Richard deCordova Responds to Miriam Hansen's "Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship" ("Cinema Journal," Summer 1986)

Abstract

Miriam Hansen's article is an important contribution both to contemporary debates about female spectatorship and to studies of individual stars. My only criticism of it, which could easily be extended to other work of its kind, is that it stops short of an attempt to theorize the relationship between contemporary theories of spectatorship and the star system as such. Hansen profits considerably from the line of argument about spectatorship that extends from Baudry, Metz, and Mulvey to much of the most compelling current work in feminist theory and criticism. This argument holds that it is through the organization of vision that a subject is positioned and addressed in the cinema. Furthermore, for Mulvey at least, this organization of vision systematically excludes or marginalizes the female spectator by addressing itself to male desire. Hansen remains fairly well within this problematic while, however, attempting to describe in more positive terms the modes of identification and address that obviously do connect women to the cinema. Valentino is a particularly good figure to study in this context because of his well-documented appeal to women during the twenties and the assumption that his films somehow addressed themselves to women's fantasies and desires. Hansen's demonstration of the ways in which Valentino's films destabilize the classical cinema's male-oriented conventions of deploying vision raises a number of important questions about the characteristics of female address and identification in the cinema. What is elided in this discussion, however, is a consideration of the broader system of star publicity and promotion within which Valentino and countless other stars were inscribed. Such a consideration would be particularly pertinent for the questions Hansen raises about female spectatorship, because so much of the apparatus of the star system-fan magazines and articles in women's magazines and newspapers-was clearly addressed to women, ostensibly to their interests, fantasies, and desires. It is important to recognize that star discourse has historically involved regimes of pleasure and modes of address that are not coextensive with (and at times are relatively distinct from) those which follow from the codes of vision in the classical cinema. One would have to take a very narrow view of the text to argue that this discourse does not enter into the reception of film and the positioning of a subject.