In the Cut: Self-Endangerment or Subjective Strength?

Abstract

This quotation from Dana Polan’s book on Jane Campion considers the director’s then-f uture project to adapt Susanna Moore’s novel, In the Cut (1995). Before the film had even begun shooting, expectations were aroused by the graphic sexual nature of Susanna Moore’s book, published in 1995 and attended by a reputation of pornographic sex and explicit sexual violence (Polan 2001: 159). The basic plot of the book and film is that English teacher Frannie Avery becomes involved with the working-class Detective Malloy, who is investigating a series of brutal murders of women. As their sexually adventurous relationship progresses, the teacher begins to suspect that the detective may be the killer; however, she continues to have sex with him and exhibits a self-endangerment that is reckless and, in the book, peculiarly detached. At the end of the book, the real identity of the killer is exposed as the detective’s partner, and Frannie is mutilated and murdered. As she is dying, her narrative voice continues to objectify her body from an observational, poetic viewpoint:

My hand over my chest, the blood finding its way between my closed fingers, my ribs light in my warm hand, my breast lighter without the rose nipple to give it weight, to give it meaning. (1995: 177)

It is easy to imagine that, if produced, In the Cut will be judged to a large degree in terms of its relation to what people have come to expect from Jane Campion as a director. That is, it may be read either as a film that extends the realm of feminist desire in new directions and opens up bold possibilities for women’s self-determination or as one that beneath its chic eroticism replays old stories of female masochism. (Polan 2001: 160)