Digital Media Shapes Human Representation - Film Stepford Wives - Assignment Example

Digital Media Shapes Human Representation: Case Study of the Film “Stepford Wives” 2009 The digital media has variously used technology to represent humans but in most cases have imbued the cultural and societal elements in such representations. Technology not only allows creativity to flow but the sub-conscious nature of the creative process also uses the cultural parameters that are prevalent of the times. While the first media age was concerned primarily with the mass media, that is broadcast media, the “second media age”, proposed by Poster (1995), has encompassed the digital media that has formed ideas based on prevalent culture. Modern study of cultural interpretations of embodiment focuses on gender and on gender relations, including its dynamics, and questions regarding its transformation processes (the context and the politics behind such changes), the ways such changes are used and for what reason. Michel Foucault was perhaps the first to study the gender scenarios motivating the social practices and cultural products shaping daily lives. In his philosophical works like Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault stressed that the body and sexuality are cultural concepts rather than natural occurrences playing an important role in the feminist analysis of essentialism. In what he called a 'genealogical' study, a kind of analytical history trying to analyze 'the present time, and of what we are, in this very moment' in order 'to question … what is postulated as self-evident … to dissipate what is familiar and accepted' (Foucault 1988a: 265). Foucault proposed that in modern society the conduct of individuals and groups is more and more insidiously regulated through scales of regularity dealt out by various measures, diagnostic, predictive and conventional knowledge such as criminology, medicine, psychology and psychotherapy. Modern individuals, become the agents of their own 'normalization' so far as they are put through, and are given to the classifications and standards disseminated by scientific and organizational discussions professing to divulge the 'truth' of their identities. Modern disciplinary society can, as a result, be restrained directly because social control is attained through finer tactics of normalization, through self-control of “normalized” persons (Foucault, iep.utm.edu). Foucault’s idea that the body and sexuality are cultural creations has attracted the modern gender theorists by relating power with and the body. Following the Foucauldian premise, feminist theorists have forwarded gender studies on the basis of subjectivity and defiance. Postmodernism, Foucauldian theory and scientific and technological rhetoric have been combined by feminist thinkers like Donna Harraway (1991) and Anne Balsamo (1996) to focus on a utopian view of gender and body that is the result of cultural use of technology. In this paper, I will discuss the film, Stepford Wives (2004) to see how the digital media and cybernetics forward the representation of gender in the Foucauldian sense of surveillance and control. The term ‘cybernetics’ popularized by Weiner (1954) refers to the study of automated control mechanisms. Although it was initially introduced in the context of developing anti-aircraft gunners to anticipate the movement of enemy aircrafts, the term is now used universally for all types of technological intervention even in our daily lives. Weiner defined cybernetics as “classed communication and control together” (quoted in Brett and Provenzo, 1995). Technology has been adapted for the purpose of communication through various ways, from physical objects to computer-created objects as in the recent times. Cyborgs are a form of robots, typically gendered as androids or gynoids, referring to human combined with some form of electro-mechanical replication. Cyborgs are in contrast to the early-day robots that had a fearful ghost-like appearance. Cyborgs, on the other hand, are realistic and human-like enough to seem more utopian and misleading. The textualisation of all aspects of life in the poststructuralist world in which lived relations find their way into the creations of fiction make the difference between the human and the robots ephemeral. As Harraway (1991) says, the cyborg as created in science fiction, literary or digital, is both “a social reality as well as a creation of fiction” that incorporates the racist, male-dominated capitalism that regales in progress and culture yet sustains the age-old patriarchal patterns. It reflects the sociopolitical position of women in the lived time when individuality is driven by a complete lack of innocence yet a utopian dream. In the film Stepford Wives (2004), the women in the gated community have been programmed with the aid of cybernetics to be the perfectly domesticated women who also embody the patriarchal ideas of sexuality. The individual is then created by the computer that has been programmed through the computer. The medium of films reinforces the existing cultural fascinations already put in place through societal norms in a psychoanalytical manner. The film then reflects the societal images and erotic looks that have been created by the social politics of the day. The phallocentricism creates the castrated version of feminine attitude that is desirable to the male as well as conforms to the subjudigation of women (Mulvey, 1994). Shaviro (1993), on the other hand, disregards Mulvey’s psychoanalytic explanation of the cinematic reference to gender as something that “ends up constructing an Oedipal, phallic paradigm of vision that is much more totalizing and monolithic than anything the films she discusses are themselves able to articulate” (quoted in Shaviro.com). Rejecting “the idealist assumption that human experience is originally and fundamentally cognitive”, Shaviro (1993) argued for a poststructuralist and psychoanalytic approach to deconstruct the cinematic body. The new aesthetics that is elaborated in the digital media then, is the result of a situation “when the real is fragmented as a result of being permeated in machines, the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity, between the observer and the observed vanishes” (Shaviro, 1993, quoted in Beller, 2006), which is a typical characterization of the postindustrial society in which the relationship between economics and consciousness is assumed to exist. Opposed to the psychoanalytic film theory, the craft of filmmaking, according to Shaviro (1993) incorporates the social realities more directly. According to Butler (1990), gender identity is merely 'a set of recurring acts’ within a very stiff authoritarian frame thickening over time to create the look of body, of ‘a natural sort of being' (Butler 1990: 33). The dogmatic power of convention that dictate gender actions is both camouflaged and reinforced by assuming that gendered identities are normal and necessary. Hence, in the film, Joanna, a television network executive who is sacked after one of the participants in the reality show that she had been directing goes on a shooting spree on the sets and, in a depressed state of mind, lands on Stepford along with her husband only to find that she is a misfit among the all-too perfect wives in the suburb. Through a thriller-like series of sequences, Joanna finds that this is the result of the Stepford Men’s Association having turned the women into gynoids, robots that are super-efficient in domestic chores, resembles the original looks but have been glamorized and sexed up. Beauty, in the sense that Mulvey (1994) considers the phallocentric representation of male desire, is then at the root of oppression that women experience unknowingly. Cinema poses this question of oppression by the unconscious way of looking at the world through the male gaze. The determining male gaze projects the women of their desire as the erotic symbol. Women are sexual objects, perhaps more explicitly in the gynoid version of womanhood. Although beauty has been an important aspect of everyday lives of women, it was, till recently, neglected in western philosophical discourse. It was thought that individualism originated from the mind, which was considered distinct from the body. In the postmodern times, however, there is a significant increase in the study of the sociology of body with the replacement of, as one scholar says “the notion of the body as a productive agent by the hedonistic body with its various manifestations” (Bethelot, 1986, quoted in Jeacle, n.d). The concern to adapt oneself to the social norms of beauty has defined gender roles, social status and sexual identities in the modern times. Much of what apparently seems to be individuality, however, is shaped by societal roles (Davis, 1994). Wilson (1995), on the other hand, poses the thesis that through history, beauty has been used for a complexity of purposes, from developing an identity to subverting it and not just as a means of establishing social norms. To Wilson (1995), the corset was a symbol of rebellion for the Victorian woman, rather than submission, to masochism as it was typically the ambitious and aggressive woman instead of the subjugated middle or lower class women who adopted the use of the corset. Hence, instead of the popular notion of bourgeois conformity, Victorian dress, in Wilson’s view, was a symbol of rebellion though through a group identification. In a similar vein, the Stepford wives could also be viewed as demonstrating group identity through their bodies and sexuality in defiance to the male hegemony in their lives. Besides clothing, the tendency in postmodernist society towards group identity through beauty is also evident in the obsession with slenderness. As Bordo (1995) says, "To be slim is not enough----the flesh must not ‘wiggle.’" The media plays an important role in genderizing the female body. The representation of Size Zero female body, with large breasts and flat stomachs, are what women want to emulate. In particular, in this gendered heterosexual world, the female body is distinctive from the masculine body. Angela King (2004, cited in McNamara, 2006) insists in the Foucaultian paradigm that women discipline their bodies through fashion, make-up and surgery in order to correct their bodies and suit the societal norms of beauty. The women in Stepford Wives conform to the notion of slenderness that is considered as a fetish in the present times. Besides the erotic male gaze, Stepford Wives also exemplifies the heterosexual division of labor that is once again determined by societal norms. The wives are all perky about domestic chores and all too perfect in these while the career-woman, Joanna, seems like a misfit in this company. Although women’s liberation is less an issue in the 21st century than it was in the 1970s, when the first version of the film was made, the male attitude towards societal norms continue to exist. The spectator is also expected to identify with the male protagonist, as characters like Joanna, Bobbie or Roger (who is one of the only gay couple in the community) are portrayed in a comical tone. Even though the creation of the gynoids are directed by the Men’s Association, controlling the stream of events in an almost omnipotent manner, the gaze is eventually on the women and not the men. While the image of the woman is like an icon, that of the man is in control. Although the focus of the film is on the gynoids – the Stepford wives – Joanna is herself an epitome of the ‘digital woman’, as described by Plant (1997), who created a “genderquake’ with the advent of the computer. The decline of the heavy industries and the emergence of the new economy enabled women to get liberated than perhaps the women of the 1970s imagined. While Joanna of the 1975 film version was a photographer, the 2004 version has Joanna progressed significantly, as the director of a television show, albeit failing to meet up to the male machinations of the society. The new society is far more complex than the earlier, requiring greater skill and flexibility to juggle between career, home-making, trouble-shooting, problem-solving as well as in eroticism. In the age of adapting to technology across the board, the women have in fact successfully integrated it in their daily lives, as portrayed metaphorically in the film. Although the Stepford Wives was made in the 21st century, at a time when women are no longer bound to the domesticated world of the 1950s or even 1970s, the latter period being when the previous version of the film was being made, there are still remnants of the culture of the previous period. As Lipsitz (1990) says, “Although cultural products reflect the generally dominant ideology of any given period, no cultural moment exists within a hermetically sealed cultural present: all cultural expressions speak to both residual memories of the past and emergent hopes of the future” (quoted in Bralesford, 2006). Lipsitz further states that in popular culture, “images and icons compete for dominance within a multiplicity of discourses” (quoted in Bralesford, 2006), as a result of which there are images of both the past and the present in the film. Hence, what Friedan (1963) termed as “feminine mystique”, which consists of “sexual passivity, male domination and nurturing maternal love”, characteristics that the second wave feminists protested against in the 1960s and 1970s, are prevalent even in the 2004 version of the film. Although the film begins with Joanna as a successful TV producer and her husband working under her, Joanna’s failure at retaining her job lets her succumb into depression and finally falling into the patriarchal trap as her husband suggests they move to Stepford to regain her health. The flow of events let Joanna realize that she too is in line for being transformed into a robot, a fantasy that the men of Stepford have turned their wives into. The end of the film, however, is more optimistic than the previous versions of the novel and the film, with good sense prevailing upon Joanna’s husband and her escaping being Stepfordization. They also liberate all the other Stepford Wives from the microchips that had been controlling them. Although Harraway (1991) felt that the cyborg did not depend on the heterosexual mate, like the father of Frankestein, to liberate it from servitude, the film in fact ends in a more optimistic note. In a sense, the film depicts the fear that men have of modern, powerful women. But, obliquely, the film also glamorizes the serene, domestic life of American women of the 1950s. The opening credit of the film shows TV advertisements from the 1950s of household appliances in an apparent show of pride. Consumerism and the American Dream of money and power are shown in a derogatory sense, as if the destiny of powerful women was in Stepfordisation. Not surprisingly, all of the Stepford wives were also, like Joanna, high-placed corporate executives. However, while the 1975 version of the film had the women pushing trolleys in a shopping mall in a sedate manner, the 2004 film had a role reversal in the end. While criticizing the consumerist society, it also discards the second wave feminist theory that women are tied to the home by the patriarchy. Thus, the analysis of the 2004 film, Stepford Wives, shows that the cyborgs – or the human-mechanical combination – reflect not only the remnants of the patriarchal attitude of an earlier era through a gendered perspective but also an indictment of the consumerist American society in the postindustrial days. The characters incorporate the values of domesticity of the 1950s and also the blatant sexuality of the present times. Although it should be noted that the women’s liberation movement has lost much of its edge of the second wave feminists, who thought that women are generally trapped in the patriarchal frame, the attitude towards sexuality, though less phallicentric as Mulvey (1994) would have seen, is still an important element of the social reality of today. The film is a more direct indictment on the consumer society, with the main protagonist, Joanna, led to the verge of insanity on the sets of a reality show, which are exemplary of the tumultuous times of consumerist creativity. Works Cited Foucault, Michel, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, L. Kritzman (ed.), London: Routledge, 1988a. ----- The History of Sexuality, translated by R. Hurley, Penguin Books, 1978. ------ Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1977. Balsamo, Anne, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, Duke U.P., 1996. Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto” Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991 Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, NY: Routledge, 1990. Bordo, Susan, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, University of California Press, 1995 Jeacle, Ingrid, Accounting and the Construction of the Standard Body, retrieved from http://les.man.ac.uk/ipa/papers/9.pdf King, Angela, “The Prisoner of Gender: Foucault and the Disciplining of the Female Body”, Journal of International Women Studies, 5.2, 2004 McNamara, Karen Roberts, Pretty Woman: Genital Plastic Surgery and Production of the Sexed Female Subject, 2006, http://www.gnovisjournal.org/files/Karen-Roberts-McNamara-Pretty-Woman.pdf Brett, Arlene and E F Provenzo, Adaptive Technology for Special Human Needs, Sunny Press, 1995 Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema”, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Eds Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 Plant, Sadie, Zeros and Ones. Digital Women and the New Technoculture, Doubleday, 1997 Liepsitz, George, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1990 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, London: Penguin Books, 1963 Bralesford, Helen, Waving or Drowning? Perceptions of Second Wave Feminism Through a Twenty-First Century Lens, Dissertation Submitted For the Degree in M.A in American Studies in the University of Nottingham, 2006, http://edissertations-dev.nottingham.ac.uk/794/1/06MAaaxhb.pdf The Stepford Wives, Dir Fran Oz, 2004, DVD Dreamworks Shaviro, Steven, The Cinematic Body, Minnesota U.P., 1993 Beller, Jonathan, The cinematic mode of production: attention economy and the society of the spectacle, UPNE, 2006 Read More