Cinema, Gender, and Everyday Space: Comedy, Italian Style

By Natalie Fullwood

Commedia all'italiana, or Comedy, Italian style, became popular at a time of great social change. This book, utilizing comedies produced in Italy from 1958-70, examines the genre's representation of gender in the everyday spaces of beaches and nightclubs, offices, cars, and kitchens, through the exploration of key spatial motifs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781137403575

Book preview

Cinema, Gender, and Everyday Space

Comedy, Italian Style

Natalie Fullwood

CINEMA, GENDER, AND EVERYDAY SPACE

Copyright © Natalie Fullwood, 2015.

All rights reserved.

Figure 3.6 © IL MONDO/RCS Archive

Figures 4.3, 5.1 and 5.13 used with kind permission of the Archivio storico eni, eni spa

First published in 2015 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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ISBN: 978–1–137–40356–8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fullwood, Natalie.

Cinema, gender, and everyday space : comedy, Italian style / Natalie Fullwood.

    pages cm — (Screening Spaces series)

Introduction: Gender, Space and Comedy, Italian Style—Contexts. Cinema, Space, Gender—Comedy, Italian Style—Spaces. Bodies, Bikinis and Bras: Beaches and Nightclubs in Comedy, Italian Style—Masculinity at Work: Offices in Comedy, Italian Style—Driving Passions: Cars in Comedy, Italian Style—Recipe for Change: Kitchens in Comedy, Italian Style Conclusion.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–1–137–40356–8

 1. Comedy films—Italy—History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures—Italy—History—20th century. 3. Sex role in motion pictures. 4. Space in motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1995.9.C55F86 2015

791.43′6170945—dc23                                     2014035666

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: March 2015

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Gender, Space, and Comedy, Italian Style

Part I   Contexts

Chapter 1

Cinema, Space, Gender

Chapter 2

Comedy, Italian Style

Part II   Spaces

Chapter 3

Bodies, Bikinis, and Bras: Beaches and Nightclubs in Comedy, Italian Style

Chapter 4

Masculinity at Work: Offices in Comedy, Italian Style

Chapter 5

Driving Passions: Cars in Comedy, Italian Style

Chapter 6

Recipe for Change: Kitchens in Comedy, Italian Style

Conclusion

Notes

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

Figures

3.1 Il ferragosto degli italiani: dream vs. reality. Le ore , August 22, 1963

3.2 Crowded beaches

3.3 The bikini

3.4 Looking at the bikini

3.5 Nightclub performance

3.6 Press coverage of Frenesia dell’estate . Il mondo , November 12, 1963, p. 19

4.1 The old-fashioned executive office

4.2 The modern executive office

4.3 Monti menswear advert. Oggi , June 20, 1963, p. 37

4.4 The open plan office

4.5 Kaloderma moisturizer advert. Oggi , May 25, 1961, p. 58

4.6 L’impiegato. The office makeover: before and after

5.1 AGIP petrol advert. Epoca , December 8, 1963, p. 184. Every day the pride of a new car

5.2 The car radio

5.3 The traffic jam

5.4 La domenica delle nonne. Le ore , July 18, 1963, p. 58

5.5 The two-shot through the windscreen 1

5.6 The two-shot through the windscreen 2

5.7 The two-shot through the windscreen 3

5.8 The two-shot through the windscreen 4

5.9 The two-shot through the windscreen 5

5.10 Gassman and Mayniel paparazzi two-shot. Le ore , November 21, 1963, p. 72

5.11 A cavallo della tigre : inclusion and exclusion through the windscreen

5.12 Motorized shot/reverse-shot

5.13 AGIP petrol advert. Epoca , April 28, 1963, p. 148

6.1 The modern kitchen

6.2 The kitchen in the rear of the frame

6.3 The maid in the rear of the frame

6.4 Il maestro di Vigevano . Sordi’s housework

6.5 Vedo nudo . Men at work in the kitchen

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the support of a number of people and institutions. The research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and I am grateful to Newnham College and the Department of Italian at the University of Cambridge for funding a research trip to Rome, essential to the book’s completion. In Rome, I would like to extend my thanks to the Emeroteca staff at the Biblioteca Nazionale (and the tortoise), to the staff at the Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini, to the staff at the two RAI libraries in Rome, and to the staff of the Sala di Lettura at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato; all lent their help and expert knowledge in ways that have been invaluable to the project.

I am grateful to RCS MediaGroup for permission to use the image from Il mondo. Thanks are also due to the Archivio Storico eni for their permission to use the images from eni and Monti advertising campaigns.

I would like to thank Robyn Curtis, Erica Buchman, and Mark Rinaldi at Palgrave MacMillan for their patience and expertise in steering the book to completion. Thanks also are due to series editor Pamela Robertson Wojcik for her judicious advice during the process, and for her championing of all things cinema and space related.

Elements of the book have previously appeared in other forms. Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in the article "Commedie al femminile: The Gendering of Space in Three Films by Antonio Pietrangeli," Italian Studies, 65 (1), 2010, pp. 85–106. Sections of Chapter 2 appeared in the article "Popular Italian Cinema, the Media and the Economic Miracle: Rethinking Commedia all’italiana," Modern Italy, 18(1), 2013, pp. 19–39.

Parts of the book have been presented at a variety of institutions, including the Universities of Notre Dame, Cambridge, Southampton, Durham, Exeter, and Bristol, and at CineRoma, the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Seminar. I am extremely grateful to those who invited me, and to all the staff and students who attended with such thought-provoking questions. I am fortunate to have had the support of a variety of friends and colleagues whose lively discussions about Italian cinema, space, and many other things made the process so much more pleasurable. You are too many to name here, but every single conversation has helped me along the way; thank you. Thanks in particular are due to Zyg Barański, Fiona Handyside, Danielle Hipkins, Ellen Nerenberg, Paolo Noto, Alan O’Leary, Catherine O’Rawe, and John David Rhodes for feedback on work in progress at various stages of the project. Special thanks are due to Robert Gordon, who supervised the doctoral project on which the book is based. His insight, advice, and support over the years have been invaluable. While I am lucky to have had the assistance of these colleagues and many more, needless to say, any eventual errors remain my own.

Finally, thanks are due to Chris, to whom this book is dedicated: for the time and space, and everything else.

Introduction

Gender, Space, and Comedy, Italian Style

The 1968 comedy Il profeta (The Prophet), starring Vittorio Gassman and directed by Dino Risi, tells the story of a non-conformist.¹ Pietro (Gassman) has rejected the fast-paced, modern consumer lifestyle of 1960s Italy to become a mountain-dwelling hermit. At the start of the film, Pietro returns to Rome as a counterculture figure, promoting vegetarianism, staging protests against traffic, and living with a group of young hippies in a camp. If Pietro is highly critical of modern consumer lifestyles, he nonetheless struggles to resist them, and the film shows him being slowly drawn back into the very consumer practices he had previously rejected. Although set in 1968, the film includes a flashback sequence describing Pietro’s life five years before, in 1963. The flashback sequence represents a wryly critical image of modernized, consumeristic everyday life in 1960s Italy: a routine and unfulfilling office job, a home filled with gadgets and TV dinners, overcrowded restaurants and beaches, chaotic state bureaucracy, the endless cacophony of traffic jams. The flashback sequence is accompanied by Pietro’s voiceover, which, with clipped irony, bemoans the drawbacks of modern life. He grumbles about his mindless office job with its constant surveillance, he moans about his expensive kitchen where his wife prepared him underwhelming meals to eat in front of the television, and he lists the stresses of Sunday trips to crammed beaches. He describes the exact moment when he decided to turn his back on modern living: Sunday, July 25, 1963, when he and his wife were stuck for two hours in a traffic jam on the way home from one of their beach trips.

In the flashback in Il profeta, Pietro’s voiceover accompanies a montage that shows the spaces of his past everyday life: his home, his car, his office, and the beach that he visited with the wife he abandoned. This book will present a similar montage of spaces, offering an analysis of the changing spaces of everyday life in 1960s Italy as viewed through the lens of the popular comedy genre known as Comedy, Italian Style or commedia all’italiana. My central focus is the comedies’ representation of space and gender. For Pietro in Il profeta, his identity is bound up with the space of the car; his success at being a modern man is expressed through his relationship with cars. His former self, as a modest office worker trapped in an open plan office, ended up in a mediocre car trapped in a traffic jam. As a successful businessman five years later, he speeds along in a flashy Iso Grifo convertible. If the film associates Pietro’s masculinity with cars, his wife’s identity, on the other hand, is associated with the kitchen. For Pietro, his modern kitchen, although paid for by him, was a space for his wife. The gendered geography of the home is reinforced by the cinematography, as the image cuts between Pietro in the living room, and his wife working in the kitchen next door, which he never enters.

This book explores two interlinked concerns: cinema, gender, and everyday space on the one hand, and Comedy, Italian Style on the other. I explore the relationship between space and gender in cinema, and how we might think about the links between cinematic representation and wider historical processes. At the same time, the book is also an examination of a key genre in Italian film history, seen from the perspective of its representation of space. In the book’s first two chapters, I look at each of these spheres of enquiry in more depth. In this brief introductory chapter, I set out the book’s key reasons for bringing the two together.

Il profeta’s attention to the everyday realities of its protagonist is typical of Comedy, Italian Style. There has been much debate over the definition and parameters of the genre, but for the purposes of this study, I define Comedy, Italian Style as a series of comedies made in the period of 1958–70 associated with a core group of directors, screenwriters, and actors. The genre was a defining moment in Italian popular culture. It had huge commercial success, its actors became iconic figures in Italy who are still well known today long after their deaths, and it left a lasting legacy for the generations of Italian comic filmmakers who followed it. Il profeta is a star vehicle which focuses on the comic performance of Vittorio Gassman. The five-and-a-half-minute long flashback sequence where he describes his former consumerist lifestyle is told entirely from his character’s perspective and is accompanied throughout by Gassman’s fast-paced, witty monologue. This use of a central comic star is typical of the genre. Much of Comedy, Italian Style is a form of comedian comedy, and the genre was predominantly structured around the star performances of (usually male) comedians, especially the four key stars associated with the genre: Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Alberto Sordi, and Ugo Tognazzi. As the attention to Pietro’s home, work, and leisure life in Il profeta suggests, the films were comedies of everyday life. They tended to use everyday settings and took much of their comedy from an everyman protagonist trying, but often comically failing, to cope with the changing nature of a modernizing Italy.

Gassman’s character in Il profeta runs the whole gamut from a full-blown consumerist lifestyle to hermithood and back again. The beginning of the end for Gassman’s anti-conformist persona in Il profeta comes when he sells out to make a television advert to buy an expensive present for his young girlfriend. In perhaps one of the most defining features of the entire genre, sex is associated with consumption. Access to affluent, consumerist lifestyles is equated with access to sex and, in their often desperate pursuit of the latter, Comedy, Italian Style’s male characters must accommodate the former. Selling out to get the—any—girl takes precedence over other moral imperatives and repeatedly requires characters to make sacrifices in other areas of their masculine identity; but these sacrifices are often futile. If the genre is a comedy of sex and consumption, it is also a comedy of masculine failure. In Il profeta, Gassman’s girlfriend leaves him for someone else before he even gets to deliver the gift. Faced with the prospect of returning to his mountaintop retreat, he chooses instead to stay in Rome and continue the process of selling out, which started with the advert. He ends the film as the owner of a successful restaurant called The Hermit’s Inn, which capitalizes on his former counterculture self. We see him driving aggressively to work in his luxury sports car over the same bridge where he had earlier staged an anti-motorization protest. The film is typical of Comedy, Italian Style’s ambivalence toward the society it depicts. Although there are moments that show the drawbacks of modern life, rather than a critique of consumption, the film is a comic treatment of the difficulty of critique itself. It also, crucially, posits sex as a complicating factor in modern man’s attempts to get by in a modernizing Italy.

Comedy, Italian Style and Italy’s postwar modernization go hand in hand. The genre was one of Italian popular culture’s most sustained and enduring responses to the intense phase of social change which Italy experienced in the 1960s. The catalyst for this swift and far-reaching change was the period of rapid economic growth from 1958 to 1963, which has come to be known as the economic miracle or the boom. To use the words of Perry Willson, Italy, of course, was not the only European nation to experience growth in this period but the backwardness of its economy at the start and the rapidity of change made its experience a particularly dramatic one (2010: 112). This was a period in which mass internal migration transformed the demographics of Italian villages, towns, and cities, as labor from rural areas moved to the growing industries of northern cities. Mass motorization, mass tourism, increased production and consumption of a variety of consumer goods, especially electrical appliances, and a move away from the predominantly agricultural economy that had characterized Italy for centuries, all altered everyday life for millions of Italians, changing everyday experiences and impacting on family roles and structures. Although the traditional structures of marriage and the family remained largely intact during the period, attitudes to gender roles and sexuality were nonetheless changing. The period under discussion in this book saw gradual changes to attitudes to gender roles, which laid the foundation for the consolidation of Italian second-wave feminism in the 1970s. If the 70s saw the legalization of divorce (1970), the reform of family law to make both partners in a marriage equal before the law (1975), and the legalization of abortion (1978), the 1960s saw the social and cultural changes that paved the way for these institutional reforms. Writing about divorce and family law reform, Chiara Saraceno argues that the subsequent changes in legislation [ . . . ] were as much the consequence of changed behaviours as they were the cause of further cultural and behavioural changes (2004: 48). There was certainly an increasing gap in the period, as Perry Willson puts it, between official discourse about sexuality, still largely governed by Church morality and the honour code, and the attitude of many Italians (2010: 125). Many of the gendered tensions in Comedy, Italian Style explore this gap between the pressures for change, and the demands of traditional, patriarchal gender relations.

A crucial feature of Italy’s experience of social change was the way in which it was played out across the media. Representations were at the heart of the social changes associated with the economic miracle. There was a rapid growth in the media during these years, especially a marked rise in advertising. For example, sales of weekly entertainment magazines grew and their advertising content increased significantly. The media sphere also became more diversified and complex as television was launched in 1954 and became available across the entire Italian peninsula by 1957, the year when television advertising also started. Television grew rapidly in popularity and, in later decades, would challenge cinema’s place as the leading mass media outlet but, at least in the 1960s, cinema retained its important place in Italy’s media landscape. Peter Bondanella has called the decade between 1958 and 1968 the golden age of Italian cinema (2001: 142). This decade saw unprecedented levels of films produced by Italian companies. At the same time, although audience numbers were declining after reaching their historical peak in the 1950s, they were still relatively robust and were declining at a much slower rate than elsewhere in Europe. The number of films imported from America declined during this period, and Italian films began to take a larger overall share of box office receipts. An internationally renowned auteur cinema produced by the likes of Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini, and Visconti coexisted (and intermingled) with a vibrant industrial base of genre production, especially comedy, but also spaghetti westerns, sword and sandal epics, cop thrillers, and horror films.

Television, print media, advertising, and the cinema all mediated the boom. If Italy was heading toward mass consumer culture in these years, the media produced images of what a modern, Italian everyday life might look like. The boom was certainly inspiration for Comedy, Italian Style screenwriters. The comedies represented average Italians relaxing at beaches, working in modern offices, driving cars, and owning fridges. However, the crucial point is that, like representations in other media, this film genre was representing these practices at the same time as they were establishing themselves as part of everyday life in Italy. The films’ images were not after-the-fact reflections of already established social realities. When Pietro in Il profeta moans about his modern kitchen full of electrical appliances, he was in fact bemoaning an everyday reality which was still far from accessible for many Italians. In running ahead of the pace of change in this way, Comedy, Italian Style, like many media representations, modeled modern spaces and practices. One of the central concerns of this book is to explore how the genre incorporated ideas of gender into these models of a modernized everyday life.

Cinema is an art of space. It takes three-dimensional, profilmic spaces in the world—whether these are locations or studio-based sets—and turns them into the two-dimensional, fictional, filmic space of the cinematic image. I am interested in both profilmic and filmic spaces: the types of spaces chosen for settings, but also the technical choices made about how to film them as cinematic images. More specifically, I am interested in exploring how ideas of gender affect profilmic and filmic spaces, and the relationship between the two. How do a character’s gender positions affect the type of spaces in which they appear and move within a cinematic narrative? Do different spaces mobilize different filming conventions depending upon a character’s gender presentations? How might wider ideas about the gendered meaning of certain spaces feed into—and be influenced by—the spaces represented in the cinema? Films construct fictional spaces, but they also construct ideas and practices of gender. My core argument is that these two ideas are inherently interlinked: that cinema constructs gender through its use of space, and vice versa.

In this book, I look at spaces that I have termed everyday spaces: the beach, the nightclub, the office, the car, and the kitchen. I use the term everyday primarily to signal scale. Rather than the larger, macro spaces of continent, nation, region, or city, I am concerned with the smaller scale spaces of everyday experiences. The spaces I discuss are those which occur most frequently across the breadth of Comedy, Italian Style. It is no coincidence that they were all also iconic spaces of everyday life associated with the economic miracle, which were being heavily mediated in other spheres as well. The fact that the comedies represent the beach as a routine part of characters’ lives, a holiday space perhaps more readily associated with a break from the everyday, gives a sense of the kind of consumerist lifestyle the genre represents. They are also spaces that take on particular gendered inflections across the genre. While the leisure spaces of beaches and nightclubs and the domestic space of the kitchen are particularly associated with femininity, the spaces of the office and the car are the primary sites that the genre uses in its construction of masculinity.

Comedy, Italian Style offers a rich vein of material to explore the relationship between gender and space in cinema. Alongside its concern with everyday life, the vast majority of the comedies include narratives about sex, couples, or marriage. As such, issues of gender and sexuality take center stage. It was a genre with dominant themes of everyday life and gender relations, produced at a time of intense social change when gender roles, everyday spaces, and the practices associated with them were experiencing profound changes, and when these changes were being played out first and foremost through media representations such as those of Comedy, Italian Style. The genre thus presents a fascinating opportunity to see the complex relationship between cinema and social change in action. By focusing on this representation of space and gender, I hope to examine the genre’s specific take on Italy’s modernization, and explore how ideas of gender were inextricably bound up with its representation of the changing spaces of everyday life.

The book lies at the intersection of film studies and Italian studies and is aimed at readers interested in both these fields and beyond. I have purposefully tried to balance the concerns of both disciplines. Indeed, one of the book’s primary aims is to make the case for what can be achieved when we combine the two. The structure of the book’s opening chapters partly speaks to the different fields which inform my enquiry. The book is divided into two sections: contexts and spaces. The two chapters in the contexts section take up, in more depth, the issues of gender and space in cinema, and the subject of Comedy, Italian Style. In chapter 1, I set out the theoretical framework linking cinema, space, and gender that informs my thinking, focusing on the 1959 film Il moralista (The Moralist). The chapter brings together Henri Lefebvre’s ideas of space and feminist geographer Doreen Massey’s application of these ideas to gender in order to explore how space and gender are interdependent constructs. It draws on film theorists, including André Gardies, Laura Mulvey, and Giuliana Bruno, to apply these ideas of space and gender to the cinema, arguing that cinematic representation provides a key example of how the interlinked constructs of space and gender are negotiated. Chapter 2 explores Comedy, Italian Style, its place in the Italian film industry in the 1960s, and its relationship to other media industries. Taking an approach focusing on stars, I look at the industrial, historical, and aesthetic features that define the genre and I examine its critical reception. The chapter argues that the majority of writing on the genre focuses on a restricted canon of classics, which has left us with a rather narrow understanding of its relationship to contemporary Italian society. In particular, there has been a tendency to focus on films which critiqued social change, in a critical paradigm inherited from the legacy of the neorealist cinema of the 1940s, ignoring the much wider bulk of the genre that did not explicitly engage in social critique, but which nonetheless, when viewed from a gendered perspective, offers up a fascinating array of responses to Italy’s experience of social change.

The rest of the book addresses individual everyday spaces. Chapter 3 takes up the representation of beaches and nightclubs, two leisure spaces where greater levels of nudity were permitted than elsewhere in Italian society, and discusses the way in which the comedies use space to organize scenes of female nudity. Through a discussion of striptease scenes in Frenesia dell"estate (Summer Frenzy, 1964) performed by a group of trans characters, the chapter highlights the precarious nature of the male/female sex binary on which the majority of the genre pivots. Chapters 4 and 5 both address spaces in which masculinity is principally at stake in the comedies. Chapter 4 discusses the representation of the office. I draw parallels between the changing representation of offices in the comedies and changing models of contemporary Italian masculinity. The extent to which the office is figured as a predominantly male space is revealed by L’impiegato (The Employee, 1959), a film that features a rare example of a female manager who is employed to modernize an antiquated office staffed by resistant male employees. Chapter 5 takes up the representation of the car and its links with masculinity. It focuses on the tension between the car as movement in driving sequences and the car as stasis in frequent scenes of traffic jams. It also explores how the car becomes sexualized in its representation as a mobile bedroom. Through readings of scenes in films including Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961), Il maestro di Vigevano (The Teacher From Vigevano, 1963), and Se permettete parliamo di donne (Let’s Talk About Women, 1964), which show men failing to have sex in cars, the chapter examines how male sexual success becomes associated with movement in cars, while male sexual failure becomes associated with stasis. Finally, chapter 6 examines the kitchen, analyzing how the comedies’ representation of women’s roles in the kitchen as traditional and unchanging existed in difficult tension with the material modernization of the space itself. The chapter examines the representation of maids to explore how the kitchen is also a site where issues of gender and class intersect. Finally, through a discussion of kitchen role reversal scenes in films including Il maestro di Vigevano, I nostri mariti (Our Husbands, 1966), I cuori infranti (Broken Hearts, 1963), and Vedo nudo (I See Naked, 1969), it discusses representations of men working in the kitchen. These scenes depart from the overwhelming norms across the rest of the genre—and Italian media more widely—that characterized the kitchen as almost exclusively female.

For my case studies on the individual spaces, I have drawn on a corpus of over 150 Comedy, Italian Style films produced in the period 1958–1970.² This broad corpus allows me to identify recurring spatial tropes and to explore how ideas of gender and space are constructed across an individual genre during a given period of time. In making these spatial links across the genre, I operate predominantly at the level of the narrative segment or the individual scene, set in a certain space. In his work on early 1950s Italian cinema, Paolo Noto has argued that Italian films in these years were characterized by a series of narrative attractions—especially comic sketches or musical numbers—which circulated from film to film. As he puts it, In these films the narrative is largely a pretext to combine individual cinematic units [cellule spettacolari autonome], which could be assembled together as a series of modules and could be reused from one film to another (2011: 122).³ The narratives of 1960s Italian comedies are much more carefully crafted than this, but Noto’s ideas are nonetheless suggestive for my analysis. I pick out the individual cinematic units in Comedy, Italian Style films that focus on certain spaces. Although integrated differently into narratives, scenes set in beaches or nightclubs, offices, cars, and kitchens appear from film to film and create a shared imagery of everyday life across the genre. By bringing together large numbers of these scenes from different films, I can explore how gendered meanings accrue to the spaces through repetition and accumulation of imagery. Although I make occasional close readings of entire films, my close cinematic analysis concentrates more on teasing out patterns in the genre’s spatial iconography. As far as possible, I have used as many images as practical considerations allowed, in order to illustrate the genre’s spatial tropes.

I would argue that working with a wide corpus offers significant advantages over most previous accounts of Comedy, Italian Style, but it also presents the challenge of how to talk about such a disparate group of cultural products, which contain a range of different styles, practices, narratives, situations, and attitudes. My approach has been to make generalizations about commonly recurring characteristics, particularly iconography and spatial configurations that are repeated in at least ten films, although usually a lot more. Inevitably, there are exceptions to these commonly recurring configurations. I dwell on these exceptions when they reveal inconsistencies with or shed light on the assumptions behind the more generalized pattern. These zones of tension