Feeling Backward (why queer theory still matters)

I recently received a reader’s report for a book proposal in which the anonymous reviewer refers to queer theory as being ‘mid 1990s’ and ‘once cutting edge’. I was struck by the notion that queer theory was over, faddish and outdated and my first response to this was that queer theory will be over when homophobia, the closet, and so on is also over. In order to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of queer theory I would like to introduce a few ideas from a recent ‘queer theory’ book that also helped me make sense of pleasures that might be construed as wholly negative. The question then is why is Brokeback Mountain pleasurable when it also makes me feel bad?

In Heather Love's Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007) she explains why hurtful, melancholic and depressing experiences constitute contemporary queer identity and thus need to be acknowledged, incorporated and negotiated since ‘many of these unlikely feelings are closely tied to the realities of queer experience past and present.’ (147) In this respect, Brokeback Mountain is a text that has a backward logic. It uses the past to speak to the present as it narrates a depressing story of historical injury and bad feeling in order to connect to a contemporary audience who may feel that they are still negotiating or finding it difficult to dispel a shameful and homophobic past – homosexuality is problematic! Love continues:

'Backwardness means many things here; shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame. I describe backwardness both as queer historical structure of feeling and as a model for queer historiography.' (146)

Many of the terms in Love’s quote may describe the characters and their narrative situations in Brokeback Mountain, as well as the spectator’s response to the film. It is important that the film does provoke negative and bad feeling. It is not a joyous experience; rather it is a film that leaves one feeling hurt and emotionally devastated in its backward turn. Yet, this is somehow what is rewarding about the film also. Brokeback Mountain’s stress on negative and depressive histories of the homosexual past help to constitute contemporary gay and lesbian identity and subjectivity since ‘the experience of queer historical subjects is not a safe distance from contemporary experience; rather, their social marginality and abjection mirror our own.’ (32)


The backward feeling and the pathos in the film articulate a refusal to see progress in the way it is often imagined by gay pride discourses. Brokeback Mountain demands us to accept that homosexuality is still impossible for many, that it is still permeated by tragedy and melancholia, and that it has a history that is still unresolved and needful of being properly negotiated in the present. Love’s work helps to unlock the process of understanding negative pleasures in political terms especially in relation to films like Brokeback Mountain. The film reminds queers that their modern subjectivity is constituted by a painful, closeted, homophobic history and that feeling backward and feeling bad are also important affective dimensions of queer subjectivity in the present.

(image: screen grab; permissions)

'I've Shaken Hands with Her': the Caravan Park and 'The Best Pair of Legs in the Business'

Drawing on research completed for his PhD, Matt Kerry discusses The Best Pair of Legs in the Business (1973).

Britain in the early 1970s was a place of moral panics, strikes and power cuts. Stuart Hall comments that 1972 was a year of ‘sustained and open class conflict of a kind unparalleled since the end of the war’ (293). Terry Staples also points out that the miner’s strike of 1973 had a direct influence on the film industry in early 1974 when the ‘restrictions on the non-domestic use of electrical power’ during the ‘three-day week’ meant that cinemas had to ‘reduce the number of shows they put on’ (229).

British cinema itself was heading for a crisis. Most of the debt-ridden Hollywood companies had withdrawn funding from British films at the end of the 1960s. Filmmakers had to resort to tried and tested formulas, such as movie spin-offs of TV sitcoms, or sex comedies, in order to sustain a living. Although Best Pair is not based on a sitcom, it is a film adaptation of a TV play, both of which star Reg Varney in the central role of Sherry Sheridan. During this period there were a number of films released which looked back nostalgically to the traditional British holiday such as Holiday On The Buses (1973), That’ll Be The Day (1973) and Carry On Girls (1973). However, Best Pair appears to evoke the mood of the time more successfully, exposing the holiday on a cheap caravan park for the dismal experience it could be.

A lot of the action in the film takes place at night. This darkness adds to the gloomy atmosphere. It’s as if the lights have literally been turned off – pre-empting the blackouts of the early 1970s. As the campsite’s only resident entertainer, Sherry attempts to construct some sense of community in the half-empty clubhouse of Greenside Caravan Park, by starting sing-a-longs such as ‘Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’, but the merriment appears to be forced. The atmosphere is like the aftermath of a party where the guests have stayed too long – a hangover, perhaps from the affluence and optimism of the late 1950s and 1960s. It’s as if the decade before hasn’t lived up to its expectations, and the decade that has followed has seen both an economic and spiritual slump.

The caravan holiday in Britain had originally been a middle-class pursuit in the 1920s and 1930s, as part of the fashion to ‘get back to nature’, just as the original pioneer holiday camps had been. Camping in a Romany style van had been a rare novelty for Bohemian types who wanted to get away from it all, the whole point of the holiday (as Angeloglou 49 - 50, explains) was to ‘rough it’, by digging your own toilet, cooking over an oil stove, and by looking after the horse, which most city folk were not used to. The static caravan parks of the post-war era, however, had little to do with the origins of middle-class camping, instead providing a cheap alternative to the holiday camp, with cut-price accommodation. As Walton points out, the number of people taking caravan holidays at the end of the 1960s had more than doubled to 4.5 million in comparison to the 2 million who took a similar holiday in 1955, and ‘The coastline of Lindsey (Lincolnshire) saw caravan numbers increasing at 1,000 per year throughout the 1950s and 1960s from the 3,000 already present in 1950’ (43). The rows of static caravans were seen by some traditionalists to be an eyesore. In his 1974 poem, ‘Delectable Duchy’ Betjeman expresses a wish for them to be swept ‘out to sea’ by a ‘tidal wave’ (21).

The crisis of the central character in The Best Pair appears to embody the crisis of Britain at the time the film was made. As an entertainer who has just been dropped by his agent, Sherry’s future job prospects look very bleak. In one scene he announces his options as “the Labour Exchange, National Assistance, and very shortly the old-age pension”, and as a last resort, he pessimistically hopes for death. Sherry belongs, suddenly, to another era. He sings Flanagan and Allen songs and does a terrible drag act that allows him the freedom to fill his gags with innuendo, when in actual fact he disapproves of the sexual revolution – in one particular scene he decries the world as a ‘filthy, dirty’ place, after discovering that his wife is having an affair. Not only has Sherry been stripped of his masculinity, but he has also lost his authority as head of the household. His son, Alan, for whom he paid to have a private education and then go on to university, is now effectively middle class and Sherry feels threatened by this. Sherry believes that Alan is also ashamed of his father for ‘making a living by being a lady’, even though his act is ‘good enough for Royalty’, as Sherry points out.

Sherry is a monarchist. His ‘idea of England’ as Stuart Hall refers to, is an imperial one, with ‘a commitment to what Britain has shown herself to be capable of, historically…rooted in ‘feelings about the flag, the Royal Family and the Empire’ (147). The film was made at a time when the Royal Family was relatively free from scandal, and it could be argued that the strong Royalist sentiments of the time were a reaction again to the crisis of the period. Princess Anne’s wedding was celebrated in the year of the film’s release, and the Jubilee came four years later. These celebrations were part of a trend of nostalgia, as Britain desperately looked back to the Coronation; a time when it was coming out of a period of austerity and rationing and was looking forward to better times.

Sherry constructs part of his national identity around his monarchist values, and name-drops the Queen at any given opportunity, his brief meeting with her, being the highpoint of his career, and a boost to what little ego he has left. He stretches the story, however, beyond credibility, telling two young campers that his Royal command performance was by special request from her Majesty, and that his job at the caravan park is merely a ‘paid holiday’. Later, we get a glimpse of a photograph of the occasion. The Queen is greeting a group of entertainers after their performance, but Sherry is on the back row, and not in close proximity to the monarch, which puts paid to his later claim that he’s shaken hands with her.

The culture clash between working-class entertainer and his educated son is brought to a head in a scene where Sherry and Mary go to have tea with Alan’s prospective in-laws. Their son is due to marry into an upper-middle class family who live in a Georgian vicarage. During his visit to the vicarage, Sherry modifies his regional accent and mimics the vicar’s body language by walking with his hands behind his back. When the vicar questions him about his job in a caravan park, Sherry disguises his shame about the job by saying that he has merely spent the summer there as a ‘try-out’, and that he intends to take over the site when he retires. Sherry feels that working in such a place is only acceptable if you are the owner, just as working as an entertainer is only acceptable if by Royal command.

The argument that ensues is triggered by Sherry’s not knowing the proper way to eat cake during middle-class ‘tea’. The vicar’s Georgian silver tea service, handed down from his grandmother is a symbol of inherited wealth. Mary expresses her admiration for it – she sees it as a symbol of ‘family’, whereas, Sherry is intimidated by it. He tries to go one better by saying that he has eaten off gold plates with the Queen. The claim is so ludicrous that no one believes him for a minute, and the lie is further compounded by Sherry’s saying that it happened first at Buckingham Palace, then Windsor Castle. Sherry wrongly believes that an association with Royalty gives him ‘class’, not realising that those who do have class might not necessarily give a damn whether he has met the monarch or not. He also attempts to speak of his relationship with the Queen in ‘show business’ terms by saying she has ‘warmth and star quality’. This is an attempt by Sherry to exclude the vicar and underline his allegiance to the Queen, and in turn demonstrate her supposed loyalty to entertainers.

Sherry’s façade then slips. He stops speaking in Received Pronunciation, throws down his pastry fork and eats the cake with his hands, much to the disgust of everyone else. By trying to break their pretence by disregarding the rituals of eating with a fork, plate and napkin, he reduces eating to its most basic function and makes it grotesque. He then also admits to his working class status by arguing that he has ‘slaved himself into the ground to make a gentleman’ of Alan. When his lie about having eaten with the Sovereign fails to convince, he desperately claims that he has ‘shaken hands with her’. Even this is a lie, and one which his wife refuses to back him up on. The bitterness of Sherry, and his lack of identity is fore-grounded in a scene which could have come as light relief, set as it is in an English country garden, away from the bleak and depressing campsite. The setting, however, throws Sherry’s inadequacies into relief. He doesn’t fit in with the middle-class traditions of the past, and without the support of his family, and uncertain job prospects, his future is uncertain too.

If earlier depictions of the holiday camp in films such as Sam Small Leaves Town (1937) and Holiday Camp (1947) attempt to construct an ideal working class community in the pre- and post- world war, in The Best Pair community falls apart, prefiguring an emergent pessimism, expressed in the crisis of the three-day week.

Carry On Researching

Matt Kerry who teaches media and cultural studies at NTU has also recently passed his PhD. As he explains below, his doctoral research explores the representations of holidays and their relationship to ideas of nation in British cinema.

The representation of the supposed free space of the holiday by a medium of mass entertainment offers a highly condensed image that demands analysis. In my thesis I question the ways in which the holiday film constructs a sense of Britishness based around the idea of community that is shaped and pressured by forces at different historical moments. Modern capitalist society offers us a structure where the holiday is presented to us as the ultimate contrast from work. It is commodified, and we choose to enter into this ideology, take our break, and return to work, refreshed. The holiday also offers a particular type of freedom, which distinguishes it from other forms of leisure. It can be considered as more of an ‘event’ than a weekend break from work, for instance.

The emergence of the holiday as a form of mass entertainment for the working class appears to coincide with the birth of cinema in the same respect. By studying the holiday film I reveal what it tells us about British culture, the nation and British life, and how cinema audiences may have engaged with and responded to these texts.

As well as providing textual analysis of the films, I also address the holiday as a liminal, carnivalesque space (Inglis 2000, Shields 2002), and also consider how the landscape is mediated through the tourist gaze (Urry 2002, Bell and Lyall 2002). I explore the ways in which the cinematic representation of the holiday shifts in relation to changing social contexts – in new formations of leisure, class and landscape. I also consider how audiences might actively respond to these films, and how these texts might construct an ideal working-class community pre- and post- World War II. Overall, I argue that representations of the traditional British holiday in these films are mostly white, working-class and raucous, but that these representations are not fixed.

Image from Carry On Cruising (1962)

Of Screen, Glasgow and Gortex

Martin O'Shaughnessy reports back from the (very rainy) annual Screen Conference in Glasgow.


I went up to Glasgow last week for the Screen Studies conference. which takes its name from the seminal journal Screen. Screen was at its height of fame / notoriety back in the 1970s when, drawing on a powerful, heady and often tyrannical mix of Althusserian Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, it was right at the cutting edge of screen theorising. It is now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and has just brought out a special number that maps out where screen theorising is today. Working in the same vein, this year’s conference sought to map where screen theorising has come from and where it needs to go. Conference plenaries delivered by conference luminaries tended to emphasise the ‘coming from’ angle and looked back to the intense, heady days of the seventies with a mixture of relief that it was over and a sense of nostalgia for its lost passion, excitement and political radicalism. Conference panels, of which there were many this year (meaning one missed much more than one heard) were more likely to look at the contemporary period. The panels helped the conference open up to screen theorising and not simply Screen Theory while taking it away from a narrowly UK-centred understanding of screen studies (I heard, for example, a very good panel on African screens).

A conference is a multi-bodied, multi-voiced beast so that what was said in it always defies easy summation. One insistent note that did emerge however was a sense that the object of screen studies had changed so profoundly over the years that we were no longer sure what we should be looking at or how. Screen had once existed in a world where cinema studies was only an emerging discipline and where television struggled to achieve recognition as a worthy object of study. Now the talk is more likely to be of the ‘death’ of cinema and the demise of television as a core national entertainment with a mass and sometimes family audience. Faced with the proliferation of screens big and small, the multiplicity of TV channels, the fragmentation of audiences, the dematerialisation of the digital image and the diversification of viewing practices, it is no longer clear what we should study or how. Can those of us who teach film and television even know any more what our students might be watching and what grounds we can meet them on? One way to respond to this frighteningly shifting terrain is clearly nostalgia: nostalgia for the old concentrated communion between film spectator and sacred cinematic texts; nostalgia for the days when the nation sat in front of Dennis Potter or Coronation Street; nostalgia for the solid materiality of the cinematic image and its indexical relationship to the real. But nostalgia doesn’t take you very far. The past is best used as a resource for comparison and critical distance rather than as a place of retreat.

Glasgow, when we arrived, was in the midst of a deluge, as the Scottish clouds perhaps shed tears for Andy Murray’s sad, semi-final defeat. It was then that my trusty blue Gortex, not as old as Screen, but more useful in a rainstorm, came to my rescue, keeping me dry from the knees up. I was nonetheless drenched from the knees down. Should I confess that my first act on arriving at the conference was to retreat to the bathroom to try to dry my trouser bottoms with the hand dryer? Thankfully no-one came in while I was doing this. Trying to explain to an eager conference goer why you are standing on one leg in the washroom is not the easiest thing to do. Explaining Screen theory, on balance, is probably easier (and much dryer).

(Photo credit: garybirnie; permissions)

Blood on the Side

Viv Chadder explores what we can learn about representations of madness from Robert Rossen's film Lilith.

I am concerned here with the last film of Robert Rossen, Lilith (1964). This is an enigmatic and intriguing film with an impressive cast, that goes to the edge of defying analysis. At first glance it would appear to be a response to the anti-psychiatry movement, at least, it departs markedly from earlier films such as The Snake Pit (1948) in their clear condemnation of the brutality of the state asylum system. Gender politics appears confined to the observation that ‘insanity always appears more sinister in a woman than in a man’.

The plot appears to defy logic at times and to depend on the improbability of an unqualified and vulnerable young man (Vincent Bruce) being employed in a plush private asylum as occupational therapist. Residents appear free to come and go at will, causing some almost inexplicable change of scene, though there is some minimal rationale for an abrupt change of scene to a jousting tournament, where the by now infatuated hero gets to crown his Lady Queen of Love and beauty. Not the first daring exploit from within her thrall, Lilith clearly feeds on his obedience and willingness to interpret and fulfil her demands at whatever cost to others’ lives and his own sanity. This mythical creature is ruler of her universe peopled by gods who weep at her disobedience. Her will is to leave the mark of her desire on every living thing. Our hero seeks to protect her in her quest to fulfil this aim, whether it be another woman, small boys, a colleague. HERE Rossen clearly risks much to be true to the novelist Salamanca’s ideas (upon which the film is based). Vincent wrenches a fairy doll from its place in the collection of Lilith’s trophies. He installs it in an aquarium of fishes, submerged in a watery grave. We share in a lecture delivered by the asylum physician to an enrapt group of staff. The psychotic spins the asymmetrical fractured web of the mad spider. The sufferers experience immense catastrophe due to their superior spirits and sensibilities. All of us, he says, are involved in ‘rapture’, in its fullest meaning of course. Vincent is congratulated on his success in achieving the transference with Lilith, staff seemingly oblivious to the manifest impropriety of the relationship that entails, and in denial concerning his admission of willingness to succumb to her seduction.

Both novel and film are heavily laden with Freudian clues, but this is no oedipal space. Jung’s anima might assist us? I am tempted to follow Mladen Dolar’s suggestion that psychoanalysis enables us to identify and encircle the space where meaning collapses. Our first view of the horrors of psychosis comes in the tour of the asylum to introduce Vincent. A woman, catatonic, sits on the floor draped over her bed in a lascivious pose? Finally it is Lilith we see through the mesh-covered viewing window. A woman we have witnessed to be expressive, animated, full of joy and passion, cunning, duplicitous, mercurial (shape-shifting), carelessly demanding the servitude of her knight of Poplar Lodge, greedy for conquests and pleasure. Careless of the lives of others , vulnerable only to psychosis at the previous death of her brother from her incestuous desires. Finally we see this dangerous weaving woman once trapped in her loom by her hair, a vacant, motionless, catatonic void. Her kingdom in ruins depredated, her loom in pieces, her vitality and creativity, her duplicitous viewpoint voided, an object of the gaze, ‘her’ language annulled, a vanished woman, no longer capable of transformation, frozen and remote.

This film has little to share with the past, more with the future. To retreat to a more specific context, I discovered that the film was shot at Chestnut Lodge Maryland, where Salamanca had worked after World War 2, and which was presided over by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. The improbable freedom of the patients, the emphasis on the transference, impose new meaning on this film with this association. So we should look to I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, rather than absorb this text in a spurious undiscoverable history.

Rossen would appear to refuse the more melodramatic representations of the mad. There is emotional but little physical violence. I do not ignore the suicide of the young man whose gift Lilith appears to refuse. He falls on his sword. The event is denied us, but its emotional power is not. We are left with the medieval trappings of Salamanca’s novel, and little hint of Macdonald’s Lilith. Her visions or her hallucinations, we do not share. Vincent orders her blood on the side with her whisky. We share just her POV through steel mesh, with a predatory hand clutching it, and look out over the splendid grounds of Poplar/Chestnut Lodge, Rockville/Stonemont, Maryland, grounds which rarely yield to the ‘threatening’, but normally remind us of the affluent, rather than the refuge of our world’s catastrophes. Touched, only on the inside with a hint of gothic shadow, as we are touched by the mark of Lilith and her rebellion against the dead hand of the joyless and undesiring. Depleted as well of the violence of Frieda Reichmann’s patients but intricate and sensitive in its depiction of the emotional dangers of the work, espousing a neo Romantic view of the work of the therapist Rossen’s film seems to be a testimony to the temptations suffered by the masochist to betray the weak to satisfy the greed of the Lady and to enjoy her favours.

Doubtless overshadowed by the publication of Joanne Greeberg’s book, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, in the same year I believe this film to be an unostentatious testimony to the work of Frieda Fromm Reichmann, without the spectacular cure, and dwelling scarcely at all on the traumatic symptoms of the patient eschewing also overt deployment of the myth of Lilith. Rossen and Salamanca (they co-scripted the film) are clearly as fascinated as Vincent Bruce by the captivating lure of the patient.

Mladen Dolar, ‘I Shall be with You on Your Wedding-Night: Lacan and the Uncanny’, October, 58 (Fall) 1991
(Photo credit: PlingPlong. Permissions.)