Issues in the Film Desert Hearts
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The purpose of this research is to examine the motion pic ture Desert Hearts with a view toward showing how the filmmaker addresses issues of class, gender, race, and sexuality, in par ticu lar in regard to how the film appears to deconstruct hetero sexual ideas of lesbians and such dominant-culture tropes as male-dominant/female-submissive structure and world view. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas emerging in Desert Hearts as an exercise in deconstruction of the aesthetic and social context in which it appeared, and then to discuss the cinematic and narrative strategy by which these ideas emerge, including issue fronts that illustrate the encounter between historically dominant and historically marginalized cultures in the modern period.The pattern of ideas that emerges in Desert Hearts arises from the contingencies implicit in the encounter at a Reno ranch in the late 1950s between Vivian, a staid middle class woman of a certain age undergoing a divorce and Coy, a free-spirited younger woman. Desert Hearts's principal line of action follows Vivian's self-discovery and indeed discovery of new realities of the world over the course of the six weeks she waits for her divorce to be come final. Though initially threatened and confused by Coy's sex ual aggressiveness and diffident in the face of Coy's lack of inhibition, Vivian is increasingly drawn to her as a personality and sex partner, and ultimately to the point of what the popular culture
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with received social wisdom.
Coy's character is the lever of challenge and transformation for Vivian. The moment of the car accident that is Coy's stage entrance is also a moment of dissonance and clash that are entirely alien to the reserved professor, and it is the point of attack for dramatic conflict in Desert Hearts. Coy's effusive, confrontational energy represents a challenge to Vivian's closed comportment and to the society the fostered and sanctioned it. The authoritative professor sees for the first time the younger person who is not only not a respectful student but also contemptuous of the presumptions of intellectual superiority that one must assume Vivian brings to most social encounters. That attitude is not softened but made more edgy after the initial encounter, and the narrative line of the film as a whole confirms that the action that unfolds from it very much stands for unfolding confrontations on a whole range of social issues.
The narrative strategy of Desert Hearts as social commentary is consistent with the critical project of radical deconstruc tionism, particularly as elaborated by Jacques Derrida, whom Ag ger describes as "a social theorist, indeed as a left and femin ist one" (Agger 503). Agger cites De
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2202
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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