Psychoanalysis of the Film Caged

In the 1950's the Hollywood Production Code was an omnipresent signifier of societal standards of decency that were to be represented in motion pictures. Censorship and restriction confronted filmmakers with a mandate of compliance to this code, forcing a moral and ethical judgment on the visual and narrative content of the film. However, the ever-present censors of societal decency often provided a catalyst for creative incorporation of the marginalized by forcing filmmakers to go beyond the readily apparent literal content of the film in order to signify and represent.

In the film Caged, John Cromwell slips in front of the censors a sub-textual or latent world of lesbian relationships, hierarchies, and power struggles while maintaining the literal guise of a hetero-normative, monosexed environment (if there can be such a thing). This contradiction between latent and manifest content is embedded in the narrative structure of the film and only further illustrates this film's compliance with Freudian dream interpretation.

In fact, the 1980s remake of the film, Reform School Girls, attempts to represent and make manifest the latent content of the original film and reinforces the use of Freudian tools of dream analysis to interpret films. However, the remake embodies some of the very same contradictions in thematic content that Caged grapples with some thirty years earlier, portraying its own self-inscribed censors and filmic latent content.

Before one can begin to examine the way that these two movies function as Freudian operators of dream analysis, the terms related to dream-analysis must be explicated. According to Freud:

We can find our way toward understanding (or "interpreting") dreams, if we assume that what we recollect as the dream after we have waked up is not the true dream-process but only a façade behind which that process lies concealed. Here we have our distinction between manifest dream-material and latent dream-thoughts. The process, which produces the former out of the latter, is described as dream-work. (Freud 47)

Freudian analysis of dreams is a fruitful metaphor for the interpretation of film. The text and subtext of a film provide a correlation with the manifest and latent content of a dream, respectively. In dreams the "unconscious material from the id-originally unconscious and repressed unconscious alike- forces itself upon the ego, becomes preconscious and, owing to the efforts of the ego, undergoes the modifications which we call dream distortion" (48). In films made under the Hollywood Production Code, the unconscious and repressed material, the latent content of the movie, becomes distorted into the visual reality of the film by the censors (ego).

The film Caged , which was made under the repressive force of the censors, offers a 1950s audience a glimpse into the world of a women's prison and contradicting lessons about hetero-normative and mono-sexed relationships. This film's lesbian cult status has arisen out of the veiled lesbian relationships and hierarchies that boil to the surface in an all women mono-sexed environment. Society and the censors have deemed homosexual behavior inappropriate to portray in films at this time. Therefore, the latent content of the movie, its lesbian wish-fulfillment, must be disguised or 'distorted', just as the ego would disguise this wish in the dreaming process due to external anxieties regarding homosexual feelings and behaviors.

One must decode much of the films distortion in order to uncover this latent content. The first fifteen minutes of the film are rich in interpretable material. Marie Allen's arrival as a scared and innocent looking young woman is reinforced against the hardened world of the dames in prison. She was married, went to Church, and as the viewer finds out is two months pregnant. The first sense one gets of the "real" environment of this women's correctional facility is during the infirmary scene (Lacan). As Marie is getting prodded during her examination and it is uncovered that she may be pregnant the nurse reacts with disgust at the prospect of the pregnancy. This large framed, unattractive woman says, with repugnance, "Another pregnant one."

It is reminiscent of John Ford's Seven Women, in the sense that the older, predatory lesbian shows abjection towards hetero-normative behavior, such as reproduction. One might argue that this does not necessarily make the woman a lesbian, but a hardened prison employee. However, in Reform School Girls the queerly coded nurse is no longer coded as queer, but is instead outrageously lesbian. She refers to the newcomers as "fresh meat", as in food for the predator, a term that is often used my men to describe new, young, fresh-faced females. When the girls are instructed to take off their clothes the nurse eyes their bodies in the most outwardly sexual way.

In fact, the camera zooms in on her face to emphasize this reaction. She then puts gloves on and in a crude and hostile voice tells the girls they are "…going to be searched inside and out so get it clean." The spraying of DDT onto their naked bodies and genitals only reinforces this notion of the crude and the abject. The juxtaposition of the natural and chemical provides a disturbing and lasting impression on the viewer. This undistorted vision of Caged may lack the need to hide the latent lesbian material that the first version desperately tried to veil; yet the pervading sense of the crude and abject in Reform School Girls is a signifier of yet another latent operator, which will be discussed at a further point in the paper.

The manifest content of Caged codes the prison matron Harper as a heterosexual woman in the first scene the viewer and Marie Allen are introduced to her. The scene opens focused on the romance magazine she is reading. She is eating chocolates while doing so, as chocolates are correlated with being a feminine aphrodisiac. This overt distortion of Harper's latent lesbianism becomes a ridiculous signifier of a fallacy. The juxtaposition of these feminine stereotypes with her large frame, husky voice, and aggressive nature only works to point out the incongruity of the whole scene. When she says things like, "Let's you and me get acquainted, honey", "You are not a number to me", and "A lot of things are tough to get in here" (like heterosexual sex) one becomes wary of the hetero-normative signifiers. In Reform School Girls, matron Edna, or "Eddie", is the most aggressively lesbian woman in the movie and also the most predatory.

The latent content of the matron's representation in Caged is made outrageously clear in Reform School Girls. The first time we meet Edna she too is eating a box of chocolates, but instead of reading a romance magazine she is reading a newspaper with the heading "The Meanest of the Mean". As the scene opens the camera focuses on her big hands grasping the chocolates and shoving them in her mouth, as she is a voracious eater of the good. In Caged, the new girls are referred to as "new fish"; in the remake Edna walks into the room with the new girls and says, "I thought I smelled fish." Once again, the notion of food for a predator is portrayed.

Predators smell out their prey and the scent of fish is an obvious reference to female genitalia. This vulgarity is a staple of Reform School Girls as it represents the most abject latent content of Caged. The kitten scene, as it is redone in Reform School Girls, searches out the most abject, repulsive conclusions, whereas in Caged the kitten is killed, accidentally. Edna literally stomps on the innocent "pussy", a crude metaphor for her predation on young girls.

The one element in Caged that is clearly not coded is the rejection of men among the inmates. Men are absent from the entire movie; accept for the parole scene, which only emphasizes how men have continuously victimized Marie, as they reject her from being paroled. Men are responsible for a large portion of the prison population's incarceration, including Marie and her '80s counterpart Jenny. The power structure in the prison is completely without male influence and at one point Kitty Stark tells Marie, while lying next to her in bed, "If you stay in here too long, you don't think of guys at all. You just get out of the habit." In the first scene that Kitty and Marie meet, the sound of a train rolling by interrupts the scene and paralyzes all the women in the cell.

They all stop what they are doing to listen. The train is a signifier of the phallic, of the outside world, of their husbands. It interrupts the scene, their lives, their order, and it stops them in their tracks. The noise coming from the train rips through the scene and does not quite fit. In Reform School Girls, the rejection of the phallic is not as poignant. Jenny engages in heterosexual sex with a man in order to escape, yet after having sex with her the man turns her in. On top of this, the blatant lesbian activity signifies the total absence and rejection of males, yet the message of victimization is not as clear as that of Caged, as the girls rarely talk of men and how they have influenced their lives. However, both films basic rejection of the male has its consequences, and this is where the contradiction between the latent and manifest content of the movies comes into play.

For Caged, the latent content as represented in Reform School Girls portrays a world of lesbian predation and desire, a world devoid of male influence, and a scene of female aggression, empowerment, and survival. In Caged, hetero-normative relationships are trounced upon, as men are the reasons for the inmates' predicaments. Yet, in the same film contradicting messages reaffirming hetero-normativity appear. The old inmate woman warns Marie Allen to get married and have another child so as to revel in the normalcy of domesticity and to refrain from coming back to prison. However, Marie Allen chooses a life of crime at the end of the film and throws away her wedding ring. They keep her file open to suggest she will be back.

The message is contradictory-get married to the wrong man and you will be in prison where you cannot rely on a man to get you out (i.e. step-father, parole board), but then get married so you will not come back. Perhaps it was because of the Hollywood Production Code that this message of the saving power of hetero-normative relationships was put in at the end in order to counter-act the ability of hardened "dames" to survive without men. However, if this is so then Reform School Girls, signifying the uncensored latent content of Caged, should not contain this mixed message; yet it does. Everything lesbian is abject in this film. Like in Caged, lesbians are predators, preying on the meek and innocent. The stomping on the kitten, the vulgar, crude references to female body parts and lesbian activity, the leather outfits and husky voices are all designed to portray that filth of lesbian activity.

In Caged, Kitty refers to Harper's first name being "filth", only emphasizing the evil, repugnant nature of the resident lesbian in charge. Both these films, one censored by the code, the other not, exude these contradictory messages of homosexual/social acceptance/repugnance as an unconscious assertion of their film/dream metaphor. Freud states, "Impulses with contrary aims exist side by side in the unconscious without any call being made for the adjustment between them"(53). This also portrays how Reform School Girls has its own latent and manifest content, that it cannot fully assimilate the "real" into its own narrative, and that movies post-production code can be read as having their own self-inscribed censors.