Patrice Petro and Carol Flinn on Feminist Film Theory

Abstract

We write this in the hope of stimulating further debate over Dallas and female spectatorship, and to respond in particular to E. Ann Kaplan's recent reply to Linda Williams's essay, Something Else Besides a Mother: Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama (Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 [Fall 1984]). We believe both Kaplan's and Williams's essays provide useful insights into questions of female spectatorship. Nevertheless, we feel that Williams's essay, with its emphasis upon maternal melodrama and multiple identification, opens up a range of possibilities for feminist film theory that Kaplan's essay, with its stress upon a monolithic position for the female spectator, tends to close down. To be sure, there are points of agreement between Williams and Kaplan: both recognize, for instance, that the female spectator of Dallas partially identifies with Stella. Kaplan nevertheless believes that this female spectator simply identify differently than the male spectator in relation to the camera's look. She places considerable emphasis upon the film's closing moments, when is standing forlorn in the rain passively watching as her daughter enters a patriarchal, upper-class marriage. And just as this routine Oedipalization of the daughter concludes the narrative, Kaplan asserts that Stella--and, by extension, the female spectator-must accept the loss demanded of woman by patriarchy. She writes: Unless we hold back from the film at that moment and deliberately avoid looking at the screen, or slow down the projector, or disrupt the process in some other way, I don't see how we can refuse participating in the patriarchal visual economy for those cinematic moments. There is a contradiction in Kaplan's argument: on the one hand, she implies that socially constructed readers actively produce textual meanings when she questions whether films themselves do the work in exposing woman's ambivalent relationship to cinematic representation. On the other hand, she suggests that film texts dictate their own meanings when she claims that Stella Dallas... ultimately... insist[s] on patriarchal norms. Kaplan adheres more to the latter view when she argues that the female spectator of Dallas cannot resist being 'seduced' by the film's mechanisms. Such a view of how meanings are produced causes particular problems when Kaplan considers the historical audience for Dallas. Kaplan writes that the 1937 female viewer did not have the option of critically distancing herself from the film, compelled as she must have been to over-identify with Stella's sense of loss and suffering. Instead