Barbara Stanwyck's Anklet
BARBARA STANWYCK'S ANKLET Paula Rabinowitz University ofMinnesota 1. Fetish, Icon, Symbol? "That's life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you", moans Tom Neal into his half-full coffee mug as he begins his grisly tale in Detour. That foot is bound to be shod in the noir world, where lowly objects assume large proportions. This chapter considers the plight, or more properly, the power of objects as useful signifiers. I hope to redeem the object and argue that, compared to the subject, it has gotten an unjustifiably bad rap. Film noir achieves its identifYing texture from an array of formulaic images, plots, locations, visual styles and objects -cigarette lighters, car windshields, doorways, Venetian blinds and, the focus of this chapter, shoes. Investigating shoes as essential elements of noir's cultural work salvages these lost objects, making it clear that the state of objecthood holds compelling authority within psychic and social formations. There can be no subjects without objects. Why, from Karl Marx and Vincent Van Gogh in the nineteenth century through Martin Heidegger, Charlie Chaplin and Walker Evans in the twentieth, have men tracked aesthetic value, social standing and the meaning of labor through the boots of workers; while women, following Sigmund Freud's consideration of the shoe as fetish object, have understood shoes to signal freedom and constraint -at once powerful symbols of mobility and icons of and for desire? I speak of two modes of desire: for the commodity itself, objects of use -products, equipment, as Heidegger called them- no matter how apparently excessive; and within its representation in paintings, photographs, films, novels, advertisements.
[Show full text]