Obscene Images (3)

(With this untimely post, I finally complete a triptych on “obscene images” I began more than a month ago. As should be clear from each of these discussions, I am not concerned here with the obscene in the conventional sense of the “indecent; lewd” [L. obscenus, obscaenus], but rather in the faux-etymological sense of the “ob-scene,” or that which is situated against [ob] the visible scene [L. scæna, scena "scene, stage," from Gk. skene "scene, stage," originally "tent or booth," related to skia "shadow, shade"]. In particular, I am concerned in this particular post with the politics of viewing and representing the womb.)

Michael Winterbottom’s Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005) is a movie-about-a-movie. Or, to be more precise, it is a movie about an aborted (or, at best, still-born) movie. Ostensibly a cinematic adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s ostensibly unfilmable eighteenth century novel, Winterbottom’s film quickly shifts into a metacinematic exploration of the inherent impossibility of that task. The eponymous narrator (Steve Coogan) struggles to narrate the story of his life, but can never seem to get beyond the moment of his birth. It is appropriate, therefore, that one of the defining moments of the work  features the actor Coogan (playing himself playing the unborn Tristam Shandy) being inserted, naked and upside down, into an enormous artificial replica of a uterus—ostensibly in preparation for filming a corresponding in-utero scene for the movie. This uterus (with the naked Coogan inside) then reappears again later in the film, this time, however, shrunk to roughly uterine size and inserted back into a meta-scene of the attempted filming of Tristram Shandy. In the latter scene, the apparent realization of the ostensible (male) fantasy of reentering the womb is ironically contrasted with the now-miniature Coogan/Shandy’s vociferous complaints about being ignored and overlooked within a film of which he is ostensibly the protagonist.

This fantasy of an adult man reentering a (mother’s) womb has a precise parallel in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film, Talk To Her (Hable con ella). Inserted into the main plot-line regarding the male nurse Benigno’s (Javier Camara) quasi-necrophilic infatuation with the comatose body of his ward, the ballerina Alicia, (Leonor Watling), there is a miniature film-within-a-film entitled “The Shrinking Lover”—which consists of a fantasy sequence in which a man takes a potion which shrinks him to miniature size, and then proceeds to disappear into an (over-sized model of a) woman’s vagina. This film-within-a-film is presented in the style of a silent surrealist film—and the silence of the film ironically echoes the literal silence (and silencing) of Benigno’s catatonic female interlocutor in the main film itself.

Both of these surrealistic scenes of grown men entering an oversized vagina/uterus are positioned within films which each revolve around men’s over-investment in women’s bodies. Benigno’s obsessive care of, and infatuation with, the unconscious body of Alicia in Almodóvar’s film is neatly paralleled by Tristram’s father’s (also played by Coogan) punctilious obsession with his wife’s reproductive cycle (ranging from his habit of always winding his clock immediately prior to intercourse, to his hands-on oversight of Tristram’s eventual delivery). Therefore, although at one level each of these vaginal/uterine fantasies represent a rupture of the primary diegetic plane of the films themselves, at another level they can be seen as the logical conclusion of the masculine fascination with women’s reproduction which is at the heart of each film.

This link between an assertion of masculine control over women’s bodies, on the one hand, and the hyper-visibility of their reproductive organs, on the other, is not, of course, unique to these two films. Indeed, high quality ultrasound images of unborn (together with images of aborted fetuses) have been used very effectively by the anti-abortion movement emphasize the intrinsic humanity of the unborn fetus. The power of these images, furthermore, is even beginning to have an impact on abortion law, as in the case of the Michigan abortion bill passed earlier this year, which in its original form would have prohibited abortions unless the physician has “first performed an ultrasound, provided the patient with an opportunity to view the active ultrasound image of the fetus, and provided the patient with a physical picture of the ultrasound image of the fetus” (in its final version, the bill was revised to simply require that patients be given the opportunity to see the images from any fetal ultrasounds which may have been performed on them).

While the use of ultrasound imagery by the anti-abortion movement is well-known and somewhat predictable, it is also worth noting that the development and popularization of this fetal imaging technology actually coincides quite closely with the US’s abortion rights movement. The use of ultrasound technology for fetal prenatal purposes dates back to the late 1950s (the first clear images of an infant’s head were produced by Ian Donald in 1959), but first began to achieve wide popularity in 1966.  Curiously, by it was also precisely during this same period that US law begin to move away the blanket prohibition of all abortions excluding only those which threaten the life of the mother (as codified in laws of all 50 states as late as the mid-1960s). In fact, it was in 1967 (immediately following the initial popularization of fetal ultrasounds in 1966) that Colorado became the first state  to loosen its abortion laws in accordance with the model established by the 1962 Modal Penal Code (extending the circumstances under which abortion would be permissible to include circumstances in which the “pregnancy resulted from rape, incest, or other felonious intercourse,” or in the event that continuation of the pregnancy would “gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother,” etc.). Many other states quickly followed Colorado’s lead, and in 1970, New York (followed by Alaska, Hawaii and Washington) became the first state to allow abortion “on demand.” All of these state laws were then rendered moot, of course, by Roe v. Wade in 1973.

My point here is that the ultrasound fetal imaging technology does not, in itself, support either a pro- or anti-abortion politics, but rather to point out the interesting fact that the modern abortion debate in the US (both pro and contra) coincides quite precisely with this possibility of viewing the fetus in its uterine environment.

Although I would not draw any conclusions about the implied politics of either film, would nevertheless posit that the scopic fascination with the “ob-scene” site of the maternal womb in the surrealistic uterine scenes in both Talk to Her and Tristram Shandy reinforce the films’ broader concerns with the medical oversight over, and possession of, the female body. To the extent that both films posit (and possibly critique) this linkage between the uterine viewing and medical oversight, we might then ask what an alternative vision of this uterine scopophilia might look like?

The beginning of an answer can perhaps be found in two visual art projects which focus not so much on the unseen the womb itself, but rather on the liminal terrain which mediates between the womb and the outside world.

The first of these projects is Barbara Hepworth’s (1903-1975) life-long fascination with topological representations of negative space—an interest which has its origins in her 1931 sculpture Pierced Form, consisting of a piece of alabaster with a hole through the center. As Jeanette Winterson observes (via Wood’s Lot), Helpworth’s interest in negative space was essentially a concern with bridging the boundary between the visible and the invisible:

By surrounding space with form, form can make visible the invisible. Reality’s lost self, her shadow-sister, is returned.
Look into a Hepworth hole and you are looking at what matter normally conceals – everything that matter cannot express.
A Hepworth hole is not only a connection between different kinds of form, or a way of giving space its own form – it is a relationship with the invisible.

Although Winterson also mistakenly claims that Pierced Form coincides with the birth of Hepworth’s first child (actually, she had a son four years earlier, in 1927), it is nevertheless true that Hepworth herself made explicit the connection her thematics of negative space and broader concerns with the “female experience.” As she remarks at one point, in sculpture

there is a whole range of formal perception belonging to feminine experience. So many ideas spring from an inside response to form; for example, if I see a woman carrying a child in her arms, it is not so much what I see that affects me, but what I feel within my own body....  It may be that the sensation of being a woman presents yet another facet of the scuptural idea (quoted by Wilkinson in Cornwall and the Sculpture of Landscape: 1939-1975).

More recently, Marie-Ange Guilleminot (1960--) began her artistic career in 1992 with Point commun. Vues de l’intèrieur, consisting of more than 90 sculptures made from plaster casts of other people’s navels. As Elisabeth Bronfen describes in The Knotted Subject, Guilleminot’s

point of departure is a perturbing and irresistible body detail, the somatic sign of nought...the naval is at once a worthless body part and a cipher for obscene fantasies of erotic or horrific nature involving penetration into the body interior or extracting something from this intimate, unknown site.

At stake in both Hopworth’s and Guilleminot’s works is the question of how to visually represent the invisible, and more specifically the representation of the womb as the site of origins, but at the same point the limits of sight. Rather than focus on the visibility of the womb itself, however, both of these artists focus instead on the indeterminate boundary space mediating between interior womb and external world. Consequently, rather than mapping straightforwardly onto a medico-political regime concerned with overseeing the female body, these latter works instead point to a more nuanced terrain wherein the relationship between the female body and the medico-political regimes within which it is embedded is constantly contested and renegotiated.
(Part 3 of 3)

Comments

[Bitch]

damn, this is great stuff. this is carnival material for sure!

[crojas]

as indeed it was!
(i particularly like the images--was tempted to try to include some stills from the movies, but didn't have time).