El caso de República Dominicana, Honduras y Costa Rica

Through my work, scavenging and picking through films that might have an investigating woman as a protagonist, I began to notice patterns, rhythms, and repetitions. These slowly organized themselves into four distinct modalities: The Adventurer, the Avenger, the Comedic, and the

60 Kawin, Horror, 6.

61 Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1993).

62 Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks.” in Re-vision: Essays, in Feminist Film Criticism.

Eds. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams. (Fredrick, MD. University Publications of America, 1984).

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Affective. I use the word mode here strategically, a combination of its musical and mathematical meanings. It is possible to play the same tune in different musical modes (major and minor being the most recognizable) and having the affective meaning of the piece change radically. In math, it is the most common value in a set of data. Of course, it also has a distinct definition in literary studies, where it can be confounded with genre but has to do with the manner in which something is expressed. In film studies, Linda Williams notably employed the term in Playing the Race Card:

Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson where she proposes that melodrama is more productively understood not as a genre, but an aesthetic mode which is “more appropriate to its dynamic and protean nature.”⁶³ And more than that, “a fundamental mode of popular American ‘moving pictures.’”⁶⁴ While the melodramatic mode as Williams understands it certainly runs through this work, the term “mode” itself is crucial. Each mode articulates a particular mood, feel, and combination of genres with its own distinctive set of narrative moves, visual patterns and general tropes.

These modes’ borders are not confining. Films frequently shift between them, moving say from comedic to affective to Avenger and back again. In Paul Feig’s 2013 film The Heat, for instance, while the overall mood would seem to clearly place in the Comedic modality, it sometimes shifts in tone and structure to the Avenger. The films I have chosen to read as case studies are not usefully considered exemplary, but illustrative. There are already books that survey the field, that list and pool and explore films with female detectives While our lists might have variations, and our methods of selection for inclusion might be different, we are participating in

63 Williams Playing the Race Card, 12.

64 Williams Playing the Race Card, 13.

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the same conversation. I see no need to replicate the work that they have already done, but rather to continue it, pushing it in new directions.

I open my study with the Adventurer chapter, in which I explore the way the female protagonists of Nancy Drew (Clemens, 1938) Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1973) and Fargo (Coen Brothers, 1999) are motivated by curiosity. Each investigator is figured as not-quite-a-woman and her in-between status is mirrored by generic shiftings. The films function as melodramas but are not melodramatic in tone, instead the tone borrows from Adventure films with their exuberance and sense of fair play.

In Chapter 2, I look at the Avenger. Recognizable from procedurals, I examine how she is compelled to investigate in ways that question her sanity. The Avenger is figured as the least traditionally feminine, but the most sexualized. Her sexuality rather than simply her gender is a problem in these texts. The thriller becomes a vital generic construct in the Avenger film, as the narrative threads between the crime and the investigations become increasingly tangled. My core text here is Taking Lives (D.J. Caruso, 2004), and is bracketed by two films by Kathryn Bigelow, Blue Steel and Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

The third chapter takes on the Comedic mode by looking at There’s Always a Woman (Alexander Hall, 1938), Fatal Beauty (Tom Holland, 1987) and Miss Congeniality (Donald Petrie, 2000). While women-centered comedies strongly tend towards to the romantic variety, films in the Comedic mode are not so confined, and they activate some of the anarchic spirit of classic comedy.

One of the central comedic loci is femininity itself. However, the ways that comedy interacts with the investigative genre can call into question that exactly is the butt of the joke.

My fourth chapter investigates investigators in the Affective mode. They investigate for and through affective intuitions. I begin with a brief look at Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924),

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move on to a discussion of Black Angel (Roy William Neill, 1946) and finish with The Gift (Sam Raimi, 2000). If the Avenger was the least feminized of the modes, the Affective is the most. She is articulated and defined by her traditional feminine roles: lover, wife, mother. The genres that we see her in also put her in the traditional role. When these films slip into horror, she is the victim and the final girl, when it activates the weepie, she is the self-abnegating figure at the heart of it.

The women who work in this mode have skills that are tied to her feminized attributes and most importantly her love becomes the diving bell of the investigation.

In my conclusion, I test my taxonomy in the laboratory of television. While the investigating woman is wildly popular in this medium, she still creates and has to navigate the same anxieties as her filmic sisters. Through an examination of Decoy (1957-8), the first program to feature a woman detective and Veronica Mars (2004-7), I show how the figure cycles through the position I developed within a single episode and in the context of the season as a whole. I argue that this fluidity is both their strength in a genre that is powered by novelty and a sign of the abiding lack of ease a woman who looks creates manifested on the level of genre.

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