FANTASY FLOATS

If the last image from Treut's Virgin Machine implies a queer "pushing off" from the New German Cinema, Ulrike Ottinger's Madame X demonstrates that nascent queer issues and aesthetics were well at work during the movement's heyday. Early films like Madame X treat female bodies as icons of resplendent, stylized physicality in an even campier fashion than Treut. Ottinger is at pains to show what might be called the de-idealization behind idealization and the dystopian side of female fantasies and desires. Madame X's references come from a wide array of contexts: feminist literature and theory, the economic problems female filmmakers faced at the time of the New German Cinema, clichéd depictions of women handed down by Hollywood melodrama, the worlds of homosocial pirate movies, Nazi iconography, and lesbian utopias. Like Ottinger's subsequent films Freak Orlando and Dorian Gray, Madame X is obsessed with props, objects, noises, music, and voice.

Like most good fantasies, the plot line of Madame X is minimal. Madame X is the leader of a pirate ship sailing for the "south seas," who

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enlists women to abandon their workaday lives for a "world full of gold/ love/adventure at sea" on her Chinese junket, Orlando. Voiced over in telegram-style English, that message is transmitted through a number of unlikely sources: Brillo boxes, newspapers, cockpits, car phones, psychiatric clients, and boxes afloat on water. The recipients? A campy selection of female clichés, among them Ohio housewife Betty Brillo; Noa Noa, a young Polynesian; Australian bush pilot Omega Centauri; and pampered Italian vedette Miss Blow-Up. Arriving on board, they bring along what Ottinger calls the "destructive impact civilization has had on them." Over the course of the film, they shed the outward signs of acculturation, boiling them down to their nasty, primal bases. As their costumes and demeanor reflect this change, the film regresses to nonlinguistic sounds and stagy scenes of intense childish ambivalence towards Madame X. Women begin to mimic Madame X's look and actions as their desires (attraction, rivalry, rebellion) are played out on the ship's floating stage. Violating X's wishes, for instance, they collectively save the hermaphrodite sailor, Belcanto. Most characters are killed off by Madame X's double, the mechanized figurehead who acts out and externalizes the diabolical desires of the actual leader, who is equally a cyborg because of her prosthetic hand. At the end of the film, the boat has docked and the members of the dead crew are reincarnated in new frocks (Freud-Goldmund becomes a punk—someone who might formerly have been her patient, as Ottinger quips) and reboard the vessel, presumably for another adventure.

At this point, Madame X's own "adventures" are worth mentioning. When it was released in the late 1970s, established feminist audiences in Germany and abroad preferred socially relevant documentaries and autobiographical filmmaking by female directors. Madame X was very badly received;^[28]frauen und film didn't even deign to review it. (Treut was one of the few to step to its defense.) Ottinger seems to have anticipated criticisms that her film traded in fetishism and eroticized power—which is precisely the point. The film is in poor taste, as we hear the voice-over remark while Madame X examines booty acquired from the yacht she raided: "Madame X felt disgust at all this incredible, luxurious bad taste." Whereas, diegetically, the repulsion is a response to the extravagant possessions of the upper-class boaters, the film deliberately produces its own stockpile of "incredible bad taste." Clearly an attack on the realist agenda of women's filmmaking in Germany of the time, Ottinger refers to Madame X as "a comedy about feminism" interlaced with fascist parable and lesbian fantasy. As for her stylistic decisions, she states: "When an elderly woman carries a bucket of coal that is too heavy for her to make it to the top of the stairs, I can help her or not help her. If I don't help her, it's not going to be a film

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that will change my behavior. I don't believe that we can transform society anymore by showing it as it is."^[29]

Role-playing marks Madame X from the start. No attempt is made to disguise the fact that the China seas on which the boat sails is staid old Lake Constance—revealing the film's low budget. (At this point in the history of the New German Cinema, it seems utterly reasonable for a female director to fantasize about pirating the bounty her male colleagues had been reaping.) Female characters are introduced one by one in voice-overs, dashing any coherent diegetic world or verisimilitudinous presentation. Betty Brillo is introduced in freeze frame, recounting her life in terms of her relationship to a generic "him," her solipsistic husband. Frozen in her kitchen, the prolonged shot sends the message that she was locked in a role that was itself stuck. Other figures enjoy more movement (but not more satisfaction): artist Josephine de Collage, played by filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, glides around on roller skates, reading philosophical, aesthetic, and political treatises; flyer Omega Centauri has a star dyed onto the top of her head, a shorthand for her fondness of the heavens. Flora Tannenbaum, clad in hunter's green, is introduced while taking her morning coffee at a small table in the middle of the woods. "Native" Noa Noa—a nod to Gauguin's colonialist erotics^[30]—and Miss Blow-Up, Italian glamour queen, come straight from central casting.

It would be hard to refute that these icons appear unfulfilled by their clichéd roles, given their readiness to escape to the high seas. Yet their hyperbolized depiction makes such a point rather moot. Reduced to campy archetypes, these women are simply figures used to stage an exotic escape fantasy. Like many other characters in the New German Cinema, they cannot be psychologized. As Patricia White has argued, "The ‘characters’ are not realistic. Nor are they allegorical. They serve as so many figures in a mise-en-scene of female bodies which work through specific possibilities and scenarios of desire within the background fantasy of the pirate ship, the women's movement, lesbian utopia."^[31]