Salvation from Affliction
This opposition to woman cuts endlessly across all the oppositions that order culture. It’s the classic opposition, dualist and hierarchical. Man/Woman automatically means great/small, superior/inferior… means high or low, means Nature/History, means transformation/inertia. In fact, every theory of culture, every theory of society, the whole conglomeration of symbolic systems-everything, that is, that’s spoken, everything that’s organized as discourse, art, religion, the family, language, everything that seizes us, everything that acts on us-it is all ordered around hierarchical oppositions that come back to the man/woman opposition, an opposition that can only be sustained by means of difference posed by cultural discourse as “natural,� the difference between activity and passivity. (Cixous, 44)
I want to begin by saying that there are a lot of things I would like to say about this film, but with respect to the assignment, I will try and contain this within the realm of the question at hand. I chose the quote from Cixous as an entry point into the understanding of the dynamics that were played out in Searching for Angela Shelton. I think the idea of a woman searching for other women who have had experiences like her own is a natural human instinct as a way of healing. However, in context to what the film was about, Angela Shelton searching for other Angela Shelton’s and discussing rape and sexual abuse, I was hard pressed to find her motives and follow through successful or helpful. I think that Angela Shelton used the cultural discourse and the use of dualisms towards Man/Woman as a way to fuel her journey.
I believe that Angela Shelton, with the use of “natural� cultural discourse towards Man/Woman, that she supported the idea that men and women are not equal and therefore men are the only beings capable of inflicting such vile acts upon another (women). That her father was responsible but that her step-mother was only a product of her father’s lust. That the real culprits were her father and step-brother, these were the true perpetrators. She blindly side stepped the idea that blame shall lie where blame is deserved and that is on everybody who perpetrated the assaults. The way in which I viewed the film I felt that she gave the power back to her assailants.
When Angela Shelton met with her father, she granted him the ability of denial. She granted him the opportunity to demean her again, and all that she did in return was roll her eyes. While throughout the entire film the point was to confront and conquer a lifetime of tragedy, she took the opportunity of confrontation and let it go.
Now in terms of her relationship towards (and I think it was towards and not with) the other Angela Shelton’s, I believe that she truly found a way to disrupt the system. That somehow they would all have similar stories. And while it’s true that many of them did in fact share common experiences, she made their stories under her own. Also, she only used their stories to tell her own, and not the other way around as would be expected. They were minute vehicles to her ultimate “salvation� from her afflictions.
And in the end: she was saved. The “original� Angela Shelton was redeemed from all evil and all past situations. Which I highly doubt wasn’t a ploy for a better plot. Things aren’t so quickly fixed in life.