1POPULAR CINEMA

subsequent efforts at adaptation and accommodation by moving from a
very physical, almost slapstick-like comic style to a more internalized, conventionally
feminine style. Her reactions in the beginning are unmistakably
coded in the terms of performative excess: she is always too eager, too
happy, too afraid, or too disappointed. Every emotion is translated into facial
expressions (e.g., of joy, excitement) and bodily movements (e.g., the
curtsies and the cartwheels). This kind of physical excess evokes the lost
immediacy of childhood, but it is also predicated on the denial of sexuality.
Significantly, her gestures become very subdued once she enters into the
rituals of sexual difference. In the same way that the question of identity is
introduced through the recognition of that difference, its reenactment ends
up producing a condition of lack. Since the “ugly girl” is presented as Other
from the outset, it is only through her painful awareness of this otherness
that the slow process of assimilation can take place. Under the pressures of
normative femininity, she begins to reenact the constraints placed on the female
body. While she continues to be vivacious, these aspects of her earlier
self are now realized only in relation to, and for, the male gaze. The precarious
nature of her compromise between authenticity and masquerade
comes to the fore in the final scene, which, for a brief moment, introduces
the possibility of failure (i.e., her suicide attempt) but then rejects such an
unacceptable solution in favor of a happy ending that, even in the closing
image of the romantic couple, fails to compensate for the woman’s initial experience
of humiliation. Perhaps the appeal of romantic comedies that engage
the discourses of gender and race in such subtle ways always hinges on
their ability to provide imaginary solutions that speak both to the desire to
believe and the necessity to doubt; perhaps therein lies the simultaneously
stabilizing and destabilizing effect of popular culture as a whole.
III.
There is hardly a film from the 1933 lineup that would be more suited to a
further investigation of the elusive alliance between gender and race than
the UFA comedy Victor and Victoria. This famous film about cross-dressing
and gender bending, remade as a Hollywood film by Blake Edwards in 1982
and a more recent Broadway musical with Julie Andrews, has played a key
role in positioning sexual difference, including its aesthetic transgressions,
at the center of ongoing analyses informed by feminist film theory and
queer studies. 27 What has been neglected in the exclusive focus on Viktoria’s
presumably liberating double cross-dressing—that is, a woman pre-
38 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich