Carnal Thoughts. Vivian Sobchack
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a number of years ago I published an essay on several low-budget science fiction / horror films made in the late 1950s and early 1960s that focused on middle-aged female characters.7 I was interested in these critically neglected films because, working through genres deemed fantastic, they were able to displace and disguise cultural anxieties about women and aging while simultaneously figuring them in your face, so to speak. For example, in Attack of the 50-Ft. Woman (Nathan Juran, 1958), through a brief (and laughable) transformative encounter with a giant space alien, wealthy, childless, middle-aged, and brunette Nancy achieves a literal size, power, and youthful blondeness her philandering husband, Harry, can no longer ignore as she roams the countryside, wearing a bra and sarong made out of her bed linens, looking for him. In The Wasp Woman (Roger Corman, 1959) Janet Starlin, the fortyish and fading owner of a similarly fading cosmetics empire, can no longer serve as the model for advertising her products (“Return to Youth with Janice Starlin!”) and overdoses in secret experiments with royal “wasp jelly,” which not only reduces but also reverses the aging process. There are, however, side effects, which regularly turn the again youthful cosmetics queen into a murderous insect queen (with high heels, a sheath dress, and a wasp's head). And, in The Leech Woman (Edward Dein, 1960), blowzy, alcoholic, despised June becomes her feckless endocrinologist husband's guinea pig as they intrude on an obscure African village to find a secret “rejuvenation serum.” Made from orchid pollen mixed with male pituitary fluid (the extraction of which kills its donors), the serum allows June to experience, if only for a while, the simultaneous pleasures of youth, beauty, and revenge—in the tribal ritual of her transformation, she chooses her husband as pituitary donor. The Leech Woman is the most blatant of these movies about ageism, not only in plot but also in dialogue. The wizened African woman who offers June her youth speaks before the ritual:
For a man, old age has rewards. If he is wise, the gray hairs bring dignity and he is treated with honor and respect. But for the aged woman, there is nothing. At best, she's pitied. More often, her lot is of contempt and neglect. What woman lives who has passed the prime of her life who would not give her remaining years to reclaim even for a few moments of joy and happiness and know the worship of men. For the end of life should be its moment of triumph. So it is with the aged women of Nandos, a last flowering of love, beauty—before death.
In each of these low-budget SF-horror films scared middle-aged women are transformed into rejuvenated but scary women—this not through cosmetic surgery but through fantastical means, makeup, and special effects. Introduced as fading (and childless) females still informed by—but an affront to—sexual desire and the process of biological reproduction, hovering on the brink of grotesquerie and alcoholism, their flesh explicitly disgusting to the men in their lives, these women are figured as more horrible in—and more horrified by—their own middle-aged bodies than in or by the bodies of the “unnatural” monsters they become. In this regard Linda Williams's important essay, “When the Woman Looks,” is illuminating. Williams argues that there is an affinity declared and a look of recognition and sympathy exchanged between the heroine and the monster in the horror film. The SF-horror films mentioned here, however, collapse the distance of this exchange into a single look of self-recognition. Touching on this conflation of woman and monster in its link with aging, Williams writes:
There is not that much difference between an object of desire and an object of horror as far as the male look is concerned. (In one brand of horror film this difference may simply lie in the age of its female stars. The Bette Davises and Joan Crawfords considered too old to continue as spectacle-objects nevertheless persevere as horror objects in films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962] and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte [1965]).8
Indeed, such horror and SF films dramatize what one psychotherapist describes as the culture's “almost visceral disgust for the older woman as a physical being,” and they certainly underscore “ageism” as “the last bastion of sexism.”9 These films also recall, particularly in the male—and self—disgust they generate, Simone de Beauvoir's genuine (if, by today's standards, problematic) lament:
[W]oman is haunted by the horror of growing old…. [T]o hold her husband and to assure herself of his protection,…it is necessary for her to be attractive, to please…. What is to become of her when she no longer has any hold on him? This is what she anxiously asks herself while she helplessly looks on at the degeneration of this fleshly object which she identifies with herself. She puts up a battle. But hair-dye, skin treatments, plastic surgery, will never do more than prolong her dying youth…. But when the first hints come of that fated and irreversible process which is to destroy the whole edifice built up during puberty, she feels the fatal touch of death itself.10
How, in the face of this cultural context, as a face in this cultural context, could a woman not yearn for a rejuvenation serum, not want to realize quite literally the youth and power she once seemed to have? In the cinematic—and moral—imagination of the low-budget SF-horror films I've described above, aging and abject women are thus “unnaturally” transformed. Become suddenly young, beautiful, desirable, powerful, horrendous, monstrous, and deadly, each plays out grand, if wacky, dramas of poetic justice. No plastic surgery here. Instead, through the technological magic of cinema, the irrational magic of fantasy, and a few cheesy low-budget effects, what we get is major “attitude adjustment”—and of a scope that might even satisfy Barbra. The leech woman, wasp woman, and fifty-foot woman each literalize, magnify, and enact hyperbolic displays of anger and desire, their youth and beauty represented now as lethal and fatal, their unnatural ascendance to power allowing them to avenge on a grand scale the wrongs done them for merely getting older. Yet, not surprisingly, these films also maintain the cultural status quo—even as they critique it. For what they figure as most grotesque and disgusting is not the monstrousness of the transformation or the monster but rather the “unnatural” conjunction of middle-aged female flesh and still-youthful female desire. And—take heed, Barbra—the actresses who play these pathetic and horrific middle-aged women are always young and beautiful under their latex jowls and aging makeup. Thus, what these fantasies of female rejuvenation give with one hand, they take back with the other. They represent less a grand masquerade of feminist resistance than a retrograde striptease that undermines the double-edged and very temporary narrative power these transformed and empowered middle-aged protagonists supposedly enjoy—that is, “getting their own back” before they eventually “get theirs.” And, as is the “natural” order of things in both patriarchal culture and SF-horror films of this sort, they do get theirs—each narrative ending with the restoration and reproduction of social (and ageist) order through the death of its eponymous heroine-monster. Attitude adjustment, indeed!
These low-budget films observe that middle-aged women—as much before as after their transformations and attitude adjustments—are pretty scary. In Attack of the 50-Ft. Woman, for example, as Nancy lies in her bedroom after her close encounter of the third kind but before she looms large on the horizon, her doctor explains to her husband the “real cause” of both her “wild” story of an alien encounter and her strange behavior: “When women reach the age of maturity, Mother Nature sometimes overworks their frustration to a point of irrationalism.” The screenwriter must have read Freud, who, writing on obsessional neurosis in 1913, tells us: “It is well known, and has been a matter for much complaint, that women often alter strangely in character after they have abandoned their genital functions. They become quarrelsome, peevish, and argumentative, petty and miserly; in fact, they display sadistic and anal-erotic traits which were not theirs in the era of womanliness.”11
Which brings us back again to Barbra, whom it turns out we never really left at all. In language akin to Freud's, the article on the production woes of Barbra's film in Entertainment Weekly performs its own form of ageist (psychoanalysis. The “steep attrition rate” among cast and crew and the protracted shooting schedule are attributed to both her “hyper-picky” “perfectionism” and to her being a “meddler” (8). We are also told: “Among the things she fretted over: the density of her panty hose, the bras she wore, and whether the trees would have falling leaves” (9). A leech woman, wasp woman, fifty-foot woman—in Freud's terms, an obsessional neurotic: peevish, argumentative, petty, sadistic, and anal-erotic. Poor Barbra. She can't win for losing. Larger