The Strong Struggling Sarah Connor

Sarah Connor. Now she is not the ordinary societal woman and mother. Well, she was at first until Reese came amidst her life in the 1980’s. Over the years, she has transformed herself from the mousy, timid woman seen at the beginning of the first movie into a muscled, ferocious warrior, trying to let humanity know about the upcoming apocalypse. We at first see her in the confines of a mental institution, doing chin-ups. She is determined to escape and destroy Skynet before they complete their most powerful creation, a cyborg. From watching scenes of being tazed, tied-down to the bed, abused by the guards, and nightmares of children on swings being destroyed by a blast—the audience feels sympathy for her.  However, her fixation on the disaster, and also her obsessive desire to keep John safe has made her a little mentally unstable and very violent, which is only aggravated by her fear and hatred of the T-800.

Her anger drives her…which helps but really hurts her. Even when she is escaping from the hospital, she encounters the T-800. Fear ultimately overtakes her, but later anger. She does not believe that this particular terminator is benevolent, no matter how many times her son pleads with her. The past events have really influenced her view of the machines—she thinks they are just plain evil. The audience can feel and view her frustration  with the ignorance of society, her distrust with the T-800, fear of the T-1000, anger with the difficulties of destroying Skynet, and the worry of protecting her son, John. That is a lot of weight to carry for one person. I feel this film focuses on Sarah more than anyone else. Yes, Arnold with a giant gun, and the “Hasta la vista baby!” is cool, and the CGU effects as well, however, most of the shots in the film focus on Sarah Connor. Her character is crucial in the series (and later John Connor). She had to deal with the terminators coming back time and time again most of her life. Plus, taking care of John! She embodies the ultimate empowered woman. Feminists must love her. She is wearing the “pants” (literally and metaphorically) and knows how to shoot a gun (well, various ones that are also huge). Optimistically, after all the struggle, anger, and finally destroying everything from Skynet that will connect to the future destruction (fingers crossed!), she can sit back and relax. Or maybe not.

A Voyeuristic Love Life

“Men, are you over 40? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired and run down? Do you have that listless feeling?”—Rear Window (playing on a radio)

            After the radio announcement, the camera returns to the apartment where it slowly reveals that the man, a photojournalist, L.B. Jefferies, is immobilized. He is alone and confined in a wheelchair. His “castrated” left leg is in a cast - inscribes:

Here lie the broken bones of L. B. Jefferies

On the wall are enlarged photos, smashed camera equipment, other various photographs, a negative of a woman’s face, and then the positive photo of the same woman on a magazine. This is a man whose perspective of life is through a camera lens…a voyeur. This voyeur is bored and confined to his wheelchair and can emerge from his “plaster cocoon” till the following Wednesday. So what does he do? Well, look at his neighbors of course! But he is bored! He begs his editor to get him back on the job:

Jeff: You've got to get me out of here. Six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment with nothing to do but look out the window at the neighbors. ..If you don't pull me out of this swamp of boredom, I'm gonna do something drastic...like what? I'm gonna get married and then I'll never be able to go anywhere.

Editor: It's about time you got married, before you turn into a lonesome, bitter old man.

Jeff: Yeah, can't you just see me, rushin' home to a hot apartment to listen to the automatic laundry and the electric dishwasher and the garbage disposal, the nagging wife.

Editor: Jeff, wives don't nag, they discuss.

Jeff: Is that so, that so? Maybe in the high rent district they discuss, in my neighborhood they still nag.

Editor: Well, um, you know best.

Jeff’s confinement to his wheelchair (being castrated and all metaphorically speaking) and not being able to be a powerful when it comes to his job, and possibly marriage…Jeff becomes bitter about love and marriage. Especially when he is peeping on the neighbors: Thorwald and his nagging wife, Miss Torso, the newlyweds, Miss Lonelyheart, the music composer, etc. Elizabeth Cowie describes these series of vignettes in Rear Window form “a kind of filmic essay on love, desire, and marriage that is alternately humorous, sardonic, and tragic, while acting as a counterpoint to the central conflict of Jeff’s own relation to love, desire, and marriage” (Cowie). He uses a back-scratcher to alleviate an aggravating feeling inside his cast, his nurse, Stella, notes his sexual impotence and notes that he has a “hormone deficiency”, and he is having lukewarm feelings and attitude towards his girlfriend (who is a fashion model) Lisa. SHE IS FREAKIN’ GRACE KELLY! This man has problems!

Hitchcock based part of Rear Window on exploring “the dilemma of a man who cannot desire a desirable woman who desires him” (Cowie). Desirous Lisa wakes Jeff up with a fairy-tale kiss, she passionately kisses and hugs him, dresses in a silky pajamas, basically…she loves him! However, his voyeurism and impotence are inherently linked. They are on totally different wavelengths: he is more attentive in his theories of Thorwald’s suspected murder and in telling her about what he witnessed the previous night. Jeff views marriage “as a form of disempowerment—castration—of the male” (Cowie). And Jeff does not need to be castrated again. The only empowerment for Jeff is his camera with a long telephoto lens, and only through that he can feel powerful and masculine.

Eventually Lisa realizes that through the lens of the camera she can receive love and be desirous in Jeff’s eyes. Significantly and expectantly, their relationship is suddenly sparked into life and transfigured, and she joins him in his charade. Lisa concludes that his insane and imaginative conclusions may actually be accurate: “Let's start from the beginning again, Jeff. Tell me everything you saw...and what...you think it means.” Throughout the film, Lisa is being transformed, “her desire for marriage no longer threatens him with loss” (Cowie).

In a thrilling scene, Lisa makes a bold and reckless decision to enter and search Lars' apartment while he is gone. Her goal is to find the incriminating evidence, the wedding ring (the MacGuffin), that will prove Jeff's theory. This moment, Lisa has entered the field of Jeff’s fantasy world/desire “by stepping into the space of his gaze not as an image but as a subject who acts, and desires” (Cowie). She eventually finds out Mrs. Thorwald’s ring, places it on her finger, and signals/points to the ring to Jeff. Pointing to the wedding ring on her finger, she daringly reveals that she has discovered the vital evidence, and it is also “a symbol of Lisa’s own desire” (Cowie). Her risk-taking escapade caused Jeff masochistic excitement, which inspires Jeff toward love, commitment, concern, and marriage in multiple ways, as he watches her through his long telephoto lens. Later after Thorwald’s discovery of Jeff’s peeping and then pushing Jeff being out of a window, Lisa cradles Jeff's head in her lap as he tells her: “I'm proud of you.” Finally, Jeff loves Lisa.

In the final scene, a doubly castrated Jeff is smiling while he rests in his wheelchair. Nearby him is Lisa, dressed in blue jeans/pants and shirt…she is the one “wearing the trousers”! After noticing that he is asleep and not watching her, she casts off her male image by putting down the “boring” and “masculine” book and assertively substitutes her own preferred reading material—Harper’s Bazaar. Lisa is giving “the last laugh” (Cowie).

Il sogno di Fellini vestito - Fellini's Dream Dress

The sack dress. Fellini’s muse behind La Dolce Vita. Who would have thought that fashion can inspire a director, and be the basis of a film. The image of Anita Ekberg emerging from Trevi fountain in a sack dress is one of the most iconic scenes in film history. Cristobal Balenciaga, the designer behind the sack dress, favored fluid lines that “allowed him to alter the way clothing related to a woman’s body.” Balenciaga contributed to the world of la moda (fashion) a “new silhouette for women.” Now woman of any shape and size can “show-off” their natural curves and look beautiful.

However, it is more than just a beautiful dress, it also conveys a meaning. One of the reasons for Fellini was a “poke at the Catholic Church and a wink at the fashion industry” (Variety.com). According to Jay Weissberg, a film critic based in Rome, Italy, he says that the dress is “[the] transparent mesh at the décolletage and the back makes it incredibly sexy and restrained…Roman women tend to love clothes that create an impression of strength as well as femininity” (Variety.com). The sack dress in La Dolce Vita sets “a new aesthetic standard and a statement of liberation from a repressive political regime and a dying culture” (Pasolini). Brunello Rondi, Fellini's co-screenwriter, explains that "the fashion of women's sack dresses which possessed that sense of luxurious butterflying out around a body that might be physically beautiful but not morally so; these sack dresses struck Fellini because they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside" (Wikipedia).

Marcello moves in a world of conspicuous semi-celebrities and their “hangers-on”, drifting cheerfully through the high class society and becoming the norm. The emerging post-war “sweet life” in which Rome is depicted as a moral wasteland is filled with a directionless self-indulgence. The iconic scene of Anita Ekberg wading in the Trevi Fountain, acts as a counterpoint to the empty lives of the characters in later scenes. They all drift into emotional and moral listlessness. Hence this film is referred to as a neo-realistic film. Italian director, Pasolini, explains La Dolce Vita as an “exhibition of the Italian pretty bourgeoisie in its own ambience with exaggerated its traits and which burns it in a revealing and gloomy light” (Pasolini).  This sack dress embodies this ideology: external and exaggerated beauty, however internal ugliness. All the characters are all cynics, egotistical, spoiled, silly, frightened, miserable, etc. However, no one sees that…all they see is beauty and glamour. A beautiful dress.

Lost in Marienbad's Surrealistic Labyrinth

“There were always walls—everywhere, around me—smooth, even, glazed, without the slightest relief, there were always walls…Always walls, always corridors, always doors—and on the other side, still more walls.”

That is how I felt while watching this movie...walking around an endless maze…seeing more doors, walls…
Everyone would have to agree that, at first, this movie was confusing and ambiguous. The plot is complex and twists every time you are starting to understand what was going on. Why is everyone frozen like statues? Why don’t we know their names? What is up with the relationships between the three main characters? We just keep questioning every moment of this film.

After all the questioning and confusion, I concluded that this film is more an artistic (avant-garde) film. In the interpretation of Last Year at Marienbad, the author describes the film as “a formalistic experiment in the medium of the film—in the sense in which cubist paintings have been described as formalistic studies”. He or she continues the connection by describing this film as a “landmark of artistic cinematography”. Most importantly, Marienbad as “an artistic presentation of the inner dialectic of the Cartesian mind”. A Cartesian paradise.

I focused on the cinematography and mis-en-scene more than the narrative/plot itself. Those aspects of the film were beautiful. The jump cuts between various conversations/scenes, the long and lingering takes, contrast of light and dark, use of reflections and shadows (oh I love using mirrors in filming!), the geometric garden, juxtapositions of shots/narration, etc. Everything I mentioned speaks volumes! They set off a surrealistic aura. All our questions of the narrative are unanswerable: “The film never provides the viewer with the means to tell what is real and what is fictitious”.

From reading Wikipedia’s article of this film and the one from class, seems like there are various interpretations of this surrealist film…a story of: persuasion, dream-like state, Cartesian mind, and relationship between patient and psychoanalyst. We’re not sure. All I know is that this film boils down to one thing: a continuity of thought. Like the characters, the audience is trapped in their thoughts…we can’t distinguish what is real or not, we can’t escape the geometric labyrinth full of walls, doors, and corridors. We’re stuck in our “French Gardens”—artificial, geometric, human controlled. No matter what: “there is no possible way of getting ‘outside’ of our minds to determine in what state we actually are; inescapable we remain imprisoned in our minds”.

Rita Hayworth: The Twenty-Four Hours a Day Gilda

Gilda. A Film Noir that is most famous for the one star…Rita Hayworth. In my book, she places the number one spot for the femme fatales in Hollywood history. In dramas, Hayworth’s roles usually consist of the “other woman”, archetypal evil seductress, and a femme fatale.  Dyer refers to her as “the object of desire [that] is unknowable and treacherous” (93). Certain elements in Rita Hayworth’s image, such as her long wavy hair, elongated legs, rouge lips, fit the generic femme fatale. A “positive charge” is given to the character of Gilda by the actress Rita Hayworth. Overall…the gal has charisma. She is a “Love Goddess” of Hollywood. However, this film and the many before & after, has influenced her image towards men, and her life.

"I think all women have a certain elegance about them which is destroyed when they take off their clothes."-Rita Hayworth

Margarita Carmen Cansino trained as a dancer in early childhood, and later danced with her Spanish father, Eduardo Cansino. Her knowledge and skill of Latin American style of dance became part of her image—“It is not just her star status that gives Hayworth her presence in the film. It is also her position as an identification figure, and her dancing” (96). This style of dance was viewed “primitive” and “authentic erotic expressivity”(97). Hayworth’s solo numbers in Gilda: “makes it possible to read her dancing in terms of eroticism for herself as well as for the spectator” (97). Every heterosexual man during this time must have been hooting and hollering at the screens when the famous “Put the Blame on Mame” performance was occurring. It was a soft strip tease. In the film, Gilda, “…her dance numbers are important movements in which the film dwells on her, sexuality” (98). This sexuality can be viewed as a praise of her own body and others rejoicing in it too, or “male heterosexual enjoyment of the character (surrender rather than control)” (98). Did this film, and possibly other’s too, make Hayworth viewed as a sex object for the male viewer?

“Gilda: I can never get a zipper to close. Maybe that stands for something, what do you think?”

-Gilda (1946)

Rita Hayworth behind all the glamor and praise was longing for someone to love her…for her.  Rita Hayworth, referring to men, said "They go to bed with Gilda, they wake up with me." The character of Gilda never left her shadow throughout all of her life. Every man, whether husband or not, viewed her as that sexualized femme fatale. She admitted herself, “No one can be Gilda 24 hours a day”. In Adrienne L. McLean’s book, Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom (2004), Hayworth’s childhood abuse and influence from her father demolished the areas of love, sex, and motherhood in her life. Her father told her to use “sex to get and hold attention” and “play sexually provocative roles” (67). Added onto that, she played roles that fit those criteria. From femme fatales roles, pin-up, and photographs…people only “saw her only as a sex goddess or as an object of men’s manipulation” (67). Hayworth once said, "Basically, I am a good, gentle person, but I am attracted to mean personalities." It was part of her nature.

This view and lifestyle took a toll on her life. Barbara Leaming writes in her biography, Hayworth If This Was Happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth (1989) “despite the artfully applied make-up and shoulder-length red hair, there was no concealing the ravages of drink and stress. Deep lines had crept around her eyes and mouth, and she appeared worn, exhausted, older than her thirty-eight years." Mentioned in Wikipedia article on Hayworth, her daughter, Yasmin Aga Khan wrote about her drinking problem: “‘Well, there's not much I can do. I can just, sort of, stand by and watch.' It's very difficult, seeing your mother, going through her emotional problems and drinking and then behaving in that manner; her condition became quite bad. It worsened and she did have an alcoholic breakdown and landed in the hospital.”

It all winds down to this:
“All I wanted was just what everybody else wants, you know, to be loved.” -Rita Hayworth
To be loved as herself.