Black bucks and Don Juans: In the cut’s seductive mythologies of race and sex

Abstract

Jane Campion is a female director who explores the "dark side of love" by audaciously mixing love, sex, and violence in her work to demonstrate how the primal responses of sex and fear are never far apart. Steeped in what Campion has characterized as the "gothic" tradition of romance, her female protagonists are sexually excited by the threat and even enactment of violence. 1 Campion’s body of work, which includes such films as The Portrait of a Lady (1996), The Piano (1993), and her 2003 film In the Cut (adapted from Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel by the same name), illustrates her abiding interest in the complex tapestry of fictions, fantasies, and mythologies that shape the cultural and individual imaginations. Campion, in ironic postmodern fashion, exposes and dismantles cinema’s mythologies. More specifically, In the Cut, like its cinematic predecessors, participates in a storytelling tradition of romantic love in which women especially, she claims, are so deeply invested. I will argue here that while In the Cut investigates and deconstructsthe influential role of the Hollywood romance genre, it fails to account sufficiently for a number of other important narratives that inform it, most notably the history of nineteenth-century American race relations and the cinematic legacy it spawned. I will trace a particular mythic topos that grew out of the American South’s post-Civil War racial anxieties: namely, the representation of black male sexual violence enacted against white women. In the Cut demands greater scrutiny for the complex relation it bears to its racialized mythmaking past and the legacy it inspires.