REPEAT PERFORMANCE and the Assignation of Blame

Having shot her husband Barney (Louis Hayward, Walk a Crooked Mile) on the stroke of midnight, Joan (Sheila Page, The Hard Way) seeks the counsel of her friend William (Richard Basehart, House on Telegraph Hill). She’s had a most unpleasant year: she and Barney had gone to England, where he’d ended up shacked up with playwright Paula and sinking into alcoholism, a downward spiral that resulted in his shooting at her hands. If only, Joan supposes, they’d not gone to England. Everything would have been fine. She’d love to be able to live the year over again.

William vanishes. Joan continues to her destination: the home of playwright John (Tom Conway, Cat People), who’s hosting a party. But when she arrives, he’s confused by this notion, believing Joan and Barney are hosting the party. Over the course of the conversation, Joan comes to the realisation that it’s no longer just after midnight on January 1, 1947. It’s just after midnight on January 1, 1946. Her wish to live the year over has come true.

Delighted by this turn of events she returns home to find Barney alive, and guests beginning to arrive for their party. She resolves not to go to England, but that proves not to be much of a solution to anything: intending to go to a party on the floor below, Paula (Virginia Field, Dance, Girl, Dance) ends up at Joan and Barney’s by mistake, is invited in, and immediately hits it off with Barney. Also showing up at the party is a Mrs. Shaw (Natalie Schafer, Secret Beyond the Door…), who will go on to commit William to an insane asylum.

Noir is known for its fatalism, and nowhere in the canon is it more bluntly handled than the shot of Joan, after getting into a spat with Paula, surrounded by other guests demanding to know just why she had seemed to take such an immediate dislike to the newcomer. You can see it sinking in: she can’t win. Fate will out, Paula has arrived and the wheels are in motion for the same New Year’s Eve that played out the first time. So she decides instead to go to California with Barney. She turns down a great role in Paula’s play when the opportunity arises. She does everything in her power to hold on to Barney, even as he spirals right back into alcoholism and is rarely seen without Paula at his side.

Many reviews on here express confusion as to what it is that Joan sees in Barney, and thus a lack of investment in the entire plot, but that rather misses the point. Joan’s initial belief is that it was Paula who dragged her relationship, and Barney, into the mud. She sees Paula as a corrupting influence, taking away the “good” Barney who existed before, and replacing him with a version she had corrupted. Without her, the “good” version of Barney would have continued to exist, and their marriage would have been a happy one.

Were Barney to slide into a torrid alcoholic affair with a different woman on the second go-round, perhaps Joan would have begun earlier to question her premise. Instead, she gets tunnel vision: Paula bad, Paula corrupting, Paula ruining marriage. Oh no, Paula.

Much is said in the film of the mechanisms by which fate forces its hand on the world, ensuring things move to end with which they are supposed to meet, and this confrontational framing is one of them. To the extent Joan shifts her mindset at all, it becomes less about saving her relationship for its own sake than simply defeating a fate which seems determined to get one over on her. But any attempt she makes to assert herself is doomed to fail because it is that very attempt which allows fate to work its magic.

That the only winning move is not to play, as it were, is of course obvious from the outside, but the sense of victory cannot be attained in such a fashion. Even ignoring the realities of life for a divorced woman in the 1940s—which is in some ways fair, because they’re never cited as a reason for Joan being determined to maintain her marriage, although not stating them out loud doesn’t mean they aren’t on her mind—simply abandoning Barney to Paula and moving on still represents a loss of the “good” Barney, victory for the evil manipulative Paula, and fate achieving its end of allowing them to get one over on Joan.

I’ve spoken about “girlboss feminism” or “girlboss capitalism” in my writing on Blue Steel and Baby Face, and Repeat Performance has hints of that ethos as well. The critique of “girlboss” feminism is that the success of individual women in “getting one over” on the patriarchal system by becoming successful within its confines does little to help the majority of women and nothing to hurt the system within which that one woman managed to succeed. The downfall of the protagonists of Blue Steel and Baby Face is necessary not because the system must tear down women and punish them for their feminism, but because they’re trying to defeat patriarchal capitalism by succeeding at patriarchal capitalism, an obvious absurdity doomed to failure.

Similarly, in Repeat Performance, Joan fails not because the system is immune to challenge, but because she confronts it on its own terms. Trying to defeat fate within fate’s own paradigms is no more fruitful an endeavor than trying to defeat patriarchal capitalism within its own paradigms. But one of the mechanisms of success both frameworks have is their ability to trap people within them and prevent them from imagining other ways things could be.

Drawing on an even wider framework, it mirrors the way those in power set those without power against each other, to distract them from the ones pulling the strings. The reason you lost your job isn’t the billionaire CEO who wanted to cut costs so an imaginary number would go up. The reason you lost your job is the immigrant who would work for cheaper. You should be angry at the immigrants, and ignore the billionaire behind the curtain. In his book “Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field,” Howard Bryant observes that “[h]ating labor and labor unions is America’s unofficial pastime,”¹ citing multiple examples of even multimillionaire professional athletes turning on their own rather than confronting those with the money and the power:

This may seem like a counterexample: if fate is the entity with the power, then focusing her ire on it rather than the powerless humans is the right move, contrary to my earlier suggestion that the right move is to not get involved. But this is where we move from fate as an abstract concept, a metaphor for the patriarchy, to the patriarchy itself: under this framework it is Barney, as a man, who has the power. He expresses that power by blatantly romancing Paula for all the world to see, even as he’s married to Joan. Joan’s response to this is to get mad at Paula, and blame her for what’s happening, instead of directing her ire at Barney, the result of which would be her exiting fate’s little game and defeating it in the process.

1  Bryant, Howard. Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field. eBook, Beacon Press, 2020. p 11.

2  Bryant p 14

3  Bryant p 15