Pierre Clementi and Catherine Deneuve in Belle du Jour (1967), dir. Luis Bunuel
A while back, I turned to twitter to ask my followers who their most ‘inappropriate’ screen crush was. I certainly know I have a few. It’s clearly not that uncommon; the old ‘women love a bad boy’ stereotype has the ring of foundational truth. The answers I received included at least two notorious bastards of literary adaptations (Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes; Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert in Lolita) and a Nazi (Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List). This was alongside your run-of-the-mill rogues’ gallery of convicts (Tom Hardy in Bronson) and gangsters (Pierre Clémenti in Belle Du Jour; Alain Delon in tons of stuff and also maybe real life). Crime films and television are full of guys like this: sexy life-ruiners. Better to parlay that inappropriate crush onto a screen avatar of a hoodlum than let a version of that play out in the real world, right?
This week, I had one of those Instagram memory posts pop up with the cover of an advance copy of my book. It reminded me that the 2-year anniversary of my publication date is fast approaching. She Found it at the Movies: Women Writers on Sex, Desire and Cinema featured women and nonbinary culture writers exploring their relationship as viewers with desire onscreen. It was a passion project based on my interest in being a female spectator and incorporating that perspective into film writing. Given that the topic was sex and sexuality, I haven’t really mentioned the book in this newsletter before: on the face of it, I didn’t think that it had much to do with what I was writing about here.
It’s since occurred to me that that’s not totally accurate. I’ve always been interested in what it means, as a female viewer, to watch, identify with, and work through the often ambivalent impressions that a film can give you. Sometimes, crime films offer up the same ambivalence, the same irreconcilable issues as a viewer and as a feminist, the same ethical russian roulette. (This is particularly true of me personally, since a friend recently described my taste in men as ‘looks like he’s just accepted mob money to throw the big fight’). In She Found it at the Movies, an entire section of essays fell under the heading ‘Fantasy and Danger’ for this reason. It seemed to me that there was a safety valve quality to desiring dangerous fictional men; men you wouldn’t touch with a bargepole in real life. I wanted to see my writers explore that.
As it turns out, they were far from the first writers to think about ‘problematic’ female sexuality vis-a-vis cinema. The way we approached it in the book was about reconciling feminist values with darker desires - or in fact, whether they needed to be reconciled at all. Historically, though, it was much more about policing and fearing female sexuality altogether.
The idea that movie-crazed young women would go to the cinema and come away with unseemly thoughts and desires - particularly so when the objects of that desire were screen crims - was of concern to many pundits and censors in the early 20th century. If moral panics around crime cinema have always been a part of the genre, nothing fans the flames of a moral panic better than that venn diagram of patriarchal fear: crime + female sexuality. Outrage spewed forth when Rudolph Valentino played a sexually-menacing -- but alluring -- kidnapper in The Sheik (1921), and eyebrows raised a decade later when a handsome young Clark Gable, playing a gangster in A Free Soul (1931) tells Norma Shearer: ‘It ain’t polite, baby, but it’s what ya want.’
Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in another steamy pre-code movie, Red Dust (1932)
Moralists have long been eyeing bad behaviour in cinema to see if people might copycat what they saw. In the early 1930s, in the lead-up to the appearance of the Production Code Administration (Hollywood’s form of longstanding censorship, wherein the censors would provide notes on productions before even seeing the finished product, among other things), the censor lived in terror that the public would romanticise and glorify the James Cagneys and Edward G. Robinsons of the gangster pictures if they did not intervene. Whereas for women audiences, the danger was seen as even more insidious.
Professor Esther Sonnet writes that for the censors, ‘assumptions were predicated on the notion that it was the more impressionable and pscyhologically weaker female spectators who were especially susceptible to the morally degenerative effects of cinema, hence the concentration of regulatory concern on pictures [...] advocating of sexual transgression.’
In other words: gangster movies might make men glamorise violence, but far worse was the idea that they might influence women sexually. They could come away with a looser sense of morality, imaginations lit aflame by the badly-behaved men on their movie screens. As Sonnet explains, ‘The dangerous, exciting, and coercive gangster provided an imaginative space into which transgressive fantasies of female desire could be projected.’
The Production Code Administration - PCA for short - was deeply Catholic in its underpinning, so it makes sense that they would have had a very ‘original sin’ approach to womanhood -- and our natural propensity to fall into moral turpitude more easily than men. The censors were heavily concerned by the moral messaging - that is, the ideas - being transmitted to female audiences in particular.
I came across a book recently, entitled ‘Our Movie-Made Children’, that gives some real insight into the beliefs around women, sex, crime, and cinema at the time. It was published in 1933 - almost a year prior to the official establishment of the PCA - and therefore still fighting the good fight for clean and decent motion pictures. Based on research funded by pro-censorship groups and written by one Henry James Forman, it finds a medley of remarkable ailments to attribute to moviegoing (physical, moral, and social; even including sleep disruption in toddlers.)
It’s a fascinating read. Forman tries to keep a pseudo-scientific tone, but inevitably slips into the same pearl-clutching that you might expect from any heavily pro-censorship text. Its data is cobbled together with unrepresentative polls of various groups, including many anecdotes and quotations from anonymous interview subjects - mostly underage, and mostly institutionalised for various petty crimes.
In a chapter called ‘Sex-Delinquency and Crime’, the author manages to link the rise of girls’ truancy from school to their gendered affection for moviegoing (they often ran off to the movies while skipping class) -- and this to their eventual moral downfall. Forman quotes several teenage girls who were institutionalised for juvenile (specifically, sexual) delinquency, linking their stories together for a tenuous evidence of cinema’s deleterious effects on the sensitive feminine mind.
I found myself wondering what, exactly, ‘sexual delinquency’ meant in 1933. It turns out that ‘wayward’ girls could be locked up not just for sex work itself, but for being coerced into sex work, having multiple sexual partners, or other perceived infractions. Unsurprisingly, these cases were overwhelmingly among the working-class, immigrant poor, and people of colour. This paper is an eye-opening overview, if you’re curious to learn more.
One young woman says that she’d go to roadhouses and parties looking for ‘the right kind of a bad man’ to take her out after watching certain kinds of movies. Another admis that ‘a movie would get me so passionate after it was over that I just had to have relief. You know what I mean.’
Forman soberly reports: ‘In a state training school for delinquent girls, one hundred and twenty one out of 252 - virtually half - declare that they felt like having a man make love to them after they had seen a passionate love picture’. He goes on to surmise that movies had the power to ‘change a typically adolescent love affair into one of illicit sex relations’ (as if -- amusingly -- the teenagers wouldn’t have figured out how to have sex on their own).
What’s always amazed me about the film censor is how deeply they, in their own anti-art, puritanical tendencies, come full circle to meet the movie-mad girls in the final analysis. Both believe, quasi-religiously, in the power of cinema in our lives. You might even say the censor, then and now, is a true cinema believer.
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Maybe you’ve heard of a ‘hybristophile’? Even if you don’t know the word, you know who they are: murder groupies. If you watch true crime, they usually make a cameo. Hybrostiphiles are women who are sexually and romantically attracted to men who commit extreme criminal acts, and honestly, it’s probably more depicted in film and television, or spoken about online, than it is common in real life. It’s an extreme. They’re women who become intimate pen-pals with convicts, even Death Row inmates, and sometimes marry or have children with them. Or women who have dedicated tumblr pages to drawing crude photoshop love-hearts around photographs of a young Ted Bundy. (Or at least, the latter pretends to belong to the same category as the former - I have my doubts, frankly.)
Most women - even the one in your friend group who thinks guys fresh out of the can are always the fittest - are not actually suffering from hybristophilia. In truth, there’s a lot of room on the spectrum between ‘women love a bad boy’ to ‘penpals with Charles Manson’, but the widespread women-led obsession with true crime documentaries and serial killer films (Casting heartthrob Zac Efron as Ted Bundy was a helluva cynical move, for instance) suggests that our relationship with the moving image has not always discouraged the fascination.
You can only imagine what Henry James Forman and his ilk at the Production Code Administration would make of this phenomenon. I expect they would say it had something to do with the weak feminine psychology. It’s why, to be honest, I have trouble paying much heed to the idea that my desires for - say - a Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders - are truly worth self-flagellation. I’m just following the (primrose?) path so many other dreamy movie-mad women and girls did. As my brilliant colleague Jessica Kiang wrote in She Found it at the Movies: ‘How do we admit that some of our erotic impulses might have their basis in unwholesome, regressive or reactionary arenas, but that they too are valid because they have become a part of us?’
Perhaps we should listen to a teenage girl who loved the movies in 1933, aged sixteen and locked up in a reformatory for some sexual misdemeanour that today would hardly bear a raised eyebrow. When she was interviewed for ‘Our Movie-Made Children’, her name and life story were not recorded. But her righteous lack of shame reverberates across the decades: ‘When I see a picture about women who “go wrong” it only makes me wish I was in their place. Because I do know what thrill and pleasures they get from going wrong.’
Me too, honey.
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Thank you for reading Sisters Under the Mink. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription to help me offset the costs of research and time spent on it, I’ll love you forever.
