"Something Beneath the Flesh...": Medicine, Music and Masculinity in the Gaslight Thriller

Description

A subgenre of the 1940s female gothic cycle, Hollywood's period 'gaslight' pictures combine crime and mystery plots with a focus on the subjective experience of the female protagonist that aligns them with many aspects of the woman's film. In both Experiment Perilous (d. Tourneur; c. Webb, 1944) and The Spiral Staircase (d. Siodmak; c. Webb, 1946) the positioning of the female lead is heavily mediated via the presence of a medical discourse revolving around her professional and romantic relationship with a male doctor, whose knowledge and authority also allows him to function as an unofficial investigator into the woman's persecution at the hands of a serial murderer.
The characterisation of both films displays an anxiety over the instability of gendered roles that is typical of 1940s crime narratives: they explore contrasting constructions of masculinity in their characterisation of the doctor-detective and serial killer and conflate the figures of the infantilised patient, fetishised victim and love interest in their leading ladies. The soundtrack is a crucial element of this gendered discourse: it reinforces the doctor's dominance whilst simultaneously allying his presentation with that of an unstable, emasculated killer, and acts both to create and contain agency within complex constructions of female victimhood. Music articulates the changing position of characters in relation to issues of crime, criminality and romance, complicating hierarchies of narrative control and posing a challenge to existing theorisations of subjectivity and ownership in the classical Hollywood score.

Period	2 Mar 2012
Held at	Bodies of Evidence
Event type	Conference
Location	Newcastle, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	National