Imagendering II

26      In Dishonored, Marlene Dietrich plays the role of a prostitute who has signed on as a spy. Her appearance, and in particularly her famous legs, is staged correspondingly. At a masked ball her disguise serves above all as a device to emphasise her lips. At some point she puts aside her mask in front of the other characters, and therefore is recognised later on. In the end, she falls in love with one of her opponents and lets him escape, which leads to her downfall - she is being charged with treason and shot. Thus, the game of masks gets destroyed by love, allowing the characters "true" personality to appear, and, with the death following inevitably, is finalized once and for all.[14]In <em>Dishonored</em>, the element of masquerade is carried to extremes, and with it the questioning of naturalised concepts of femininity within the narrative framework: Dietrich, dressed once again as a prostitute, faces the firing squad. The young commandant loses heart and refuses to give the order to shoot, and while a replacement officer is being sought, Dietrich takes the opportunity to put on her make-up and to adjust her suspender. Right at the beginning of the film, Dishonored comments on the endangerment of the female spy due to her femininity, when an insert title appears on the screen with the words:[15]On the vulnerability of the female spy through the dilemma of the incompatibility between someone's mission and heart - usually leading to a fatal ending - see Horvilleur 148. "Strange figures emerge from the dust of the falling Austrian Empire. One of these, listed in the secret files of the War office as X-27, might have become the greatest spy in history . . . if X-27 had not been a woman." The implication that the female protagonist is endangered through a sexual/love affair - usually linked to a theme of vision and recognition - can, according to Dole, also be encountered in current police films: "Although male movie cops sleep with their enemies on occasion, female law enforcers are routinely placed in danger through a sexual relationship, usually with an opponent" (82).

27      Although The Long Kiss Goodnight and Shining Through realise an impressing amount of the above-mentioned potential for inversion, they exhibit some remaining traces of the female spy as spectacle. Linda Voss in Shining Through, for example, accompanies her National Socialist employer, who has fallen in love with her, to the opera. There she is seen and recognised and, in a scene borrowing heavily from Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1945/6), her cover gets blown (Pawelczak 123). In The Long Kiss Goodnight, the possible endangering of the mission by a sexual/love affair is only dismissed when the man concerned gets killed. Consequently, a certain ambivalence regarding the gender-transgressive female character can still be observed in the analysed two rather recent films. According to Butler, though, this corresponds to the manner in which gender is culturally produced, that is, from a multitude of incoherent directives. Such incoherence offers, however, the possibility for subversive reconfiguration:

The injunction to be a given gender produces necessary failures, a variety of incoherent configurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the injunction by which they are generated. Further, the very injunction to be a given gender takes place through discursive routes: to be a good mother, to be a heterosexually desirable object, to be a fit worker, in sum, to signify a multiplicity of guarantees in response to a variety of different demands all at once. The coexistence or convergence of such discursive injunctions produces the possibility of a complex reconfiguration and redeployment […]. (185)

Both films thus achieve something that in recent cultural studies discussion has been described by the term empowerment, that is, a self-reflective authorization of the female characters and the female spectator.[16]Dole 78, Hills 46 and Tasker 139 apply the term to the characters, and Brown 68 to the female spectators. Tina Vares, however, calls attention to the heterogeneity of female spectator reaction (Vares 235). In The Long Kiss Goodnight this empowerment is based on the power of gaze of a muscular and armed heroine performing violent action. In Shining Through it is based on the pleasure and knowledge that an ordinary woman derives from viewing films of a predominately male-oriented genre.