In "Through the Looking-Glass: Woman, Cinema, and Language," Teresa de Lauretis writes, "the dominant cinema specifies woman in a particular social and natural order, sets her up in certain positions of meaning, fixes her in a certain identification (15)." As a kind of allegorical Every Woman, AB234 (Stowe) is both literally and psychologically recoded by a patriarchal/pedophilic state apparatus that attempts to recode her body, her mind, and her stories in a totalizing moment of confession. One issue at stake in the projected images of woman that "Closet Land" offers us is whether or not the film "addresses itself to the activity of uncoding, de-coding, deconstructing the given images [of women in cinema] (Doane, 217)." Let's consider three instances of AB234 set up in certain positions of meaning, fixed in a certain identication.
Woman as Child. One recurring image
positions the officer in charge (allegorically the State, the Father, the
Pedophile, the Analyst) across an interrogation/torture table from the
writer still clothed in her white nightgown. The officer congratulates
her on having "no ideas."
Woman as Whore. In this scence, the writer's white nightgown has been removed and replaced with black underwear. Her face has been caked with heavy makeup; the soundtrack is "Fernando's Hideaway."
Woman as Patient. Here, the writer, clothed in a hospital gown, bound to the interrogation/torture table, is literally fixed in an identity. The male "attendants," whose discourse not only negatives her presence but also springs from a kind of surrealistic "Father Knows Best" script, objectify her as more speciman than human.
