Imagendering II

26      Marked in such a triple way she enters Tom's apartment and starts nursing him. In the early morning, the heavily alcoholic agent suffers from a strong hangover. With the bottles still pressed against her front, she introduces her motherly role by telling Tom that as a youngster she used to care for her father and her seven brothers. The way she recalls her childhood memories is funny and seems absurd against the background of her initial foolishness. She then begins her cure with hot tomato juice against the remaining alcohol in his blood to re-establish his physical health. The burning red juice acts as an antidote to alcohol.

27      Afterwards, Jerri refers to her "real," that is "natural" motherhood underneath her make up: "Pretty is just how good you apply your base," she explains to the slowly recovering Tom while fixing his breakfast. She de-fetishizes herself in order to switch over from the sphere of a phallic celebrity to the sphere of a domestic housewife and mother. In order to do so, she debunks her sexualized femininity as a mask. This means that she removes the fetishized mask to express a hidden but true womanhood. But — and here is the joke — this quasi natural femininity of Jayne Mansfield is portrayed to be as phallic as the modelled one. As she bends over the table towards the eating Tom, she allows him a deep look in her plunging neckline and continues: "I am equipped for motherhood." She makes clear what exactly equips her for motherhood, namely her breasts that are or could be full of milk. Thus the film negotiates a concept of natural femininity that is at the same time domestic/maternal and fetishized.

28      The "underlying" and "real" womanhood in the movie is perceived humorously and provokes our assumption that it does so because it comes into conflict with a non-phallic and non-maternal reality of women in the fifties' society that did not correspond with this concept of gender. The phallic form of female nature is the joke of that scene. It even may only have been representable as a joke because it did not match the common discourse of gender identity of that time. Hence we can understand the strategic impact of this comedy in the (re)construction of a patriarchal gender system that lost its discursive self-evidence.

29      The West-German movie Wenn der Vater mit dem Sohne.... was aligned with this very project as well.[7]Directed 1955 by Hans Quest. The widowed Teddy (Heinz Rühmann) raises little Ulli (Oliver Grimm) who as a baby was abandoned by his mother, who emigrated to the USA directly after the war. Not knowing the facts, the boy sees his father in Teddy. Years later his mother wants to take him back and bring him to the States. Thus Teddy flees with the boy to Italy. Finally the mother catches up with them and Teddy now understands that a child is better off with his mother: he lets Ulli go. Unlike Jayne Mansfield, who appears motherly by nature, the social father Teddy is not provided by nature to nurture, in other words, he is not "equipped for motherhood." When after five years Ulli's mother surprisingly contacts Teddy in order to take the boy with her to the USA, Teddy desperately kidnaps the unaware boy and flees with him to Italy. After having cared for Ulli almost all the child's life, he understandably does not want to separate from him. On their way south they have to stop in the Swiss mountains and Ulli becomes hungry. Hence Teddy tries to milk a cow in a pasture. In this footage, milk emerges in the realms of intact nature, in the context of purity and rural environment. But the father is unable to give milk to his son: after a number of ridiculous and funny attempts of milking, the cow shatters the bottle with its tail. The loving, nursing, and caring man appears absurd and unnatural and consequently it is mother nature herself who hinders his efforts. The plot heads for the necessity of an exchange between the provident but awkward single-father and the so far absent but nevertheless biological mother. After the exchange took place, Teddy himself gets cured from his incapacity to work that had stricken him after the death of his own son during the war. When finally Ulli is placed in the proper position with his mother, Teddy can also find his place in society and carry on his profession as a famous clown.

30      Parallel to Teddy's story, the course of Peepe (Carl-Heinz Schroth) proceeds. The always boozed best friend and former colleague cannot stand milk and seeing a glass of it makes him literally sick. Like Teddy, Peepe is unable to work and a social outsider. However, at the happy end of the film Peepe marries Teddy's landlady Frl. Biermann (Fita Benkhoff). Unlike Jayne Mansfield who was placed outside of the "natural" order as a "single star celebrity," the deviant figure, Frl. Biermann is ridiculed as an old maid. The movie portrays Frl. Biermann's initial sexual desire for Teddy as completely ridiculous and her attempt to make him drunk and to seduce him as sheerly hopeless and embarrassing — as a joke. Consequentially, the development of the relationship between Peepe and Frl. Biermann relationship runs the other way around. In the last scene we see Peepe sitting in front of a glass of milk, even drinking it. Doing so, he reports to Teddy, who returns childless, which tragedy happened to him when he was totally drunk: "Frl. Biermann did marry me. Since then all I drink is milk, to prevent worse." Symbolized by milk, Frl. Biermann takes over the maternal role for Peepe and in doing so reconstructs him as a responsible man. Moreover, she too gets "cured" from her initial desire and thus becomes reterritorialized within her "natural" identity. Hence her welcome-kiss for Teddy is not ambiguous or ludicrous anymore. Neither Fräulein (miss) nor Bier (beer) nor Mann (man) anymore, she becomes Peepe's wife.