masquerade and ‘genuine womanliness’ beneath, or, put differently, it is not a matter of two layers. Rather, she defines womanliness as a ‘capacity’ inherent in all women. It is the use to which this capacity is put that makes it either ‘genuine’ or a masquerade (‘genuine’ referring to its use as a ‘primary mode of sexual enjoyment’, as opposed to masquerade, or the use of womanliness ‘as a device for avoiding anxiety’) (Rivière 1986, p. 39). It is therefore important to bear in mind the status of the masquerade as metaphor in its role as an analytical tool. More recently her notion of gender masquerade has been reworked for the analysis of cinematic femininity and female spectatorship by Doane, who draws attention to the use of femininity as a ‘decorative layer’ (Doane 1991, p. 25). In particular, she highlights the excessive nature of the use of the ‘accoutrements’ of femininity: ‘The masquerade doubles representation; it is constituted by a hyperbolization of the accoutrements of femininity’ (Doane 1991, p. 26). In relation to masculinity as masquerade, she comments that, while this is indeed a possibility, it is unnecessary because of the dominance of masculinity in the patriarchal gender hierarchy: ‘it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to’ (Doane 1991, p. 26). The use of womanliness as masquerade is a defence mechanism against masculinity for Rivière (namely, a reaction-formation resulting from anxiety about punishment or castration by the father/masculinity for having stolen the phallus in her appropriation of the intellectual role). It would seem that masculinity has no need for such a reaction.


However, as Lacan was to point out in ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, neither gender really possesses the phallus, so that castration anxiety is in fact common to both genders. This anxiety is betrayed not only by the feminine masquerade, but also its equivalent, and in a sense therefore ‘feminized’, masculine display: ‘The fact that femininity finds its refuge in this mask … has the curious consequence of making virile display in the human being itself seem feminine’ (Lacan 1985, p. 291). Indeed, masculinity has even greater need of the masquerade than femininity, because it bears the onus of possessing the phallus: ‘No one has the phallus but the phallus is the male sign, the man’s assignment … The man’s masculinity, his male world, is the assertion of the phallus to support his having it. To the woman’s masquerade there thus corresponds male display (parade is Lacan’s term)’ (Heath 1986, p. 55). As a result, cinematic wish-fulfilment under patriarchy tends to fetishize femininity, in Lacan’s terms, as ‘being’, and masculinity as reassuringly ‘having’ the phallus/woman (Lacan 1985, p. 289). As Heath summarizes, ‘The fetishization of the masquerade that cinema captures is the male distance: having, possession, the woman as phallus as the term of the fantasy of the man, her identity for him’ (Heath 1986, p. 58). This clearly works in genres focusing on femininity as spectacle and fetish object, such as melodrama and horror. When femininity is sidelined and masculinity becomes central as spectacle, as in the Italianization of the western, the intensification and parodic manipulation of traditional western iconography of masculine accoutrements construct masculinity as masquerade instead.18 Particularly foregrounded is the fact that ‘All the trappings of authority, hierarchy, position make the man, his phallic identity: “if the penis was the phallus, men would have no need of feathers or ties or medals … Display [parade], just like the masquerade, thus betrays a flaw: no one has the phallus”’ (Heath 1986, p. 56). For ‘feather or ties or medals’ we might substitute guns, hats, dusters, boots, spurs and cigars. However, whereas femininity as masquerade is an anxiety-driven defence against patriarchal retribution for appropriating the phallus, masculinity as masquerade functions as an anxiety-driven defence against the suspicion that, despite patriarchal claims, masculinity does not, after all, really possess the phallus. At this point we should recall that masquerading possession of the phallus forms part of a larger phantasy originating in the mirror stage of infancy, but relived and reiterated during the fantasy work of film spectatorship. The first phase of Lacan’s mirror stage (discussed in


chapters 3 and 4) establishes a dynamic of pleasurable primary narcissism when the image of a unified, whole body is glimpsed in the mirror for the first time. Contrasting with the prior sense of fragmentation and helplessness, the mirror image appears to affirm the desired phantasy of an ideal ego, a unified, omnipotent and therefore phallic, body. It is this narcissism, with its features of self-sufficiency and phallic omnipotence, together with the fear of their loss/castration and the suspicion of lack, that motivates the excess of masquerading masculinity in films exhibiting the male body as spectacle, and this is particularly true of the spaghetti western. Neale chooses the Eastwood character in Leone’s trilogy as an exemplification, in extreme form, of the cinematic expression of the phantasy of ‘the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego’, noting that ‘the hero’s powers are rendered almost godlike, hardly qualified at all’, and suggesting that this may account for the ritualization of these powers and thence the apparent inevitability of his victory by the end of the narrative (Neale 1993, p. 12) (Figure 9). However, not all heroes in the spaghetti western maintain the inviolability of Eastwood’s character, with some failing to fulfil the phantasy. Neale’s criteria for the defeat of the cinematic hero, read as the ‘eventual disintegration’ of the ‘image of self-possessed, omnipotent masculinity’, and used to analyse the fate of Alain Delon’s gangster in Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), can be applied to Silence (Jean Louis Trintignant) in Corbucci’s Il grande Silenzio (1968). The omnipotence of these male characters, both silent and apparently invincible, comes

Figure 9 In control of the shootout: Clint Eastwood in Leone’s Per qualche dollaro in più (1965).


under threat after contact with femininity which is also racially different (Delon’s exchange of looks with a black female singer, and the sexual relationship between Silence and Pauline, the black widow who hires him to avenge her husband’s murder). As Neale points out in relation to Delon’s character, who is subsequently shot and wounded, the narcissistic omnipotence of masculinity is threatened by the ‘double difference’ of gender and race (Neale 1993, p. 12). Similarly Silence has his hands mutilated, an act symbolic of castration, before he is killed, as part of the sadomasochistic dynamic functioning both to express fear of loss of phallic narcissism and to disavow homosexuality. Neale, following Mulvey, draws attention to the centrality of this theme of ‘lost or doomed male narcissism’ in westerns that elaborate on the threat by ‘women, society and the law’, and resulting in what he calls the ‘nostalgia Western’ (Neale 1993, p. 15). Of special interest in this context of nostalgia for a lost male narcissism is Leone’s C’era una volta il West. The film is exceptional as a spaghetti western in its centralizing of femininity, as well as masculinity, as spectacle, and in its return to the traditional cinematic use of female sexuality as arena for homosocial relations, fetishistic reassurance of phallic possession and affirmation of male heterosexuality. Claudia Cardinale as the prostitute Jill McBain frequently fills the screen, but not of course as action heroine equivalent to Frank, Harmonica and Cheyenne (the only time she takes a rifle from the wall sees her shooting ineffectually into the night). Her character functions as a sexually charged reference point constantly returned to and reiterated as the objectification of male desire. Her powerful screen presence provides the traditional cinematic, fetishized embodiment of the phallus for masculinity, while her own desire is acknowledged only to be negated and denied (most strikingly in her prolonged gaze at Harmonica before he leaves at the end of the film). She embodies constant reassurance that masculinity does, after all, possess the phallus, if not in directly possessing her (which Frank in fact does), then in the constant possibility of such possession. In terms of spectatorship (both diegetic and on the part of the cinema audience), looking at her is already a form of possession. As Cheyenne tells her: ‘You don’t know what it means to a man, seeing a woman like you.’ Affirmation of masculine possession of the phallus is particularly important in a film imbued with nostalgia, notably for an omnipotent phallic narcissism doomed, if not to extinction, then to transformation or displacement as civilization and the law advance on the West. They do so in the form of the railway and the town built around it, a civilization that


brings with it the power of state (rather than anarchic) law. On the surface this civilization appears to be headed by femininity (Jill inherits the land where the new town is built), but it is Harmonica and Cheyenne who ensure that she keeps it. Jill’s sexuality is foregrounded, her identity subsumed into that of prostitute, the most common form of femininity in the genre, sexually available to all comers not just as satisfier of male desire, but as affirmation of heterosexuality, particularly in the three main male characters. The other, desexualized feminine roles of the wife and mother she could have been are introduced only to be denied (her marriage of one month to McBain is situated in the antefact of the film; her husband and adoptive family of three children are already dead by the time she arrives in Sweetwater; her husband’s death means she cannot, after all, give him more children). She is not allowed to remarry at the end of the film (so denying her desire and the film the romantic happy ending, of Wright’s classic American western plot). Rather than cutting a familial, matriarchal figure at the forefront of civilization in the final frames of the film, in which she is surrounded by male workers (the usual interpretation of this scene), she represents a lone, sexualized femininity ‘reassuringly’ swamped by masculinity, doubtless having her behind slapped, as Cheyenne foretold earlier, in a gesture of possession and domination. This latter reading is supported, moreover, by the historical prevalence of prostitutes (rather than female harbingers of civilization) in communities springing up along the railroad as it was being built, to provide for the needs of the male workers. However, running alongside the fetishism of femininity as phallus in this film, and indeed the more common scenario in the spaghetti western, is the fetishism of the accoutrements of masculinity as bearers of this particular value. In terms of the role played by material culture in identity formation, we are back in the realms of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption (theorized during the period in which the western is often set). Material possessions are consumed, in other words, paraded as well as simply used, in order to signify social status. This notion of consumption came to the fore particularly in commedia all’italiana, a genre grounded in the economic boom and its associated emphasis on mass production and consumption in Italy from 1958 to 1964. It is perhaps no accident that the spaghetti western, begun in the early 1960s on the back of this wave of consumerism, also displays a consummate and especially visual interest in the social meaning of things (although from a parodic rather than a satirical viewpoint).


The material goods in question are clearly very different. Apart from the technology of guns, they are usually more primitive, given the pre-mass industrial setting (while the advance of civilization and its law means that the gunslinger will become obsolete, a major theme in C’era una volta il West and Il mio nome è Nessuno). The car, icon of urban commedia all’italiana, is relatively unusual in the representation of an era when the horse was the main mode of transport and the expansion of the railroad across the American West was in its infancy. The unexpected and startling appearance of Sean’s motorbike in the Mexican landscape of Giù la testa!, a car in Quièn sabe? and even a bi-plane in Il mercenario, are exceptions that prove the rule, symbols of white wealth and status, while the motorized Mexican Army, in Giù la testa! and Il mercenario, for instance, represents repression and brutality in the context of the revolution. Instead, social, and particularly gender, status, more commonly attaches to the breed of animal used for transport, with the mule regarded as indicating lesser wealth and phallic power than the horse. In Per un pugno di dollari Eastwood makes his entry on a mule, graduating to a horse after payment from the Rojos. When Baxter’s men deride him for riding a mule, his mock interpretation of this as an insult to the animal is a metaphor highlighting the mule or horse as a status-marked extension of the male body. The later political spaghetti western aside, the early films that established the genre and its iconography, and in particular Per un pugno di dollari, focus on primitive, atavistic social relations (the more complex politics of the Mexican revolution in this film, and of the American Civil War in Per qualche dollaro in più and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, are invoked mainly to illustrate their irrelevance to the personal objectives of the male characters and to historicize the action, while also, in the case of the last film, making an anti-war statement). These primitive social relations, pared down to the minimum, are none the less constituted with constant reference to material goods, as men relate to each other through things (gold or money, guns, style of clothes, the manipulation of a cigar), or chattels (horses, ‘woman’). The construction of masculinity as masquerade means that the accoutrements of masculinity communicate socially-specific meanings in a code understood by all. As in consumerist commedia all’italiana, the spaghetti western focuses on the fetishizing of commodities by emphasizing not just their utility, but also added social, gender-specific value. The gun, to take a major masculine accessory, is not just prioritized in the films in terms of its utility (although this is of course of key


importance, with much technical, if not always historically accurate, information given in the films on different makes, their characteristics and effectiveness, leading to a cult of spaghetti western weaponry (Frayling 1998). However, the gun (whether it be a .45 pistol or a Winchester rifle) functions not merely as useful deadly tool in the spaghetti western. On the contrary, it is the obsessive object of repeated, lingering close-ups, and of man-to-man conversations that take this prop outside and beyond narrative space. The focus on how fast it is used, the sound it makes when fired (as Tuco remarks in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo), where it is kept and even its angle to the body make the gun a prime determinant not just of the individuality of a man, but of his phallic potency. The fetishistic overvaluation of the gun beyond utility as signifier of the phallus in the western and urban crime thriller is by now a commonplace. With the spaghetti western, this association is taken to such lengths as to suggest not only parody, but also a masculine masquerade signalling lack in its anxiety to convince otherwise. Most usually worn nozzle down in a holster alongside the hip, where it hangs parallel to the penis, the gun must be withdrawn in a split second and held in the up or horizontally erect position from which it is fired. This is the classic way in which Eastwood in Leone’s trilogy wears his pistol. Mortimer in Per qualche dollaro in più is distinguished by wearing his pistol towards the front rather than at the side of the hip. When Eastwood interrogates the old man about Mortimer, it is the position of the gun on his body that proves to be his identifying marker. Harmonica in C’era una volta il West wears his pistol behind him. In Corbucci’s influential Django (1966), Django (Franco Nero) conceals his machine gun (a phallic indicator so huge it cannot be secreted on the body) in a coffin. This parodic variation inevitably led to a spate of unusual places from which guns are unexpectedly fired: the toe of a boot in C’era una volta il West, a guitar in Johnny Oro, a banjo in Ehi, amico … C’è Sabata, hai chiuso. Guns are emphasized verbally as well as visually. Tuco and the old gunsmith he is about to rob in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo share common ground in their gun knowledge, with Tuco using parts from different guns to make his own, personalized version. In Per un pugno di dollari Eastwood and Ramon have an ongoing dialogue about the relative efficacy of the pistol and the rifle, with Ramon offering a veiled challenge: ‘When the man with the pistol meets a man with a Winchester, the man with the pistol is a dead man.’ In the shootout at the end of the film Eastwood proves him wrong, as he urges an


incredulous Ramon to shoot him repeatedly in the heart (shielded, unbeknown to Ramon, by a metal plate) as he himself moves into pistol range. The phallic connotation of a gun hanging idly, then sticking out and up, together with the eroticization of the shootout, is unmistakable (the foreplay of the sequence of facial close-ups as the participants look deep into each other’s eyes, the striptease effect as the flap of a jacket or duster is slowly pulled aside, or the poncho lifted, to reveal the holster and its deadly contents, the taking out of the gun and firing/ ejaculation). In the case of Indio, for whom sex and death are irrevocably intertwined, the deaths he inflicts are followed by languor and a post-coital smoke in Per qualche dollaro in più. For Eastwood in the trilogy and his imitators in successive films, lighting up a cigar in a situation of potential conflict is a phallic gesture, a sign of cool detachment and bravado, particularly emphasized by his idiosyncratic manipulation of the cigar between his lips. His cigar becomes a fetishized substitute, standing in for his presence in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, as Tuco tracks him down by following his discarded cigars and calculating how close he is by the ever-increasing heat in the tip. Items of clothing also stand in metonymically for the male body, taking the masquerade to its extreme in a fusion of the mask with the man. For example, Eastwood’s hat and poncho, draped strategically over the back of a chair, take the bullet meant for him in Per qualche dollaro in più. Similarly Harmonica uses the duster to signify ‘gunman’ in his account of his experience at the railroad in C’era una volta il West: ‘I saw three of these dusters waiting for a train’. The leather dusters made a special impact when the film was shown in Paris, where it ran for six years, giving rise to a fashion craze (although Eastwood had already worn one in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo). The effect of this cinematic costume on street clothes design reiterates the function of the cinema screen as a shop window in a consumer culture (discussed in relation to commedia all’italiana). Historical research combines with fantasy in the adaptation of this garment for the western. Gaines notes that the duster, a type of frock coat, was adapted from the medical coat of the Civil War or the nineteenthcentury coachman’s coat, and is not in fact traceable to the historical West (Gaines and Herzog 1998, p. 175). The duster became the sign of the gunfighter, and as such is worn in Il mio nome è Nessuno by Nobody, taking over from the retiring gunfighter, Beauregard, who wears a jacket and waistcoat, and swaps his Stetson for a woollen hat on the ship bound for Europe and a new life.


Visually the long, heel-length duster served to make its wearer look tall and so more threatening, as do the characteristically tight-fitting trousers and heeled boots worn by Eastwood, for instance. But of all the accoutrements contributing to the masculine masquerade, the gun remains the most powerful. However, the illusory nature of this potency is underlined in some films, while at the same allowing the spectator to revel in the fantasy of the masquerade. In C’era una volta il West, for example, the theatrical backdrop of a massive advert for a show features prominently in the scene where Harmonica saves Frank’s life when his own men fire on him. In Il mio nome è Nessuno, Nobody remonstrates with his challenger in the saloon for wearing his gun at the wrong angle, going on to demonstrate how much faster he himself is on the draw in an impossibly fast performance of showmanship. The fairground scene, with its opportunities for testing various physical skills, at which Nobody excels, repositions gun display in the context of the Wild West shows in which the western-as-performance originated (with Girotti reprising the farcical showmanship skills of his character from the first of the successful Trinity series, Lo chiamavano Trinità, 1970). Masculinity as masquerade in the spaghetti western is all about showmanship and performance. In Il mio nome è Nessuno it is repeatedly exposed as an illusion, perhaps most forcefully in the staged fake final shootout between Nobody and Beauregard before the intradiegetic camera of a newspaperman (with another fake shootout at the beginning of Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua morte). During a shootout in a hall of mirrors, Nobody, unlike his unfortunate opponent, is master-spectator of multiple mirror images, a proliferation of omnipotent ideal ego reflections for his gratification and that of the film spectator. Ultimately, however, the parody of omnipotent phallic power is itself parodied, as Nobody finally replaces Beauregard in the barber’s chair, pushing his fingers into the groin of the barber/assassin where Beauregard had pushed his pistol. The iconography of masculinity as masquerade, relating to style and surface, raises the question of the role of verbal language in relation to the visual in terms of both the accoutrements and actions of masculinity. Like the adventure strand of which it is a variant, the western is linked historically to the comic strip, with its emphasis on the more easily accessible portrayal of visual action rather than dialogue, and to the condensed narrative of adventure literature. Similarly the melodrama, with its roots in the fotoromanzo, relied more on the visual, photographic depiction of emotion than on lengthy dialogue, restricting the verbal dimension to short pithy sentences and commonplaces.


In addition, on the production side of film-making, language was not infrequently a problem, given the international make-up of the cast of genres like the spaghetti western. Eastwood’s crucial role in cutting down the number of lines he had to speak in the influential Per un pugno di dollari, and generally shaping his character into the muchcopied laconic model of 1960s Anglo-masculine cool, is also well known (if at the time perplexing, he recalls, to Italian actors from the more verbose and physically dynamic school of acting) (Frayling 1998). The 1960s saw an upsurge in anglophilia, reflected also in Italian auteur, as opposed to commercial genre, cinema, with the cool, modern London scene providing the inspiration for both Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) and Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). Under Eastwood’s influence, Leone’s ‘heroic’ characters tend to follow the Anglicized format of understatement, where verbal language is restricted to short questions and statements. This is taken to extremes with the character of Silence, the mute hero in Corbucci’s Il grande Silenzio (although not with other characters in the film). Many other directors, on the other hand, continued to promote the Italian style of acting, for example Tessari’s extremely verbose and physically busy Una pistola per Ringo, and Corbucci’s Sergio, whose talking to himself undermines his cool in Il mercenario. The later political spaghetti western strand, on the other hand, inevitably involves more dialogue (this is the case in the latter parts of Giù la testa!, for instance, a film that develops a focus on the Mexican Revolution). As far as the films that established the genre are concerned, however, the representation of masculinity as masquerade predominates in the iconographic and generally visual domain, rather than in extended dialogue. Neale explains as follows: Theoretically, this silence, this absence of language can further be linked to narcissism and to the construction of an ideal ego. The acquisition of language is a process profoundly challenging to the narcissism of early childhood. It is productive of what has been called ‘symbolic castration’. Language is a process (or set of processes) involving absence and lack, and these are what threaten any image of the self as totally enclosed, self-sufficient, omnipotent. (Neale 1993, pp. 12–13) At the same time, language and entry into the symbolic allow access to power, and as such are usually a masculine prerogative, with femininity traditionally restricted to the pre-symbolic phase. The preference of


western and spaghetti western heroic masculinity for object-relations over language use, as in the case of the peplum, may serve as a means of identification and reassurance for male working-class audiences who do not possess the power of the symbolic (while also recalling Paolella’s use of the metaphors of childhood and adolescence in relation to the peplum and spaghetti western respectively). However, written, as opposed to verbal, use of the symbolic, maintains its association with power, notably in terms of racial difference within the hierarchy of masculinity, as we shall see. Lingering close-ups on the faces of male characters, and their attention to each other’s actions and masculine accoutrements (weapons, clothes, horses), emphasize visual rather than verbal communication. Like verbal language, however, this masquerade also engages the symbolic in that it operates according to a socially accepted code. The visual signs of the masquerade are, like verbal language, encoded and decoded within a system that is culturally specific. In this context, verbal and written language play a reduced role proportional to the social formation of the films, namely pre-capitalist, pre-industrial society, with masculinity as free, mobile and, importantly, as style. This contrasts with masculinity of substance, tied to the stasis of private property in land and home, and to the promoting of patrilineality through family and association with femininity (a more common variant of masculinity in the classic American western). Eastwood’s statement that he will buy a ranch in Kansas with his booty at the end of Per qualche dollaro in più may be true, but is not fulfilled within the diegesis, and marriage as the happy ending to films in this genre is rare. Written language is not usually central, and verbal language is coded as inferior to action. As Tuco explains to his garrulous pursuer before shooting him from his bubble bath in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo: ‘When you gotta shoot, shoot, don’t talk.’ The function of naming, so crucial to patrilineality and patriarchal property concerns, is of particular interest in the spaghetti westerns, with attention frequently drawn to its inauthenticity or even absence. Some of the most striking examples of roving super-masculinity have no name at all. Eastwood’s characters in the trilogy do not reveal their real name, leading to the ‘man with no name’ legend (although the no-name topos was already current in the thriller novels of Dashiel Hammett) (Frayling 1998). Nobody in Il mio nome è Nessuno is another archetypal hero, an Everyman figure with whom to identify. Alternatively, male characters acquire pseudo-names according to certain characteristics (Silence because he is mute, and brings the silence of death


with him wherever he goes, in Il grande Silenzio, Harmonica because of the musical instrument he plays in C’era una volta il West, Angel Eyes because of the shape of Van Cleef’s eyes, contrasting with his character’s non-angelic penchant for torture, and Blondie, the man with no name, because of his hair colour, in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo). Concealment of true identity, unlike the public patrilineal celebration of property ownership and family headship, is a part of the masquerade and its masking of the inner self that can be crucial to survival in a gun culture. At the same time, continued concealment of identity fuels desire for its revelation on the part of others, a desire that can become obsessive, as in the case of Frank’s repeated question to Harmonica, ‘Who are you?’, which punctuates C’era una volta il West. Ehi, amico … C’è Sabata, hai chiuso! ends on the question of Sabata’s true identity, as he is asked: ‘But who are you?’ and answers enigmatically: ‘Haven’t you realized yet?’ Similarly, Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua morte concludes with the interchange: ‘You still haven’t told me who you are’, ‘A first-class pallbearer’. Names can be dangerous, and their misuse fatal. The last surviving McBain child, witness to his family’s slaughter in C’era una volta il West, also has to be killed because, as Frank intimates to his fellow gunslinger who has addressed him: ‘Now that you’ve named me …’. Tuco’s adoption of Bill Carson’s name in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo alerts Angel Eyes to the fact that he may know the identity of the grave where Carson has buried the gold, and as a result he has him tortured. His decision not to torture Eastwood is based on his expectation that the latter would not talk. In other words, a white North American is perceived as possessing mastery over the verbal/symbolic, whereas Tuco, a Mexican, has no control and reveals all. When in a later scene Eastwood turns away to write the name of the grave on the back of a stone, a strategy to prevent being shot after verbalizing it, this is a trick. It transpires that he has written nothing; the grave is marked ‘unknown’. Language is treacherous and slippery, and its meaning can evaporate. Written language, much like the laws of civilization, is particularly deceptive and dangerous. When Sean hears Juan’s version of what revolution really means in Giù la testa!, he throws away Bakunin’s book on the subject, only for it to provide a clue to his whereabouts for his future assassin. The masquerade of phallic omnipotence, then, takes place in the visual, in preference to the verbal, realm of the symbolic, and with only minimalist recourse to the latter. The focus on male bodies, rather than just male minds, in interaction, together with the virtual exclusion of


femininity, shifts sexuality away from the patriarchally safe terrain of heterosexuality and closer to that of homoeroticism and homosexuality. The threat posed by this shift fuels disavowal in the form of sadomasochistic violence characterizing all-male action genres (Neale 1993). As a result of this shift, other areas of identity in which masculinity masquerades, in addition to the phallic display of narcissistic omnipotence, also come into play. As Holmlund emphasizes, masculinity must be read in terms of multiple masquerade, not just that of gender, but also those of sexual and racial identity (Holmlund 1993). Perhaps the most crucial masquerade of all in the spaghetti western, from the point of view of gender politics, is masculinity masquerading as heterosexual to disguise not simply homosexuality, but homosociality itself, namely the sociopolitical foundation of patriarchal male hegemony. Contributing to this masquerade, but at the same time managing to expose it, are the dynamics of sadomasochism, and interlocking with it is the issue of racial difference.

Sadomasochism, race and sexuality Violence and death are integral parts of the western genre, formulaic ingredients that the film audience expects to see repeated, with novel variations. In the male-dominated spaghetti westerns social relations are regularly characterized by violence, whether at the macro-level in the political strand featuring the American Civil War and the Mexican Revolution, or at the micro-level of interpersonal relations as the solitary hero pursues his individual quest, only temporarily combining forces and bonding with others to further his own interests. In this predominantly male environment, eruptions of man-on-man sadomasochistic violence function, according to Neale, to negate the eroticizing of constantly interacting male bodies for the voyeuristic, fetishizing gaze of the film spectator, an idealized patriarchal gaze assumed to be male (Neale 1993). In the event, this attempt at negation serves only to attract attention to homosexual possibilities with its heavy-handed form of denial, especially in a genre where masculinity overtly prefers its own company. Sadistic mutilation of men by each other, rather than dampening erotic tension, stimulates it by legitimating the male body as object of the gaze. Even though the male body is for the moment no longer a whole, healthy, omnipotent object of desire, when it is the hero who is the object of mutilation, the audience knows that this is only temporary and that he will soon recover, often with miraculous speed, to


become so once again. Sadism, moroever, has sexual connotations. Inherent in these sadistic images is the ‘power over’ dynamic engaged by sexual relations, with mastery as sadism over helplessness as masochism. The sadistic dynamic recalls the initial sense of erotic pleasure in the phantasy of the unified, omnipotent and phallic, rather than the fragmented, helpless and impotent, body, validated and enjoyed as primary narcissism in the mirror stage. At the same time, the infantile sense of fragmentation, helpless dependence and merging with the maternal body also holds its own erotic pleasure, namely that of plenitude and jouissance, a masochistic state to which masculinity must resist the desire to return. However, sadomasochistic mutilation of the body also reworks the anxiety underlying the narcissistic phantasy, namely fear of fragmentation, castration and impotence. The breaking of Eastwood’s hands in Per un pugno di dollari inaugurates the genre’s portrayal of this fear with prolonged, sadistic mutilation disabling the hero’s use of the gun/phallus, with Django suffering a similar fate in Se sei vivo, spara!, while instances of thumbs shot away abound in Il grande Silenzio. This film, far from assuaging these fears, takes them to their nightmarish conclusion as Silenzio, omnipotent and sadistic castrator of others (his accurate shooting regularly deprives men of their thumbs), is himself shot in the hands before being killed. Fear of losing an eye, a common expression of the fear of castration elaborated by Freud in his essay on the uncanny, features in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, with the dying, one-eyed Carson, and with Tuco’s near-blinding on the orders of Angel Eyes. Loss of leg-use (Morton’s legs in C’era una volta il West and the Colonel’s legs in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, or their absence, as in the case of Shortie, the legless ‘half-soldier’ in the latter film) also connotes castration, as we saw in the chapter on horror. In similar vein a man’s ear is sliced off in Django, while actual castration takes place offscreen in Il mercenario. Freud indicated that sadomasochism is motivated by pleasure: ‘These names [sadism and masochism] chosen by Krafft-Ebing bring into prominence the pleasure in any form of humiliation or subjection’ (Freud, ‘The Sexual Aberrations’, 1984, p. 71). Mutilation of male bodies in Per un pugno di dollari is constructed as pleasurable for intradiegetic male onlookers, who laugh as Eastwood is beaten up and his hands broken by the heel of a spurred boot, and again when he is beaten up in Per qualche dollaro in più. When Silvanito is tortured by Ramon’s men in the former film, on the other hand, this is accompanied by the sound of offscreen male laughter. Audience identification is particularly invited by the anonymity of the intradiegetic voyeur of


the sadomasochistic scene. Silvanito is an older, grey-haired, paternal figure, and the cackling laughter sounds like that of another old man. This serves at one level to disqualify Silvanito as object, and the laughing voyeur as subject, of desire, thereby suppressing the sexual component. But at the same time it introduces a variant of oedipality suggesting incestuous homosexual desire: the taboo desire of the sons (Ramon’s men) to kill the father (the wise old barkeeper), is sexualized in this scene by virtue of the sadomasochistic dimension. Close-ups of male faces in Il grande Silenzio also suggest spectator participation in their voyeuristic/sadistic, fetishistic/masochistic fascination, as a man’s thumbs or hands are shot away. Leone’s westerns are singled out for analysis of the interaction of voyeurism and fetishism by Neale. Concentrating on the shootout, he observes that: the exchange of aggressive looks marking most Western gun-duels is taken to the point of fetishistic parody through the use of extreme and repetitive close-ups. At which point the look begins to oscillate between voyeurism and fetishism as the narrative starts to freeze and spectacle takes over. The anxious ‘aspects’ of the look at the male [homosexual voyeurism] … are here both embodied and allayed not just by playing out the sadism inherent in voyeurism through scenes of violence and combat, but also by drawing upon the structures and processes of fetishistic looking, by stopping the narrative in order to recognize the pleasure of display, but displacing it from the male body as such and locating it more generally in the overall components of a highly ritualized scene. (Neale 1993, p. 17) For Neale, the shootouts ‘involve an imbrication of both forms of looking, their intertwining designed to minimize and displace the eroticism they each tend to involve, to disavow any explicitly erotic look at the male body’ (Neale 1993, p. 18). However, despite the design behind this carefully constructed mix of voyeuristic and fetishistic looks, the erotic aspects of the shootout, with its prolonged foreplay, striptease and phallic ejaculation, unavoidably sexualize not just the male, but also the female film spectator’s gaze. The diversionary tactic of sadomasochistic violence mediating the male gaze by a combination of voyeuristic and fetishistic constructions in effect fails singularly to de-eroticize the male body, and for a number of reasons. First, the eroticizing of the male body as spectacle


is already an inevitable consequence of projecting the body and its parts magnified on screen, thereby feeding voyeuristic, fetishistic spectator desire and scopophilia, and triggering a set of interlocking identifications. Second, in light of the role of the male body in desire and phantasy, the repeated placing of several male bodies together immediately suggests a complex of psychosexual interrelations involving eroticism and potency. Third, as suggested earlier, sadomasochistic violence, rather than distracting from sexuality, actually introduces it as a possibility, because a degree of sadomasochism is always present in ‘normal’ sexual activity, only becoming pathological in excess (as discussed in the chapter on horror). Last, but not least, the iconography of metal spurs, leather on skin, high-heeled boots and whips introduces homosexuality by resonating with contemporary gay porn, at the same time also feeding into sadomasochist fantasy (Gaines and Herzog 1998, p. 179). (A key precursor to this is the sadistic Valance’s whip, with its ornate metal handle, in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962.) In Il grande Silenzio and Il mercenario lassoes are used to capture and bind victims. The latter film also sees Sergio, a self-sufficient, narcissistic gunfighter who shows a marked disinterest in women, not just bound in a horse’s harness by Paco, but also sporting the leather headpiece and bit, the point of which is unclear unless read in terms of a gay bondage scenario (Figure 10). Significantly, he is in this masochistic position on Paco’s wedding night, and at precisely the time when Paco has sex with Columba. The film also exposes an overt homosexual agenda. Jack Palance’s character, Curly, is stereotyped as homosexual by his effete voice, curly hair, feminized clothes sense and band of male followers. The way he interacts with other male characters further supports this agenda of homosexuality as a ‘perverse’ feminization of masculinity (for instance, he weeps openly when one of his men is killed). The position of femininity, otherwise marginalized, is similarly taken up by the adolescent Evan, victim of homosexual rape in Se sei vivo, spara!, and is emphasized by prolonged close-ups of his smooth, hairless face, big blue eyes and longish blond hair, as, bound by Zorro, he casts long looks at Django that are overtly homoerotic. When Curly is captured trying to inflict a similar fate on Sergio, he behaves in a sexually provocative manner in a scene that develops the suggestion of male rape. Paco’s men tear off Curly’s clothes as he lies on the ground, and a zoom shot moves in to his crotch as they undo his zip and pull off his trousers. When Sergio remarks that he is too ugly to be naked and should be left with some clothes on, Curly


Figure 10

Male bondage: Sergio (Franco Nero) in Corbucci’s Il mercenario (1968).

defiantly takes off his shirt to reveal a well-defined torso. Another crotch-shot features towards the end of the film, as Paco is framed between Curly’s legs at the beginning of their shootout. Overt homosexuality, stereotyped as effeteness and feminization, is introduced as negative and dismissed (Curly is shot at the end of the film). However, homoeroticism is rife around Sergio, and not only in the scene when he is bound and masked by Paco. In a bathing scene, his naked, pale golden torso is on display to the admiring intradiegetic male gaze of numerous Mexicans, again emphasized using close-ups. Such is the degree of homoerotic tension in the film that a female character, the Mexican Columba, enters the narrative. She does so ostensibly as an enthusiastic revolutionary, but functions primarily to attempt to mediate, with her female heterosexuality, the homoerotic look of the (male) film spectator at Sergio’s body. In order to correct the balance of the sexualities, Columba even marries Paco, a highly unusual event in the spaghetti western (although mitigated by the fact that they are Mexican rather than white). This is necessary to distract


from the growing bond between Paco and Sergio, whose wrestling over her (despite the fact that Sergio evinces no desire for her at all) provides yet another opportunity for close male contact. This bond, with its iconographic intimation of sadomasochistic, bondage-style rolereversals (Paco first binds and masks Sergio, who in turn later lassoes him), is particularly threatening in its exposure of a homosexual agenda. Crucially, more than just laying bare homosexual possibilities, sadomasochism in the films ends up training a focus, with its intensification of all-male relations, on the underlying homosocial power base of patriarchy. In other words, as far as gender politics are concerned, homosexuality in the spaghetti western functions as a titillating distraction, attempting to draw attention away from the gendered power base of patriarchy, and into the terrain of sexuality. It does so, moreover, in a decade in Italian society when this power base increasingly became an object of feminist critique and activism. Sadomasochism in the spaghetti western can therefore ultimately be read as an ineffectual denial of homosociality/homosexuality (or, to use Irigaray’s neat encapsulation, ‘hom(m)osexuality’), and as a failed attempt to affirm male heterosexuality (Irigaray 1985, p. 171). The compulsory heterosexuality of patriarchy is represented by marriage, which also signals the passage of masculinity from the selfsufficiency of phallic narcissism into the realm of the symbolic/the social/the law. This passage heralds the completion of the oedipal trajectory, in other words, the socially satisfactory resolution of the Oedipus complex defining classic Hollywood closure. But as Mulvey points out, this is often not the outcome in the western genre, in which ‘the rejection of marriage personifies a nostalgic celebration of phallic, narcissistic omnipotence’ – a rejection especially foregrounded by Frank, Harmonica and Cheyenne in C’era una volta il West (Mulvey 1981, p. 14). Rather than resolve the Oedipus complex via heterosexuality and marriage (in other words, transferring desire for the mother onto another woman, and transforming competition with the father into identification with his position in heading a new patriarchal family formation), the complex is on occasion sidestepped or drastically scaled down in the spaghetti western. In some films the traditional family trio (father, mother, son) is completely replaced by an all-male family (Ramon and his men in Per un pugno di dollari, Indio and his men in Per qualche dollaro in più, Zorro and his homosexual ranch hands in Se sei vivo, spara!, Juan and his six sons in Giù la testa!). Alternatively, the family is reduced to the father–son dyad, thereby


excluding femininity altogether and preserving homosocial exclusivity (as in Se sei vivo, spara!). Importantly, in order to disavow father–son incest and homosexuality, as well as homosociality, the two must part at the end of the film (Irigaray 1985, pp. 192–3). This dynamic can be also seen at work in ‘old man’/‘boy’ pairings. In Per qualche dollaro in più Colonel Mortimer and Eastwood’s character address each other with these terms of affection only when their partnership is at an end. Eastwood’s uncharacteristically inviting ‘What about our partnership?’ as Mortimer turns to ride away betrays a reluctance to break their bond, and evokes a sense of loss suggestive of melodrama and its family dynamics. However, Mortimer leaves him his inheritance (having avenged his sister, he is not interested in the reward money), turning round to check in paternal fashion that Eastwood is not in trouble when a shot is fired. A similar separation occurs at the end of Il mio nome è Nessuno, as Nobody takes over from his role-model, the older Beauregard, a retiring gunfighter who departs for Europe. Their growing bond has distinct homoerotic overtones, most notably in the prolonged exchange of looks as they eat together on the train. Loss is once again evoked by Beauregard at the end of the film, as he voices a paternally affectionate letter he is writing to Nobody, but of which the latter is oblivious. Successful resolution of the Oedipus complex begins with separation from the mother/femininity. This process also involves sadomasochism, the dynamic, as we have seen, invoked to de-eroticize male relations in the genre. Sadomasochism is a factor in the process of infantile masculine separation and differentiation from the m/other (as opposed to from the father/same), and, after the resolution of the Oedipus complex (inasmuch as it is ever completely resolved), in the reiteration of differentiation from femininity. As Benjamin argues, the masculine need for separation and differentiation can fuel sadism against femininity, in an extreme attempt to disavow masochistic desire for reincorporation by the pre-oedipal maternal body. Femininity evokes both fear (of incorporation and loss of identity) and desire (for the plenitude and jouissance accompanying incorporation). From the perspective of masculinity, femininity is alarmingly characterized by an absence of differentiation, namely the desire to merge with others, its identity formation governed by interrelations in the context of marriage, the family and domesticity. In Ehi, amico! … C’è Sabata, hai chiuso, we are privy to Banjo’s nightmare about a woman wanting commitment, while in films like Killer calibro .32, women ask the hero ‘Do you have to leave?’ All this must


be rejected if the boundaries of masculinity are to remain intact and impenetrable, a rejection that can fuel misogyny. In one of the most extreme expressions of misogyny, the sadistic display of masculinity over femininity uses sex to transform the separation/rejection drive into rape, with the display element key to reaffirmation of masculine identity boundaries in gang rape (a scenario feared by Jill in C’era una volta il West). In this context, femininity is made responsible for rape, with the ‘need’ to assert masculine identity laid at the door of femininity as ‘cause’ of this need. This dynamic is at work in Texas, addio, in which revenge is sought by two brothers for their father’s murder. By contrast, the mother, raped by the murderer, is not avenged, but, on the contrary, blamed for the rape by its product, the younger brother (a standpoint internalized by rape victims who kill themselves, rather than their assailants, like Mortimer’s sister in Per qualche dollaro in più, and Evan in Se sei vivo, spara!). Violent assertion of gender and class differentiation combine in cross-class rape, for instance when Juan, a Mexican peasant/bandit rapes a middle-class Mexican woman travelling in Giù la testa!, a misogynistically directed scene that portrays her as a sexually provocative snob who is justifiably ‘taught a lesson’ by a future hero of the Mexican Revolution; in other words, by a character with whom the audience is encouraged to empathize. Both gender and racial differentiation are found in combination in certain rape scenes, as we shall see. Cross-gender rape encapsulates an array of sadistically enforced differentiations (gender, class, race), while at the same time functioning to affirm the heterosexuality of masculinity in a genre dealing in homosociality, homoeroticism and homosexuality. The feminization of Evan, victim of homosexual rape in Se sei vivo, spara!, for instance, continues the paradigm of sadistic rejection of femininity by masculinity, together with a cross-race assertion of difference (Evan is white, Zorro’s ranch hands are Mexican). Another form taken by the differentiation of masculinity from femininity, this time in its domestic and familial, rather than sexual, associations, is the perversion of food use in the spaghetti western. Food provision is a key aspect of nurturing. attributed to femininity in the home. In Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Angel Eyes regales a hungry Tuco with a lavish meal in his quarters. However, the food is merely a prelude to a prolonged torture scene, triggered when Angel Eyes offers Tuco snuff at the end of the meal, only to trap his fingers shut in the snuffbox. Mealtime represents the traditional heart of everyday family life, but is not sacrosanct to Angel Eyes, who at the beginning of the


film establishes his scorn for familial domesticity by killing a father of two at table, and then one of his children. The McBain family are all killed as they prepare the wedding feast, a ritual meal signalling the formation of new family unit with Jill’s arrival in C’era una volta il West. Ramon and his followers, a pseudo-family, eat a last supper before their downfall in Per un pugno di dollari, joined by a Judas-like Eastwood who is also on the payroll of their enemies (Frayling 1998). Eating a meal is rarely without unpleasant connotations in the films. Sean in Giù la testa!, Sergio in Il mercenario and Beauregard in Il mio nome è Nessuno all dine at table in saloons (a sign of white sophistication), only for their meals to be disrupted by trouble (with their continuing to eat regardless, a sign of bravado). Differentiation from femininity/domesticity/family is key to the selfsufficiency of narcissistic masculinity and to the preservation of its boundaries. This is made particularly clear in the flashbacks of male characters, contradicting the view of characterization in the genre as undeveloped and even non-existent. These flashbacks not only explain character motivation and history, but, importantly, illustrate how the family can be a source of suffering for masculinity. Eastwood’s enigmatic comment, ‘I never found home that great’, in Per un pugno di dollari, leaves much to the imagination. However, flashbacks in Per qualche dollaro in più, C’era una volta il West, Il grande Silenzio and Texas, addio, for example, all reveal traumatic family events, often from childhood, that mark the male characters for life and fuel their desire for revenge. The experience is rarely recounted verbally (as it is in Texas, addio), with masculinity remaining silent in order to preserve selfsufficiency and not display emotion (while in the case of Silence, this is underlined by his enforced muteness after the killers of his family cut his vocal chords). In Per qualche dollaro in più, flashback instalments occur when Indio falls into a reverie as he relives his illicit entry many years previously into a bedroom, his shooting of a young man and rape of a young woman, who shoots herself (rather than him) while he is still on top of her. But as the film progresses it becomes clear that at least some of the events in the flashback are also seared in Mortimer’s psyche, and the revelation that the young woman was his sister offers an insight into his suffering and desire for revenge. Harmonica’s flashback to his childhood in C’era una volta il West, again relived in instalments, beginning out of focus and gradually becoming clearer, concerns the murder of his brother, an event that defines and shapes his character. The hazy figure moving ever nearer to the young Harmonica with each flashback


turns out to be Frank, the final clarity of image coinciding with the dying Frank’s dramatic recognition and remembrance of the event as Harmonica thrusts a harmonica between his teeth. Like the chiming watch in Per qualche dollaro in più, it is an inanimate object, and not verbal language, that communicates the trauma for which revenge is now sought. Flashbacks in Texas, addio explain Burt’s desire to avenge the murder of his father, which he witnessed as a child of seven years. Flashback nostalgia for family members lost in tragic circumstances is a form of masochism, a painful yet pleasurable re-immersion into the feminine dynamic of relations with others, of merging with family (or in the case of Sean’s graduated flashback in Giù la testa!, with friends). The experience is so traumatic that the hero, the characteristic lone rider in the films, always moves on at the end of the film (if he survives), remaining solitary in order to be self-sufficient and invulnerable to yet more trauma. Close relations, especially with women, are replaced by material possessions, such as the gun, gold or silver. The combination of the two (Ringo’s golden gun in Johnny Oro, Silver’s silver gun in Killer calibro .32) signals the perfect narcissistic substitution of heterosexuality by the costly, prized phallus/the masculine self. The interchangeability of gold with femininity is made clear by Ringo in his declaration that gold is his first love, after his mother. He is introduced by an extradiegetic song over the initial credits: ‘He rode off all alone with a pistol in his hand, he didn’t care about lovin’, only glittering gold, and love was a thing he thought could be bartered and sold, in his loneliness he has only gold’. In Killer calibro .32 Silver tells Janet he has been in love, but now has his silver Colt revolver as a companion instead, with the song over the final credits also referring to a lost love and to his loneliness. As well as offering reassurance of the hero’s heterosexuality, the songs indicate emotion and feelings of loss. However, these emotions are all carefully contained outside the diegesis. The other that must be kept at bay, initially the incorporating maternal and then the feminine, is not just the gendered other, but also signifies in the racial domain in the spaghetti western, as already intimated. With femininity often only cursorily present, introduced merely to establish masculine heterosexuality, the racial masculine other, such as the Mexican, or, less commonly, black, Native American or Chinese, often takes over the role of subordinate. At other times, the imposition of hierarchical gender and racial difference coincide, notably in cross-race rape; for instance, the near-rape by a Mexican of the white Ruby in Una pistola per Ringo and by a white North American


man of the black Pauline in Il grande Silenzio, the Mexican Indio’s rape of Mortimer’s sister in Per qualche dollaro in più, and the Mexican Tuco’s conviction for rape of a ‘virgin of the white race’ as well as rape of a ‘minor of the black race’ (her virginity left unspecified, either because she was not a virgin or because virginity was not considered an issue in relation to the ‘black race’) in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. Homosexual rape in Se sei vivo, spara! is firmly associated with the Mexican male other as perpetrator, with the white outlaws led by Oates establishing their heterosexuality in an inordinately lengthy scene in which they leer at a saloon-girl as she sings and displays herself. When the hero is involved in cross-race rather than same-race male bonding, this leads to a partial displacement of focus from gender difference to racial difference (Eastwood and Tuco in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Sean and Juan in Giù la testa!, Sergio and Paco in Il mercenario, as opposed to Eastwood and Mortimer in Per qualche dollaro in più, or Nobody and Beauregarde in Il mio nome è Nessuno). However, homoeroticism still places homosexuality on the agenda in both types of male bond. Crucially, cross-race male bonding usually works to promote the superiority of white masculinity (with the half-Mexican, half-North American Ringo and Django in Johnny Oro and Se sei vivo, spara!, respectively, rare examples of heroic miscegenation). In particular, the racial other provides masculinity with a means to differentiate in a triumphant assertion of whiteness and all the genre-specific forms of supremacy this entails (weapons, leadership skills, tactical expertise, sparse but effective use of the spoken word, literacy, kindness to women, children and horses combined with independence and the ability to disassociate from femininity and the family). In the following elaboration of the genre-specific forms taken by white supremacy in the spaghetti western, the concept of whiteness versus non-whiteness takes precedence over racial difference (Dyer 1997, pp. 1–40). Even this apparently transparent opposition is not watertight, as is often the fate of ideologically tendentious binary conceptualization, in that there are, as Dyer points out, greater and lesser degrees of whiteness (with whiteness a cultural perception rather than an accurate description of skin colour). This immediately raises issues of audience consumption of whiteness in Italy as opposed to, say, white North America or Northern Europe. In particular, Italian audience interpretation of cinematic representation of whiteness and non-whiteness would have its own connotations as far as Mexicans, the most common racial other in these films, are concerned. Mexicans are not ‘black’, but they are not ‘white’ either. Italians, as Southern Europeans,


are (stereo)typically darker-skinned than Northern Europeans, and as such would have more in common, in terms not only of non-whiteness of skin colour, dark hair and eyes, but also, as Latins, with Mexicans as Spanish speakers, than would white, (stereo)typically blond-haired, blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon audiences. On the other hand, from a socioeconomic and geographic point of view, the Italian audience’s European belonging would align it more with modernized (white) Europe than with a less developed country like Mexico in a continent on the other side of the world. Within Italy itself, with its cultural and socioeconomic North–South divide, perceptions of whiteness would also differ. Northern audiences, particularly in the industrial triangle Milan–Turin–Genoa and the Veneto, for instance, would consider themselves more Northern European than Southern, with Northern Italians generally regarding Southern Italy as another country. Moreover, the concern of peasants with land-ownership, an issue at the heart of the Mexican Revolution often featured in the spaghetti westerns, bore some similarity with the problems of a predominantly agricultural, underdeveloped and impoverished Southern Italy. This contrasts with the higher standard of living in the more prosperous Northern cities, a contrast paralleled by the class, wealth and urban–versus–rural divide between the snobbish stagecoach travellers from the city and Juan’s peasant family, featured at the beginning of Giù la testa!. Migration from Southern to Northern Italy, particularly as a result of the economic boom (1958–63), was, indicatively, at a peak during the early years of the spaghetti western. By the end of the 1960s, as the genre began to decline, Turin had become ‘the third largest “southern” city in Italy, after Naples and Palermo’ (a demographic issue elaborated in its effects on both the migrant Southern family and the host population in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960) (Ginsborg 1990, p. 220).19 Historically-specific perceptions of civilized, Northern Italian, urban whiteness, and uncivilized, Southern Italian, peasant non-whiteness, therefore inform various positions of identification with North American whiteness and Mexican non-whiteness as encoded by the films. With spaghetti western production aimed at rural Southern Italian terza visione audiences after the takeover from initial urban prima visione production, this area of identification takes on added interest. Given this context, and in the absence of appropriate data, one can only speculate that the fantasy work of film spectatorship would, for Southern Italian masculinity, involve a degree of identification with Mexican non-whiteness, but also a considerable degree of wish-fulfilment


in identifying with white superiority. As far as feminine spectatorial fantasy work is concerned, the mostly ancillary role in the films of femininity, both white and non-white, none the less involves the additional, alluring element of glamour and fashion. The white former prostitute Jill in C’era una volta il West, and the white wife in Johnny Oro, for example, allow for representation of the western genre’s inherent exoticism of North American costume from another era (an exoticism also in evidence in the male fashion craze for the duster in Paris, as we saw earlier). This exoticism is extended to include ethnic fashion with female Mexican bandits/revolutionaries like Columba in Il mercenario, Dolores in Una pistola per Ringo and Adelita in Quièn sabe?, all of whom go through many costume changes. Crucially, these representations of non-white femininity (Neale’s ‘double difference’) are allowed more active roles and more screen space than their white counterparts (white female outlaws are not a common feature of the genre). Adelita in particular is a fully-fledged bandit who lives the outdoor life alongside her compatriots, even ‘heroically’ riding off on her own at the end of her plot-line. However, like Columba and Dolores, she still dreams of marriage, domesticity and ‘a life not on horseback’, while all three conform to the feminine beauty ideal, unlike the real ‘hard women’ of the West as photographically recorded. The whole issue of racial difference and the superiority of white over non-white masculinity in the cinematic western has been traced back to Owen Wister’s essay ‘The Evolution of the Cowpuncher’ (1895), which registered a racist response to the immigration of Jews and Eastern Europeans, and his novel The Virginian (1902), on which Fleming based his western film, The Virginian (1929) (Tompkins 1992). The representation of the Mexican other, so common in the spaghetti western, also has a long history in Hollywood cinema. As noted earlier, preceding the spaghetti western, and helping to trigger the Eurowestern in both Germany and Italy, was the European success of Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960), with its Mexican village setting. The film features North Americans (the seven) on the side of the peasants against the bandits led by Eli Wallach, a complex scenario of whiteness both with and against non-whiteness.20 Mexico, rather than North America, was favoured as the predominating fictional spaghetti western setting because the landcape of Spain, and especially Almeria, lent itself to cheaper location shooting. In addition, the Mexican, rather than the Native American, black or Chinese other, could be convincingly played by Italian actors due to physical similarities (a factor further complicating Italian audience identification in terms of whiteness).


In the scale of degrees of whiteness, ultra-whiteness, and so superiority in all genre-specific areas of expertise, is usually connoted by blond hair and blue eyes, and epitomized by Eastwood in Leone’s trilogy. Tuco, a Mexican bandit, calls Eastwood’s character Blondie in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, drawing attention to his pale skin during the desert ordeal to which he subjects him, and remarking pointedly that fairhaired people, with their pale skin, have less tolerance for the sun. Blondie’s face becomes blistered and mutilated by sunburn, a visible sign of cross-race sadism. White masculinity in the western is stereotypically associated with fair skin and hair, cleanliness and attractiveness, while the Mexican has darker skin, and is often dirty, sweaty, swarthy and unappealing.21 This was characteristic of early Hollywood portrayals of Mexicans, who were called ‘greasers’, leading to complaints from the Mexican government (Buscombe 1996, p. 185). Close-ups of Ramon’s sweating face during the shootout in Per un pugno di dollari helped establish this feature for the spaghetti western. In terms of representation of racial difference, the dichotomy between (white) cleanliness versus (non-white) sweat and dirt in the films can also be read in relation to femininity as posited in terms of purity (the asexual madonna), as opposed to the association of its opposite, dirt and pollution, with danger and the threat of the other (the sexualized, menstruating whore) (Douglas 1985). Recurrence of the adjective ‘dirty’, replacing the noun ‘greaser’ but used in equally racist fashion in relation to Mexicans, can be read in this context (as in Se sei vivo, spara! and Il mercenario). Blondie triumphs in the end with his overall supremacy over Tuco in terms of tactics and gun expertise, both talents already foregrounded in the first film of Leone’s trilogy as superior to those of his Mexican adversary, Ramon, and, together with Mortimer and his array of guns, over Indio in Per qualche dollaro in più. To these skills Ringo even adds surgical talents, as he removes a bullet from a Mexican bandit in Una pistola per Ringo. Weapons expertise and tactical skills are key to the superiority of blond/grey-haired, blue-eyed, Irish Sean over Juan, the Mexican peasant-bandit-revolutionary in Giù la testa!. While one of Juan’s men blows himself up trying to prove they do not need the help of a gringo, he is the master of dynamite, and only he knows how to assemble a Gatling machine-gun. This dynamic is repeated in Il mercenario with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Sergio hiring out his machinegun expertise and leadership skills to Paco and his Mexican bandits-turned-revolutionaries. El Chuncho in Quièn sabe? is an exception to this racial division of weapons knowledge, with his ability to use a Gatling gun. He is, however, illiterate.


One aspect of the superiority of white over non-white masculinity is the hero’s relation to language. As discussed earlier, the spaghetti western hero tends to use verbal language sparingly to prevent selfrevelation and maintain his boundaries. Non-white masculinity, on the other hand, tends towards garrulousness and an over-use of language in a way that is encoded as feminine. This expression of white supremacy is established at the outset of Per un pugno di dollari by Eastwood’s taciturn response to the talkative Mexican bell-ringer who greets him on his entry into the village. The hero’s first appearance in the film therefore establishes him as the strong, silent type, shifting attention to the iconography of his appearance. Garrulousness is often a key feature of Mexican masculinity, with Indio’s hysterical outbursts in Per qualche dollaro in più a high point aligning him with the traditionally feminine position (the wanted poster shows him laughing, mouth wide open, the epitome of emotional self-revelation and ‘speaking the body’). While use of verbal language exposing the inner self does not connote a powerful masculine position, literacy is a requirement for superior white masculinity. The association of illiteracy with stupidity is clear as Eastwood in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo helps a struggling Tuco read a note left for them by Angel Eyes (‘See you soon, idiots’), remarking, ‘It’s for you’. The representation of white and non-white masculinity in the spaghetti western is complex at the level of performance, as well as that of consumption both within and outside the diegesis. For example, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Sergio Kowalski in Il mercenario is called ‘americano’ by the Mexicans, but is in fact a Polish émigré. Whiteness crosses several racial and continental boundaries here, not least because he is played by the Italian actor Franco Nero. Similarly, the part of the ultra-white, blond-haired, blue-eyed Nobody, the expert gunslinger in Il mio nome è Nessuno, as well as Trinity in the eponymous series of films, is ostensibly played by an actor of Anglo-Saxon origins, Terence Hill. This is of course the pseudonym of the Venetian actor Mario Girotti, his colouring allowing him access to white hero roles (which he subverts in the popular Trinity films with his filthy, sweaty appearance and piggish table manners, doubtless as part of the ‘safe’ appeal to juvenile, family audiences who ensured Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (1974) the place of highest-grossing film in Italian cinema history as late as 1990) (Weisser 1992, p. 330). To complicate matters further, the Mexican Tuco is played by a North American actor, Eli Wallach (reprising his role as bandit chief in The Magnificent Seven), Juan in Giù la testa! is played by the North American actor Rod Steiger,


and the Mexicans Ramon (Per un pugno di dollari), Indio (Per qualche dollaro in più) and El Chuncho (Quièn sabe?) are played by the Italian actor, Gian Maria Volonté. Similar crossing of white/non-white boundaries occurs in the case of female characters (the Mexican Marisol in Per un pugno di dollari is played by a German actress, and Italian actresses commonly play both white and Mexican female characters). The performativity of white and non-white masculinity and femininity in the spaghetti western, beginning with the primary performance level of actor-character as white masculinity or femininity inhabit the non-white other, is underlined as masquerade. In particular, the transparency of whiteness as masquerade indicates the problematic nature, not just of racial difference, but also, by association, of gender difference, together with the hierarchizing structure into which these differences are ideologized. The boundaries established to demarcate difference are ultimately unstable and permeable. One key metaphor for this is the frequent setting of the films either near or on the Mexican border. Crossing the border from North America into Mexico was already seen in Hollywood films as passing into the different, exotic and dangerous terrain of the racial and cultural other. The spaghetti western replicates this association. In Per un pugno di dollari, for instance, Eastwood sends Marisol and her family over the border into North America, where they will be safe from Ramon’s uncivilized treatment. In particular, for both heroic and unheroic masculinity, the permeability of the frontier is not only a key feature of masculine mobility and freedom of movement, but also works as a metaphor for other types of border crossing between the various social categories defining identity. The spaghetti western is especially concerned with the borderline between different genders, sexualities and races. It both investigates and polices the boundaries of masculinity against the incursions of femininity and non-whiteness, invoking and then denying male homoeroticism, and, on occasion, homosexuality. Ultimately, from a sociopolitical, as well as psychical, gender standpoint, the genre reinforces homosociality against the threat of gynosociality, a fundamental dynamic that we have also seen at work in the case of other genres.

Notes Introduction 1 The high point for American imports pre-1970s were the immediate postwar years. In 1948 Italy imported 668 American films out of a total of 874 foreign films, in 1949, 502 out of 669, and in 1950, 394 out of 539 (figures recorded by ANICA, Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche ed Affini) (Monaco 1966, table 11). In terms of worldwide export of Italian films in the period 1950–65, figures rose from 848 in 1950 to 2,993 in 1965, with high points in 1963 of 3,953, and in 1964 of 3,947. The highest number of films (106) exported to the US during these fifteen years occurred in 1963 (Monaco 1966, tables 12–14). Wagstaff notes a shift from the beginning of 1946 (when only 13 per cent of box office earnings in Italy went to Italian films for which there was no export market) (Wagstaff 1996, p. 220; 1998, p. 78) and 1947 (a year of low domestic production and high US imports resulting in a debt to foreign owners of 90 per cent of receipts of films shown in Italy), to a situation thereafter of relative import–export parity by the mid-1950s (40 per cent of receipts came from exports) (Wagstaff 1998, p. 76), and of profit by the mid-1960s (Wagstaff 1995, p. 97; p. 105, table 5). 2 Co-production allowed financial risk-sharing while doubling the size of the protected market in terms of screen quotas and tax rebates (Wagstaff 1992). It rose from 12 per cent of national production in 1950 to 75.3 per cent in 1965, with Italo-French co-productions in particular totalling 764 films during the period 1950–65 (Wagstaff 1998, p. 76). 3 For an overview of gender relations in Italy, see Passerini 1996. 4 In relation to the Formalist definition of art as ‘making strange’, one might argue that this element is kept to a minimum in genre cinema (with its basis in repetition) as opposed to art cinema. On the other hand, the formulaic structures in genre cinema are already an artistic rearrangement of the building blocks of reality. 5 On the prima, seconda and terza visione system of film exhibition in Italy, see Wagstaff 1995, pp. 113–15. 6 Discussion of the cultural and economic reasons for the dominant role of US culture in Italy, and evaluation of the effects of acculturation and openness to cultural imports on Italian national culture, can be found in Forgacs 1990, 1996, and Gundle 1986. 7 Forgacs gives a figure for 1967 of 1,733 Italian films as against 4,669 imports (of which 2,987 were US) (Forgacs 1990, p. 148). For most of the period from the 1920s onwards, at least half the number of films shown were imports, with a percentage of over 70 until the 1950s (Forgacs 1990, p. 26). 8 For an early structuralist genre study, see Wright 1975 on the western.

215

216 Notes

Chapter 1 1 For a 1947 cover illustration of Grand Hotel featuring the couple in Mancato appuntamento, see Hine 1997, facing p. 338. 2 The use of highly condensed narrative structures in fotoromanzi and then in film melodrama also finds a precedent in the reduced narratives of the Biblioteca dell’italiano popolare (Galani edition), sold from the beginning of the century for 25 centesimi (Brunetta 1998, II, p. 130). 3 Sales of top fotoromanzi like Grand Hotel did not decline alongside their cinematic equivalent. This magazine was still selling nearly 900,000 copies a week twenty years later in 1976, with a later fall to 400,000 in 1992 due to television as an outlet for melodrama repackaged as soap opera (Hine 1997, p. 338). A higher figure of one and a half million copies of Grand Hotel sold weekly in 1976 is given in Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 46. 4 Blondness has long been associated with Hollywood depictions of dangerously sexualized, unmaternal femininity, such as Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis, the femme fatale in Wilder’s archetypal film noir, Double Indemnity (1944). Italian cinema has followed suit, often equating blondness with threatening foreignness, as with Ingrid, the blond lesbian Nazi drug-dealer who seduces the dark-haired Concetta in Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945), and, more recently, Heidi, the blond Nordic model from the future who disrupts dark-haired Italian Maria’s marriage in Nichetti’s Ladri di saponette (1989). 5 The song Lacreme napuletane (‘Neapolitan tears’) provided much of the subject-matter on which the plot is based (Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 22). 6 The medicalization of female desire as illness, such as hysteria, is discussed by Showalter 1987, pp. 121–44. It has a long history in Italian culture, finding expression especially in theatre, for example, with the plays of Goldoni and Pirandello (Günsberg 1992, 2000). 7 In practice the sale parocchiali did not always follow censorship regulations, showing excluded films in the absence of sufficient numbers of films suitable for all or almost all (‘per tutti’ and ‘per tutti con riserva’) in order to fulfil the financial need to show around 150 films a year. In the process these cinemas created damaging competition for commerciallyrun cinemas in some areas (while overall constituting only one-third of Italy’s cinemas, and providing a mere one-tenth of all cinema seats) (Valli 1999, pp. 35–9). 8 See ‘La famiglia’, L’enciclopedia cattolica, vol. 5, cited Ginsborg 1990, p. 23. 9 In 1921 in Italy, around ten times more women than men worked as typists, stenographers and copyists (5,841 women vs 571 men) (Istituto Centrale di Statistica, Censimento della popolazione, 1921). 10 The oedipal dynamic in Catene is also noted by Aprà and Carabba 1976, p. 53. 11 Caldwell gives the following figures based on government surveys of 11,500,000 Italian families from 1950 to 1953: families in wretched conditions with lowest living standards (13,570,00 or 11.7 per cent); families in poor conditions with low living standards (1,345,000 or 11.6 per cent); families in average conditions (7,616,000 or 65.7 per cent); families in well-off conditions (1,274,000 or 11.0 per cent) (Caldwell 1991, pp. 48–9).

Notes 217

Chapter 2 1 For an account of economic miracle, see Ginsborg 1990, pp. 210–53. 2 The ill-timed irruption of advertising into films shown on television would become a scourge, and is satirized to great effect by Nichetti’s Ladri di saponette (1989). 3 The intricacies of genre differentiation in relation to comedy are discussed in a Hollywood context in Neale 2000 pp. 65–71. 4 For Marx’s critique of the working day under capitalism, see Marx 1974, I, pp. 222–86. 5 On the role of visual or sight gags in comedy, see Carroll 1991. 6 An examination of British audience response to Hollywood stars in terms of purchasing clothes and copying hairstyles can be found in Stacey 1994. 7 For a discussion of all three types of fetishism, see Gamman and Makinen 1994, Dant 1999. 8 An account of the social connotations of different makes of cars, and their significance in the comedies, is given in Giacovelli 1995, pp. 150–6. 9 See Introduction, note 6. 10 The mother in this 1963 film clearly does not belong to the increasing number of households owning a television (which rose from 12 per cent in 1958 to 49 per cent by 1965) and a fridge (from 13 to 55 per cent), let alone the more expensive washing-machine (from 3 to 23 per cent) (Ginsborg 1990, p. 239). 11 A discussion of building speculation during the boom can be found in Ginsborg 1990, pp. 246–7. 12 Palmiro Togliatti, postwar leader of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) and focus of hope for social change, has been criticized for not going far enough in addressing the situation of women, notably in his failure to unpick the role of the Church in women’s oppression, and for submerging women’s issues in the traditional left-wing preoccupation with class as the locus for struggle. This criticism represents a common feminist view of Marxism, while in an Italian party-political context it relates specifically to the strategic ‘historic compromise’ between the Communists, the Church and the DC. Sordi’s character in Una vita difficile is imprisoned on suspicion of involvement in the attempt to assassinate Togliatti in July 1948. 13 On the role of women during the boom, see Chianese 1980, pp. 109–22.

Chapter 3 1 This figure is given by Wagstaff 1996, p. 224. Discussion of 89 of these films can be found in Cammarota 1987. 2 For an account of the adventure genre, see Cawelti 1976. 3 These films were at the time called variously film d’azione, film di costume, film d’epoca, film storico, film storico-avventuroso, film storico-mitologico (Cammarota 1987, p. 15). See Martinelli’s filmography of 183 films belonging to this silent first muscleman cycle (Dall’Asta 1992). 4 With ticket prices for 1957 at 149 lire, a figure of 887 million lire indicates an audience of nearly 6 million (5,953,020) for Le fatiche di Ercole in one season (Quaglietti 1980, Table E).

218 Notes 5 D’Annunzio writes on 30 June 1913: ‘The Roman hero of the action is called (Plinio) Fulvio Axilla. His super-strong companion is a freed slave from the Marche, named Maciste (an ancient surname of the demi-god, Hercules)’ (Dall’Asta 1992, p. 217). 6 A list of pseudonyms appears in Ghigi 1977, p. 738, n. 6 and Cammarota 1987, p. 205. 7 For an examination of the relatively new role of the female action heroine in Hollywood cinema, see Tasker 1993. This has accelerated since her book was written, with powerful female figures like Lara Croft, adventuress and tomb raider, successfully taking part in the masculine world of action in her transition from computer game to the big screen. 8 The comic strip association with the peplum can be seen in advertising for the first cycle. See the poster illustration for L’atleta fantasma (1919) in Dall’Asta 1992, p. 82. 9 One exception occurs in Ercole contro Roma. In this film Hercules lives and works as a village blacksmith. However, he is not the original Hercules, but the one reborn every 100 years since Hercules first fathered a child in the village. 10 See Theweleit 1987–9, for psychoanalytical readings of hard military body-coverings in the context of Nazi Germany. 11 An analysis of La battaglia di Maratona in terms of popular taste is given in Lagny 1992. 12 For a discussion of the choice of white versus non-white as the least unsatisfactory set of terms, together with other related theoretical and methodological issues, see Dyer 1997, pp. 1–40. 13 The term ‘homosociality’ is used by Sedgwick 1985, following Irigaray. 14 The expressions ‘l’entre-femmes’ and ‘l’entre-hommes’ are used by Irigaray in an interview entitled ‘Women-Amongst-Themselves: Creating a Womanto-Woman Sociality’ in Whitford 1991a, pp. 190–7 (pp. 192, 191). The second expression is equivalent to Irigaray’s own term ‘hom(m)o-sexuality’, later transposed into English as ‘homosociality’, while the first can be said to approximate to the opposing term, ‘gynosociality’. 15 Wyke notes that this phrase was used by Fox to publicize Theda Bara’s portrayal of Cleopatra in 1914, the implication being that audiences would be attracted to the spectacle of marriage and family destabilized by female desire. 16 The notion of affidamento was suggested by the Milan Libreria delle Donne (Kemp and Bono 1993, p. 26 n. 17).

Chapter 4 1 For an analysis of fear and desire in the English gothic novel, see Day 1985. 2 Desire for change also involved an increase in the numbers of women filmmakers in the 1960s. Miscuglio notes: ‘The concept of a women’s cinema first emerged during a period of protest, when women made a link between struggle against cultural misogyny and the appropriation of the means for the transmission of culture and ideology’ (Miscuglio 1988, p. 155). In general, their films would not have gone on general release, and are not

Notes 219

3 4 5 6

7 8

9

10 11 12

easily obtainable today. One outstanding exception is Lina Wertmüller, who honed her skills with Fellini on Otto e mezzo (1963), and went on to direct commercially successful films thereafter. For an introduction to the horror genre, see Jancovich 1996, Wells 2000. See Berenstein 1996 for a gender-specific account of Universal’s 1931–6 cycle of horror films. Hunt 1992, Jenks 1992, Troiano 1989, and Wells 2000 give 1956 as the year of production, whereas 1957 is given in Brunetta 1993 and Mora 1978. La maschera del demonio came 109th, with 141 million lire, followed by L’amante del vampiro (124th with 106 million), Seddok, l’erede di Satana (128th with 93 million), and L’ultima preda del vampiro (131th with 75 million) (Mora 1978, p. 298). The fullest account of films from the classic Italian horror cycle remains Mora 1978, II, pp. 287–322. Bava’s La maschera del demonio (1960) was banned in England for eight years (Hunt 1992), while a particular case in point in British horror is the outrage that greeted Powell’s Peeping Tom, also 1960. See Hunt’s recapitulation, in the context of Italian horror, of Bordwell’s definition of art film characteristics as ‘patterned violations of the classical norm’: unusual camera angles, stressed cutting, prohibited camera movement, failure to motivate cinematic space and time by cause-effect logic, enigmas of narration (who tells the story, how and why it is told) (Hunt 1992, p. 69, Bordwell and Thompson 1997). Williams cites horror, melodrama and pornography as genres of excess evoking extreme bodily responses in the spectator (Williams 1999). Dadoun regards the body ‘dismembered or divided into pieces’ in horror as an echo of shamanistic rites (Dadoun 1989, p. 49). An analysis of the Medusa myth in the context of horror and psychoanalysis can be found in Creed 1993, pp. 105–21, 151–66.

Chapter 5 1 This figure is given in Wagstaff 1992, p. 260 n. 4. Brunetta estimates nearly 800 Italian westerns produced between 1964–74 (1993, IV, p. 403). 2 Carabba believes the number of Italian westerns preceding Leone’s first western to be considerably less than 25. He also draws attention to the popularity of existing comedy westerns starring the duo Franchi and Ingrassia (Carabba 1989, p. 81). 3 Il mio nome è Nessuno is credited as supervised and presented by Leone, and directed by Valeri, but is often included in Leone’s filmography. 4 For a list of films sporting the name Django, not always in the original Italian title but inserted for export to Germany, see Wagstaff 1998, p. 81. 5 A list of pseudonyms used by performers, directors, music composers, scriptwriters and cinematographers is given in Weisser 1992, pp. 363–461. 6 The comic strip heritage is especially clear in the title sequence of some of the films, beginning with Per un pugno di dollari and continuing with films like Killer calibro .32. 7 See also Volpi’s plot phases in Nowell-Smith et al., 1996, pp. 67–8.

220 Notes 8 Wagstaff notes that Italy’s production of films collapsed from a high of 562 in 1915 to a low of 12 in 1930, rising to over 100 a year by 1942 (Wagstaff 1996, p. 219). Figures comparing Hollywood western production numbers in relation to other films from 1926 to 1967 are given in Buscombe 1996, p. 427, table 4. Table 1 (p. 426) gives figures for western productions from 1921 to 1977. 9 Per un pugno di dollari was based on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), also incorporating ideas from Goldoni’s play Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters) (1746). The play features Arlecchino (the part taken by Eastwood), a servant whose desire for money (also Eastwood’s motivation) leads him to serve two masters (the Baxters and the Rojos, rival families), one of whom is Beatrice (the Rojos matriarch for whom Eastwood works) cross-dressed as a man, and the other is her lover, for whom she is searching. The plot allows for plentiful physical farce as Arlecchino rushes to serves each in turn. Violence is also in evidence (as part of the overall violence, Eastwood is beaten and has his hands broken), not least from Beatrice to her servant. Whereas in the play Beatrice and her lover are finally reunited, the film ends with the destruction of both families, with Eastwood as catalyst. 10 Co-productions rose from 12 per cent of all Italian films made in 1950, to 75.3 per cent in 1965, peaking in 1970 (Wagstaff 1995, Frayling 1998, p. 63). 11 Production fell from a high of 227 in 1925 to 54 in 1958, and just 11 in 1963 (a remarkable drop even in the context of a fall in production of feature films generally in the US) (Buscombe 1996, pp. 48, 426). By the end of the 1960s Italy was making more films than Hollywood (300 per annum), with more than half the profits during that period coming from Italian films (Wagstaff 1996, p. 220). 12 Carabba gives 190 spaghetti westerns made in Italy from 1964 to 1968, with a high of 63 per annum in 1968, falling to 16 in 1969, after which the genre was revived with the Trinity series (Carabba 1989, p. 84). 13 Wagstaff gives audience figures of 745 million for Italy in 1965, compared with 501 million in the UK and 419 million in France (Wagstaff 1998, p. 74). 14 See Wagstaff 1998 for a detailed analysis of profits. 15 Frayling estimates 1,690 communes without a cinema in 1963, rising to 3,399 in 1969. Given that the overall number of cinemas did not decrease, this implies more cinemas in urban centres (Frayling 1998, p. 56). 16 For a list of spaghetti westerns from 1971 onwards showing full frontal female nudity, see Weisser 1992, p. 38. (Black) back female nudity was already present in Il grande Silenzio (1968). 17 A summary and translation of the arguments of Paolella and Micciché can be found in Frayling 1998, pp. 53–6. 18 For Levitin, speculating on the possibility of roles for feminists in the western, it is the parody westerns of Mae West, rather than the straight western, that provide the only convincing roles for realistic female westerners. However, the centrality of the camp, mannered masquerade to the Mae West persona hardly makes her a realistic representation of femininity, as well as reinforcing, rather than subverting, the stereotypical patriarchal

Notes 221 location of femininity in surface (Levitin 1982). A more realistic and powerful female westerner role can be found in Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995), whose central female character’s shooting, tactical and cooperational skills enable her to avenge her father’s murder, and ride off alone, in true loner hero style, at the end of the film. 19 An analysis of migration in Italy is given in Ginsborg 1990, pp. 210–52. 20 The question of race in The Magnificent Seven is discussed in Buscombe 1993. For further discussion of the representation of Mexico in North American cinema, as well as essays on Mexican cinema, see King et al., 1993. 21 There are, of course, exceptions to the portrayal of the Mexican as sweaty and unattractive. While the Mexicans in Leone’s trilogy conform to the model (particularly the huge, sweating, sadistic henchman of Ramon, Indio and Angel Eyes), in Il mercenario Paco’s appearance becomes progressively more attractive (his facial hair decreases, he looks cleaner) as the film proceeds. This is in order to facilitate both the film’s promotion of homoeroticism, and its concern to deny it by making him a suitable object of desire for Columba.

Filmography Adua e le compagne, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960 L’amante del vampiro, Renato Polselli, 1960 Amanti d’oltretomba, Mario Caiano, 1965 Gli amori di Ercole, Carlo Ludovico Bracaglia, 1960 L’angelo bianco, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1955 Un angelo per Satana, Camillo Mastrocinque, 1966 L’atleta fantasma, Raimondo Scotti, 1919 L’attico, Gianni Puccini, 1962 Attila, Pietro Francisci, 1955 Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti, Nanni Loy, 1959 La battaglia di Maratona, Jacques Tourneur and Bruno Vailati, 1960 Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966 Il boom, Vittorio De Sica, 1963 La bugiarda, Luigi Comencini, 1965 Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Sergio Leone, 1966 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1919 Cabiria, Giovanni Pastrone, 1914 Caltiki, il mostro immortale, Riccardo Freda, 1959 Catene, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1949 Chi è senza peccato … , Raffaello Matarazzo, 1953 Lo chiamavano Trinità, Enzo Barboni, 1970 I compagni, Mario Monicelli, 1963 Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità, Enzo Barboni, 1974 La corona di ferro, Alessandro Blasetti, 1941 La cripta e l’incubo, Camillo Mastrocinque, 1964 La cuccagna, Luciano Salce, 1962 The Curse of Frankenstein, Terence Fisher, 1957 Danza macabra, Antonio Margheriti, 1963 Il demonio, Brunello Rondi, 1963 Disonorata senza colpa, G. W. Chili, 1953 Divorzio all’italiana, Pietro Germi, 1961 Django, Sergio Corbucci, 1966 La dolce vita, Federico Fellini, 1960 Una donna libera, Vittorio Cottafavi, 1955 Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder, 1944 Dracula, Tod Browning, 1931 Dracula, Terence Fisher, 1958 Due soldi di speranza, Renato Castellani, 1951 Ehi amico … C’è Sabata, hai chiuso, Gianfranco Parolini, 1969 C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West), Sergio Leone, 1969 Ercole al centro della terra, Mario Bava, 1961 Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, Vittorio Cottafavi, 1961 Ercole contro i figli del sole, Osvaldo Civirani, 1964 222

Filmography 223 Ercole contro Roma, Piero Pierotti, 1964 Ercole e la regina di Lidia (Hercules Unchained), Pietro Francisci, 1958 Ercole sfida Sansone, Pietro Francisci, 1964 Fabiola, Alessandro Blasetti, 1949 Il fanciullo del West, Giorgio Ferroni, 1943 Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules), Pietro Francisci, 1957 I figli di nessuno, Ubaldo Maria Del Colle, 1921 I figli di nessuno, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1951 Frankenstein, James Whale, 1931 La frusta e il corpo, Mario Bava, 1963 Il giovedì, Dino Risi, 1963 Giù la testa! (A Fistful of Dynamite Duck, You Sucker!), Sergio Leone, 1971 La grande guerra, Mario Monicelli, 1959 Il grande Silenzio, Sergio Corbucci, 1968 Guai ai vinti, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1955 The House of Usher, Roger Corman, 1960 Ieri, oggi, domani, Vittorio De Sica, 1963 Io la conoscevo bene, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1965 L’ira di Achille, Marino Girolami, 1962 Jason and the Argonauts, Don Chaffey, 1963 Johnny Oro, Sergio Corbucci, 1966 Killer calibro .32, Alfonso Brescia, 1967 Ladri di biciclette, Vittorio De Sica, 1948 Ladri di saponette, Maurizio Nichetti, 1989 Le legioni di Cleopatra, Vittorio Cottafavi, 1960 Lola Colt, Siro Marcellini, 1967 I lunghi capelli della morte, Antonio Margheriti, 1964 Lycanthropus, Paolo Heusch, 1961 Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan, Riccardo Freda, 1969 Maciste all’inferno, Guido Brignone, 1926 Maciste all’inferno, Riccardo Freda, 1962 Maciste contro i Mongoli, Domenico Paolella, 1963 Maciste contro il mostri, Guido Malatesta, 1962 Maciste contro il vampiro, Giacomo Gentilumo, 1961 Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi, Antonio Leonviola, 1961 Maciste nella valle dei re, Carlo Campogalliani, 1959 Maciste l’uomo più forte del mondo, Antonio Leonviola, 1961 Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas/Ercole contro il gigante Golia, Guido Malatesta, 1965 The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges, 1960 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford, 1962 Il marito, Nanni Loy, 1958 Matrimonio all’italiana, Vittorio De Sica, 1964 La maschera del demonio (Mask of Satan/Black Sunday), Mario Bava, 1960 Il mattatore, Dino Risi, 1960 Il mercenario, Sergio Corbucci, 1968 Il mio corpo per un poker, Lina Wertmüller, 1968 Il mio nome è Nessuno (My Name is Nobody), Sergio Leone and Tonino Valeri, 1973

224 Filmography I mostri, Dino Risi, 1963 Il mostro di Frankenstein, Eugenio Testa, 1920 Il mulino delle donne di pietra, Giorgio Ferroni, 1960 Nata di marzo, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1957 Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau, 1921 L’onorevole Angelina, Luigi Zampa, 1947 Operazione paura, Mario Bava, 1966 Orlando e i paladini di Francia, Pietro Francisci, 1956 L’orribile secreto del Dr. Hichcock, Riccardo Freda, 1962 Otto e mezzo/821, Federico Fellini, 1963 Pane, amore e fantasia, Luigi Comencini, 1953 La parmigiana, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1963 Peeping Tom, Michael Reeves, 1960 Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), Sergio Leone, 1964 Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More), Sergio Leone, 1965 Una pistola per Ringo, Duccio Tessari, 1965 Le pistole non discutono, Mario Caiano, 1964 Poveri ma belli, Dino Risi, 1956 Poveri milionari, Dino Risi, 1958 Le quattro verità, Alessandro Blasetti, 1962 The Quick and the Dead, Sam Raimi, 1995 Quièn sabe?, Damiano Damiani, 1966 Quo vadis?, Enrico Guazzoni, 1913 Quo Vadis?, Mervyn Le Roy, 1951 La regina di Saba, Pietro Francisci, 1952 Riso amaro, Giuseppe De Santis, 1949 Rocco e i suoi fratelli, Luchino Visconti, 1960 Roma città aperta, Roberto Rossellini, 1945 Roma contro Roma, Giuseppe Vari, 1964 Le Samourai, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967 Scipio l’Africano, Carmine Gallone, 1937 Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua morte, Antonio Margheriti, 1968 Se sei vivo, spara!, Giulio Questi, 1967 Seddok, l’erede di Satana, Anton Giulio Maiano, 1960 Sedotta e abbandonata, Pietro Germi, 1963 The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954 Una signora dell’ovest, Carl Koch, 1942 I soliti ignoti, Mario Monicelli, 1958 Il sorpasso, Dino Risi, 1962 Lo spettro, Riccardo Freda, 1963 La strage dei vampiri, Roberto Mauri, 1962 The Student of Prague, Stellan Kye, 1913 Il successo, Dino Risi, 1963 Tempi duri per i vampiri, Steno (Stefano Vanzina), 1959 The Terror, Roy Del Ruth, 1928 Terrore nello spazio/Il pianeta dei vampiri, Mario Bava, 1965 Texas, addio, Ferdinando Baldi, 1966 Ti ho sempre amato, Mario Costa, 1954 Tormento, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1951

Filmography 225 Torna!, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1954 Totò contro Maciste, Fernando Cerchio, 1962 I tre volti della paura, Mario Bava, 1963 The Treasure of Silver Lake, Harald Reinl, 1962 Tutti a casa, Luigi Comencini, 1960 L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, Dario Argento, 1969 Ulisse, Mario Camerini, 1954 Ulisse contro Ercole, Mario Caiano, 1962 L’ultima preda del vampiro, Piero Regnoli, 1960 Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, Luigi Maggi, 1908 Una vampira indiana, Vincenzo Leone, 1913 I vampiri, Riccardo Freda, 1956 La vendetta di Lady Morgan, Massimo Pupillo, 1965 The Virginian, Victor Fleming, 1929 La visita, Antonio Pietrangeli, 1963 Una vita difficile, Dino Risi, 1961 Vortice, Raffaello Matarazzo, 1954 The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah, 1969 Winnetou the Warrior, Harald Reinl, 1963 Yojimbo, Akira Kurosawa, 1961

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Index abortion 40, 41 absent father 56 actor pairings 21 adultery 39–40, 85, 87 see also heterosexuality, illicit; women, labour force participation and sexual availability advertising 60–1 of films on television 99 affidamento 123, 124, 164 age-youth axis 161–2 alienation 8, 83 of women 134 all-male community 129–30 Amanti d’oltretomba (dir. Caiano) 144, 154, 161, 163, 171 Amazons 125–6 American films, impact of 12 American stars 101 Andreini, I. 62 androgyny 102, 116 angel in the house 68 angel of consumption 68 Angelo bianco (dir. Matarazzo) 21, 22, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 53, 58 Anglophilia 196 anti-hero 174 anxiety 38, 73, 106, 145 identificatory 143 masculine 143 and sexual difference 143 see also castration anxiety; separation anxiety Aristotle 2, 60 arrivismo 77, 81, 84, 137 art cinema 3, 4, 10, 11 and export market 12 asexuality maternal 29 of nuns 32 Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (dir. Loy) 61, 64, 66, 70, 71, 77, 90, 91, 93

audience composition 13, 14 as consumers 2 preference, topographical classification 12 proximity of and identification reception and class 66 sizes of 8–10 auteur cinema 3, 4 autocoscienza 136 avanspettacolo 64

16

Bava, M. 17, 18, 100 binaries 17, 110, 134, 159, 176 see also Madonna-whore binary bisexuality 102, 107 black humour 68 blood 167 and eternal youth 162 transfusion 153, 154 see also vampirism Blow-up (dir. Antonioni) 196 body cult 117 fragmented 106 in pieces see fragmented body spectacle 2 as surface 2 see also female body; male body bondage 204 see also sadomasochism bonding 209 boundaries 2, 147 fluid 17 C’era una volta il West (dir. Leone) 173, 174, 185, 190, 194, 195, 198 207 Cabiria (dir. Pastrone) 4, 15, 98, 129 Caltiki, il mostro immortale (dir. Freda) 144, 148–51 cannibalism 153

234

Index 235 capitalism subversion of 70 and unsatisfied desire 73 see also commodity fetishism car as fetish object 69, 77–8 as flight from domestic sphere 93 as status symbol 70–1, 77 as symbol of virility 77–80, 82 casa chiusa see Riformatoria delle penitente castle, symbolism of in horror 143 castration anxiety 38, 48, 74, 92, 106, 143, 161, 151–2, 188, 200 Catene (dir. Matarazzo) 21, 23, 26, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 41, 43, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58 Catholic Church 27, 41, 86 see also church cinema; church welfare; Riformataria delle penitente censorship 27, 90 character doubling 36 simplification 21 Chi è senza peccato (dir. Matarazzo) 21, 23, 30–1, 33, 37, 41, 43, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 77 child actors 21 in melodrama 20 see also mother-child separation; mother-daughter dyad childhood 19, 71 church cinemas 8–9, 11, 25 church welfare 57 see also Riformatorio delle penitente cinema domestic market 5, 6, 7, 65–6 export market 4, 5–6, 8 massification 12 profitability 5, 8 receipts 9, 25 see also prima, seconda and terza visione cinema cinema di parocchia see church cinemas cinema feuilleton 24 cineopera 3, 27 cineromanzo 20

close-up 90–1, 139, 142 and emotion 15, 16 in horror films 150, 152 in spaghetti westerns 184, 197 see also shots, use of clothing in spaghetti westerns 183, 194 see also costume; haute couture comedy comic consumption 68–84 and materialism 60 and mise en scène 15 and sex 60 Commedia all’italiana 3, 8, 13, 60ff and class 66 and economic success 65 serie A 65, 66 Commedia brillante 65 Commedia sentimentale 20, 65 Commedie all femminile 64 Commedie anti-matrimoniali 64 Commedie di costume 64 Commedie giallorosa 64 commodity fetishism 74–6, 79 conjugal fidelity 22 conspicuous consumption 16, 81 consumer culture 60 consumerism, Americanization of 78 consumption 1, 7 parasitic 68–9 primary 70 contraception 41 control 69, 71 convent 32 corps morcelé 106, 144 costume 32, 33 symbolism of colour 103, 114 criminality 35 see also theft, thieves; prison, imprisonment cuckoldry 87, 88 see also adultery; heterosexuality, illict culture cultural production 1, 109 spaces of 10 Danza macrabra (dir. Margheriti) 144, 155, 156, 160, 162, 168

236 Index deferred action 47 desire 14, 20, 31, 73 brute 118 displacement of 33–4, 35–6 familial 48 female and procreation 19, 31 infantile 48 location of 106 oedipal 48 pre-marital 31 relocation of 36 spectatorial 121 see also economic desire; female desire destiny 24, 39, 113 see also fatalism Disonorata senza colpa (dir. Chili) 23, 27, 31, 32, 34, 35, 43, 54, 56, 59 diva 136 divorce 85, 86–7 Divorcio all’italiana (dir. Germi) 63, 64, 85, 86 Django (dir. Corbucci) 193 domestic bliss 19ff domesticity rejection of 114, 115, 125 as threat to masculinity 115 dominatrix 121 doubling 106, 159 dream factory 55 dubbing 8 Due soldi di speranza (dir. Castellani) 65 Dyrell, E. 29–30 Eastwood, C. 174–5 economic desire 43, 44 economic independence of women 135 see also women, labour force participation economic miracle, economic boom 3, 26, 60 effect on marriage 84 see also migration, south-north emigration 26, 57 Ercole al centro della terra (dir. Bava) 111, 115, 117

Ercole all conquista di Atlantide (dir. Cottafavi) 115, 118, 124 Ercole contra Roma (dir. Pierotti) 111 Ercole e la regina di Lidia (dir. Francisci) 99, 103, 107, 112, 114–15, 117, 120, 124, 125, 127 Ercole sfida Sansone (dir. Francisci) 112, 115 erotic genre 12–13 see also pornography eroticism 102 displaced 130 escapism 7 exchange-value 77 of women 119 expressionist cinema 137 family all-male 204 family romance 20, 44, 46–59 patriarchal 19–20 as site of oppression 19–20 see also patriarchy fatalism 40, 41, 46, 85 father-son relationship 48–9, 78, 79 feeling-tone 46–7, 73 female body commodification of 84, 88, 89–90, 91, 92 exposure of 90–1 in horror films 133ff objectification of 107 female cooperation 55 female desire 16, 17, 28, 120, 158, 159–60 displaced 37 medicalization of 35 punishment of 39 female sexuality commodification of 61 as threat 19 female solidarity 44 femininity 19 asexual 122, 123 castrating 158 disempowerment of 38 displaced 38 divided 159–72 domestic 19, 115

Index 237 fetishized 188 gynosocial 123 in horror film 134 identified with body 38 leisured 32 marginalized 62, 66–7 non-white 211 older 162, 163 on-screen 38 in peplum films 103–4 as phallus 191 reproductive 84–5 in westerns 186 feminism 123 femmes fatales 34, 35, 37, 125, 134, 147 fertility 31 and patriarchy 89 fetishism 14, 17, 37, 74–5, 106, 107 film noir 37 film-as-text 13, 14 flashback 176, 207–8 Formalism 8 fotoromanzo 20–1 fragmentation 109, 189, 200 fragmented body 106, 144, 145, 162 freeze shot 90 Freud, S. 44, 48–9, 55–6, 66, 74, 76, 92, 106–7, 145, 200 fumetti 98 Gassman, V. 62, 70 gaze 66, 67, 183–4 female 67 heterosexual 131 homoerotic 131 homosexual 131 and identification 141–2 male body as object of 130, 131 gender 2, 108 and audience reception 25 and class relations 61 and consumerism 60ff as performance 66, 186 as process 2 representation 1, 4, 8, 19 genre cinema 3 export market 4

Giù la testa! (dir. Leone) 174, 192, 204, 210 glamour 7, 24 eroticized 29 Gli amori di Ercole (dir. Bracaglia) 103, 115, 117, 120, 121–2, 124, 125, 128 Glia ultima giorni di Pompei (dir. Maggi) 98 Gothic horror 143 Grand Hotel magazine 20–1 Guai ai vinti (dir. Matarazzo) 30, 39, 57 gun concealment of 193 phallic 194 prioritization of 192 gynophobia 135–6, 147 gynosociality 119–32, 164, 166, 171 hair as symbol of female sexuality 32–3, 157, 165 as symbol of male effeminacy 117 Hammer horror films 137, 138 haute couture and desire 33 helplessness 131 male 143, 144, 146 heroism 112–13 heterosexuality 17, 107–8 illicit 17, 120, 125, 126, 127 licit 17, 120, 125 Hollywood studio system 3 home as locus of consumption 93 see also domestic bliss hommes fatals 34, 35 homoeroticism 17, 203 homosexuality 107, 199, 202–3 denial of 130, 184 homosociality 66, 119–32, 160 homosocial bonding 17 honour 20, 21, 29, 35, 57, 85–6, 89 crime of 87 Southern 85–6, 87 horror films 3, 133ff horror spectatorship 141 I compagni (dir. Monicelli) 64, 69–70 I figli di nessuno (dir. Matarazzo) 21, 22, 23, 26, 30, 32, 36, 43, 49, 53, 58

238 Index I lunghi capelli della morte (dir. Margheriti) 165, 166 I mostri (dir. Risi) 82, 90, 93 I soliti ignoti (dir. Monicelli) 61, 63, 64, 65, 6, 70, 76, 83, 92 I tre volti della paura (dir. Bava) 140, 155, 162 I vampiri (dir. Freda) 138, 141, 154, 170 iconography 15 of female desire 29 ideal ego 105 identification 14, 61 and audience proximity 16 and gender 1–2 and musclemen 102 narcissistic affirmation 105 production of 69 with screen image 105 spectatorial 1 identity feminine, shared 161 formation 105, 142 self-creation of 69 shared 161 Ieri oggi domani (dir. De Sica) 90, 91, 96 Il boom (dir. De Sica) 61, 63, 68, 84, 91–2 Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (dir. Leone) 174, 176, 184, 192, 197, 200, 206, 212 Il demonio (dir. Rondi) 158 Il fanciullo del West (dir. Ferroni) 176 Il giovedi (dir. Risi) 62, 68, 78, 84, 96 Il grande Silenzio (dir. Corbucci) 189, 196, 198, 200, 202 Il marito (dir. Loy) 78, 84, 92, 93 Il mattatore (dir. Risi) 64, 68, 71, 76, 87–8, 90, 93 Il mio corpo per un poker (dir. Wertmüller) 173, 185 Il mio nome è Nessuno (dir. Leone) 174, 185, 195, 197, 213 Il mostro di Frankenstein (dir. Testa) 136, 144 Il mulino delle donne di pietra (dir. Ferroni) 138, 154, 156, 162, 171

Il sorpasso (dir. Risi) 62, 63, 65, 82, 84, 93 il successo (dir. Risi) 61, 62, 68, 78, 79, 81, 84, 91, 93, 95 illegitimacy 30, 57–9 illiteracy 11 imago 105 incorporation 151, 152, 163–4, 205 italianità 26–7, 33, 65 Johnny Oro (dir. Corbucci) 208 jouissance 200 Jung, C. 46 Killer calibre .32 (dir. Brescia)

174, 185,

186, 208

L’amante del vampire (dir. Polselli) 140, 141, 148 L’attico (dir. Puccini) 6 L’ira di Achille (dir. Girolami) 117 L’onorevole Angelina (dir. Zampa) 65 l’orribile secreto del Dr Hichcock (dir. Freda) 141, 144, 152, 154–5, 156, 160, 171 L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (dir. Argento) 139 L’ultima preda del vampiro (dir. Regnoli) 148, 155, 159, 161, 162, 163 L’unita (dir. Comencini) 22 La battaglia di Maratona (dir. Tourneur and Vailati) 116, 117 La bugiarda (dir. Comencini) 64 La cripta e l’incubo (dir. Mastrocinque) 137, 140, 155, 156, 163, 165, 166 La dolce vita (dir. Fellini) 81, 87, 91, 196 La fustra e il corpo (dir. Bava) 158 La grande guerra (dir. Monicelli) 64, 65 La maschera del demonio (dir. Bava) 138, 141, 144, 155, 161, 163, 170 La parmigiana (dir. Pietrangeli) 64 La strage dei vampire (dir. Mauri) 155, 156, 157, 160, 162 La vendetta di Lady Morgan (dir. Pupillo) 161, 162 labour power 91

Index 239 Lacan, J. 105, 106, 145, 188–9 Ladri di biciclette (dir. De Sica) 23 language standardization 11, 22 treacherous 198 Le fatiche di Ercole (dir. Francisici) 107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 117, 120, 122, 125, 131 Le legioni di Cleopatra (dir. Cottafavi) 115, 120, 121, 122 Le pistole non discutono (dir. Caiano) 174 Le quattro verità (dir. Blasetti) 63 Le samourai (dir. Melville) 189 leisure 81–2 leisured wife 84 lesbianism 102, 140, 166–7, 168–9, 170 vampiric 137 liminality 67, 109 Lo spettro (dir. Freda) 141, 144, 146, 160 Lola Colt (dir. Marcellini) 173 loss 20, 32, 46, 47, 50, 52, 73 see also separation anxiety Lycanthropus (dir. Heusch) 154, 159 lycanthropy 153–4, 159 Maciste films 98–100, 112, 116 Maciste all’inferno (dir. Brignone; Freda) 116, 124, 129 Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan (dir. Freda) 118, 122 Maciste contro i Mongoli (dir. Paolella) 123 Maciste contro i mostro (dir. Malatesta) 119 Maciste contro il vampiro (dir. Gentilumo) 97, 134 Maciste l’uomo più forte de monde (dir. Leonviola) 115, 118, 121, 122, 124 Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi (dir. Leonviola) 115, 121 Maciste il vendicatore dei Mayas (dir. Malatesta) 111, 112, 115, 119, 121, 123 Madonna-whore binary 36, 85, 89, 103, 122, 186

Magnani, A. 28 male body commodification of 91 effeminate 109 eroticization of 201–2 heroic 97 pumped-up 109 see also musclemen male desire 37 male pairing 205 mammismo 47, 53 Manfredi, N. 62 marriage 84–96 avoidance of 93 rate 136 traditional 87–9 see also domestic bliss Marx, K. 75, 76 masculinity 17, 62 heroic 115 idealized 20, 110, 111 impaired 79 as masquerade 182–99 musclebound 97 omnipotent 189–90 satirized 68 as sexual spectacle 183 masquerade 186–9 feminine 188 as metaphor 187 Mastroianni, M. 62, 64 Matarazzo R. 6, 17, 20–6, 77 mater dolorosa, 28–46 maternal infidelity 48 phallus 154 sexuality 159 maternity and motherhood 28–9 matriarch matriarchal society 120–1 phallic 20 matrilineality 31, 165, 166 Matrimonio all’italiana (De Sica) 64, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88 melodrama 3, 6, 8, 19ff as female genre 13 popularity of 25 and reverse-angle montage 15 midget 118

240 Index migration, south-north 26, 57, 61, 86, 101, 115, 210 military combat 117 mirror image 144, 189 mirror stage and infantile psychosexual development 105, 145, 188–9 mise en scène 5, 15 heroic 112 in melodrama 22, 32 in peplum films 111 misogyny 66, 103, 107, 206 in Hercules films 126 in horror 139 mother archaic 149 castrating 152, 154 mother love 21 phallic 42–3, 50, 55, 121 sacrificial 20 mother-child bond 23, 28–9 separation 20, 29, 39, 42, 45, 47, 49, 51–3 mother-daughter dyad 40, 52, 164 negative 55 motherhood 19, 20, 29, 159 phallic 121 as suffering 39 multiple identity spectatorship 102 muscleman film see peplum film musclemen 100–2 American 101 black 109 semi-naked 116 muteness 39 mutilation, sadistic 199, 200 nakedness, male 183 naming 197–8 narcissism 105, 130, 189, 190 narrative 15, 16, 110 Nata di marzo (dir. Pietrangeli) 64 Nazzari, A. 21, 27 necrophilia 152 neorealism 3, 4 in melodrama 23 neorealismo rosa 65 nostalgia 47, 50 Novella Film magazine 24

Oedipus complex 105, 106 oedipal desire 16, 47 oedipal fantasy 156 oedipal trajectory 43, 50–4 oedipality 47–9, 54, 156 resolution of 205 Operazione paura (dir. Bava) 138 oral sadism 152 orality 153 Pane, amore e fantasia (dir. Comenci) 65 panning shot 91 parent, idealized 56 parental identity 43, 50 parentlessness 54 parody 156 passivity as powerlessness 51, 52 paternity 27–8, 31 paternal identity 31 patriarchy, patriarchal ideology 1, 17, 62 class inflection of 110 patriarchal surveillance and audience gender composition 13 threat of gynosociality to 125 patrilineality 31, 57 peplum film 6, 17, 97ff audience 101 as export 100 hero 111 production 100 Tessari’s rules for 103 Per qualche dollaro in più (dir. Leone) 174, 183, 185, 192, 194, 204, 206, 207, 212, 213 Per un pugnio di dollari (dir. Leone) 174, 176, 178, 184, 192, 200, 204, 213 performance work and dishonour 44–5 phallus 109, 187, 188, 190 identification with 74 phallic narcissism 190 phallic omnipotence 198 phallic penetration 168 privileging of 143 symbolization of 106 see also mother, phallic

Index 241 point of view 14, 104 popular genre 3 popular song 27 pornography 90 gay 184 pose 111 Poveri ma belli (dir. Risi) 65, 84, 93 powerlessness 102, 106, 107 pre-marital sex 39 see also heterosexuality, illicit pre-symbolic 196 prima visione cinema 11, 65, 179, 180 prison, imprisonment 32, 36–7, 42, 51, 52, 56 prostitution 85, 92, 173, 190, 191 as exchange-value 85 providence 22 pseudo-names 197–8 psychosomatic illness 51 public/private binary 68 pumped-up body 109, 111 quest

112–13, 115

race 209–10 racial difference 209, 211–12 racial hierarchy 108–9 racial other 17, 108, 116–17, 208 racial superiority 118–19 see also white supremacy rape 30, 39, 89, 206 inter-racial 208, 209 Reeves, S. 100–1, 102, 116 repetition 15, 21 revenge 21, 30 Riformatorio delle pentite 30, 39, 41 Riso amaro (dir. De Santis) 6, 17, 67 Rocco e i suoi fratelli (dir. Visconti) 210 Roma città aperta (dir. Rossellini) 6 Roma contro Roma (dir. Vari) 134, 149 romance 167 romantic love 34 romantic soundtrack 34 Romanzo d’appendice 20, 21 sadomasochism 199–214

17, 158, 173, 190,

sale parocchiali see church cinemas Sanson, Y. 21, 25, 27–8, 29 satire 7 in comedy 130 scopophilia 14, 16, 38, 106 screen as shop window 1, 73 screen as surface 2, 104 Se incontri Sartana, prega per la tua morte (Margheriti) 186, 195, 198 Se sei vivo, spara! (dir. Questi) 200, 204, 206 Seconda visione cinema 65 Seddok, l’erede di Satana (dir. Maiano) 154, 159 Sedotta e abbandonata (dir. Germi) 85, 89 sentimentality 23 separation anxiety 38, 50, 56, 74, 144, 148 sex as consumption 82 economic uses of 37 sex-gender binary 108 sexual difference 106 sexual fetishism 74, 76 sexuality, recreational 30, 31 shootouts 195, 201 eroticized 194 shots, use of 15 in melodrama 22, 23, 46 see also close-ups; freeze shot; panning shot; tracking shot; upshot signs 74 consumption of 69 systems 69 silent cinema 62 musclemen in 98 westerns 177 single motherhood 30–1 slapstick 64, 72 sleep and feminization 127 snakes as symbol of sex 152 social norms, reversal of in comedy 62 social relations commodification of 61, 77–81 pre-consumerist 83 reification of 76, 83 social status 73

242 Index Sordi, A. 62 soundtrack 8, 16 and desire 34 in horror 141 in melodrama 23 in peplum 111, 113–14 in spaghetti westerns 175 spaghetti westerns 3, 6, 8, 17, 173ff class composition of audience for 179 spectacle film see peplum film spectator pleasure 132 spectatorship 25, 61, 66 multiple identity viewpoint 102 splitting 106, 122, 124, 159, 160 sport 117 star system 8 stardom 14, 62 iconography of 5 male 137 stars-as-commodity 15 status 70 Steele, B. 4 stereotypes, cultural and gender 27 subversion, subversiveness 62, 67, 70 surface 1, 17 sword and sandal film see peplum film symbiosis 164 symbolic 73–4, 105, 144, 196–7 television 60 as cinema dei poveri 11 impact on cinema going 9–10 spectatorship 10 Tempi duri per i vampire (dir. Steno 138) Terrore nello spazio (dir. Bava) 140, 150 terza visione cinema 9, 11, 65, 101, 179 Texas, addio (dir. Baldi) 207, 208 The Magnificent Seven (dir. Sturges) 178 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (dir. Ford) 202 The Seven Samurai (dir. Kurosawa) 178 The Wild Bunch (dir. Peckinpah) 178 theft, thieves 70 theft of women 119

third-run films see terza visione cinema thriller horror 140 Ti ho sempre amato (dir. Costa) 22, 31, 32, 37, 41, 44, 57 Tormento (dir. Matarazzo) 21, 26, 30, 31, 32, 37, 41, 42, 45, 53, 54 Torna! (dir. Matarazzo) 21, 22, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 40–1, 42, 52 totemism 74 Totò contro Maciste (dir. Cerchio) 97 tracking shot 15 transvestitism, spectatorial 66 Tutti a casa (dir. Comencini) 64 Ulisse (dir. Camerini) 99, 101 Ulisse contro Ercole (dir. Caiano) 112, 118, 121 Un angelo per Satana (dir. Mastrocinque) 166, 168 Una donna libera (dir. Cottafavi) 44, 61 Una pistola per Ringo (dir. Tessari) 196, 208, 212 Una signora dell’ovest (dir. Koch) 175, 177 Una vita difficile (dir. Risi) 78, 79, 84, 92 undead 169 unemployment 61 unruly women 67 upshot 111, 114 urbanization 60 use-value 76 wife as 85, 92 vagina dentata 128, 134, 151, 154, 158 vampirism 137, 153, 170–1 female 155, 157 female-to-female 170 female victims of 156 male-to-male 155 vendetta 182 verisimilitude, 2 victim-identification 139, 141 violence 113, 199 sadomasochistic 173, 181 virginity 85, 89 virility, cult of 27 visual pleasure, gendered 141

Index 243 Vitti, M. 63 Vortice (dir. Matarazzi) 21, 52, 54 voyeurism 14, 37–8, 88, 91, 105 wage labour 68 water as ejaculation 111 as representation of sexual intercourse 32 western all’italiana see spaghetti western

white supremacy 209–10, 211–12, 213 women as butt of joke 66 exchange of 119, 120 independent 13 isolation of 123–4 labour force participation 13, 43–4, 45–6, 84, 135; and sexual availability 44–5, 51 women’s movement 103

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