Lt. Brann: Mrs. Mahoney, I’m going to screw you to the wall.
Eileen Mahoney: Where am I now, then?
Lt. Brann: There are walls, and walls.
A central figure in the Cinema of Transgression, the contra cinema movement that flourished in New York City’s underground art scene from the late 1970s to mid 1980s, Beth B has long been obsessed with power and its circulation within a capitalist and patriarchal culture. From 16mm shorts like “Letters to Dad” (1978), in which multiple “actors” read excerpts from suicide notes by members of the notorious People’s Temple, to longer, increasingly more developed films that explore the politics of torture (Black Box [1978]) and the hypocrisy of organized religions (Salvation [1987]), Beth B’s consistently provocative visions confront audiences with images that vacillate between the gut-wrenchingly visceral and the overtly satirical. Screened in such non-traditional spaces as punk rock clubs and, in the case of some of her more recent multi-media installations, functioning prisons, Beth B’s works have thrived on the fringes, finding audiences, and occasionally distribution, in the least conventional arenas. Fittingly, her feature-length 1993 Sundance Film Festival entry, Two Small Bodies, was financed by, and initially released through, German television, a venue that provided Beth B. with the opportunity to, in her own words, “explore subjects that are more unusual…whereas Hollywood sort of follows industry standards.” As the excerpt that begins this article suggests, Two Small Bodies is a text that coheres with the complex and, at times, controversial socio-political concerns evidenced in even her earliest works, addressing the theme of power through a visual rhetoric of incarceration, exploitation, and entropic disintegration.
The plot of Two Small Bodies is deceptively simple. A police detective, Lt. Brann (Fred Ward), investigates the apparent abduction of two young children by repeatedly interrogating their mother, Eileen Mahoney (Suzy Amis), in the hopes of uncovering whether or not she has murdered them. From the very start, his line of questioning is both aggressive and recursive, a mode of inquiry that compliments the film’s critique of male authority, as well as its relentlessly claustrophic tone. Through a visual logic that echoes Lt. Brann’s persistent desire to “go over [Eileen Mahoney’s] story one more time,” Beth B. composes her shots so that the viewer’s gaze is literally circumscribed by the very parameters of the screen itself. The film’s two characters are repeatedly framed by variously opened doors, austere walls, and assorted windows through which we can glimpse landscapes of barren, skeletal trees that more closely resemble frazzled nerve endings than foliage. Even within the context of the film’s narrative, any hope of escape is immediately frustrated by the detective’s inevitable return to the “scene of the crime,” as well as his compulsion to persistently re-engage in a dance of power and psychological manipulation over which his command becomes increasingly tenuous.
As the film’s plot unfolds, Eileen’s house becomes a cramped and dimly lit microcosm of a society predicated upon the circulation of disciplinary power within a largely sexist cultural matrix. As a symbol of oppressive patriarchal authority, Lt. Brann’s desire to “dominate” finds articulation through acts of physical intimidation and linguistic tyranny. He struts about Eileen’s house as if he owns it (smoking freely, opening windows and doors without permission, etc.), all the while imposing his base corporeality through a multiplicity of threatening postures; likewise, he consistently labels (or “brands”) Eileen’s lifestyle and behaviors with terms that impose specific – and frequently gendered – meanings upon her life. In the discursive realm Lt. Brann attempts to simultaneously create and police, Eileen is not a “mild” “hostess” at an establishment for “exotic dancers,” but and employee at a “strip joint”; she is not a single mother pursuing her right to experience physical pleasure through sex, but a “whore, fuck, slut.” For Lt. Brann, and the patriarchal ideology he represents, the manipulation of language and the meaning of words is a vital mode of control. It provides “handles” that are “helpful” in establishing and maintaining systems of meaning through chains of signification that, as the film progresses and the balance of power between Lt. Brann and Eileen inevitably vacillates, ultimately reveal themselves as verbal constructions used to maintain the illusion of order. As Eileen responds to Lt. Brann’s tellingly, and self-consciously clichéd request for “just the facts, ma’am”: “there are no facts.”
In the insular world of Two Small Bodies, where language and meaning are consistently destabilized, the characters’ panicked attempts to effect coherence function to expose the theatricality of everyday life, i.e., the roles we play in creating (and recreating) ourselves on a daily basis. Ward and Amis purposefully deliver their dialogue like actors from a hackneyed community theater production. Consequently, their performances emphasize the very artificiality of their roles and, perhaps, of film itself. From the very start, Lt. Brann, clad in tan trench coat and dark brown fedora, assumes the mantle of the prototypical tough-guy film noir detective committed to ferreting out the “truth.” In a seemingly rehearsed tone, he mumbles existential platitudes (“if you want false hope, go to church…this is reality”) and employs melodramatic threats of physical violence whenever he feels his macho façade begin to slip away (“I’ll kick your ass if I think you’re fucking me over”). Eileen Mahoney, on the other hand, is somewhat more complicated. Speaking in a tenor by terms venomous and indifferent, Eileen is a figure who elides simple classification. She is a mother, and yet, because of her occupation as a “hostess” and the fact that her children are missing, she is not a mother in the “proper” (i.e. “culturally endorsed”) sense of the word; likewise, although the film’s narrative suggests that her children might possibly be the victim of a psychotic kidnapper’s desire for bloodlust, because Eileen’s reactions do not coincide with Lt. Brann’s expectations regarding proper gendered behavior, she is never above suspicion regarding their disappearance. Resistant to Lt. Brann’s aggressive tactics, she twice turns his blatant attempts at coercion through sexual harassment against him, reducing his use of nudity – both his own and, in a particularly unsettling scene, Eileen’s – into fumbled gestures that reveal the dents in his own fragile armor. By responding with little more than mild disgust, Eileen short-circuits Lt. Brann’s appeal to the socio-cultural impact of the human body, that most immediate vessel for the circulation of cultural power. Without emotional attachment, Eileen notes that “when [one] ceases to feel tender towards naked flesh,” the body becomes “meat,” dead tissue open to various forms of control and consumption. Thus, while at times the elusive femme fatale, a role that supports and perpetuates Lt. Brann’s own tenuous persona, she is also the catalyst for the narrative’s deconstruction of patriarchal authority’s imaginary edifice. Furthermore, she is the primary figure in Beth B’s ultimate project: the exploration of power as endogamous rather than hierarchical, a disciplinary force that, operant throughout all levels of culture, is as alluring as it is contestable.
Two Small Bodies’ recursive narrative structure, an organizational logic underscored by Lt. Brann’s frequent exits and entrances, provides the ideal forum for Beth B’s study of the function, circulation, and seductive quality of power in Western culture. As the illusory edifices supporting Lt. Brann’s hyper-masculine posturings begin to crumble, power is traded back and forth and roles are reversed. Once the target of patriarchal inquiry, Eileen becomes Lt. Brann’s inquisitor, interrogating both his position in, as well as the resilience of, those social and cultural institutions (law enforcement, the family unit, etc.) from which his “authority” emanates. Beth B maps these exchanges through the film’s mise-en-scène, with the empowered character generally occupying a commanding position within the frame. When Eileen assumes control of their progressively sadistic (and masochistic) interchanges, her figure dominates the shot, rendering Lt. Brann’s form as submissive. Once empowered, she relishes her moments of control, attacking Lt. Brann with the same spirit-crushing tactics through which she is assailed. Likewise, as Lt. Brann’s patriarchal shell comes perilously close to shattering beyond repair, he temporarily re-assumes power, and a dominant position within the frame, through one of the only means left at his disposal – physical violence. Perhaps the most profound instance of this panicked reassertion follows close upon Eileen’s revelation that not only has Lt. Brann been the subject of her surveillance, but that he might not possess that ability to ensure his own family’s safety or prevent his “boys” from molestation. Angered and confused, he lashes out at her with obvious distress in his voice, emphasizing that “yours [children] weren’t molested!” Hence, through the text’s recursive dynamic, the cycle of power and abuse Beth B sets into motion suggests that the underlying focus of her film is not simply the deconstruction of patriarchal authority, but a revelation of the myriad dangers and inequalities inherent in power itself. Even though power changes hands throughout the course of the narrative, its ultimately destructive potential remains, threatening to further “break” their progressively shattered identities. In this sense, it soon becomes clear that the eponymous bodies refer not only to Eileen’s absent offspring, but to the text’s central protagonists as well.
In western culture, power functions through its discursive imposition, and thus it necessarily requires an object upon which it can be exercised. Indeed, in its most effective manifestation, the disciplinary apparatus need not be present for the subject to adhere to it precepts. This symbiotic exchange underlies the sadomasochistic motif that informs much of the film’s action. As in many sadomasochistic relationships, in which the power relations between the aptly named “top” and the “bottom” are consistently open to negotiation. Lt. Brann, the trench coat sadist, needs Eileen Mahoney. It is a desire that demonstrates Beth B’s understanding of power as recursive, and it is a yearning that Eileen verbally acknowledges on several occasions throughout the film (“You don’t want me to break,” she says during one exchange, “because if I do I won’t be of use to you anymore”). Lt. Brann and Eileen Mahoney’s sadomasochistic interchanges find their most explicit articulation during the film’s final sequences, in which Lt. Brann and Eileen Mahoney trade both fleeting hypotheses and intricate fantasies about her missing children’s fate, a linguistic danse macabre that Lt. Brann allows to continue even after the children’s corpses are discovered and the real killer (“a drifter”) has surrendered himself to the authorities. Building towards its entropic climax through the various application of handcuffs – that most over-determined of sadomasochistic signifiers – Lt. Brann and Eileen culminate their erotically-charged power-play cuffed together, literally and figuratively exchanging the “upper hand” as they at once realize their respective insignificance (their smallness) and their mutual indispensability.
In a closing shot the seems designed to recall the concluding scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous final work, Salò o le 120 giomate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), Lt. Brann and Eileen Mahoney dance, their bodies occupying an equal space within the frame. Likewise, in a gesture akin to Pasolini’s cinematic critique of fascism and its will to dehumanization, the cyclical, closed, and entropic system on display in Beth B’s film is one in which the only possible outcome is “death” in the form of spiritual rigor mortis or physical and/or mental disintegration. In the end, they dance, leaning against one another as if to keep from falling to the floor. They are “dead” bodies cuffed together, rotating slowly in a clumsy, listless waltz. As Eileen notes in a whisper against Lt. Brann’s ear: “It’s what they do in graves.”
