The spring 2008 issue of Forum explores the concept of desire as a force inspiring works of art within a variety of cinematic and literary genres. The issue opens with a guest article by Homay King examining the intersection between the “desire to know” and Orientalist elements of mise en scène within the genre of film noir. The discussion of cinematic representations of desire continues with articles on murder and the gaze in 1960s British film and female effigies in contemporary film Lars and the Real Girl. Turning to literature, an analysis of Angela Carter’s novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman looks at the function of desire within identity formation; while an essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s confessional notes presents a new take on a popular topic: forbidden longing. In moving between the personal and the universal, the forbidden and the permissible, the articles in this issue present a spectrum of approaches to and understandings of desire and its aesthetic incarnations.

Man Ray, Noire et Blanche, 1926

Contents

Guest Article

The Shanghai Gesture 
Homay King (Bryn Mawr College)

Articles

“Desiderio in Search of a Master”: Desire and the Quest for Recognition in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman 
Helen Butcher (University of Chichester)

Mod Murder: Death and Desire in Swinging London Film 
Michelle Devereaux (University of Edinburgh)

Hopkins’s confessional notes and desire: a reconsideration 
Martin Dubois (University of York)

Female Effigies and Performances of Desire: A Consideration of Identity Performance in Lars and the Real Girl. 
Kate E. O'Neill (University of Calgary)

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Guest Article

The Shanghai Gesture 
Homay King (Bryn Mawr College)

Many classical films noirs rely upon Orientalist elements of mise-en-scène to convey a sense of enigma or unintelligibility. This article gives a name to this visual trope, “the Shanghai gesture,” and describes how Asian objects in Hollywood cinema have come to be associated with the irrational. In The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941) and The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946), elements of Orientalist décor function to evoke a sense of mystery or exoticism. In many cases, these elements are little more than exoticist set-dressing. However, in some cases they come to bear the burden of explanation for unresolved aspects of the plot, or even to suggest a limit-point of western rationality. This article concludes with a discussion of The Shanghai Gesture (Sternberg, 1941), addressing both mise-en-scène and the unique circumstances that surrounded its production. Based on a play by John Colton, the property was greatly sought after by all the major Hollywood studios, and rejected numerous times by the Hays Office for its “sordid” depictions of Shanghai bawdy-houses and casinos. Archival correspondence reveals that Hays and others linked the script’s sordidness to its Asian setting. Both a hot commodity and an object in need of censorship, The Shanghai Gesture itself became an over-determined Orientalist object, at once coveted and taboo, desirable and incomprehensible.

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Articles

“Desiderio in Search of a Master”: Desire and the Quest for Recognition in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman 
Helen Butcher (University of Chichester)

This essay examines the manner in which desire and Hegelian recognition intersect in Angela Carter’s 1972 novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. After providing a brief description of Hegel’s famous account of the interaction between the lord and the bondsman, the essay goes on to discuss the manner in which the novel invests the figure of the love-object with the potential to become an ideal master. The image of the reflecting eye, which recurs throughout Carter’s text, is then analyzed as an enactment of, and a commentary upon, the desiring gaze.

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Mod Murder: Death and Desire in Swinging London Film 
Michelle Devereaux (University of Edinburgh)

This paper explores the themes of gender identity, self-reflexivity, and the concept of the cinematic gaze in British modernist film. Specifically, it focuses on how the social milieu of 1960s Swinging London informed the films Peeping Tom, Repulsion, and Blow-up regarding the construction of the sexualized female image and how it is replicated within the process of filmmaking itself. These self-conscious portrayals of the commodification of sexuality to violent ends thrived in the “mod” era. More than anywhere else at that time, London in the early- to mid-60s offered a crystallized view into the emerging sexual revolution while exploiting the very currency that cinema has furtively traded in since its inception: the appropriation of the female image for the pleasure of the male voyeur. This brief cycle of films self-consciously pointed to the perils of the mod love affair with image over content. By examining them within the confines of mise-en-scène and the psychoanalytical discourse of Laura Mulvey (voyeurism as sadism) and Gaylyn Studlar (voyeurism as masochism) as well as other cinematic texts on scopophilic desire (the works of Hitchcock), it becomes clear that British modernism offered a timely and unique discourse on the process of looking, and being looked at, in the cinema.

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Hopkins’s confessional notes and desire: a reconsideration 
Martin Dubois (University of York)

Since their publication in 1989, the confessional notes Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) kept as an undergraduate have been a major influence in shaping criticism of his work. The sexual indiscretions and longings the confessional notes record have been central to recent studies of eroticism in Hopkins’s poetry, corroborating the suggestion that his poems allowed for the homoerotic expression his religious vocation denied him. While not questioning the seriousness of Hopkins’s attraction to other men, this article seeks to establish the broader moral scrupulousness the confessional notes evidence. As well as recording lapses in sexual propriety, the notes reveal the startling range of what Hopkins considered to be failings in need of repentance. They are the product of a curious moral fastidiousness, which recorded the killing of insects or indulgence in eating biscuits with apparently the same concern as when registering sexual excitement at the crucifixion scene. One prominent aspect of the confessional notes is the frequency with which sinful behaviour is initiated by reading or writing. In this the notes provide early indications of Hopkins’s doubts over the legitimacy of writing poetry, which grew more explicit once he had joined the Jesuits. Any interpretations of his work which see Hopkins as displacing sexual desire into his writing should also recognise the very real qualms the confessional notes show him entertaining about poetry itself.

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Female Effigies and Performances of Desire: A Consideration of Identity Performance in Lars and the Real Girl. 
Kate E. O'Neill (University of Calgary)

The female sex doll allows for the projection of uninhibited sexual fantasy and is animated through that fantasy in the mind of her partner. In this way, she can be seen to function as a performative effigy of desire, maintaining heteronormative male sexuality by reflecting a patriarchal ideal of female physicality and objectification while simultaneously demanding a responsive performance of heterosexual masculinity. In the film Lars and the Real Girl, the relationship between the female sex doll and her male partner is shifted into the public sphere, and Lars projects a social, rather than sexual, identity onto Bianca, the sex doll object of his desire. The social identity constructed by Lars reflects his desire for a non-sexual, community-oriented, and ultimately subservient female partner, and the widespread acceptance of this model of femininity by the community is evidenced through the performative interactions that occur between Bianca and those around her. Because the sex doll exists in a potentially deviant category of sexual interaction, the community’s refusal to treat her as an object, but rather as a living subject, reflects the power of performance in the construction and maintenance of social identity. The very fact of Bianca’s object status allows her to take on complex sexual and social fantasy-roles, all of which prove to be problematic, but which ultimately allow for the maintenance of male sexual and social authority.

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Editors

Kim Richmond
Ana Salzberg