Fluid Fantasies: Splash and Children of a Lesser God more

Fluid Fantasies: Splash and Children of a Lesser God Susan Felleman "Talk about beauty and the beast . . . she's both"1 The representation of the feminine as Other has been a commonplace focus of critical feminist scholarship at least since 1949, when Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex undertook its ambitious mythographical analysis of the construction of femininity.2 Feminist film theorists have found the Other exemplified and imagined most consistently and leg- ibly in the cinematic production of what is called "classical" Holly- wood drama, as it was there, in Hollywood, under the efficient, and therefore codified, mechanics of the studios, that filmic representation of sexual difference became most formulaic, as did representation of all socially constructed differences, including age, class, race and na- tionality. In recent feminist film analyses, however, many critics have con- cerned themselves with contemporary cinema, particularly films which, in the absence of the codified and more or less predictable tropes that governed classical cinema, seem to make issues of difference symp- tomatic, as they become sites of contemporary angst.3 Modern in- dustry, technology and media have so altered our contemporary un- derstanding of the dichotomy between illusion and reality, Teresa de Lauretis suggests, that "it is not by chance that all the nature-culture thresholds are being thematized and transgressed in recent movies: incest, life/death (vampires, zombies, and other living dead), human/ non-human (aliens, clones, demon seeds, pods, fogs, etc.), and sexual difference (androgyns, transsexuals, transvestites, or transylvanians). Boundaries are very much in question, and the old rites of passage no longer avail."4 This symptomatic display of postmodern angst in contemporary, post-studio American cinema calls for more complex exegesis, as nei- ther the cinematic apparatus nor the industry that controls it are notably more stable than those boundaries themselves. Whether or not the gaze is male,5 its objects are cast against a shiftier background and Splash (Ron Howard, 1984) 110 cast more ambiguous shadows in many recent films. This would seem to be due, in part, to directors working much more independently of studios today. Yet, at the same time, they are more anxiously dependent upon producing a saleable product since television and home video - technology are constantly affecting and altering the marketplace, and women are finally, if still slowly, penetrating the film industry. Thus, in addition to asking basic questions about the cinematic apparatus (in theory as immutable as the unconscious itself) and its inherent, structural capacity to simulate and to stimulate psychic phe- nomena,6 it is critical to examine how the age-old mythology of Woman is bodied forth in contemporary cinematic productions. This essay examines two recent commercial films, Splash (Touchstone, 1984; directed by Ron Howard) and Children of a Lesser God (Paramount, 1986; directed by Randa Haines), both of which participate in the representation of woman as Other. The two films share critical narrative and iconographic elements and yet belong to entirely different genres. Both are centered upon romance, but while Splash is at once a romantic comedy and a fable, Children of a Lesser God is a "message picture," a contemporary melodrama. Fables have rarely been the basis for successful commercial films, probably because the classical Hollywood film's modus operandi has typically been mimesis, the privileging of the spectator's empathetic response through the transparency of the apparatus, facilitating "sus- pension of disbelief" and the illusion of reality. Melodrama, once a staple product of Hollywood, has had to go underground, so to speak, not into an alternative cinema, rather ensconcing itself within the seemingly more complex, realistic forms demanded by an audience perceived to reject the monolithic assumptions and territorial restric- tions of that genre. Thus, both films to an extent appropriate anachronistic devices, obscuring these behind the realism of detail so ubiquitous in contem- porary film. In each case, the discursive method serves to reveal (Splash) or disguise (Children) the meaning that inheres in its narrative and its iconography. So, while superficially Splash might appear to deal in ludicrously sexist assumptions, as a mere exposition of its basic plot would indicate, and Children of a Lesser God might appear to plead for recognition of feminine subjectivity, as its script does, in fact, actual analysis of each film's structure reveals that Splash finally raises more questions about the representation of Woman as Other than does Children of a Lesser God, which never escapes the phallocentric terms of this discourse. Close examinations of these two films, then, will allow us to evaluate the "state of the art," as it were, in the production and deconstruction of the myth of the feminine. Immersion and Immanence: The Watery World of Woman 111 Over and over again: the women-in-the-water; woman as water, as a stormy, cavorting, cooling ocean, a raging stream, a waterfall; as a limitless body of water that ships pass through, with tributaries, pools, surfs and deltas; woman as the enticing (or perilous) deep, as a cup of bubbling body fluids; the vagina as wave, as foam, as a dark place ringed with Pacific ridges; love as the collision of two waves, as a sea voyage, a slow ebbing, a fish-catch, a storm . . . / What Klaus Theweleit describes in this compilation of metaphors from his Male Fantasies is nothing new. These conventions that link femi- ninity to fluid are so familiar that they are rarely questioned. The watery woman and the underwater woman are manifestations of an idea of femininity as immanent, as part of nature and nature's pro- cesses, as organically fluid and sensually immersed (and immersing). These conventions are so versatile and so very suitable for summarizing the traditional yet variable characteristics of the feminine mystique, as evidenced in the variables of Theweleit's list, that the invocation of the metaphor can refer to any number of notions about Woman. Thus, the immersion of the figure of Woman in the contemporary cinema takes its place in a distinguished and infinitely varied history of such representations in Western culture, including the birth of Venus, watery mythological hybrids such as sirens, naiads and nymphs, Rhine maid- ens, the legends of Melusine, Undine, the Lorelei and the Little Mer- maid, to name just a few. Splash's Madison (Darryl Hannah), a cer- tifiable mermaid, and Children of a Lesser God's Sarah (Marlee Matlin), not a mermaid, but a deaf woman who is most truly "herself" when "sensually lost in her own silent world as she swims,"8 then, have a common genealogy. But is there a common meaning—an epis- temological source—that illuminates the prevalence of these images? The Fall: Man's Secret Desire Nor shall I ever forget the instance of the young homosexual with an indissoluble fixation upon his mother, who in adolescence lay on the bottom of a bathtub filled with warm water and in order to be able to maintain this archaic aquatic status or foetal situation breathed through a long tube protruding from the water which he held in his mouth.9 As Sandor Ferenczi's recollection suggests, psychoanalysis offers one answer to the question of the meaning of the mermaid (and here I refer to any female figure associated with water): she represents the Mother in the most primitive sense, water being the embracing amniotic fluid of the womb. Thus, Freud finds that: 112 Birth is regularly expressed in dreams by some connection with water: one falls into the water or one comes out of the water—one gives birth or one is born. ... In myths a person who rescues a baby from the water is admitting that she is the baby's true mother. There is a well-known comic anecdote according to which an intelligent Jewish boy was asked who the mother of Moses was. He replied without hesitation: 'The Princess.' 'No', he was told, 'she only took him out of the water.' 'That's what she says', he replied, and so proved that he had found the correct interpretation of the myth.10 This interpretation, proposed by Freud, and expanded into an am- bitious and symptomatic phylogenetic theory by Ferenczi in his Thal- assa, quoted from above, casts light on our two films. In both Splash and Children of a Lesser God the male protagonists' romances are initiated by their falling into the water and into the arms of the woman. In neither instance, however, is the fall strictly speaking accidental. In the first scene of Splash, Allen Bauer (Tom Hanks), an eight-year- old child, enigmatically, but quite deliberately, throws himself off a boat into the ocean, wherein he is rescued by little Madison, the mermaid. The entire plot of Splash depends absolutely on this event; as an adult, Allen suffers from an uncanny nostalgia clearly derived from this "primal scene." In Children of a Lesser God, a less fabulous scenario is introduced by James's (William Hurt) fall into water. Pursuing "the most mys- terious, beautiful, angry" Sarah to the edge of a pool where she is Children of a Lesser God (Raina Haines, 1986) swimming, he falls in the water while attempting, in sign language, to tell her that he is falling in love with her. The metaphorical analogy between falling in water and falling in love, explicit in the film's script, is embodied by the incident, which results in James's and Sarah's immediate underwater lovemaking, which seems to be facilitated, rather than impeded by their subaqueous environment (don't they have to breathe?). Whereas Freud recognizes the prenatal fluid of the mother's womb as the predominant source of such symbolism,11 Ferenczi, in Thalassa, explores the more esoteric possibility alluded to by Freud—that man, as evolved from a once aquatic creature, retains a phylogenetic memory of water-bound existence and that our experiences and notions of birth, death and coitus are all linked to the traumatic rupture neces- sitated by the recession of waters and subsequent adaptation to dry land: The interpretation of being rescued from water or of swimming in water as a representation of birth and as representation of coitus . . . which is current in psychoanalysis, demands therefore a phylogenetic interpretation in addition; falling into the water would again be the more archaic symbol, that of the return to the uterus, while in rescue from water the birth motif or that of exile to a land existence seems to be emphasized.12 The merits of Ferenczi's theory are less the issue here than the asso- ciation he observes between birth and coitus imagery, particularly as these are involved with water, and the concomitant relationship to notions of motherhood.13 Splash is almost explicit in its suggestion that Allen's romantic ennui is symptomatic of a repressed preOedipal fantasy and that his romance with a mermaid is, in fact, an enactment of that fantasy. The mermaid, of course, with a monolithic tail instead of two legs, is a thinly veiled symbol of the Phallic Mother. This interpretation of Allen's problem is substantiated in Splash through a clinically manifold set of male characters, each of whom has his own "solution." Whereas Allen's solution is theoretically impossible (but not textually or cinemati- cally),—that is, the actual acquisition of the Phallic Mother in the form of a fetishized woman who, at least in her primary form, does not "lack," and an almost literal return to the womb —the more clinically plausible scenarios are offered by the film's comedic sidekicks, the characters of Freddie (John Candy), Allen's brother, and Dr. Kornbluth (Eugene Levy), the obsessed scientist. Freddie, already a voyeur at 10, is a lascivious consumer of porn magazines and skin flicks. This and his chronic attempts to look up women's skirts are blatantly illustrative of a scopophilic, voyeuristic 114 perversion and hint at fetishism as well (in that what one sees, pre- sumably, when looking up a woman's skirt, is not her genitalia but her underwear). Dr. Kornbluth, were he not such a pathetic schlemiel, would be a case study in sublimation, his infantile fantasy having been transformed into "scientific" curiosity. In that his determined search for evidence of mermaids is in "real life" terms ridiculous, however, there is a degree of delusional neurosis represented in his character, not unlike that of Dr. Norbert Hanold, the deluded archaeologist of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva, the subject of Freud's Delusion and Dream.14 That Kornbluth turns out to be right, after all, is of little consequence if one recognizes Madison not as a reality, but rather a reification of this particular collective fantasy. This nearly transparent mapping out of male desire and dysfunction is facilitated through the mechanism of comedy. Freddie and Dr. Korn- bluth are perceived, at the film's most superficial level, strictly as vehicles of laughter, neither bearing a particularly central role in the film's core narrative of Allen's and Madison's love affair. Additional ease is afforded this hardly subliminal content by negating the role of parents. Allen's and Freddie's father, we learn at one point, is long dead. There is no mention of their mother (the implication is that she too is dead). The only mature female character in Splash is Mrs. Stimmler (Dody Goodman), Allen's secretary, who is hilariously mixed-up, silly and confused for the duration of the story as the result of a recent accident (she was struck by lightning). She, too, appears to figure strictly as a comedic sideline, but her dizziness and dislocated sensibilities might signify at another level the unbearable, disenchanting "reality" of the /?os*Oedipal mother (substitute).15 In Children of a Lesser God, similar dynamics are thickly obscured. It is neither in the characterology of the protagonists nor in the narrative itself that Sarah is revealed as a male fantasy, but in the film's very structuring of word and image. The elision of the terms of falling in love/water discussed above is one such example. Many others are concerned with sets of oppositions wherein James's masculinity is defined in terms of what Sarah is not and has not. Language and speech, as will be discussed shortly, are the operative issues. Thus, given this obscurity, it is difficult to read Sarah as a sign of male desire for the mother, as such. James, as a character, lacks the dysfunctional disturbances that make Allen's case so poignantly clear in Splash. This protagonist is manifestly without neurotic traits, in fact is the epitome of masculine strength, prerogative and transcendent will. The task of sorting through Children of a Lesser God's hermeneutic system, then, is less a task of reading just below the surface of its narrative and 115 more one of examining its terms. The fantasy of returning to an imaginary, perhaps prenatal existence in fluid, harmonious symbiosis that is suggested by the beauty of James's and Allen's underwater romances is then a major undercurrent (as it were) in the two narratives. Other currents manifest in the sexual dramas of both films involve associated characteristics of the female Other and of male desire that complicate and sometimes react against this fantasy—which also represents a kind of death drive—revealing the ambivalence and anxiety engendered by the Other and desire for her. Bacchic Abandon: Woman's Sexual Appetite A curious feature of both Madison and Sarah is their overt sexual appetite and aggressiveness. In Splash, it is the mermaid who initiates every sexual encounter, from the first kiss to the first fuck. So voracious is Madison's sexual desire that she cannot wait until she and Allen are in the privacy of his apartment, but rather seizes him on the elevator when he brings her home. Indeed, Madison's immodesty is understood (by the viewer, unlike Allen, privileged with knowledge of Madison's nonhumanity) as entirely natural—she has no sense of privacy—thus, she is not in the least self-conscious about her nakedness when she emerges from the water at New York's Liberty Island. Allen responds to Madison's innate initiative with simultaneous delight and disbelief. The disbelief engenders some suspicion and doubt, particularly when he is not with Madison, but never manifest fear or anxiety. Such is not the case in Children of a Lesser God. Sarah, too, is sexually ravenous, but her appetite is associated in several scenes with threatening (read castrating) characteristics. In a scene that precedes the conversion of Sarah's immense anger to sexual energy with James's fall into the water discussed above, she bitterly describes to James, who appears to believe her sexually ignorant, her sexual history. This consisted of practically prostituting herself at a rather young age to an indeterminately large number of teenage boys, acquaintances of her sister's. "Sex was always something I could do as well as hearing girls . . . better!" she signs. When, after describing this "sordid" past to James, she accuses him of wanting to deflower the "poor, little, deaf virgin," he reacts with revealing violence: "Do you think I'm threatened by that? You think that I give a god damn that you fucked every pimply-faced teenager . . . ? I don't. I don't give a shit!" Sarah has clearly hit a raw nerve. 116 This raw nerve suffers quite a lot of irritation in the course of the film. Sarah's sexuality is on several occasions presented as excessive and on more than one as possibly hostile. After having seen the movie Some Like it Hot, she is so hot that she and James are barely inside the house when she is undressing and the two are "doing it" on the floor. In another scene, her lust is directly linked to anger when she interrupts an argument with James to propose they fuck. In the film's most explicit sex scene, the position is female superior and Sarah curtails their lovemaking out of anger, launching herself up and off the supine James. During Children of a Lesser God's climactic fight scene, James demonstrates that he believes Sarah's sexuality to be, in part, the enemy, when he challenges her to "use that little mouth of yours for something besides showing me that you're better than hearing girls in bed!" This seemingly unusual representation of aggressive feminine sex- uality, charming as it appears to be in Splash and frightening as it borders on being in Children of a Lesser God, suggests an uneasy and Splash (Ron Howard, 1984) precarious construction of Woman, the beauty of her natural imma- nence always too close to the horror of animal excess. That Madison's nonhuman genealogy does not evidently include the enculturated fem- inine virtues of passivity and modesty and that Sarah's mouth is used as a sexual, and not an oratorical apparatus, that both display a rather Dionysian sexual power, suggests that both characters derive from a common conception of unbridled feminine nature—of what Woman 117 may be secretly, way down inside her cultural apparition. Silence: Speech, Subjectivity and Desire . . . there is no crime worse than silence, for it covers women's sex with its "thick veil," renders it inaccessible, indomitable, implacable: terrifying. ... it is this self-sufficiency that is unbearable: because he "envies" her unassailable libidinal position, man projects his own insufficiency, his own "envy," onto woman. If woman is silent, if she keeps a "thick veil" drawn over herself and her sex, she must have her reasons, and good reasons, for wishing to remain enigmatic: she has to hide that "cavity filled with pus," she has to hide the fact that she has "nothing to hide." By seeking to make herself enigmatic, woman is only continuing the work begun by nature. . . .16 Aside from their common aquatic predispositions, Sarah's and Mad- ison's most notable shared feature is their lack of speech. Madison, the mermaid, is entirely mute until, inspired by a television advertise- ment, she utters her first word: "Bloomingdale's." Within six hours of this first utterance, Madison has acquired a full, working vocabulary in the same manner—before the television display in the appliance department at Bloomingdale's. Initially, her speech is characterized by the platitudes and idioms of commercial soft-sell. Finally, it is entirely naturalistic, if a little "California," but it is always entirely received — never her own. Sarah's lack of speech is, of course, considerably more intractable and central to Children of a Lesser God's structure. She is deaf and has no access to the mimetic method adopted by Madison in Splash. James, her lover, is a speech teacher whose operative pedagogic as- sumption is that deaf people ought to (want to) speak. So utterly essential is speech to James's character that he talks to himself when alone, in lapses of consciousness he talks to people who cannot hear him and, most importantly, he is filled with anxiety and disbelief of Sarah's insistent disdain for speech. Language, which Sarah does have, in the form of sign language, is divorced from speech in Children of a Lesser God. James's anxiety is in no way assuaged by the fact that Sarah can communicate. His apparent panic derives from her inability (what he believes is unwill- ingness) to enunciate. Leading up to the climactic fight in which he accuses her, among other things, of willfully withholding her voice as a form of control, are manifold displays of James's insistent privileging of sonant expression. These suggest the masculine "envy" of the per- 118 ceived secret of feminine self-sufficiency discussed vis-a-vis the psy- choanalytic discourse by Sarah Kofman, cited above, and in reaction against this "envy" or anxiety, the "extortion" of speech in the psy- choanalytic process.17 The recurrent motif of James's offering to teach Sarah to speak, coupled with her rejection stands out: 1) their first meeting: "If you let me, I bet I could teach you how to speak;" 2) their second meeting: "Listen, how would you like to fake out Franklin and make me look real good?" 3) their first date: "You know, I am a really good teacher, though. You should let me help you." 4) After having visited Sarah's mother: "Let me help you, damn it!" 5) After they have become lovers, in bed: "God, I can't ever get close enough (pushes her away and signs), say my name. Just once—say my name (she shakes her head). I'm sorry, I need it, I'm so . . . (she withdraws, signing reproachfully). I know I promised, I'm sorry, I forgot... I don't want you to speak. ... It just came out!"18 In every instance, Sarah angrily (in sign language) insists that she does not want to speak, that she has more than enough communication skills, that it is others who lack them. The irony of this is that Sarah's insistence is always articulated by James. Children of a Lesser God's method for constructing "dialogue" between the speaking man and the signing woman, such that it can be understood by the audience, is monologic. James "translates" Sarah's signs into speech.19 This solution to the film's built-in problem is certainly not the only possible one; its employment reflects Children's symptomatization of sexual difference. The most interesting effect resulting from putting Sarah's signs into James's mouth is the film's solution to the inevitable problem of the shifting personal pronouns: "You" and "I." Up until a certain point in the film, James substitutes "you" for Sarah's signed "I" and "I" for her signed "you," e.g., "If you let me, I bet that I could teach you how to speak . . . (she signs) . . . and you could teach me . . ., but I don't want to mop the floor!" The filmic intention may well be to naturalize the incorporation of two "voices" (what do you call a nonvocal lin- guistic expression?) into one, but the semiotic result is the denial of Sarah's subjectivity: The sense of uniqueness, identity, and unity which we tend to associate with subjectivity are [sic] the effects of the ability to say "I" and to thereby appropriate language as one's own. But the dependence is reciprocal. Lan- guage is only possible because it is infused with subjectivity. The personal pronouns "I" and "you" enable the "conversion of language into dis- course," . . .20 It is not until Sarah's first lengthy (non)speech (what do you call an extended nonvocal discursive expression?), that the shifters begin shift- ing.21 Thereafter, James reverts to for the most part substituting "you" 119 for Sarah's signed "I" until the film's climax, wherein this very problem is raised by Sarah's hands through James's mouth: "Everyone's always told me who I am. And I let them. She wants. She thinks. And most of the time they were wrong. They had no idea what I'd said, wanted, thought. . . . you think for me—think for Sarah—as if there were no I. . . . Until you let me be an I the way you are, you can never come inside my silence and know me." The eloquence of this "speech" is contradicted by the film's election of James (as opposed to, for instance, subtitles) to "speak" it. For even, indeed especially, when he stops converting her "I" to a "you," he ends up appropriating her "I." It's a no-win situation for Sarah's subjectivity. Additionally, James's reaction to Sarah's plea for subjec- tivity is hostile: He stops signing and says bitterly, "Well, that's all very moving, but how are you going to manage? You can lock yourself back inside your precious silent castle . . . (Sarah signs something, evidently that James hasn't "heard" what she's been saying) I heard! I heard every word, goddamn it. I translated for myself. It went from your hands into my brain and out my mouth. And you know what? I think you're lying. I don't think that you think that being deaf is so goddamned wonderful! I think that you're scared to death to try. I think that it's nothing but stupid pride that's keeping you from speak- ing. Right? You want to be on your own? Then you'll learn to read my lips and use that little mouth of yours for something besides showing me that you're better than hearing girls in bed. (James stops signing and continues screaming) Read my lips! What am I saying? You want to talk to me? Then learn my language! Did you understand that? Of course you did. You've probably been reading lips for years, but that's the great control game, isn't it? I'm the controller. What a fucking joke! Now, come on! Speak to me! Speak! Speak to me!" James's devaluation of sign language, one that is shared by the film in its refusal to acknowledge sign language as a language like any other (suitable for subtitling, like any foreign language), suggests that Sarah's signing is something else. Indeed, the film itself emphasizes the physical (immanent) nature of signing in contradistinction to the dis- embodied (transcendent) character of speech.22 Sarah's "language" is so inextricably bound up in her body, so mimetic in its expression, that it collapses the semiotic distance between sign and referent, much as does the hieroglyphic, as Mary Ann Doane has described: . . . the hieroglyphic, like the woman, harbours a mystery, an inaccessible though desirable otherness. On the one hand, the hieroglyphic is the most readable of languages. Its immediacy, its accessibility are functions of its status as a pictorial language, a writing in images. For the image is theorized 120 in terms of a certain closeness, the lack of a distance or gap between sign and referent. ... it is the absence of this crucial distance or gap which also, simultaneously, specifies both the hieroglyphic and the female. . . . Too close to herself, entangled in her own enigma, she could not step back, could not achieve the necessary distance of a second look.23 That the hieroglyphic nature of sign language is collapsed within the figure of Sarah with the hieroglyphic nature of Woman is evidenced by the treatment of the marginal figure of Johnny, James's absolutely intractable student, who not only resists all attempts to make him speak, but also never is shown using sign language, either. He, a truly deaf man—has access neither to language (the symbolic) nor to the body. Sarah, then, is distinguished by the secret, mysterious hiero- glyphic that is her body. Reflection and Projection: Woman's Self-image Thus Sarah's body functions in Children of a Lesser God as the vehicle of her expression. Her language, such as it is, is bound to her body, and so, it is suggested, are her very thoughts, her cognition. Out for a walk by the shore one evening, Sarah "tells" James what waves "sound like" by staging a beautiful, auto-erotic performance, caressing her own body, rhythmically exalting and pressing her breasts and releasing them. Like her solitary swims and other instances where she is shown peacefully and gracefully alone, and in contrast to her bitter and difficult social interactions, this incident illustrates the primary narcissism conceived as the core of Sarah's character. This conception of feminine narcissism is precisely that described by Freud as "probably the purest and truest feminine type." This type is characterized by a "certain self-sufficiency" and: the importance of this type of woman for the erotic life of mankind must be recognized as very great. Such women have the greatest fascination for men. . . . the charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-sufficiency and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us. . . . It is as if we envied them their power of retaining a blissful state of mind—an unassailable libido-position which we ourselves have since abandoned. The great charm of the narcissistic woman has, however, its reverse side; a large part of the dissatisfaction of the lover, of his doubts of the woman's love, of his com- plaints of her enigmatic nature, have their root in this incongruity . . .24 Here Freud himself participates, as Sarah Kofman has described, in the mythology of the eternal feminine. Whereas male narcissism is described as pathological, inevitably a perversion, female narcissism, specifically the narcissism of "beautiful" women, is practically nor- 121 mative and the "truest feminine type." Sarah is a textbook fantasy of this truest type. Thus we find her often before a mirror in moments of introspective difficulty.25 This brings us back to Splash and to Madison, whose facile acqui- sition (incorporation) of language, complicates her status as an em- bodiment of the Other, that is as a function of the imaginary. In Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, the famous fairy tale that looms distantly in the background of such a tale as Splash, the little mermaid sacrifices her voice, as well as her tail, in order to court the love of a mortal man and his immortal soul: "But remember," said the witch, "once you have taken human form, you can never become a mermaid again! . .. And if you do not win the prince's love so that he will forget father and mother for your sake, cling to you with all his mind and let the priest place your hands in one another's so that you become man and wife, you will not get an immortal soul! The very first morning after he weds another, your heart will break, and you will become foam upon the water. . . . But you must pay me. . . . And it is no small thing I am asking for. You have the loveliest voice of all down here upon the bottom of the sea, and no doubt you think you will be able to bewitch him with it, but that voice you must give to me. The best thing you possess will I have in return for my precious drink! For I must give you my own blood in it . . ."26 The little mermaid, for the prospect of love and transcendence, accepts the witch's horrifying proposition and her tongue is cut off. The ob- vious analogy to castration in the mermaid's double loss—of tail and of tongue, as well as the displacement of the mother onto the figure of the witch,27 whose own blood allows the mermaid's metamorphosis, unmistakably betray the story's implicit allegory of feminine sexuality and sexualization. In Splash, significant liberties are taken with this story, that is as- suming it can be considered in some sense an adaptation. Madison is initially mute, but acquires language, magically, through the medium of television. She also becomes self-conscious through television, which functions as her tree of knowledge. Indeed, Madison is in most respects quite the opposite of the little mermaid. Whereas the little mermaid relinquishes her underwater world forever in order to aspire to human love and immortality, Madison has "six fun-filled days" leave on earth, the duration of the full moon, before she must either return to the sea or stay forever. She, like the little mermaid, comes out of the sea for the love of a man, but while every step the little mermaid takes on her human legs, though graceful and elegant, is "like treading on pointed tools and sharp knives,"28 Madison's earthly visitation entails neither agony nor speechlessness. If we examine the characteristics of Madison as a character, however, we find that she has no character. Whereas Andersen's mermaid story can be seen as an allegory of puberty, when a girl (particularly in the Victorian world) must subordinate herself and her powerful instincts to an oppressively patriarchal and Christian construction of woman- hood, Splash gives us a mermaid who is finally a mere projection of a culturally constructed ideal of femininity. This is why it is the tele- vision set, and not the mirror, before which Madison's self-image is activated. Like Freud's narcissistic woman, child, wild animal—like Sarah — Madison displays an innate self-sufficiency in her underwater form. And Allen, like James, is drawn to this enigmatic beauty. But whereas Sarah is conceived as a "real" narcissistic character and Children of a Lesser God constructs a melodrama around the fiction of her other- ness and its confrontation with James, Splash never affords Madison enough of a character to relocate her otherness from the realm of the imaginary to that of the real. Thus the dissatisfaction, doubt, anxiety and envy that accompany James's desire for Sarah are in Allen's case absent. It is not until he learns that Madison is "a fish" that his confidence in his object choice is shaken and it is shaken by the rev- elation that, in a certain sense, Madison is not real. The Horror, The Horror: Woman's Voice and Man's Dread Men have never tired of fashioning expressions for the violent force by which man feels himself drawn to woman, and side by side with his longing, the dread that through her he might die and be undone . . .29 When Allen finds Madison in the appliance department at Bloom- ingdale's and finds that she suddenly can communicate in impeccable English, the first question he asks her is her name." It's hard to say it in English," she replies. "Well just say it in your language," he suggests. "All right," she says, "my name is . . ." and lets out a sonic screech of so high a pitch that the picture tubes of all the TVs on display shatter. Allen's reaction, in Splash's typically understated comedic manner, is more one of embarrassment than horror: "How 'bout those Knicks?" he remarks to the stunned salesmen. If Allen finds Madison's idiosyncrasies somewhat odd, his utter en- chantment seems to prevent his doubts from becoming profound. In Children of a Lesser God, on the other hand, a similar scenario shows more immediate effect. At the end of the scene described above (p. 19), in which James accuses Sarah of willfully and selfishly withholding 123 speech, Sarah finally, in a moment of intense emotional anguish and frustration, in an uncontrollably distorted voice, explodes, screaming a string of desperate, unintelligible sentences accompanied by humil- iated and wretched gesticulations. James, aghast and seemingly dis- gusted, turns his head away from this terrifying display. The natural voices of Madison and Sarah, the menacing volume and pitch of their unintelligible "speech," suggest the dread of which Karen Horney writes in the citation above.30 These voices imply that beneath the blissfully beautiful and silent surface of the enigma, exists a creature "whose extraordinary and dangerous being might at any moment return through violence."31 The dread manifest in James's response, as well as the deferred dread that Allen experiences later, when the cumulative signals of Madison's uncannily alien behavior are explained by the revelation of her watery origins, reflects the underbelly of man's desire for the Other—his unconscious fear of being subsumed, of losing his carefully forged faith in the autonomy of his ego. As Horney additionally points out, "what he fears in women is something uncanny, unfamiliar, and mysterious. If the grown man continues to regard woman as the great mystery, in whom is a secret he cannot divine, this feeling can only relate ultimately to one thing in her: the mystery of motherhood."32 In the last analysis, it is the fact of motherhood, the epistemological intersection of life and death in her womb that generates this anxiety —this dread.33 The Music Box: Woman's Positioning in the Cultural Apparatus Where Sarah comes from, and where Madison comes from, there is no music. When Madison hears music for the first time, she likes it, so Allen gives her a music box with little dancers inside. Sarah, of course, has never heard and will never hear music. James loves music. The first thing he does upon moving into his new home is to set up his stereo and play a Bach recording. Some time after Sarah has moved in with him, he one day realizes that he hasn't listened to music since she came and lies down on the couch to listen to Bach, while Sarah sits obliviously, but not unhappily, in a corner, doing nothing, in front of a poster of musical instruments. Shortly, James gets up and removes the record. When Sarah looks at him inquiringly, he signs, "I can't enjoy it. I can't because you can't." Later, Sarah asks him to show her what Bach sounds like (as she had shown what waves sound like) and he attempts, miserably, to do so. He looks ridiculous; Sarah looks mystified. After their dreadful fight, Sarah goes home to her mother. 124 In an intimate and reconciliatory scene between the two women, Mrs. Norman (Piper Laurie), in a motherly gesture, recovers a music box, which evidently had belonged to the little deaf Sarah, and hands it to her daughter, who gazes fondly at the pirouetting ballerina within. The music box, a minor detail in each of the films, suggests the mechanism by which cinema in general, as a function of culture, or- ganizes the representation of Woman—how the desire and the dread attached to her otherness are contained. Music is culture and she doesn't have it. The music box is the cultural apparatus that allows Woman's beauty to be displayed, while circumscribing, indeed elim- inating, her powerful threat. While both Sarah and Madison (like the little mermaid), display ineffable grace (Sarah as she swims and even dances;34 Madison, too, when she swims and when she skates),35 they do not depend upon any musical fluency. Their grace is organic; their bodies respond to an internal flux or rhythm that man can only marvel at. The soundtracks of the two films, particularly in Children of a Lesser God, underscore the role of music. In these two films, as in all Hol- lywood productions, music functions as an indicator of "mood." Thus, in both, very "watery" music appends the images of Sarah and Madison swimming. In both films, such music is directly contrasted to the diegetic use of "cultural" music. The eerie, nondiegetic, mood music that describes the atmosphere that emanates from the realm of the Other lacks the structure, the complex harmonies or insistent rhythms characteristic of "actual" music. This is particularly striking in Chil- dren of Lesser God, which is virtually without silence, that very quality which is supposed to define Sarah, But Sarah's silence cannot be rep- resented and must be invoked through nonmusical music—pseudoam- bient sound. This must be in part because "silence in a cinema is embarrassing" and music serves "to conceal the furtive pleasure of indulging in private fantasies in public places,"36 but also because silence itself is defined as inaccessible. The Horror/The Beauty: Man's Transgression "I am not a fish!" screams Allen, submerged up to his chin, naked, awkward, humiliated, his hands covering his genitals, in Splash, after Madison has been found out. She and Allen both have been interred at the Museum of Natural History for observation. Before they are convinced that Allen is "only a man," the scientists try one more experiment. They hoist Madison into Allen's tank to observe their interaction. Allen now displays the horror and revulsion that had been deferred previously. "I guess they thought you might be one," says 125 Madison apologetically. Allen cannot bear to look at her and violently discourages her physical advances. He is released. No amount of scru- tiny shall reveal Allen to be a hybrid. The contrast between not only her anatomy, but Madison's very prettiness and grace underwater, and the ridiculous sight of Allen, water up to his chin, utterly out of his element, underlines the seemingly intraversable threshold between na- ture and culture. Allen's uncanny nostalgia for that something he felt closer to at the Cape, his unconscious nostalgia for Madison—the primal scene represented by his forgotten childhood encounter with her, is finally here confronted with that deferred dread. After Sarah leaves him, in Children of a Lesser God, James appears to become depressed. While Sarah is at home making amends with her mother, reconciling herself to the implications of the music box, James wanders—solitary, forlorn, confused—through his day-to-day life. Sitting at a noisy coffee shop, he plugs his ears with his fingers, a curious expression on his face. He walks by the shore. Finally, he immerses himself one night in the pool, naked, closes his eyes and is shown, in slow motion, suspended in what he imagines to be Sarah's world. In both films, the man is transposed into the immanent, cultureless, feminine environment. The contrast is illuminating. Allen's reaction, and the ridiculous sight of his body, shown full-length in a long shot, suggest the impossibility, at least in the "real" world, of this trans- position succeeding. Allen does not become a fish; he does not identify with Madison. James, on the other hand, believes in the possibility of having access to Sarah's element. Children of a Lesser God allows him to be seen as identified by fragmenting his body, as it had Sarah's in the film's prelude,37 avoiding the visibility of his genitals by showing him only from the waist up, using the ambient music associated with Sarah to invoke her "silence." Beauty and the Beast: Love and Transcendence Both Splash and Children of a Lesser God end with resolution and reconciliation. After escaping her imprisonment, Madison no longer has any choice—she must return, forever, to the sea. At the last moment before she is to leave him, Allen, who has come to accept Madison's difference, learns that he may go with her: Madison: I was ready to stay with you forever. Allen: I know, but now that they know who you are they're never going to leave you alone. Madison: I can't ever come back to you. Allen: I wish I could come with you. Madison: You can. Allen: How? Madison: It can be done. Allen: How?! Madison: Remember when you were eight years old and you fell off the ship? You were safe under the water, weren't you? Allen: Yeah . . . ? Madison: You were with me. Allen: You mean that was real? You mean that was you?! This is great! I can go with you and still come back and see Freddie at Christ- mas! Madison: (sadly) You can't ever come back. Allen: (despairingly, after a long pause) Madison . . . Madison: I understand. As Madison swims away, Allen suddenly changes his mind. Culture, which has been represented as ridiculous and oppressive throughout the film, particularly in figures of male authority—the police, the union, the scientific establishment, the museum, etc.—is here represented by the National Guard, who, as they close in on Madison, force Allen to make that happy and horrible decision between nature and culture, to relinquish this world forever, for eternal love and death. For this event can really only be understood as the actualization of the fantasy represented in Splash's opening (primal) scene, the child's return to the imagined symbiosis and inertia of the phallic mother's womb. Splash's "happy ending," then, engenders a profound ambivalence, demonstrating that the ultimate meaning of Allen's desire is an im- possibility: Aristophanes' myth pictures the pursuit of the complement for us in a moving, and misleading, way, by articulating that it is the other, one's sexual other half, that the living being seeks in love. To this mythical representation of the mystery of love, analytic experience substitutes the search by the subject, not of the sexual complement, but of the part of himself, lost forever, that is constituted by the fact that he is only a sexed living being, and that he is no longer immortal.38 Annihilation is the meaning of Allen's love for Madison. The tran- scendence of Splash's ending is the fantasied transcendence of the realities of life: gendered sexuality and death, in which, the idealized mother stands "at the source and fading-point of all subjectivity and language—a point which . . . threatens the subject with collapse."39 Children of a Lesser God avoids this revelation in its happy ending. Children of a Lesser God (Raina Haines, 1986) James's supposed transgression of symbolic boundaries allows him to ask Sarah, when she returns to see him at the film's end, "do you think we could find a place where we can meet—not in silence and not in sound?" It has been necessary, up until this point, for all of James's lines to be both signed and spoken, and hers to be translated by James. Sarah's response to James's question, now, however, is allowed to obscure the problem of representing such a compromise. She signs, "I love you," which by this point in the film, does not need to be translated. He signs the same in response, without "saying" it. Together, they make the sign for "connect," as previously demonstrated by Sarah. The camera pans away from the two as they embrace and moves out to sea and sky as the music swells. Children of a Lesser God's solution to James's and Sarah's com- munication gap is a pseudosolution. If Sarah's silence did not have to be made somehow representable as such—if her signs did not have to be treated as hieroglyphic instead of semiotic, it would have been unnecessary for James to have sounded them for her. So the solution of the two characters' problems is, in fact, only a solution to the film's problem. And at that level, too, it is bogus. Any discourse more com- plicated than, "I love you," could not be carried out in this manner. The spirit of compromise and self-revelation aroused by James's and Sarah's profound love is supposed to forge a "place where we can meet—not in silence and not in sound." But such a place is only 128 representable in the cliches that allow the mythologies upon which the film is predicated to be elided. Finally, then, Children of a Lesser God supports a myth of the feminine as Other—as silent, immanent, mysterious—a myth of Woman as Nature in which love is the bridge across that anxious precipice between Nature and Culture. Splash, one might say, is a parody of this very construction, enabled by the mechanisms of comedy to reveal the unconscious sources of the myth. The anxiety generated by its "happy ending" fosters a retrospective examination of its terms, such that Splash verges upon blatantly exposing its own fallacy. Perhaps the contradiction between Children of a Lesser God's text, which pleads for Sarah's subjectivity, and its subtext, which under- mines it, and the inverted contradiction between Splash's seemingly lightweight male fantasy and the devices exploited to reveal it as such, suggest a methodological issue that ought to be explored by those who would demystify representations of sexual difference without aban- doning the scopic pleasure of the cinematic experience. Whether the comedic exposition of myth in fact serves to undermine it, or rather upholds it by dissipating anxiety, is another, and very difficult, ques- tion. NOTES This article is a revised version of a paper written for a seminar on Feminist Theory and Visual Representation conducted during the Spring of 1987 in the City University Graduate Center's Ph.D. Program in Art History by Pro- fessor Linda Nochlin, to whose encouragement and example I am indebted. 1. Ryan to Deckard re: the replicant Zhora, in the film Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982). 2. See especially part III, "Myths" in Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952). 3. See, for instance, the special issue of Screen 23, nos. 3-4 (September- October 1982) on "The Power of Looking: Masculinity in Crisis/Inde- pendent Heroines" and Camera Obscura no. 15 (Fall 1986) on "Science Fiction and Sexual Difference," both of which feature a majority of articles on recent films. 4. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 45. 5. A question asked by E. Ann Kaplan in Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983) in response to, e.g., Laura Mul- vey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (Fall 1975). 6. For instance, the work of Christian Metz, e.g., Film Language (New York: 129 Oxford University Press, 1974) and Jacqueline Rose's feminist reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), as well as many of the essays in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 7. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies vol. I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 283. 8. The caption to Paramount publicity photograph #CLG-5040-10A. 9. Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (New York: Norton, 1968) 48. 10. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1977) 160-61. 11. "We must not forget that this symbol is able to appeal in two ways to evolutionary truth. Not only are all terrestrial mammals, including man's ancestors, descended from aquatic creatures (this is the more remote of the two facts), but every individual mammal, every human being, spent the first phase of its existence in water—namely as an embryo in the amniotic fluid of its mother's uterus, and came out of that water when it was born . . ." Freud, Introductory Lectures 160. 12. Ferenczi, Thalassa 48. 13. Interestingly, Ferenczi's theory is cited by Theweleit in support of his reading of male aggression. Theweleit employs both Ferenczi's under- standing of human genitality as a result of primeval trauma and Elaine Morgan's related, though anthropologically and historically different, theory of human physiology and human sexuality as adaptations to a largely aquatic existence and subsequent readaptation to land, wherein the female of the species initiates and preserves the aquatic episode, her anatomy therefore reflecting it more profoundly (thicker subcutaneous fat layer; longer head hair—not only to protect the exposed head from sun, but also to be grasped by infants; larger breasts—with fur lost, the infant had to be held in the arms to nurse, etc.), while the male more readily preserves and reinitiates the land-based existence. See: Elaine Mor- gan, The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution (London: Stein & Day, 1982). As Theweleit concludes his section, "Very Early History: The Woman from the Water" (288—294), "The ocean and the mother-child relationship produced the female body, just as the male body acquired its heavier musculature, strength, and speed through subsequent involve- ment in hunting and warfare." Seductive and fascinating though such biologisms may be, they cannot fully account for the culturally specific mythologies of femininity, nor, more importantly do such explanations of physiological evolution adequately inform questions of why the male's fantastic relationship to the primal mother should be differently phrased from that of the female. 130 14. Sigmund Freud, Delusion and Dream, and other essays, trans. Philip Rieff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956). 15. In one scene, Mrs. Stimmler inexplicably wears a shower cap; in another, she wears her bra on the outside of her blouse. 16. Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) 48. 17. Lea Jacobs describes just such a reaction to feminine "silence" operative in Now Voyager: "Charlotte's enunciating stance is silence, a silence which refers to the private realm figured by her room, where body, image and language itself exist for Charlotte alone. . . . Jerry puts Charlotte into a position of enunciation. . . . her cure is completed when her silence is converted into this man's language, when through him, her ambiguous and private relation to her own desire become public, representable. . . . Jerry's 'I wish I understood you' is the expression of his fascination before the enigma, an effort to penetrate Charlotte's silence and to know her desire." The parallel to Children's discourse and to Kofman's under- standing of the psychoanalytic project is striking. "Now Voyager: Some Problems of Enunciation and Sexual Difference," Camera Obscura no. 7 (Spring 1981) 97-99. 18. The obvious allusion to ejaculation in James's "it just came out," points to the source of James's anxiety. Whereas his enunciation, like his ejac- ulation, operates as phenomenological evidence of his thought and his orgasm, Sarah's thoughts, like her orgasm, are secret, enigmatic—cause for his epistemological doubts about Sarah's love, Sarah's pleasure and ultimately, perhaps, Sarah's humanity. 19. All of William Hurt's lines are delivered verbally, while only some are in sign language, as well. Marlee Matlin's lines, though delivered in sign language, are all incorporated into Hurt's. When Hurt is translating Mat- lin's lines, he is not necessarily signing them, thus the film's "dialogue" is not fully represented to the deaf viewer. Further, it is my understanding that Hurt's signing in the film is quite poor (i.e. "illegible"), thus further handicapping a deaf "audience." Finally, Matlin's signing, which is, when seen, presumably "legible," is not always shown in full, as she is often cut away from in order to show Hurt's responses. The film's blatant disregard for the deaf viewer is another signal that the difference repre- sented in Children of a Lesser God is only nominally an aural one. 20. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 10. 21. When Sarah learns from James that he had gone to see her mother, she becomes furious. James, in turn, expresses dismay: "Let me help you, damn it!" he yells at her. Sarah's response (as it is signed by her but enunciated by James—he substitutes his "you" for her "I") is dramatic: "How? By showing you the joys of sex with a hearing man?" He responds to that charge angrily (and revealingly), "I think that is one language that you don't speak!" In Sarah's subsequent "monologue" there is a shift in 131 James's assignment of personal pronouns as he speaks her signed language. He begins, "You have more than enough communication skills; I don't." (Presumably, Sarah has said, "J have more than enough communication skills; you don't!") She/He continues (James, for the first time in the film, using the word "I" for Sarah's "I"): "They never did .. . they could never be bothered to learn my language. I was always expected to learn to speak. Sex was always something I could do as well as hearing girls . . . better! At first I let them have me because they wanted to. Before long, the boys were lined up on a waiting list. My sister pimped for me. No introduction. No talk. We just went to a dark place and . . . (she makes a dramatic sign—clearly that for "fuck"—three times; James does not "say" it) . . . They didn't even take me out for a Coke first." Sarah then turns to James and signs something. "No, that is not what I wanted to know about you!" he responds. "I thought I was such a big deal coming on to the deaf girl, giving her a thrill," he translates Sarah's further remarks, again substituting his "I" for her "you," and then, "and all the time you were laughing at me. I was thinking poor, little, deaf virgin . . . who spread her legs for every.. ." James then violently interrupts his repetition of Sarah's insults and yells at her, "Do you think I'm threatened by that? You think that I give a god damn that you fucked every pimply faced teenager. . . I don't. I don't give a shit!" (He clearly does). Sarah storms out again. The shifting of pronouns in this scene is confusing and telling. 22. In Children of a Lesser God's very first dialogue, Dr. Franklin, with his back turned to James and to the camera, speaks lines that could not be "heard" (that is, seen) by Sarah, even were they signed, clearly inaugu- rating a distinction between speech, which is here divorced from vision and the body, and signing, not introduced until later, which depends upon vision and the body. 23. Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23, nos. 3-4 (September-October 1982) 75-76. 24. Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914) in General Psychological Theory (New York: Collier, 1963) 69-70. 25. Presumably in consideration of James's desire that she should speak, Sarah in one scene stands privately before a mirror and studies the reflection of her mouth as she mimics the shapes of speech. In another scene, she has attached a book of poker rules to her mirror frame and studies it as she makes herself up for the poker party she and James are to attend. Sarah's most dramatic private crisis too is enacted in front of a mirror that seems to take her by surprise as it throws her reflection back at herself while she's cleaning. Her violent reaction—she throws something at the mirror, smashing it—is not satisfactorily explained. It might be read as her attempt to break out of her narcissistic self-sufficiency. 26. "The Little Mermaid," Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales: a selection, trans. L. W. Kingsland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 94-95. 132 27. The mermaid's interactions in the story are with her grandmother and her sisters. She has a father, king of her underworld realm, who is never directly engaged in the narrative, but her mother is never mentioned. Nina Auerbach discusses "The Little Mermaid" as "a guide to a vital Victorian mythology whose lovable woman is a silent and self-disinherited mutilate, the fullness of whose extraordinary and dangerous being might at any moment return through violence," in Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) 8. 28. Andersen, Fairy Tales 98. 29. Karen Horney, "The Dread of Woman: Observations on a Specific Dif- ference in the Dread Felt by Men and Women Respectively for the Opposite Sex," Feminine Psychology (New York: Norton, 1967) 134. 30. It must be noted that Karen Horney, whose observations cited herein are consistent with Freudian ones, in a polemically motivated move rejects the central Freudian articulation of the Oedipal moment. She argues that innate sexual differences are psychically experienced and "known" by infants from birth. Male and female infants' preOedipal relationships to the mother are seen as inherently different; the male infant has an instinct for penetration, the female for reception. Thus, like Ferenczi, Theweleit and Elaine Morgan, she participates in a dangerous privileging of biology. The glaring essentialism of Horney's position is critiqued in: Janet Sayers, Sexual Contradictions (London: Tavistock Publications, 1986) 36-^42, 62-3, and 79-80; and Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage, 1974) 125-31, e.g. 31. See note 27. 32. Horney, Dread 141. 33. Both films underscore the issue of motherhood by asking the question, "what kind of children?" In Children of a Lesser God, when James asks Sarah what she wants, her answer is deaf children. James replies that he doesn't want deaf children, but that he wouldn't mind if they were. In Splash, after Madison agrees to marry Allen, and just before she is exposed as a mermaid, Allen exclaims that he wants children, one of each—a boy and a girl. Madison's cryptic response is "which kind?" In each case, the real issue—male or female—is displaced onto the films' textual ersatz categories of difference, respectively hearing/deaf and human/non-human. This is precisely the form of displacement that Constance Penley has noted in science fiction films in her article, "Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia," Camera Obscura no. 15 (Fall, 1986) 75—6: "In these [science fiction] films the question of sexual difference—a question whose answer is no longer 'self-evident'—is displaced onto the more remarkable difference between the human and the other. That this questioning of the difference between human and other is sexual in nature, can also be seen in the way these films reactivate infantile sexual investigation. One of the big questions for the viewer in Blade Runner, for example, is 'How do 133 replicants do it}' Or, of The Man Who Fell to Earth, 'What is the sex of this alien who possesses nothing that resembles human genitals . . . ?' These very questions must be asked of both Splash, in which Madison, in her primary form, inspires wonder about the nature of her reproductive system (which is in fact about to be tackled by the team of scientists investigating her when she is saved and escapes their laboratory towards the end of the film) and at the end of which one must ask how Allen and Madison are going to do it under water, and Children of a Lesser God, for which the latter question must be repeated. 34. When she and James, on their first date, go to a restaurant for dinner, Sarah proposes they dance. James agrees after expressing surprise that Sarah can dance. She explains that she feels the vibrations of the music. On the dance floor, Sarah demonstrates a remarkably fluid and sensual sense of movement as she dances to "I'll Take You There," a Motown song by the Staple Singers. Sarah seems transported as she dances, es- sentially alone, in that she closes her eyes and dances quite expressively (and narcissistically) pretty much oblivious to James, who somewhat sheepishly withdraws to the margins of the dance floor and simply stares at the seemingly self-sufficient Sarah as she attracts a certain amount of attention, swaying, eyes closed, slowly (in comparison to the song's rhythm and the other dancers on the floor). In the background of this scene one can discern a telling piece of scenery. The restaurant, which has an aquatic theme, includes a sort of tank, recessed into a wall and surrounded at the wall's surface with a string of pearly lights. Inside the tank, behind the almost cinematic plane of glass, there is a mannequin —a nude female figure in the pose of the Capitoline Venus—submerged in the water. 35. Madison's skating is not unlike Sarah's dancing. Despite having never seen ice before, she's a natural, and as she spins and turns gracefully, Allen withdraws somewhat to watch her. 36. Simon Frith, discussing the theories of musicologist Zofia Lissa, in "Hear- ing Secret Harmonies," in High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film, ed. Colin MacCabe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986) 53. 37. Children of a Lesser God's precredit sequence shows Sarah asleep in a dark room, through the windows of which sea winds are blowing. The rife sounds of the wind, banging shutters and tinkling glass are appended by an elegiac, eerie musical score, while the camera in close-up fragments Sarah's body and Sarah's room, which emerge out of a deep blue, moonlit darkness. See the discussion of "mood music" above. 38. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981) 205. 39. Jacqueline Rose, "Julia Kristeva—Take Two," Sexuality in the Field of Vision 155-56.