ABSTRACT
Since its release in 1992, Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female has repeatedly been called to account for its misogyny and homophobia by a number of queer critics who regard the fi lm’s affi liation to the thriller genre as less important than the psychic metanarrative it inscribes.1 Indifferent to those aspects of the fi lm that indicate Schroeder’s directorial homage to Roman Polanski’s earlier apartment trilogy, Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and Le Locataire/The Tenant (1976), these readings tend to ignore the primary role ceded to story location within Schroeder’s fi lm, which utilizes the exterior and interior spaces of an actual apartment house, in favor of the character psychology that story space secondarily supports.2 In abstracting the psychological drama out of the material or environmental dimensions of the fi lm’s story, however, these readings offer no real resistance to a psychic narrative they nonetheless fi nd objectionable: the archaic drama of female narcissism, here presented as the story of lesbianism or the failure of women to achieve appropriate ego boundaries.3 As incisive as these readings are, and as indisputable their accounts of the fi lm’s politics of sexual representation, I wish to approach Schroeder’s fi lm with less of an emphasis on psychic narratives of feminine identity formation and more of an emphasis on the apartment space in which these narratives are grounded. Accordingly, I have little time to spare for the pretitle sequence that jump-starts many other readings of the fi lm but seems clunkingly like something added on after the polling of preview audiences revealed some confusion about character motivation.4 At best dreamlike, at worst pedantic, the sequence reveals two little girls, dressed exactly alike, one applying makeup to herself and her identical twin whom she cossets adoringly, both staring into a dresser mirror that the camera shot deftly exploits to redouble their already doubled images. In this apparatus shot par excellence, the frame widens to one side to reveal the two girls initially perceived as refl ected fi gures standing in the illusory depths of the mirror, before a fi nal reorientation sites them before the camera less ambiguously. Spatially and temporally unanchored from the diegesis it nonetheless inaugurates, the mirror sequence functions in excess of the requirements of plot intelligibility: it provides no signifi cant backstory information that is not
delivered on cue within the fi lm by the discovery of aged newspaper clippings referencing the death by drowning of a young girl, an identical twin to the needy young woman who is aggressively remodeling herself in the image of her roommate in the narrative present. Adding nothing in story terms, the real purpose of the childhood sequence is to incentivize psychological interpretation per se: the Besch twins-no less than the mirror in which they appear-stand for femininity itself, and for the identifi catory mechanisms that are considered endemic to it. But we might for the moment decline this invitation to elucidate plot in psychological terms and try to keep separate the fi lm’s sexual thriller narrative and the interpretation it seems to insist on, that femininity is a masquerade or lesbianism is pathological, both arguments that appear with deadening frequency in the secondary literature.5 Given the physical logistics of the thriller plot, in particular its spatial twists and turns through the apartment house that is its primary location, the fi lm can be made to tell a different sexual story, perhaps less homophobic, than the one we think we know.
