Imagendering II

Scrutinizing the self and others: The Long Kiss Goodnight

6      Samantha Caine (Geena Davis), a primary school teacher and mother of an eight-year-old daughter, suffers from partial amnesia and only remembers the last eight years of her life. After a series of traumatic events she starts searching for her past with the help of a private detective, Mitch Hennessy (Samuel Lee Jackson). Gradually she (and along with her the audience) discovers that she used to be an assassin for the CIA called Charlene Elizabeth Baltimore. Meanwhile, however, circumstances and power structures have changed; former enemies of her employers have become the CIA's allies. This new situation leads to a series of brutal confrontations involving Samantha/Charlene, Mitch and their opponents, including the CIA.

7      In espionage films the character of the secret agent is often portrayed as a split personality; here, this provides additional depth as the split results from a modern woman's view of herself and from conflicting notions of contemporary femininity. Accordingly, both sides of her personality confront each other in two mirror scenes hallucinated by Samantha. In the first scene, Charlene introduces herself to Samantha thereby announcing her return. In the second scene, Charlene goes so far as to cut the throat of the primary school teacher and mother.

8      According to Carol M. Dole, such character splitting is a mechanism typical of contemporary films portraying women whose power is based on armed violence and physical strength: "Splitting, which distributes among multiple personalities or characters the modes of power that would otherwise be concentrated in a single female hero, reduces the threat of each individual protagonist" (89). This mechanism aims at the empowering of women without bringing about the sense of disempowerment in men (Dole 81).[1]Empowering and disempowering are terms used by Dole that I will discuss further at the end of my article. The possibility that violent women trigger in men a feeling of disempowerment exists not least because violence normally results in establishing hierarchies. In this specific case this carries the added consequence that it represents a reversal of traditional configurations (Vares 223). By splitting the role, the male and female attributes of the heroine can be apportioned to two personalities and thus the binary ordering of the sexes can be re-established at least within the character. In consequence, "[e]ach of these splitting techniques avoids commitment to a single representation of heroic womanhood […]" (Dole 94).[2]Dole's observations are based on a traditional, i.e. original, rational-autonomous and uniform understanding of the subject, in the Descartian sense, whereas the current post-structural interpretation sees the subject as being decentralised and generated through discourse (Nünning 613). Hilary Neroni thinks, that the splitting results in a stereotypical representation of two traditional opposite images of women, the whore and the faithful wife. "The battle between these two stereotypes in The Long Kiss Goodnight offers us an example of the role of violence in male fantasies of women" (157). Thus the splitting reinforces the duality of women rather than collapsing it (160).

9      However, I challenge Dole's and Neroni's thesis that the female spy in The Long Kiss Goodnight is being weakened by such a splitting strategy. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, there exists a certain tradition within espionage films to employ main characters with a split personality. In the opening credits already we see contrasting images characterising each side of the heroine: Scenes portraying Samantha are shot normally, that is, in positive (compare fig. 1), whereas scenes from Charlene's life are shot in negative (compare fig. 2).[3]Moreover, by showing family photographs in a reverse shot through the telescopic sight of a weapon we see that traditional role images will be attacked. Secondly, the film emphasizes the subversion of the binary opposition, on the one hand between the heroine's two contradicting personalities, and on the other hand between femininity and espionage activity. As a result, the film constructs a complex image of a woman that includes both female-defined and male-defined characteristics. Binary oppositions are undermined as follows: firstly, we can identify iconographic similarities between, say, lipstick and bullets.