That Feel When No Gothic Wife
In this latest series of blog posts, we’ve talked a lot about adaptation. Whether it be adapting a book into a movie, or adapting a style of film making into a new era of film, the concept of adaptation can be found really in any sort of art. What is a song but the adaptation of feelings into sound waves? With this perspective, we can examine film in any number of interesting ways, and today I’d like to take a close look at three films that have to do with the adaptation of societal critiques. They adapt books and plays into films, yes, but at the same time they’re adapting century old literary styles into films. These are films that adapt the reality of many women into artistically exaggerated stories. They’re adapting the world around them into art that says something about it. What are they saying? Well I can’t tell you, and the directors can’t either. That’s up to you to decide. But I’ll tell you what I think they’re saying. So let’s talk about some Gothic women’s films.
For the uninitiated, let’s break down what I mean when I say “Gothic women’s films”. Sometimes called “paranoid women films” or ”Gothic romance films”, these terms refer to a short lived type of movie that saw its heyday in the 1940s. Noted for their Gothic style (obviously), these films follow a certain formula involving a young woman trapped, psychologically or physically, in a massive house by her manipulative, but charismatic older husband. The dialogue is melodramatic, and you’ll often find characters speaking in that early 20th century English affectation. This is the general formula for a Gothic women’s film, and while it’s good to know the mechanics of the genre, one of the questions about these movies is whether or not it could even be called a genre. There weren’t a whole lot of these movies made in the first place, and they converge with film noir in much of their style, a category of film that has it’s own long history of debate about the validity of it as a genre.
Still, I think it’s safe to say that Gothic women’s films are, at the very least, a type of film. It’s probably best not to get too wrapped up in the genre semantics that envelop so much of film debate. Much of my writing today will be based on the work of Diane Waldman, who essentially defined the Gothic womens film as we know them today, and she considers at least “the Gothic” to be a genre that spans multiple mediums and time periods. So we’re going to stick with that interpretation if it’s perfectly alright with the reader.
Alright enough meandering, let’s talk about our first film; one of the most lasting contribution to the genre, George Kukor’s 1944 release Gaslight. The title of the film has recently come back into the popular vernacular, which has some sociocultural implications we’ll come back to. Gaslight is, as one would expect, a rather typical Gothic women’s film. We follow the story of Paula, an aspiring opera star, who gets swept off her feet by Gregory, and the two quickly marry. Gregory begins to psychologically torment Paula, subtly at first, but slowly he ramps up his assault on her senses, convincing her that she’s become forgetful, unaware, with a penchant for stealing Gregory’s belongings. Eventually he almost entirely convinces her that she has lost her mind. This is, of course, where the phrase “gaslighting” comes from, meaning the act of making a romantic partner think they’re insane through manipulative means. In the end though, a noble detective figures out that Gregory was after the family treasure, and justice is served- these are still Production Code times after all.
But seeing the bad guy get their just desserts in Gaslight feels different from other Code-era films. This isn’t Cry of the Hunted, where the viewer is left annoyed at the insistence of formal punishment for the lovable criminal anti-hero. This is Gaslight, where a disgusting embodiment of male oppression gets justifiably punished at the end of the story. It’s a moment of vindication for both the female lead and the female audience, who get to live vicariously through the beautiful Ingrid Bergman’s Paula. This was a large part of the appeal of Gothic women’s films, for women to see their real life problems represented on the big screen, to see all of their brushed off “hysterics” validated. There’s a real catharsis in Gaslight’s closing scenes, in watching our victimized protagonist catch up to the information the audience already knows. We, the viewers, only know what’s going on because of the very noir detective subplot, which adds a much needed secondary dynamic to the script.
Beyond just being a noir film with elements that appeal to women, Gaslight also highlights an important recurring theme in the Gothic women’s film, that being the use of the house. Gaslight is, like other films of the genre, set in a great big house that, instead of being a place of comfort, becomes a prison for the abused spouse. It’s a theme that can be seen in nearly every Gothic women’s film, one that speaks to the understated horror of domestic life. Frequently stairway railings are framed as prison bars, and the vertical movement on staircases will often be reflective of power dynamics in the scene. These distortions of the home, the place most traditionally associated with women, into a haunted and menacing habitat reflected the anxieties of women at the time.
Waldman writes about the cultural changes that led to housewives’ new perspective on marital dynamics, stating “the home is no longer the center of the husband’s life, and the woman finds herself without occupation and with an unsatisfactory emotional life. On the other hand, the culture was beginning to offer a life outside the home for women, and birth- control knowledge and openness about sex were challenging the domination of sexual life by puritanical ideas”. This conflict of changing times would set the stage for the Gothic women’s films, which would manage to translate the clash of ideals in an artistic way. Gaslight does this expertly, exaggerating the incarcaratory nature of domestic servitude through Gregory’s refusal to let Paula out of the house. And in a time where husbands were away at war, women taking their roles in the factories, and long held traditions about sex being eroded, I’m sure these social upheavals were enough to make plenty of women think they were going crazy.
Now then, let’s see how a later entry to the genre tackles these same themes and story telling conventions. Sleep, My Love, directed by Douglas Sirk, hit theaters in 1948, the year Waldman identifies as the end of an era for the genre. Sirk approaches the Gothic women’s film with his signature directing style, and borrows elements of noir, with chiaroscuro lighting and highly mobile camera work. Sleep, My Love follows the naive Allison (Claudette Colbert) and her husband Richard (Don Ameche), who is having an affair. With the help of a phony doctor’s hypnosis, Richard influences his wife’s dreams, causing her to act out violently as she sleepwalks, with the goal of driving her to suicide. Eventually the third component of the love triangle, Bruce (Robert Cummings), comes to rescue his love from the grips of her heartless husband.
The plot of Sleep, My Love is clearly similar to that of Gaslight, and being in the same genre, there share many of the same themes. One aspect that differentiates Sirk’s Gothic women’s film is the element of hypnosis, likely a product of the influence of Dr. Sigmund Freud’s work in popular culture at the time. Now, instead of just representing the oppression of domestic life during strenuous social changes, the Gothic romance interpolates the advancements in psychology, an emerging science at the time. Freud’s ideas were hitting America hard at the time, introducing radical new ideas about sexuality, hypnosis, and the unconscious mind. Sleep, My Love deals with these new ideas rather directly, as well as the aforementioned social advancements for women.
Here’s a question: What do both of these films tell us about relationships between men and women in the 40s? Well they paint a fairly grim picture, filled with loveless marriages, at least on one side, affairs, and men manipulating women. But they also both end with our heroines being saved by new lovers, good men showing these naive women what’s really happening to them. This could surely be a product of the male directors that made these films, but these were popular films for women of the time. Should we take this to mean there may have been an undercurrent of desire for a male savior to free these housewives from their loveless marriages? I’d argue we should; the drive towards infidelity is palpable in many of the highly selling romance novels published to this day. But these were Production Code films, and you couldn’t just have characters committing adultery on screen at the time. Through the demonizing of the husbands in Gothic women’s films, directors were given an opportunity to provide female viewers with a highly desired story, the story of a woman leaving her husband for a better man.
I suppose now is as good as ever to talk about the cinematography elements that make Sleep, My Love such an exemplary Gothic women’s film. Director Douglas Sirk seamlessly incorporates the symbolism of noir into the romance, playing with shadows and the misé en scene to highlight certain elements of each shot. Take the still below, where Richard and his mistress make a secret rendezvous. The two move to the far left of frame, faces become obscured by the silhouettes of indoor vegetation. Not visible in this frame, a lattice pattern, a noir trademark, makes up much oof the background later in the scene. The two have moved closer to the darkness, the light of the restaurant’s entrance dwarfed, far away in the back of the set. Sirk makes it apparent through cinematography that these Richard and Barby are up to no good.
Now take a look at this shot. That’s Allison’s knight in shining armor on the right, and her dastardly husband on the left. Note the shadows cast by the window frame and the leaves, impossibly projecting on the wall behind Richard, but not on his face. Sirk ditches realism in shots like these, using the feelings created by the shadows to convey the emotion and subtext of the scene. The two men are at odds, with Richard torturing Allison psychologically, and Bruce trying to free her from him, though he can’t yet know that Richard is the villain in all of this. Bruce is, of course, standing in the one part of the frame where the shadow pattern does not appear. Even in bright scenes, Sirk manages to elevate a shot through novel lighting.
The last film we’ll look at today, I’m sorry to say, doesn’t quite fit into the category of Gothic women’s film. It is, however, another movie from the Douglas Sirk filmography, and features similar themes in a slightly more noir setting. Shockproof, released in 1949, represents a breakaway from the heroines we see in the prior two films. The plot follows Jenny (Patricia Knight), recently released from prison, as she falls in love with her parole officer, Griff (Cornel Wilde) and the two escape both the police and Jenny’s former lover, the ne’er do well gambler Harry Wesson (John Baragrey).
Shockproof is a classic example of a director subtly going against the Production Code, Sirk stated he took on the film because it dealt with a favorite theme: “the price of flouting taboos”. And the film most certainly has a lot to say on the topic of taboos, with the crux of the film’s romance revolving around the prohibited passion of our protagonists. The couple is trapped by the mandates of society, their love forbidden by powers beyond their control. Sirk emphasizes this in many ways, trapping the couple in frame as often as possible. In large part, the film is about the ways in which aspects of society foster a repression of desire.
Sirk shows us this in the still above. Griff and Jenny have accepted their love for each other, and are now working diligently to keep it hidden from the public. Jenny tries to write a letter to Harry Wesson, but she can’t conjure the will to tell him the truth in writing, out of fear of the repercussions. She’s in her new home, a place where she should feel safe and comfortable. Yet in frame her head is encased in vertical prison bars created by the staircase. The frame is cluttered by the telephone, the light, and the calendar that tells us we must be aware of how much time Jenny has. The wonky design on the piano provides another variation of Sirk’s chaotically patterned backgrounds. Sirk has transformed the home, much like he did in Shockproof, into a suffocating place, mirroring the conditions of the world that have trapped Jenny.
In this transformation of the home, Sirk revisits the themes found in Shockproof. But Jenny isn’t much like the hapless victims of the Gothic women’s films. One could argue that she’s saved by Griff in a sense, but she chooses him. It’s entirely in her control if she chooses to let Griff reform her, or return to a life of crime with Harry Wesson. This is an evolution in the way women are portrayed on screen; Jenny isn’t just a victim by the hands of evil men, she’s a victim of society’s oppression, just like Griff, just like anyone else. One sees this leveling of the playing field in a later scene, shown in the shot below. Sirk places the camera behind the bed, giving the audience a sort of fly-on-the-wall perspective. The two are again imprisoned, this time by the bed frame, a symbol of the passion that got them in their current predicament perhaps. They’re also pushed into the corner of frame, making them cornered both literally and figuratively. A lattice pattern can be seen above the door, their only exit, suggesting their escape is futile, or at the least highly dangerous.
So what do these films tell us about adaptation? Well, all three are adaptations of books or plays, and they take different approaches with how they alter their original stories. But we’re not talking about that. Gaslight and Sleep, My Love are adaptations of a couple things — the Gothic literary style, and the lives of women at a time of social upheaval. Through metaphor, misé en scene, lighting, and dialogue, directors Sirk and Kukor bring the worlds of Gothic literature to life, and symbolize the tensions and oppression of women’s lives. Shockproof ditched the Gothic style for a more contemporary noir atmosphere, which makes sense considering it wasn’t working off any source material, but similarly interacted with the changing role of women. One considers Shockproof in comparison to the films that came before it, and notices the rising independence of female characters in tandem with women’s independence in society. This is the magic of these films, in representing our real world in an imagined space, they allow us to identify with other types of people, to think about how others might feel. Movies aren’t just adaptations of books and screenplays; they’re interpolations of our own experiences, and when presented with the right visual mastery, they can create something that speaks to us more with more truth than even our own lived stories.
