Cinematographer on “Repulsion,” among other films.
It didn’t occur to me until recently that one reason Polanski’s 1965 masterpiece resonated so greatly with queer kids when it was shown in New York revival houses in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, was that Carol, so brilliantly played by Catherine Deneuve, was a queer body, repulsed by the status quo, and by standard ideas of beauty that did nothing to cover up the bitter work of aging, or silence women who had been made equally mad by their commodification, but who are socially acceptable because they can afford a facial, and complain about men. Carol is too repressed to join in those discussions because she’s queer and unsure of her body; indeed, she’s repulsed by her own form because she feels “different.” Carol thinks as she pulls off her gloves, fascinated by the peel: Is this my hand? My body? Is this what men make of it? And what are men? Do they really smell this way? Why is it that when I smell them I vomit? Carol gets hers when she invents the man or men she wants; they are largely faceless and as masculine as her dreams. And what Carol’s dreaming of, really, is power, and an aspect of her repulsion vis a vis the straight men who “like” her is their weakness, their demands, the physicalization–claiming–of whatever’s in their purview. She’s James’ governess in “Turn of the Screw,” but less hindered by propriety; instead of driving a child to his death through the building up hysteria, Carol kills on her own. (Both the James and the Polanski are set in the land of repression: England.) I don’t know how “crazy,” I thought Carol was when I saw the film because so many of her responses made sense to me across the distance of Deneuve’s blondness and beauty which I ordinarily wouldn’t respond to because it’s not a look I usually respond to. Still, it was a mark of Polanski’s genius to cast Denueve in the role: the world wants to be blonde. Via Deneuve Polanski asked: What if blonde was not synonymous with white beauty and the fantasy of erotic love, but with queer thoughts, and female perversions?
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