Hit Me With Your Best Shot: The Color Purple

I read Alice Walker's The Color Purple for the first time in the backseat of a car during Spring Break of my junior year of high school, while my parents drove me from Virginia to New Jersey to start looking at colleges.  I would say, "By the end of the book I was audibly crying," except that would imply I wasn't already crying at several earlier stages.  As soon as I finished the book, I read it again, and then I read Damage by Josephine Hart (!), and then Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, and then The Color Purple again, and I cried again.  After well over a thousand miles of driving up and down and around the northeast (thanks, Mom and Dad!), I had a new favorite novel.  The cheap, tan, pulpy paper became somewhat damp from the stickiness of car travel and the saltiness of teenaged tears.  You can still make out the giveaway waviness in a few pages of my copy, which I bought for that trip in 1994 and still keep in my office.

The image above might be my favorite from the film, not remotely dulled for me by its ubiquitous reproductions (in slightly stylized form) as the poster image for the movie and the cover art for my paperback.  There is so much here: an elegantly simple device to communicate the passage of time; a distinctive but unfilled outline, heralding the imminent arrival within the frame of a new, debuting, but instantly iconic actress; a gesture to the Old Southern art of cut-paper silhouettes, evoked as gently here as it is brutally, dazzlingly reprised in the art of Kara Walker; an echo of prior images when Celie's and Nettie's candlelit shadows played pat-a-cake on two walls of a bedroom, such that we instantly grasp adult Celie's Bible and other books as her next-best-thing substitute for a vanished and deeply-missed sister; the rough, milled texture of the wallpaper, connoting the texture of those pages Celie is turning; and an indelible, two-ply image of reading itself as both a lonely activity and a life-saving rescue.  The low contrast and other qualities of the light here make the image unmistakably sad, even if you don't know the context.  At the same time, the shot is just warm enough—softer and more tender than the harsh, lapidary colors sneaking through the curtains at left—that you also sense the intimacy of the scene.  You'd imagine that, having read five books during a week of car travel, or three books a total of five times, that I must not have been much of a talker.  In fact I was, especially with my equally garrulous parents, but they knew I loved to read and had no problem leaving me to it even in the tight space of a four-door.  What they thought about hearing me cry with my nose in a novel I have no idea; I can't remember if I talked to them about what I was reading.  But I do recall, with fondness and wistfulness, that sense of feeling totally alone when I was reading, even when the people I loved most in the world were eighteen inches away.  This shot is a perfect index for that kind of feeling.  "I'd like to thank everyone in this book for coming," Alice Walker writes on her never-bettered dedication page, and for hours of reading The Color Purple, Celie and Mister and Shug and Nettie and Sofia and Squeak and the rest were the only people I recognized around me.

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Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Dead Ringers

Even in my most productive weeks, in ten of my most productive weeks, I cannot compete with Nathaniel R's indefatigable productivity. If you know Nathaniel, you know he is always fretting that his site traffic will collapse, or seeking ways to give his readers more more more. He is so extraordinarily generous, it makes me tired just thinking about it, which is why you should donate.

Most recently, he has been laboring even harder than I have to make sure you know about my new book, The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema, which I started working on within a year of meeting Nathaniel in 2002.  Already he published this interview I got to do with top-flight film critic Tim Brayton about the book's ideas, its contexts, and what I hope people might get from it (which was a joy to do).  Today he is hosting a new installment of his delicious Hit Me With Your Best Shot series that is also designed to plug the book by showcasing the subject of its first chapter, David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, an eerie film noir in crimson and blue, chrome and rue, starring two twin brothers as each other's homme fatal.

I'm delighted to see what his other contributors select as their favorite shot in this deliriously gorgeous movie, shot by Peter Suschitzky, the same cinematographer who lends chic, subtle macabre to all of Cronenberg's pictures.  Suschitzky also gave us the fluorescent slash of light sabers in The Empire Strikes Back, the farcical flatness of Mars Attacks!, and the scary, rock-and-roll martyrology of Peter Watkins' Privilege, a clear and underseen precursor to the film that closes my book, Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine.  I suppose I'm being predictable by picking a shot that already illustrates my chapter on Dead Ringers.  But since photo captions in academic books typically keep to a bare minimum, I thought I'd say a little more about why I selected it, and what I find more generally artful about the shot, and why I relish as gruesome and disquieting a film as Dead Ringers, and what you might hear if you dip into conversation with The Desiring-Image.



These are the gynecological tools that Beverly Mantle designs for operating on "mutant women."  They wheel into this shot from just out of frame, staggering the eye with their horrid shapes while flattering it with their texture and detail, and with the precise, elegant framing Suschitzky achieves even from this spontaneously-arriving element.  The plot logic behind these implements is even more revolting than their fanged, spindly appearance: at this point the drugged-up and heartbroken Beverly believes that all women's bodies exist in a state of grievous mutation, which only he can assess and emend, using these devices.  Soon enough, we will learn that Beverly perceives himself and his own twin brother to be mutants, and will "operate" on Elliot accordingly.  No points for guessing that this goes badly.  Cyril and Stewart Marcus, the New York gynecologists whose true story inspired Dead Ringers, did not in fact smelt such alien technologies, though they did die together under mysterious circumstances, and one of them did leap atop a female surgery patient in a narcotic haze to huff her anesthesia, as Beverly does soon enough in this scene.  If you want to know more about the Marcuses, read the "Dead Ringers" chapter of this book, and feel bad for Rosenbaum that he gets no credit of any kind in Cronenberg's film.

My book is about queer cinema from the late 1980s to the present, and its biggest goal is to define that rubric so that it doesn't only or even primarily equate to "gay and lesbian film."  Instead, I want the phrase to suggest an expansive, debatable, fluctuating range of movies that use story, style, and structure to throw their audiences out of easy assumptions about what any desire is, how it works, who feels it, via what promptings, how abruptly it might shapeshift, and how cinema helps create it.  I wrote two chapters on Cronenberg because he's more or less our poet laureate of shape-shifting bodies and weird sexualities, though Dead Ringers marked something new for him in the wake of Rabid, Scanners, The Fly, and their ilk: rather than douse us in the plasma and viscera of bodily change, Dead Ringers uses uncanny atmospherics, brooding performances, and objects like these tools to imply total overhauls in desire and embodiment.  As the best horror movies know, and some of the most erotic movies do as well, what we imagine for ourselves is often scarier and sexier than images can show us.  Beverly's tools are unnerving, then, because they force you to conceive of the body they would fit: an ingenious cinematic trick, though not one that every viewer will want to try at home.

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