The Mirror Didn't Crack: Costume Drama & Gotiiic Horror in Sally Potter's Orlando

Sally Potter's film adaptatioti of Virginia Woolfs Orlando engages not only wilh costume drama and modernist fiction, but with equally elaborate trappings of contemporary popular genre (science fiction and/or horror) tiim. Questions of bodily identity and representation unite the cinematic genres ol costume drama and sciencefiction,and Potter's film insistently refers to the novel as the body that her film is clothing/experimenting upon. The novel has a tendentious relationship with the popular-on publication, it was the most commercially successful of Woolfs novels, and Woolf, in considering her novel a popular "entertainment," relegated it to the critical bottom drawer In doing so. she associated Ihe literary romance with film as a popular form, and many critics since have pointed out the cinematicity of Orlando's historical and geographic sweep, such as in the scene where Orlando, transformed from a man to a woman and traveling w ith a group of gypsies, sees a cinematic projection of her English gardens on the hills of western Turkey.' As a woman, Orlando see.s rather than feels time's movement, and she is both the cinematic spectator and the cameraa point beautifully encapsulated by the conclusion to Potter's film, where Orlando's daughter lifts a video camera to observe her mother. Specularity is gendered female in the novel, and this femininity is linked to what Catherine Craft-Fairchild reads correctly as the cinematic. However, she concentrates on cinematic techniques such as dissolves, close-ups, and establishing shots, and thus omits Important ekphrases of visions in pools, screens, smoke, and mirrors, which arise in relation to Orlando's questions of gender/sexual identity. Smoke and mirrors are, wittily, central to the abrupt shifts of time that take place in the novel and film: for example. Potter's visual shorthand conjures the smoke of a steam engine to be heralded a.s '"The lliture!" hy Shelmerdine (Billy Zane). In this paper, I consider how Virginia WoolTs Orlando solicits its future cinematic adaptation, and how that adaptation engages with similar literary questions of genre and gender as the novel it adapts. By placing Sally Potter's Orlando in the context of gender/genre-bending adaptations contemporary to it, an instructive theorizing of adaptation as cinematic New Flesh on literary bones can be developed. Orlando romances not only the popular, but the speculative: with its time-traveling, sex-changing protagonist, Wooifs novel and Potter's film present an alternative science fiction: a feminist speculative fiction that explores the tropes of bodily and cultural adaptation, while experimentation with the medium itself replaees experimental science within the narrative.' Too often framed as a costume drama, however innovative, for example by Ginette Vincendeau and Julianne Pidduck. the film Orlando argues for Woolfs vision ofthe future, as one that critically emerges from, rather than embracing or discarding, the romantic novel. Whereas critics who desire fidelity to Woolfs novel criticize the film for its lack of commitment to Woolfs lesbian romance, I argue that the film, by engaging with the female body and with the ptipular, critiques the novel for its protestation of realism while "screening," rather than mirroring, sexuality. The film's engagement with "The Present," which

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40/Costume Drama & Gothic Horror in Sally Potter's Orlando is costume drama's future, is not Potter's invention; it is her tribute lo, and development of, the novel's radic'-' iv.'.-mtaland also a critique ofthe novel on its own terms, Orlando (Tilda Swinton), in Potter's rendering, is both cinematic fantasy and fantasist. There is nothing to stop the audience from presuming that the manuscript she tums over to an editor in the film's final section is both Woolfs novel and a screenplay adaptation, and that s/he has presciently conceived this form and written the film we are now watching, a postmodem twist that Woolfs elaborate poem about an oak tree does not present. The novel concludes with Orlando awaiting her lover Shelmerdine's deus ex machina entrance in an aeroplane. The film concludes with Orlando's vision ol an androgynous, queer angei (Jimmy Somerville) in the sort of outrageously fake gold lame outfit associated with B movie science fiction such as Barbarella. Orlando's affinity to genre film is not confined to its use of costume, nor even to the temporal gaps and global circumnavigation of its sloty structure.' Gender and genre inter-relate here, as Pidduck argues. Several reviewers note that Orlando was released in the same year as another gender and genre-bending British film, Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992). a thriller about the IRA, a British soldier, and a transvestite nightclub singer, whose revelation of "real" gender is the film's key scene, andin a profound sensethe "thrill" at the heart ofthe elaborately plotted thriller. National secrets pale in comparison to the revelation ofthe phallic woman, whose male organ undermines, but also recharges, the masculinity of tbe larger political and military enterprises in which her lovers are engaged. Anne Ciecko notes that Potter's positioning of gender trouble within the (traditionally female / traditionally British) costume drama olTers a strategic critique ofthe intersection of gender and nation. Orlando undergoes the opposite translation, from male to female, similarly at a moment of political crisis (in the film version), and finds herself both disempowered and liberated. Gender slippage, and the sense of slippage it induces in the viewer, is part of the uncanny realm of what Linda Badley calls, in the context of horror, "the body fantastic," the Cronenbergian "New Flesh." Orlando's fantastic body, like Dil's in The Crying Game, produces genre as well as gender slippage: this is the territory of horror, one that Jordan had explored in his early film. The Company of Wolves (1984). Co-adapted by Jordan with Angela Carter from her short stories about wolves. The Company of Wolves is, like OWi7(/o. part of the familiar tenritory of British cinema: a literary adaptation costume drama. Operating as an independent arthouse film tliat drew considerable audience based on its generic attributes and advanced SFX, Company can productively be read as a precursor to the reception and (re)classification of Orlando. Badley theorizes Company a% a successful attempt to imagine the female gaze within the horror genre, drawing attention to the frame narrative, which was created for the film, and is not present in any of Carter's wolf stories, or the radio play fi-om which she adapted the screenplay. A pubescent girl in a ramshackle house in 1980s England dreams the film's historicized and literary centreliterary in the sense that it is adapted from Carter's previous writings, and in that those writings refer to the literary tradition of Red Riding Hood, and its basis in female-female oral storytelling (Badley 121-22), Adaptation is, literally, a nightmare from which the girl does not wake, until the werewolves of her dream break into the spaee/time ofthe frame narrative, tearing down the cardboard walls ofthe deserted house and howling outside her bedroom door. The inset narrative is itself full of inset narratives, feral fairy tales related by the female characters, rife with transformations. At first, these transformations occur exclusively to men, transformations that Badley reads as feminizing, because male bixlies find their insides on the outside, becoming grotesquely bloody and hairy with gaping mouths (Badley 122). When Rosaleen, the adolescent protagonist and dream-self of the dreamer in thefi-ame-narrative.takes over telling stories from her conservative Granny, the ripples of transformation spread until she is able to calm a werewolf w ith a story about a female werewolf who seeks help from a priest and then retums to her world without harming anyone. At the conclusion of this story. Rosaleen becomes a wolf, and tears out of the inset narrative into the frame. The transformation is not shown, unlike the violently imaged transformation

Costume Drama & Gothic Horror in Sally Potter's Orlando/41 ofthe Count who eats Granny. It is implied thai Rosaleen's transformation is sexualor perhaps textual, a graceful metamorphosis of story into body. Badley suggests as much by ending her chapter on the femaie Gothic in considering thefirststory that Rosaleen herself tells as an example of female cmpowennent through the uncanny (Badley 123). Avillage woman wreaks revenge on the nobleman who impregnated and abandoned her by turning all the aristocratic guests at his wedding feast into the wolves their grotesque consumption causes them to resemble. Carter's class politics stand naked here, in the powdered wigs and elaborate costumes ofthe aristocrats, but also her understanding ofthe power ofthe female gaze. The woman works her transformation by looking at the guests in a mirror, which her gaze then shatters, leading to the fragmentation of their supposedly civilized selves. Women, thefilmargues, feel at home in the uncanny space ofthe powers of horror, because those powers are identified with their bodies, particularly their bodies' power to transform. BtKiy horror and the Gothic haunt Orlando's narrative stnicture and mise-en-scene as ghostly "visions" of prior texts. Orlando's eighteenth-century "coming out" as a woman at the Countess' salon implicitly refers to the wedding party in Company in its blue-grey color scheme, costuming and wigging, and social cruelties. Like the witch in that scene, Swinlon's Orlando ha,s red hair, a traditional signifier of witchcraft. Unlike that witch, Orlando is a member ofthe same class as her tormentors, and her red hair is disguised under a massive, grey-white wig. Her potential power is stifled under the weight of class and gender perfonnance. Her subsequent Bronte-esque encounter with Byronic freedom fighter Shelmerdine carries many overtones of Gothic, from Orlando's identification with nature and subsequent dispossession of her domestic space, to her almost psychic connection with Shelmerdine. and a mutual understanding ofthe slippage of gender. Literary and physical transformations have been indicated at the moment of Shelmerdine's introduction, which rewrites Mr. Rochester's in Jane Eyre, as Shelmerdine falls from his horse and must be rescued by Orlando. Charlotte Bronte's text haunts the 1992 final draft ofthe screenplay, in which Orlando bums down her house after Shelmerdine has left, becoming the madwoman in the attic in a rage of gender and class awareness (Potter 1992. 91). This draft, along with a revised draft from 1990, stored at the British Film Institute library, act as potent and potential versions ofthe film, persisting as traces in the realized text, ghostly doubles that eeho the doubling within the text. Potter, in her casting, visualizes both the Khan and Shelmerdine as Sasha's twins; Jimmy Somerville appears twice, doubling himself, but also twinning and paralleling another famous queer, Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth; the streets of Khiva are populated by extras wbo are all twins; and Orlando becomes her own twin in changing gender, a point reinforced when she stands in front of her own (male) portrait in the film's final section. In Orlando, the doubling and haunting arise through the surface of para-textual material with reference to filmmaking itself. Potter talks about the transition from The Gold Diggers to Orlando as a Frankensteinian process: "part ofthe project with The Gold Diggers was to dismantle everything and break every possible rule in order to put it back together again. And I think that with Orlando I have finally developed some ofthe skills to put cinema back together again in ways that make sense to me" (Zeig 25). Re-membered in a perverse form, the dismembered body of cinema is remade from textualfragments^animage taken from the lexicon of Iwdy horror lliat is underlined by part of her next reply, about the process of adaptation: By far the largest part of my work in the adaplalion was in the skeletal undemcalh sirucliirc anil that meant dealing with a narrative, motivation, or the traditional, skeletal aspects of a film script. The images, the playing with the form, the luxury ofthefleshthatcame after the bones, really. (Zeig 25)

42/Costume Drama & Gothic Horror in Sally Potter's Orlando The novel, as dissected by Potter, is Ihe skeleton ofthe film; it is cinema that enfleshes the text. Woolf's novel provides the "traditional, skeletal aspects," while Potter uses the techniques of film. and particularly experimental film, to "play with the fonn" and bring the creature into being. Film is metaphorised as monstrous here, made of experimental flesh on dead bones, an idea that the film references in moving, in its sections, from Death (a section that closely parallels the novel) to Birth (a section that offers a complete rewriting). While many theories ofcinematic literary adaptation, beginning with the work of adapter and critic Bela Baktzs, see film as the ghostly revenant of a once-living text. Potter suggests that filmor. at least, her filmcan literally revivify a literary text, and take pleasure in its hybrid, monstrous physicality. Adaptation is itself a speculative fiction, the actions of a Gothic scientist for whom cinema is conceived as a stnicture built from, and dependent on. literature. Cinema is both flesh and costume, through which adaptation is a mark of difference that reminds us we are watching a film, as we are reminded that Orlando becomes a woman when she has to enter into the socialized discourse of dressing for her peers. Clothed or unclothed, both transgressing/blurring gender boundaries and adhering to them, the presence ofthe female body is a problem. Its hybridity is unmoored from genrefilm,and, in being unmoored, is not punished^as. for example. Ripley (Sigoumey Weaver) is punished in the Alien films. Swinton's body, focus of almost every shot in the film, is the center of controversy: too feminine to be read as male in the first part ofthe film, once the body's femininity is revealed it is even more troubling. The relationship between novel and film, predicated on the body of Swinton as performer, encodes a making-public of queer sexuality and of feminist theory: her nakedness is the film's. Posed nakedly before the mirror, Orlando appears to refer to the aesthetics and critique the gender politics of Botticelli's Venus. The film stages this moment of speculative specularity in a stylized, languorous mood, both naturalized and fantastic, with dust motes suggesting both shooting in natural light and a fairy godmother's magical powder. The reflective surface ofthe mirror and its doubling of Orlando remind the viewer that this is cinema, reinstating the medium itself as experimental technology of vision. WooH's Orlando encounters a similar moment of textual and gendered experimentation, tinged w ith the fantastic, when she regards herself in the mirror. Working on her epic poem for the first time as a woman, she writes "a line which did not scan and made no sense with what went before." and, with this entry into what can only be called free venie or experimental poetics, tums to the mirror {Woolf 130). The line that she writes. "Life, and a lover," suggests to her that which she lacksas a woman, the Freudian model would sayand leads her into a gender performance. As in the conventional scene ofthe actress in her dressing room. Orlando changes clothes, puts on make-up, and does her hair before her reflection in the mirror. That refiection is given an elemental charge of fantasy: she sees herself as "a mermaid [...) a siren in a cave" (Woolf 130). Orlando, not yet accustomed to this masquerade of femininity, enters into another: she dresses as a man and goes out to find "life, and a lover." This episode, in which Orlando re-enters London society as a man and befriends a prostitute called Nell from whom she leams much about living as a woman, is omitted fi-om all three versions of Potter's screenplay^a fact much decried by critics, who see Orlando's transvestism and friendship with Nell as "proof of her lesbianism, as well as importantly anti-classist. Read carefully, WoolTs description of Nell reveals not only class prejudice against the popular (w hich is also, I argue, prejudice against the lower-elass entertainment ofthe cinema) but also an exact, unerotic. and heteronormative performance of masquerade, in which Orlando, now crossdressed in a man's clothes, assumes the male gaze and a male desire that reinforces her sense of lack, because desire for a woman is only possible when she is performing as a man. Orlando encounters Nell on a night when "(ejverything appeared in its tenderest form. yet. just as it seemed on the point of dissolution, some drop of silver sharpened it to animation" (Woolf 149). It is hard not to read the chemical processes of photography into this description. Silver (nitrate) animates an urban period set (featuring "the architecture of Mr. Wren") careftilly lit by "a sickle moon [...] enforced by the street lamps [...] a hglit infinitely becoming to the human countenance" (Woolf 149). Woolf suggests that such a cinematic landscape "presents us with so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable" (Woolf 150). It is at this pointwhen the unattainable has been invokedthat Orlando sees Nell in Leicester Square, which, even in Woolfs time, was home to many of London's most glamorous picture palaces. The cinematic square has "an airy yet formal symmetry" in which "the sky seemed most

Costume Drama & Gothic Horror in Sally Potter's Orlando/43 dexterously washed in," and a staged emptiness that draws Orlando's eye to a young woman sining in the center iifthe square who "seemed Ihe very figure of grace," with eyes "of a lustre such as is sometimes seen on teapots but rarely in a human face. Through this silver glaze the young woman looked up at him (for a man he was to her) appealing, hoping, trembling, fearing" {Woolf 150), The move from "dextrous" establishing shot to lustrous facial ciose-up is specifically organized by gender It is Orlando's masquerading male gaze that is the kino-cyc that presents London to him as a film set, complete with silent screen starlet ga/ing at him wordlessly through a "silver g(l)aze." On this dramatically lit set, Orlando and Nell literally act outOrlando acting as a man, Nell as a vulnerable womanthe pretence of a romantic scene that is, as feminist theory claims about Hollywood cinema, a masquerade for the economic exchange of sex and money in prostitution. Nell "rouse[s] in Orlando all the feelings which become to a man," via her pertbnned femininity, which produces a masquerading masculinity, that, once desire is quelled, fades into an identlficatory femininity (Woolfl50)/ Orlando's femaleness recognizes Nell's "deception." her "seeming" that is an act both in the setise of performance and agency, as her periormance of "trembling" femininity both allows her to cam money by making men feel like men. and disguises the economic transaction as romance. Nell does not speak to Orlando once tliey enter her room, disappearing behind "a scrven. where, perhaps, she rouged her cheeks" as Orlando had done before the mirror, until Orlando, her own falsity revealed to licrby Nell's playacting, "flung off all disguise and admitted herself a woman" (Woolfl 51. my emphasis). The encounter then becomes a conversation between women in which Nell narrates the story of her life, and the reader receives, not Nell's story, but Orlando's reflections on Nell's "commonest expressions" (Woolf 151), Orlando retains control of the narrative, with Neil rendered as her object by class, now, rather than gender. Woolf intimates that literary prose can, through its verbal eloquence, give a sense of realism, of the "commonest expressions of the street comers," that cinema (however populist), in its silence and deceptive luster, entirely lacks, Nell and her friends, ofP'screen," tell stories and talk of desire: "but histthey are always careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into print" (Woolf 152). Literary fomi can allude to the stories told among women, in the vemacular, but it cannot tell them. Woolfs disdainful impersonation of cinema, on the other hand, suggests that her attempt at theorizing film can bring the secret stories of women's desires into view. Wtrolfs Orlando is the (dis (embodiment of a feminist literature: Potter's Orlando is the (re)embodiment of transtextual transsexuality. As the angel sings at the end of the film, this Orlando is deliberately both novel and film, "neither a woman nor a man." a thirdspace who reflites critical discourses of drag, passing, periormance, and adaptation through the multivalencc of the film mediutn itself. Cinema is reinstated as a "luxury of the flesh," an embodied pleasure that builds on the skeleton of feminist experimentation Woolf developed in her speculative fiction. Sophie Mayer
Notes
' Atica Vlasopolos gives a thorough account of Wooirs cinematic writing and narrative focalization, -1 use Ihe word "speculalive" to refer lo science fiction and postmodern horror and I'antas)' film. It originates in feminist science fiction criticism to describe a body of feminist writing engaging wilh the metaphysical and metaphorical, more than tiarrative, conventions of seience fiction, often with a strategic grounding in the historical presenL

44/Costume Drama & Gothic Horror in Sally Potter's Orlando

-' Pidduek. looking at temporal and k>cai distortion as feminist strategy in Potter's Orlando, compares Wooirs novel to picaresque novels Gulliver i Travels and Around the World in Eighty Days (179). Karen Diehl applies Deleuzian notions of time-space lo patterns of temporal and visual distortion in the film. Woolf wTites that, "she was of the tribe which nightly bumishes their wares." a description equally applicable to prostitutes and actresses, whose professions were heavily linked in the common imagination of Regency England, and that suggests female sexuality as performance (150).

Works Cited
Badley, Linda, Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic. Contributions to ftw Study of Popular Culture. Westport and London: Greenwood, 1995.48. Bronte, Charlotte. ,/flneyn?, London: Smith, 1848. Bnizzi, Stella. "The Erotic Strategies of Androgyny." Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies. London and New York: Routledge. 1997.173-99, Carter, Ai^ela, The Bloody Chamber. London: Gollancz, 1979. , The Company of Wolves. The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works. Ed. Mark Bell. London: Chatto, 1996. 185-244, Ciecko, Anne, "Transgender, Transgenre. and ihe Transnational: Sally Poner's Orlando." TrapU (1998): 19-34. The Cotnpany of Wolves. Dir. Neil Jordan. 1984. DVD. Hen's Tooth. 2002. Craft-Fairchild. Catherine. "'Same Person... Just a Different Sex': Sally Potter's Construction of Gender in Orlando." Woolf Studies Annual 1 (3001): 23-48. The Crying Game. Dir. and Scr. Neil Jordan. Miramax. 1992. Diehl. Karen. "The Doiir You're Looking Through; Alien Images and Words in Orlando (WoolCPotter)." Travvtling Concepts III: Memory. Narrative. Image. Ed. Nancy Pedn. ASCA. 2003,177-88, Orlando. Dir, & Adapt, Sally Potter. Perf. Quemn Crisp, Jimmy Somerville, and Tilda Swinton. Sony Pictures Classics. 1993. Pidduek, Julianne. "Travels with Sally Potter's Orlando: Gender. Narrative, Movement," Screen 38,2 (1997): 172-89, Potter, Sally. Orlando [screenplay]. London: Faber. 1994. . Orlando [final]. Unpublished draft. 1992. Script Collection, BFI, . Orlando [revised]. Unpublished draft, 1990, Scripl Coilecticm, BFI, Vlasopolos. Anca. "Focalisation, the Cinematic Gaze, and Romance in Meredith and Wooif." WooifStudies Annual 7 (2001): 3-22, Woolf. Virginia. Orlando. A Biography. 1928. Ed. Brenda Lyons. London: Penguin. 1993. Zeig, Sande. "Queens of England," Filmmaker 1.4 (Summer 1993): 24-6. Velvet Light