[NOTE: I still have one more review to post for Reverie Series: Spillane, but in the mean time I wanted to write a bit about finishing John D. MacDonald’s ONE FEARFUL YELLOW EYE. Esp. in how that book relates to the Giallo. And the tradition of the monstrous feminine. As always, NOTHING BUT SPOILERS BELOW.]
[BACKING UP]
After discovering the color-keyed world of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee at a local secondhand store, I decided to make a trek out of town to see what other vintage mysteries I could find. Among other things, the trip yielded four new covers in the McGee series (#s 9, 10, 12, & 14), and brought me back to thinking about my first experience with McGee, #8 in the series, ONE FEARFUL YELLOW EYE. My initial impressions (after sitting down and burning through the first 60 pages the day I discovered that consummate Ron Lesser cover sitting on the shelf) are here.
In this post, beyond featuring scans of the aforementioned paperbacks, I'd like to pick up one key thread in YELLOW EYE, and the way that it relates to the "yellow" world of Giallo narratives.
[THE PERFUNCTORY SUMMARY]
Though I think the summary is the least-important thing about the book, I’m going to include it here so that the characters and scenarios discussed below have some context. The back of the 1966 paperback I have says this:
“Glory Doyle had been one of the broken birds. McGee had taken her aboard The Busted Flush, patched her up, and turned her loose to make another try at life. Now she was calling for help again. Someone had very quietly, very skillfully, extracted six hundred thousand dollars from her husband during the last painful year of his life. Blackmail? Obviously. But the how and the why ofit baffled McGee until he began to detect the lingering, unpleasant odor of sadism; until he began to turn up the nasty little bits of evidence left by someone who preferred to maim rather than kill, someone who liked to watch and savor the agony of his victim …”Beyond Glory and McGee, the key characters for our discussion are the deceased (and extorted) Dr. Fortner Geis, his resentful daughter Heidi Geis Trumbill—who suspects that Glory has somehow stolen the missing money—and Anna Ottlo, the seemingly simple-minded maid who had served the Geis family for as long as anyone could remember.
From the start of the book, it's clear that Travis McGee's status as an intrepid "salvage expert" (he who travels the country on missions of recovery) is intimately, inseparably tied to the narrative energy MacDonald expends on nearly every female character in the story. A cry for help transmitted across phone lines is what gets McGee off "the sunny deck of his houseboat in Ft. Lauderdale" and into the "gray cold of Chicago." A cry for help uttered by one Glory Geis (nee Doyle):
“I was here because of the way Glory Doyle's voice had sounded across the long miles from a Chicago December down to a balmy morning aboard the Busted Flush at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale.Geis' relationship with McGee is a complicated, long-standing one, which started when he discovered her wandering, “broken,” out of her mind on a beach:
‘Oh Trav,’ she said, a wan voice, deadened and miserable, ‘I guess there’s only one word. I guess the word is help. It’s a lousy leverage, huh?’
‘But I’d use it on you if I had to, Lady Gloria.’
‘You’ll come up here? You really will?’”
“Four and a half years ago I had gone dawn-walking and found Glory Doyle sleeping on the public beach. She was twenty-nine. She was broke, loaded with flu virus, hysterical, suicidal, and mean as a snake. I packed her back to the Flush like a broken bird. As she was mending, reluctantly, I pried the story out of her, bit by bit.Note the repetition of “broken bird”—of equating a female human being to a damaged animal that needs saving by a man—and the old-fashioned, even faux-chivalric direct address when McGee calls his old friend “Lady Gloria”. His salvaging of Glory involves a sexual relationship that develops between them, one that McGee “carefully disentangles” himself from when he deems it time to send her back into the world with her wings mended. And this isn’t his relationship to Glory only, but, with slight variation, it appears to be the default version all his significant female relationships take. Indeed, that special “salvage power” he exerts on the women who cross his path.
…
One Saturday morning when it was her turn to do the marketing, she came back to the house to find that her husband had broken in, had killed the friend, both children, and himself.
…
She began to hear voices, and she knew that when she went out people nudged each other and pointed at her and told each other of the terrible thing she had caused.
…
Somehow you can tell the real crazies from the broken birds. This one was pure bird. She’d had just a little more than she could handle. She had to have somebody to hang onto, somebody who could make her see that her disaster was as much her fault as is that cyclone or flood or fire which takes all but one of a family.”
This includes Heidi Geis, who spends most of the book stopped up with (among other things) the wrong-headed notion that Glory must’ve somehow stolen all her dead father’s fortune. There’s also a subplot about a nasty divorce that Heidi has gone through just before the start of the story, one that set her up for life moneywise, on account of her ex-husband’s dalliances with both women and men. When Travis questions him about the reasons behind the divorce, he says he sought sex outside the marriage because Heidi was pathologically unable to allow herself to consummate. When McGee meets her, he gets a sense of this “negative sexuality” right away:
“She [Heidi] had that rare and contradictory look of being both slender and substantial, a look which I suspect comes from a certain breadth of shoulder, fruitful width of pelvic structure.In his first-person narration, we are sure to get hints of the way McGee sees himself: A certain cockiness, a recognizable sexual machismo—how he gets his “full and fair share” of sexual partners, how he refers to himself in the frat-third-person (“the McGee”)—and a notion of McGee sizing up this possible suspect in the case not so much for how guilty she might be, but how beddable. Later in the book, after the case has seemingly been solved, Travis convinces Heidi to return with him to Florida, to his boat, to work on that “No” until it becomes a “Yes” (and not just a “Yes” for McGee, but for all men).
…
Personal chemistries have not yet been isolated and analyzed by the physiologists. Here was a specimen in her twenty-five-year-old prime, in full bloom. Certainly the female of my species, beyond question. She had walked with a promising curl of power in the haunch. Her arms were crossed under a hammocked roundness of breast, and her mouth was of an understated sensuality in shape and dimension.
But we were saying no to each other without any words. In my out-sized, wind-weathered, semi-battered, loose-jointed way I seem to get the right responses for my full and fair share of the fair ones, but I could not see any signs of impact, or experience any. Maybe Old Lady Nature sets up some kind of overriding counter irritant when the genetics are a bad match. I knew this could be a heady package for somebody, but not for the McGee. I had caught the smiling eye of the girl at the corner of Huron for a half-second, and it had been a resounding yes, both ways. A conditional yes. Yes, if it wasn’t too late for us by the time we met. Yes, but I’m sorry it can’t be.
I wondered about the No which Heidi Geis Trumbill and I were saying to each other.”
This after a book full of encounters that feel as though they’re included to convince the reader that McGee, whatever else he is, is a stand-up, morally circumspect guy. After all, he drops everything and comes to the rescue of Glory, a woman he hasn’t seen for four-and-a-half years, whose since married another man, who lives many states (and states of being) away. McGee as a character so morally circumspect that the reader shouldn’t bat an eye at the notion that, in terms of universal karma, he “deserves” this endless string of sexually attractive woman in and out of his Flush bed. No matter how you look at it—even on the evidence of just this one book—it’s a tough argument to take.
In that uber-masculine, uber-heroic construction of McGee there’s more than a whiff of old-guard, unexamined sexism—the male wish-fulfillment cliché of a rugged, extremely capable man whose daring investigations almost always include the “healing of a broken bird” (aka, a damaged female). That notion of the rational, able man as curative; a necessary societal measure to meet the “hysterical,” “uncontrollable,” wholly out-of-bounds woman. The “logic” of the man as the leash for the “emotion” of the woman.
This worldview, on its face of course, is nonsense. A kind of adolescent, perpetually arrested development in the meagre male mind. Despite MacDonald’s progressive attitudes toward the environment—evident in his willingness to divert the plot of his “airport mysteries” into tributaries that do nothing but make his “personal politics” clear—it’s hard not to at least question his depiction of the women in the story. Women who seem to exist in the McGee universe only in relation to the man himself.
(It goes without saying that this same trait is present ten-, twenty-, one hundred-fold in Spillane. At one point in THE GIRL HUNTERS, widowed Washington-DC power broker Laura Knapp—she who, of course, is immediately smitten with the raw, barrel-chested boulder of masculinity that is Mike Hammer: “She [Laura] pulled away, her breasts moving spasmodically against my chest. Her eyes were wet and shimmering with a glow of disbelief that it could ever happen again and she said softly: ‘You, Mike—I want a man. It could enver be anybody but—a man.’ She sturned her eyes on mind, pleading: ‘Please, Mike.’”
Likewise in other books sharing this same lineage—the Fleming Bond books I’ve read come to mind. Though the literary Bond’s sexual relationships are much more complicated than what tends to get depicted in the movies, it should also be pointed out how much more *disturbing* they sometimes are. Disturbing precisely because of this nuance, because of the time spent on constructing Bond as a male, sexual, character who also suffers from clinical-level depression, self-loathing, and a sometimes crippling lack of confidence.
The Bond of Fleming’s debut bears this complicated equation out. Many have pointed out that CASINO ROYALE serves not only as origin story, but as template and “explanation” for why the Bond character serially, even pathologically, throws over one woman after another. This is true, but inside the origin there is also seriously disturbing stuff. Like this passage: “And now he [Bond] knew that she was profoundly, excitingly, sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape.”)
So I don’t want to exaggerate its presence in YELLOW EYE—and it’s just one McGee “adventure” I’ve read so far, so maybe it’s just an isolated blip—but it seems impossible to properly follow the shape of a McGee narrative without following this parade of “broken” females who can’t help but bloom and/or wilt in relation to McGee’s “therapeutic” skills. I.e., the narrative makes considerably less sense *as a narrative* if this repeating theme isn’t recognized—accepted as the “pattern in the grain” that is Travis McGee.
And it begs the question:
Does MacDonald’s use of endlessly alluring female forms—sometimes needy victims, sometimes conniving femmes—do anything to subvert, challenge, upend the convention as found in so many male-driven detective stories?
No one would argue that part of the very appeal of the books is their packaging of these female forms prominently on covers (it’s what caught my eye and got the first one in my hands—take away covers like these by Ron Lesserr and my “enjoyment” quotient, my urge to collect them, can’t help but wane).
In many ways, it’s the equivalent question found in a Giallo that builds its narrative weight (also, viewer enjoyment) on nothing but the damsel-in-distress template established by key actresses like Edwige Fenech?
[SO COMES THE GIALLO CONNECTIONS]
As with the “typical” Giallo, then, I’m not sure I can make a blanket statement about how this presentation (exploitation, manipulation, even “bad use”) of female characters makes me feel. As a reader or viewer. As a “consumer” of this particular mode of popular art. Even as a male.
In the Giallo, my willingness to put up with (or put aside objections to) these sexist tendencies has to do with the success or failure of the story’s other cinematic, stylistic, oneiric traits. How strongly conceived. How memorably deployed. How bravura, each set-piece.
Likewise with MacDonald, from the first page (as I described in those initial impressions) I was taken with the stylistic chutzpah thrumming underneath his “genre” prose. As the old cliché goes, when his narrative acrobatics are good, they’re great. And help ensure that my personal Geiger Counter—my sense of that singular thing that radiates from any and every thing that interests me creatively—keeps getting tripped.
(Also, re: misogyny, there’s the point that Kim Newman makes in one of his Argento commentaries, that Argento’s films are, on the whole, significantly less misogynist than the films of Luis Bunuel or Alfred Hitchcock. And yet that never seems to stymy the critical praise they get—at least the pop-culture version of that praise [i.e., would anybody try to argue for a second at this point in film history that Hitchcock *wasn’t* a genius?])
Michael Mackenzie, in his visual essay GENDER AND GIALLO (available on the pretty-much-definitive Arrow Blu of Bava’s BLOOD AND BLACK LACE), takes up this discussion while formalizing his view of the Giallo. For his purposes, he argues that the representation of gender in the genre actually determines what sort of Giallo you’re watching: either “F(emale)-Gialli” and “M(ale)-Gialli”. Before focusing on gender, he traces the obsessions found in Golden Age Gialli to postwar uncertainty, the liberalizing and “breakdown” of European culture, sexual liberation, terroristic political activity, etc. He also connects the development of various “streamlets” within the Giallo filone from their headwaters, whether they be Film Noir or the “Female Gothic” films of the 1940s.
What is more interesting re: MacDonald is Mackenzie’s discussion of the Giallo’s tendency to present female characters as “problem(s) to be solved and contained.” Solved-slash-contained by the male protagonists and/or the investigative structure of the films themselves. As Mackenzie argues: “… for the most part, the F(emale)-Giallo protagonists are not doers. Rather, they are people to whom things are done.”
This could just as easily be a description of McGee, his methods, and the emphasis in YELLOW EYE on women who come to exist *in relation to him*—in relation to his ability to “solve” them like problems. But Mackenzie’s description of M-Gialli also applies, making YELLOW EYE (perhaps the character of McGee himself) a kind of hybrid form.
He argues that M-Giallo narratives are concerned with “male anxiety, confusion, and ambivalence towards the modern world and the changes wrought be recent socio-cultural developments including women’s emancipation, sexual liberation, the spread of urbanization, and the resulting feelings of imprisonment and alienation … a growing lack of certainty regarding men’s position in a world in which the old systems of privilege are being challenged on multiple fronts.” The male protagonists of these films are largely “ineffectual,” “essentially powerless to effect the outcome of the narrative”. For Argento's BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, he focuses on the first and last encounters between the movie’s “detective” (Sam Dalmas) and sex-maniac killer (Monica Ranieri).
In the first, Sam misunderstands—mis-sees—Monica as the victim of the sex-killer (instead of the truth, that she's the killer herself). In his last encounter with her, after he’s finally understood her role in the mystery, it’s only in time for her to dominate him. His death at her hands is assured—her containment impossible—but for the last-minute intervention of the police, who save Sam’s life and imprison Monica.
But even in this “solution of the female problem,” the world of the Giallo remains broken, unrestored. Mackenzie points out (as David Sanjek before him) that one of the key truths about the Giallo's worldview is that the “resolution of [its] epistemological conundrum fails fully to restore either the viewers' or the characters' faith in a coherent moral or perceptual universe.”
This is particularly appropriate to McGee’s final confrontation with the book’s real villain, a confrontation that finds him taken by surprise like a complete amateur, subdued before he can put up a fight, literally tied to a chair by ankles and wrists without any opportunity to use his masculine, animal abilities to free himself or save the day.
 |
| AS OLD AS ART: The Gorgon’s Head—the mighty Medusa. First introduced to me in a truly creepy MURDER AT MIDNIGHT episode starring Peter Lorre as a criminal on the lam who has the bad luck of stumbling into a wax museum run by a man who uses the Gorgon’s decapitated, still-ambulatory head to turn fleeing criminals to “stone-wax”. There’s a long history of the depiction of what’s come to be called the “monstrous feminine” in literature and art (everything from Greek Myth to the ALIEN film series). |
[McGEE’S FEMALE MONSTER UNMASKED]
The aforementioned whiff of sexism becomes full-on bad wind when we get the book’s final twist—that the malevolent power behind the bleeding dry of Glory Geis’ husband was that plodding, “meaty,” big-fisted ogre Anna Ottlo. Not only was the seemingly simple-minded, loyal-to-a-fault house mother not what she seemed—smart enough after all to systematically blackmail a dying man right out of his life—she was an even more unimaginable evil: a Nazi war criminal. She and her torture-partner husband escaped Germany by adopting the identity of Jewish prisoners they had murdered. And when McGee and Heidi go to confront them—in the dayglo and artificial paradise of an upscale retirement community—this sudden shock of remorseless torture, of unpunished war crimes, takes the fore.
McGee as protagonist—as ineffectual male “hero”—nearly ends the book without realizing that Anna is behind the blackmail-and-murder scheme. In fact he leaves the case behind when he and Heidi wing their way down to Florida to engage in sexual therapy; only as an afterthought—a nagging sense that he’s mis-seen some detail in the case (a Giallo-ism if ever there was one)—does he arrive at the actual solution. Part of it stems from a series of puzzle pieces that refuse to fit into the official “solution”. Part of it stems from a menacing dream that Glory—while recovering from being dosed with enough LSD to melt her brain—keeps having about Anna:
“‘I have a nightmare about her, over and over. She keeps clapping her hands in front of my face and telling me I’m burning up, that my skin is getting so hot I’m going to set fire to anything I get near.’”When McGee is greeted by Ottlo—now under a new identity, further disguised—MacDonald invokes the notion of the monstrous feminine right away:
“Her [Anna’s] white hair had been dyed a peculiarly unpleasant shade of building-brick red, and cut into a style that would have looked cute on a young girl, the bangs curving down to the eyebrow level. She wore dangling gilt earrings, a yellow blouse, purple pants, and zoris. It was a grotesque outfit for a woman in her middle fifties. The meaty face had lost no weight, and the pottery-blue eyes were the same.”McGee is then taken from behind, with no inkling he is being attacked, only ineptitude in the face of such ambush. When he wakes up, he finds himself immobilized—thoroughly in the power of this Nazi torture master who had posed as a bumbling grandmother while bleeding those around her dry. The description of McGee regaining consciousness while tied to a chair could just as easily describe the immobilized, pseudo-coma state that Jean Sorel’s character “wakes up to” in Aldo Lado’s SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS (a physical manifestation of his [the male’s] narrative ineffectiveness):
“Brightness shone through my eyelids. My chin was on my chest. I tried to swallow the gravel packed into my throat but I couldn’t budge it. I opened my eyes and tried to sit higher in the chair and saw at once why I could not. It was a tubular aluminum lawn chair, the kind with a double bar for the armrests. My forearms were fastened with wide white surgical tape from wrist to elbow to the chair arms, wrapped around arm and armrest, tight and overlapping, so that my hands had darkened and puffed. My legs were straight out, heels resting on terrazzo, pants cuffs hiked up by the same kind of tape which had also been used to fasten my ankles together.”While Anna recounts her escape from Germany, McGee is forced first to watch, then to listen to (which is actually worse) the torture that Anna’s “husband” (Perry) inflicts upon Heidi. In these moments, McGee is not only powerless, he is—worse—wholly unable to protect one of the female “birds” of the book.
Anna’s monstrosity stems not just from what she’s willing to do while torturing McGee—an outcome that a man in his line of work must have anticipated—but the lengths to which she’s willing to let her “husband” go, in destroying the mind-body-soul of Heidi. Who was, after all, only tagging along with McGee on this adventure as a kind of lark—who is McGee’s companion at this point in the story only because of his irresistible sexual prowess. Her acceptance of his companionship means she also accepts these moments of wrenching torture, rendered not in gory, eye-witness detail, but as “off-screen” action whose shrieks act as a soundtrack for the conversation Ottlo and McGee have outside in the garden:
“A sudden harsh hoarse cry of anguish from Heidi sickened me. It sounded effortful enough to tear her throat.(Again, there’s the overlap with Sanjek’s conception of the Giallo universe—one whose damage “cannot be undone,” even when the mystery reaches its solution. Also, note that Nazi torturer Anna Ottlo also sees this female character as nothing more than a bird.)
‘His little bird sings well for him. You understand, of course, about people like Perry. I like a bit of it, for amusement. But to him it is necessary. A sexual orientation, I suppose. First there must be the gross humiliations, the unthinkable violations of the precious citadel of self, with pain as the spice and fright as the sauce … what he likes best, to create those moments of ultimate hopeless horror when his companion experiences damage she knows cannot be undone, cannot be mended, and then begins to wonder how long he or she will be forced to sustain the burden of consciousness and of life itself.’
Out of the silence Heidi began to make an explosive sound, a kind of squealing grunting sound repeated over and over in abrupt jolting rhythm, then dying slowly away.
Anna listened with tiled head, half-smile. ‘Ah, he is a rascal, that one!’”
So it’s not just Glory Geis’ post-traumatic dreams that are overpowerd by a lumbering, irrational Anna Ottlo—clearly MacDonald intends the reader’s to be as well.
That McGee does finally vanquish this female Nazi Ogre haunting all the book—through force of will, manifest desperation, lunging at her even while shackled and numbed in the chair—seems to separate it from the Giallo conventions Mackenzie describes. Except when we consider that Heidi (and by extension McGee, helpless to save Heidi, on the ground still tied to the chair) is only saved because of the sudden injection of “the authorities” (a la the example in BIRD) into the scene.
The credulity of the book’s male-female relations gets further stretched when MacDonald tries to convince us that McGee “rescues” Heidi’s abused femininity a *second* time in the closing pages of the book. In the immediate aftermath of her gruesome torture. Because of how unbelievable and pat it seems, it again smacks of a certain latent sexism that colors the world of the books. As I work my way through the rest of them, it’ll be interesting to see if this proves an exception, or the rule.
Leonard Jacobs
May, 2015
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