Marsha Gordon. Cinematic Violations in Peter Greenaway´s ´The baby of Mâcon

8/13/2019 Marsha Gordon. Cinematic Violations in Peter Greenaways The baby of Mcon

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female reproductive body in the horror film, links the disgust and loathing of abjectionto the maternal:

Virtually all horror texts represent the monstrous-feminine in relation to [Julia]Kristeva's notion of maternal authority and the mapping of the self's clean and proper

body. . . . Consequently, [bodily wastes] fill the subject--both the protagonist in the textand the spectator in the cinema--with disgust and loathing. (13; brackets mine)

The opening scene of The Baby of M con attempts to provoke--or perhaps parody--asimilar reaction of mother-loathing for both the play's and film's audiences. Greenawayenvisions childbirth as the locus of sexual violence in a very Kristevan fashion.

Claiming that the baby is the product of a virgin birth, a miracle aligning the child with Jesus and herself with Mary, the daughter usurps the baby as her own and offers herown body as proof to this miracle. Her body becomes a text that the midwives andothers read for evidence of her virginity. Spreading her legs on stage for a threefoldaudience--the "inspectors," the play's audience, and the film's spectators--virginity teststhe legibility and validity of the woman's body and personal narrative. The fictiveproof of her virginity not only makes the daughter legible, but legitimizes her offspringby validating her "ownership" of the child. The daughter later explains to her "romanticinterest," the Bishop's son, that proof of her virginity can only truly be produced by thenegation of her virginity: "treat me like a whore and you will see me bleed, and thenyou will believe me." For the daughter, de-virginization is the moment of the narrativein which her authority can be legitimated through blood-as-letter. Greenaway seemsintent to point out that the notion of a discernible "truth" is, at best, fallible; at worst, itis deadly--perhaps as much for the daughter in the film as for the spectator outside ofthe film.

Ultimately, not even a Joseph can enter her mythology as the baby mystically upholdsthe daughter's self-representation of the virgin birth. The baby turns against his sisterand enforces her own prophecy of a pure and clean body. The daughter's body is abody of contention--caught between the performance of "mother" and the clean andproper body of virginity. As the daughter begins to seduce the Bishop's son (hereafter"Joseph," as she calls him in her continuing self-comparison to the Virgin Mary) her"son" imposes her invented purity upon her. The baby does not allow the destructionof her virginity, forcing the daughter to retain this physical monument that is legible tothe court. The baby is the inescapable image who returns, as all repressed things do, toexploit his own exploitation. [2] Using his saintly "powers" to control a bull that

disembowels the Bishop's son, the baby rewrites his own mythological origins in Joseph's blood by upholding the "textual" proof contained on and in the daughter'sbody-as-virginal-text. Stopping any further inscription of his sister's body, hemaintains the hymen's division between inside/outside and pure/impure, therebyguaranteeing that she will still signify virginity and thereby validate both of theirmythological histories.

As the community enters the manger scene, they read the daughter as the murdererbecause blood covers her body--primarily from the bull that she kills against the son'swarnings. The misreading of the daughter is again based on the assumption that visualproof accurately represents the truth--that the relationship between visibility and

reality is transparent and immediately knowable. The passivity with which peopleaccept certain narratives is, in many ways, what the entire film is about. Greenaway
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destabilizes and questions the relationships between seeing and believing, betweenreality and fiction. The film seems to suggest that to wholeheartedly believe anythingbased upon what the eye perceives is not only foolish, but dangerous as well.Representation convolutes reality and even being a witness to an event does not ensurethat the "truth" can be known, least of all as the truth is construed through ambiguous

signifiers such as the blood that covers the daughter's body.

After slaying the bull, the daughter rants and raves in front of the other cast memberswho immediately call for the removal of the child. Like her mother during the birthperformance, she becomes unintelligible except as her body "speaks" her, as her defiledbody narrates itself. She, too, becomes a visual embodiment of the monstrous maternalhere: the blood that covers her is emblematic of the inside moving outside and of herassociation with death, the most abject state of all. The monstrous is thus equated withthe sexual in reference to the woman's body: the daughter is punished for her desire,the women of the court have monstrous obsessions with child-bearing, and the otheractors and the court find the thought of the "real" mother's sexual past unfathomable.

Greenaway comments on The Baby of M con in a way that alludes to his fetishizationof sexual violence and the ways in which he uses this violence to affect his spectators:"The film doesn't use violence as an instrument of pleasure. Here there is realretribution, and real hurt. Here there is cause and effect. Cinema is more powerful thanthe other so-called serious arts. We must insure that it contains challenging andprovocative ideas" (qtd. in Shulman 18). Greenaway insists that the power of cinemamay and should move beyond the confines of the screen. He thus characterizes TheBaby of M con as inflicting in extra-cinematic ways. The lines between fantasy andreality, film and life, blur within the violent narratives he creates. Greenaway's desirefor extra-cinematic realism moves beyond mise-en-scene and into the audience itself.

In The Cinematic Body, Steven Shaviro argues for the importance of the oft-neglectedbody in cinematic theories,

Film is a vivid medium, and it is important to talk about how it arouses corporealreactions of desire and fear, pleasure and disgust, fascination and shame. . . . Powerworks in the depths and on the surfaces of the body, and not just in the disembodiedrealm of "representation" or of "discourse." It is in the flesh first of all, far more than onsome level of supposed ideological reflection, that the political is personal, and thepersonal political. (viii)

Shaviro displays the immediacy and importance of the spectatorial body. Not only isthe spectatorial body a crucial theoretical consideration, but Peter Greenaway attemptsto directly affect this body through his films.

But it is the specifically female body that serves as Greenaway's canvas for imaginingsexual violence and for invoking spectatorial reactions. As Linda Williams' essay "FilmBodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" points out, cinema most often conveys pleasure,pain, and fear through women's bodies (4). The spectatorial mimicry or response(depending upon the situation) of emotion or sensation that she finds in "body genres,"confirms the spectator's embodied response to certain visual and aural stimuli.

The scene in which the daughter is raped because she cannot be executed as a virginaccording to the rules of M con society directly challenges the distance of the


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This scene thus implicitly mocks its spectators for their passivity. The rape scenefurther questions the realness of the rape itself, leading us back to Greenaway'scomment about "real" retribution and hurt. If, as he states, the retribution and hurt arereal, what makes the spectator of this film assured that what transpires on-screen is afiction? Of course, this is hardly a real fear for contemporary audiences, who

understand how to read cinema as fictional and thereby unreal. Plus we all know that--for better or worse--Julia Ormond and Ralph Fiennes survived the making of this filmto go on to other projects. However, I do think that Greenaway intends to provoke thespectator into thinking about this assumed relationship between representation andreality. The uncanny feeling of having been tricked into allowing this rape to transpirehighlights the spectator's passivity. Greenaway understands the distance needed bythe spectator in order to voyeuristically consume a film and he successfully disruptsthe safety of this space.

Causing the spectator to question his or her own spectatorial position and his or herown complicity in this act of rape, Greenaway implies that the film's spectators could

be fooled as easily as his courtly spectators. Daniel Dayan notes this inability tointervene in narrative on behalf of the spectator as one of the frustrations that threatensto rend the spectatorial body ("Tutor Code"). The daughter's rape is also symbolic ofthe viewer who is being symbolically raped by narrative--who is being forced toconsume a narrative that reproduces patriarchal dominance through such on-screenviolence. However, there is a crucial point of spectatorial resistance here that Shaviroimplies in his idea of the spectator as the potential wrench in the cinematic machine.Spectators can always leave the theater, thereby refusing the "rape" or whatever else isbeing thrust upon them.

This refusal seems especially pertinent in relation to Greenaway's films, where this actof resistance occurs with relative frequency. Audience members "rising from their seatsand racing to the exits" during the opening sequence in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife andHer Lover are reported in the 1991 Current Biography Yearbook entry on Peter Greenaway(257). In my own experience of viewing this film in a theater in California, the audienceof about twenty was reduced to a mere five by the end of the film. Amidst grunts andshrieks of surprise, viewers filtered out at various points in the film when it was clearthat they had seen enough or perhaps too much. These instances seem to verify thatGreenaway's cinema is able to affect the spectator in a radical way, eliciting both verbaland physical reactions. Even if spectators are largely passive--or even if Greenawayseems intent on showing them their passivity--they are in fact able to react in a waythat makes them active. The very act of getting up and walking out before the film hasended places the "final word" clearly on the spectator's side.

The blurring of performance reinforced at the end of the play and film when the film'scast comes out to bow is reminiscent of Greenaway's own confusing roles as director,sadist, critic, and fetishist. The daughter (or actress--it is impossible to choose theproper name here), the Bishop's son and the bull are all wheeled out in carts--allseemingly dead. The baby is dismembered and only his head is present at theplay's/film's end. These four are the casualties of the film--the bodies that are notrecuperated through a final bow, who do not acknowledge that this is, after all, "just" aperformance, "only a play," or "only a film." It is difficult to discern precisely who isderiving pleasure from Greenaway's often sadistic cinema, but perhaps what isultimately being critiqued is the notion that the end goal of cinema is, in fact, pleasure.Though Laura Mulvey has approached this same subject matter in a radically different


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way, the fetishization of sexual violence can be understood as a means by which such acritique can be leveled. However, the risk of the critique becoming impossibly blurredwith the uncritical fetish itself is almost inherent in such absurdist narrative. The carewith which Greenaway and cinematographer Sacha Vierny photograph otherwiserepulsive or unviewable scenes makes understanding Greenaway as a critic of sexual

violence a rather difficult undertaking. The stunning beauty of the repulsive in aGreenaway film suggests that Greenaway takes pleasure in the act of forcing hisaudiences to see (or perhaps even more, to desire to see) that which would typicallyremain taboo, unseeable.

Endnotes

[1] A film that is as much (if not more) difficult to watch is Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo, orthe 120 of Sodom (1975). (back)

[2] Another moment in which the repressed returns occurs during a play within themasque that parodies the "real" mother's labor and the baby's birth, confirming that the"true" story lives on in the popular imagination of the court. (back)

[3] I think it fair to say that she has ceased being the daughter here, as it is implied thather role in the play is no longer being acted out. Rather, it is the actress in the playwhose is raped by the men. (back)

Works Cited

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Dayan, Daniel. "The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema." 1974. Film Theory and Criticism.Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. 4th Ed. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1992. 179-191.

Greenaway, Peter. The Baby of M con. 1993.

- - - . The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover . 1989.

- - - . Drowning By Numbers . 1988.

- - - . A Zed & Two Noughts. 1985.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Feminism and Film Theory. Ed.Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988. 57-68.

Pally, Marcia. "Cinema as the Total Art Form: An Interview with Peter Greenaway."Cineaste 18:3 (1991): 6-12, 45.
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Marsha Gordon. Cinematic Violations in Peter Greenaway´s ´The baby of Mâcon

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