10 was one of the outstandingly popular movies of the ’70s. It is always difficult to pin down what makes a box-office hit, but perhaps the most successful films are those which strike on some contemporary problem or insecurity in the issues they raise, while resolving these issues in a satisfactory or unthreatening way. 10 seems to me to fit this formula very accurately, because it deals, fundamentally, with the male reaction to the women’s movement and taps many current anxieties – about ‘liberated’ women, about impotence, ageing, masculinity, and, very obliquely, about homosexuality. These are also the concerns of, for example, Godard’s Slow Motion (Sauve Qui Peut – La Vie) which, like 10, hinges around two different versions of ‘New Woman’: the Male Psyche Under Threat theme has been running through both mainstream and ‘Art’ movies of the late ’70s. The success of 10 is that it functions so as to defuse that threat, while still presenting it convincingly.
If a film is to tackle, for example, the male fears connected with the women’s movement, it has to represent within it not only those fears but also their causes. This makes for contradictory sets of values, different possible meanings, different interpretations: in order to achieve its ultimately reassuring aim the film cannot crudely impose one interpretation or there would be nothing to overcome, no visible or felt threat to be dissolved. Out of the many different meanings and layers of discourse in the film, one set must finally dominate – but, as Gramsci says of the dominant or ‘hegemonic’ ideology, it must govern not by brute force and coercion but by a consent which has to be won. What 10 must do if it is to fulfil the function I have suggested, is both to represent liberated women and the threatened male ego, and yet to find ways within the film to undermine the former, and subtly bring the latter to a position of hegemony within the competing ideologies which it presents. I intend to focus on key points of conflict within the film to investigate which meanings are dominant and which are undercut, how this is achieved, and why.
Meanings are first circulated around a film before it even reaches the cinema, through publicity. As with many movies, 10 was sold to the public mainly on the basis of images which did not in fact exist anywhere in its narrative: the poster showed Dudley Moore and an almost-naked Bo Derek in an embrace on the sand. This doesn’t even correspond to the fantasy sequence in the film where Dudley, sunbathing, daydreams of Bo Derek running towards him in her bathing suit. The image of Dudley and Bo embracing makes it look as if a large part of the film consists of them copulating on beaches, evoking a fulfilment to what, in the film, remains at the level of a wish – because in fact, when Dudley does get the chance to sleep with Bo, he becomes disillusioned with her and they never ‘make it’.
The publicity, then, offers a consummation which the film, in a more complex way, frustrates, and indeed ends by suggesting is not worthwhile anyway. However, on a cruder but perhaps more crucial level, the publicity, and the whole aura of the film at the height of its success, centred quite simply on Bo Derek’s figure – or, to be more precise, her bustline. For a brief period of our cultural history Bo Derek featured in the public eye in much the same vein as Erica Roe, the woman who ran naked across a rugby pitch, and whose breasts became a major image in the popular imagination. The ‘speech’ which surrounded 10 was almost entirely about the size of Bo Derek’s breasts – jokes about ‘measurements’ abounded and this bustline became the dominant image of the film. One memorable poster showed simply an enormous cleavage, in which a tiny Dudley Moore dangled, like a pendant on a chain – an economic portrayal of the famous breasts and male sensibility at the same time.
The way the film was represented outside the cinema through Bo Derek’s bust and generally fantastic figure, implied that the relation of audience to film inside the cinema was a straightforwardly voyeuristic one, along the lines of male desire. The radio advertisement for 10 featured a couple arguing, the woman angry because her man had been to see 10 and wouldn’t stop playing Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ – the theme music from Bo Derek’s one sex scene. In other words, the film was actually marketed by invoking a woman’s jealousy at her husband or boyfriend fancying Bo Derek. This was reinforced by numerous women’s magazine articles which presented Bo Derek as a threat: one item in Company showed a photo of her looking ‘normal’ in a dufflecoat, with the caption: ‘For those of us who bitched whilst our menfolk lusted, it’s comforting to know that even sex-symbols have their off-days …’ and so on.
Now given that 10 is largely about male insecurity, it would seem that this image of it is misleading. Bo Derek is not even one of the main characters in the film; she is the object of Dudley Moore’s fantasy but plays a relatively minor role. Yet although the publicity differs from the narrative content of the film, it does draw out its real sexual undercurrent – rather as graffiti often does, when the implicit sexuality in, say, a film poster, is brought to the surface by parts of the anatomy crudely added by kids. The whole area of film publicity is an interesting one in itself: many ‘violence against women’ films were picketed by feminists on the basis of their posters, which often depicted scenes of violence not actually found in the films, but indicative of the fantasies they evoked. An example is the poster for The Shining, a montage of two images, Shelley Duval screaming and Jack Nicholson with an axe, which were never juxtaposed in the movie. But, as we learn from dreams, images represent wishes as much as facts.
From this angle the images and ideas surrounding 10 are uncannily accurate, since they are very close, not to the plot, but to the psyche of the male protagonist. A core of voyeuristic, infantile sexual wishes gets right outside the cinema, as it were, and takes over from the content of the film itself by evoking precisely Dudley Moore’s (‘George’s’) fantasies in a potential audience, weaned onto the film via Bo Derek’s breasts.
The underlying drive of a film cannot be reduced to any particular part of the script. If the dialogue and plot of 10 were mapped out on paper, they would reveal a quite different story, dealing with issues like monogamy, sexual liberation, male chauvinism, insecurity, and ageing. But whatever the film appears to be when written out flat, when it actually comes alive in imagery it also functions on a quite different axis. Some images are more powerful than others, some film moments more crucial, some devices – gags, for example – more effective, and these filmic stresses create values and meanings which can cut across those of the dialogue; they can be both visually and emotionally more powerful than just ‘talking’. Certain feelings are drawn out of the ‘story’ narrative and create, on a different level, a sort of psychological narrative, a ‘sub-script’ which is nowhere written or spoken but which carries the dominant meaning of the film – dominant because it works on the most unconscious level. All films have a certain quality which is like turning a head inside out; their movements and actions are powered by internal drives as much as external devices.
The main plot of 10 concerns George’s (Dudley Moore’s) troubled relationship with his girlfriend Sam (Julie Andrews), an adult woman with her own career, and his growing fantasy about Jenny (Bo Derek) whom he glimpses on her wedding day and subsequently dreams of as a perfect virginal figure. After following her to Mexico he eventually meets Jenny in reality through saving her young husband from drowning. He has the chance to sleep with her but is disillusioned by her promiscuity, and ends up with Sam again. This is in many ways the classic Hollywood morality plot of fantasy pursued, fulfilled, and finally exploded, leading back to the ‘home is best’ type of finale with the return to the original lover/place/job etc. On this level the film deals with the issues of both women’s liberation (as represented through the Julie Andrews figure) and sexual liberation (Bo Derek) and George’s confrontations with each.
However, the ‘psychological narrative’ of the film is fundamentally the regression of George to an infantile state, until very near the end he is re-introduced to adulthood. My argument is that this level of the film, which works through visual organization, comedy, gags and timing, successfully undercuts the issues raised on the more ‘serious’ level, by providing the male character with a way out of every confrontation; since if he is represented psychologically as a child, all problems and conflicts become things which happen to him. This perfectly dramatizes the general male response to feminism and seems to have touched the raw nerve of a current strand of feeling, judging by the film’s financial success.
We are first introduced to George’s emotional problems as he chats with his gay colleague Hugh, who remarks, ‘I could have analyzed you a lot better than that expensive shrink – the trouble is, you would have come out gay and I couldn’t do that to Sam.’ When George says ‘I’ll give her your love’, Hugh tells him: ‘Give her yours’. On the plot level, Sam, George and Hugh all move in the same world of professional musicians – Sam is a singer and George a composer. Right from the start there is an association of Sam with George’s gay friend which forms an important part of the film’s psychological movement. Because Hugh and Sam are so close, and Hugh always encourages George to stay with her, a certain suggestion of (male) homosexuality attaches itself to Sam; and since she does not fulfil a totally ‘feminine’ stereotype, George’s relationship with her appears in some ways as not quite heterosexual enough. Even her name, abbreviated from ‘Samantha’, is that of a man. The theme of homosexuality is an oblique one in the film; it works not only through Hugh, but in the way that of the two women, one is set up as more ‘masculine’ (Julie Andrews) and one as ‘feminine’ (Bo Derek) so that in a certain sense George is offered, on this representational level, a choice between a homosexual and a heterosexual relationship. Yet because this choice is manifested as a choice between women, the film never really has to confront it as an overt issue – it is perhaps the most deeply buried sub-text of all. Nevertheless, it does seem to be one of the areas of anxiety for men that the film touches on, and has an important bearing on the portrayal of Sam.
The first key sequence in the film starts with George slotting a cassette into his car stereo, so that we hear Sam singing on the sound-track over shots of him curb-crawling in his car and eyeing up women on the sidewalk. The relation between sound and image here sets up the emotional space of the film, the arena in which its central drama is acted out. Her song – ‘No more than a man’ – stakes out the pitch:
‘He’s no more than a man
Nothing special that you’d run to see
He’s a child to be sure
At times insecure
But he pleases me …
He’s a man, nothing more
Sometimes clumsy and absent of mind
The mystery is what he sees in me …
Why should I ever doubt him
When I know all along
That the very best of men must roam.
Sure I get lonely without him
But a man, right or wrong,
The more you bind him,
the less you find him home…
He’s no more than a man
Just a weaver of wishes and dreams
When he’s shy, insecure,
He’s a child, to be sure…’
At this point George crashes his car, having moved from cruising the first two girls he saw, to trailing Bo Derek whom he has glimpsed in her wedding car on the way to church. The steady continuation of Sam’s song, despite all this, turns it into a kind of safety net for George. Even while he is chasing other women, there she is on the sound-track, full of understanding: ‘He’s a child’ — and she is his mother. The whole persona of ‘Cuddly Dudley’, which comes from outside the film, contributes to this. On the other hand, Julie Andrews brings with her the persona of the Singing Nanny from The Sound of Music. There is no scope for her to be childish or threatened – he is enclosed by her voice as if in a playpen, within which he can do anything he wants and still be accepted. And he is placed as a child at just the moment when he starts to ‘roam’ – any threat he might pose to Sam through this is thus defused at the very start. This use of Sam’s voice-over is repeated at several key points later, when a song from the musical she is acting in is used to accompany George’s infantile wanderings. The number is titled ‘I give my heart just to one man’: although the plot-rationale makes the words merely part of Sam’s work, at the rehearsal studio, in practice they serve to repeat the experience of the ‘No more than a man’ sequence, and to create in auditory form a sort of comfort-blanket for George while he follows his own whims.
His car crash – which he glides into as in a nightmare, just as Sam sings for the second time ‘He’s a child to be sure’ – is the first in a string of gags and accidents which play a key role in turning George from an active adult into a passive infant. Kicking off from this crash, the mishaps which follow are: he is stung on the nose by a bee while hiding behind some flowers in the church, watching Jenny’s wedding; he locks himself out of his house after an argument with Sam; he falls down a steep slope and cannot climb up to reach the phone in time to receive her call; he has several fillings at the dentist under a local anaesthetic which makes him dribble and spill coffee down himself in a restaurant while he’s trying to pick up a woman; he then takes pain-killers and is incapable of speaking when the police are called to his house which he has ‘broken into’; in this totally infantile state – dribbling, unable to talk or walk properly – he staggers next door to join in his neighbour’s orgy, is seen at it by Sam thereby incurring her anger; arrives in Mexico (chasing Bo Derek) half-dead and has an impotent sexual encounter with a woman he meets there; the next morning he is unable even to walk across the beach, slipping on the sand and falling over.
Many of these scenes of physical incapacity can be seen as concerning impotence – as when he falls down the slope and, panting and gasping, can’t get up it – the rearrangement of these three words gives the obvious sub-text to this and many other sequences, culminating in his actual sexual incapacity with the woman in Mexico. However, this meaning seems to me fairly obvious, as is the phallic significance of George’s obsession with his telescope, and his neighbour’s telescope, which is bigger. The most important thing about the telescope is that it revals the essentially voyeuristic nature of George’s sexual activity (or non-activity). The film is full of sexual puns and phallic references, and since it sets out overtly to deal with male fears about ageing (it opens at George’s fortieth birthday party) it is hardly surprising that impotence is a major theme.
However, I believe that the gags and incapacities of the male character have both a simpler and more basic function, which relates more to infantile regression than to phallic sexuality. For all the ‘accidents’ and gags come at moments when George is under threat from serious criticism posed as coming from a bossy or over-demanding woman. When any discussion of his behaviour arises – and this consists of a lot of the film’s dialogue – it is instantly undercut through slips and accidents which put the man in a passive position. External physical things happen to him, just at the point when verbal criticisms are made of him, so that the two become psychologically fused. The panicky sense of frustration created by the timing of these incidents – like the classic example of reaching the phone just after it stops ringing – invites you to identify with the Dudley Moore character; and it is physical devices which create these nightmare feelings. The scene where he cannot walk across the sand in Mexico is taken almost straight out of those bad dreams when you want to run but can’t – when you have no control over your actions. Through such means George is turned into somebody passive, to whom things happen. This seems to me to represent very clearly the man-under-pressure feeling at the heart of the film.
Of course, these gags are a reminder that Blake Edwards also directed the ‘Pink Panther’ films. The gag is both a theatrical and a filmic device that relies on timing and comic acting. But its function in 10 is quite particular, and its timing is crucial not just for the internal functioning of the gag, but its function within the narrative. The initial car crash takes place because Dudley is watching Bo Derek and not the road. Yet the physical sensation of a car crash is of something happening to you, and instantly, something caused by George’s own actions is felt, physically, as an act of fate, in which he is the victim.
The next major ‘accident’ comes, conveniently, after he has had an argument with Sam and is meant to apologize. Whenever anything of substance happens within this relationship, George is quickly put into the position where he ‘couldn’t help it’. He becomes increasingly powerless as the issues of his commitment, sexuality, and male chauvinism become more clearly defined. If this was an Art Movie about Modern Relationships, we might take more notice of this aspect of the film and those parts of the dialogue where sexism is discussed in detail. But every time these issues are raised, the film slips a gear and the narrative is by-passed, not by an opposing idea, but by a switch to a different level entirely, one of physical effects. These create a current of feeling – whether funny, painful or downright frustrating – which pulls everything else along with it. The accelerating pile-up of incapacitation – the dentist visit, his dribbling, being unable to speak, etc. – not only returns George to the literal state of an infant, but puts the audience in a position to share his sensation of incapacity and frustration through basic film mechanisms: for example the simple device of intercutting between the ringing telephone and George scrambling up the slope.
Having regressed to a point of total motor discoordination, George staggers half-clothed and inarticulate to join the orgy next door which he has hitherto merely envied through his telescope. This orgy, the mecca of his infantilism, is like an enactment of polymorphous, undifferentiated sexuality; the true site of George’s regression. He has, in fact, moved backwards through almost classically Freudian phases of sexual development. It is interesting that the dentist who does George’s teeth, thereby incapacitating him for much of the film, is Jenny’s father. It is worth noting that Freud interprets fears of losing teeth and dentist nightmares as representing the fear of castration. The white-coated dentist wielding a large drill is a very powerful image of bodily threat and this interpretation would seem justified given, first, George’s obsession with his telescope and other phallic objects, and second, the dentist being Jenny’s father – which puts him in the classic place of the castrating father. The fact that George’s entire vision of Jenny is based on seeing her getting married would also seem to fit in with this particular psychological schema.
However, after the dentist’s anaesthetic George seems to move into a sort of pre-oedipal phase of complete babydom and unbounded sexual experience. When he staggers off to join the orgy, completely out of his head, he is returned to a morass of physical one-ness with other bodies. The anaesthetic and the drugs he has taken put him in a symbiotic relationship to the outer world – literally, since he cannot feel the boundaries of his own body. So when Sam finally breaks into his house and sees him, through the telescope, at the orgy next door, her anger doesn’t feel like a consequence of his activity, it feels like one more thing happening to him. The whole scene has the nature of another ‘accident’ (a bit like being told off for wetting yourself – another connotation of the word). This is reinforced by the fact that as he looks through his neighbour’s telescope and sees her seeing him, it swings round and hits him on the head. Even the telescope, the means of his voyeurism, is switched from being his instrument into something which acts on him. As he is struck by it, we identify with him and not – unless we make an effort – with Sam (who is understandably fed up). Similarly, when George is tumbling down the slope in the telephone sequence, we become so physically bound up with his flounderings that we forget the reason behind the whole scene, which is that he owes Sam an apology. This constant turning round of his activity into passivity perfectly reproduces the sensation of being threatened which men seem to experience in relation to women.
The saga of regression peaks at the beginning of George’s stay in Mexico, when, while he’s floundering on the beach, Jenny’s hunky husband actually kicks sand in his face – the nadir of weediness. But as he lies on the sand fantasizing about Jenny, the plot suddenly switches from fantasy to reality and George realizes that the young husband is drifting out to sea in his dinghy. There then follows a kind of triumph of the superego, for instead of letting the man who stands between himself and Jenny float out of the way, George quickly gets a boat and goes out to save him. It is very like the classic resolution to the Oedipus complex: morality dictates that you cannot kill Daddy in order to have Mummy (and her breasts), and Freud claims that on acceptance of this taboo rests the male sense of justice and morality. From the point where he saves Jenny’s husband, George suddenly grows up and commands respect: his professional status is stressed for the first time, as he performs that evening at the piano – and he becomes, finally, morally superior to Jenny, whom he has been grovelling after throughout the rest of the film. Saving her husband gives him access to a higher morality and he ‘grows up’ just in time to undermine her position, having already, from a different angle, undermined Sam’s.
This sudden switch is essential if George is to combat successfully both the women in the plot, or rather, the ideology which each stands for. For the dialogue in scenes with Julie Andrews and Bo Derek gives the two women very strong roles, arguing for, respectively, women’s liberation and sexual liberation. The women are set up as opposites throughout the film, partly through its structure – for example, George following Jenny while Sam is singing her song. However, it is mainly felt because George sees them as opposites. (This echoes the Company article about ‘our menfolk lusting after Bo Derek’ – we are supposed to identify with Sam.) But there is nothing at all in what either of the two women says which indicates that they have opposite ideas. Taken together, their speeches add up to a well-founded argument for women to be taken seriously, sexually and in every other respect – and moreover, for the idea that one is responsible for one’s own happiness, a concept which is way beyond George.
Two key scenes, one with each woman, are worth examining in detail for some clues as to how these feminist ideas, which must appear very explicit in the written script of the film, are undercut and ultimately put down in ways which reinforce precisely the sexism and moralism they are attacking. The first is a brilliant argument scene between Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews, which takes place at night when Sam wants to go to bed and George is busy peering through his telescope at the orgy next door.
George: ‘That son-of-a-bitch across the way’s got a bigger telescope than we have.’
Sam: ‘Not we have, you have – I don’t keep peering through somebody else’s windows to get my jollies – you’re a dirty old man George and so’s your friend.’
George: ‘He’s not my friend –’
Sam: ‘Well he should be, you must know him intimately by now.’
George: ‘I don’t watch him, I watch his broads – he’s got a hell of a stable over there.’
Sam: ‘Then he must be pretty good in the sack, huh?’
George: ‘What’s that got to do with it?’
Sam: ‘Well, unless he’s using some new, remote-control screwing device, how can you keep from watching him too?’
George: ‘I concentrate on the broads.’
Sam: ‘Well he’s around, isn’t he?’
George: ‘What are you getting so het up for?’
Sam: ‘Well, have you got the time, or do you want to wait ’til after the late show?’
Despite his preoccupation with watching women, George is paradoxically portrayed as under unreasonable pressure from his girlfriend’s sexual demands. On paper, she has already, in this scene, criticized his voyeurism, and made a sexual invitation – something which is connected with her bossiness in the way the whole sequence is constructed.
Sam: ‘First, I am getting a little fed up at sexually emancipated women being referred to as broads. Second, I think a telescope aimed at anything other than the stars is an invasion of privacy, and qualifies the viewer as a peeping tom and there’s a very good law against that.
Third, the first two really wouldn’t bother me a bit if you’d stop watching so goddam much television and pay a little more attention to your bedroom guests – this guest in particular. Now – do you want to argue or do you want to make love?’
Sam not only makes her own sexual demands but, far from ‘bitching’ or showing jealously of the women George ogles, she demands that he stop referring to them as ‘broads’. She certainly does not act like a mother: but this is the role she ends up being placed in through George’s interpretation of her criticisms as ‘telling him off’. There follows a long argument about whether or not the term ‘broad’ is derogatory:
George: ‘Define broad.’
Sam: ‘Your definition or mine?’
George: ‘Well I know yours.’
Sam: ‘A girl who screws around a lot.’
George: ‘A hooker.’
Sam: ‘A hooker’s a hooker – the fact that they both spread their legs doesn’t make the terminology exchangeable.’
George: ‘What’s the difference?’
George: ‘And so does a broad. The only difference is a hooker makes the price going in.’
Sam: ‘Ah – so by definition, the broad is less virtuous than the hooker.’
George: ‘As far as I’m concerned, virtue’s got absolutely nothing to do with it.’
Sam: ‘As far as you’re concerned, or any man for that matter, virtue has everything to do with it.’
George: ‘Listen, I just said “broad”.’
Sam: ‘Are you really trying to tell me that “broad” is not a term used by men to describe women in a disparaging fashion?’…
And so it goes on, until they turn to the dictionary for a definition and, sure enough, find the word ‘broad’ listed as derogatory. After she has won her point, and George is sulking, Sam finally says, ‘You know what’s the matter with you, George –’
‘Oh, male chauvinist pig, yes.’
‘Besides that. You’re gutless. You’re afraid to admit that you blew it and lose like a man.’
‘I wouldn’t mind losing like a man, if you weren’t so damned determined to win like one.’
Written out as dialogue this is a very hard scene, and it contains a serious statement of anti-sexism: Sam wins the argument and George is shown up as the male chauvinist he is. But in the film itself, this level is subsumed within the other dimension of George’s passivity. During this sequence, Sam puts on her glasses for the first time, and at the moment when she reads the dictionary she looks like a caricature of the bookish schoolmarm, so that at just the point where he makes his complaint about her winning ‘like a man’, the image sets her up in an ‘unfeminine’ and ‘male’ role. She is dominant in the frame throughout the entire sequence, particularly at its end, where she is much higher and is looking down on him. George, on the other hand, has an enormous, bright red bee sting on his nose from the previous sequence, which makes him a figure of both humour and sympathy. It provides a let-out – it is impossible to take the scene too seriously when he has this clownish, bulbous nose that makes his every remark at once comic and pathetic. The combination of Sam as the hard-headed woman in glasses dominating as she reads the dictionary, and poor old George, a walking image of suffering with his giant bee sting (though this ‘accident’ was caused by his own voyeurism) – makes it almost seem as if it is she who has put George in this painful and vulnerable position. Whenever she says anything serious to him he always happens to be conveniently injured, or fall over, or to be victimized through some physical device that counteracts the dialogue.
Sam’s speech in this scene, if taken seriously, would provide a perfect analysis of George’s fantasy about Jenny, hingeing as it does on an ideal of ‘virtue’ (glimpsed in her bridal veil) – and moreover would agree with most of what she says to George in the Mexico sequence. Yet Sam and Jenny are psychologically posed as opposites, in what is an arbitrary but very typical way; not just within films and representations generally, but in ideas about women in real life. The idea that he has options places the male hero in a classically secure position.
After George has saved her husband (who is taken to hospital) Jenny invites him to go to bed with her, a feat which she organizes to the accompaniment of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. However, when he asks her why she is making love with him, and she answers, ‘Why not?’, George’s ideal of the fresh and innocent bride is shattered and he starts telling her off for having an affair with the man who saved her husband’s life – though this is partly pride on his part:
George: ‘I thought maybe you thought I was something more than just a casual lay.’
Jenny: ‘Why did you think that?’
George: ‘Oh great, thank you. – Because I thought you were something different – something special.’
Jenny: ‘Yes, as far as I’m concerned I’m very special. And if I feel like sleeping with someone I do it because I want to, I enjoy it, it pleases me.’
George: ‘Jolly good! But there’s more to life than turning (furious) on and screwing to Ravel’s “Bolero”.’
Jenny: ‘Sure there is, but there’s nothing wrong with turning on and screwing to Ravel’s “Bolero”.’
Then they argue about whether or not Jenny has a ‘problem’, since George thinks there’s something wrong with her for being so willing to have sex with him.
As in the earlier argument with Sam, the text here offers a serious criticism of George’s mores; in this case, of the moralistic fantasy in which he expects Jenny to be ‘pure’, and his disappointment at her unromantic motives. It would be possible to merge Sam’s more consciously feminist speech, and Jenny’s defense of sexual liberation, into one coherent critique of George’s behaviour; indeed both speeches show how George’s idealization of Jenny is merely the flip-side of his preoccupation with ‘broads’ and is an integral part of his voyeurism and fantasy life – in short, of his sexism. But the two scenes are played as total opposites. In the first George is the poor beleaguered male, being moralized to, and already retreating into his baby-boy role. By the time the Jenny sequence arrives, he is the moralist, he is grown-up. He has gained in stature in every way: through the saving of the husband, his long regression has been suddenly reversed, and many little details in the scene reinforce his supposed maturity in contrast with Jenny, who is made particularly vacuous. So just as the first major critique of George’s sexism is undercut by his comic silliness, here, what might have been a powerful critique of his sexual double standards is undercut by making Jenny so silly. She squeals too much and jumps childishly on the bed; beads swinging from her hair get in the way of their embrace; she is obsessive about turning the record of ‘Bolero’ back to the beginning after every interruption – altogether, she is presented as slightly ‘over the top’. If a woman who believed in sexual freedom had been pictured as not quite so silly, the scene would have been more ambiguous. However, since the two women have been set up as alternatives, it is reassuring to believe that George’s fantasy has been justifiably exploded, because this allows him to go back to Sam. In reality, though, his change of heart derives not from a sudden re-discovery of Sam, but from his disillusion when Jenny turns out not to be the virgin bride he had imagined – a fantasy which Sam would have been the first to criticize.
Both women in the film are strong and articulate and both are sexually active and demanding. Neither acts as George would like, or as he expects. Their opposition in the movie reveals more about male fantasy than about these characters themselves. At the beginning Sam is the boring, nagging old mother-figure; George would rather watch TV than make love with her. At this point Jenny is attractive, exciting, desirable. Towards the end they are divided differently: Jenny is careless, unromantic, a-moral, Sam in contrast appears loving and affectionate and serious. The way they are played off against each other is always via the pivot of the man – illustrating yet again the centrality of the male psyche to the workings of the film.
This brings us back to the original question of dominant meanings. The sections of dialogue that I have quoted in detail reveal how the film contains within it a powerful and coherent critique of its own fundamental drive, in the words of the women characters, but uses what one might term below the belt tactics to defuse and undercut these critiques. Of course it is possible to interpret the film in different ways; on first viewing I was very surprised, given the nature of its publicity, by the strength of its ‘feminist’ dialogue. But ultimately this is an interpretation which can only be made by wilfully going against the grain of the movie, because the slapstick and physical effects force you to identify physically with George in his regression and mishaps.
Film is a physical medium: it has the capacity for actual physical effects. If you put a camera on a roller coaster or fast car, you can create the sensation in an audience of being in a roller coaster or fast car. It is possible to make people feel actually sea-sick in this way. This is an effect quite peculiar to film, and one which seems to have been neglected in film theory, although much has been written about visual point-of-view. But this is not the same thing. When we cut from George sliding around on the slope to the ringing telephone and back again, we are not placed visually in George’s position, we watch him – but a sensation of frustration is created, and this does place us in precisely his physical/emotional position. Film theory has also made much of audience identification with male heroes as initiators of the action. What has been less observed is the capacity for identification in passivity. We do not feel that George creates the action – we feel he is a victim of events, and again, this feeling is very similar to that evoked by watching a film, when we are, literally, at the mercy of its movement and pace – the movie happens to us. This is one of the features films share with dreams. We all invent our dreams – we create the events that happen in them, they are fuelled by our wishes. Yet they seem to happen to us, they just ‘come to us’. We experience them as if someone else has written the script. And this is very much how George in 10 experiences his own life.
This lets him off the hook in the face of feminism – which is where the film functions so powerfully in allaying contemporary male fears. What could be more reassuring than to find, first, that George is justified in lusting after Bo Derek because his girlfriend is such a cross old stick, second, that tubby, ageing George can have the sexy young girl he is after, and third, that she isn’t worth having anyway? Most men can conveniently skip the middle stage and relax in the knowledge that, while you could of course have it if you wanted, it isn’t really worth it.*
There might be more grounds for a ‘feminist’ interpretation of 10 – given that its main female figure, Sam, is explicitly feminist – if it were not for the very crude, in fact distressing sexism that slips out in the treatment of some of the minor female characters. It is often in odd corners like these that a film’s fundamental ideology is revealed because, as with jokes, they seem trivial, but they are also more ‘off guard’ moments.
One of these characters is the old woman servant at the vicar’s house where George goes in his quest for Jenny; she is almost blind, farts, falls over, and is made fun of in a peculiarly upsetting way. Another is the dentist’s assistant, who is presented as a typical ‘dumb blonde’. Then there are the women at the orgy – George’s ‘broads’ – who are throughout the object of voyeuristic titillation not only for George but for the audience. Finally, there is the woman who sleeps with George in Mexico, a relatively important figure in terms of the film’s theme of ageing. When George is impotent on going to bed with her, this is presented as an effect of her ‘unattractiveness’, and she has some key lines when, sitting morosely at the bar, she ponders the fact that men grow old and look distinguished, while women grow old and unattractive. ‘What’s fair about that?’ she asks – and the barman agrees that nothing’s fair about it. The supposed truth of the idea is not questioned. Although this seems like a meaningful little moment in the film, it is quite unnecessary – after all, the woman could have been made more attractive – the film has made her unglamorous and pitiable. But it is the old dream-theme again – it just ‘happens’ to be like that, the older woman just ‘is’ unattractive, and she just does ‘make’ George impotent.
Brecht once said of theatre, that people ought not to be represented as if they could only act one way in any given situation: they could act differently. Films tend to make you feel that the events and people pictured could only have been as they are shown – and this is not only true of Hollywood films, it applies just as much to most of the ‘avant-garde’. The dreamer is presented with his or her own thoughts and desires as if they were not her/his own – a phenomenon externalized in Greek literature where ‘The Gods’ are the initiators of actions and emotions that ‘happen to’ people: which is why there is a god or goddess for just about every named emotion. In most films, which centre on the male psyche, there is, not a god, but a goddess for every emotion, or rather a woman for every shifting fear or desire of the male ego. I have tried to show how in 10 the female characters do in fact have a potentially radical discourse independent of the male ‘hero’ – yet their roles in his own dualist fantasy are stronger, and over-ride such potential. Ultimately, the audience has no choice but to endorse the sentiments of the theme tune. Yes, he’s a little wayward and absent, he behaves badly, but he’s a child at heart – often irritating, insufferably sexist, he’s ‘No more than a Man’: which seems to explain everything. How could he be different? But what it explains, of course, is the film itself.
(Based on a talk given at the National Film Theatre, London 1982.)
*A re-run of many of these themes is found in the Dudley Moore film Unfaithfully Yours (1984), where his obsessive jealousy of his beautiful and much younger wife, resulting in a plot to kill her, turns out to be unfounded – implying that the only thing wrong in his behaviour was that it was based on an error – not on grossly possessive, violent sexism. As in 10, this film allows male sexual fears to be acted out, but reassuringly shows them to be ultimately unfounded.