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STVDIVM 19.Indb “I’D SELL MY SOUL AND ALL MY TRAVELLING SHOES TO BELONG SOME PLACE”: PASSION FISH (JOHN SAYLES, 1992) IN ITS CONTEXTS “I’d Sell My Soul and All My Travelling Shoes to Belong Some Place”: Passion Fish (John Sayles, 1992) en contexto Juan A. Tarancón* Universidad de Zaragoza Abstract The election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States in 1980 marked the beginning of a period of conflicting discourses on gender issues. Reagan had come to power advocating traditional values and a more frugal government but, upon his arrival at the White House, he adopted the moral agenda of the Christian Right while making ostentation, greed and the pursuit of wealth the most salient traits of his presidency. It seems that during the 1980s discourses swung between the superwoman archetype and the assault on women’s rights; between the deification of money-making, good looks and hedonism on one hand and a virulent reaction against women’s legal achievements on the other. However, as the decade wore on, the work of a large number of writers, filmmakers and plastic artists revealed the need to come to terms with the contradictory discourses women were being exposed to. Among these was a new generation of women writers like Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason or Barbara Kingsolver, who offered in-depth analysis of the challenges faced by women in Reagan’s society by turning their eyes to small-town USA. Likewise, in the field of cinema, Reaganesque products like Dynasty (1981-1989) or Fatal Attraction (1987) shared US screens with a growing number of productions that rested on a new look at the rural heritage of the country and that brought to the surface a more complex negotiation of the conflict between the ongoing campaign for women’s rights and the * Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana. Miembro del Grupo de Investigación Consolidado H12 Cinema, Culture & Society. Correo electrónico: [email protected]. Fecha de recepción del artículo: 6 de marzo de 2013. Fecha de aceptación: 24 de junio de 2013. STVDIVM. Revista de Humanidades, 19 (2013) ISSN: 1137-8417, pp. 231-248 232 ][ Juan A. Tarancón “I’d sell my soul and all my travelling shoes…” conservative reaction fueled by the Reagan administration. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how two of these works, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (1990) and, more particularly, John Sayles’ Passion Fish (1992), turned their look to the regional lore of the United States as a way to engage with contemporary challenges and provide a critical awareness of the course of society at the time. Dissimilar in many respects, and not always as coherent as critics want us to believe, both stories rest on a feminized version of the parable of the Prodigal son and on rural imagery to renegotiate the legacy of the Reagan years and reimagine life anew with the complexity that women seemed to demand at the time. Key words: US cinema, US fiction, cultural studies, John Sayles, Barbara Kingsolver, Ronald Reagan, space, regionalism, postmodernism. Resumen La elección de Ronald Reagan como presidente de los Estados Unidos en 1980 marcó el comienzo de un periodo de discursos contradictorios sobre cuestiones de género. Reagan había llegado al poder defendiendo los valores tradicionales y la austeridad del gobierno pero, una vez en la Casa Blanca, adoptó la agenda moral de la derecha cristiana a la vez que hacía de la ostentación, la avaricia y el ansia de la riqueza las características más destacadas de su presidencia. Parece que durante los años ochenta los discursos oscilaban entre el arquetipo de la “supermujer” y los ataques a los derechos de las mujeres; entre, por un lado, la exaltación del dinero, de las apariencias y del hedonismo y, por otro lado, una virulenta reacción contra los avances legales y sociales conseguidos por las mujeres. Sin embargo, con el paso de los años, las obras de un buen número de escritores, cineastas y artistas plásticos revelaban la necesidad de enfrentarse a estos discursos contradictorios que recibían las mujeres. Entre estos artistas se encontraba una nueva generación de escritoras como Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason or Barbara Kingsolver que se iban a centrar en la América rural para ofrecer lúcidos análisis de los retos a los que se enfrentaban en la sociedad de Reagan. De forma similar, en el campo del cine, pro- ductos de la era Reagan como Dinastía (Dynasty, 1981-1989) o Attracción Fatal (Fatal Attraction, 1987) compartían las pantallas de cine y televisión con un crecien- te número de producciones basadas en una nueva mirada a la herencia rural del país, y que sacaban a la superficie el conflicto entre los movimientos por los derechos de las mujeres y la reacción conservadora alentada por la administración de Ronald Reagan. El objetivo de este artículo es ilustrar cómo dos de estos productos, la no- vela de Barbara Kingsolver Animal Dreams (1990) y, en particular, la película de John Sayles Passion Fish (1992), recurrían al legado rural de los Estados Unidos para examinar los desafíos del momento y ofrecer una lectura crítica del curso que había tomado la sociedad. Aunque distintas en muchos aspectos —y no siempre tan cohe- rentes como nos quieren hacer creer los críticos— ambas historias descansan en una feminización de la parábola del hijo pródigo y en una recuperación de la imaginería rural para renegociar el legado de Reagan y volver a imaginar la vida de nuevo con la complejidad que las mujeres parecían demandar en aquel momento. STVDIVM. Revista de Humanidades, 19 (2013) ISSN: 1137-8417, pp. 231-248 “I’d sell my soul and all my travelling shoes…” Juan A. Tarancón ][ 233 Palabras clave: cine, narrativa, Estados Unidos, estudios culturales, John Sayles, Barbara Kingsolver, Ronald Reagan, espacio, regionalismo, postmodernismo INTRODUCTION Barbara Kingsolver’s second novel, Animal Dreams (1990), tells the story of Cosima “Codi” Noline, a physician working in Tucson who drops out after her first year of residency and decides to go back to her hometown in rural Arizona where she will find her real purpose in life as she reconnects with the past and with the land. The story unfolds as Codi establishes relationships with the townsfolk. Once an outsider in her own hometown, upon her return she seems fascinated by the life of the people and, as she observes (165), what she wishes more than anything else is she “belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots.” This narrative of exile and return combines effortlessly with Kingsolver’s lyricism to articulate some of the feelings US citizens harbored after a decade of state-sponsored greed, competitiveness and individualism. Animal Dreams is hardly an exception in post-Ronald Reagan USA. Kingsolver’s novel came to join a vast number of cultural manifestations that called for a more cooperative and fairer society, and that tended to associate the alternatives to Reaganism with a rediscovery of the country’s rural heritage. Although this movement can easily be perceived, for example, in the areas of photography, painting, music, or fashion —and although a more interdisciplinary approach would prove extremely informative— for practical reasons I will focus only on the field of narrative and, in particular, on the field of cinema and on one crucial film of the post-Reagan years, John Sayles’ Passion Fish (1992). It is my contention that, like the contemporaneous fiction of writers like Barbara Kingsolver, Passion Fish offers a complex assessment of some of the contradictions and of the consequences of the Reagan ethos for citizens in general and for women in particular. Made during the presidential campaign of 1992, Passion Fish betrays a compelling change in the mood of the country that crystalized with the unexpected victory of Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election. In its dramatization of the process whereby two equally troubled women, May- Alice (Mary McDonnell) and Chantelle (Alfre Woodward), find themselves isolated in rural Lousiana after a life of excess and self-indulgence in New STVDIVM. Revista de Humanidades, 19 (2013) ISSN: 1137-8417, pp. 231-248 234 ][ Juan A. Tarancón “I’d sell my soul and all my travelling shoes…” York and Chicago, Passion Fish emerges as a vehicle that suggests alternatives on how to rethink society away from the hedonism, the worship of wealth, and the social aloofness that characterized US society during the 1980s. In this respect, the experiences of the two female protagonists of Passion Fish seem to echo Codi’s prodigal return to her hometown and, although changes won’t come easy for these women, in the end, as Codi says upon returning to her hometown (30; emphasis in the original), they seem more than willing to “sell [their] soul and all their travelling shoes to belong some place.” 1. FORGOTTEN ROOTS The objective of this article is not only to offer a textual analysis of Passion Fish but to attempt to, however minimally, grasp some of the cultural forces at work in the United States at the turn of the decade and expose the relationships that have gone unarticulated in the descriptions of such critical period. As we will see, despite the recent reactionary campaigns to pump up the myth of Ronald Reagan, and despite the idolatry that his name triggers in the present among people from all walks of life,1 some of the cultural expressions that surfaced during his presidency —not unlike, for example, the discourses that would eventually lead Bill Clinton to victory over Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush— suggest that US citizens demanded a different kind of politics. From a cultural studies perspective, any analysis of this kind must be accompanied by real questions about the nature of cinema and the methodology used or, otherwise, we run the risk of merely perpetuating a limited view of the social sphere that would hardly displace the dominant stories about the Reagan era that we have inherited.
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