Imagendering II

41      Indeed, both men are far from any kind of sexual suggestion. When Ilona Farkas gets unerringly drunk at her wedding and dances to the fierce gipsy music, Alexander is overstrained by the situation. After her dancing, screaming, smashing of glasses, singing and artistic jumping is over, Ilona arranges to get locked in the bedroom with Alexander. While she undresses in front of him, he starts panicking and hysterically searches for an exit. When he climbs out of the window and hangs on the ledge like "grapes on the vine," she remarks cheerfully that she will "harvest him when he is ripe." His fear and reluctance of sexuality is staged in the most explicit way at the end of the movie. In the basement of his house, Ilona teases Alexander that he would not know how to kiss anyway, even if he wanted to. From there on he embraces her confidently in order to prove that he can kiss. But in the crucial moment he chickens out and confesses that she is right. Thereupon, he rushes out of the house into the next bar, getting extremely drunk.

Everything flows

42      Two functions of alcohol regarding the men in the movies emerge in the analyzed sequences: we find a fear of sexuality and a naiveté towards women, symbolized on the one hand by a dilettante dealing with alcohol, and, on the other hand, by its excessive indulgence. Alcohol appears in all the plots as an examination that puts the boundaries of gender into question. If men control their physical and psychic boundaries, i.e., if they are not afraid of partial defragmentation and if they always find their way back from a drunken state to their predetermined gendered form, their manhood is considered to be intact. According to this, especially masculinity emerges as an instable battlefield.

43      However, the opposite is true with the women. The drinking woman[13]Furthermore, the drinking woman often is presented as dark and exotic. Take Alma (Thelma Ritter), the janitress of Jan Morrow (Doris Day) in Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959) as an example. She drinks with Brad (Rock Hudson), who loves Jan, until he literally faints. Just as the "hot blooded Hungarian" Ilona Farkas in Mein Mann das Wirtschaftswunder, who gets drunk and dances furiously to the gipsy band. on the screen can stand much more alcohol than her male counterpart and seems to be self-confident and determined. According to psychoanalysis, the regular female gender identity in hetero-normative systems has to be imperfect and unstable because it lacks the symbolic phallus that is the symbolic signifier. It first becomes fixed by the allocation of men's subjectivity or by phallic self-stratification through fetishization. But this "normality" no longer exists in the comedies of the 1950s. In fact, the female protagonists rule their gendered boundaries, they are subjects of themselves, not of somebody else. They can drink dauntlessly, and doing so, actively express their sexual desire,[14]As subjects they desire someone else as an object of their desire, instead of - as Freud puts it - desiring to be desired, i.e., to be the object of another subject. but are also presented as ridiculously deviant in the films.

44      The autonomous drinking women are a good laugh just as the men are who are too shy to drink or who drink too much. The happy end constellation aimed at by the romantic comedies of the 1950s is an inversion that exchanges the sexual, societal, and economic positions of men and women. While alcohol is the frontier of that liminal process, milk stands for the river that crosses this border and carries the binary codes of gender. In all the movies the role of these two liquids is used in the same manner without even explaining it with a single word. Only the lust for, or respectively, the incapability to consume alcohol or milk is expressed, but their meaning seems to be self-evident. It is this self-evidence that refers us to the productive effect of these drinks because their subtext is able to disguise its meaning and hence cannot be easily interpreted. On the contrary, it seems odd to examine the function of this little liquid story and to give it discursive importance.

45      By analyzing romantic film-comedies as organized aggression against a certain historical occurrence of different gender identities and practices of the 1950s, we could detect a hard struggle to reconstruct a hetero-normative gender system. Within the cinematic apparatus, only the joke could cross the discursive border easily and call for the acknowledgement of the existing deviant identities. One of the techniques was to create a little and almost invisible side story to the main plot, in which this inversion could take place: the story of the consumption of milk and alcohol. In this marginalized, disguised, and comedic sphere any severe proposition could be stated. For a better understanding of historical processes, an analysis of sources of popular culture seems to be necessary if not indispensable. In addition, we should turn even more to such cultural products which are too easily marked as solely entertaining and foolish. As we hope to have shown, especially these media are holding an enormous potential for historical interpretation.