Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (45 page)

mentions that she looks Jewish. Another reviewer said, “Whether she is up there staggering around in blue bloomers or sagging-kneed and spindly- legged or sliding seductively on a vermillion chaise lounge, she looks as edi- ble and as enticing as a plate of hot pastrami.”
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He finds her deliciously ap- pealing, but, in a peculiar turn of phrase, she is as attractive as Jewish food.

Like reviewers, the film seldom “speaks” Fanny’s Jewishness in words, yet it registers the presence of Jewishness early and repeatedly. Barbra speaks Fanny’s first line as the camera moves around from behind her to pick up her reflection in a mirror.
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She pulls down the enormous collar of her leopard coat, half-smiles at herself in the mirror, and says, “Hello, Gorgeous?” The ironic half-question, half-greeting, which later comes to signify Barbra as surely as her nose, shows Fanny as a character who performs “in private” and sets up the spectator as her most intimate intimate. Simultaneously revealed are what Sander Gilman has documented as two key markers of Jewishness: the nose (thus far hidden by her collar and by the camera’s position behind her) and the voice.
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Her first characterological gesture reminds us of what we already know (that she’s Jewish) and stresses that this Jewishness is founda- tional and significant.
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It also links the visual and the aural (modes that are extraordinarily mutually dependent in musicals) and locates both in the realm of the performative. Barbra’s Jewishness is revealed through profile and voice, but her face is visible only after the three long shots of Fanny’s back as she en- ters the theater, moves down a long hallway, and down another hallway into the backstage area, the only sound the clicking of her heels against the floor. The film explicitly teases our desire to see her face, to hear her voice. The per- formance of Jewishness satisfies desire. From that moment, Jewishness is what Barbra does.

By way of her nose and her speaking voice, though, Barbra does Jewish- ness with a difference. In the mid-1960s the media made much of Streisand’s refusal to get her nose fixed, of her determination to maintain the mark of difference. “The desire for invisibility, the desire to become ‘white,’ lies at the center of the Jew’s flight from his or her own body,” writes Gilman.
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Streisand’s tactic was exactly the opposite. Alan Spiegel writes (in an other- wise disparaging account of Streisand), “Her struggle becomes to make au- diences see that what might first appear too irregular, too coarse, or yes, to precociously Jewish is actually just right, radiantly necessary.”
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Her insistent “mark of difference” connotes contradictory meanings, both charisma, an in- dependent style, and even unconventional beauty, as well as shrewdness and audacity.
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If Barbra’s spoken voice, as in “Hello, gorgeous?” continually reperforms her Jewishness (conflated with New York, Brooklyn, working-class, urban,

and East Coast), her singing voice takes her elsewhere, to the blues of African American women singers, to the belting of Ethel Merman, to the crooning of the developing rock ’n’ roll.
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Streisand’s singing voice does not allow her to pass; what would she pass for? Rather her voice evokes what Levine describes as “the exotic, the primitive, and the atavistic”—again, but differently, the Jewess.
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The passionate expressiveness and intimacy of her singing voice makes it seem natural and untrained. Streisand’s singing voice is completely of her body and it also separates from her body, from her self, to take on, al- most literally, a life of its own. It was described endlessly as “blood-tingling,” “seductive,” “like a wound-up meadowlark.”
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Her extraordinary, perverse, monstrous voice spans the common break in women’s voices between chest and head voice. When Streisand belts, which she does below, above, and through her (virtually inaudible) break, her voice works with and against Jule Styne’s brassy, percussive, syncopated score. She often shouts, draws a line out, her volume and tone fluctuate in extremes. She tends to sing in the middle of her range, but with a vengeance, almost speaking, almost singing, her voice sculptural. Musicologist Elizabeth Wood theorizes what she calls a “Sapphon- ic voice,” which “traverse[s] a range of sonic possibilities and overthrow[s] sonic boundaries.”
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A woman with such a voice, she writes, “may vocalize in- admissible sexuality and thrilling readiness to go beyond so-called natural lim- its, an erotics of risk and defiance, as desire for desire itself.”
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“Greatest Star”

Funny Girl
is propelled by two competing narratives—one of stardom, which depends on Fanny’s uniqueness and singularity, and one of her heterosexual- ization, which emphasizes her sameness (to other women, to the social order, to narrative tendencies). Ultimately, the heterosexual narrative fails and the narrative of stardom dominates the film; stardom is achieved at the expense of marriage. The final image consists of Barbra-as-Fanny in a dark dress spotlit against a dark background, singing “My Man” as if in a concert, an image that lifts Streisand out of the diegesis and privileges Streisand herself over her por- trayal of Fanny Brice.

In both narratives Fanny’s Jewishness is always already there and virtually unremarked upon as well as fundamentally defining of her character. Where- as many “lesbian” narratives privilege women’s friendship, women bonding, or the filmic potential of desire or eroticism between women,
Funny Girl
takes a different tack.
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Desire and eroticism is impelled in the spectator by the se- ductive force of Barbra in the singular act of performing in a musical film.

Streisand’s Jewishness parodies and subverts traditional femininity and fore- stalls the possibility of visual victimization or objectification.

In
Funny Girl
the “star” narrative is driven precisely by Fanny’s difference from other women. Fanny’s distinctiveness is first shown in relation to one of the most prevalent images of Jewish women after World War II, the Jewish mother.
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Fanny’s mother and her mother’s cohorts, whether Irish or German, signify embodied ethnicity and typify the overbearing Jewish mother so pre- dominant in American fiction and popular culture, from Michael Gold’s
Jews Without Money
to television’s
The Goldbergs
.
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(Even when Fanny does be- come a mother in the film, she hardly cares for the child and is still primari- ly identified as a star.)
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Mrs. Brice’s friends are preoccupied only with mar- riage and reproduction and find Fanny’s desire to perform absurd. They value beauty as means to an end, attaining a husband. They sing, in a song whose melody suggests a nursery rhyme, “If a girl isn’t pretty as a Miss Atlantic City

/ All she gets from life is pity and a pat.” Fanny’s mother plays on the national “threat” of her singularity when she sings, “Is a nose with deviation such a crime against the nation? Should I throw her into jail or drown the cat?” Fanny, crunching on a pickle held between two talonlike nails, is confident, playfully gawky, almost tomboyish.

Fanny is next defined in opposition to the “white” women who make up the chorus line, her otherness eventually launching her into stardom. As the vaudeville theater manager, Mr. Keeney, says in frustration when she, “the one with the skinny legs,” messes up the choreography: “You stick out, and you are out!” Undeterred, as this is, of course, the predictable, necessary opening of a star story, Streisand sings one of
Funny Girl’s
best-known songs, “I’m the Great- est Star.” She attempts to cajole and impress Mr. Keeney with her “gifts,” alter- nating non-Jewish jokes and voices (mock operatically, “I’m a natural Camille / As Camille I just feel / I’ve so much to offer”) with easily identifi references to things Jewish—a bagel, for example—spoken in a heavy New York accent and with a Yiddish intonation in which the last note of a line goes up in pitch. She speak-sings, “I got thirty-six expressions / Sweet as pie to tough as leather”; her talents transcend gender. Keeney carries on his business and then removes her physically from the theater, but Fanny turns right around and runs back into the theater. She careens onto the stage, now empty of the other women, Mr. Keeney, and Eddie, his assistant. She freezes, looks around and via a long shot that pans the theater, takes in the sight of its emptiness. (This is the same panning shot as in the earlier, opening scene; it thus links Fanny’s early and later life.) The music comes in softly at fi with deep strings in syncopation. As the orchestra builds, Barbra belts the last chorus of the song, made emphatic through a key change, several notes lowered by half-step intervals and other

notes held longer in earnest, bluesy emotion. In her red sailor shirt, blue bloomers, black stockings and boots, Barbra throws her head back, flings her arms out, and sings, exclaiming, “In all of the world so far / I am the greatest, greatest star!” The performance is pure Streisand.

This early moment exposes the performative slippage of Streisand and Brice. Fanny, the character, claims, well in advance of her diegetic stardom, to be the “greatest star,” and Streisand makes the same claim at the same time in the same body in the same voice. As Fanny Brice, she sings, “I’m the greatest star / I am by far / But no one knows it,” but in spite of its ostensible expres- sion of frustration, it is self-congratulatory, almost autoerotic, a self-coming out. She knows she is being watched, and we can’t resist watching. She seems to sing for herself, but it’s always for us. The long fingernails, the characteris- tic gestures, the tear-filled eye, the soft-focus shot: Fanny’s not-yet-star body is Barbra’s already-a-star body. “I’m the Greatest Star”—the simultaneous as- sertion and performance of greatest star-ness—is a performative utterance in

J. L. Austin’s sense. As she—both Fanny and Barbra—claims her stardom, she—Fanny—becomes a star. Streisand’s performance and star persona si- multaneously exceed and contain the character.

On film Streisand always plays Streisand. There are gaps in her acting style, those Brechtian moments where the actor splits from the character. For example, at the end of “I’d Rather Be Blue,” Fanny’s first solo appearance as a singer-rollerskater, Barbra pauses to pull up the fallen strap of her dress. The gesture conveys Fanny’s pleasure in her performance and her guilelessness on stage. But Streisand’s rendition of the movement is layered: we see her self- consciously reach for the strap, pull it up onto her shoulder, and then let the movement undulate down her torso and legs and into her skates. The gesture appears more choreographed than the dance that precedes it. In this gesture the expected, conventional blurring of actor-character-singer fractures into Barbra-playing-Fanny. Here and elsewhere Barbra is Fanny Brice, but she re- fuses to become or disappear into Fanny Brice.

The unusual star persona that emerges from the filmic conflation of Bar- bra and Fanny is supported by Streisand’s highlighting her difference from other actresses. Biographies and gossip tell us she was late, unpredictable, and difficult on the set. She argued with director William Wyler constantly. She was a perfectionist and insisted on doing numerous takes of every shot. She did her own hair and makeup and only allowed herself to be filmed on the left side. In the sound studio she refused to settle on any one cut of a song. Soon after they began recording the music for
Funny Girl
, musical director Walter Scharf decided to prerecord the songs on tape instead of vinyl to save money, and to produce separate tracks for orchestra and vocals, to allow

Streisand to make later changes.
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And she insisted that “My Man” be record- ed live—the first time for a movie musical.
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Once Fanny’s rise to fame begins, each step in her success finds Jewishness undermining heteronormativity. Fanny’s stardom emerges from her otherness, which she reconstitutes through humor and through a parody of femininity and heterosexuality. Fanny’s first role in the
Ziegfeld Follies
is to star in a wed- ding extravaganza with numerous women dressed as brides. In typical
Follies
fashion they represent the seasons of the year—the summer bride, the winter bride, and so on. Their headpieces are decorated with emblems of the season, like corn husks and flowers, and the brides are engaged in activities like brush- ing their hair, taking bubble baths, and gazing at themselves in mirrors. In re- hearsal, surrounded by tall, buxom blonds, Fanny, well aware of her marked- ly Jewish looks, tells Ziegfeld that she can’t sing “I am the beautiful reflection of my love’s affection” “straight.” When he insists that she perform, she queers the song by stuffing a pillow under her dress. Looking eight months pregnant, she sings the correct lyrics, first in exaggerated British opera, “I am the walk- ing illustration,” and then finishes the line in Yiddish inflection, “of his ado- ration?” Because the song positions women as objects of male desire and ac- quisition (although in the film the song itself can be seen as parodying the use of women’s bodies in the Follies), Fanny’s “pregnant” body takes that objecti- fication to its logical extreme: she makes explicit the connection between het- erosexual desire, sex, and reproduction. At the same time, her other “natural” physical differences from the other women—she is much shorter and almost bumps headlong into the breasts of a Ziegfeld girl—remove her entirely from the elaborate system of exchange the song expresses. When she dances with one of the men, her “body” interferes and prevents their embrace. When she sings, “His love makes me beautiful,” and performs mock horror at seeing herself in the mirror, the song derides heterosexual desire. She is a huge suc- cess, and Ziegfeld responds, “I ought to fire you, but I love talent.” Fanny’s talent is in her ability to ridicule heteronormativity by way of Jewishness and get rewarded for it. She later dances as a Yiddish chicken in “Schvan Lak,” sending up the heterosexual romance of ballet and mocking the ethnic nor- mativity of a “white,” European, high-art form.