Missing History

Near the beginning of William Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Prospero instructs his daughter Miranda for the first time about his past and, in passing, about her own. She has been watching a harrowing sea storm and shipwreck, a physically harmless piece of magic that Prospero has created to rectify history, but one so overwhelming that Miranda is quick with sympathy for its human victims. The tempest and Prospero's inquiries about what Miranda remembers of her early childhood, what "house or person," prompt the young woman to ask two questions, queries which Carol Gilligan astutely paraphrases as "Why all the suffering?" and "Where are the women?" Prospero's reply reflects his interest in justifying his present actions as remedies for past injustices—"what's past is prologue," as his traitorous brother Antonio will later say—but as Gilligan notes, Prospero's account fails to do justice to Miranda's curiosity, memory, and desire. In the course of the play, Miranda herself learns to forget her own initial questions, and her education about her father's past forms the groundwork of her forgetting. Her future marriage (and, extradiegetically, that of ill-fated Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I) is celebrated in another illusion staged by Prospero, a wedding masque that dramatizes Miranda's regenerative role through fertility imagery of the goddess Ceres while stressing her function as the ligature binding feuding political factions. Yet the marriage that Prospero arranges, though it recaptures and consolidates political power and identity, comes at the expense of Miranda's grasp of a history that encompasses women, their sense of home, and their ties to each other.

In a similar fashion, the narration of U.S. history through cinematic illusion was a paramount interest of Hollywood moviemakers in the closing decade of the twentieth century, as evidenced by their production of numerous films concerning World War II, the American presidency, and other history-based topics. Yet rarely did these films find compelling answers to the questions "Where are the women?" and "Why all the suffering?" Film scholars in turn focused their attention on Hollywood's drawing on history for its subject matter, and they generated original, highly illuminating studies on the topic, including Robert A. Rosenstone's Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (1995), Vivian Sobchack's anthology The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (1996), Robert Burgoyne's Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (1997), and Marcia Landy's anthology The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (2000), as well as influential work by Fredric Jameson, Hayden White, and others. Moreover, pioneering feminist film scholars, such as Susan Jeffords and Lucy Fischer, made critical inroads in demonstrating the disproportionate burden of blame women and the feminine have borne in film narratives that seek both to reflect and deflect masculine trauma in the wake of war. Yet where women's history is concerned, a spectrum of critical issues remains underexamined, underacknowledged, and underexplored.

By taking Miranda's questions as a central focus, this book aims to address some of these gaps. More precisely, I propose to examine a series of significant cinematic depictions of twentieth-century American history—films from the 1990s whose subjects range from World War II, to the cold war, to contemporary techno-warfare and globalization—in order to chart the narrative and aesthetic means by which they both evoke and elide perspectives on the changing place of women. As will become apparent, I am especially interested in exploring the uncanny as a complex psychological and aesthetic mode that both subtly and overtly informs the gender portrayals these films create, as well as in identifying the diverse political visions the uncanny can serve. These range from the forgetting of women's multifaceted historical trajectory—and especially the role of the women's movement—in the name of a nostalgic ideal of nation, to the radical erosion of the very gender identities on which that retrograde ideal depends.

To be sure, although I contend that Hollywood cinema often replays a pattern of erasure of women's place in history that is at least as old as The Tempest, it is worth emphasizing that, according to Jameson, Hollywood history films of recent decades do not confine the erasure to women's history; they extend it to history per se. That is, in his words, the genre of the historical film "with its surface sheen of a period fashion reality [offers] a formal compensation for the enfeeblement of historicity in our own time, and as it were a glossy fetish in the service of that unsatisfied craving." Although this insight is provocative, Jameson's development of it overlooks significant gendered dynamics within a larger process.

One of these is gender's function as the "glossy fetish" par excellence through which history is jettisoned—for example, in films that honor, elevate, and celebrate iconic versions of women (as symbols of a nation, as mothers, and as first ladies) within narrative trajectories that deracinate and derealize them as historical entities. A second and related dynamic, previously mentioned, is the creation of historical erasure within the aesthetic mode of the uncanny or unhomey, a mode that resembles the process of fetishization insofar as it relies on repression and forgetting for its effects, yet that also activates the dread, anxiety, and identity destructuration that a meeting with the repressed can arouse. In this context, uncanny moments often reduce women to eerie dolls and abject monsters, beings stirring repressed memories of both womb and tomb. As I also intend to demonstrate, however, the uncanny can alternatively serve as a springboard to unconventional cultural critique and to the engendering of less masculinist depictions of the past.

In a further, related dynamic, the evasion of women's history is implicated in the management of other social groups and social histories in recent films, a dynamic that, again, eerily echoes elements from The Tempest, with its reliance on Miranda as a conduit for justifying a patrilineal, heterosexual, Eurocentric hierarchy. That is, films about the past glimpse at histories of cultural groups for whom the ambiguously gendered Ariel, the powerful Algerian "witch" Sycorax, and her feared son Caliban can be seen as stand-ins, yet often shape and wield them in the name of protecting a politicized ideal of womanhood.4 An additional important example is the gender-specific means by which profit-motivated, image-generating corporations provide women—like the fetishized Rachel in the cult film Blade Runner (1982)—with implanted memories that allow them limited power and self-representation; memories often designed, as in Rachel's case, in a way that supplants women's actual histories and belies the larger reality of their "home." Finally, in a dynamic related to all of these, there is the pattern in which women form structuring narrative absences, in the manner of the "fallen" woman Hero in Much Ado about Nothing. That is, a woman is metaphorically buried alive, and then ultimately returned, redeemed, or resurrected, her narrative absence having structured the resolutions of men's conflicts over power, identity, and hierarchy, the very conflicts that, as often as not, made her "death" necessary in the first place.

While such broad generalizations as these forecast some of my key concerns, they also beg for further exemplification and explanation, and perhaps no films better illustrate the patterns in question here than the classics of the 1950s, specifically Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952), The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). The latter two, along with two films from the decade on which my study focuses—the ostensibly more equitable 1990s—provide especially revealing examples in the context of the present study and will serve as entry points to my larger subject. The 1990s films I shall consider here are the much-debated, wildly popular Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) and the politically provocative Bulworth (Warren Beatty, 1998).

Lacking the patina of gender and ethnic equality that characterizes much Hollywood cinema of the 1990s, The Searchers and Vertigo provide models that are the more telling because of their relatively more transparent evocation and elision of women's history as a means of managing a range of intractable problems from the past. Generically disparate, these two films nonetheless share concerns with traumatic history and conflicted identity boundaries, centrally symbolized in female characters. Set in post-Civil War Texas, 1868-1873, The Searchers narrates a quest to recover Debbie Edwards (Natalie Wood), the niece of embittered ex-Confederate soldier Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), by Ethan and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), her adoptive brother. Debbie's captor, a Comanche chief named Scar (Henry Brandon in "racial drag"), bears responsibility for the killing of her family and the rape of her mother, whom Ethan loved and desired; when Debbie comes of age, Scar takes her as a wife. Sexually and racially "contaminated" in Ethan's eyes, her identity becomes the subject of fierce conflict between him and Marty, with her life and possible reintegration into the "Texican" community of her childhood hanging in the balance. The battle over who Debbie is is played out in the sublime and sacred Native American landscape of Monument Valley, and is also powerfully embedded in images of archways, cave openings, and rock cleavages, uncanny formations that visually rhyme the earth as mother, the sexualized female body, and the film's various thresholds of "home," from the settler's homestead to the native's teepee.

Within this symbolically charged world, Debbie functions as the displaced and recovered, fractured then healed, symbol of the uncanny home that makes Ethan as hero possible. And through Ethan's quest for and recovery of Debbie, the film evokes and seeks to contain not only the bloody history of conquest and civil war that gave birth to the nation in the nineteenth century, but also anxieties about race, gender, and miscegenation born of the 1950s, fears exacerbated by Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka (1954) and the school desegregation it mandated. To achieve symbolic mastery of this legacy, however, the film conspicuously sacrifices Debbie's own desire and coherence. That is, although Debbie initially refuses rescue and insists that her home is with the Comanches, barely escaping Ethan's bullets in the process, in the film's climax she readily agrees to leave with Marty when he sneaks into her teepee, and after Ethan's dramatic recognition of her and change of heart, is spared and taken "home." Brian Henderson rightly contends, "The text itself rides roughshod over Debbie by making her change her mind . . . a conspicuously unmotivated act in a film that elsewhere supplies too many motives."

If Debbie's captivity story lacks crucial motivation, strikingly, the film itself calls attention not to this absence but to the missing causality in a secondary story, that of her counterpart "Look" (Native American Beulah Archuletta), the ample-bodied Comanche wife whom Marty unwittingly acquires while doing trade with her family. After some terrible humor at her expense, Ethan and Marty impel Look to go find Scar; when the men eventually catch up with her, she has been killed by U.S. soldiers on an apparent terrorist raid. Her death prompts Marty's poignant questions about her destiny and desires, whether she sought to warn Scar's people or to find Debbie for him. As he calls attention both to her innocence and to the lack of satisfactory answers, the scene reveals her body lying in a teepee, its entrance a significant iteration of the threshold motif. In this moment, The Searchers comes as close to a direct confrontation with U.S. destruction of the Native American population and culture as it ever dares.

Yet in her story, too, there are crucial displacements, shaped by the fact that looking and looking back are defining prerogatives for Ethan—sources of unspeakable sexual knowledge and obsessive self-motivation. Hard on the heels of this scene centered on Look, the sight of traumatized white women and girls, recovered from the Comanches by the army, prompts Ethan's famous look back in horror, an act that epitomizes the motivation for his quest even as it enforces the film's shift in focus from Look as victim to the Euro-Americans. In keeping with this symbolic logic, Look is not just a casualty of Ethan's quest; like Lot's wife, she is punished for looking back, but in this case, looking back at the white man's behest. Moreover, she becomes both a sacrificial object of Ethan's obsessive retrospection and a woman whose death substitutes for Debbie's, in yet another displacement that makes Ethan as hero possible.

Janet Walker forcefully argues that traumatic Westerns such as The Searchers "represent the massacre of American Indians as the massacre of settlers" and thereby "represent indirectly a historical reality they cannot really justify: the conquest of Native Americans and the appropriation of their land." My reading of the functions of Look and Debbie identifies the critical role of Native and Euro-American female characters in effecting these problematic transpositions. Reinforcing this view is the broader historical resonance of the film's deployment of Look and Debbie as symbols. A large Native American woman, similar in build to Look, served as a European and Euro-American symbol of America as early as the sixteenth century. She was sometimes known as L'Amérique or the Indian Princess and was often portrayed wearing a feathered headdress and perched on an alligator-like reptile. A precursor of Lady Liberty, the Indian Princess became slimmer and increasingly Europeanized by the time of the American Revolution, and in the course of the nineteenth century (and well before Disney's Princess Pocahontas), she evolved a persona with the look of a beauty queen. By the time of The Searchers, she is movie star Natalie Wood, costumed as a squaw who anachronistically wears lipstick.

Like The Searchers, Vertigo too reveals how Hollywood historiography has depicted and situated female characters in ways that simultaneously call up and conceal broader constellations of historically determined problems, especially those that emerge from the nation's complex ethnic, racial, and economic legacy. It reveals, as well, how such historiography tends to evoke and disguise these problems through a heroine constructed to fit a hero-centered narrative. At times, the process is not one of reducing a complex set of identity differences to the difference of gender, but rather a practice of voiding women's identity of its complex historical, ethnic, and class specificity and thereby effecting other forms of evocation and erasure as well. In fact, Vertigo, as a product of the era nostalgically viewed as America's "golden age," offers an especially illuminating instance of this practice.

A fictional overlay on a fictional overlay, the film centers on the deception of Scottie (James Stewart), a former detective who is duped into thinking he is protecting the beautiful blonde Madeleine, ostensible descendant and double of the mad Carlotta Valdez, from insanity and suicide. Although the film represents the ancestral Carlotta as a "real," aristocratic-looking person and part of local San Francisco history, she is in fact a fictionalized double of the historical wife of Maximilian (1832-1867), archduke of Austria, a man installed as emperor of Mexico in 1864 under the mistaken belief that he had been elected, and later, despite his wife's vigorous and wide-reaching efforts to prevent it, executed when he refused to abdicate. As a result of his execution and her grief over his death, this Carlota (so spelled) spent the remaining sixty years of her life living in a chateau in her home country of Belgium in a state of madness.

The complex intersection of Mexican, European, Native American, and U.S. history that the film's construction of "Madeleine" draws on need not be fully recounted here, but the "bleaching" of identity that the film and its protagonist execute deserves commentary, since it reflects how history is deracinated through the person of the woman on the border. The historical fact that Carlota was the daughter of Belgium's Leopold I in effect legitimizes the film's creation of a blonde Spanish woman—congruent with Hitchcock's and 1950s North American fantasy ideals—even though the film's Carlotta Valdez lived in a California that, though part of Mexico, was home to few actual descendants of the Spaniards. Judy (Kim Novak), the woman hired to play Madeleine, must herself be transformed into the era's and director's northern European blonde ideal, and that ideal, like the film's Carlotta, symbolically exists on multiple borders. These include the boundaries between respectability and illegitimacy, nobility and destitution, the U.S. and Mexico, an interchangeable past and present—but especially between reality and illusion, sanity and delusion, the living and the dead.

The setting and aesthetic look of the film, which draw on the protosurrealist work of Giorgio de Chirico, reinforces this sense, and as Helen Gardner notes, de Chirico's work takes inspiration from the historical past, infusing its locales with "a mood of intense and mysterious melancholy . . . a foreboding sense of departure and of a time long past yet always present" (emphasis added). Hitchcock replaces the squares, arcades, and palaces of Roman and Renaissance Italy seen in de Chirico's early work, and the towers of his Tower Series, with shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the mission at San Juan Batista and other settings, relying on framings, points of view, and embellishments to make the film's visual architecture uncannily resemble de Chirico's. Hitchcock's handling of mise-en-scène evokes, spatializes, and reconfigures the layers of Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo history in a manner that complements Judy/Madeleine/Carlotta's function, and together these elements represent the past that haunts the film's tragic "all-American" protagonist. The history to which they allude becomes the mirror of his haunted, fragmented, modernist inner self. If history is what haunts us—and is therefore "what hurts," in Jameson's famous formulation—then perhaps we should speak of two histories here. One is Scottie's psychological history, the basis of the film's manifest content—to play on Freud's ideas of manifest and latent dream content—and the other is the social, ethnic, and gender history that informs the film's latent content and its "political unconscious" (in Jameson's words); that is, the "colorful" past before it was reduced to Madeleine's platinum blonde swirl and pale gray suit. Thus, just as The Searchers transforms Debbie into a fetishized substitute for history, Vertigo homogenizes the past through the fetish of Madeleine, and both women serve reductively subsumptive functions.

More recently, in a 1990s film that is ostensibly more "about" history, Jenny (Robin Wright), Forrest Gump's childhood sweetheart in the film that bears his name, serves both as a resonant symbol of a key facet of women's history—the kind of abuse and suffering that helped motivate the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s—and, simultaneously, as an example of how Hollywood cinema conjures up then empties out women's history in order to serve socioeconomic ends not at all women's own. In a visually striking scene set in the 1970s, Jenny and Forrest (Tom Hanks), the film's simpleminded, picaresque hero, return to the small farmhouse in Alabama where her "white trash" father had physically and sexually abused her as a small child. Releasing years of pent up rage about what she endured at his hands—and at the hands of most of the men in her adult life as well—she throws first her sandals and then all the stones she can find at the empty house, shattering its windows, and finally collapses in a heap in front of the dreaded "home" that she never fully managed to escape, despite her engagement with what the film presents as counterculture rebellion, including protest against the Vietnam War. Through a juxtaposition of the emotionally crippled Jenny with the house, the sequence evokes Christina's World (figure I.1), Andrew Wyeth's 1948 painting of Christina Olson, a woman who was physically crippled from the time of her childhood on.

It thereby heightens the pathos of Jenny's unfulfilled dreams by raising them to the more general level of a resonant symbol of a longing for and simultaneous exclusion from "home"—a move that mirrors Terrence Malick's citation of the painting in Days of Heaven (1978) as well. Although Jenny, unlike Christina, faces the viewer, the film's quotation of Wyeth is nonetheless reinforced by Jenny's pose, her slender limbs, and her childhood closeness with the formerly leg brace-bound Gump, whom she often urged to run to safety. It is also reinforced by the shot's ambiguous blend of loss and longing and its complication of attitudes toward America's so-called golden age, ambiguity counterpointed in the original by Wyeth's infusion of his realist style with a feeling of abstract expressionist introspection and a sense of home as a place that is always already unhomey, inherently its own eerie opposite. A few scenes later, Jenny is tied to an even more recognizable, historically resonant American symbol: she and an image of the Statue of Liberty—associated here with the celebration of the American bicentennial in 1976—are juxtaposed when it appears on a television in Forrest's home, and Jenny holds her hand up in a pose that echoes, with a difference, the raised arm of Liberty.

Yet, even though the film visually generalizes Jenny's situation, it fails to acknowledge the ways in which women's history in the 1960s and 1970s is centrally about collective efforts to solve the problems that her antinostalgic story instantiates. The film's only direct allusion to the women's movement comes when an African-American woman reporter asks Forrest, now a celebrity runner, why he is spending his days traversing the nation. Is he running for world peace or for women's rights? she queries. Although he provides no real answer—"I just felt like running," he claims—the film's visuals do when the sequence cuts to a shot of him running in a logo tee shirt on which both "Nike" and its ubiquitous swoosh are emblazoned, the ostensible tokens of Jenny, since his Nike running shoes were her gift to him. In the logic of images that jumps from Christina's World to the Statue of Liberty to Nike—all tied to Jenny—the film advances Nike as the unabashedly commercial culmination point; in context, the preeminent symbol of freedom and a synonym of the American nation, borne by Forrest as he crisscrosses the country's beautiful vistas—Monument Valley among them—moving to a film score of exuberantly rhythmic rock music, while Jenny herself catches news of him on yet another television, as she waits tables in a restaurant.

At the level of character motivation, Forrest's running has been spurred by Jenny's departure from his home; she had sought refuge there from the excesses and disillusionment of the disco scene, but then felt compelled to move on, leaving behind the gift of Nikes (a product he happily endorses as "the best gift anyone could get in the wide world"). Nonetheless, the central motivation for the symbolism is unmistakable. What here almost literally boots out women's history generally, and even upstages Jenny's personal story as Forrest's soul mate, is a consumer emblem in a virtual television infomercial. More precisely, what both displaces women's history and serves as a synonym for American freedom is a multinational corporation with a notorious history of paying slave wages to its employees—overwhelmingly women—working in sweatshops located in Vietnam, Indonesia, and China. (Cynthia Enloe's comments about the militarization of shoes heightens the irony here: "A pair of sneakers is militarized to the extent that the women who are sewing those sneakers [in China, Indonesia, or Vietnam] have their wages kept low because major brand corporations and their factory contractors hire former military men as their managers, call on local militarized security forces to suppress workers' organizing, or ally with governments who define the absence of women workers' independent organizing as necessary for 'national security.'") Finally, in Forrest Gump, "Nike," a female-gendered symbol of victory in ancient Greece, no longer bears any trace of its own history either.

To appreciate the depth of the irony of the configuration of questions and images that this sequence contains, it is useful to go back to the historical record and specifically to the position paper circulated at the event that was the inaugural public act of second-wave feminist protest, the "No More Miss America" demonstration held in August 1968. Contrary to caricatures of late-1960s feminism, this paper is neither theoretically unsophisticated nor essentializing, but is instead a complex, nonreductionist assessment of the intersections of sexism, racism, consumer culture, and militarism. It sharply criticizes not only the pageant's objectification of women but also the lack of racial and ethnic diversity among its winners, including its lack of "a true Miss America—an American Indian." Further, the position paper indicts the routine use of Miss America as a "walking commercial for the Pageant's sponsors," who plugs their products on television and promotional tours, and it censures the ways in which she was used to promote U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, where, as the "highlight of her reign," she was sent "to pep-talk our husbands, fathers, sons and boyfriends into dying and killing with a better spirit. She personifies the 'unstained patriotic American womanhood our boys are fighting for.'" In sum, the position paper's larger vision offers a framework that could elucidate the connections among the film's African-American woman reporter, the Vietnamese woman who might have made the running shoes Hanks wears, and Jenny herself. That is to say, it offers exactly what Forrest Gump does not, a telling critical perspective on the intersecting historical problems affecting women during the era traversed by the film. Nike's mid-1990's ad campaign, based on images of women's empowerment, makes the ironies noted here all the more acute.

If Chicano and Mexican-American histories are simultaneously evoked and erased through an aestheticized blonde ideal in Hitchcock's film, and the history of the women's movement is both conjured up and concealed in Forrest Gump, African-American women's history is alluded to and elided through an ideal of young, black, womanly beauty in Beatty's Bulworth. Nina (Halle Berry), the woman in question, exists as an amalgamation of those qualities that serve the needs of theme, plot, and character instead of as a coherently conceived dramatis persona, and in this regard she resembles Debbie in The Searchers, Jenny in Forrest Gump, and women characters in numerous historically based films. Specifically, Nina combines roles as (1) a hip-hop woman; (2) an assassin's assistant, hired to help kill U.S. Senator Bulworth (Beatty) by a stereotyped Italian crime figure, who is being paid by none other than the despairing Bulworth himself; (3) an exquisitely attractive, very much younger love interest for Bulworth, a man who is unaware that she is trying to set him up and who develops second thoughts about dying; (4) an articulate Marxist political savant whose mother was a Black Panther; and finally, (5) a family-identified daughter and sister, who agrees to set Bulworth up so that she can pay off her brother's debt to a local gang leader and thereby save his life.

It is possible to see this portrait as an improvement over the consignment of African-American women and girls to what Jacquie Jones calls the "accusatory space" of the black ghetto film—an emphatically sidelined position that serves as a reproach to young black females for the troubled lives of young black males. "Somehow," Jones explains, "these girls seemed to me to exist in the space of the accused. After all, according to the news of the early eighties, it was those teenage, female-headed households that produced those boys." Yet, if Nina's diverse traits and less marginal position, along with Berry's fine performance, potentially make for a more complex and less stereotypical portrait, the film itself fails to connect all the character dots. Nina articulates an astute political analysis of a host of problems besetting contemporary African Americans, but only in a single scene is she given this strong political voice, and it is a scene that centers on a conversation with Bulworth in the romantically lit backseat of a limo.

Nostalgically reflecting on a time when young black people knew who Huey Newton was, Bulworth asks her, "Why do you think there are no more black leaders?" Nina's response makes it clear that she knows not only who Huey Newton was but also the impact of the assassination of black leaders on American politics. As she develops her answer, she also explains how, in contemporary America, issues of race and class merge, how the increasing globalization of capital has moved jobs away from U.S. urban centers into the third world, undermining the urban black political base, and how consumerism militates against the self-sacrifice that social progress requires. Further, she spotlights how the present-day increase in media monopolies curtails cultural opportunities and limits the expression of alternative visions. The film would have us believe, however, that at the time its events take place—the 1996 elections—well-publicized debates about the culturally specific forms of sexism in the Black Panther Party, in gangster rap, in ghetto-based films, and in the idea of the 1995 Million Man March would register not so much as a blip on Nina's highly informed political consciousness, or that she would revere the name of Huey Newton and the memory of her own Black Panther mother but fail even to mention women such as Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, or bell hooks. The scene thus affords a variant on the kind of forgetting of women's historical interconnections that is played out in Miranda's history lesson in The Tempest's second scene. By the end of her speech, Nina has become not so much the voice of the black community or a credible female emblem of black nationalism, as a kind of ventriloquist's doll, reciting the white filmmaker's male-centered view of black history in America.

If Nina's voice nevertheless provides lessons in history and politics for Bulworth, who for once is nearly silent (but later appropriates Nina's lesson in a media appearance), it is she herself who is finally reduced to near silence by the film's end. At this point, Bulworth wants her to follow him out of her family's ghetto home and into the media spotlight. She does, and the two kiss seconds before he is assassinated by the interest group (insurance) that his new political stance has most pointedly offended. In the moment before the assassination, the romance plot comes dangerously close to reducing Nina not only to a silent love interest, but, in effect, to something like the prone position that Stokely Carmichael notoriously said was the only one open to women in the Black Panther Party. Specifically, Nina reassures the racially insecure sixty-year-old Bulworth by saying "you're my nigger" just before their last kiss. She thereby confirms his "black" masculinity, creating a dissonant echo of the kind of confirmation that some Black Panther leaders, motivated by a specific history of castrations, emasculation, and lynchings, had demanded of black women; along with it (in the revealing vocabulary of the film's preamble), Nina confirms Bulworth's distinctive ability as a politician able to get the populace "aroused." In this way, Nina is defined more by the requirements of Beatty's politics and plot—and by Bulworth's black-phallus-envy-driven developmental trajectory—than by internal coherence or by black women's historical experience vis-à-vis white men in America. (Bulworth's assassination further doubles him with black men; in this case, with the martyrs whom he has admired and sought partly to emulate.)

The requirements of Beatty's plot and politics are also reflected by his desire to make Bulworth into an often comic but ultimately perceptive white version of a homey or homeboy, a part with a dress code he adopts while he is in Nina's neighborhood, where he also plays a kind of Shakespearean fool. To be sure, there has probably never been a more unhomey homey than Beatty. Yet his odd presence and behavior underscore the unheimlich (unhomey) aspects of Nina's neighborhood as home, and to the film's credit, it conveys this point in some telling effects. Nina's extended family lives in a house that is warmly lit and comfortable on the inside but surrounded by dangers that also make it seem like a prison. Strangely enough, those dangers take the shape of little African-American boys of five or six, children who, along with slightly older boys, "soldier" surreal, steely blue nighttime streets, packing guns and dealing drugs in a virtual third-world setting. The boys are so young that, when they threaten Bulworth, he can easily buy them off with ice cream cones, a humorous move that converts them back to children and ironically spares him from Nina's bullets as well.

For her part, Nina brings Bulworth to her home to set him up for the hit. When one of her family members, not knowing her aim, admonishes her not to become involved with this white man and to remember the destructive consequences of a similar involvement for her mother, Nina protests that she has something else in mind, and at this point, she still does. But the narrative also recalls an old pattern of African-American women offering sexual appeasement to white men in order to protect their families from harm. Safiya Bukhari-Alston's historical perspective illuminates this issue. Focusing on the ways in which the legacy of slavery shapes ideas of gender, she explains, "Since [Black men] had been stripped of their manhood in every way but the ability to 'pleasure' women and make babies, the sexual act soon became the measure by which the Black man measured his manhood. The Black women worked right alongside the Black man in the field and she worked in the Master's house. The Black man could not defend or protect his family, while in most cases the Black woman was the one who defended or protected the family from the slavemaster's wrath by any means necessary."23 The film, then, glimpses historically and racially specific forms of literal unhominess, rooted in the black slave woman's role in the master's home and the white man's place in hers, yet it also romances away that legacy's relationship to the surreal, third-world quality of contemporary ghetto life.

What the four examples just examined share, in addition to a pattern of displacing women's history, are diverse, historically specific forms of uncanniness. That is, all four films envision versions of the home—and by extension, particular images of the nation—as an unheimlich (strange, weird, or disquieting) place whose strangeness stems from past events that the narratives aim to master. Moreover, each seeks mastery precisely through a complex, equivocal, reductive symbolization of women. In each case, women become identified with sites of conflict—from the thresholds of the Western homestead, teepee, and landscape in The Searchers, to Judy/Madeleine/Carlotta's various haunts in Vertigo, and from the abandoned farmhouse of Jenny's childhood, remembered as the dreaded site of abuse in Forrest Gump, to Nina's neighborhood in Bulworth, a place turned inside out, in her view, by the globalization of capital but also made strange by the presence of Bulworth himself. And in each case, it is the process of not telling women's histories that makes possible women's deployment in these narratives as symbolic answers, identified with these sites, to the needs of narrative and hence national identity. Yet just as women's lack of distinct histories and their resulting fragmentary status are preconditions for their iconic functions in "solving" problems of identity rooted in the past, so, too, are they part and parcel of women's obverse roles, as signs of identity's mutability, incoherence, and uncanniness. In short, besides being intended to help solidify ideas of home and nation, women in history films can serve as synonyms for a legacy of division, displacement, and ambivalence.

If this formulation of the unhomey seems a closed loop, a further shift in historical perspective can lead to a view of how these same sites crystallize the intractable, often overlooked unhominess of the home for women, whose place traditionalists claim that it should be. As will become evident, the trajectory of the theory of the uncanny, from its origins in Freud, through feminist revisions of the 1970s and 1980s, and on to more recent cultural studies reworkings, is one in which a problematic concept has been recuperated, fostering alternative understandings of narrative and aesthetics along with powerful critiques of standard narrative practices. At stake is an expansion of Freud's original concepts of the unheimlich into an extremely valuable framework for conceptualizing the historical and symbolic positioning of women in film. In the chapters ahead, I shall explore the concept of the historical unheimlich in greater detail and use it to bring various problems of film and history into focus. My goal here, however, is to introduce basic tenets of theories of the uncanny and to provide a brief overview of their development during the last century.

Theories of the Unheimlich

Although Ernst Jentsch published a medicopsychological study of the uncanny in 1906, Sigmund Freud's extraordinary 1919 essay, "The 'Uncanny'," which cites Jentsch's work, represents the canonical opening volley in debates about the concept as an aesthetic category and a psychological phenomenon. Defining the uncanny as "that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar," Freud posits the unheimlich as a universal intrapsychic experience (albeit one to which he feels himself virtually immune), a phenomenon rooted in repressed memory, as well as an aesthetic category designating figurations opposite to "what is beautiful, attractive and sublime." Further, Freud famously explains that "heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich." Thus the word heimlich itself conveys an ambiguous sense of home, configuring it as a site that is cozy and comfortable yet also secret, covered, best left unseen, and therefore threatening and strange. If canny and uncanny, as English counterparts to heimlich and unheimlich, do not precisely convey these same home-centered meanings, they nonetheless point toward a similar ambivalence and synonymity in their meanings of clever and too clever. That is, like the words heimlich and unheimlich, they jointly enact the potentially frightening interchangeability, doubling, and lack of clear boundaries that they denote. Although such uncertainty is potentially terrifying in life, as Freud indicates, in art and literature, aestheticization can render such ambivalence enjoyably terrifying and can also mask it altogether, in effect rendering it un-uncanny.

Further, the word canny possesses a denotative meaning that harmonizes with Freud's theory of the origin of all unheimlich experience. Specifically, in Scottish a "canny wife" is a midwife and the "canny moment" is the moment of birth. Although not noted by Freud, these meanings point toward what he identifies as the unheimlich's first source: "the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning." For Freud, this biological past is the prelude to all experience of the uncanny, including that generated by aesthetic motifs such as doubles, dolls, and automata; a severed head or limb; psychological experiences such as déjà vu; and the fears of being buried alive or castrated. All bespeak anxieties about identity boundaries, including the division between past and present, living and dead, and self and (m)other, although Freud considers none of these motifs in light of the potential unhominess of the home for the women who live there.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, feminist scholars including Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Tania Modleski, and Lucy Fischer, challenged, expanded, and revised Freud's ideas to fill in this gap, thereby illuminating the social and psychological positioning of women in creative and theoretical works concerned with the unheimlich. Drawing on Kristeva, Fischer's work, for example, investigates the double in films about sisters and, in the process, reiterates "the real and benevolent possibility of the female body for doubling" in pregnancy, a benevolence that contrasts with masculine projections of women as dual creatures, encompassing womb and tomb or mother and whore. Fischer also uses the concept of the doppelgänger to shed light on German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta's woman-centered Sisters, a film that productively reflects on Germany's suppression of Nazi history. For her part, Cixous criticizes Freud's analysis of his primary literary example of the uncanny, E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale "The Sand-Man," because it effaces Clara and minimizes Olimpia, the story's two principal female characters, in order to focus on Nathaniel, the male. Cixous faults Freud, as well, for trying to tame the uncanny by underestimating its radical potential for destabilizing the borders of identity, including his own. She thereby points the way toward the use of the aesthetics of the uncanny to intervene in conventionally gendered narratives, including historical ones.

Freud's theory of the uncanny also serves as the jumping off point for Modleski's feminist investigation of Vertigo, with its theme of radically destabilized identity parameters—in this case, those of gender in particular. She reads Judy/Madeleine/Carlotta as Scottie's troubling double, a woman who surprisingly takes him back to his own home and self. In Modleski's words, "It is as if [Scottie] were continually confronted with the fact that woman's uncanny otherness has some relation to himself, that he resembles her in ways intolerable to contemplate—intolerable because this resemblance throws into question his own fullness of being." Thus feminist scholarship exposed anxious masculine suppression and projection of destabilizing uncanniness within the self; it also focused attention on the benevolent dimensions of female duality.

In this same context, pathfinding feminist scholars also investigated the unheimlich in literary and film genres addressed to women, especially the female Gothic, with its stories about women who are literally terrorized in their own homes. In particular, Modleski's work recognizes that "Gothic novels for women continually exploit the sensation of the uncanny as it was defined by Freud to a far greater extent than any other type of mass fiction," and she theorizes that the basis of the genre's appeal to women lies in the separation anxiety that daughters experience in relation to their mothers. Examining the woman's film of the 1940s, Mary Ann Doane focuses on the uncanny in relation to dynamics specific to cinema, with the less-bounded experience of subjectivity it provides, relative to that of novels, and on film's distinctly spacialized and specularized uncanny dimensions. And, identifying the source of ideological tensions within Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door (1948), Diane Waldman stresses the historical pressures that marked the period immediately after World War II—especially the push to move women out of the paid workforce and into the traditional, presumably more socially stabilizing home—and how these pressures shaped an architecture of uncanniness in the gothic romance film.

Indeed, with the advent of cultural studies and the new historicism in the 1980s, theorists increasingly reworked Freud's theory to historicize uncanniness within the frameworks of the ethnic, racial, and sexual dynamics of particular nations, cultures, and histories, and especially in relation to postcolonialism, migratory labor, and globalization. In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva focuses on the foreignness of migrant workers within the modern metropolitan nation and on the correspondence between these strangers without and the uncanny strangers that exist within the psyches of native citizens, a correlation that can lead, in her view, to one of two trajectories. The first is a path of paranoia and destruction, as the boundaries between imagination and reality dissolve and the dreadful imaginary is mistaken for material reality; the second is a hopeful path of productive confrontation with the inner unknown as the basis for identification with the unfamiliar foreigner and hence for sociality. Revealingly, Kristeva also observes that "a foreigner seldom arouses the terrifying anguish provoked by death [or] the female sex." Yet, powerfully illuminating as her analysis is, it never fully examines the implications of this assertion for the foreigner who happens to be female.

A related lapse appears in Jameson's suggestive investigation of magic realism. Jameson enlists Freud's concept of the uncanny in order to account for resistant effects of magic realist aesthetics in third-world and especially Latin American cinema. He contrasts the deep layering of history in magic realist texts with the Hollywood history film's reliance on an idealized, nostalgic, superficial vision of America in the 1940s and 1950s as its key historic reference point—in effect, the fetishized replacement for history identified in my earlier quotation from Jameson. In the context of magic realism, he productively matches Freud's ideas about the aesthetics of the uncanny with the historical depth and resonance generated by magic realist films. The lapse arises from the inferences that he draws based on his conclusion that Freud's choice of "The Sand-Man" as his exemplary text was unduly constraining. Jameson argues that "what is to be retained from Freud's canonical demonstration . . . is the way in which narrative elements can be intensified and marked from within by an absent cause undetectable empirically but read off the sheerest formal properties."37 Thus, for example, third-world filmmakers have transformed the technical imperfections in the kind of film stock that their limited budgets allow into a deliberately crafted, resistant aesthetics, a counterstatement to Hollywood's technical perfection and to the advanced capitalist values such perfection connotes. Yet, given the striking importance of powerful, often subversive women figures in a wide variety of magic realist literary and film texts—an importance far greater than that found in the Hollywood paradigm—and given Hollywood's own methods for managing the historical uncanny, Jameson's theory gives short shrift to Hoffmann's tale, with its female human characters and its unheimlich female automaton, Olimpia.

For Homi Bhabha, however, the idea of Olimpia serves as a springboard to another extension and recontextualization of Freud's idea of the uncanny. Bhabha's interest centers on the cultural uncanny; that is, on the interstitial social spaces and historical asynchronicities—the doubled-up spaces and times—that adumbrate the colonialist-imperialist history embedded in contemporary politics, literature, and culture. From Bhabha's perspective, the aesthetics best suited for configuring the historical past reveals it as always already intruding on and intermingling with the present, thereby creating in-between spaces and interwoven temporalities in which innovation, interruption, and exposé occur. In this context, Toni Morrison's work serves as a primary example. Her novel Beloved (1987) effectively rewrites the unheimlich in a distinct African-American register, one informed by her cognizance of a legacy of slavery that invaded, displaced, colonized, and deprivatized the home. As Bhabha writes, her work reveals the process by which "the recesses of domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused, and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting."

Bhabha also draws on feminist theory to hint at the uncanny's deconstructionist potential. Defining the "unhomey moment" as one that "relates the traumatic ambivalences of personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence," Bhabha argues that feminism makes "visible the forgetting of the 'unhomely' moment in civil society." It thereby reveals "the patriarchal, gendered nature of civil society and disturbs the symmetry of private and public which is now shadowed, or uncannily doubled, by the difference of genders which does not neatly map onto the private and the public, but becomes disturbingly supplementary to them." The result is a redrawing of "domestic space as the space of the normalizing, pastoralizing, and individuating techniques of modern power and police: the personal-is-the political; the world-in-the home." In a related vein, he reinterprets Hoffmann's "Sand-Man" as a particularly "canny" illustration of how colonized subjects are expected to perform in order to gain cultural membership. Like the young women in Hoffmann's tale who are pressed by their suitors to prove their difference from the beautiful doll-like Olimpia by imperfectly performing identifiably human acts and gestures, colonized subjects must generate slightly imperfect reiterations of culturally accredited formulas and conventions if they are to establish their credentials as human.

Despite Bhabha's attention to Morrison and to feminism, Maureen Molloy, in an important essay on recent New Zealand cinema, criticizes his study, along with Freud's essay and Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves, for missing the centrality of the figure of woman in their concepts of the uncanny. Molloy's critique speaks to oversights in some other scholarship as well:

"Woman" is the specter that haunts [their] essays, appearing in tantalizing but evanescent references. All three scholars allude to, but none develops, the significance of "woman" in relation to the uncanny . . . Of the three theorists, Bhabha makes the most of the feminine ghost who is at the center of the haunting uncanny of cultural domination. He is, however, oblique in his analysis, using "the figure of woman" to signify the private "home" of the culturally oppressed . . . However, what he misses in metaphorizing "the figure of woman" is woman, as female, caught not only within a cultural and racialized oppression but caught within it as a woman.

Thus Molloy returns the focus not only to woman as symbol but to the experiential world of women per se. She thereby underscores not only woman's ambiguous positioning at or as the nation's hearth and home and yet as peripheral to the civil state, but also women's corresponding ambivalence toward home and nation. For women, home and nation are always something more, and less, than homey.

At the same time, Molloy never loses sight of historical shifts in the dynamics that generate complex and troubling symbolic equivalencies among the feminine, the home, national identity, and the unheimlich. She highlights, in particular, the ways in which the increasing destabilization and fragmentation of national identities, under the pressures of postcolonialism and globalization, renewed the production of nationally resonant figurations of female uncanniness in the 1990s, a phenomenon she explores in relation to three New Zealand films from that decade, including The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) and Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994). The third of these, Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994), is a film whose uncanny imagery conjures up a private female world and an historical act of matricide—famously committed by two teenage girls in the 1950s—in what Molloy reads as a kind of allegory of the nation, bespeaking the ruptures and ambivalences in New Zealand's sense of national identity in the 1990s. Molloy thus connects an ostensibly private, if historically based narrative with a public narrative of nation and national history in ways that acknowledge the larger ramifications of a seemingly eccentric or anomalous tale as well as its power as a revenant. Molloy summarizes the place of the uncanny as follows: "The uncanny, with its implications of doubling, merging, and return of the repressed, is the expression and the effect of the feminine. The lack of boundaries, surety, and the return of the archaic make it also a powerful expression of the postcolonial nation."

Addressing U.S. cinema, Molloy illustrates her theory by pointing to the correspondence between Blade Runner and "The Sand-Man," and between Rachel and Olimpia, foregrounding gender in the process. The linking of the cult film to the tale is evocative and also points beyond Molloy's argument toward further historical shifts. Whereas Olimpia is pure mechanism (a "dry" machine), the far more human but extremely fetishized Rachel is a replicant (a "wet" machine, "colloidal"), a contrast that reflects both the increasing importance of technologies that magnify gender distinctions in a wide variety of contexts and the radical diminution of difference between the human and nonhuman in recent science fiction and science fact, as in, for example, the concepts of the cyborg, android, and replicant. Moreover, as a living doll, Rachel possesses implanted memories, epitomized in the film by a constructed family snapshot of her and her mother sitting on the steps of the porch of their home. This image both links her back to Shakespeare's Miranda, whose memories her spectacle-producing father simultaneously supplants and implants, and ahead to twenty-first-century audiences, whose prosthetic memories—derived from film, video, and television viewing, digitally enhanced family albums, and packaged travel and theme park experiences—Rachel's photo doubles. In fact, the brief suggestion of movement within a play of light and shadow that marks the final seconds in which Rachel's snapshot appears on screen directly ties it to the viewer's cinematic experience, and Rachel's mistaken belief that the snapshot is proof of her humanity thus reflects on the viewer's beliefs and humanity as well—especially so, given the highly reiterative nature of cult film experience. Thus the uncanny doll and the celluloid double point toward evolving technologies of reproduction and their ambiguously human effects.

Additionally, it has become not only the doll that disturbs as "she" magnifies the borderlines of identity, but also, symbolically, Dolly, the history-making cloned Scottish sheep, and the real capacity for biological doubling that science now possesses. The uncanny, in short, currently exists on a distinct and heightened historical plane, given these scientific and science fiction developments, which complement the destabilization of identities that globalization, postcolonialist dynamics, and population and labor shifts have ushered in. Even films that do not directly engage these scientific developments may reflect them obliquely or rely on them as frames of reference and reception. At the same time, the gender and name of "Dolly," or "little doll," also suggest a clear perpetuation of patterns of the uncanny from the past, and both traditional and shifting reiterations of the uncanny are important contexts for comprehending the films that this book explores in the chapters ahead.

Before I turn to the project of outlining those chapters, however, some further comments on the historical embeddedness of the concept of the uncanny are in order. The previous discussion demonstrates the inseparability of aesthetic and psychological theories from historical pressures and political values. The fact that Freud himself wrote his treatise in the shadow of the First World War points as well to the importance of historical context to a theory, such as his, that defines itself in universal rather than historically or politically specific terms. This context also offers clues about the relevance of his theory to the war film genre—perhaps the major form of U.S. history film at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries—a genre conventionally associated with the sublime. Factoring in the history of the uncanny as an aesthetic category, one closely related to the sublime and the beautiful, also provides a springboard to theorizing a more equivocal gendering of the aesthetics of the uncanny, not just as the problematic synonym of the feminine that Molloy describes, but as a destabilizing third term that productively deconstructs the binarisms of male-female and sublime-beautiful, and can thereby erode nostalgically masculinist versions of the past.

Aesthetics, Gender, and Genre: A Historical Perspective

In Hollywood cinema, an aesthetics of the sublime has conventionally defined key male-centered genres, and in particular the Western, with its vast, majestic, overwhelming landscape, and, as I have noted, the war film, with its immense scale of battle and sacrifice. Conversely, an aesthetics of the beautiful has been conventionally aligned with the sociality, domesticity, and intimacy of female-centered genres such as romantic comedy and domestic melodrama, although aesthetic beauty is by no means limited to this role.46 This aesthetic division of the sublime and the beautiful, which has roots contemporaneous with the founding of America, emerges in the eighteenth-century theories of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, thinkers who helped to establish the stereotyped gender values of these categories in the last half of that century. For both Burke and Kant, the masculine sublime contrasts with the feminine beautiful, and the arguments and assumptions of both point toward the inseparability of aesthetic form from political dynamics and historical forces.

An example of the gendering of aesthetics especially pertinent to the war film is Kant's discussion of warriors and sublimity. Kant urges that certain military personnel, if they wage war with respect for citizens' rights, are aesthetically superior entities, sublime opposites to the "effeminate" types who spring up during long periods of peace:

For what is that which is, even to the savage, an object of the greatest admiration? It is a man who shrinks from nothing, who fears nothing, and therefore does not yield to danger, but rather goes to face it vigorously with the most complete deliberation. Even in the most highly civilized state this peculiar veneration for the soldier remains, though only under the condition that he exhibit all the virtues of peace, gentleness, compassion, and even a becoming care for his own person; because even by these it is recognized that his mind is unsubdued by danger. Hence whatever disputes there may be about the superiority of the respect which is to be accorded them, in the comparison of a statesman and a general, the aesthetical judgment decides for the latter. War itself, if it is carried on with order and with a sacred respect for the rights of citizens, has something sublime in it, and makes the disposition of the people who carry it on thus only the more sublime, the more numerous are the dangers to which they are exposed and in respect of which they behave with courage. On the other hand, a long peace generally brings about a predominant commercial spirit and, along with it, low selfishness, cowardice, and effeminacy, and debases the disposition of the people.

A few years later, in the course of the French Revolution, Kant was to affirm a universalist pacifist stance (Perpetual Peace [1795]), but his idea here that peace and effeminacy form sublime opposites to war and warriors looks back to a position articulated earlier by Burke. As W. J. T. Mitchell explains, "Burke's most notorious derivation of political values from the mechanics of sensation is his linking of sublimity and beauty with stereotypes of gender. Sublimity, with its foundation in pain, terror, vigorous exertion, and power, is the masculine aesthetic mode. Beauty, by contrast, is located in qualities such as littleness, smoothness, and delicacy that mechanically induce a sense of pleasure and affectionate superiority . . .."

For Burke, not only gender but also national identity (and as I will later discuss, race) came to derive political valence from aesthetic perception. In the wake of the French Revolution, Burke took pains to distinguish between the purportedly false French sublime, and what he saw as the gender-destabilizing feminine or transvestite character of its violence, and the true English one, which he perceived as moderate, masculine, and mediated—that is, something one experiences at a safe distance, and paradigmatically, a phenomenon in nature. Shedding light on this idea of feminine French violence, Patrice Leconte's film La Veuve de Saint Pierre (2000) reminds us that the guillotine was nicknamed la veuve or widow. Moreover, according to Regina Janes, the explicitly erotic contemporary representations of the French Revolution's instrument of death as "a gaping, single-toothed vagina dentata" underscored the "parallels between female anatomy and guillotine geometry and set up a tense oscillation between desire and destruction." Thus, for Burke's theories, the French Revolution—clearly a watermark sublime image of armed political struggle—created a serious discrepancy, since he both preferred the sublime as an aesthetic mode and condemned this particular political embodiment of it—in fact, dissociated the event from true sublimity.

More recently, the issue of the sublime in history became an important focus in the work of Hayden White, who criticizes Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France as illustrative of a misguided movement to "exorcize the notion of the sublime from any apprehension of the historical process." To White, Burke's position and his preference for a "sort of delightful horror" reveal the "domestication of history effected by the suppression of the historical sublime," a move that renders history too familiar, comfortable, safe, and comprehensible. On the contrary, White argues, history, and the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century in particular, should be represented as a succession of sublimely terrible developments that are irreconcilable with the sort of realist, romance-inflected narrative exemplified by the nineteenth-century novel. The unfathomable irrationality and sublimity of history must be laid bare, in White's view, so that witnesses, driven by a utopian yearning for change, are spurred to act out politically significant choices. Thus White sees the fragmentation of modernist and postmodernist narrative as better suited for representing twentieth-century history than conventional "domesticated" narratives. Although White's analysis is compelling and significant, and his concept of "domestication" pertinent to 1990s films, that concept, with its implicit associations not only of "taming" but also of femininity and falsification, nonetheless perpetuates a problematic tradition of gender hierarchies in aesthetic categories. It also neglects to consider any potential role or value for the conventional association of the feminine and the beautiful with peace.

The same era that created what is now called the Romantic sublime, theorized in Burke's and Kant's work, also produced exemplary uncanny texts and prototheoretical work on the relatively elusive idea of the uncanny. Hoffmann's "The Sand-Man" (1816), with its beautiful yet terrifying doll-like automaton, Olimpia, exemplifies the former, and Heinrich von Kleist's remarkable treatise "On the Puppet Theater" (1810) illustrates the latter. Unlike the sublime and the beautiful, however, the uncanny became a significant category of aesthetic and cultural analysis only in the twentieth century when Freud published "The 'Uncanny'" in 1919, as I have already noted. With the horrors of World War I as its backdrop, Freud's essay fuses evocations of death, trauma, beauty, domesticity, and epistemological uncertainty.

As Freud explains, the uncanny gives aesthetic expression to anxieties about a range of distinctions, including those between child and mother, self and other, the living and the dead, human and machine, imagination and reality, and mind and body. Although Freud never expressly discusses war, and initially even postpones considering the subject of death because, as he says, of its gruesomeness, his essay's relevance to these topics is powerfully apparent. He notes that because the "uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression," it can be a source of morbid anxiety, regardless of whether the uncanny thing originally triggered dread. Nonetheless, he adds, "many people experience the feeling [of uncanniness] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies," a phenomenon clearly intensified in wartime and necessarily aestheticized in its fictional representations.

Warfare is linked to the uncanny in additional ways as well. During war, identity boundaries are typically rigidified, for example, through propaganda that reduces the enemy to inhuman automata. Indeed, extending this idea of rigidification to an extreme was the eighteenth-century Prussian ideal of state governance on a military model, an ideal which later spread through Germany and finally became all-pervasive and normative during the Nazi years. As Michel Foucault observes, war and the militarization of society were conceived to function as sources, in effect, of a general automatization: "Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility." (Not coincidentally, eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed the acme of the popularity of automata.) Thus the militarized society and the enemy as automata heighten an uncanny self-other doubling that tests the boundaries of difference. At the same time, war also tests identity boundaries through experiences of physical and psychological trauma that throw the limits of the self into doubt and that result in compulsive, mechanical behavior.

Significantly, Freud's catalog of uncanny images moves from those that evoke precisely such trauma to the vision of our original "home" in the womb:

Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet which dance by themselves—all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove able to move of themselves in addition. As we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its association with the castration-complex. To many people the idea of being buried alive while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was filled with a certain lustful pleasure—the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.

Elaborating on this last insight a few pages later, Freud offers what he terms a "beautiful confirmation" of his theory in the saying Liebe ist Heimweh (love is homesickness): "Whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, still in the dream, 'this place is familiar to me, I have been there before,' we may interpret the place as being his mother's genitals or her body." The uncanny is thus a double of nostalgia (from the Greek for "return home" and "pain").

Paradoxically, then, the German word heimlich (homey, domestic, domesticated) can mean its opposite, unheimlich (uncanny; literally unhomey), and thus contains a darker double of itself—the double being a defining element of the uncanny. Paradoxically, too, the fear of castration provoked by images of severed hands and limbs finds its roots, in Freud's view, in our oneness with our first home, the mother's body. And paradoxically, the origin of the larger deadly terror produced by the uncanny is the memory of the domestic and maternal and even of "a certain lustful pleasure," a certain "home-sickness." A further implication colors these insights but goes repressed and unstated: namely, that the idealized maternal provides a means of evoking and evading the reality of death that war horribly magnifies, and of conjuring up yet concealing an intensified psychic conflation of womb and tomb as doubles in their power to define the limits of human existence.

This submerged connection between wartime and the maternal is further reinforced in one of Freud's references to the recent war, in a passage on the overaccentuation of psychical reality, a passage that is sandwiched between his paragraphs on the maternal uncanny. Here, too, the relationship of combat to the uncanny remains implicit yet unmistakable. Indeed, the segment offers an especially revealing glimpse into how Freud's repression of the recent war shades his thought:

In the midst of the isolation of war-time a number of the English Strand Magazine fell into my hands; and, amongst other not very interesting matter, I read a story about a young married couple, who move into a furnished flat in which there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening they begin to smell an intolerable and very typical odour that pervades the whole flat; things begin to get in their way and trip them up in the darkness; they seem to see a vague form gliding up the stairs—in short, we are given to understand that the presence of the table causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of that sort. It was a thoroughly silly story, but the uncanny feeling it produced was quite remarkable.

This anecdote itself is remarkable for a number of reasons, including Freud's earlier claim that it had been some time since he had "experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny impression," as well as his lack of express analysis of the story's highly suggestive details— the young married couple, the typical evening-time odor, and the accompanying crocodiles, animals known for their terrifyingly toothy maws. These elements function together to hint at a particular kind of imaginary fear, namely, the dread of the vagina dentata. In light of Freud's remembered wish to escape "the isolation of war-time" through such "silly" literature, there seems to be a double symbolism at work. To put it punningly, in the contexts of the story itself and of the historical pressures of the war, the crocodile stands as a primitive symbol that conflates the terrible "maw of war," devouring the youth of Europe, and the "ma of war," the castration anxiety-producing mother, who symbolizes both womb and tomb according to a familiar formulation, both the source of the soldier's "home-sickness" and emblem of the war's terrible toll in human life. (The connection between the terrors of trench warfare and the forms of desire that drive classic 1930s horror films—at least as these are posited by the fictionalized biography of James Whale, Gods and Monsters [Bill Condon, 1998]—furthers this association between war and uncanniness. So, too, does the driving influence of unheimlich homes on post-World War II soldier-cowboys such as Jeb in Pursued [Raoul Walsh, 1947] and Ethan in The Searchers.)

Beyond pointing toward an important if half-buried linkage of war, women, and the uncanny, Freud's reflections also offer evidence of an erosion and slippage of aesthetic categories, the blurring of boundaries that is itself a mark of the uncanny, the wish to cover over the discomforting uncanny with a "beautiful confirmation" of viability. Indeed, insofar as the aesthetics of the beautiful and the unheimlich overlap, and insofar as the aesthetics of the sublime and the uncanny share a focus on terror, the uncanny has the potential to subvert distinctions based on aesthetics and gender posited by earlier theories of the sublime and the beautiful. In terms of the triad of aesthetic categories that I have presented, then, the uncanny has the power to function as the deconstructionist's third term. That is, while the uncanny ostensibly stands outside of the binarisms aligned with the sublime and the beautiful—male-female, immensity-smallness, strength-weakness, terror-pleasure, wartime-peacetime, Anglo-Saxon-French, and so on—it exists between them and functions to reveal how, in Derrida's words, "each allegedly 'simple' term is marked by the trace of another term." The uncanny thus traces, for example, how terror resides in (being born of) woman—an idea that famously subtends the bloody struggles undertaken by Shakespeare's Macbeth.

The question then becomes, what implications do these aesthetic considerations hold for gender and genre issues of the World War II combat film (especially in the expressly commemorative forms in which it emerged at the end of the twentieth century), in films that depict cold-war history, and in films that rewrite more contemporary techno-warfare? If, as Robin Blaetz maintains, the combat film has tended to "manage" femininity and especially maternity (and hence death, I would add) by submitting them to male mastery, to what extent is this sense of control both furthered and called into question in late-twentieth-century cinema by the destabilizing aesthetic forces of the uncanny? That is, how has the uncanny both served nostalgic, masculinist agendas and mobilized feminist-friendly cultural critique? And if reimagining the past has very often entailed negating the history and impact of the women's movement by reducing women to mothers and icons of the nation, in what ways has the uncanny helped to revive remembrance of the historical differences that women's ideas and actions could make?

Chapter Overview

The pages that follow seek answers to these questions through their investigation of 1990s films in the Hollywood narrative model, although the last chapter, which considers two films by independent filmmaker John Sayles, treats work that also provocatively departs from that paradigm. The films engage U.S. history from World War II to the present, including the complex legacies of the cold war and the techno-war in the Persian Gulf. A recurring focus within this cinema is the calculated military or political use of symbolic women for public-relations purposes, and my study also traces what happens when female characters move from the largely symbolic position they occupy in the World War II combat films to a more central position in a Gulf War film (anticipatory of Jessica Lynch's status in 2003), as well as the effects of this shift on the critiques of image manipulations that are developed. Only one of the films in my study centrally concerns actual historical personages, Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995), but all of them fictionalize and aestheticize historical events, and are in varying degrees shaped by an aesthetics of the uncanny—a mode that can reduce women to dolls and monsters, yet can also serve as a means of unconventional cultural critique and of engendering less masculinized inscriptions of the past.

Chapter One focuses primarily on masculine identities inscribed in World War II combat films. I examine three combat films; among them, Keith Gordon's Midnight Clear (1991) is the one most defined by an uncanny aesthetics, as it expressly conjoins home and battlefield in order to generate tellingly unconventional configurations of combat masculinity and an unequivocally antiwar critique. The other two films, Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998), are both better known and more conventionally conceived in relation to aesthetic sublimity and beauty. Nonetheless, they too make innovative and revealing use of uncanny aesthetic configurations to reimagine received ideas about warfare, moral accountability, gender, and generational difference. On the other hand, equivocal inscriptions of the maternal—shifting, for example, between the mother as revered bearer of soldiers and troubling public-relations symbol, or between idealized life force and terrible "ma(w) of death"—provide highly problematic moments across these films. Insofar as these works reduce symbolic women to womb and tomb, they provide predictably inadequate answers to Gilligan's questions, where are the women and why all the suffering?

Chapter Two focuses on first ladies, and specifically Pat Nixon—wife of World War II veteran and consummate cold warrior Richard Nixon—as she is recreated in Oliver Stone's film Nixon. I read Stone's construction of her against the popular image of Plastic Pat and, more generally, against America's historical ambivalence toward its first ladies, ambiguously situated public figures who share the White House and serve the contradictory function of symbolizing both the nation and the private, familial realm. Stone's film generates an iconic portrait of Pat that in some measure contradicts the popular view of her as an uncanny doll or a rigid robot, an image defining her instead as an idealized truth figure. It thereby situates her as an opposite to Nixon's mother, Hannah, whom Stone vilifies as the maternal symbol of a long history of Protestant repression. An array of uncanny images reflect back on her deficient mothering and forecast Nixon's haunted adult personality, revealing him as plagued by neuroses that undermine his public success and private happiness. Stone's Nixon, for example, hallucinates that his wife and mother are one and the same, thereby fetishizing both as he displaces the familiar wife into the repressed "mother" of his familiar but estranged past. Yet, it is not only Stone's Nixon who effectively mistakes these women for the uncanny stranger within; at times, the film itself also conflates Hannah and Pat, reinscribing both in fetishistic terms and reinforcing the ambivalence that defines the maternal as uncanny.

Concerning repressed history, the film underplays Nixon's insistence on a Stepford wife public image for Pat, whose warmth and humor he stifled, as well as a pattern of profound mistrust of women that marked his entire political career. This facet of the cold warrior's leeriness is revealed not only by the historical Nixon's color-coded conflation of femininity and Communism (for example, his labeling of the non-Communist Helen Gahagan Douglas as the "pink lady"), but also by his unconscious creation of a painful pun on his wife's name. Drawing a metaphor from poker, the game he profited from while serving in the Pacific during World War II, Nixon claimed that America "cannot stand pat" in its war against Communism, a revealing, symptomatic conflation. Similarly, Nixon underexposes the unselfconscious blend of racism and sexism that existed within his administration. It thereby forms a vantage point that essentially exculpates Nixon, painting him as a leader whose potential for greatness was tragically sabotaged by his mother and the cold piety of her childrearing. Perhaps most importantly, the film never discloses the extent to which the historical record refutes the media construction of an uncanny Pat. Specifically, that record reveals that, in sharp contrast to her husband, Pat Nixon was at ease with people of various nationalities, races, ethnicities, and disabilities—that is, with those whom Kristeva calls the uncanny "strangers without." The record also verifies her success as a goodwill ambassador to third-world nations, the kind of countries that her husband, along with Henry Kissinger, made the mistake of deeming peripheral to U.S. foreign policy and thus felt free to treat badly, with tragic long-term consequences.

Chapter Three begins by tracing the history of gender and ethnic integration in the U.S. military after the Vietnam War, along with that of 1990s sexual scandals in the American armed forces, and the persistent fetishization of masculine-coded combat technology, in order to provide a context for reading Courage Under Fire (1996), Edward Zwick's film about the Gulf War and its aftermath. I consider this film not only a compelling depiction of the stakes and destructiveness of sexual harassment within the military, but also a confirmation of the abilities of women soldiers in combat zones and an exposé of some of the political mechanisms by which U.S. history gets lost. First among them is the public-relations machinery of the government and military that cares more about selling expedient images than presenting historically accurate information. Thus, for example, the film shows a White House public-relations man intent not on the truth but on the capital he gains by giving the public a perfectly packaged woman hero of the Gulf War, posthumously honored with a congressional medal—an echo, with a important difference, of the military's ambiguous use of a symbolic woman for public-relations purposes in Saving Private Ryan.

Yet, even though Zwick's film revealingly remembers woman-centered history and directly confronts some of the manipulation and censoring to which it is subject, Courage Under Fire also positions the woman hero in a way that both calls up and obscures other pertinent histories. These include the so-called collateral damage of the war (often dead and injured Iraqi women and children) and the North American patriarchal legacy that segregates black men from white women—the white woman soldier's death in the film being not only the subject of an investigation by an African-American officer but also the apparent prerequisite for the close bond he ends up feeling toward her. Also obscured is the historical fight for control over oil and the so-called Muslim Orient as a means to a born-again American masculinity. Last but not least, the film's missing history includes the subjectivity of the central woman character herself. Because she has been killed by a fellow soldier and hence is seen only through flashbacks, serving as the narrative springboard for the memories of various male characters, viewers are never positioned to identify directly with her and her own experiences of the war.

As I argue, the uncanny pervades Courage Under Fire. It surfaces in the evocations of the Vietnam War film genre through reiterated images of napalm and repeated sounds of whirring helicopter blades, generic elements patterned like recurrent nightmares. It erupts in the haunted, guilty dreams, flashbacks, and "buried alive" feelings experienced by its protagonist, an African-American officer who served in the Vietnam and Gulf Wars and who, during the latter war, was responsible for the death of a white friend amidst the confusion of battle. The uncanny also appears in the southern, plantation-style home to which this black hero, ironically enough, goes to beg for forgiveness from that white friend's parents, and it is manifest in the film's echoes of the Watergate scandal, with its incriminating evidence on secret tapes. More generally, it reverberates across this film to a range of films from 1990 onward, including The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1990), Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995), and Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000), that use the death of a woman as a narrative and political springboard to a new or renovated political order, symbolic systems that are also highly reflective of contemporary U.S. identity. Above all, it breaks through in the film's maternal imagery, encompassing not only a tank that serves as womb and tomb for the protagonist's friend but also the film's ambivalent construction of the woman soldier and its resonant citation of Saddam Hussein's infamous phrase, "the mother of all battles."

The final chapter pairs John Sayles's Lone Star (1996) and Limbo (1999), companion films set, respectively, in Texas and Alaska, states that help define the southern and northern boundaries of the continental U.S. The chapter contextualizes these films in relation to the reiterative, uncanny motifs, characters, and stories that Molloy analyzes in her study of recent New Zealand cinema, including the recurring figure of the daughter-storyteller as a significant symbol in the narrative of nation. Like the New Zealand films, Lone Star and Limbo reflect directly and indirectly on the symbolic status of females in relation to the contemporary destabilization of national identity boundaries by a variety of social, economic, and historical pressures. In Sayles's two films, paramount among these pressures are competing ideas about the past and the interests it should serve, about how multiethnic, multinational border history defines community, and about the past as a resource for economic exploitation, in the form, for example, of the highly commercialized, environmentally irresponsible theme park tourism that hallmarks contemporary globalization.

Unlike the New Zealand films (at least as Molloy reads them), and unlike many of the films discussed elsewhere in this book, Sayles's work creates female characters whose functions are instrumental in recovering and reimagining repressed history, especially socially symbolic personal history, and in debunking nostalgic notions of nation, as well as in complicating the symbolism that equates woman and nation. Moreover, his films achieve these effects without overlooking the cultural oppression that affects women and girls specifically as females. Further, although both Lone Star and Limbo center on middle-aged male protagonists, they move female characters to the center of their stories in surprising, revelatory ways and simultaneously challenge established patterns of Hollywood aesthetics and narrative, including narrative closure, to reveal the "past-present" that continuously defines the complex temporality of lived social existence in America. In this context, Lone Star's innovative use of Latin American-affiliated magic realist aesthetics to depict the dynamics of the past-present is especially noteworthy. Finally, this chapter recognizes that Sayles does not abandon the idea of the nation as an unheimlich home, but instead relates that national uncanny to women's experiences and, in the process, imaginatively transforms it into a provocation for considering alternative visions of the future to those that look nostalgically back to the kind of nuclear families and couple formations that purportedly defined America's "golden age."

In an epilogue I reflect on some of the filmic and historical ramifications of September 11, 2001. In particular, I consider the television documentary 9/11 (2002), with its doubling of Hollywood combat film conventions, and I explore documented evidence of women's resistance to the seemingly ubiquitous U.S. rhetoric of the war on terror that followed the attacks on September 11. In thus moving broadly from Prospero and Caliban to the contemporary West and the Taliban, I emphasize the ways in which Miranda's queries, "Where are the women?" and "Why all the suffering?" appear to be as essential now as ever.