Some critics have called Alan J. Pakula’s neo-noir Klute (1971) progressive and radical in its positive depiction of
an independent, sexually liberated woman; others have argued that the construction
of the female character is no different than that found in classic noir, and
that Klute actually operates in a
profoundly anti-feminist way. This essay seeks to explore the reasons behind these
diverging interpretations, locating the source of the difficulty in assessing the
main female character’s power over the narrative in the disjunctive
relationship between sound and image in the film. In marked contrast to the
classic noir cycle, in Klute the
story is filtered through the subjectivity of the female character, who poses a
distinctive challenge to the patriarchal order and the foundation of the
heterosexual couple. At the same time, there is a disconnect between the words
she speaks in voiceover and the actions we see unfold onscreen that actively
works to undermine her point of view. It becomes increasingly difficult, then,
to say with any certainty whether the film’s central female protagonist can be
considered an active subject or a passive object presented for the male gaze.
The only evidence of his whereabouts is an explicit letter he has
supposedly written to a call girl in New York. The tape recorder appears once
again over the opening credits, now playing back heroine prostitute Bree Daniels’
voice, calmly discussing business with a client and recommending that he
unashamedly act out his desires: “Oh, inhibitions are always nice ’cause
they’re so nice to overcome,” she says and laughs seductively. “Don’t be
afraid. I’m not… You should never be ashamed of things like that, you mustn’t
be, you know. There’s nothing wrong. Nothing… nothing is wrong. I think the
only way that any of us can ever be happy is to let it all hang out, you know,
do it all, and fuck it.”
Sex, then, and the frankness of this prompting become the disruptive
factor which opens the narrative. “In general in the movies, as in society,”
Sylvia Harvey writes, “the family at the same time legitimizes and conceals sexuality” (37, emphasis I
original). Tom Grunneman’s loyal wife must, of course, deny that her missing
husband could have ever been involved with such a woman, but Bree’s voice, introducing
illicit sex into the domestic environment, has effectively dislodged the image
of the perfect family. The absence of family relations in most classic noirs or
its negative and distorted treatment, as in Klute,
inherently presents a critique of the American ideal of heterosexual marriage
and procreation. Whereas in most genres successful romantic love leads
inevitably in the direction of the stable institution of marriage, “the point
about film noir, by contrast, is that it is structured around the destruction
or absence of romantic love and the family” (Harvey 37). It has been noted that
the defining contours of noir are the product of that which is abnormal and
dissonant. The absence of “normal” family relationships creates a vacuum that
ideology abhors, allowing for the production of seeds of counter-ideologies. As
Harvey points out,
“The absence of disfigurement of the family
both calls attention to its own lack and to its own deformity, and may be seen
to encourage the consideration of alternative institutions for the reproduction
of social life. Despite the ritual punishment of acts of transgression, the
vitality with which these acts are endowed produces an excess of meaning which
cannot finally be contained. Narrative resolutions cannot recuperate their
subversive significance” (Harvey 45).
In Klute, however, the
heroine’s transgressions are not punished as much as overcome through the reinstatement
of the heterosexual couple at the end. The film places Jane Fonda in the role
occupied by the femme fatale, the villainous seductress who lures men into
deep, deadly trouble in classic 1940s noir. The primary crime of the genre’s
“liberated” woman, Janey Place notes, is her refusal to be defined in relation
to men, and “this refusal can be perversely seen… as an attack on men’s very
existence” (35). But, while in classic noir the femme fatale is seen as “the
obstacle to the male quest” (Kaplan 16) or “the central problem in the
unraveling of truth” (Gledhill, “Klute
1” 15), in Pakula’s movie Bree is neither the object of the male investigation nor
a problem in its path, but rather a clue on the way to discovery.
The character is not a conventional noir woman because she is finally
proven innocent of the family’s and the missing man’s destruction; in fact, she
has to be saved from her own sexual confusion by the eponymous private
detective (played by Donald Sutherland). In the 1940s thrillers the great issue in question is the
reliability or otherwise of the woman, the degree of fidelity or treachery
inherent in her sexuality; in contrast, the main concern in Klute is the detective’s mission to
establish his friend’s honor, the sexual integrity of the man. The fatal passions
of noir are here humanized into romance as the woman is cleared of any direct
involvement of the crime and proceeds to move throughout the narrative from
brittle but genuine self-sufficiency to love and dependence on a man.
In her persuasive analysis of the film, Diane Giddis is prompted to
treat Klute as a dramatization of
inner conflict rather than a straight suspense story, converting the two male
protagonists into projections or symbolic extensions of the heroine’s psyche. “More
than a contemporary reworking of the private eye movie,” she writes, “[Klute] seems closer to the psychological
suspense thriller, with most of the action going on inside the central
character’s head” (27). Thus Bree’s potential killer can be seen as the
incarnation of the emotional danger presented by the private investigator. As
Giddis notes, from the beginning the two men are shown in juxtaposition, the
first threatening “breather” call Bree gets from her tormentor immediately
followed by Klute’s appearance on her doorstep and in her life. The second time
Klute and Bree meet, the killer, later revealed to be Peter Cable, the missing
man’s employer, is shown watching them through a gate ascending the outside
stairs from the detective’s basement apartment to Bree’s apartment inside.
Although the investigator’s intentions are the opposite of the woman’s pursuer,
his methods are often the same; they both watch her from the shadows, follow
her on her trips, Klute taps her phone and Cable tapes her sessions with
clients, and both are associated visually with plummeting depths and vertical
shafts, darkness, and screens of wire netting. Significantly, both men bear
towards Bree an intense and ambiguous staring gaze.
The woman’s physical danger increases throughout the film in direct
proportion to her involvement with Klute. As her attachment to the detective
grows, Cable progresses from disembodied, silent telephone presence to
anonymous voyeur and rooftop visitor to fully materialized assailant. Instead
of clinging to Klute for protection, however, the heroine repudiates and
rejects him, seemingly holding him responsible for what is happening to her. At
the height of her emotional involvement with Klute, she tells her therapist
that she would like to “go back to the comfort of being numb again.” Throughout
the film the character’s dual desires—to maintain control and her need and fear
of losing it—create a split in her actions between a loving, vulnerable Bree,
which alternates—and sometimes co-exists with—the manipulative and defensive
Bree.
The first time Bree and Klute have sex is a perfect example of the contradictory
impulses that draw the heroine to him at the same time that she needs to
reassert her detachment. Frightened by a noise on her roof and unable to sleep,
the woman goes down to Klute’s apartment for company. In her pajamas and
without makeup on, she is clearly open and vulnerable, lying on his bed and
getting tucked in. In the middle of the night she wakes up and the two make
love. She must, however, assume the role of prostitute when she feels
threatened, reminding Klute that he means no more to her than any other client
and he has failed to satisfy her. Falling back into the comfortable and
empowering routine of her job, she assures him, “You were terrific, a real
tiger. Are you upset because you didn’t make me come?” she asks. “I never come
with a john.” Yet the scene doesn’t end with her assertive exit from Klute’s
apartment; this image of independence is undermined when it dissolves into a
shot of her lying in her own bed again, alone and miserable.
Not only is there a split in meaning between sound and image, but the
voice itself is shown as contradictory. The hesitant, searching remarks made to
the therapist, which are often played in voiceover, are answered by the sure,
controlled voice on the tapes that Cable obsessively plays. By the end of the
film, the heroine’s voice has been effectively stolen by her aggressor and
turned against her. The words which were empowering in the original context
they were uttered in are repositioned by Cable as indices of the evil which
female sexuality incites in men when they are played back to her over the phone
and during her final confrontation with the killer.
In her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey posits that the male unconscious “has two avenues of escape” from the
threat of female sexuality and the underlying castration anxiety: voyeurism or
fetishistic scopophilia. In the first, the woman is investigated and her
mystery demystified counterbalanced by her devaluation, punishment, or saving
of the guilty object. Mulvey notes that this option is characteristic of film
noir, and this strategy is clearly present in Klute, where the detective tries to protect and save Bree, and the
killer tries to punish and destroy her.
In “Klute 2: Klute and Feminism,” Gledhill notes how
the two sides of the ’40s noir private eye—his romantic idealization of women
and the contradictory embittered accusatory disgust—are split in Pakula’s movie
between the two male characters, “representing complementary faces of
patriarchy faced with the problem of female sexuality” (107).
In contrast to Bree, the detective is defined by a puritanical, almost
virginal sexuality. Unlike the private investigator of classic noir, Klute’s
power stems not from a knowing, often embittered or disillusioned view of the
world, but from his innocence. As Gledhill notes, he is “a country boy, with
his illusions and morals intact” (“Klute
2” 105). His puritanism undermines Bree’s assertiveness; he responds not to her
sexuality, but to the lost child in her. Although the relationship that slowly
develops between the two is based on understanding and acceptance—she allows
him to see her “mean,” “ugly,” and “whorey,” and he never judges her—Klute’s
gentleness is accompanied by strong paternalistic traits.
The second “avenue” Mulvey discusses concerns the complete disavowal of
castration by fetishizing the woman, turning her into a spectacle (63-65).
Accordingly, in Klute the heroine
materializes as an aspiring model, first seen in a lineup at an audition for a
commercial, where the selectors discuss the details of the female applicants’
appearance as if they were cattle. Mulvey notes that in cinema the pleasure in
looking is split between active/male and passive/female, with women, “in their
traditional exhibitionist role” simultaneously “looked at and displayed, with
their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be
said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness”
(62-63, emphasis in original). I would argue that Pakula’s film significantly
complicates this dichotomy through the filtering of the very act of
being-looked-at-ness through the main character’s subjectivity. Although the
object of the gaze, Bree is not passive or stripped of agency, instead
appropriating and using the gaze for her own pleasure (the satisfaction of
being in control) and profit (making money off of her male clients). She
exploits and is exploited at once.
Gendering Kaja Silverman’s concept of suture, Mulvey goes on to argue
that it is the male figure with which the spectator can identify, “so that the
power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active
power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence” (64).
Whether or not Bree’s voice actively controls the direction of the narrative in
Klute will be explored further in
this essay, but it is undeniable that we identify with the female protagonist
throughout the film, associating the events unfolding onscreen with her point
of view, not that of either of the male characters. At the same time, it
remains debatable whether Bree actually maintains control through exercising
her voice. Because of the disjunction between sound and image, the audience
experiences a distance between the narrating voiceover and the story being
narrated which leaves room for ambiguity.
One way of looking at the plot of the typical film noir, Gledhill
argues, is to see it as a struggle between different voices for control over
telling the story (“Klute 1” 16). In
classic noir, a hierarchy of discourses is established, suppressing the female
discourse in favor of the male. The subjective narration, usually developed in
voiceover, is almost always performed by a man, which, as Molly Haskell points
out, completely deprives the woman of her point of view (198). It is not as
clear if this is the case in Klute,
where the confession-oriented investigation of noir is divorced of the male
hero, becoming an investigation of the self, one instigated by the woman. Her
claim to wield the normally male prerogative of words allows Bree, especially
in her meetings with her clients, to actively engage with male sexual fantasy
instead of passively being its object. In order to understand the degree of
power Bree holds over the narrative, we must analyze the way her voice is used
throughout the film.
Mary Ann Doane and Silverman have discriminated between different kinds
of voice in cinema. Doane distinguishes between (1) synch; (2) voice-off (where
a character speaks from offscreen and is not seen); (3) interior monologue
(where we see the character and hear his or her asynchronous voice); and (4)
disembodied voiceover (no visible character or designated diegetic figure).
Silverman takes these categories and, applying them specifically to the female
voice in cinema, remaps them in terms of “embodiment” as: (1) synch sound
(which she suggests binds the female film subject to the prison of the
objectifying image); (2) the floating voice (one that at times emerges as
detached and, at other time, can be attached to a specific female body in the
film and thus enjoys a certain degree of subjectivity or resistance to
classical cinema’s objectification of the female body); and (3) the disembodied
voice (a voice entirely without visual locus, which Silverman understands to be
the most resistant to the oppressive dominant ideology of patriarchy). In Klute, the voice of the heroine starts
as disembodied, “freed from its claustral confinement within the female body,”
but thereafter fluctuates between these different stages of embodiment (186).
What is problematic about analyzing Bree’s power in terms of her relationship
to the objectified female body is that it is the body itself which acts as the
source of the character’s independence and power.
Bree confides in her therapist that the only time she feels in control
is when she is turning tricks. Trying to get away from “the life” through
modeling or acting jobs places her in a position of helplessness,
vulnerability, and passivity, whereas with a john she can feel wanted, she
knows what she’s doing, and, “for an hour, [she is] the best actress in the
world and the best fuck in the world.” She continues, “That’s what’s nice about
it. You don’t have to feel anything, care about anything, you don’t have to
like anybody, and you just lead them by the ring in their nose in the direction
that they think they want to go in, and you get a lot of money out of them in as
short a period of time as possible, and you control it, and you call the shots,
and I always feel just great afterwards.”
From the first time we see Bree interacting with a client, we are
encouraged to identify with her subjectivity. Even in the moment in which it
would perhaps be easiest for the film to objectify the woman, when we see her
having sex, our adherence to Bree’s point of view is clinched when, groaning
out a fake orgasm, she quickly checks her watch over the client’s shoulder.
Although she offers her body, her mind is elsewhere. Later we witness how her
favorite client, an old man who “never lays a hand on [her]” pays Bree to
fabricate stories about erotic encounters in romantic locales. She approaches
prostitution as if it were a form of masquerade, no different than her
auditions as an actress or her modeling calls.
For the character, control turns on enunciative power, what Silverman
calls “her capacity to effect through discourse” (83). The importance she
attributes to play-acting, however, suggests that “enunciative authority can
come to be invested only in a voice which refuses to be subordinated and judged
by the body” (Silverman 83). The character thus aspires to the condition of a
disembodied voice, a fact indicated not only by the verbal masquerade, with its
disconnect between body and voice, exteriority and interiority, actions and
feelings, but by a telling remark she makes to her analyst: “What I’d really
like is to be faceless and bodiless and be left alone.” As Silverman writes,
“The
voiceover is privileged to the degree that it
transcends the body. Conversely, it loses power and authority with every
corporeal encroachment, rom a regional accent or idiosyncratic ‘grain’ to
definitive localization I the image. Synchronization marks the final moment in
any such localization, the point of full and complete ‘embodiment’” (49,
emphasis in original).
Michel Chion, in The Voice in Cinema, similarly comments on the contrasting values traditionally assigned
to the embodied voice, on the one hand, and the disembodied, acousmatic, voice,
on the other. Sexual difference functions as a point of reference, especially
when, in one striking passage, he compares the localization of a previously
unlocalized voice to the performance of striptease:
“In much the same
way that the female genitals are the end point revealed by undressing (the
point after which the denial of the absence of the penis is no longer
possible), there is an end point in de-acosmatization—the mouth from which the voice issues…. As long as the face and the
mouth have not been completely revealed… de-acousmatization is incomplete, and
the voice retains an aura of invulnerability and of magic power” (28).
It is at the moment when we see Bree, significantly objectified in the
model lineup, that she is divested of the threat to create disequilibrium and tension
that, according to Chion, the acousmetre
always poses. Reduced to a fetishized being, the character no longer possesses
any of the powers of the acousmatic presence, defined by Chion as ubiquity,
panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence. The acousmetre “has only to show
itself—for the person speaking to inscribe his or her body inside the frame, in
the visual field—for it to lose its power…” (Chion 27). In fact, after the
point in which we first see the character onscreen, her voice is constantly proven
wrong by the image, Bree’s actions belying her words.
We hear Bree tell her therapist that her fear of Klute makes her angry,
makes her want to manipulate him, but we watch her melting under his gaze and
touch and caringly returning his caresses. Later, she tells him to not “get
hung up on [her],” even as she embraces him in bed. She says she could never
give up her lifestyle for him, but Pakula shows us an image of her sitting at
his feet, looking expectantly up at him like a child. This undermines the
character’s control over the narrative, as we are always more likely to believe
in the image rather than the voice. This belief, Gledhill explains, “rests on a
number of factors: first, the powerful stereotype of romantic love inevitably
takes precedence over these half-articulations of the problems of would-be
independent women; second, the ideology of the eye and the camera as offering
first-hand evidence of reality may support the image against the voice…”
(Gledhill, “Klute 2” 109).
In marked contrast to the heroine, the detective and Cable (Charles Cioffi) are defined
by their inscrutable silence. This is the ultimate source of their power, as
words are shown to be deceptive, not adequate to the truth, and eventually
dangerous. If the male protagonists say little, they are nonetheless given
control over the image, their gaze assessing and ultimately controlling the
scenes they survey. Whereas in classic noir the femme fatale or spider woman is
connected to darkness, shot in silhouette, obscured by shadows, or shown in mirrors
and reflections, conveying the overwhelming lack of unity and control, in Klute it is the men who are less visible
(Place 41). Our first sight of Klute from Bree’s point of view comes through
the peephole in her door, his face distorted by the lens, and later she peers
at him through the barely cracked and still chained door so he is only
partially in view. Throughout the film, both Klute and Cable are shot in
darkness and half-light, in silhouette or hidden in shadows, and whenever they
appear the movie abounds in jarring vertical camerawork, sudden plummeting
downward zooms or ascensions in elevator shafts, imagery of netting, wire mesh,
and claustrophobic rooms made vulnerable by skylights, suggesting insecurity,
sudden submersion, and imprisonment. The mise-en-scene reinforces the point
that the male characters represent danger and mystery more so than the female
protagonist and that, while she is displayed and fetishized by the camera, they
lie outside the realm of visual objectification.
In a change almost unprecedented in film noir, Klute’s final scenes pose the possibility of a fulfilled
heterosexual relationship and of domesticity; the threat of female sexuality
which was contained and punished in the classic noir cycle here is reduced
through assimilation. Some have considered this ending as unambiguously
positive. Giddis, for instance, writes,
“Klute—the healthy,
giving, loving side of Bree—appears to have triumphed over Cable—the malignant,
fearful, unfeeling side. Cable’s death signals the start of a new life for
Bree. At the end she is leaving New York for a small town in Pennsylvania with Klute,
apparently giving up prostitution for good. She seems to have emerged from her
dark night of fear unified, whole” (33).
Without considering the ambivalence of the voiceover and the
contradiction between image and sound, however, this reading is perhaps overly
optimistic. “I know enough about myself,” Bree declares during the last scene
of the film. “We’re so different,” she continues. “Whatever lies in store, it’s
not going to be setting up housekeeping in Tuscarora and darning socks. I’d
just go out of my mind.” This assertion of independence is completely
contradicted by the image, in which Bree gathers her belonging and leaves her
apartment with Klute; the voice is shown to be mistaken. Ironically, when they
leave, Bree’s room is stripped bare except for the telephone, which no voice
will answer.
In this essay I have attempted to show how character subjectivity and
spectator positioning are constructed in Klute
through both sound and image, and, significantly, through the disconnect
between the two. I argue that this disjunction happens primarily along gender
lines, as the female voice remains at odds with the (self-) objectifying of the
female body throughout the film and the control exerted by the male gaze. While
initially Bree Daniels appears as the epitome of the independent, modern,
sexually liberated woman, the threat she poses is contained as her assertions
are repeatedly undermined by what we see. I do not wish to suggest that there
is a “correct” reading of Pakula’s movie as either a progressive film that
empowers its main female character nor a work engaged solely in the ideological
function of reinforcing the values of patriarchy. Instead, my hope is to
express the inherent and constant tension embedded in the movie between these
two types of discourses and suggest the different ways this tension is handled.
The film responds to and gives voice to the repressed needs of our culture even
as it tries to manage and resolve such anxieties.
Works
Cited
Chion, Michel. The Voice in
Cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Print.
Doane, Mary Ann. “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and
Space. Yale French Studies. 60
(1980): 33-50. JSTOR. Web. 23 Apr.
2015.
Giddis, Diane. “The Divided Woman: Bree Daniels in Klute.” Women and the Cinema:
A Critical
Anthology. Kay, Karyn and Gerald Peary, eds. New York: Dutton, 1977. Print.
Gledhill, Christine. “Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist
Criticism.” Women in Film Noir.
Kaplan, E. Ann. London: BFI, 1978. Print.
Gledhill, Christine. “Klute 2: Feminism and Klute. Women in Film Noir.
Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. 2nd ed. London: BFI, 1980. Print.
Harvey, Sylvia. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. 2nd ed. London: BFI,
1980. Print.
Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to
Rape: The Treatment of Women in the
Movies. 2nd ed. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1987. Print.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Introduction to 1978 Edition.” Women in Film Noir. Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. 2nd ed. London: BFI, 1980. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Thornham, Sue, ed. New York: New York University
Press, 1999. Print.
Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” Women
in Film Noir. Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. London: BFI, 1978. Print.
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic
Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. Theories of Representation and
Difference. Teresa de Lauretis, ed. Print.
Indeed impressive post.
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