merry feminihilist xmas

I want to tell you a Christmas film: in a land locked in by majestic mountains, a nun falls in love with a militaristic ruffian who cannot give love. The nun agonizes over this desire that is taking over her; it makes her question her calling as a nun. Finally, the nun decides to renounce her vows and accept the love in her heart.

Sound familiar? If you guessed The Sound of Music, you are close but no cigar. The Christmas film I’m thinking of is Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 hothouse flower of a movie, Black Narcissus. Of course, the mountainous terrain is not Austria but the Himalayas; the militaristic leading man is not the gorgeously carved Christopher Plummer but a weirdly wooden (and thick-thighed in khaki hotpants) David Farrar. And the nun who renounces her religious calling for secular love is not perky pixie Julie Andrews, but the little-known Kathleen Byron, who plays Sister Ruth. I drew out the above Xmas card as homage to Sister Ruth. I’ve always thought that if I weren’t who I am now, I’d be a nun. If I were Christian-oriented, I’d surely be a different kind of Sister. There is something glittering about belonging to a gang whose aesthetic is ascetic. I’m still drawn to the streamlined stillness in their lives—the simplicity of dress, nourishment—as well as their classic devotion to education, of themselves and others. So this Xmas post is about how one fictional nun in particular has shaped my feminine idiosyncrasy.

Sister Ruth is the anti-Julie Andrews-as-Maria, just as Black Narcissus is a totally antithetical treatment of the plot structure of The Sound of Music: nuns, femininity, romance. Both films are structured by the journey by which a woman un-represses her sexuality and becomes heterosexual. The Sound of Music offers a happy ending, a proper heterosexual woman in Maria. Black Narcissus gives us the gift of Sister Ruth, a tragic ending for her, but a blazingly inspiring portrait of a thoroughly modern, thoroughly improper heterosexual woman. The Sound of Music is a Christmas film that isn’t really about Christmas. It wielded “My Favourite Things,” which has become a Christmas carol despite the fact that the only Christmassy thing about it is that the song can sound like a gift wish list—which is perhaps why I do love the song and film. Black Narcissus is its brunette bad girl cousin. It offers the world no carols, but a significant gift nonetheless.

Early on in the film, we are already cued to the fact that Sister Ruth is not quite right. When the Mother Superior suggests Sister Ruth as a team member to Sisterr Clodagh (perfect Deborah Kerr), the leader of a covenant to set up shop in the Himalayas, Sister Clodagh immediately replies: “But she’s ill.” Ill: Physically? Maybe. Mentally? Most certainly. Sister Ruth is hysterical, moody, and generally attitudinous. When she gazes out of her habit, her eyes belong not to a bride of Christ but to an axe-murderer:

Predictably, Sister Ruth is set up as foil to the protagonist, Sister Clodagh. Clodagh is control and reason; Ruth is lack of both. When, in the last 20 minutes of the film, Sister Ruth decides to literally throw off her habit and don a red dress, she is only fulfilling the sexual frustration that had been boiling up inside her, the sexual frustration that had become her illness. In a last ditch effort, Sister Clodagh attempts to reason with Sister Ruth, and offers to stay with her through the night so that Sister Ruth doesn’t do something she’ll regret—like running off to the arms of the abovementioned hotpanted man. The tableau is heavily symbolic, very pretty but boring.

Nun in white opens and reads the Bible(Clodagh); defrocked Nun opens a compact and applies blood-red lipstick (Ruth). The male directors use red lipstick to symbolize a woman’s madness: her desire to un-repress a pent-up sexual self. When Sister Ruth applies the lipstick, she looks beautiful but not particularly erotic—she looks as though she’s eaten a small child for dinner.

Lipsticked, Sister Ruth tosses off into the bamboo jungle to find her man and force her love upon him. He refuses her, and she literally goes mad. And here is where the directors, too, get carried away—with the metaphorical use of the lipstick: just before Sister Ruth knocks herself out in a fit of hysteria, the screen is overlayed with a red wash. The audience is put in the position of Sister Ruth, and we literally “see red.” What is more interesting than this rather pedestrian cinematographic trick, though, is what happens to Sister Ruth when she wakes up: her lipstick has been transferred to her eyes.

Knowing that this is a fictional, filmic construction, we understand that the red rimming the eyes of the actress Kathleen Byron is meant to indicate a physical manifestation of the exhaustive insanity of Sister Ruth. But when the filmmakers get carried away with symbolism, the materiality of the feminine object takes hold of tired symbolism and creates rebellion from repression. I like to read this moment as a supremely transformative moment of fictionality, in which the boundary between the reality of film production and fantasy of film consumption is pragmatically blurred. In short, I imagine that Sister Ruth herself wiped off the red lipstick from her mouth and slathered it on to her eyes.

At this point in the film, the well-tread narrative of feminine competition takes over: Sister Ruth goes back up to kill Sister Clodagh, whom she sees, perhaps not so delusionally, as love-rival. But I see this moment as a supreme moment of nihilist femininity. Sister Ruth rejects all pre-set structures of feeling, and this includes not only the sisterly love of the nunnery, but also the heterosexual romance that took her out of the nunnery. When she transfers her lipstick from mouth to eyes, she is taking that which is used to seduce men—neon-posting lips that will kiss or suck—and using it to highlight her own newfound vision. She turns her eyes into lips. Instead of inviting men to “read her lips,” she is trying to see the world with her lips. Had Sister Ruth been a real person rather than a figment of male film directors, she would leave the man’s house, not to kill another sister, but to wander the world with her mystic red eyes, to blaze her own path, her own kind of sisterhood.

The still is from 1947, but Sister Ruth looks so modern here: hair freed from tight sausage pin-curls, mouth erased, eyes lined red, it could well be 1997, or 2007. To imagine Sister Ruth as creating her own final persona is to see her marking her own nihilist spirit with the tools of femininity. When I slather on some of my beloved Shu Uemeura RD 134 lipstick on my eyes, I feelt pretty Sister Ruth-esque.

Maybe not an everyday look, but it is good, once in a while, to produce new functions for old objects of girlhood. Happy feminihilist xmas to all!

elegy for bettie page

For the past couple days, I’ve been hobbled by love for Bettie Page. And when I say “hobble,” I’m not being metaphorical: walking has been a tender experience. My toes, swollen, throbbed as if they had a heartbeat of their own. My calves hurt like I’ve been doing squats. I have a tiny perfect purple bruise at the Southern tip of each of my foot arch, punched in by the patent leather edge of the YSL Tribute pumps I wore Friday night. The bruise and the pain were a result of walking on those 5-inch heels the width of a tapestry needle for approximately six straight hours.

Friday night, December 12, 2008, I co-hostessed a party with my beloved co-pilot and RISD colleague, Jewelry and Metalsmithing professor Tracy Steepy, at her newly-purchased house. It was a belated official house-warming and end-of the semester celebration, but for me, it had a more somber undercoat. That morning, Bettie Page died after complications from a heart attack; she was 85.

Bettie Page was, for those of you who don’t know, THE pin-up queen of the 1950s. For me, she represents the 1950s. Fuck all of this fetishization of the 1950s as repressed suburban hotness (Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road; that AMC show Mad Men). Bettie Page was the orchidal opposite of that timid and boring feminine sexuality, which is only “hot” through boring nostalgic impulses. Bettie bared her body when the rest of the female population was caught up in looking like a lampshade or upside-down mixing bowl. Bettie Page is one of my prime personal idols of femmeness.

So dressing for the party, I also wanted to dress in tribute to Bettie: my version of “fifties” style is a hairy mohair cardigan, in dark purple, worn with a vintage Hole t-shirt and ripped back-seamed pantyhose. Before the guests arrived, I asked my friend Lori Talcott to take some Bettie Page-tribute pictures of me. I wanted to try to capture a smidgen of Bettie’s spirit in photo. This turned out to be quite difficult. I’m used to casting myself in self-portraits for this blog, and having another person photograph me unnerved me a bit. Asking Lori to take a Bettie photo of me, I felt less like Bettie than an actress playing Bettie—hopefully the great Gretchen Mol playing Bettie in the underrated biopic, The Notorious Bettie Page.

I’m quite shy, and when Lori played Bunny Yeager or Paula Klaw (two of Bettie’s great photographers who were incidentally also female) I found that I was not adequately Bettie. Lori arranged me on the sofa and as she got ready to push the button, she called out, “Make love to the camera!” As you can see in the above picture, I couldn’t. Unless you count the natural Korean alcohol-flush as sexy flush.

I was disappointed with myself. I felt like a femme-loser for not being able to replicate an iota of Bettie Page’s vibrancy and joy in the photo. But the night was young, and the pumps were on. Funnily enough, even before our party coincided with Bettie’s death, I had already planned on wearing my splurge for the semester, the said YSL pumps that I bought precisely because they reminded me of Bettie Page: black patent leather, peep-toed, mary-jane straps, 5-inch stiletto heels. Yes, they are YSL, but I will forever think of them as “Bettie Pumps.” I put the Bettie Pumps on around 7:30 pm, and didn’t take them off until the last guest left, around 1:30 am. I made a conscious decision to keep them on the whole night, as a tribute to Bettie’s passing.

I had tried on high heels before (I actually injured my foot once forcing it into a Chloe boot one size too small), but this was the first time I made a serious investment of my own. The shoes forced me to pick my body up and shake it down into a new form. I am and have always been a chronic sloucher—my mother used to threaten to bind a ruler to my spine if I didn’t stand up straight. I’m about 5’9”, and with those shoes, I’m sure it actually just compensated for the 5 inches lost by my usual slouch. But with this added height, one guest noted that I should push my chest out and stand up even taller. And I do admit that being 6 foot tall is quite fun. But that suggestion didn’t appeal to me somehow. I found myself slouching even more in those heels. I wasn’t wearing the pumps so I could tower over people; I was wearing them so I could feel like Bettie—or rather, to create what feeling like Bettie means.

Wearing these heels, the feeling that struck me more than height increase was the sheer pain in my feet. I’ve taken ballet before, so I know the specific pain of navigating a floor on your toes: this was not that pain. The pain of the Bettie Pumps was that I felt as though I had no feet: my feet felt as if they were chopped off, as if they were stumps. I wasn’t walking on my toes, I was walking on my ankles. The height of the heels forced my feet into a completely inhuman pose. Whereas a bare (or at least stiletto-less) foot forms a 90 degree angle with the ankle, the Bettie YSL pump forced the tops of my feet to create a smooth, straight line—a pefect 180 degrees—with my ankles. This was weird foot-binding: the heels of my feet were crushed right up against my Achilles’ tendon, which lengthened and slimmed out my legs but also made me feel as if I had no other body part but those legs.

Miracle of miracles after a few whiskeys: I didn’t once fall down the stairs while giving house-tours. In fact, I joked around with our guests as I hobbled and bobbled around: “It hurts so good,” and “You have to pay for beauty.” Yes, shamefully, all these clichés about the masochism of femininity. But the truth is, it really didn’t hurt so good. It just FUCKING HURT! But I didn’t kick the pumps off, I endured the pain, because I felt like Bettie. Pain is an inevitable part of any creative or creating process. A house-builder has to sweat to move lumber, a metalsmith has to hammer and anvil; I see femininity as just such a creative product.

This is NOT masochism. Masochism is a disorder by which the viscerality of pain is replaced with pleasure. A masochist who feels sensual pleasure at getting his or her bum whipped and says the pain is pleausurable is not actually feeling pain: “pain” as a visceral element loses meaning. Hobbling around in Bettie Pumps, I didn’t feel a warm glow of pleasure. This was pain. But the pain was in tribute to the passed Bettie, to create an elegiac gesture. When pain is used to accomplish something, to produce something, it is not masochism. That is simply process. So any tradition of thought that invokes masochism as a major tenet of femininity is sloppy theorizing. “Masochism” is just another way that men have used to denigrate the creative process that is femininity. What they say is: “Oh, women can’t possibly endure pain; they must actually and simply enjoy it.” Again and again, men want to naturalize women’s relationship with femininity as something simply sensual and orgasmic, rather than something calculated, aesthetic, designed, creative. When Bettie threw on her pumps and threw off her sweater, they figured she was simply “being herself.” Perhaps some of them gave her the credit of being “an actress.” But no: she was more universal that. Bettie Page was an ARTIST. She was an artist whose creative product was femininity. Bettie Page was a sculptor of XX genetics, a female fleshsmith.