A Film Canon

This gender-bending comedy turns on a young woman's ingestion of an exotic seed that transforms her into a man - or, at least, makes her act as if she were a man, producing a series of increasingly overt lesbian encounters that sit uncomfortably with her strait-laced bourgeois mileu. The 'exquisite embarrassment' of silent cinema works perfectly for an anxiety about something that can't be articulated, or, more accurately, an anxiety predicated on its inability to be articulated, fusing the open secret of lesbianism with that of the medium's technological limitations. This imbues everything with a knowing performativity, distinct from any primitive theatrical residue, which tends to undermine those gender binaries implicit in the heroine's adoption of 'maleness'. In fact, the pervasively comic presence of the 'mulatto' maid, who also swallows one of the seeds (with even more dramatic effects), suggests that Drew is gesturing towards a kind of sexual mulattism - a dimensional, rather than categorical, model of sexual orientation that finds supreme expression in the anarchy of the third act, necessitating the (token) gesture of repression that closes the narrative. This lesbian element also provides an interesting subversion of Griffith's 'home invasion' scenario, collapsing the hysterical distinction between inside and outside upon which his melodramatic conception of femininity depends.