Camera And Action, page 27
Sexual zealotry became a double-edged sword. For feminists and traditionalists alike, "free" love also translated into unwanted pregnancies, abandonment, and more desperation for women. Sexual liberation, it seemed, became just another version of the "love' em and leave 'em" philosophy. "We're free spirits, we have the Pill, we learned to achieve orgasm," one writer chided. "Without a shot fired, we have surrendered our inalienable rights to be picky, and I want the right back.... The trouble with a quick hop into bed is that it leaves a woman felling nonexistent except for her primary sexual characteristics" and produces selfcontempt since "it is quite hard to esteem yourself just for having been born with standard equipment."40
While critics and viewers argued endlessly whether Carnal Knowledge was about chauvinism but was not chauvinistic, the unresolved issue was the degree to which screen permissiveness in mainstream fare addressed issues of power in the larger society. If "telling it like it is" depended on exploiting Ann-Margret's sensuality and having actors speaking "men's" language (women as body parts), the film's realism also had a vested interest in those identifying features as current, considering the interest in sexploitation. The close-ups of Ann-Margret's body, especially her attractive bosom, were selling points in press releases. She was already an icon in popular culture, which was one of the reasons for her getting the part. Despite Bobbie's outcome in the story, Ann-Margret's allure became the focal point of the film's appeal.
By keeping women identified through what the Cosmopolitan writer called "standard equipment," Carnal Knowledge constructs gender as it deconstructs romance.41 Obviously, the film indulges Jonathan's "no holds barred" realism to point out the "trouble" with MGM. Yet Carnal Knowledge enables what Laura Mulvey calls its own "language of desire" or its new discourse of re-representing the reality between men and women. If the film's deconstruction of Americans' fixation with romance works in countering the MGM past by taking love out of the equation, it ignores its own convention.42 This film sits as one of the most provocative in the debate over film's role in opening up the conventional romance through raw honestyits claim of innocence.
For men, the film may have been about the absurdity of the macho image and the rebellion against its impotence or, as one writer noted, "a counterpart to `The Feminine Mystique."' Yet, if the film liberated men "from the role of oppressor and exploiter," considering the candor in language and the general sympathy for Jonathan's condition, it treaded insensitively on women's historical suppression and exploited the very thing it was trying to subvert.43 As one woman confessed, "I walked down the street with tears streaming down my face because I had been bombarded for an hour and a half by every demeaning, ugly word ever used to belittle womanhood." Explaining further that she was as much offended by the audience's "predilection by supportive applause" for Jonathan's demeaning of Bobbie as she was by the scene itself, the writer pointed out that the "jock laughter for the screen words and situations that made man's dreary conquest-urge seem sporty, funny, sexy," only endorsed and perpetuated the myth that "boys will be boys."44
The film's central argument is for film to be honest in portraying everyday life and show how men and women really are. In this case, it was how men and women battled and, revolution or not, that had to be shown. Realism on the screen tended to place on audiences the burden of subverting and deconstructing. It can, therefore, be assumed that the risk of using sexism to reveal itself was less dangerous than using racism to combat itself, for in the latter there would have been an element of social action or a call for caution to consider. As it stands, the film's ending returns power and control to Jonathan, who has paid for and therefore controls the script. While it may have been possible for Nichols/Feiffer to present a film about male chauvinism and exploitation, the film's effect is left up to the viewers. Viewers still saw men's experiences from a male point of view but not female. Like the woman who left the theater in tears, what were women's choices in a society where boys could still be boys?
At mid-decade, feminist Robin Lakoff saw a parallel struggle. As she declared, "The woman's movement is but a few years old, and has, I should think, much deeper ingrained hostility to overcome than the civil rights movement ever did." Women's struggle would become "a subject for ridicule," even "among the intelligentsia" where "the black civil rights struggle ... never" was "among those very liberals who were the first on their blocks to join the NAACP." By comparison, the gender struggle "should indicate that social change must precede lexical change: women must achieve some measure of greater social independence of men before Ms. can gain wider acceptance."45 Had the underlying question to Feiffer been, "do whites really hate blacks?" then how many howls would have been heard in the same New York theaters as viewers watched African Americans reduced to passive stereotypes? If the result had been "nightly riots," the film would have said less about real racial strife in America than it would have about prevailing notions (shared by filmmakers and viewers) about what was safe, in bad taste, and discursively "correct" on the silver screen.
Liberating women from the "standard equipment" syndrome meant "reclaiming [their] bodies from a male-dominated" discourse. The result would be "laying claim to other kinds of agency."46 Feminists saw the difficulty in women's success through civil rights arguments based on gender. One viewer pointed out in the fall of 1971 that if "a similar film [had] been made purportedly exposing racism rather than sexism, in which the script contained epithets describing negritude with the same insensitivity that femaleness is here dealt with, there would have been nightly riots in the cinemas."47
As women were calling for more equal treatment socially, film reconceptualized their screen identity. Cinema adapted women to popular portrayals, as Laura Mulvey explained, "heroines who are spies, investigators, or detectives."48 Yet, the camera cannot be ignored as a "third eye." The way it portrayed women is its construction of agency not just a reflection of reality. Carnal Knowledge was fast opening the screen to different identities than had been produced in the MGM past, but it was also keeping possibilities closed for women .41
Jonathan, for example, slyly slips a slide of Susan in his slideshow and Sandy gets the message. Slipping Susan in for a microsecond brings the narrative back to the beginning where, for a few sequences, Susan re-conceptualizes the fantasy that Jonathan and Sandy constructed about her. Her strong voice subverts the romantic ideal by setting the conditions of Sandy's inquiry at the mixer in the beginning sequence of the film. She was the icebreaker, the witty intelligence in her semantics game when Sandy finally suggests, "You ought to be a lawyer." Susan replies, "I'm gonna be a lawyer." Susan at this point represents the eastern intellectual woman in sweaters and tweed skirts who was expected "to pursue fierce intellectual independence" yet remain "well-bred, ladylike."so
Yet, Susan disappears a third of the way through the film. Sandy tires of her, his marriage, and suburban living. Her disappearance is critical for the story to resume its commentary because she is the ideal of women seeking to combine traditional roles with a career. She is the new assertion, the new possibility. She offers a chance for fair treatment of women in cinematic representations. She "can tell men their thoughts," as Sandy explains to Jonathan. She is the only woman in the film who keeps Jonathan off balance and promises to unload cinema of its notorious use of women as duplicitous or alluringly dangerous. Either way, with Susan silenced, the chosen conclusion of her life and new persona for women - having it all - interrupts the logic of Jonathan's narrative of discontent. Hence, Susan's disappearance prevents the representation of women's natural progression from college to career and cinema's chance to take women's issues seriously. Once Jonathan seduces Susan and Sandy marries her, she exists only as a frame in the slideshow. Her disappearance suggests mainstream's inability to reconfigure women's lives in narratives on screen. She is reduced, euphemized, silenced, erased, and denied social action. Carnal Knowledge's myth of using sexism to confront the romance fails the film's feminist leanings and works instead to see women's resourcefulness as a destabilizing force not only to men's power but also their very identity, as was shown by Susan's disappearance.
With critical acclaim for his groundbreaking film, Nichols helped to establish what could be done in mainstream film. In this sense, Carnal Knowledge confirmed the task ahead for women's liberation and showed that women's rights were still bypassed on screens. The stakes were higher for women in this process of deconstruction than for men, as women in the early 1970s claimed. Carnal Knowledge fit in the paradigm of sexual liberation for those who believed to experiment meant to advocate. To break down dominant mores and encourage females' sexual expression meant social advancement. Approval of sexual promiscuity in mainstream magazines and popular bestsellers softened the moral implication for women's sexual behavior. When Liz Smith of Cosmopolitan, for example, wrote Nichols personally to congratulate him and Feiffer on producing "one of the best movies ever!" she also railed against women's libbers who detested and pilloried the film while dragging it through the "Women's Lib" mud. "Actually," she wrote, the film is "making the very point they want"- that, like life, "this movie is hateful to and about women" but its unfairness "speaks some awful truth.""
When feminism's early task was to point out inequities between men and women by raising consciousness about misogyny, the "awful truth" meant that cinema was guilty. Time's critic called both Jonathan and Sandy "fatuous travesties of the American male ... who loath the opposite sex."" Roger Ebert acknowledged the film's attempt to expose the inability of the sexes to operate outside of their social constructions. "Men and women," he argued, "fail to find sexual and personal happiness because they can't break through their patterns of treating each other as objects."53 The Wall Street Journal pointed out further that it was "not an exploitation film" but instead "a film about exploitation - that of women by men" and "moreover ... a feminist film." If seen as a feminist film, it is about the male ego, misogyny, and bourgeois sexual dysfunction. It is just as the Wall Street Journal critic claimed, "a film about exploitation."54
Yet the problem was less what the film showed than what it disguised. Tucked inside the political act, in the loosening of women's sexual mores, lay the issue of authority and empowerment. Women's social agency also depended on demystifying stereotypes. As one activist wrote, "What the camera in fact grasps is the `natural' world of the dominant ideology." Popular culture has to find "new meanings" not just replacing men's traditional roles with women. New assertions for women "have to be created ... within the text of the film." The third eye is both product and process, not an inert tool.55
If the truth about men and women is the narrative's measure of disruption, showing victimization through Bobbie's sensuality, for example, was not enough. She was portrayed as the most endearing and the most emasculated female character in the story - the "victim par excellence" and "the film's most powerful feminine argument."56 She represents the trouble with the "sexy babe who really just wants to get married."57 She is the one whom the camera dominates, yet the film is about Jonathan, the representative middle-aged man who may be a chauvinist but still gets to tell the story. He has the final word and holds the final image. Strength and power are measured in sexual performance and key to that is woman's physical perfection, still a conventional frame of reference.58
With Sandy and Jennifer out of the picture, viewers return to Jonathan and the space of his defined male authority. He finds only one woman necessary to fulfill his needs, since his potency is now measured by his professional success. She is a Middle Eastern call girl, Louise (Rita Moreno), the one person he can pay and predict. Louise propagandizes his strength and power and returns him to his imagined self. He is young, alive, revitalized, and immersed in the angelic fantasy of Bobbie, when he first saw her as an attractive ice skater in Manhattan. He recalls the first image of her before their sexual involvement. The blinding whiteness of her fur hat and white skating costume dominate the screen. He sinks into the myth of the past and just how he wanted it to be, but Louise interrupts, saying he is "a man who inspires worship because he has no need for any woman." He is lying flat on his back with arms stretched out crucifixion style, looking into nowhere, as he hears "because he has himself."
The camera shows a relaxed, grinning man and then ends with a sinister image of the era of Bobbie. The blurred vision of a twirling, romantic, sensual skater on the blinding white ice comes into and out of focus and contrasts to the dark warmth and mystical music of Louise's apartment. The carnal touch of the present displaces the frigidity of the past and reiterates the power of the script, the reality of cinematic representation, and the anxiety of impotent stories and meaningless identities. Louise restores Jonathan's identity according to the script he has engineered, ordered, and bought. The film, through Louise, affirms "the man" and his story ceases to be personal. Instead, it becomes the fact about women.
The sixties and seventies in filmmaking provided an unprecedented chance and opportunity for experimentation in film. Films were recognized for those new images of carnal freedom and tests of sexual knowledge, for breaking boundaries and claiming new truths. It was imagined that telling it like it is would somehow connect to empowerment. Hence, Carnal Knowledge was indeed a test for the possibilities in mainstream film.59 The picture first set up the '40s and '50s film conventions as influencing men's and women's dishonestly. Next, it liberated the screen through Jonathan's language and Bobbie's body. Finally, the film held up in court for its artistic merit. Thus, Carnal Knowledge was indeed a test of what realism produced.
In the era of women's liberation with sexual permissiveness and new knowledge on women's sexual experiences equalizing the playing ground, it makes sense that a film such as Carnal Knowledge would represent how things really are. The federal government's endorsement and protection made it a privileged work of art. Audiences, filmmakers, and actors came together in a perfect arrangement. What Nichols was showing and Jonathan telling could seem influential on the one hand and a measure of the film industry's progress on the other. Just as Jonathan could have his cake and keep it, too, if sex came without intimacy, so too could the film make a statement on the state of social relations and indulge in mainstream voyeurism at the same time.
Yet, art without metaphor and deconstruction without reconstruction are contradictions. Placed in the context of a Cosmopolitan type of construction of women's liberation, Carnal Knowledge was part of the discursive process by which men and women negotiated new identities in response to real-world situations. The discussion Nichols' film invited was the question of representing sexuality as liberation rather than arguing that the sexual revolution was not really liberating. As women discovered limits to the rhetoric of equality emerging out of the civil rights activity of the previous decade, they began to question the very construction of gender identity and its relation to social power as produced in places like the media. If, as Teresa de Lauretis claims, "the movement of... film actually inscribes and orients desire," then the desire to be brutally honest in Carnal Knowledge is also what gives it license to ignore the subjugating nature of its own visual exploitation.60 Feiffer and Nichols' treatise fits the standard female masochist and male sadist model where the female body is etched and inscribed by men, that is, sexualized and gendered - routed, rerouted, and put back on track.
Before achieving any measure of independence and equality, women had to negotiate social change by imagining and advocating new identities outside of the traditional discourse of ladyhood, Madonna, sex-kitten, and even the stereotyping of feminists during the early seventies. With the Code breakup, the new ratings system, and the experimental trend in filmmaking well underway by the production of Carnal Knowledge, moving pictures faced no obstacles on their way to sexualizing women on screen. The industry immersed itself in the context of sexual verity and turned to women to imagine what it might look like in mainstream features. With the help of Cosmopolitan and Helen Gurley Brown's "swinging con temporary chick" audience, as one writer put it, it would seem exhilarating to crush "old standards ... under the heels of the advancing young."" Perhaps the kind of knowledge audiences consumed was not new information but just carnal visuals; maybe Carnal Knowledge is really just another "dirty" movie, despite Academy endorsement, federal sanction, and critical acclaim of the Feiffer/Nichols team.
Three months after Carnal Knowledge was released, Norman Lear debuted his soon-tobe-famous All in the Family. The television artist gave Archie Bunker, its main character, full rein to represent the bigot in America, the voice of protest against the myriad cultural and social changes. Again the generations meet - Archie and son-in-law Meathead. Archie put America back on course by teaching "the little one" (his daughter Gloria) and her husband the truth about their generation's antiestablishment assumptions.
In the debut of the series, Archie and his wife Edith walk through the door. "I'm sorry, Archie," Edith apologizes to her husband. "How was I to know?" she asked. "I thought it was a religious picture - Cardinal Knowledge," she tells him. "One of the dirtiest pictures I ever seen," he said to her. If cinema seemed too preoccupied with carnality, then Archie and Edith would save American living rooms from it. All in the Family defined America's moral standing by using the film as both a contrast to convention and an endorsement of the film as a now movie" because the television series was a satire of Archie's misguided notions. Making peace with cultural changes meant imagining the working-class Bunkers as the last best place to guard convention and then mocking the convention they protected. This playful incongruity between cardinal and carnal knowledge placed Nichols' film in conversation with other cultural exchanges about generation and gender debates.
