Page 103 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

88 Lotte Hoek

both ways. It could revel in the entertainment values associated with black
popular performers like Dandridge, Bailey, and Belafonte while enjoying
the cultural pedigree offered both by Bizet and by classically trained opera
singers. (38)

Smith thus shows how in the production of Carmen Jones, and specifically
in its dubbing choices, the matching of particular bodies and voices followed
a cultural logic that valued these bodies and voices in different ways.
I would suggest that the combination made in Carmen Jones, a phan-
tasmatic body produced out of black bodies and Bizet, combined the
explicit association of the black body with physicality and immanence (sex
and jazz), with a culturally prestigious, and transcendent, form like opera.
The phantasmatic body produced is not only one that domesticates the
black body for consumption but in its linking to opera makes it desirable.
In the combination of Shima and Jenny too, what is most important for
producers is not merely that they reproduce the dominant fiction on screen.
Rather, it is from the ideal type that they produce an erotic fantasy. From
the dominant aesthetic expectations for the public presence of women, as
outlined in the previous section, not only the ideal is produced, but also
the ideal fantasy object for male heterosexual desire. Jenny and Shima con-
stitute together what cannot be in real life, the fantasy woman of contem-
porary Bangladeshi cinema: inordinately wealthy, with a middle-class
upbringing and education, as well as a tendency toward nudity. It is this
fantasy woman that the producers of Bangladeshi cinema tend to recreate
again and again, often by means of Jenny and her colleagues. It is exactly
the respectable middle-class woman, difficult to approach in real life,
which fuels erotic fantasy and desire. It is the notion of perfect composure
that suggests the possibility of its very transgression.
The combination of Jenny and Shima produced a cinematic form that
film producers consider successful with the imagined working-class audi-
ences in the rural areas. Jenny and Shima were purposefully brought
together by film directors. Against the imaginary backdrop of a working-
class audience for their films, the scenes sketched in Bangladeshi commer-
cial cinema are marked by images of modern middle-class prosperity.

Besides luxurious living rooms, big cars, and television screens, the markers
of this wealth and status are imprinted on the women in the films. Wearing
georgette shalwar kameezes with heavy embroidery, cell phones in hand,
these characters are students of city colleges and spend their days drinking
Coke in amusement parks. They become the signs of modernity and mid-
dle-class prosperity. Aurally, this is represented by Shima’s voice. However,
this fantasy is not only admirable. A crucial element in the construction of
these female characters is their sexual corruption. The mise-en-scène of the