Challenge for In the Cut
Here is my challenge for In the Cut, the Campion film from 2003 that I would like to see proceed to the next round. I have tried to be clear, but there is a lot to say about this film. I don't expect to be in league with the great psychoanalytic writing about Hitchcock, only to borrow some of that writing's accessibility and, to me, exciting relevance. That's the kind of argument that I'm going for here: that Campion, like Hitchcock, delivers psycho-sexual tension to the masses.
I owe much of this analysis to my conversations with eldert.
If you can't stand theory, just skip to the paragraph below. I've put most of the review behind the cut.
As Franny and Pauline leave Franny's New York Apartment, the neighbors habitually greet them on the stairs. Franny doesn’t speak to them.
“Why don’t you say ‘Hi?’” asks Pauline.
“I nodded,” retorts Franny. This first interaction introduces Franny’s reluctance toward language, her hesitation to enter the symbolic realm. Like many of Campion’s films, In the Cut is obsessed with a particular strain of feminist thought, this one emerging from Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire. Asserting language as a domain in which subjectivity is worked out, Campion has made a story about a cunning linguist forced into the role of detective. Franny’s academic approach to language as a tool of the other (rather than for communication, signification, or self-identification) is the Ego’s way to separate her from the people around her and keep her safe, distant and disinterested. But to escape her rendezvous with the killer’s engagement ring, Franny has to figure her own relation to articulation and to tongues. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The story of In the Cut is, on its face, a serial killer mystery story. On this level, it’s a suspenseful whodunit with red herrings and a satisfying surprise that is supported by the text. Someone is killing and cutting up women in the vicinity of Franny’s building, and having shared the bar with a victim just before her death, Franny becomes an object of the investigation. Detective Malloy wants to know what she saw that day, but Franny is reluctant to say. It’s unclear what prevents Franny from talking. She has witnessed the victim giving head in a bathroom stall, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. Maybe it’s because she stayed and watched. Maybe it’s that the man, whose face was hidden in shadow, had the same tattoo as detective Malloy. In fact, Franny believes that he was Detective Malloy.
I’m no Lacanian, but it helps to know that this film is lensed with a sensibility provided by Jacques Lacan. And why not? Horror films and detective stories have been mucking around with Freud so long it’s become habitual, generic, diluted with the bromides of popular psychology. By hewing herself to the rules set forth by Lacan, Campion creates in a bracingly realized universe. She depicts a familiar world through unfamiliar rules. Like Lacan’s correction to Freud, Campion’s correction to the detective story is not for the faint of heart.
To the charge that In the Cut presents an esoteric mystery legible only to the initiated, that to those without a rarified theory of language it is just a lousy detective story, I will counter that I hadn’t read Lacan before In the Cut, and that it sparked my interest in him. If Franny, like a textbook Lacanian subject, has trouble locating her desire, the camera does not. Worthy of the eroticism of his concepts, every shot of In the Cut is sexual. We linger on breasts and ankles, faces and asses. When Franny watches the blowjob, we get right in there until we can see saliva, then hang around and watch well beyond the NC-17 mark.
Franny has her antecedents. The opening montage of In The Cut shows the city dappled with falling blossoms and peppered with the indecipherable signifiers of taggers and graffiti artists. Under Franny’s myopic eyes, the unknown codes evoke an encrypted totality like Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49. Like that story’s detective, Oedipa Maas, Franny will suffer an initiation to the symbolic order. (Witness a scene in the subway where workers carry a heart shaped wreath down the stairs, briefly encapsulating Franny in a backdrop of roses and the misapplied category, “Mom”. The film is so full of these moments of mise-en-scene that it might seem overdetermined if it wasn't so effective).
People are always putting names on things, and it fascinates and disturbs our detective. Franny hardly talks at all. But she has a favorite story that she tells her (younger) half sister Pauline. It is of the day that their father met Franny’s mother. We see it in memory, a scene from a past in which bodies are buttoned up so that only faces show - improbably located in a past that looks more turn-of than mid-century. Thus, Franny's mythology of her own origin exists in a fantasy world curiously free of sex. And in this story, Franny’s father, in a single afternoon of ice skating, replaces one fiancée with another, just as a writer would swap out the subject of a sentence, leaving the other elements intact. The usually dispassionate Franny becomes wistful in telling the story, she is struck by its romance, but she is also disgusted by the way in which women become the subjects of men’s sentences. That is, her resistance to talking (her student asks her “Why don’t you talk?”) is a resistance to enter into a spoken realm where men's capricious desire lives at the level of the sentence and makes disaster of the epic.
Finishing the story, she skips the marriage and her own birth, noting that her father broke her mother’s heart and left her to die.
Like Pauline, Franny’s father lived in the unconscious, led by desire. But what does Franny desire? She seems only to know what she doesn’t want. She doesn’t want to be like her half sister. Obsessive and flirtatious, Pauline confesses that she’d do anything to get a dick inside her. She gives Franny a charm bracelet that symbolizes a courtship fantasy: one that ends with a tiny cradle and baby. But like Carole in Repulsion, Franny is so resistant to her world that it makes her insane. Her jaw is set defensively, but she walks the world with her mouth half open, flits from a sidewalk confrontation with her obsessive one-night-stand to a back alley mugging, only to lunge into the path of a taxicab and get crumpled on the street. She takes her knocks.
The stubborn linguist doesn’t want to articulate, but neither does she want to be articulated. She wants to study language, not participate in it, and her avocation: collecting terms for a book on slang, suggests the realm in which she is comfortable approaching words. Words are the signifiers of the other used for indicating sex and violence.
But this world of articulation is briefly interrupted, and Franny writes the word that Detective Malloy uses to describe the murder of the girl. “Disarticulated.”
Campion consistently departs from a knee-jerk feminism that would present women as victims, as weak. Franny is drawn to the politically incorrect Detective Malloy. Malloy talks trash in a bar, “You stare back at them, that’s how you flirt with Black girls.” He and his partner joke about fat girls and faggots. She tells them off. Later, she fucks Malloy “because I wanted to.” But despiter her apparent ability to get what she wants, it’s alienated Franny who Campion’s film wants to work on. Bridging the roles of detective and femme fatale, Franny has to be broken down and reconstituted by the cruel world of which she is a part. If I didn’t know Campion, I might accuse the film of being anti-feminist.
In the Cut has flaws. Its blurry, expressionistic camera, cut with equally fanciful POV shots get tiring. The character of Cornelius, an African American student that Franny exploits for his knowledge of slang, is less believable than he could be: He is supposed to be Franny’s other, not the film’s. But none of these things detract from the remarkable triumph of this film. A female director has made a woman’s story in a world of socio-linguistic theory that is both uncommon and legible. The reluctance and alienation in the film are palpable, the eroticism profound, and the terror - well the terror gets lost a bit in the fascination, and isn’t that the point?
There is much more to In the Cut than this, of course. Franny's attachment to the romantic language of poetry, here relegated to subway advertising, adds a wrinkle to her ambivalence toward language and romance, blurred into one idea. Repeated references to "To the Lighthouse" suggest another set of themes and motifs, and indeed we inexorably move toward the lighthouse itself for the denouement. As she did with Holy Smoke, Campion invites cheeky and serious contemplation of her symbolism, but holds us too close to give the wide angle view that might invite a facile interpretation. Is it big totemic cock or a source of light, something visible or someplace hidden? Neither "To the Lighthouse" nor the lighthouse itself has a simple role in this story.
If you hate theory, if you are sickened by the blurry poetry of subway rides, there is still this: In the man’s world of big budget movies, Jane Campion has made a gritty and literate detective story in which Meg Ryan gets earthshaking cunnilingus from behind, then asks her lover where he learned to do that. I feel like that’s pretty good.
I owe much of this analysis to my conversations with eldert.
If you can't stand theory, just skip to the paragraph below. I've put most of the review behind the cut.
As Franny and Pauline leave Franny's New York Apartment, the neighbors habitually greet them on the stairs. Franny doesn’t speak to them.
“Why don’t you say ‘Hi?’” asks Pauline.
“I nodded,” retorts Franny. This first interaction introduces Franny’s reluctance toward language, her hesitation to enter the symbolic realm. Like many of Campion’s films, In the Cut is obsessed with a particular strain of feminist thought, this one emerging from Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire. Asserting language as a domain in which subjectivity is worked out, Campion has made a story about a cunning linguist forced into the role of detective. Franny’s academic approach to language as a tool of the other (rather than for communication, signification, or self-identification) is the Ego’s way to separate her from the people around her and keep her safe, distant and disinterested. But to escape her rendezvous with the killer’s engagement ring, Franny has to figure her own relation to articulation and to tongues. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The story of In the Cut is, on its face, a serial killer mystery story. On this level, it’s a suspenseful whodunit with red herrings and a satisfying surprise that is supported by the text. Someone is killing and cutting up women in the vicinity of Franny’s building, and having shared the bar with a victim just before her death, Franny becomes an object of the investigation. Detective Malloy wants to know what she saw that day, but Franny is reluctant to say. It’s unclear what prevents Franny from talking. She has witnessed the victim giving head in a bathroom stall, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. Maybe it’s because she stayed and watched. Maybe it’s that the man, whose face was hidden in shadow, had the same tattoo as detective Malloy. In fact, Franny believes that he was Detective Malloy.
I’m no Lacanian, but it helps to know that this film is lensed with a sensibility provided by Jacques Lacan. And why not? Horror films and detective stories have been mucking around with Freud so long it’s become habitual, generic, diluted with the bromides of popular psychology. By hewing herself to the rules set forth by Lacan, Campion creates in a bracingly realized universe. She depicts a familiar world through unfamiliar rules. Like Lacan’s correction to Freud, Campion’s correction to the detective story is not for the faint of heart.
To the charge that In the Cut presents an esoteric mystery legible only to the initiated, that to those without a rarified theory of language it is just a lousy detective story, I will counter that I hadn’t read Lacan before In the Cut, and that it sparked my interest in him. If Franny, like a textbook Lacanian subject, has trouble locating her desire, the camera does not. Worthy of the eroticism of his concepts, every shot of In the Cut is sexual. We linger on breasts and ankles, faces and asses. When Franny watches the blowjob, we get right in there until we can see saliva, then hang around and watch well beyond the NC-17 mark.
Franny has her antecedents. The opening montage of In The Cut shows the city dappled with falling blossoms and peppered with the indecipherable signifiers of taggers and graffiti artists. Under Franny’s myopic eyes, the unknown codes evoke an encrypted totality like Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49. Like that story’s detective, Oedipa Maas, Franny will suffer an initiation to the symbolic order. (Witness a scene in the subway where workers carry a heart shaped wreath down the stairs, briefly encapsulating Franny in a backdrop of roses and the misapplied category, “Mom”. The film is so full of these moments of mise-en-scene that it might seem overdetermined if it wasn't so effective).
People are always putting names on things, and it fascinates and disturbs our detective. Franny hardly talks at all. But she has a favorite story that she tells her (younger) half sister Pauline. It is of the day that their father met Franny’s mother. We see it in memory, a scene from a past in which bodies are buttoned up so that only faces show - improbably located in a past that looks more turn-of than mid-century. Thus, Franny's mythology of her own origin exists in a fantasy world curiously free of sex. And in this story, Franny’s father, in a single afternoon of ice skating, replaces one fiancée with another, just as a writer would swap out the subject of a sentence, leaving the other elements intact. The usually dispassionate Franny becomes wistful in telling the story, she is struck by its romance, but she is also disgusted by the way in which women become the subjects of men’s sentences. That is, her resistance to talking (her student asks her “Why don’t you talk?”) is a resistance to enter into a spoken realm where men's capricious desire lives at the level of the sentence and makes disaster of the epic.
Finishing the story, she skips the marriage and her own birth, noting that her father broke her mother’s heart and left her to die.
Like Pauline, Franny’s father lived in the unconscious, led by desire. But what does Franny desire? She seems only to know what she doesn’t want. She doesn’t want to be like her half sister. Obsessive and flirtatious, Pauline confesses that she’d do anything to get a dick inside her. She gives Franny a charm bracelet that symbolizes a courtship fantasy: one that ends with a tiny cradle and baby. But like Carole in Repulsion, Franny is so resistant to her world that it makes her insane. Her jaw is set defensively, but she walks the world with her mouth half open, flits from a sidewalk confrontation with her obsessive one-night-stand to a back alley mugging, only to lunge into the path of a taxicab and get crumpled on the street. She takes her knocks.
The stubborn linguist doesn’t want to articulate, but neither does she want to be articulated. She wants to study language, not participate in it, and her avocation: collecting terms for a book on slang, suggests the realm in which she is comfortable approaching words. Words are the signifiers of the other used for indicating sex and violence.
But this world of articulation is briefly interrupted, and Franny writes the word that Detective Malloy uses to describe the murder of the girl. “Disarticulated.”
Campion consistently departs from a knee-jerk feminism that would present women as victims, as weak. Franny is drawn to the politically incorrect Detective Malloy. Malloy talks trash in a bar, “You stare back at them, that’s how you flirt with Black girls.” He and his partner joke about fat girls and faggots. She tells them off. Later, she fucks Malloy “because I wanted to.” But despiter her apparent ability to get what she wants, it’s alienated Franny who Campion’s film wants to work on. Bridging the roles of detective and femme fatale, Franny has to be broken down and reconstituted by the cruel world of which she is a part. If I didn’t know Campion, I might accuse the film of being anti-feminist.
In the Cut has flaws. Its blurry, expressionistic camera, cut with equally fanciful POV shots get tiring. The character of Cornelius, an African American student that Franny exploits for his knowledge of slang, is less believable than he could be: He is supposed to be Franny’s other, not the film’s. But none of these things detract from the remarkable triumph of this film. A female director has made a woman’s story in a world of socio-linguistic theory that is both uncommon and legible. The reluctance and alienation in the film are palpable, the eroticism profound, and the terror - well the terror gets lost a bit in the fascination, and isn’t that the point?
There is much more to In the Cut than this, of course. Franny's attachment to the romantic language of poetry, here relegated to subway advertising, adds a wrinkle to her ambivalence toward language and romance, blurred into one idea. Repeated references to "To the Lighthouse" suggest another set of themes and motifs, and indeed we inexorably move toward the lighthouse itself for the denouement. As she did with Holy Smoke, Campion invites cheeky and serious contemplation of her symbolism, but holds us too close to give the wide angle view that might invite a facile interpretation. Is it big totemic cock or a source of light, something visible or someplace hidden? Neither "To the Lighthouse" nor the lighthouse itself has a simple role in this story.
If you hate theory, if you are sickened by the blurry poetry of subway rides, there is still this: In the man’s world of big budget movies, Jane Campion has made a gritty and literate detective story in which Meg Ryan gets earthshaking cunnilingus from behind, then asks her lover where he learned to do that. I feel like that’s pretty good.