Reconstruction 7.3 (2007)
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S for Scopic: Wellesian Myths of the Border and White Female Beauty / Cheryl Greene
Abstract: Orson Welle's film A Touch of Evil, set in a Mexican bordertown, is very problematic because of the way he chooses to image both Mexicans and women. Although Welles' film challenged the mainstream film industry in his day, his story's deeper mythic structures depend on racist siting of sexuality. He uses the camera to play with "looks" in order to direct our gaze at the problem of social justice, yet his visual arguments do not provide Mexicans agency in the film. His film adds to dominant cinematic discourses of "whiteness" in its day. Additionally, by using "light" to assault the character played by Janet leigh, he perpetuates white male fantasies of female sexuality and beauty. Thus, Welle's project for social transformation fails to create a credible alternative to our ways of "seeing." While he offers us the heroic Mexican detective Vargas, played by Charlton Heston, he contradicts this same trope by depicting the noble Vargas as a mirror of detective Quinlan. Thus, the drama is not about the truth-seeking Vargas in the end, but is a re-telling of Quinlan's life and his progression towards self-destruction.
"In a phallocentric society, power is measured by big-ness (as in feature-length films), and penetration (as in the Hollywood industry). These are the crucial markers or signs of success, of 'making-it,' of coming... into fruition, that is."
(Fregoso 261)
"In my own years of obsession with the Welles films, I have come to call this central figure of desire and contradiction the Power Baby, the eating, sucking, foetus-like creature who . . . in Touch of Evil sucks candy and cigars in a face smoothed into featurelessness by fat as he redefines murder and justice according to desire. . . ."
(Houston 439-440)
<1> Touch of Evil , director Orson Welle's great film noir about a Mexican cop trying to solve a murder that takes place on the United States/Mexican border, has had a controversial history since its first release in 1958. To begin with, Orson Welles was so infuriated by studio changes made to his film that he would never make another film in Hollywood. In his battle with the studio, he produced copious director notes asking the studio to re-edit the film and restore it to the way he had shot and cut the scenes. Welles' notes offer key insight into his method as a director and show the importance of filmic elements like sound and voice - demonstrating how representation is constituted by much more than image. As an example, he discusses why he chose a mix of musical scores to recreate the sounds of music emanating from bars and restaurants for his long opening scene - where the camera, suspended on a crane, takes the viewer through the streets of the Mexican border town. The shot ends at the border where a car explodes just as the Mexican cop Vargas, played by Charlton Heston, and his American wife Susan, played by Janet Leigh, enter into this highly contested geographical space.
<2> Welles is very aware of the social construction of the border town and offers a complex look at the disparate groups of people competing for political and economic power in the border economy. Vargas, the Mexican cop, is actually there on his honeymoon with his wife Susan, and gets caught in the web of intrigue that surrounds the American detective Quinlan's search for supposed justice. The film twists and turns as Vargas tries to ascertain truth from fiction as well as justice and injustice. We see him fighting stereotypes as Quinlan refuses to cooperate with him, yet it is questionable if Welles actually offers a valid critique of these stereotypes or if the reproduction of them as rhetorical tropes merely re-inscribes the dominant heirarchy of "whiteness."
<3> It is important to analyze Welles' film within the "networks of historical and social productions of meaning" (Pollock 305). In particular, Touch of Evil is problematic because of the way he chooses to portray both Mexicans and women. Although his film does not correspond to the mainstream Hollywood industry of his day - his story's deeper mythic structures situate sexuality "where ethnicity and racial, cultural and geographical othering [provide] the necessary conditions for the representation of European male heterosexual fantasies about female sexuality" (Pollock 286). How does he participate in the reproduction of dominant ideologies of sexuality and race? How does "light," used to caress the character Susan, perpetuate white male fantasies of female sexuality and beauty?
<4> In Touch of Evil, Welles uses the camera to play with "looks" in order to direct our gaze at the problem of social justice. In this way he makes an argument for using the cinema and representation as an agent of social transformation. But whose interests does he serve? Is he concerned with providing Mexicans agency in the film by choosing to make Vargas, played by a white actor, Charlton Heston, the hero of his story? By privileging representation as a means of challenging social order is Welles able to actually offer the viewer an alternative view to the dominant discourse of classical cinema? Or does he merely add to filmic representations of "whiteness," and "white female beauty?" These questions need to be critically examined in order to understand how Welles' film impacts the way viewers see Mexicans and women.
<5> Jean Franco, in Plotting Women, notes that "the demands of narrative structures that belong to the continuing saga of the white man's search for identity make it difficult for the films to avoid underpinning the already secure foundations of paternalism. The inevitable dislocation between stated intent and narrative logic is obvious" (183). There are several ways in which Welles' project for social transformation in Touch of Evil fails to create a credible alternative to our ways of "seeing." While he offers us the heroic Mexican detective Vargas, he contradicts this same trope by depicting the noble Vargas as a mirror of Detective Quinlan. Thus, Vargas' story is eclipsed by the depiction of Quinlan's decline. In the end, the drama is not about the truth-seeking Vargas, but it is a retelling of Quinlan's life and his progression towards self-destruction.
<6> By examining Welles' film in the context of the visual language of the canon of art history, classical cinema, and the white male colonial gaze, it is possible to see how he projects a white "racist" film aesthetic and reproduces dominant border myths. Welles' story displaces the subject Vargas by reducing his presence as merely a "function of the white subject, not allowing her/him space or autonomy" (Dyer 13). The film ends with the body of Quinlan as it floats in the river. We see Vargas return to his wife's arms; however, his reunion is fraught with irony. Then the camera returns to the floating sign of Quinlan's body - to remind viewers of this other man's life and death. The final irony of the end of the film tells us that Quinlan's hunch about the murderer was right after all, and he just went about framing justice in an unethical way by planting evidence. However, is this merely a "Touch of Evil" as the title suggests? The ending leaves one wondering who ultimately is the speaking subject of this film according to this parting shot offered by Welles.
Myths of White Female Beauty
<7> The paradoxical legacy of Welles' film was to place a white woman at the visual center of a reconfiguring of power relationships along the U.S./Mexican border. Janet Leigh's portrayal of Susan stands apart from all the other women portrayed in the film. Her image is contrasted with the women of the Mexican bordello - who are shown through quick cuts. They are displayed mostly as body parts - legs, tight corsetted bodices, sultry eyes, and pouty lips. Susan is the "American" white woman - a standardized trope - meant to be viewed, but she is shown as a figure that has to be contained. She is the only woman with full access to the American side of the border. And it is because of her position as a middle-class white American, that allows her to cross the border. Interestingly, Welles tracks her movement - she is stalked both by Grande's gang as well as the camera that has normalized the white paternal gaze.
<8> Since Heston's character Vargas becomes the key figure of morality in this tale of police corruption, you would expect less emphasis on the actions of Susan, his wife. The film follows the noble Vargas back and forth across the border of Mexico as he searches for clues about Hank Quinlan's involvement in the framing of a murder suspect. While all of this is going on, Vargas' wife, Susan, suffers from Quinlan's devious scheming. Welles' camera technique serves to highlight Susan's plight. In the beginning of the film she is outspoken, and unusually brave. When Vargas is off investigating, she follows a young man that asks her to come speak to a Mexican crime boss. Throughout her scenes the actress Janet Leigh is bathed in white light. Welles' use of light to highlight Susan Vargas as the "white" wife of a Mexican detective plays into a vocabulary of "whiteness" that measures a woman's beauty by her Caucasian looks and virtue. In contrast, the representation of the indigenous peoples of the Mexican border town follows many racist stereotypes - they are both cannibalistic and savage - signifying "otherness."
<9> The scene where Quinlan attacks Grandi in the room where they are holding the drugged Susan is full of Welles' emphasis on "looks." He uses the camera to play with "looks" by the use of light as a strobe effect - limiting what we can and cannot see. Additionally, he cuts back and forth from the struggling men to Susan's distraught face, and finally ends the scene with her opening her eyes to see the dead Grandi. What are we supposed to recognize in this sequence of "looks" - that is finalized with Vargas driving below the balcony where his wife cries out for help? Why is it he cannot "see" her?
<10> What are we supposed to recognize in this sequence of "looks" - that is finalized with Vargas driving below the balcony where his wife cries out for help? It may be that Susan being punished - a form of social justice. It is also the normalizing gaze of a white male heterosexual fantasy. We are supposed to enjoy her terror, the power that Quinlan wields over her body. Susan cannot be seen or heard by her husband. She has been silenced. The way the camera lingers on her cleavage and curves, and the manner in which the scenes display her form in a bright light, tells us to look at her only as a sexual object. Additionally, the film's rape scene further implies her purity is already suspect because she is married to a Mexican man, and that her beauty is not something she controls. No. Welles controls it completely and utterly with the camera's lens. It is here in this repetition of rhetorical tropes that define female beauty that we can read Welles' artistic genius as a result of the deeper, mythic structure of racism.
<11> Welles isolates Susan, and gives her whiteness a particular meaning. She glows ethereally throughout the film, and this "whiteness" is supposed to tell the viewer something about her moral character. Throughout the film we see female sexuality imagined through "what social and economic colonisation and exploitation [have] made it possible to imagine white people could do to other, non-Western people" (Pollock 286). Thus in the scene where Quinlan kills Grandi, we understand the direct relationship between Quinlan's power over Grandi and his power over Susan's drugged body.
<12> First, Welles must establish the darkness and decay of the Mexican side of the border to highlight Susan's "white" virtue. He must define what is not white in order to show us the visual value of "white beauty." It is full of shady characters, gangs, bars with dance-hall girls, prostitutes and is a seedy vortex of the underside of society. Here indigenous peoples and Mexicans are put in their "natural environment" - an environment of moral uncertainty, where exotic women seduce men, and entice them into "bad behaviors." Janet Leigh, as Vargas' white wife, shows us Vargas' nobility as well, because this marriage ensures that he climbs the social ladder and achieves a higher status because of his possession of a "white" woman.
<13> Ultimately, Welles film prostitutes white women, through the character of Susan, but another aspect of his scopic regime is the way his depiction of other female characters, like the one played by Marlene Dietrich, also perpetuates a racist myth of hispanic (exotic) female sexuality - "spattering both [white and Mexican women's] bodies with their abject sexualisation (Pollock 286). Welles use of "white" and European actresses as Mexican women shows us this mixed economy - white women become the sign of the exotic or "raced" other. It is a collapsing of racist myths. However when he does include some Mexican women in the film, how can we read them? These women are masculinized in the "rape" or "attack" scene where Susan is alone in her hotel room. How does the film show us that even though they wield power, they are still not behaving acceptably as women? Shown in contrast to Susan's visual "whiteness" and purity - these "other" women come to define Susan's "white beauty." This scene becomes a site of power - "where human identity can be diminished by the exposure of [her] vulnerable body to a costumed and protected gaze" (Pollock 299). The Mexican women are "raced" by this gaze. They are not given individual identities or subjecthood like Vargas or Quinlin or even any of the other male detectives in the film. And the shot directs the viewer's gaze to Susan as the sign of "woman," and "beauty." That the Mexican women want to watch also implies that this "white woman" is somehow different from them as women. Thus the idea of "woman" is constructed representationally through the gaze of the heterosexual white male - who alone understands the value of her body and virtue. These "otherized" women who participate in the "attack" scene are not meant to share in this knowledge and power - they are simply put there for contrast - to further explain the value of Susan's "white" female beauty to the viewer's gaze.
<14> Welles frames the figure of Janet Leigh for our critical evaluation - she is constantly highlighted, pointed out, isolated from other figures, so that we may "look" at her beauty and know her beauty. An examination of the poster of the film clearly shows that she is nothing more than an object. Although Charlton Heston, as Vargas, is shown embracing her in his arms - her eyes are closed, her head is thrown back, her arms hang down - she is not acting, but being acted upon.
<15> Touch of Evil's narrative depends on a particular concept of female beauty that also hinges on moral character as well. We are taught to examine the woman subject's features in isolation - her smile, her eyes, her hands, the whiteness of her skin, and her gaze. It is a privileged fantasy - a colonizing gaze - that displays the artist as creator, the woman as model, and the value of the work of art, in this case film, as coterminous with the artist's individual reputation. This is how Beauty is taught, and it is an economy that depends on the idea that there is one known standard, that the viewer holds the standard of beauty, and that the woman's beauty is an ideal form that corresponds with our idea of what is good.
<16> While the film highlight's Susan's whiteness and beauty, she is continuously in danger and exposed to violence. Leading one to ask, "is violence the true language of social relations?" (Aldama 143). Touch of Evil begins with an explosion that occurs with an interracial kiss, and ends with the image of a dead man floating in a filthy river. As Welles' expert lens travels back and forth across this seedy border landscape the film visually idealizes the relationship between beauty, violence, and race within the canonized standards that dominated the Hollywood cinematic tradition of his time. Understanding Welles' vision is important because of its contributions in the cinematic tradition that co-opts and exoticizes the border economy. In this way it is possible to understand this B-grade mythic masterpiece, not as pure "art," but as a complex and powerfully nostalgic moment that is the result of a "totality of many relations and determinations" (Pollock 305).
Works Cited
Aldama, Arturo. Disrupting Savagism: Instersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant and Native American Struggles for Self-Representation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
Dyer, Richard, White. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Houston, Beverle. "Power and Dis-Integration in the Films of Orson Welles." In Film Quarterly: Forty Years- A Selection. Eds. Brian Henderson, Ann Martin, and Lee Amazonas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Lippard, Lucy. Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.
Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories. New York: Routledge, 1999.
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