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Martin Scorsese and His Young ‘Girl’: Female Objectification in Who’s That Knocking at My
Door? The opening sequence
of Lina Wertmuller’s Sotto
. . . Sotto reveals both a sardonic appraisal and a rejection
of male/female erotic relations by presenting gender issues in a manner that
reflects an all too-frequent reality; the camera focuses on Ester’s breasts,
then it cuts immediately to a shot of her husband gazing hungrily at her
voluptuous body. His subsequent oafish behavior, contrasted with the
collected demeanor of his wife, effectively foregrounds male treatment of the
female-as-object (i.e., scopophilia) and the consequent inability to respond
to the psychological demands of women. Scorsese’s early
films, influenced by the films of his youth and his ItalianAmerican[1] heritage, strive to recapture the
remonstrating, yet tongue-in-cheek mixture of realism, reflexivity, and
surrealism found in films such as Wertmuller’s Sotto . . . Sotto. It’s
Not Just You, Murray!, Who’s That
Knocking at My Door, and Mean
Streets the fountainheads of his successive works, take upon themselves
the task of describing contemporary social reality (a task that has been neglected
all too often by directors too obsessed with moralizing, myth-making, and
pandering to prurient interests to notice what’s going on around them). Like
Wertmuller, Scorsese demonstrates a more accurate rendition of the
relationship between men and women by presenting an exaggerated male
arrogance/ignorance combined with an excessive, albeit temporary,
acquiescence of the female screen-object. To discover that
Scorsese has been raked mercilessly over the coals for his “realistic”
portrayal of women, then, is far from mind-boggling. There has been a new
illiberal tendency to Scorsese’s early
films, being primarily autobiographical in content, are indeed, in many
aspects (if not all), male-dominated. The (male) protagonist’s actions mirror
the (male) director’s subconscious (in a Fellinian mode reminiscent of Roma, The Clowns, 8 1/2,
etc.). Scopophilia is no doubt prevalent throughout the majority of his
early films.[3] In Who’s
That Knocking At My Door, women are categorized into the age-old
Madonna/Whore dichotomy. J.R., a young, marginalized ItalianAmerican male,
makes the distinction between “girls” and “broads.” Zina Bethune, a blond
WASP, appears as simply “the Girl” in the credits. The diegesis of the film
is centralized around the strained relationship between the two characters.
J.R. approaches the Girl on a ferry boat, perhaps in an effort to escape from
his male-dominant world. Through a series of analepses, we learn that he
refuses to have sex with her, because she is a “good-girl.” When he finds out
that she has been raped by an ex-boyfriend, he immediately dismisses her as a
“broad,” and his shallow means of reconciliation consist of telling her that
he “forgives her” and will marry her “anyway,” even though as J.R. would say,
“you don’t marry a broad.” When she rejects his binarized world view, he
seeks refuge in the church, only to undergo a wild, psychical crisis. In
other words, female objectification occurs, but in a purposeful manner
designed to question binarized gender roles and explore masculinity in
crisis. The concept of an
ideological “other” in the film overlaps with political and religious
conventions. Catholicism, for Scorsese, is quite directly linked to the
construction of the woman as the “other” who attempts to subvert the current
represented homogeneity from the perspective of her marginalization. One of
the final and most powerful scenes in
Who’s That Knocking At My Door ultimately occurs when J.R. seeks refuge
in the Church, only to be faced with innumerable terrifying icons (including
Santa Lucia, the epitomized victim perantonomasia of patriarchal governing
principles).[4] Because of his guilty conscience, he
becomes increasingly frantic, hallucinating uncontrollably, until he is in a
state of overwrought hysteria. At one point, he kisses Christ’s feet, then
turns away from the crucifix with a bleeding lip. At the heart of this
sequence is a condemnation of conventional gender arrangements that are
facilitated by a religion that by many is perceived to valorize voluntary
acts of self mutilation and extend the gap between sexual differences.
Rebecca West contends that this final scene may have a positive valence; for
it shows J.R. undergoing an identity crisis that “may or may not lead to a
questioning of binarisms and hierarchical concepts of otherness” (333). She
further writes that J.R. is “in a state of what might be called mystical
hysteria as the strict boarders of his dominant world crumble, along with his
rigidly constructed male subjectivity.”[5] In this scene Catholicism becomes the
symbolic vehicle for a violent ethos. As this becomes apparent to both J.R.
and the spectator, a crumbling of machismo,
stereotyping, and gender “otherness” occurs. J.R.’s dependency on
icons is revealed to us only gradually in the film: he chastises the Girl for
lighting the holy candle while they are drinking coffee. This dependency
expands geometrically as the film reveals that his faith is made up of male
hierarchies and dingy miracles. Bowing under the weight of his own guilt, he
encounters Rabelais’s “cup of dissimulation,” the warming lies of religious
and symbolic deceit. The Church, with its grim, patriarchal figure of an
imposing God, presiding over an obeisant Virgin Mary (the meek thrall of
mankind, no less), epitomizes all of the baseness that Scorsese has
hyperbolized throughout the film. (Charlie, in Mean Streets, experiences a similar culmination of visions and
mixed ideals, burning himself in an attempt to chasten his sinful soul).
J.R.’s breakdown is a symbolic divestiture of all claim to phallic authority.
He is the fragmented product of a male-dominated sphere and rigidly defined
religious structures, and the sequence in the church graphically announces
Scorsese’s own iconoclastic approach to the issue of sexuality in crisis. J.R.’s muddled,
pseudo-iterative visions along with the dissymmetry from one shot to the next
suggests an embedded fundamental
narrator. Scorsese is, as Metz would phrase it, the “grande imagier” of
the diegesis. Who’s That Knocking at My
Door and Mean Streets were
initially intended to be presented as part of a trilogy, portraying
Scorsese’s personal, religious, and sexual experiences in Little Italy.[6] J.R., then, embodies Scorsese’s marginalization
as an ItalianAmerican male and an inability to redefine his own place in a
crumbling system made up of artificial binaries. These forced binaries
are expressed semantically in J.R.’s dismissal of women as either
“good-girls” or “whores.” After he takes the Girl to the theater to see the
film, Rio Bravo, the Girl mentions
that she likes the leading actress, Angie Dickinson. J.R. rebukes her,
saying, “Well, let me tell ya something. That girl in that picture was a
broad.” The Girl, as yet still oblivious to J.R.’s binarized system of
belief, inquires, “What do you mean, a broad?” J.R., responding more
intuitively than logically, declares, “A broad. You know. There are
. . . there are girls and then . . . and then there are
broads.” The Girl is the
“other,” hopelessly alienated in J.R.’s male hierarchy. J.R. does not wish
to incorporate his “girl” into his male-dominant reality in any way, but
places her on a Jungian pedestal of virginal “otherness” (the “anima” he
desperately hungers for). When J.R. is not with the Girl, he whiles away his
time participating in various “masculine” activities—cruising about in cars,
engaging in rumbles, and drinking and cavorting with his buddies in a bar
called the “Pleasure Club.” Significantly, women are never present in any of
these scenes. Male and female are semiotically separated from one another in
the majority of the film. The exception occurs at the beginning of the film
when J.R.’s mother prepares a calzone for her children. The children, both
boys and girls, sit expectantly at the table awaiting their feast. The mother
mysteriously disappears after this scene, however, and does not reappear
throughout the entire film. Her brief appearance at the beginning alludes to
a psychic scenario that contributes to the formation of J.R.’s fixed system
of binaries; the ItalianAmerican “Mamma” slaves zealously to serve and feed
her family in a conspicuously traditional Catholic household based on set
gender roles. The sequence at Sally
Gaga’s apartment exemplifies the contrast and segregration between the
masculine and feminine spheres and an ensuing male violence and dominance.
The boys play cards and drink excessively in some sort of attempt at male
bonding, but the result is physical aggression bordering on slight lunacy.
The music in this sequence serves as a disclaimer that is in conflict with
the viewer’s actual experience—a tactic that is postmodern in the sense that
it destabilizes our “reading” of the text. The musical score of the film
creates an entirely separate mode of perception by itself. It is didactic
contrapuntal music in the sense that the emotional tonality of the music is
strategically contrasted against the dominant attitude of violence in the
scene. We see this in the sequence at the church as well, when the title song
of the soundtrack accompanies a series of fragmentary shots of J.R., the
church, and religious icons. J.R.’s visions and analepses in the church
become all the more bizarre when they occur to the tune of a pop song,
resulting in clips reminiscent of Bunuel’s avant-garde episodes. The
intervening flashbacks may be seen as a Perechian jigsaw puzzle, in terms of
the facets of J.R.’s relationship uncovered by the segmented shots, in that
the process of uncovering them is not managed in an ordered and sequential
way. These same scenes
involve an experimental, postmodern resistance to closure, proclaiming the
film’s own artifice and commenting on its own procedures. When Sally Gaga is
threatened with a gun, the boys boisterously flee from the room, J.R. turns
around and points, and the shot is replayed two more times with subtle
differences evident in his motions. There is a spatial separation between
the boys running away and the victim, but at the same time, a temporal
simultaneity. The use of postmodern conventions is tied to a redefinition of
the marginalized “other.” An increasing distance occurs between the spectator
and J.R.’s masculine world, a distance of which we are made aware by the
absence of bridging cinematic signs. Form and content interact in a way that
forces the spectator to “experience” the diegesis, rather than acknowledge
what in many films, is simply “told.” Similarly, female objectification
presents itself as a construct that the spectator is allowed to experience
and then freely reject. Immediately following
the scene at the apartment is a series of brief clips from John Wayne films.
This, accompanied by J.R.’s boyish interest in Westerns at the beginning of
the film, complicates the issue of masculinity and gender roles. The clips
are intertextual markers for the spectator. They ambiguously allude to an
underlying cause for the unruly behavior of the boys, and we begin to
associate the dialogism (in the Baktinian sense) of the Western “flick” with
machismo and masculinity in crisis. Throughout the film,
male domination and violence are emphasized through the blatant contrast
between the mindless antics of the boys and the rational reticence of the
Girl. She is a victim not only of rape, but also, of the skepticism of J.R.;
yet rather than strike back, she remains self-possessed, and in every sense,
superior to the male characters. When J.R. finds out that she has been raped,
he automatically discards her and labels her as a “whore.” However, although
J.R. doubts her story, the moral values of the Girl are never called into
question by the spectator. Violence, Scorsese seems to maintain, is the
product of machismo. Les Keyser suggests
that “an adequate appreciation of Who’s
That Knocking requires more emphasis on the source of the cracks in
J.R.’s consciousness than on the cause of the tear in the girl’s hymen” (27).
I would argue, however, that the source of the cracks in J.R.’s consciousness
and the cause of the tear in the girl’s hymen are one and the same. Both are
precipitated by masculinity in crisis and the ensuing male violence. This
macho mentality is at the very core of the rape in the film. This mindset is
also clearly at the root of J.R.’s pathetic sexual bouts with the prostitutes
in Amsterdam, and when combined with his refusal to have sex with the Girl,
successfully raises questions of gender construction in the minds of the
spectators.[7] When J.R. devalues the Girl’s emotional
stress and paradoxically spurns her, we are reminded once again that the male
mind is the source of all of the dichotomies and psychological conflicts
that occur within the film. Purdue University Works Cited Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire. Bloomington,
Indiana UP, 1986. Keyser, Les. Martin Scorsese. New York: Twayne,
1992. Lapsley, Rob, and
Michael Westlake. “From Casablanca
to Pretty Woman: The Politics of
Romance.” Contemporary Film Theory.
Ed. Antony Easthope. London: Longman, 1973. 188. Lawton, Ben. “What
is ItalianAmerican Cinema?” Voices in
Italian Americana 6.1 (1995): 27–51. Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema.
New York: Oxford UP, 1974. Mulvey, Laura.
“Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema.” Contemporary
Film Theory. Ed. Antony Easthope. London: Longman, 1993. 112–22. Sautman, Francesca
Canadé. “Women of the Shadows: Italian American Women, Ethnicity and Racism
in American Cinema.” DIFFERENTIA
review of italian thought 6/7 (Spring/ Autumn 1994): 223–25. Scorsese, Martin. Scorsese on Scorsese. London: Faber,
1996. West, Rebecca.
“Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My
Door?: Night Thoughts on Italian Studies in the United States.” Romance Languages Annual 1991. Vol. 3.
Ed. Jeanette Beer, Charles Ganelin, and Anthony Julian Tamburri. West
Lafayette, IN: Purdue Research Foundation, 1992. 331–38. |
[1]In response to Scorsese’s film entitled, italianamerican (1974), and its ethnic ramifications, I have eliminated the hyphen. For a more thorough explanation of the moral and political implications of this construct, see Lawton.
[2]Sautman further implies that Scorsese places women in a position of moral subjugation by portraying Teresa as racist and the male character as unbigoted in his attraction to an AfricanAmerican woman (37–38). However, the male character actually admits that he cannot have a relationship with the singer due to her race. In other words, both male and female characters are equally guilty of racism (and a lack in certain ethics is obviously not exclusive to one gender).
[3]For a thought-provoking analysis of the female spectator’s position in film and the “female gaze,” see Doane.
[4]Santa Lucia was a virgin martyr denounced as a Christian by her rejected suitor and executed in Sicily during the persecution of Diocletian. Her name, suggestive of light in Latin, is the reason that she is popularly invoked against eye disease. In art she is often depicted holding her own eyes, plucked out in her martydom, on a dish.
[5]West later alludes to Toril Moi’s interpretation of mystical imagery that defines it as an obscurity of consciousness. West writes, “If we see J.R.’s crisis in these terms, he is ‘turning into a woman’ as the rigid logic of patriarchy gives way . . .” (333).
[6]See Scorsese’s comments in Scorsese on Scorsese (21–32). It can be said that Scorsese, reminiscent of Thomas Carlyle’s narrative methods, synthesizes realistic data and dramatizes this mass like a didactic novelist.
[7]The explicit treatment of sexual acts is certainly another challenge—and one that I would propose to tackle in a more extended study of Scorsese.