ANALYSIS OF FILMS WITH RESPECT TO THE ESSAY

 

THE ANALYSIS OF FEW FILMS BASED ON THE ESSAY-VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA (LAURA MULVEY)

Mulvey begins her article by reminding readers of the function of women in the patriarchal unconscious according to psychoanalysis: “she first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and, second, thereby raises her child into the symbolic”.  She goes on to explain that “in patriarchal culture [woman stands in] as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning”. She argues that since film is an advanced system of representation (like language and the unconscious), the structure of (mainstream) film reflects and reinforces the prevailing patriarchy which is structured by the desires of man. 

The Male Gaze theory, in a nutshell, is where women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire. From the feminist perspective, this theory can be viewed in three ways: How men look at women, how women look at themselves and finally, how women look at other women. Typical examples of the male gaze include medium close-up shots of women from over a man’s shoulder, shots that pan and fixate on a woman’s body, and scenes that frequently occur which show a man actively observing a passive woman. The Male Gaze suggests that the female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male. In 1929 Salvador Dali released a film called Un Chein Andalou, which is an abstract short film that portrays a perfect example of this. One scene in the film, a man is found dissecting the iris of a young woman’s eye, which infers this idea of female sight not being central, and that men are not only the audience, but also in control of the action, the camera, the direction, the writing, et cetera, therefore completely running the show, dominating the entirety of the narrative and how it is depicted.

Mulvey finds that mainstream film forms depend on two types of visual pleasure; scopophilia (essentially voyeurism), derived from Freud’s theories of taking other people as objects through scopophilic gaze, and narcissism, derived from Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage whereby one attempts to identify with a self-like image.  She explains that pleasure derived from these forms of looking “can be threatening in context, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox.  

Chikni Chameli is an example that depicts scopophilia in the sense that the body movements in Kathrina’s dance makes the audience to gesture into the emotions. It builds the way [woman] is to be looked at into the spectacle itself, indicating that cinema is built upon a patriarchal system that promotes the active/passive division of power along patriarchal lines. It naturalizes the dynamic of woman as image, man as bearer of the look presenting this dynamic not as something scripts and cinematography built and designed, but as a natural feature of people themselves. Mulvey is arguing that the fourth wall makes the camera’s (and director’s, and editor’s, and the whole crew’s) and the hetero man protagonist’s objectification of women characters seem like a truthful and unbiased reflection of how reality works.

The film “Rare Window” by Alfred Hitchcock is convincing the thesis of Laura Malvey that Man is the bearer of the look while Woman connotes to-be-looked-at-ness. The main character of this film is put in such conditions that he has to be scopophilic. A photographer Jeffries has broken his leg and now he has to watch everything going on outside through the window. The film reveals to us one of the main needs of men – peep through the keyhole, figuratively speaking. It is really impossible to keep away from such a forbidden fruit. And the blame of everything is curiosity, namely it moves the main mechanisms in a man, allowing to forget about other equally important needs (food, rest, sex) and exciting the imagination at a time. In this film everything is concentrated around the man, Jeffries, women are just a background here.

In this film we can see many scenes convincing Malvey’s thesis. Jeff Jeffries (Stewart), a photographer who works in magazine and has broken his leg, is forced to miss in the four walls and have fun just because of peeping into the daily life of the yard, and neighbors with binoculars. Having noticed the suspicious behavior of one of them, he comes to the firm belief that the latter has murdered his wife. Being motionless himself, Jeff enlists the aid of Lisa (Kelly), a quiet blonde working model in the fashion house – here she is particularly beautiful. The girl is desperately in love with him and therefore agrees to perform for him a dangerous “work down”. Of all the works by Hitchcock this is an exercise in scopophilia in which the viewer is nothing left to do but to take part in the process. It’s like to stay Hitchcock himself within 112 minutes. “Look out the window and see what you should not see” – says Jeff to the nurse (Ritter), and the viewer looks through the window and sees what the main character sees.

All this business – this structure of pleasure in looking – is not inherent to the film medium but to prevailing film form in its aping of the male unconscious. The camera is an instrument beholden to the neurotic needs of the male ego. Representing woman as an object to be enjoyed by man is the cause of problems. A woman’s body must not be a puppet for a man to be looked at and enjoyed at his wanted times. The management of this issue lies in recognizing the language of the movie and depicting them in a constructive manner.