Imagendering II

by Massimo Perinelli and Olaf Stieglitz, University of Cologne, Germany

Prologue

1      Using feature films as primary sources has become a more and more common research option in international historiography during the last years. In the New Cultural History especially, images in general and feature films in particular form prominent parts of its program which aims at a fundamentally different perspective of history (Daniel). Nevertheless, writing history by analyzing film comedies is still a rare practice, for established academic rules seem to enforce a certain "seriousness" and "relevance" of employed source materials. Such mass media forms of "only entertainment" are usually dropped from the scholarly agenda. This paper questions this convention and aims to present a Gender History of the social dimension of laughter. It intends to demonstrate, by scrutinizing several West-German and US film comedies of the 1950s, that romantic comedies of that era firstly served as a tool in a process of (re-)establishing heteronormative and patriarchal gender systems; secondly, we will outline that this development was highly contested and depended on constantly referring to forms of gender subversion and deviance. We interpret this emphasis on male and/or female deviance and its recurring presentation as abject in the films not only as the often described "backlash" of the 1950s, but as evidence for existing subversive elements in both national gender systems. Subordinating and marginalizing these subversive elements was not self-evident or even "natural" but the result of repeated and arduous efforts to reterritorialize them into the heteronormative structure. Yet, our objective does not include a comparative approach in the strict sense. Instead of looking for differences and similarities, we postulate and take as given corresponding aspects in both post-war societies which derive from the immediate wartime situation and its influences on the gender system.

2      For such an approach, it is necessary to accept movies as part of historic gender discourses, as media that simultaneously produce these discourses in their multi-relational reference to other social factors and contribute to their social distribution in the processes of audience reception. With the help of literary theory, New Historicism as articulated by Stephen Greenblatt, Moritz Baßler and others, and a definition of discourse as formulated by Michel Foucault, we understand movies as texts which form a fabric of individual discursive layers. Moreover, feature films themselves formulate new, different, enhanced meanings in addition to the existing discourses (Baßler, 14). In our view as cultural historians, a theory that combines the historicity of texts with the textuality of history constitutes a productive answer to current questions concerning how fiction informs reality and vice versa. We consider this question to be wrongly posed because neither fiction nor feature films can escape their historic and discursive setting; as movies are composed of discourses, and are themselves only understandable in historic discursive structures (Perinelli, 46). This also means that texts/movies always tell us more than they intend to. Given their multi-dimensional complexity, movies might serve as valuable tools for historians to gain new perspectives and pose different questions in the framework of cultural history.

The Joke

3      What we state for films and their discursive production of social reality is especially true for comedies and their function of modifying hegemonic discourses. In our opinion, it is primarily the joke, as described by Sigmund Freud in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, which enables people to regress from logic while remaining understandable (Grotjahn); it allows the transgression of social borders without the fear of sanction. The joke is thus able to transmit a new (or yet denied) meaning and provides an opportunity for safe passage from the utterable into a sphere of social taboo.

4      According to Freud, the joke expresses an otherwise repressed unconscious aggression which has worked its way to the surface, something Freud calls joke-work. To pass the censorship of the pre-consciousness, this aggression needs to disguise itself through symbolization. In other words, the joke helps to articulate a tabooed desire. It thus serves to set free the energy needed to suppress aggression and leads to increased pleasure through laughter.

5      Additionally, the joke is a fundamentally social technique because it needs a certain social setting to be effective: firstly, the person whose aggression is to be expressed, secondly, the victim against whom the aggression is directed, and thirdly, a person who checks whether the aggression is adequately symbolized and disguised in order to hurt enough to be effective without transgressing social conventions too much. The third person's laughter is the touchstone of the social arrangement: if she or he laughs, the first person is allowed to join in. The joke-work of the first person ultimately depends on the third person who judges whether the second person might be victimized through that joke.[1]Freud describes several different forms of joke-work. Here, we focus only on the mentioned one.