The Body Keeps the Score: Reading the Rhythms and Rites of Bodies in Film
The essay that launched 1000 musings on the nature of moving through the world.
The epigraph to Susan Bordo’s essay on “Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body” is a poem by Delmore Schwartz called “The Heavy Bear.” The poem charts the “withness of the body” as Whitehead termed it, the instinctual habits, needs and desires of a body, as well as the paradox of the inseparable relationship between a subject that, unable to extricate themself from their body, nevertheless does not locate their essential self within that ‘heavy bear.’
It is an apt introduction to a discussion on bodies: what is at once the outward manifestation of an individual’s being in the world is simultaneously an object of that subject’s perception. Bodies are, and are not, the possession of their ‘owner.’ While always being ‘with’ the individual, bodies are made and unmade, inscribed by, and subsequently read through, the cultural norms and rites of the world they move through. Far from being a static site of meaning, bodies are fluid texts that reiterate, subvert, or deconstruct the dominant discourse/s that are culturally written upon them.
“That inescapable animal [that] walks with” (Schwartz 20) the subject has long been the focus of theorists’ and thinkers’ explorations of culture, discourse and the operations of power. By reading selected theoretical texts alongside visual depictions in films of bodies in movement, this essay seeks to explore the extent to which the ‘heavy bear’ may, while necessarily operating within hegemonic schemas, break free of the cultural text and dance its way into new and subversive meanings.
Bodies are, for historian Michel Foucault, emblematic of the ways that power circulates in modern society. He states that it is “one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals” (98). The operative word is “certain”: hegemony distinguishes between the kinds of bodies and beings that can be recognised as individuals in the discourse/s that it privileges. Louis Althusser similarly posits that hailing, or interpellation, is necessary for a subject to come into being for the culture/society it inhabits. The subject must be recognised by its cultural milieu as fitting a pre-existing notion of an individual and it is this recognition that designates the subject as an “I.”
Both Foucault and Althusser assert, then, that society’s hegemony is upheld, and its power disseminated, by reading bodies in relation to the dominant discourse/s and then differentiating between ‘individuals’ and ‘non-individuals,’ those more or less ‘human,’ inscribing each body with meaning that is likewise read by other bodies within the culture. The readers of bodies are then, inescapably, simultaneously, being read in return.
As Foucault says, “the individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle” (98). This power which circulates through and amongst bodies is directed against the self, too, through the practice of self-surveillance. A body, the heavy bear that drags (Schwartz 33) a subjectivity always along, is objectified by that subjectivity, measured, read and self-corrected to ‘fit in’ and be recognised by the dominant discourses of its culture. The Foucauldian conception of power is non-centralised, yet omnipresent, living within the very bodies it writes upon.
By reading bodies, investigating the habits, movements, and gestures of individuals as they navigate their textuality and subjectivity, it is possible to begin to understand the ways that bodies keep the score by moving either along with the dominant ‘rhythm,’ or conversely, the risks and rewards that a body ‘out-of-tune’ may invite.
The dance that a body is always already a guest at, whether it be as a wallflower who other dancers fail to acknowledge and who haunts the periphery of the action, or as the star attraction who others gather around and cheer on (at least until she missteps and loses the tune) is a dance that follows set patterns. The steps that are prescribed for different bodies are largely dependent on the rules of the party organisers: the hegemonic structures of patriarchal society. There are set roles for different dancers; the availability of these roles decreasing the further removed one may be from what is perceived in Western society as the generic norm: the able-bodied and cisgender white, heterosexual man.
Karl Marx foregrounds the ways that historical power distribution within society mediates the ways that bodies are read, since, as he says, “it makes a difference whose body you are talking about: one that tills its own field, or one that works on an assembly line all day, or one that sits in an office managing the labor [sic] of others” (in Bordo 21). Different bodies must dance in different ways, being written and read in ways linked to their historical, socio-political, and geographical positions.
Each body’s personal history, too, plays a part in their dance. As feminist critic Susan Bordo asserts, “through routine, habitual activity, our bodies learn what is ‘inner’ and what is ‘outer,’ which gestures are forbidden and which required, how violable or inviolable are the boundaries of our bodies, [and] how much space around the body may be claimed” (10). Movements are circumscribed by societal notions of how a particular body should move, while personal history entrenches these unwritten rules, keeping the score, figuratively, of the consequences of trespassing the ‘inner’ and outer’ bodily boundaries.
In trauma theory, too, it has been established that traumatic events leave their mark on the sufferer’s body and mind and may even be genetically inherited by a subject’s descendants. How to read bodies and deconstruct the ways that they may be seen to keep the score, how they literally and figuratively dance within the world, is a field of enquiry nonetheless beset by paradox and vested interests. One is always already at the same ‘dance,’ and any reading is always already a reading emitting from a body which, too, keeps the score.
In “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” a critical text dissecting the controversial Rodney King trial that saw a jury absolve the police brutality directed towards a black man, Judith Butler discusses the supposed distinction between seeing and reading. Seeing, as Butler asserts, seems to indicate something manifestly and visibly true (16), that is, so presumably incontestable that witness- statements may indict or absolve an alleged criminal. Reading, conversely, she posits, entails navigating hegemonic discourse, either through reiteration of the text’s suppositions or through subversion: reading ‘against the grain.’
As the case of King makes evident, however, the act of seeing is always already a reading of the meanings hegemonically inscribed onto bodies. According to Butler, “the visual field is not neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful” (17). This notion that bodies cannot ‘simply’ be seen, but rather are unavoidably read as texts, is supported by Bordo and Foucault.
The visual field is likewise not neutral to gender, class, or sexual orientation, causing bodies to move and be seen as moving in different ways depending on their adherence or diversion from the perceived cisgender, straight, white, male norm. As an art form dependent on the visual field and the movement of bodies through it, film is particularly suited to an examination of the ways that bodies dance through, with, or against the gendered and racialised discourses that attempt to regulate how they should be read.
Laura Mulvey discusses the complexities embedded in reading traditional Hollywood films in her seminal, albeit controversial, essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative.” “An illusion cut to the measure of desire” (7)—the pleasure in watching films derives, according to Mulvey, from the erotic gaze directed at the passive woman-object of the film, as well as identification with the active male-subject, crafting a distinctly male gaze.
Utilising psychoanalytic terms and theory in her discussion of cinema, Mulvey posits that the scopophilic instinct that finds pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object and the ego libido that identifies itself with the protagonist, a more perfect and ideal version of the self, is activated regardless of the gender, race, class or sexual orientation of the viewer. She further asserts that, while the protagonists may seem to change in various films, the active role is recurrently encoded as masculine, while the passive role is feminised, with the result that “cinema builds the way [the woman] is to be looked at into the spectacle itself” (7).
Despite inviting criticisms of heteronormativity and eliding the heterogeneity of viewers, Mulvey’s essay remains useful in formulating an approach to reading bodies in film. If a viewer seeks to identify themself with the protagonist—a protagonist identified as such by the way that their body is written and read within the cinematic world—and the viewer is necessarily also a body that is always already read and written, films may be seen to act as a normalising structure.
When the ‘dance’ portrayed on screen iterates the expectations of the score a particular body is expected to keep, the viewer may internalise further the unwritten rules of their own body’s movements. Conversely, if a cinematic ‘dance’ subverts expectations, remaining out of step with hegemony, the viewer’s own sense of self and world may be deconstructed as they are invited to identify with new possibilities of being a body in the world. For those bodies historically seen as Other, a cinematic iteration of the norms that circumscribe and inscribe different bodies, if explicitly framed, may catalyse what Butler terms a frame-break that reveals the generally elided functioning of power structures. There are many ways to do the dance differently and rewrite the body/-ies in film, then, as will be further elucidated by looking particularly at what bodies do in a selection of films.
In The Accused (Kaplan 1988), Jodie Foster’s character, Sarah Tobias, imbibes alcohol, flirts with men, does what is often referred to as an “erotic dance” (Bordo 17) and is subsequently gang-raped by a group of men who also imbibe and flirt. Within both the film’s discourse and the wider cultural and critical discourse that accompanied the film, much is made of Foster’s character’s movements, particularly her gyrations, the looseness of her limbs and her visibly (in the Butlerian sense of an implicit reading) yielding form during the dance that immediately precedes the men’s violation of her.
Whether her body is read by characters or viewers as an invitation, speaking “a language of provocation” (Bordo 14) that outweighs her verbal language, or defended as an expression of bodily autonomy that is then violently desecrated, the dance remains central to any reading of the film. The underlying thrust of this discourse, regardless of the positionality of the viewer/reader, is that dancing is never ‘just’ a dance for bodies always already positioned as an erotic object.
The camera angle and videography in this scene iterate the objectification of the dancing woman, shifting between the perspectives of the various male gaze(r)s in the room, implicating the viewer in looking at the gyrating body as an object to be desired and stared at. The ensuing violence is complicated by the complicity of the viewer who, moments before, albeit involuntarily, is made to look at Foster move as if the way she is moving is meant only to be looked at. Any notion that the dance may be for Sarah’s own benefit, an expression of bodily autonomy in response to a song she likes, is elided by competing discourses that centre on what the dance meant, rather than allowing for the possibility that a dance by that sort of body, could just be.
That the way a body moves will be read in variable ways, depending on the appearance and gender identity of the (here literal) dancers is further exemplified in the juxtaposition of two films on erotic dancing. Premiering only two years apart, Showgirls (Verhoeven 1995) and The Full Monty (Cattaneo 1997), while ostensibly sharing similar subject matter, could not contrast more distinctly in tone and theme, or in the reception they engendered. Nomi, Verhoeven’s star showgirl, has her talent derailed by misogyny in a film characterised by nudity, objectification and intensely performative sex acts; Elizabeth Berkley, the actress playing her, continues to receive vitriolic and gendered critique from audiences despite the film’s cult success.
The Full Monty, in contrast, is a feel-good, relatively family-friendly film in which its band of down-on-their-luck men unite their town and elicit hope, laughter and joy through erotic dancing. It was a box office hit. The women in Showgirls are lithe, tan, stunning and acquiesce to rubbing ice on their nipples to make them hard for an audition: every scene of Nomi dancing, even when encoded as exploitative, hypersexualises her and invites an erotic gaze. The men of The Full Monty are of varying weights and heights and are not typically handsome barring one, explicitly homosexual, character. The men’s dancing is rarely in time with the music, while the way Nomi’s body moves is her meal ticket; any misstep on her part has dire consequences.
The difference in these films’ representation/s of erotic dancing seems to lie in the ways the bodies within them are mediated by the societal constructs and associations of both the reader/viewer and the characters within the film. According to Bordo, those construed as Other from the norm are often hypervigilant of their bodies, and tend to engage in strategies of self-surveillance and self-correction more self-consciously than those in possession of bodies hegemonically construed as ‘invisible’ by virtue of their heteronormativity (3).
Nomi as a character is self-consciously performative in all that she does: from her dancing to her movements during sex to the way she walks, while the men in The Full Monty’s foray into the world of eroticising their bodies is a performance of objectification that is read by viewers and other characters within the film alike as that: a performance. Once they go ‘the full monty,’ they are met with laughter and cheers, making explicit the way that their bodies are able to reject eroticisation regardless of movement. For these men, a dance is just a dance, whereas for the women of Showgirls and The Accused, to dance is to invite possession, court danger and fail to adequately perform the hypervigilance prescribed for bodies hegemonically inscribed as objects.
Mary Wollstonecraft says about a woman’s relationship to her body: “taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s scepter [sic], the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison” (in Bordo 11). In patriarchy, the body of the woman is hyper-visible and always already the object of the male gaze. Although all identities, as Butler asserts, are citational and constitute an individual for society through its performativity, to be a woman is to be self-reflexively, consciously performative.
Whereas Gary and his friends in The Full Monty may explore and discover what it might be to experience one’s body as something to be looked at, Nomi has internalised her body as her currency within an androcentric milieu. Both these films, rather than subverting the expected ways that particular bodies must dance, literally and figuratively, to be recognised, when juxtaposed, frame the frames of normativity that attempt to regulate between those who are seen to dance as an invitation, and those who just dance.
For people of colour, women, gender non-conforming and queer bodies, bodily hypervigilance is often simultaneously self-preservation. Franz Fanon asserts that, in the white world, “the body [of the man of colour] is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty…And all of [his] movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge” (in Butler 18). This implicit knowledge seems to be the inheritance of those bodies whose movements, being Other from the perceived norm, are experienced as self- consciously performative.
In Moonlight, the Oscar-winning 2016 film by Barry Jenkins, the protagonist whose name morphs alongside his identity, is hyperaware of his surroundings and the degree to which he seems to fit (or not) within them. The film lingers over Little/Chiron/Black’s eyes at multiple points, reflecting a world that, as the film shows, does not make the ‘dance’ of a sensitive, queer, black boy an easy one.
In Cuties (Doucouré 2020), a young immigrant girl, Amy, similarly attempts to assimilate by mirroring the movements of girls in her new context. Garnering conservative criticism and critical acclaim alike for its honest portrayal of the hyper-sexualisation of women that filters down to prepubescent girls through its protracted and uncomfortably close shots of the gyrating crotches of young girls, Cuties traces the hypervigilance of a body learning to keep a score not written with her in mind.
In Girlhood (2014) by Céline Sciamma, based likewise in cosmopolitan France, the reserved black protagonist, kicked out of school and abused by her brother, finds her place in the world through observing and mimicking the actions and movements of the girl gang she ultimately joins.
The bodies of the protagonists of these films become what Foucault terms “docile bodies’ (in Bordo 165), the norms of cultural life learned by reading the bodily discourse of those around them. All these bodies exist, too, at the intersections of various discourses: race, sexual orientation, class, gender and/or nationality. As these bodies attempt to keep the score and learn how to move to enter the cultural dancefloor, they must navigate various ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ bodily boundaries and attempt to perform recognisable individuality, even as their performance iterates a tune that will continue to largely exclude bodies like theirs.
Elided by Western discourse that positions assimilation—the adequate performance of ‘individual’-ness—as integral for recognition, is the threat that those who refuse to dance in-step pose to hegemony. Anne Fausto-Sterling, discussing the gendered sexual economy that Western society depends upon in relation to intersexuals and transgender people, defines queer bodies as “unruly” (24); their very existence threatening to change the nature of the societal dance irrevocably.
In film, transgender characters have often been used to explore fantasies of fluidity, atemporality, flexibility and mutability while ultimately reinforcing the binary rigidity they seem to challenge, as Judith/Jack Halberstam discusses in their essay, “The Transgender Look.” Defining entertainment as “fantasies of difference that erupt into reproduction of sameness” and that “allow for variation while maintaining a high degree of conformity” (Halberstam 84, 85), the transgender body becomes a symbol of “flexible subjecthood” (85) only to ultimately be subjected to hegemonic gendered ways of looking, reading and moving.
In Tomboy (Sciamma 2011), the protagonist whose prepubescent features and body at first confuse both reader/viewer and other characters is never portrayed as a subject uncertain of their identity or engaging in fantasy. It is hard to read Laure/Mickäel’s attempts to pass as a boy as only childlike play or ‘experimenting’ with gender identity/expression when scenes such as the one of the neighbourhood children playing a game of soccer reveals a confident young child whipping off their t-shirt alongside the other boys without a modicum of the shame or bodily hypervigilance societally inscribed onto a woman-body. While Laure/Mickäel is self-consciously performative and hyperaware of their bodily discourse and movements throughout, Sciamma frames this ‘dance’ as one performed solely for the benefit of the readers of that body that would oppose an identity that Laure/Mickäel seems to recognise implicitly.
In “Bodies That Matter,” Butler proposes that certain bodies, read as abject and excluded, threaten “the symbolic hegemony [and] might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter” (243). In Tomboy, once Laure/Mickäel is forced into a dress in order to appease socialised norms that clearly contrasts with their inner sense of self, these norms are revealed as arbitrary, having little to do with the body they attempt to circumscribe. The protagonist here knows the way their body should ‘dance’ to be rendered recognisable to society, but refuses it, choosing instead to mould for themselves a bodily identity that will not drag on their self like ‘a heavy bear.’
Films are, as Mulvey posits, a source of pleasure that allows the viewer/reader to eroticise certain characters while identifying with another. Simultaneously, as a visual field that invites, even necessitates, the reading of movements of different bodies in a particular way to propel an intended narrative, films may iterate, subvert and/or deconstruct the ways that bodies are written and read. Allowing more bodies onto the metaphorical dancefloor, the bodies of the racialised or gendered Other as well as the “unruly bodies” of queer and gender non-conforming people in film disrupts the dance of hegemony that, as Foucault shows, is dependent on every body keeping the score.
*The above essay was written during my Honours degree in English Literature in 2020.
I'm so obsessed with you, your brain and your writing! Reading this makes me want to go back to Uni (or just make video essays for youtube, whatever comes first). Always an inspiration x
This is so kind of you! Thanks, Liv. Can't wait to see the video essays that emerge from your brain; coming from you, they will be nothing less than magic. (Take me with you back to Uni!)