Whose Fantasy is This Anyway?: The Female Serial Killer in Dirty Weekend and The Eye of the Beholder
Crime Fiction offers avenues of transference not available in ‘the real’, giving an outlet for women’s pain and rage experienced as a result of male violence.1
Noir crime fiction is surfeited with the image of a fatal woman, an iconic figure that reflects male angst and insecurity. This image is rooted in the genre’s historical and political development - proven by vestiges of Gothic, melodrama, and the detective genre - and informed by Western philosophical, literary, and cultural theories. Many classical noir films and novels like Robert Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror and James M. Cain’s ThePostman Always Rings Twice, respectively, for instance, are informed by (Freudian) psychoanalytic theory that consigns women to the role of ‘not men’ or as in Simone de Beauvoir’s aptly entitled book, ‘The Second Sex’, foregrounding the binary opposition while occluding issues like deep-seated female oppression and subjugation. Freud’s view that ‘man fears woman because she is castrated’,2 provides an underlying template from which dangerous women in classical noir texts (films and novels) are generally constructed - phallic women whose images provoke castration anxiety - and therefore require, most of the time, an obligatory annihilation. In that vein, a woman’s fatalism in the noir tradition is equally expressed by her duplicity and seductiveness - the modern day Delilah - which fundamentally means ‘just being an active woman.’ The male protagonist’s devoir in the canonical noir in effect is either to annihilate or to redeem her.
The amalgamation of ‘duplicity and seductiveness’ (the play of gender and sexuality) in the portrayal of the fatal woman mirrors the misogynistic Western culture that produces it. Noir texts conversely capture this mirroring with their distinct portrayal of the male protagonist who is devoid of heroism, and a set of narrative conventions and visual stylisations that heighten not only the threatening and ominous milieu that he inhabits but also the mental state that he is in. The consequence of this is the genre’s need to find a scapegoat, providing an inoculating balance to the checkered male protagonist. This narrative scapegoat is personified in the figure of a femme fatale, emblematic of Western literary tradition’s view of a woman as an embodiment, and in noir’s case, of male fantasy. Whether she embodies an external (economical, physiological etc.) threat or is an embodiment of male fear (psychological, psychoanalytical, philosophical etc.) towards the disruptive nature of women with regard to the patriarchal value system, there seems to be an unwritten prescription of how a woman should be represented. Because of her inherent fatalism, the infamous femme fatale’s comeuppance is prescribed by the genre, ideologically driven by the genre’s desperation to insert male authority. Lawrence Kramer, speaking of women’s role as an embodiment, makes a very illuminating point:
A woman may be judged to deserve punishment whenever she steps beyond paradigmatic position; her role as an embodiment is protected from injury by doing injury to her body. A woman may come to deserve such punishment either by affirming whatever features of femininity are stigmatized in her particular milieu or by unmasking the condition of stigma-free masculinity there as an illusion.3
Kramer’s argument highlights the fact that as an embodiment, a woman is therefore the gauge that is used by patriarchy to measure, demarcate and disseminate its own masculine ideology, reaffirming the oppressive binary opposition prevalent in Western thinking. Unless she conforms to the patriarchal standard, she is deemed punishable.
The noir genre, argue some feminist critics, is not a male genre per se, ‘offer[ing] a space for the playing out of various [original italic] gender fantasy’.4 Informed by feminist theories, the link between the neo-noir genre and its classical counterpart is established with the portrayal of a fatal woman. Conterminous with contemporary gender destabilisation, neo-noir texts capture the experience of paranoia, alienation and fragmentation within the figure of a fatal woman, which, unlike the classical noir, is now the emotional centre of the narrative. She is now a noir protagonist with the inherent existential dilemma of a deluded dream that characterises noir sensibility, functioning as a mirror of a morally collapsed society. She is transgressive and able to mobilise beyond the patriarchal paradigm, cocksure in her own satirical rights, yet demonstrating weaknesses and making a plethora of errors of judgement. The absurdly iniquitous femme fatale of retro-noir is transformed by neo-noir into a self-aware post-feminist female human, trapped in a miasma of contemporary anxieties like anybody else. Her humanness or ‘perceived wholeness’ modulates her into a new threat, which according to Tania Modleski in her studies of women in Hitchcock’s films, ‘not because they automatically connote castration, but because they don’t’.5 The celebration of her ‘otherness’ may reaffirm the patriarchal binary system, yet her willingness to use her own resources against the asperity of the noir world and life conversely and effectively undermines the traditional gender prescriptions, which ultimately renders patriarchy irrelevant and archaic.
My intention here is to examine two serial killer noir texts - Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend and Marc Behm’s The Eye of the Beholder (henceforth The Eye), questioning whether spatial constructions in these texts liberate or subjugate the subjectivity of the female serial killers, and how noir conventions employed problematise or facilitate the representation of their characters. This section seeks to demonstrate that the mobility of the female serial killers is a sign of their transgression, enabling them to manipulate their space as a means of achieving their goal. It argues that the difference between both texts primarily lies in the narrative positioning of the female characters - while Dirty Weekend has its main character as the female serial killer, TheEye narrative trajectory follows its hardboiled and male sleuth literary origin by posing the female serial killer as the object of the male protagonist’s investigation. Arguably, although the gender of the author affects the construction of space in his and her respective texts, the essential question lies in the way the texts diverge or conform to the canonical noir conventions, reflecting their different ideological motives.
The transgressiveness of female serial killers in both novels is contingent not only upon their ability to manipulate their mobility, a leitmotif that permeates both texts, irrevocably challenging the idea that women are always associated with locality, but also on their ability to subvert generic conventions. Doreen Massey, a feminist geographer, uses a somewhat anthropological argument to link the discussion about the public and private division with the binary opposite of masculinity and femininity. Massey elaborates:
Some culturally specific symbolic association of women/woman/local does persist. Thus, the term local is used in derogatory reference to feminist struggles and in relation to feminist concerns in intellectual work (it is only local struggle, only local concern) […] That bundle of terms local/place/locality is bound in to sets of dualism, within which a key term is the dualism between masculine and feminine, and in which, on these readings, the local/place/feminine side of the dichotomy is deprioritized and denigrated […] and that place called home is frequently personified by, and partakes of the same characteristics as the assigned to woman/mother/lover.6
Massey’s observation de-romanticizes the idea that a woman’s role as ‘Domestic Goddess’ is empowering, revealing that its association with locality forecloses some important feminist issues that are germane to women’s struggle for equality and liberation. For Massey, locality is a sign of phallogocentricism, i.e., a euphemism for female suppression. Mobility, which according to Philip L. Simpson ‘has always meant freedom to escape one’s past and the consequences of the past’,7 is antithetical to locality and therefore is an apt and liberating means which the female serial killer uses to redefine her space.
Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend is a rape-revenge fantasy, embedded with an arsenal of canonical noir conventions such as labyrinthine plot, a depressing mood, and fragmented characters. However, the novel’s narrative trajectory is informed by its conscious generic inversion, and exacerbated by the portrayal of a female sociopath as its emotional centre. Dirty Weekend, according to Sally Munt, is a ‘feminist crime novel on to a superlative revenge fantasy that inventively synthesizes a hybrid satire in which the hero is a serial killer’.8 This arguably positions the avenger within the narrative itself, a liberating position that is traditionally occupied by a male protagonist character. Munt’s observation is undeniably political, hence the apotheosis of the sociopath female protagonist as ‘the hero’, an example of feminists’ revanchism that finds its apt expression in a serial killer noir text like Dirty Weekend. As Jane Caputi asserts, ‘the theme of revenge of women fighting back and serially killing those who would rape, abuse or kill them is increasingly prevalent theme in fiction authored by women’.9 The principal subversion of this genre as claimed by Caputi is the birth of a central female serial killer who is the protagonist rather than the antagonist of the text; like Bella in Dirty Weekend who refuses to remain or be a victim and goes out on a killing spree as an act of vengeance for the treatment she receives from men. Zahavi’s intention is to establish the link between Bella and her revenge by applying a feminist view of space as ‘a location in which to roam, play, plant and settle, not in which to bluster and bully, or in response, to cower and huddle’.10 As a satire, Dirty Weekend oscillates cunningly between noir conventions and a serial killer narrative, which as a result, produces a hybrid figure whose characteristics reflect the marriage of the classic femme fatale figure and the noir protagonist. With the emphasis on the working of her psychology, this novel provides an insightful and sympathetic understanding of the development of Bella’s character and the motivation behind her actions, which consequently create in the reader the inevitable sense of complicity.
Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend bears a surface resemblance to Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45,11 especially with regard to the characterisation of the female protagonists. The early part of both texts concentrates on the construction of the female characters as victims of male oppression, violence and intrusion into their private lives.In Dirty Weekend, Bella is constantly stalked by her voyeuristic male neighbour, Tim, who threatens her with several indecent and dirty calls. Thana (Zoe Lund), the female protagonist in Ms. 45, was physically raped twice on the same day, signifying her vulnerability in the noir world. Refusing to capitulate, Thana manages to kill and dismember her second rapist who had broken into her house. Like Bella, the constant harassment from male strangers wherever she goes leaves her with no choice but to start carrying and using a .45 gun, enabling her to retaliate by roaming the night streets killing men who abuse or harass women, culminating in her running amok and shooting people at a Halloween party. The final shooting scene is done in slow motion so that the seemingly random shooting is not mistaken as such, allowing the audience to see that Thana’s victims are all men. Although situating her revenge within a sociopath paradigm, the shooting is also symbolic of her role as a scourge of society, or in Dirty Weekend’s context, as an avenger in ‘[a] holy war’ (p. 98). Both texts turn personal revenge into political action, but Ms. 45’s ending, in which Thana is finally stabbed from behind by her own female friend, is flagrantly misogynistic, that is a severance from the ending of Dirty Weekend, which is a direct criticism of the masculine ideology of the serial killer noir genre itself.
The entanglement of the dichotomy of interiority and exteriority to highlight and signify the fear, desperation and alienation of the female protagonist is set from the beginning of Dirty Weekend, foregrounding that ‘[t]his is the story of Bella, who woke up one morning and realised she’d had enough’ (p.1). The novel instantly modulates the subdued mood into action, and Zahavi’s main purpose is to establish Bella’s victimisation, constructing her identity with loaded images and discourses of a victim. The dingy interiority of her rented flat, and the violent exteriority that is Brighton, are now a combined metaphor for Bella’s mental state, foregrounding not only noir’s deterministic forces that oppress and alienate her, but also the forceful consolidation of patriarchy into her life. Mark Seltzer sees this as ‘an exposure of private interiors so complete’ that ‘the senses of monitoring the interiors [...] become unnecessary or redundant’.12 For Zahavi, the root of Bella’s suffering is existential, rooted in Bella’s being a woman, which in Western tradition, is often associated with nature. The novel is loaded with Bella’s association with nature (‘A black day for humankind’ (p.27) and ‘The damp earth that nurtured me. The soil from which I sprang. Banal perhaps, but mine’ (p.28)), enabling Zahavi to associate Bella’s revenge with female nature. Only by identifying Bella’s existential despair is Zahavi is able to accentuate the fact that ‘pain and Bella made poor companions’ (p. 1).
To a certain extent, Bella’s existential despair is underlined by the novel’s textual design that intentionally positions her as a victim, evoking noir’s sensibility of an oppressive and virulent milieu. For instance in chapter two, when Bella receives a threatening and harassing call from Tim, the phrase ‘Bella in the basement’ is repeated five times. On one level, this repetition can be interpreted as the framing of her character into a limited, mundane and banal pattern of life. On another, it is meant to be a consistent reminder for Bella of her position as a victim, which crucially creates the perspective of the novel. This textual evidence also evokes the pattern of desire that keeps recurring in the novel. Across the text, Bella’s judgment is underscored by her inherent morality as evident in these narrations: ‘Bella was reared to be polite […] She was educated to be sensitive’ (p.65) and ‘Bella the moralist’ (p.70), reminiscent of the canonical noir protagonists’ lamenting the loss of innocence when they become sullied by the noir world. Bella’s actions are therefore bound up by a sense of determinism, signalling her vulnerability in the malignant face of the outside world. The sense of worthlessness is almost insistent: ‘Does she matter, this Bella-person? This nothing-person? She doesn’t think so’ (p.21), creating a feeling of alienation that psychopaths in noir thrillers usually experience. This echoes noir’s mood of pessimism as the protagonist is trapped in the loop of human relations and power struggles, which irreversibly scar her emotionally. This sentiment is verbally expressed by Tim – her voyeuristic male neighbour - ‘I don’t think you’re worth anything’ (p. 44), and reiterated by Nimrod, the male clairvoyant that she consulted, ‘They have all been there. They’ve had a good poke around […] You were open house, my dear’ (p.36). What this textual evidence gradually reveals is that Bella’s victimisation is visibly translated into Bella’s connection with the space she inhabits. Indeed, Bella confesses:
I looked inside myself and there was nothing there; so I thought I’d camp in the empty space. Everything had drained away. All the hope and all the fight. Trickled away on the train down to Brighton. (p.33)
The etiolated language reflects the vacuity of her spirit. Therefore, her ability to transgress the spatial boundary is the defining feature of her liberation, and this ability is found in her desire to analyse her own feelings. Initially ‘she wasn’t one to analyse what she felt’ (p.30), leaving the feeling buried in diegetic space, and all that she sees is ‘nothing underneath’ (p.32). As her desire begins to be expressed by language, she finds that ‘the solution, like the key, is within’ (p.34). The reference to the ‘key’ within is a phenomenon that I believe resembles Copjec’s interpretation of the ‘locked room/lonely room’.13 In her analysis of film noir, Copjec argues that ‘what film noir presents to us are spaces that have been emptied of desire. Or: the emptiness of the room indicates less that there is nothing in them than that nothing more can be got out of them’,14 a sentiment reversed in Dirty Weekend as the narrator avers that when ‘[y]ou begin to feed an appetite you didn’t know you had […] you came to see that it’s never enough’ (p. 172).
Carla Freccero argues that ‘what is romanticized in the figure of the serial killer, then, is an ideology of violence that presents violence as something originating in the private sphere’.15 Zahavi essentially subverts the masculine form of serial killer narrative by de-locating the origin of Bella’s victimisation less in her own private space, i.e. her own flat, and more in the public sphere, which ironically and consequently dramatises the feminists’ doubts regarding the notion of ‘a place called home’. Inundated with Tim’s harassing attention and calls, Bella’s private space is incessantly becoming a ‘lock[ed]’ place with ‘stale’ (p.8) air, and these images are used by Zahavi to create a sense of foreboding. Tim, therefore, is an embodiment of the masculine ideology that mercilessly infiltrates her space, and his ideological function is to maintain the security of the boundaries of masculine gender assumptions, trying to make sure that Bella will remain within the culturally secured place assigned by patriarchy. Zahavi uses Tim and other men that Bella encounters to demonstrate how patriarchal intrusion into private space is a major source of the collapse of the romantic idea of a home, highlighting its increasingly ambivalent status. As a satire Dirty Weekend foregrounds Tim’s flagitious infiltration into Bella’s space to raise moral alertness, questioning the legitimacy of his actions that physically immure her. It is through her encounters with her other ‘victims’ that Bella’s perception of her dwelling changes drastically, realising upon going ‘back to her own flat [that is…] unlikely to be missed […] the source of her damnation and her salvation. Her rest, her rented rat-hole, her little box of tricks.’ (p.140). Translated into spatial terms, this visual imagery enhances her sense of alienation – bona fide noir’s credo. This is also the noir sensibility that consequently invalidates the victim/perpetrator schism, creating a sense of complicity in the reader.
The change in the conception and perception of her space also mirrors her ontological uncertainties, reminiscent of the noir protagonist’s and the male serial killer’s schizophrenic identification with space. During her consultation with Nimrod, Bella demands: ‘Cut out my heart and put a stone in it’s place. I want vengeance’ (p.24). This demand has bifurcate functions. One, it shapes the ideological perspective of the text by reconfirming her status as the Other, consigning her further into an alienated position. Lee Horsley in her analysis of male psychopaths calls this ‘the stripping of the civilised part’ (p. 112), which is echoed by Mark Seltzer’s claim that ‘the devoided interior must be understood not as the cause of violence but as its desired effect: the production and externalisation of voided or dead places within’.16 Zahavi subverts this by celebrating Bella’s ‘otherness’, and in the process, allowing Bella to siphon off male oppression – her getting rid of pain. Two, the demand also announces Bella’s ability to transgress her ‘victim’ position, enabling her to assume her agency. Copjec, in her application of Lacanian psychoanalysis, suggests that the content of the emptiness is ‘finally visible for anyone to see’ once ‘desire gives way to drive’.17 Her desire (I want) is now manifested by her drive (vengeance). Hence, Bella’s interpretation of her interior emptiness makes way for her mobility or her ability to move out of her private space, resulting in her revengeful actions, which concurrently validate both her existence and action.
The celebration of Bella’s ‘otherness’ through the serial killer narrative is the key to Bella’s liberation, which in turn enables Zahavi to destabilise patriarchy and masculinity. Bella’s existential despair is rooted not in her fear of men, but in their destructive nature and tendency to inflict pain – ‘What they want they must posses. What they can’t posses they must penetrate. What they can’t penetrate they must destroy’ (p. 35). Bella’s fear can only be at the centre of the narrative when it is validated, and Zahavi’s strategy of validation is by ‘[g]iving flesh to your secret fears’ (p. 46). Although Nimrod (a male clairvoyant) is the one who helps to validate her fear, his status as a foreigner and Bella’s alienation are coexistent; thus allowing them to share the same spatial perspective. Likewise, Mr. Brown, who assists her in materialising her ‘tactics […] [and] strategy’ (p.63) by selling her an illegal gun is also an alienated figure, situating him outside the law as illegal gun dealer and a socially outcast as a homosexual (‘You mean I ‘m doing business with a bumboy, Mr. Brown?’ (p.81)). Essentially, one of Dirty Weekend’s main motives is to invalidate phallic power and Zahavi uses alienated male figures (Nimrod and Mr. Brown) as a destabilised representation of the phallus. Both male characters gave her weapons (flick-knife and gun), modulating their phallic symbolism into real weapons. Zahavi is aware enough not to fall into the trap of creating Bella as a phallic woman. Reference to a phallic symbol (including penis-envy (p.103) and a phallic god (p.108)) is made several times in Dirty Weekend, magnifying the significance of the satirical view of misogynistic traits in this serial killer narrative. Bella’s powerlessness without a real gun (‘She might be a nobody, but the gun makes her somebody’ (p.129)) is a salient indication of Zahavi’s intention to both reduce its symbolic power and importantly, to analogically belittle men’s reliance on their biological penises to oppress women, proving by the fact that the crimes committed by men in Dirty Weekend are sexual and gender related. Zahavi uses satirical tools to deride, exaggerate, show contempt, and to illustrate how serial killing is an apt expression of self-insertion that validates Bella’s existence.
Besides validating Bella’s existence and action, her serial killing concatenates the transgression of spatial boundaries that appropriately mark her liberation. As mentioned in the earlier section, the structure of the serial killer narrative is centrifugal – spiralling away from the centre: Bella’s first murder takes place in her neighbour, Tim’s, house and further killings occur into a hotel, a parking lot, and the road – indicating her growing mobility and agency. This newly found mobility and power through serial killing provides the aegis in dealing with her existential despair; she satirically reinvents herself ‘until she became their most fertile fantasy […] The lilith of their dreams’ (p. 94), signifying her ability to assimilate with the outside world, and is enhanced by her feeling comfortable and liking ‘its anonymity’ (p. 102).
The narrative climax of Dirty Weekend takes place towards the end of the novel when, before leaving for London, Bella encounters a male serial killer. Zahavi intentionally named him Jack (‘She thought that she heard him say his name was Jack’ (p.184)) to evoke both the notorious Jack the Ripper and the major concern of her satiric text, that is, an attack on male sexual violence. This encounter is flagrantly ideological for three reasons: one, by naming the serial killer Jack, the novel highlights the perpetual confrontation of the feminine and masculine ideological motives in the serial killer narrative; two, by juxtaposing two supposedly mythical figures, Dirty Weekend reveals its actual mechanic of criticising male sexual violence, attacking it at the symbolic and fantastic levels. As a consequence, what remains unchallenged is the real, and as Bella’s existence has already been validated, the actual encounter is automatically reduced from a cosy pseudo-battle to a real physical encounter, allowing Bella to get the better of Jack; three, in addition to validating Bella’s existence, the encounter also shows Bella’s intransigent attitude towards female oppression through sex. Although their physical closeness resembles the act of making love, an intimacy usually reserved for lovers’ erotic union, the encounter foregrounds Bella’s control over the situation:
She grunted as she stabbed him, but softly, like a lady […] They grunted back and forth. They sounded like a courting couple, grunting in the shadows of the pier. (p.183)
Indeed, the quote above illustrates how the narrator eroticises the act of killing Jack, bringing women’s life-long suffering to an end. Dirty Weekend ends appropriately with a warning:
If you see a woman walking, if she’s stepping quietly home, if you see her flowing past you on the pavement [….] Think on. Don’t touch her […] For unknowingly, unthinkingly you might have laid your heavy hand on Bella. And she’s woken up this morning with the knowledge that she’s finally had enough. (p.185)
As a noir text, this warning provides an unsettling ending, not because of its revelation that women are no longer succumbing to male oppression, but because these women’s duende is inescapable, pre-destined, and fatal.
Unlike Bella in Dirty Weekend, the female serial killer in Marc Behm’s The Eye struggles to find a way of validating her existence and liberation. There are two reasons for this. One is that the narrative structure of TheEye itself, is a regurgitation of the hard-boiled private eye tradition, which is a masculine genre par excellence. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner cites that The Eye is ‘a private eye novel to end private eye novels’ (The Eye of the Beholder, Cover, 1999), foregrounding not only the satiric and cynical nature of the novel but also its noir vision. In TheEye, the male protagonist is more akin to the vigilantism of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer than Sam Spade’s authoritative professionalism, which means that the Eye is not motivated by monetary, but personal reasons. However, unlike Mike Hammer, the Eye’s personal reason is the interpretation of his existential despair and not revenge. This existential despair is rooted in noir’s sense of determinism related to his perpetual guilt of not knowing his own daughter Maggie. Secondly, a close third person narration is used that is effective in producing a subjective point of view. The third person point of view enables the novel to modulate the male protagonist’s existential despair into fatal obsession noir style, and the femme fatale is the object of his obsession. Underlined by his wife’s sneering message: ‘Here’s your fucking daughter, asshole! I bet you don’t even recognize her, you prick! P.S. Fuck you!’ (p.8), this narrative style also encourages the audience to feel sympathetic towards him, and the picture of ‘a group shot of fifteen little girls sitting at tables in a classroom’ (ibid.) is used by Marc Behm as an object cataphor, a form of suspense device that essentially portends the Eye’s eventual fatal ending.
When the Eye embarks on ‘The Hugo job’ (p.12), he is drawn into a web of murderous activities perpetrated by a multiple personality female serial killer, Joanna. This is the way the novel transfers the value of the object cataphor from the classroom photo to the female serial killer figure, foregrounding the narrative’s effort to objectify her. Cataphor, according to Deborah Knight and George McKnight in their study of suspense is ‘an advance reference signalling some event or action that could occur later in the story’18, and in the context of the noir narrative, facilitates the formation of the inevitable entrapment of the male protagonist. One important value of cataphor is the indication of its spatial dynamics that it creates and negotiates between the male protagonist and the female serial killer, as in order for suspense to take place, a direct link between the characters and event should be established, and the linkage is situated within the space where the event takes place. What this means, in noir terms, is that the male protagonist and the female serial killer are now destined to meet and occupy the same space, a choice that the latter eventually comes to make. It is through this understanding of the female serial killer’s status as an object cataphor – the doublet of which are literal manifestations of the Eye’s existential despair and fatal ending - and her identification with her shared space with the male protagonist, that her struggle for validation can be seen. Noir’s cynicism about masculine ideology as well as its tendency to show the corrupt world through the protagonist’s satiric eyes shows the extent of the genre’s amenability, invariably allowing the female serial killer to find her own voice, thus signalling her liberation and power. Joanna’s ability to mobilise beyond personal spaces is an indication of not only her liberation and power but also a criticism of the noir world she inhabits.
TheEye has a strong satirical motif, using the Eye’s view of women as a hyperbole; while it foregrounds the fragmented image of women, it crucially criticises the validity of the Eye’s ostensible omnipotent gaze. At the outset of the novel, the Eye is bombarded with images of nude women in a Playboy magazine: ‘MISS AUGUST, far-out Peg Magee (left) is turned on by Arab movies, skin diving, Mahler, and zoology.’ ‘MISS DECEMBER, demure Hope Korngold (right), admits her erotic fantasies often involve subways, buses, and ferryboats. All aboard!’ (p.8). Less than an hour later, he looks at a photo of ‘a group shot of fifteen little girls’ (ibid.). These multiple images of women that concatenate the themes of anonymity and fragmentation are central to the formulation of the Eye’s gaze, giving the impression that women are reduced to mere images or objects of male fantasy. None the less, Joanna – the female serial killer – sees this ‘Playboy mentality’ as a joke. As an illustration, when responding to her husbands, Dr. Brice, who asks: ‘What kind of nonsense is that? Masturbation is … lonely’ (p.35), Joanna laughs: ‘Where did you read that? In Playboy?’ (p.36), leaving him ‘ashamed of his moribund reaction’ (ibid.) In this light, Joanna’s character is born out of the need to deconstruct the monolithic assumption of the Eye’s gaze, and her cynicism is the very weapon she uses to shield herself from him. Joanna’s light-hearted attitude towards male gaze is embodied in her countless physical transformations, which are the articulation of her contumacious protest and resistance against such a gaze.
Marc Behm intertwines the dichotomy of privacy and publicity to effectively form the conflicting noir world inhabited by the main characters as well as a reversal of the standard doppelganger narrative, allowing the female serial killer to exhibit her subjectivity. In the standard doppelganger narrative, for instance in Robert Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror,19 the psychologically dark twin is the embodiment of destructive sexuality (she actually commits murder), while the good one represents the redeeming aspect of the chaotic noir world. In TheEye, however, there are two kinds of pairing involved. One, the pairing of the Eye with Joanna that essentially produces mystifying effect, a result of the display of a range of emotions, from sympathy to alienation. This pairing is a crucial noir mechanism that creates a sense of complicity as the point of identification, which in the Eye’s point of view, is gradually disintegrating. What this does is to create a more sympathetic femme fatale through the attempted transfer of guilt, reflecting in turn the irony in the Eye’s voyeurism. Second, the multiple personality that Joanna performs and displays is used by Behm to explore her subjectivity more profoundly. What this effectively does is to ultimately create ‘a sympathetic character because of the space provided for a counter-image of inner struggle to emerge’,20 foregrounding Joanna’s subjectivity, allowing us to feel sympathetic when she appeals: ‘Don’t hurt her…please don’t hurt her’ (p.110). With such sympathy, she is validated, ‘blissful [and] [r]eprived’ (p.139). In addition to exposing the femme fatale’s survival needs in a male dominated world that degrades women, Behm allows this narrative style to give history to her subjectivity (‘Well, I’ll tell you. I lost my childhood and my youth. My father and my husband. And my mind –’ (p. 156)), forming a melancholic mood that epitomises the noir sense of loss, alienation and victimisation. Serial killing, hence, is her means of demonstrating her resistance to her own objectification.
The novel consistently extenuates the power of the Eye’s gaze, questioning its legitimacy. The Eye’s obsession with Joanna foregrounds the male protagonist’s perpetual entanglement with the femme fatale. In the standard canonical noir narrative, the romantic entanglement between the male protagonist and the femme fatale is one of the major causes of him being sucked into noir’s underworld. The Eye, on the contrary, problematises this romantic entanglement by creating a platonic bond between the Eye and Joanna, which consequently negates the idea that the femme fatale in the novel is the embodiment of the Eye’s fantasy, shifting the femme fatale’s fatalism from her sexuality to her fragmented identity, i.e. her ‘otherness’. The Eye immediately develops a fatal obsession with her multiple personality that he showers her with his ‘shepherding love’ (p. 158), using her as his source of redemption. He is desperate and doomed, admitting that ‘He needed this. Her. [Original italic] She was his appeasement, his rod and his staff in the valley of death. And he was hers’ (p.60). His obsession highlights the flaw in his character and judgement, and the novel deliberately belittles him, cynically reducing him into ‘just some little peeper’ (p. 108).
One key structural element of noir concerns the blurring and entanglement of the notion of the victim and perpetrator, mystifying the reader’s association with the protagonist. This signals the collapse of spatial boundary, allowing both characters to coexist in the same space. Initially Joanna is the object of the Eye’s investigation, and she exists within his perceptual space, however, as the story progresses, there is evidence of Joanna’s retaliation against the Eye’s gaze. Though initially more subtle, for instance, during the first ‘meeting’ with the Eye, ‘she turned quickly and glanced at the Eye, or beyond him, at - what?’ (p.17), her retaliation increasingly becomes more conspicuous and certain, aptly demonstrated as it is her resistance that makes her more aware of the fact that she is being watched:
Then she looked over her shoulder, straight into the Eye’s hiding place.
‘There’s somebody there, Jim!’ She pushed him aside. ‘He’s watching us!’
Brice jumped up. ‘You gotta be kidding!’
‘Over there,’ she pointed. ‘Look!’
‘There’s nobody there, Jo!’
‘Yes, there is!’ (p. 36)Upon realizing that she has been followed, ‘she […] stood in the lobby watching everyone who came through the doorway behind her.’ (p.55) On guard to the hilt, she decides to hire a private eye, Kinski, to find out who has been following her; thus blurring the hunter/hunted schism.
One of the existential effects of the blurring of the hunter/hunted binary opposition is manifested in the way the Eye’s existence is reduced to that of an amorphous figure, moving like a phantom. In many instances, she ‘looked straight at the Eye’ but she ‘saw only the passing traffic’ (p.98). What this suggests is the strategy that Joanna develops, turning the Eye into the ‘other’ himself, apotheosising him as her ‘poltergeist’ (p.141). At the level of ideological symbolism her strategy essentially reverses and destabilizes the Eye’s ontological status, allowing the lopsided relationship to grow into a symbiosis as both figures are now conflated into alienated individuals in the noir world. The Eye is now a ‘spirit that I invented to haunt myself […] I won’t have you gunning down my spirit’ (ibid.), and she also finds him ‘comforting’ (p.174), making him the source of her redemption, a reversal from the standard noir characterization.
In addition to mirroring the destabilisation of the Eye’s ontological status, Joanna’s ability to transgress personal space is facilitated by her ability to perform different gender roles. Joanna’s multiple personality acts not only as a survival skill but also as a sign of revenge for the oppression she receives from men. The Eye obligingly explains the motivation behind her serial killing, when upon the Eye’s visit to Dr. Darras, she concedes:
‘What did you tell her [Joanna] to do, Dr. Darras?’
‘I?’ She frowned. ‘I told her to confront life. To fight. Not to yield or grovel.’
‘Well, that’s just what she’s done.’ (p.91)The fluidity of gender identity warrants Joanna more space and allows her to form a female friendship with Becky Yemassee, whom she grooms to look and behave like her. They become partners in crime and hold a stake out together at a gas station where Becky is shot dead. After Becky’s death is announced, Joanna takes her revenge by killing ‘seven men that night’ (p.176), evincing the idea that Joanna’s action is a sign of her refusal to become a victim, and her mobility defines the power and liberation that she possesses. Indeed, towards the end when the Eye prays that Joanna will shoot and kill him so that he can be ‘at peace for a while!’ (p. 206), Joanna’s shot only manages to injure him, thus denying him eternal peace. Ultimately, at the last moment of her life: ‘Her eyes opened, and she smiled at him. “Yes, I know you”. ‘You were in the park … you had a camera … you took my picture”’ (p.209), foregrounding The Eye’s sombre and bleak vision.
Copyright © 2005 by Jamaluddin Bin Aziz
Notes
1 Sally R. Munt, Murder By The Book?, 1994, p.206
2 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 1994, p.127
3 After the Lovedeath, 1997, p.2
4 E. Ann Kaplan, Women in Film Noir, 2000, p. 10.
5 The Women Who Knew Too Much, 1988, p. 2
6 Space, Place and Gender, 1998, p.10
7 After the Lovedeath, 1997, p.139
8 Murder by the Book?, 1994, p.203
9 ‘American Psychos: The Serial Killer in Contemporary Fiction’, Journal of American Culture, 16(1993), p.108
10 Catherine R. Stimpson, Where the Meanings are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces, 1988, p. xvi.
12 Serial Killers, 1998, p.165
13 Shades of Noir, 1993, p.189
15 ‘Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho’, Diacritics, 27(1997), p. 48.
16 Serial Killers, 1998, p. 167
17 Shades of Noir, 1993, p.188
18 Richard Allen and S. Ishii Gonzales (eds.) Alfred Hitchcock Centenary Essays, 1999, p. 108-109.
20 Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller, 2001, p. 137
