Imagendering II

11      The transformation from Samantha to Charlene takes place gradually and gets communicated by various mechanisms, one of which uses the mirror scenes as mentioned above. Further mechanisms are as follows: Samantha increasingly picks up on male-connotated behaviour, such as drinking, smoking and swearing - activities her boyfriend jokingly indulges in at the beginning of the film.[4]For male codification of these activities see for example Vares 223. The principle of a phased intensification is also applied to Samantha's assumptions concerning her past. As her weapon skills return, she thinks - first due to her dexterity with a knife - that she must have been a cook. In the course of the story this assumption is commented on ambivalently. Samantha knocks out her first opponent with a cake. In the further confrontations with her opponents, the visual and acoustic codification of her as the female victim is gradually being replaced by that of her as the female culprit. Initially, Samantha is depicted as attractive for both the characters on screen and for the people in the audience. Her adversaries strip her down to a white négligé and she gets tortured by being tied to a water wheel. Yet, the more her fighting spirit returns, the less her underwear highlights her femininity. Instead, the camera emphasizes her upper arm muscles and what used to be Samantha's hysterical cry of fear alters into Charlene's battle cry.[5]This change is achieved by cinematic means, that is, both the camera range and the framing is altered (switching from a medium long shot or from American shot to a close shot), resulting in her arms filling the middle of the screen. Regarding muscular women and the way in which they present a problem for a binary conception of gender identity see Tasker 4 and Brown 62. Thereafter, her négligé gets replaced by an armless (and again white) T-shirt and a pair of jeans.[6]With regards to her clothing, Samantha has already dressed as a man at the beginning of the film when she appears as Santa in the Santa Claus procession.

12      In addition to these transformation processes there are also fundamental elements of ambivalence that help to resolve the oppositions. Motherhood, as a popular vehicle for traditional representations of women, relates to both personality aspects, in conflict-oriented as well as harmonious form (Dole 105). The character names are also chosen correspondingly: both names, Samantha and Charlene, get shortened to Sam and Charly, that is, to names normally attributed to men. Furthermore, Samantha's surname Caine is reminiscent of the pugnacious biblical figure Cain.

13      In accordance with its undermining of binary oppositions, the film's end remains open. We see the heroine spending her days peacefully on a farm with boyfriend and child at her side. Her appearance combines that of Sam and Charly. When her boyfriend remarks that he could live like this forever she confidently throws a knife at the nearest tree, where it sticks quivering. Dole's regarding of this ending remains ambivalent. On the one hand, she claims that the end is monopolized by the traditional female side. On the other hand, it is precisely this open-end quality that offers new possibilities of strength and of self-acceptance to the heroine (Dole 98). Neroni is convinced, that Sam has become a schoolteacher again, even if we do not see that. For her the combination of Sam and Charly ultimately fails, so she speaks of an "uncomfortable amalgamation" and a "uneasy combination" (154, 158). At the same time she notices: "But the combination also shows that we cannot separate the violent woman from the schoolteacher - or the whore from the mother" (158). She gives another hint, that there is more complexity in his depiction of femininity than she would like to admit: "When faced with the question - who is the fantasy, Samantha or Charly? - the film nicely formulates the idea that both these identities are based in fantasy" (158). I will return to this deconstruction of an original gender identity in my discussion of Judith Butlers notion of gender as a cultural construct below.

14      I prefer Karen Schneider's approach of assessing the ambiguity to Dole's and Neroni's interpretations; Schneider concludes that: "Sam has not repressed Charlie but incorporated her; she can fully reemerge any time Sam/Charlie needs - or wants - her to. It is left for the audience to decide if this is a promise or a threat" (11).

15      The role-transgressing potential of a figure like Sam/Charly causes problems for binary sex/gender conceptions:

For example, feminists working within the dominant theoretical model of psychoanalysis have had extremely limited spaces within which to discuss the transformative and transgressive potential of the action heroine. This is because psychoanalytic accounts which theorize sexual difference within the framework of linked binary oppositions (active male/passive female) necessarily position normative female subjectivity as passive or in terms of lack. From this perspective, active and aggressive women in the cinema can only be seen as phallic, unnatural or 'figuratively male'. (Hills 39)

Psychoanalytical approaches not only see an active performance but also special devices and weapons as phallic: "It is perhaps the centrality of images of women with guns […] that has caused the most concern among feminist critics. The phallic woman, that characters like Sarah Connor and Ripley represent, is seen as a male ruse […] (Tasker 139).[7]See also Schmid-Bortenschlager 80, 90 and Brown 53, 56. The logic behind these approaches emerges as a circular "'philosophy of capture' in which the innovation of a new concept is contained and interpreted in an endless being-made-what-one-is-a priori" (Hills 44). If role-transcending heroines are basically seen as being phallic or male they cannot be perceived as questioning gender categories, and women as a result can only be defined as being passive (Vares 239, Brown 53, 56, 65 and Hills 39, 44). What this does result in, however, is that gender roles become absolute. In addition, these approaches are blind to their own self-constructing element: "In the circular logic of gender/role identification, the character wields the guns and muscles because of the role and is identifiable in the heroic role because of the guns and muscles" (Brown 60). Adding to this is the ultimate and too narrow notion of viewer identification (Brown 69). Barbara Creed notes that post-Mulvian feminist film theory increasingly questions an identification model where the spectator is monolithic and rigidly oriented on his or her gender counterpart on the screen. It is assumed rather that the audience takes alternating positions, depending on how films attempt to channel and manage to regulate the identification process (84 and Neale 4-5).