Tears, melodrama and ‘heterosensibility’ in Letter from an Unknown Woman PANSY DUNCAN In the course of an engaging discussion of maternal melodrama, Brett Farmer offers a brief precis of a scene from the memorable gay coming-of- age drama The Fruit Machine (Philip Saville, 1988). 1 As Farmer describes it, the scene positions the young gay male protagonist and his mother in front of the classic romantic melodrama Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), and becomes witness to the spectacle of their tearful, absorbed response: after a tender embrace, ‘the two … continue to watch together, enraptured and in tears, as the final scene of this famous film, loved by generations of women and gay men alike, plays itself out …’. 2 For Farmer, what merits consideration here is the contiguity the scene sets up between the two figures’ viewing practices. By situating the prototypical gay male protagonist’s viewing practices in intense emotional and spatial proximity to those of the mother, the film locates the origin of gay spectatorship in the cultural cradle of maternal instruction. Yet what magnetizes my interest is less the causal relation than the resemblance between the two practices, a resemblance suggested by Farmer’s reference to ‘generations of women and gay men alike’. The spectatorial customs of the straight middle-aged woman and the young homosexual male vis-a-vis melodrama have acquired very different cultural connotations within the various theoretical projects to which they have been conscripted. While queer theory has recruited the gay spectator of melodrama as an icon for the subversive, recuperatory practice of ‘reading against the grain’, the female spectator of melodrama emblematizes, for much feminist theory, if 1 Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 151–97. 2 Ibid., p. 151. 173 Screen 52:2 Summer 2011 © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/screen/hjr005 at University of Auckland on April 19, 2014 http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from