PS Afterthoughts on Gender and Medium
It would seem from the commonalities of these five films that this "form of necrophilia'' is gendered. All of the objects of necrophilial desire are women; all of their morbid lovers, men. And the gender biases of the classical cinema and its preferred objects are overdetermined by cultural and psychic forces. Elisabeth Bronfen has thoroughly analyzed the imbrication of death, femininity, and the aesthetic in modern literature and art. But it must be added that the cinema can and sometimes does offer up male objects of desire, too. If these five films (1948-1976) date from an era in which the silent cinema and the prewar classic cinema were being "mourned," what stories relating to these themes, if any, can be found in the contemporary, post-Hollywood Renaissance narrative cinema? And might the sexual and gender roles of such a scenario possibly be more fluid or variable in a cinematic universe informed at least indirectly by postmodernism, feminism, and academic film theory of various stripes? Two films, both of which are powerfully engaged in a kind of Bloomian romance with the classical Hollywood cinema, raise problems related to gender and return: Dead Again (Kenneth Branagh, 1991) and The Majestic (Frank Darabont, 2001).
In Dead Again, Branagh revives the reincarnation theme, with not one, but two contemporary characters who bear uncanny resemblances to the couple at the center of an infamous murder case of the forties. Although the scenario might have included the kinds of presentiment (or should it be postsentiment?) that led Paul Mangin, in Corridor of Mirrors, to conclude that he and Mifanwy both were reincarnations, it does not.43 Indeed, Branagh's contemporary private eye, Mike Church, seems uncannily ignorant of his prior existence until he is induced to recall it under hypnosis. Even then, his attraction to the amnesia victim he calls Grace seems unmotivated by the past. As a plot element, amnesia itself represents a sort of affront to the perverse romance with the past that is so characteristic of Dead Again s predecessors. Even as a film excessively caught up in film history, patently indebted in story and style to Hitchcock, Welles, and countless classic melodramas, as Marcia Landy and Lucy Fischer have detailed in an excellent consideration of the film, this pastiche does not, in fact, so much mourn the classic cinema as "valorize itself through re-vision'' of it. And, as Landy and Fischer also note, the film's bizarre gender-reversal conceit (under hypnosis, Church discovers that he is not the reincarnation of Roman Strauss, but rather, Roman's wife, Margaret) not only creates illogical gaps and inconsistencies in the scenario, but also is ultimately gratuitous and fraudulent as a postmodern reconsideration of gender roles in the classic film: "At a time when deconstruction, postcolonial discourse, and queer theory have sought to undermine certain forms of psychological and behavioral identification, Dead Again resorts—its assignment of murder, violence, and blame to the figure that conjures up the spectre of same-sex sexuality—to traditionally pernicious characterizations.... The film rehearses, rather than revises, gender and sexual conventions."44
Lacking a protagonist who recognizes the image of the beloved in her (or his) revenant, then, Dead Again evades the raison d'etre of many of the scenarios from which it derives inspiration. No one looks at another across time with melancholic desire in Dead Again (in fact, no one even dies "again" in Dead Again), and this reflects its own lack of genuine feeling for the films it pastiches, or travesties.
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