I've Heard the Mermaids Singing

A Queer Film Classic

Julia Mendenhall

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781551525648
• eBook ISBN: 9781551525655
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A Queer Film Classic on Canadian director Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, her quirky and hopeful first feature film which made its premiere at Cannes and won its Prix de la jeunesse. Presented as a "videotaped confession," it tells the story of Polly Vandersma, an unpretentious and introverted young woman who takes photographs as a hobby and works as a personal assistant to an elegant and sophisticated, but unsatisfied, art gallery director, Gabrielle St. Peres, whom she worships. This book presents a new close textual analysis of Mermaids that places this complex yet teachable film unquestionably within the global queer film canon while uncovering many of its complexities. The film has appeared on the Maclean's "Top 10 Films of the 20th Century" and Toronto International Film Festival's Best 10 Canadian Films of All Time.

Julia Mendenhall, a longtime fan of the film, places it in the context of the director's life experiences and her filmic oeuvre, the production and reception history of the film within the mid to late 1980s and the 1990s era of "outing," and the development of queer theory.

Four: Envisioning Our Futures

It was commonly feared that simply discussing sexual nonconformity would give people ideas about forms of sexual expression and gratification that would never have occurred to them otherwise. —Donald E. Hall (2003, 22)

The rise of an almost fascistic theocracy in the US and the much commented upon shift to conservative, security-conscious, achievement-oriented, rule-oriented thinking and behavior in our global climate, well, scares me. I want in my own tiny way to provide an antidote to the insidious forces of authoritarianism and absolutism. —Patricia Rozema39

Patricia Rozema’s thoughts about absolutism sound like they could have been written in 2014, but they were written in 1985, while she was typing up scene ideas and preparing grant applications for I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Throughout this volume, I have called attention to the ways in which Rozema and her film have indeed provided a “tiny antidote” to various ideological, political, and cultural forces, ever since May 10, 1987 when approximately five hundred admirers gathered outside of Cannes’ Grand Palais, seeking Sheila McCarthy’s and Rozema’s autographs and attention. The world has changed in many positive ways in the intervening years, but it has not changed enough, especially for sexual, racial, ethnic, economic, ability, religious, geographical, and gender minorities—in other words, for all of us who diverge from patriarchal norms in some way—and today, that might include almost everyone. We also now live in a world where the pressures to conform to hetero-patriarchal authorities and their absolutist “right way” might mean that there is little room for risk-taking and limited encouragement to envision any kind of future, much less an erotic utopian one, as Polly does. How can we be like Polly at the end of Mermaids? Can we too simultaneously reclaim, develop, and maintain a pleasurable Polly-esque postmodernized polysexuality? Rozema’s film quietly formulates and endorses its own self-development stratagem, represented by her original concept, “oblique pragmatism.” This strategy works, I maintain, precisely by means of “self-indulgence,” in other words, by indulging in one’s desires, whatever those desires happen to be, as long as one maintains an empathy for oneself and others. Even though Rozema humbly describes Mermaids as a tiny antidote, I argue that she and her film, via her prescription for transcendent, utopic, and indulgent ways of being, have done and will continue to do profound cultural work.

Rozema’s existential stratagems for eccentric indulgence, rather than egocentric blind ambition, were developed from her varied personal experiences, her conservative and progressive contexts, and especially her own self-development as a writer and a filmmaker. In an archival document dated January 1986, several months before she and Alex Raffé applied for Mermaids’ production funding, Rozema made a list titled “THE INFLUENCES” for Mermaids, and toward the bottom of the list were three items that I propose mostly influenced the form, content, and theories of Mermaids:

1. The highly accessible “self-indulgence” of all Woody

Allen’s work since and including Love and Death.

2. Twenty-two years of belief in Calvinism and subsequent

disbelief.

3. Reactions to Passion: A Letter in 16mm.40

I assert that the last item might have been the most important influence: the critical reactions to her film Passion (as discussed in Chapter One). In another financing application packet, Rozema writes: “Why this project?” referring to Mermaids, and she goes on to divulge that “Passion: A Letter in 16mm was … a personal film … but I’m not particularly thrilled with the end result. Somewhere along the line, it lost the humor and some of the complexity I had originally intended for the piece. As writer, director, producer, and editor, I can hardly blame this on anything but my own inexperience. Some might blame it on my ‘self-indulgence.’ I think the problem is that it [Passion] isn’t ‘self-indulgent’ enough—if I was more self-indulgent, I would enjoy it more.”41 The suggestion here is to be more self-indulgent, and when added to the theory of oblique pragmatism, that we might want to be self-indulgent in an indirect, hidden, or secret way. This sounds a lot like what Polly does in the film—she cultivates her autoerotic self-indulgence via a kind of Freudian sublimation, which means to channel and externalize one’s natural, native sexual energies and desires into culturally acceptable and meaningful work—her photographs.

However, there are dangers in indulging one’s desires. Rozema took the risk in Mermaids of not being understood, of creating not a “highly accessible, self-indulgent” Woody Allen-esque film, but a highly personal film that would perhaps not be understood by anyone but herself and her close circle of friends, which might perplex critics, both popular and scholarly.

However, Rozema’s risk was rewarded. The fully realized film sung to its Cannes audiences and to most of its audiences and critics; it was and is accessible, understood, and inspiring to many and has been recognized by a few as weighty, effective, and in short, a classic. For example, in 2009, Steve Persall, writing for the St. Petersburg Times (Florida) included Mermaids in his “Twenty Films that Still Resonate” out of the “nearly 900” screened at the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival since 1989.42 Persall notes: “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing … debuted with a comedy of mistaken artistic identity among lesbians.” As he describes how LGBTQ films progressed “from underground to popular cinema,” he lists such classics of queer cinema as Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989); Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991); Go Fish (Rose Troche, 1994); Gods and Monsters (Bill Condon, 1998); Paragraph 175 (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2000); and Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006). However, despite Persall’s praise—and putting Mermaids in fine company—at times it seems that Mermaids’ wily strategy of indirect queerness has perhaps been a bit too implicit and too inaccessible, leading to some mixed responses.

In 2003, Tom McSorley included Mermaids in his article “The Beginnings of the Beginnings: Canada’s Top 10 Fiction Feature Film Debuts since 1968” for the now-defunct Canadian film magazine, Take One.43 He placed Mermaids fifth and wrote:

Lauded at Cannes in 1987, the likeable and fey Mermaids carried much hope for a promising new generation of independent Canadian cinema upon its gossamer wings. Perhaps too much. The rather slight feminist fable of Polly, a temp who falls in love with her boss, a sophisticated art gallery owner, Mermaids examines Polly’s rich fantasy life as well as her less than glamorous “real” life. Rozema’s first feature is at once cloying and sentimental, intelligent and honest. With its inspired fabulism and a winning performance by Sheila McCarthy it also signaled, both inside and outside the frame, a quiet confidence in being Canadian and being independent. (2003, 26)...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Synopsis
• Credits
• Introduction: The Oblique Pragmatist’s Stratagems
• One: Creating the Queer Fairy Tale
• Two: Coming Out, Cannes, and Criticism
• Three: Reading Polly’s “Perversities”
• Four: Envisioning Our Futures
• References
• Filmography
• Index