Essay Paper

During the Seventies, when popular studies such as From Reverence to Rape and Popcorn Venus began to explore the representation of women in cinema, it became commonplace to decry the fact that, despite the advent of more enlightened times, women were increasingly relegated to stereotypical roles--primarily housewives and prostitutes--in mainstream movies. While actresses are now less frequently cast as submissive homemakers (although there is still of course a dearth of good roles for women), the curiously protean figure of the female prostitute is as prevalent as ever in contemporary cinema. A cursory look at Russell Campbell's Marked Women, an impressively researched, exhaustive survey of prostitution from the silent era to the present, offers irrefutable evidence that the figure of the prostitute has been a fixture since the earliest phase of narrative cinema. Given the ubiquity of prostitution in the movies, it's more than slightly astonishing that Campbell's bravura study is the first genuinely comprehensive scholarly work to tackle this enormous subject.

The fact that prostitution as a narrative preoccupation, whether in Hollywood genre films or rarefied art cinema, has been more or less taken for granted and denied the benefit of extensive analytic scrutiny until the publication of Campbell's book mirrors the ambiguous status of prostitutes themselves--objects of equal amounts of adulation and disdain in both "real life" and the movies. Needless to say, men--whose knowledge of female experience is extremely limited--make the vast majority of these movies featuring streetwalkers, brothel denizens, or call girls. Nevertheless, the immense value of this book resides in its realization that celluloid prostitutes reveal the internal contradictions of male domination. Far from being an unproblematic, unnuanced stereotype, the prostitute protagonist is an inveterate shape shifter who, depending on the vicissitudes of film history, surfaces as fallen woman, lethal seductress, generous nurturer, audacious rebel, or brain-addled drug user. In ways that are both unexpected and disturbing, prostitution provides something of a master key for unlocking the cinema's tendency to alternately enshrine, fetishize, and demonize nearly all female protagonists.

Of course, as an academic with both leftist and feminist sympathies, Campbell must finesse a number of critical and methodological hurdles. Although it's arguable that prostitution reached a certain apogee during late capitalism (inspiring a sizable part of Godard's output in the bargain), it also flourished in precapitalist eras and, despite the rhetoric of commissars, has never been eradicated in state socialist regimes either. (While Campbell does not discuss documentaries, nonfiction films on prostitution in Cuba constitute a minor subgenre). In addition, male leftists and radical filmmakers often share the same sexist framework that ensnares their conservative and liberal peers. Therefore, in order to eschew narrow ideological shibboleths, Campbell borrows from the psychoanalytic and feminist perspective of Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein, whose writings espouse the notion that the "roots of male attitudes towards women can be traced to family structures, universal under patriarchy…" In acknowledging that these male attitudes do not result in monolithic patterns of representation, the book is devoted to the "complex, dynamic field in which ...