A Film Canon

 

 

Now, Voyager is Bette Davis' myth of origins, offering an explanation for her gravitation towards infantilism, grotesquerie and insanity by casting her as the product of a late, accidental birth. Not only does this condemn her to the generational no-man's-land of the adult-child, or "spinster aunt" (grand-daughter of her mother, daughter of her sister, sister of her niece), but it generates a tyrannical maternal gaze, determined to construe her as both intrinsically freakish and responsible for her father's death. From this perspective, her psychoanalytic transformation represents the apotheosis towards which all her tragic performances yearn, moving beyond a mere 'makeover' to a self-revelation that anticipates the coming-out narrative, and perhaps explains her status as a gay icon, especially given her self-conscious celebration of 'depravity' in the face of conventional tastes: "Well, whoever wants that kind of prettiness? There's something else you can have if you earn it - a kind of beauty." That said, this intense emotional convulsion is offset by the moderation with which Dr. Jaquith (Claude Reins) conducts his therapy, extrapolating a pragmatism from Whitman's lines that, once again, construes Davis' transformation in terms of her screen persona, but in a more intellectual register. The result is an idiosyncratic romantic melodrama, in which sexual love is replaced by - or deflected into - a daughter's desperate need for her mother's love and father's presence, to the extent that romance is ultimately equated with the experience of shared parenthood. In the process, Davis' peculiar relation to domestic spaces is also symptomatised, as evinced in the liberating transfiguration of her mother's staircase from umbilical cord to inanimate object.