Feminism and Film Theory - Essay Example

Your Your When is a Voyeur just a Voyeur? Feminism and Film Theory In the American film industry, the blockbuster movies often follow a fairly common formula. Action movies tend to feature a protagonist with rippling muscles and a washboard stomach, with inner demons plaguing him. With the help of a sidekick (usually of a minority ethnic background, or a woman), this hero has a suspenseful ride through a conflict with a villain, but almost always ends up carrying the day. The Lethal Weapon movie series, starring Mel Gibson as Detective Martin Riggs, follows this pattern. After his wife died, Riggs became a loner, living in a trailer on the California beach. Through the cycle of the four movies, the audience sees many shots of Riggs’ back, arms, and torso while seeing him gradually cycle through a series of attractive, ultimately submissive women until he finds domestic bliss once again, and has blown away a lot of bad guys. For feminist theorists, movies like this are a clear example of the patriarchal mindset that governs the Hollywood studios, which churn out film after film lauding men as the heroes and women as the passive observers. But what about movies with strong women? There are examples of those movies out there, but those movies tend to have a common pattern of resolution as well, fitting the patriarchal ideal. Titanic features Kate Winslet as a strong-willed woman who defies convention, and her intended husband, to have an affair that will stand the test of time, despite the fact that her lover dies on board the ship, and she lives another eight decades. She smokes at the dinner table, despite the fact that, in 1912, such behavior was considered taboo for women. She casts aside wealthy marriage for steamy love, and ostensibly is flouting gender stereotypes for era. However, while she seems to be choosing her own love, the script has her choose submission to another man, and the screen gives the audience voyeuristic access to her as a sexual object. So, the dissident role she appears to be playing is actually part of the patriarchal titillation with those who would attempt to be radical. G.I. Jane is another movie that appears to have a woman rebel against stereotype, by trying to compete with men in boot-camp competitions. Demi Moore plays a woman who has to fight discrimination from those in her group, superiors, even a member of Congress who pretends to be on her side but who has been selling her out. However, in order to succeed in this group, the woman has to take on male characteristics to advance – most graphically, she shaves her head to comply with the male regulations for hair, rather than taking advantage of the modifications made for women’s hair. It is when she assumes the physical form of a man in her group that she finds success. However, as was noted with Titanic, what appears to be a flouting of gender stereotypes actually becomes a titillating experience for the male voyeurs in the audience. It is precisely because of the paucity of authentically strong female roles in cinema that are not part of the industry’s agenda to pander to its patriarchal base that Laura Mulvey felt outraged enough to write “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1973. Her central argument revolved around a combination of psychoanalytic and feminist discourse, analyzing “the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle”(Mulvey, p. 14). To summarize her position, she considered the institution of Hollywood cinema a sellout to patriarchal ideology, by developing so many ways to depict the woman in a position of inferiority, shown on screen for the voyeuristic pleasure of the man. The action in most movies takes its definition from the male point of view, in her opinion. A classic movie that fits this profile is the Hitchcock thriller Rear Window. Noir thrillers like this often use a woman as not only the object of a particular investigation, but also the femme fatale who brings danger to the situation, or a submissive partner. As Denzin notes, “the voyeur’s film…probes the secrets of female sexuality and male desire within patterns of submission and dominance”(p. 8). Mulvey asserts a phallocentrism to the Hollywood film industry, which generally portrays the woman as a source of danger, simultaneously desired and rejected by the man. She emphasizes the concept of “scopophilia,” or the pleasure taken in looking at something – a pleasure that is a central part of the moviegoing experience. Freud originally took scopophilia and connected it to the building blocks of human sexuality, particularly in the ways that one controls others by gazing on them as objects (Peters). Once this desire to control reaches an extreme form, though, Mulvey argues that the voyeuristic obsession creates “obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other”(Mulvey p. 17). Mulvey goes further, suggesting that the pleasure of the voyeur comes not just through viewing, but by imagining oneself in the role of the performer on screen. In other words, watching Mel Gibson undress a young, slender yet nubile blonde on screen in Lethal Weapon 2 and have sex with her multiple times permits one the pleasure of “repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer”(Mulvey 17). The key here, according to Mulvey, is that the male spectator takes the female as his own vicarious object of sexual desire (Peters). The male in both situations – spectator and actor – controls both the action and the gaze. Mel Gibson, in this situation, controls the action, while the male spectator has control over where, and how intensely, he looks. Mulvey explains that “[a]s the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look”(Mulvey, p. 20). The erotic look is the source of the spectator’s power; the power comes from his fascination with “the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis”(Mulvey, p. 21). The psychoanalytic view of the woman on the screen is that she represents the man’s anxieties about castration, because she does not have a phallus, and this explains the ambivalence: the man both desires and detests the woman. This combination causes the man to want power or control over her, according to Mulvey (p. 21). There are two solutions to this problem: either the threat of castration is eliminated (hence the many dreamed and actual murders of women by men in voyeuristic film), or neutralized by some sort of commitment involving the surrender of power by the woman, such as marriage (Peters). An additional element of the power of the voyeur is the distance he maintains between himself and the object of his vicarious stimulation and control. As Guy Peters indicates, Rear Window is a strong example of this trend. There is a double layer of voyeurism in this film: that between the viewer and the screen, and that between Jeff, the protagonist, and the people he views from his wheelchair through the telephoto lens. Jeff often sits and looks out his window, in the same posture that a viewer sits and watches in a movie theater. At times Jeff will retreat into the shadows of his apartment, so that those whom he is viewing cannot turn and see their voyeur. During the film, Jeff’s own separation breaks down: Lisa turns on a light in his dark apartment; Thorwald (one of the people Jeff is watching) turns to stare into Jeff’s apartment; Lisa enters the apartments where Jeff is looking (Peters). One of the main sources of suspense in this film is whether or not Jeff will be able to maintain the safe distance of the voyeur, or be drawn into a perilous situation. Not everyone agrees with Laura Mulvey, as one might imagine. Paula Murphy writes that Mulvey’s arguments are simply out of date: in the years since the 1970’s, opportunities in the workplace and in relationships have improved dramatically for women, and those opportunities are appearing in valid ways on the movie screen. In addition, according to Murphy, because Mulvey’s view even attacks portrayals of women who are successfully powerful as a titillation of the spectator, there is no way for the film industry to lose its patriarchal label as she defines it – in other words, there is no way for the film industry to satisfy Mulvey’s feminist critique (Murphy). The fact that such movies as Mel Gibson’s ultra-testosterone action thrillers are made, and that there is no obvious counterpart made for the feminist side of the conversation, shows that the film industry still has a way to go to lose its label as a patriarchal industry. Works Cited Cowie, Elizabeth. “From Fantasia,” in Contemporary Film Theory, ed. Anthony Easthope. New York: Longman, 1993. Denzin, Norman K. The Cinematic Society, the Voyeur’s Gaze. London: Sage Publications Ltd., 1995. Doane, Mary Ann. “Heads in Hieroglyphic Bonnets,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Doane, Mary Ann. “Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory,” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Murphy, Paula. “Psychoanalysis and Film Theory Part 2: Reflections and Refutations.” Kritikos Vol. 2. Accessed 8 December 2006 online at http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~nr03/Psychoanalysis%20Part%202%20Reflections%20and%20Refutations.htm Peters, Guy. Film and Psychoanalysis: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Accessed 8 December 2006 online at http://www.guypetersreviews.com/rearwin.php Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Read More