Dark Victory as a “medical discourse” woman’s film

(via Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s [Indiana, 1987])

In the films of the medical discourse, on the other hand, the female body functions in a slightly different way. It is not spectacular but symptomatic, and the visible becomes fully a signifier, pointing to an invisible signified. The medical discourse films, acceding to the force of the logic of the symptom, attribute to the woman both a surface and a depth, the specificity of the depth being first and foremost that it is not immediately perceptible. A technician is called for—a technician of essences—and it is the figure of the doctor who fills that role. Medicine introduces a detour in the male’s relation to the female body through an eroticization of the very process of knowing the female subject. Thus, while the female body is despecularized, the doctor patient relation is, somewhat paradoxically, eroticized. (39-40)

Thus the doctor is given extraordinary powers of vision which have the potential to go

beyond the barrier usually posed by an exterior surface. In this branch of the “woman’s

film,” the erotic gaze becomes the medical gaze. The female body is located not so much

as spectacle but as an element in the discourse of medicine, a manuscript to be read for

the symptoms which betray her story, her identity. Hence the need, in these films, for the

figure of the doctor as reader or interpreter, as the site of a knowledge which dominates

and controls female subjectivity. (43)

In the films of the medical discourse, more than any other group, the woman is most nearly

the pure object of the gaze. She is deprived of subjectivity through the displacement of the

sympathy one might have expected to characterize the relation between spectator and film

to the diseased body of the female protagonist. The body is fully in sympathy with the psyche, hence the disease is not accidental or contingent, but essential to her being. The female body is above all symptomatic, and it is the doctor who is therefore endowed with a gaze—a gaze which demonstrates, for the male subject, the compatibility of rationality and desire. The logical outcome of this suppression of female subjectivity is the blindness of Bette Davis in Dark Victory. (178)

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To be dazzled is to be blinded not by darkness but by too much light—to possess too fully the means of seeing but to lack an object of sight. The doctor, on the other hand, as the figure of classical reason itself, always possesses not only a limited and hence controllable light, but an object to be illuminated—the woman. Over and over in these films, the scenario of a doctor training a light on a woman, illuminating her irrationality with his own reason, is repeated…Light is the figure of rationality in these films. But light also enables the look, the male gaze—it makes the woman specularizable. The doctor’s light legitimates scopophilia and is the mechanism by means of which films of the medical discourse insure the compatibility of rationality and desire.

For desire is not absent from the doctor/patient relation. On the contrary, that relation is eroticized in many of the films….a benevolent paternalistic relation of doctor to patient is almost imperceptibly transformed into an amorous alliance. The romanticism attached to medicine as an intellectual adventure bleeds over onto the doctor/patient axis. The prophetic status of a doctor’s offhand comment at the beginning of Dark Victory (“To go inside a human being’s skull and tinker with the machinery that makes the whole works go—that is romance, isn’t it?”) is proven when Dr. Steele, shortly after performing brain surgery on Judith Traherne, falls in love with her. (61)

The doctor is not merely the practitioner of an objective science--he acts as the condensation of the figures of Father, Judge, Family, and Law, and his "powers borrowed from science only their disguise, or at most their justification." He is, in short (and this is certainly the case in the films), a wise man of unlimited capabilities. His function is of a moral and social order. In this relation between doctor and patient and the structure it assumes

were symbolized the massive structures of bourgeois society and its values: Family-Child relations, centered on the theme of paternal authority; Transgression-Punishment relations, centered on the theme of immediate justice; Madness-Disorder relations, centered on the theme of social and moral order. It is from these that the physician derives his power to cure; and it is to the degree that the patient finds himself, by so many old links, already alienated in the doctor, within the doctor-patient couple, that the doctor has the almost miraculous power to cure him.

As Foucault stresses, the doctor and the patient form a "couple" in complicity against disease and madness.

It was perhaps inevitable that this complicity should be mapped onto a heterosexual relation within a classical cinema which depends so heavily on the couple for its narrative configurations and its sense of closure. The language of medicine and the love story become interchangeable, as in Dark Victory-she: "I'm no longer in your care"; he: "You'll always be in my care."….

Sexuality or the erotic relation is thus given scientific legitimation in the figure of the doctor who acts simultaneously as a moral and social guardian. A woman's illness may be defined in many ways by the classical text, but it is never simply illness. More often than not it is a magnification of an undesirable aspect of femininity or a repudiation of femininity altogether. If the disease is excessive, it invariably necessitates punishment--in the interests of a legible sexual differentiation. But there is also a sense in which the filmic delineation of a woman's illness is always punitive. For, as Sontag points out, "Nothing is more punitive than to give disease a meaning--that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.” (63)