Scribd
Upload
28 views3 pages

Freake 2010

Uploaded by

promortalista
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
28 views3 pages

Freake 2010

Uploaded by

promortalista
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

252 journal of visual culture 9(2)

Barbara Creed, Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual


Display in the Cinema. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009. 256
pp. ISBN 978–0–522–85709–2 (pbk)
In the opening pages of Darwin’s Screens, Creed bravely announces: ‘So much
has been written on Darwin that it might seem as if there is nothing left to say’
(p. xxiii). Yet, despite the flood of interest in Darwin’s legacy, there is a curious
omission: his influence on early cinema.The deceptively simple premise of Creed’s
study is to correct this imbalance, shedding light on a surprisingly unexplored
intersection.Throughout the text, Creed refers to varying ‘evolutionary narratives’
(e.g. sexual selection and display, the shifting relationship between human and
animal, devolution and degeneration and anti-anthropocentricism), drawing
on a wealth of study on evolutionary science’s impact on 19th-century literary
narratives, in order to consider how the usurping of man’s position as singular
and divine to entangled and bestial has been culturally signified, and how these
narratives took on unique forms in the medium of cinema:

With its power to capture reality, combined with its fluid representation
of time and potential for representing both science and the surreal, the
cinema has, from its beginning, offered a perfect medium for an exploration
of Darwinian theory and its impact on what it means to be human. (p. xxiv)

This task is approached by working through a series of genres or subgenres of


film: horror, science fiction, the Hollywood musical, film noir, Pacific narratives,
and the use of the animal on screen, using mostly films from the 1930s as illus-
trations. Each individual study examines varying aspects of Darwinian theory in
connection with predominant narrative forms in order to examine the visual
mechanisms employed to decentre man’s position as ‘not a singular divine spe-
cies but simply one among many’ (p. 152).
For example,in an analysis of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 classic version of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde, Creed lays out how the metamorphosis from bourgeois scientist to
primitive beast played to fin de siècle fears of devolution and degeneracy fuelled
by the fact that ‘Darwinian theory allowed for the possibility of reversal’ (p. 7).
Specifically citing cinema’s unique connection with temporality, and its ability to
speed up, slow down, freeze and splice temporal moments, Creed suggests that
‘Darwin anticipated the power of the cinema to yoke together disparate forms
and to depict visually the drama of evolutionary transformative’ (p. 27).To Creed’s
credit, the use of Darwin to re-approach horror and science fiction makes a great
deal of sense and it is surprising that these connections have not been made
before, for issues of metamorphosis, regression, abjection and godlessness are all
staple features of both genres and Darwinian narratives.
It is perhaps, then, her analysis of the Hollywood musical, and its associated issues
of spectacle and beauty, in which the exploration of Darwinian influence is even
more intriguing.The saturated sexual displays of Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic
and spectacular dance sequences is granted a Darwinian (and sometimes
amusing) twist by comparing their rhythmic geometry to the mating rituals of
birds and insects. The wider implications of this are felt in Creed’s re-evaluation
Books 253

of the common assumption that ‘the musical is nothing but a display of beauty’
by stating that ‘beauty always means something; it is not an empty signifier’
(p. 92). By repositioning cinematic spectacles of beauty as a sexually and
naturally motivated category rather than an aesthetic and/or spiritual one, Creed
opens the door to a whole host of re-evaluations of early cinema, the star system,
and the beauty industry through the lens of evolutionary narratives: ‘Darwin’s
demystification of beauty, and his association of beauty with the sexual, gradually
influenced the way in which beauty was represented in the cultural and artistic
practices of the twentieth century’ (p. 110–11).
These debates continue (and mutate, true to evolutionary form) into a nuanced
engagement with the femme fatale. In an inspired, yet not unproblematic,
response to Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), Creed
suggests that the ‘woman on display’ (in this case Marlene Dietrich in Blonde
Venus) is, in fact,‘an active performer in the ritual of sexual display’ (p. 121), who
has placed herself in a position of visibility so that she may participate in sexual
selection: ‘The femme fatale performs in order to capture and control the male
gaze, to lock eyes, as a means of signalling a reciprocity of desire’ (p. 122). It is in
chapters 7 and 8 where Creed’s re-visioning of Darwinian cinematic influences
fully mature: her analysis of the Pacific in popular film opens up a sophisticated
engagement with the discourses of primitivism, and Darwin’s very tangible
impact on ‘the creation of the Pacific as a surreal space for the exploration of
subversive and uncanny ideas’ (p. 161). Creed then mobilizes three versions of
King Kong to theorize the ‘screen animal’, a category which she states was

conceived outside a Cartesian epistemology that regarded the animal as an


irrational machine.With its vast array of complex special-effects technologies,
the cinema is able to approach the creation of the animal as a Darwinian
being, a creature with the power to feel and communicate. (p. 174)

The result of this, she claims, was to essentially disassemble the anthropocentric
view that man is the only creature capable of language and, hence, desire.
Whilst there is a wealth of material here to get excited about, and one senses
that Creed has highlighted an area of study that will be explored for years to
come, the book is not without its flaws. Creed never fully acknowledges the
fundamentally different influence of Darwin on literature and film, spending
much of her analyses on narrative rather than visual form. This results in
a dependence on the scholarly work of others in the field of 19th-century
literature’s Darwinian themes, most noticeably Gillian Beer’s (1983) Darwin’s
Plots. Another issue is the conspicuous absence of Freud, or at least, the
recognition that Darwin’s influence on psychoanalytic thought is under review.
In some senses, Freud’s relative absence appears to make a point, for many of the
issues Creed highlights are most frequently thought through psychoanalytically:
repression of bestial drives; the desiring male gaze; dissolution of boundaries; the
nature of human consciousness. Creed’s pedigree on Freud is not in question
here (see her previous works The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993, and Phallic Panic,
2005), but one does feel that a more explicit agenda is needed to make plain
254 journal of visual culture 9(2)

the revisionist stance of re-placing Darwin as the originator of such narratives.


Alongside these issues, there is a tantalizing theoretical perspective, that of
refiguring poststructuralism’s decentred subject within Darwin’s ‘entangled
bank’, which is left somewhat entangled itself in the introduction and never fully
developed. One gets the sense that, to both Creed’s credit and criticism, it is the
vast scope of this book and its rather brief running time that forces these issues
to remain somewhat unresolved. Despite these concerns, this is an exciting text
that eloquently and accessibly positions Darwinian theory as a gold mine for
future film theorists.There are some intriguing ideological implications bubbling
under the surface of Creed’s analyses, which I sense will be revisited time and
time again. This is, without doubt, an invaluable text that adds a rich dimension
to the analysis of cinema.

References
Beer, Gillian (1983) Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot,
and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Creed, Barbara (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.
London: Routledge.
Creed, Barbara (2005) Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny. Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press.
Mulvey, Laura (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16(3): 6–18.

Suzy K. Freake
University of Nottingham
[email: [email protected]]

You might also like