"KIDDER'S ROLE IN BRIAN DE PALMA'S SISTERS IS CENTRAL TO THIS RE-EVALUATION"
Margot Kidder is the focus of the latest essay in a series called "Double Exposure," posted at Medium today, by The Quiet Axis. Here's a brief excerpt:
What is Double Exposure? Double Exposure is an ongoing Quiet Axis series that reconsiders the public images of actors whose most complex work has been overlooked, misread, or flattened by history. Drawing on psychoanalytic and film theory, each entry reframes a career not through fame or downfall, but through the roles that disrupted coherence — formally, emotionally, culturally. These are not tributes. They are reclassifications.Margot Kidder is remembered as Lois Lane — sharp, quick-witted, and iconic. Yet that image, cemented by the 1978 Superman and its sequels, overshadows a different trajectory: one marked by fractured performances, destabilising roles, and a refusal to conform to coherent femininity. The dominant narrative — fame, decline, disappearance — is not just reductive. It reflects a deeper structural failure in cinema’s cultural memory. Kidder’s most radical work — formally and psychologically — has been omitted from her legacy not because it lacked substance, but because it threatened the frameworks through which we remember women on screen. This essay argues that Margot Kidder’s career exposes the limitations of critical and cultural systems that favour legibility, coherence, and control. Her performances, rich with instability and layered contradiction, demand a re-evaluation of how we process female complexity in film.
Kidder’s role in Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1972) is central to this re-evaluation. Playing conjoined twins Danielle and Dominique, Kidder inhabits a narrative of bodily fragmentation, voyeurism, and erasure. The film’s surface may be pulp, but her performance is anything but shallow. She doesn’t simply switch between two characters; she fractures, spills, collapses. Her voice slips between registers; her gestures oscillate between seduction and disorientation. In a genre that often reduces women to victims or threats, Kidder plays both — and neither. She resists categorisation.
Theoretical frameworks deepen our understanding of what Kidder is doing here. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) famously argues that classical cinema renders women as passive objects of the male gaze. Yet in Sisters, the gaze is anything but stable. De Palma disorients the spectator’s position. Kidder’s body provokes surveillance but also disrupts it. She cannot be fully possessed by the camera. Barbara Creed’s concept of the “monstrous-feminine” applies here: Kidder’s character(s) embody the cultural fear of female multiplicity, of women who do not resolve into one.
Read the rest at Medium.