By Megan Brown
I have seen Gilda at least 20 times, but I’ve seen this particular scene- the part in which the titular Gilda is introduced to us- at least 25. Here, Johnny Farrell (played by Glen Ford) eases open the bedroom door where he’s told “the canary” is waiting. Indeed she is. The room is black, at first. And then the lights go up. Indeed, she is waiting: Rita Hayworth, brandishing her curls, her steely eyes, in what film critic Mary Ann Doane calls “an almost violent gesture” (Doane 99). Slipping up her taffeta dress to cover a scandalously bare shoulder, dominator of her small, cinematic kingdom like Julius Caesar or Citizen Kane. We know she is waiting before we see her, one because of the darkness, and one because the movie is hers. The text is an organism which is entirely dependent on her entrance. Gilda, those technicolor letters squashed above Rita Hayworth’s leonine body, her eyes daring the camera, daring us. Witness me, take me, I am not the offering but the offerer.
Shot for shot (or rather plot point by plot point) the above scene in Gilda is an exact copy of Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard.” We have the heroine/hero (Johnny Farrell) opening the taboo room where a woman’s body is revealed to be. The room is licentious, dangerous. In “Bluebeard,” it is attended by edicts and threats veiled in language. In Gilda, it is the bedroom- the (quite literal) site of promiscuous activity. In “Bluebeard,” the revelation is the dead feminine body wounded by penetration. In Gilda, the revelation is the female body alive and poised and threatening, Rita Hayworth offering herself to our eyes like a poisoned apple. These two texts which are in active conversation with each other- “Bluebeard” and Gilda- will be the focus of my paper. Whereas “Bluebeard” assuages male anxieties, Gilda creates them. Our titular woman is possessed of that forbidden carnal knowledge and it does not maim her but instead makes her dangerous, unsavory, hungry. She is masculine in her appetite and is the consumer and not the consumed. And a woman possessed as she is of herself and her sexuality is a terrifying thing.
I want to take a step back here and discuss the genre of film noir as a whole, because this topic gives us further proof of ancestry between the movies of the 1940’s and “Bluebeard.” As Sylvia Harvey writes, “The encounter with a depressed peacetime economy…began a process of general disillusionment for many of those returning home after the war, in search of the values which they had fought to defend” (Harvey 39). In the golden age of film noir- about from the 1940’s to the mid-1950’s- American patriarchal values underwent extreme displacement. As Harvey puts it, there was a double transformation at play: the man-turned-soldier returns to a home that is just as ravaged as him, this time by economic breakdown and uncertainty. To greatly simplify Freud’s theory of the uncanny, these men returned to the site of comfort to find the familiar- the wind-up toy wife, the neat little house house, the Cadillac, the office job- very, very, strange. There was another transformation at work too. As film historian Stella Bruzzi writes in the first chapter of her book “Bringing Up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War Hollywood,” “multitudes of American women…found fulfillment in employment during the war” (Bruzzi 2). So that little toy wife, so amicable pre-conflict, transforms now into a highly dubious figure. One that is capable of building the sides of ships, meeting other women, and encountering other (strange) men. What was she up to while her beloved was away? Who entered the home, whose home did she enter, whose cologne is on the bathroom counter? There are locked, forbidden rooms in every home now: the study, the bedroom, the top drawer.
This notion of “returning home” to make a bed with a stranger pervades “Bluebeard.” Before we know of the cutlass and the locked chamber with its miniscule wives, Bluebeard is an aristocrat. He is charming in that Jane Austen man-of-the-gentry way, unremarkable except for the eponymous hue of his facial hair. Perrault tells us of Bluebeard’s courting history, “the younger of the two sisters began to think that the beard of the master of the house was not so blue after all and that he was in fact a fine fellow” (Perrault 189). But Bluebeard as he appears known – a fine fellow, a master of the house- evaporates the minute he and his new bride return home. He, like many post-honeymoon lovers, becomes controlling, moody, prone to other interests, other distractions. Remember the promised rage: “if you so much as open [this door] a crack, there will be no limit to my anger” (Perrault 189). Though once charming, he remains impersonal now more than ever. He cannot be possessed as a person by knowing. He has his secrets, his locked doors, his impossible revelations in the shadows of rooms with familiar names (like Kitchen, like Bedroom). We can imagine, too, a similar dynamic at the end of WW2: happy, canvas-clad husbands kissing their sweethearts goodbye before boarding the boat, and then coming home ravaged. Wives venturing outside the kitchen or the market to dirty their hands with oil and grease, picking up a lover, spoiling the sheets. In both “Bluebeard” and the post-war era, the home becomes fraught, the office, the bedroom, the lips of a spouse all forbidden, all locked doors with potential mounds of the dead. Gender, as an offshoot of identity, becomes slippery: he, with his head full of trauma, might be called hysterical. He cannot, with the economy and all, find a job. She has had a job. She has brought home money to pay the bills, has built ships and bombs and ammunition like a soldier herself, she has (literally) worn the pants. Husband and wife are strangers as people, husband and wife are strangers as category
I want to transition to talking about the femme fatale as a denizen of the film noir and as a manifestation of post-war gender anxieties. To even those unfamiliar with French, the term femme fatale is self-explanatory. She is a woman, la femme. And she is fatal, deadly, poisonous. Gila is an example of a femme fatale. So is Mildred Pierce in Mildred Pierce, Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, and Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. As Mary Ann Doane writes in the introduction to her book Femmes Fatales, “The femme fatale is the figure of a certain discursive unease…her most striking characteristic, perhaps, is the fact that she never really is what she seems to be” (Doane 1). She never really is what she seems to be. She is evasive and slippery, a cipher in a black slip and gloves. And this is what I mean when I say that Gilda (and, for that matter, the film noir genre) is in constant conversation with “Bluebeard.” If the femme fatale presents an impenetrable appearance masking a shifting interior reality, then we can read her as the Forbidden Room personified. In Perrault’s text, the forbidden room is “small…at the end of the long passage on the lower floor” (Perrault 189). In other words, it is unassuming, hidden, inaccessible. Before the chamber is open, it becomes a cabinet of possibilities; any number of unnamable and incomprehensible wonders (or perversities) could lie within. So too the femme fatale, so too Gilda. She is an animated veil, a walking shadow. She is, per Doane, the “figure of a certain discursive unease.”
Take Gilda, for instance. In their first dinner down at the casino, the three main characters of the film-Johnny, Gilda, and Ballin- share a toast “to the three of us.” In a previous scene, a drinking to the” three of us” comprised a company of Johnny, Ballin, and Ballin’s cane, which harbors a hidden bayonet point. Hence Johnny’s comment back at the casino table: “I get confused,” says Johnny. “Well, just a few weeks ago we drank a toast to the three of us” (26:31). Here, we see an obvious connection to both Doane’s theory and Perrault. Superimposing Gilda and the cane, we see that they are one: shiny object (a door, a room) that holds within it a myriad of possibilities, all dangerous.
There’s another implication here as well. And I don’t want to get stuck in the weeds with Freud, but there is something to be said about knife-as-phallus. This symbolic interplay is heightened when we consider Bluebeard’s chosen instrument (entendre intended) of destruction: a “cutlass” (Perrault 192), which the storybook villain uses to chop off the heroine’s head. Or literally: getting rid of the maidenhead. The association between Gilda and object is obvious, perhaps. The camera laps up Rita Hayworth’s every move like a dog: Gilda rolling up a silk stocking before carnival (occuring at 1:03:10), Gilda outfitted in a low-slung sequin dress, raising a toast to her other. The Carnival shot is especially voyeuristic. Here, the camera trains itself on Hayworth’s foot, following the motion of the stocking as she rolls the fabric up her leg. The camera and the intended viewership belies itself in its gaze. This is the gaze of appraisal, of perverse, window-peeking delight. But there’s a marked difference between Gilda-as-object (silk stockings, sequins) and Gilda as dangerous object. Gilda as phallus, not necessarily in a solely sexual way, but in a lethal way. In the way that many film critics attest that the knife that Norman Bates wields in Psycho is also a phallic object. In comparing woman to cane, to knife, the movie indeed affirms that Gilda is something to be possessed while also affirming the inherent power in her person. She is the cutlass in Bluebeard’s hand, the sexual dominator, the man.
I want to talk more about the female bogeyman created as a result of all these gender anxieties. Using the lens of post-war familial breakdown, we can view Gilda as this: the ultimate manufactured monster of male anxieties, a vampiress of the missing maternal instinct. She is the cane-and-knife, the hidden object, the unknown in the home and in the bed. She is sexed and sexual and yet unattainable. Like Bluebeard, her mystery makes her unpossessable. As Sylvia Harvey writes of the femme fatale, “The ideological safety valve device that operates in the offering of women as sexual commodities breaks down in possibly most of these films, because the women are not, finally, possessed” (Harvey 40). As we’ve already discussed in our historical context, there was this prevailing fear during the postwar era that femininity had fundamentally changed. What I mean is that women had left the home and had thus brought into question their cleanliness, their purity. Sex within the home, in the binds of a union made official in some grand church, was one thing. Going back to Harvey’s quote, marriage legalized and moralized the possession of a woman, funneled her desire towards conception and motherhood. But in the film noir, as Harvey tells us, the “women are, not, finally, possessed”- they, like the wayward factory women of the 1940’s, stride without domestic tethering from place to place, from bed to bed. Make no mistake, the film noir still regards women as objects capable of being held, of being possessed (remember Gilda and the cane). But there’s danger here too in the ultimate failure of that possession, of the unattainable, invincible object taking to the casino, to the dancefloor.
I want to transition now to talking about the different role of sexual knowledge in “Bluebeard” and in Gilda. “Bluebeard” presents a portrait of female sexuality in which the body is invariably fatal to the beholder. That is, as soon as the heroine is introduced to her own “femaleness” – the bleeding brought on by puberty, sex, or childbirth- she is met with the threat of death. In one of the tale’s moments of bawdy (and delightful) double-entendre, our heroine is “so tormented by her curiosity” (Perrault 190) over Bluebeard’s chamber that she “raced down the little staircase so fast that more than once she thought she was going to break her neck” (Perrault 190). A la Cecile in Dangerous Liaisons, Perrault fashions the sexual “torments” of a new and virginal bride- her curiosity (an Alice-in-Wonderland, childish word) to see what goes on behind locked doors. There is strong desire and potential delight in curiosity. There is something to be uncovered, which may yield wondrous results. Unfortunately for our heroine, that budding want of sexual knowledge is attended by doom and danger and threats of death. It’s important to note that our heroine is not the dangerous one herself. She, unlike Gilda, harbors no bayonet point. Our heroine’s desire is n innocuous if a bit reckless, hence the racing down the stairs like a child at Christmas. Yet it’s the mere presence of her want, of her chance of encountering what she might want, that frames the danger at the heart of “Bluebeard.” Hence through the idea of “breaking her neck”: curiosity, desire, women and brides wanting to know the Thing that men already expect, are all attended by the threat of death.
And, more than any other work perhaps, death pervades female sexuality in “Bluebeard.” After all, the corpse is the extreme ideal of the body-made-object, the paramount expression of that marital “possession” laid out by Sylvia Harvey. In the ultimate, climactic scene of “Bluebeard,” our heroine eases open the forbidden door to find, of course, the unrecognizable bodies of newly fledged brides. “After a few moments, she began to realize that the floor was covered with clotted blood, and that the blood reflected the bodies of several dead women…(these were the women Bluebeard had married and then murdered one after another)” (Perrault 190). After being “tormented” and “trembling” (Perrault 190) at the thought of opening the door, the final act is consummated. And blood is the sum of this discovery: blood on the floor, on the bodies, from the bodies that once were brides and unfortunately will always be women. This gruesome scene, Perrault tells us, is the nuptial expectation: a woman’s body cannot survive desire nor can it survive marriage. Womanhood is blood, and the state of womanhood is fatal- the taking of a maidenhead is the taking of a maiden’s head. Both are invariably fatal acts.
There’s also an undertone of transgressive sexuality that runs through this (literally and figuratively) climactic scene. For one, the heroine’s “discovery” takes place when her husband leaves the home. “Bluebeard told his wife that he had to travel to take care of some urgent business…and that he would be away for at least six weeks” (Perrault 189). And two, there is the matter of the interdiction: “I absolutely forbid you to enter that little room.” As Sylvia Harvey writes in “Woman’s Place, “the family is sanctified as the acceptable location of a sexuality defined in extremely limited terms” (Harvey 37). The heroine, however, is not experiencing this “sanctified” version of her sexuality. She makes the “discovery” of female bodies, her body, while her husband is away on business. Like a wartime wife, our heroine is a figure who indulges male anxieties- she plays while her husband is away. And if she is gratifying herself- trembling, racing down the stairs, drowning herself in torment- then she is not doing so with an eye towards an heir or the cradle. It’s this breed of female sexuality, unsanctified, unalloyed by the aim of conception, that men are so afraid of. And in “Bluebeard,” our heroine (and our other brides) does not get away with having her cake and eating it too. For her desire, for her curiosity, she and they and every other bride are punished. They are the bodies on the floor of Bluebeards’ chamber, bodies that may be possessed and hung and disposed of. Male control is reasserted. All is right in the world.
In Gilda, the body, Gilda’s body, is still a possession. There are numerous mentions throughout the film of what Gilds invokes in men, of what men might do to her. “Gilda’s much too beautiful” says Ballin to Johnny as he leads him over to the table, “to be left alone” (25:38). There’s that ‘locked door’ again that prevents explicit mention of just what people do in the dark, but the implication is there. What might someone do to Gilda, what will happen if she’s alone? In “Bluebeard,” the eponymous husbands possesses his woman’s, the women’s, bodies, and thus what happens in the dark is always fatal. But Gilda’s body is Gilda’s. And thus what happens in the dark is whatever she wants to happen. After being pulled out of a lover’s arms by Johnny Farrell, Gilda turns to her paramour and tells him “‘if I would have been a ranch, they would have named me the ‘bar nothing’” (41:25). Now, Gilda (the movie) paints this scene and this line of dialogue as sinister, as perverse. In the beat before, Gilda sways with her man in the smoky casino, his hand traversing her lower back. And, after: Johnny wretches Gilda away by the arm. She is Ballin’s wife and thus from Johnny’s handling of her we can tell that her purity is more important than her well-being. However, there’s the catch: she is Ballin’s wife, but Ballin, unlike Bluebeard, does not own his wife’s body. It is Gilda that sways on the dancefloor, it is Gilda that allows and enjoys the traversing of the hand, it is Gilda that is the “bar nothing.” At this line, the male anxiety squirms: Gilda is “much too pretty” to stoop so low. She has a husband, a powerful one: why doesn’t he satisfy her? What do women want? But for all the sinisterness the male gaze festoons her lines with, Gilda’s desire is relatively uncomplicated. She is a beautiful woman. She knows she’s a beautiful women. She will use this fact to destroy, she will use this fact to have fun.
Any analysis of Gilda would be remiss without mentioning the scene. I am referring, of course, to the infamous striptease Rita Hayworth performs to “Put The Blame on Mame.” If I’ve seen Gilda 20 times, I have also seen this scene 25 times. I could write a novel on this scene alone: Rita Hayworth possessing the body and character of Gilda, taking the stage of the casino in a bias cut, satin dress. Her tossing a sable wrap aside as the intro starts, peeling off a satin opera glove as she croons about how we should all put the blame on Mame: a woman whose sexuality is linked with natural disasters. “One night she started to shim and shake / that brought on the Frisco quake” (1:39:11). Her raising her arms high above her head to hold out the last note, her tossing a diamond necklace into the crowd like it’s worthless to her. And then, among the jeers and whistles, her calling out “I’m not very good at zippers. But maybe if I had some help!” (1:40:51). The line of men she draws, stumbling and sweating and pushing for a first glimpse at flesh. Her laughing, teeth barred, as they attempt to tear her apart.
As Mary Ann Doane writes of this particular scene, “striptease provides the perfect iconography for film noir, economically embodying the complex dialectic of concealing and revealing” (Doane 105). What Doane is essentially saying here connects to a point I made earlier: that Hayworth’s body becomes the bloody chamber, the site of mystery and revelation. She assumes the role of both Bluebeard and the heroine in this scene: she is the revealer, the opener of doors, but she does so already knowing the secret. Sexuality, and the particular power of her sexuality, is nothing new to Gilda. She already knows what lies behind the locked door. What’s impressive about this scene, then, is the way it turns the gendered assumptions of “Bluebeard” on their head. It’s the men that are curious, it’s the men that are foolish, rushing like the heroine so that they themselves might “break [their] neck” (Perrault 190). Gilda is a sexual object, sure, but it is Gilda that is presenting herself as object. It is Gilda that knows that the secret of her uncovered would make a man tremble, like our heroine on the threshold of the forbidden room. It is Gilda, mouth open, laughing as they rush to rip her to shreds.
If we’re talking body politics, then both Gilda and “Bluebeard” acknowledge that power lies in the possession of the body, her body. In “Bluebeard,” that power lies with the husband. Marriage, and particularly the vexed element of sexuality involved in marriage, renders the wife to the ultimate possessable state. Remember the shaking, the trembling, the revelation of female bodies in a darkened room. Female sexuality, Perrault tells us, is at all times attended by danger, by death. And it is the dead women that is the ultimate object, the ultimate male fantasy of complete corporeal ownership. Enter Gilda, enter Gilda. Unlike Bluebeard’s wives, her body is not broken by sex. She has made the discovery of the bloody chamber. She dances close to her man in the dark in a satin, backless dress. She is the Bar Nothing. And her body is indeed an object (recall the knife-in-cane). But Gilda’s body, as Sylvia Harvey reminds us, cannot be possessed. The revelation of her own sexuality, the dark chamber of her own body, does not bring Gilda to vacate herself. Rather, she possesses herself. Her body in her hands brings men to their knees, reduces them to denizens of their foolish curiosity to know her body, to be the naive girl at the threshold of the bloody chamber. She herself is both commodity and commodifier, seller and profiteer; she is never without power.
Works Cited
Bruzzi, Stella. Bringing up Daddy : Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War Hollywood. BFI
Pub., 2005.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Gilda: Epistemology as Striptease.” Femmes Fatales : Feminism, Film
Theory, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1991.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Introduction: Deadly Women, Epistemology, and Film Theory.” Femmes
Fatales : Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1991.
Gilda. Directed by Charles Vidor, 1946.
Harvey, Sylvia.“Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Rev.
and Expanded ed. Ann E. Kaplan, 1998.
Perrault, Charles. “Bluebeard,” in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar, W.W. Norton, 2017.
