Discuss, in relation to key texts and a film of your choice, what is meant by the ‘gaze’ in feminist film theory
‘The gaze’ in feminist film theory is a concept which was first addressed in Laura Mulvey’s essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film’ in Screen magazine in 1975. In the essay Mulvey coined the phrase the ‘Male Gaze’, to describe the way in which narrative Hollywood film was aimed at an imagined male audience. The gaze is rooted in the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Lacan, Freud’s theory of scopophilia, and Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’.
Later feminist theorists have attempted to redefine aspects of the gaze, to take it beyond the limitations of Mulvey’s original essay.
‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ is a recent film aimed at a female audience and so it is interesting to detect the male gaze dictating the plot. Using its separation from contemporary Western society (both culturally and chronologically) the film's makers attempt to excuse the Male Gaze altogether. I will be using this as my main filmic reference in conjunction with other films, essays and peripheral media, in attempting to define the gaze in its multiple incarnations, and examine its relevance in relation to western society and its cultural production.
Laura Mulvey wrote ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film’ in response to what she saw as the shortcomings of other writing about psychoanalysis in the film journal Screen. She argued that they had ‘not sufficiently brought out the importance of the female form,’ in the symbolic order, whilst Julie LeSage had voiced similar objections in her 1974 essay ‘Jump Cut’ when she accused the ‘Screen’ scholars of ‘Reducing the human form to the male,’. They were the first to acknowledge the overt gender inequalities that were reflected in the production and content of cinema, not just in terms of labour division (the male directors and producers of the films, and the gender specific jobs of the onscreen characters) but in the way in which the shots were framed, and the narrative was constructed. Mulvey uses Freud’s concept of scopophilia to examine the psychological roots of the Male Gaze, breaking down into two conflicting parts; its active aspect and its narcissistic aspect.
Freud described scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality, where the viewer takes pleasure in seeing another person (i.e. the on-screen woman) as an object. He later theorised that it first appears at the stage of pre-genital auto-eroticism after which the pleasure of looking is transferred to others. In Mulvey’s theory of the gaze this aspect of scopophilia is an active instinct, which drives the male viewer to project his fantasy onto the female figure, and which is responsible for reducing images of women in cinema to passive signifiers for male desire.
The narcissistic aspect of scopophilia arises when a child’s pleasure in looking is combined with their fascination with likeness and recognition. Mulvey relates this to the ‘Mirror Stage’ described in the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s writings as the stage in a child’s development where it begins to recognise its own image. Mulvey argues that the cinematic apparatus, the way in which film is projected in front of the viewer in a darkened space, returns the viewer to the pleasure of this stage. In Mulvey's imagined male viewers the pleasure of watching comes from the combination of active scopophilia with their identification with their own more perfect mirror image (ideal ego), which they learnt to project onto others through a process of recognition and misrecognition in the Mirror Stage. Through these instincts the viewer identifies with the male protagonist and takes pleasure in subjecting the female to their gaze, which is shared by the male protagonist on screen.
‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ is a contemporary film set in a pre-feminist era and culture. The viewer is meant to identify with the female protagonist Sayuri when she is sold to a Geisha house to be a slave, however while this custom is seemingly treated as archaic and cruel, when Sayuri becomes a geisha all associated customs are treated with reverence and glamorised in a typical Hollywood style. This film, which is marketed at women (Marketing for the film included a promotional advert for Maxx-factor mascara, which heavily featured clips from the film borrowing from and enhancing is glamour) attempts to find a compromise for a post-feminist western audience, exoticising prostitution to the point of de-familiarisation. Prostitution is referred to as a western aberration. When Sayuri's training begins, the matriarchal figure Mameha says ‘[we] are not prostitutes’, and towards the end of the film when a fellow geisha, Pumpkin is ‘americanised’ by US troops and becomes a ‘common’ prostitute with none of the traditional paraphernalia of the Geisha and she subsequently betrays Sayuri, juxtaposing the nostalgic and exotic ideal of sanitised Japanese ‘geisha’ with the conventional western untrustworthy ‘hooker’.
The male characters in the film are presented as harmless, despite the sexual-repression inherent in their society. It is these four men who control the film's narrative, as Sayuri's actions are all centred around them as they compete to be her domo (to take her virginity and to have exclusive control over her sexuality). They can be broken into 2 pairs. The older men, Dr. Crab and the Baron, compete in a bidding war for Sayuri's virginity, whilst the two younger men (though the youngest, The Chairman is still twenty years her senior) are honour bound not to bid on her, but as they are stronger and younger the audience is intended to want Sayuri to be with one of them (despite the fact they already have wives). The Baron can been seen to represent the Male Gaze as he acts on the desire implicit in the gaze, attempting to forcibly undress Sayuri taking away some of her innocence, for which he is punished as the old man Dr.Crab is allowed to win the bidding war.
If anaylsed with the psychoanalytical methods of Mulvey’s essay, The Baron is undressing of Sayuri to demystify her and deny the threat of castration that she presents through her lack of a penis. In comparison to the violence of the Baron Dr.Crab’s use of his privilege over Sayuri to force her into sex is appears to be excused in the morality of the film. In the tiny prelude to the sexual act that we are permitted to witness between Sayuri and Dr. Crab he is pathetic; the detached camera angle re-enforces his impotence and the narrative quickly moves past the act. Within the morality of Hollywood cinema, if one of the younger men had been the one to take her virginity it would not be so easy to forgive them, as they are presented as strong charismatic figures to be admired by the audience, the Ideal Egos to which Sayuri is drawn.
Ultimately it is the Chairman who Sayuri is meant to be with, in a classical romantic sense, as she declares her affection towards him throughout the film and eventually the narrative brings them together. At the moment of resolution it is revealed that Sayuri 's actions, not just through the seen narrative but in the exposition, have been controlled by the Chairman who is revealed to have always know her identity, and made sure that she would become a geisha and protected her in the style of a guardian or god-like figure.
‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ is very similar to the Hollywood ‘Women’s Film’ of the 1940s and 50s (the period in which the film is set) in they way in which viewers are meant to indentify with the films characters. It does not satify the demand for narrative film that offers positive identifications for it’s female viewers that Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca make in their paper ‘Gentlemen Prefers Blondes’, as the film's protagonist is always passive. The post-feminist viewer is at best expected to sympathise with her. Whether sympathy alone is enough to maintain narrative interest is tenuous, so the element of romance with the Chairman character is needed in order to give female viewers something to identify with positively, even though it requires the suspension of normal western morality .
The 2008 romantic comedy ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ has also used sympathy with a pathetic protagonist to drive its narrative, however interestingly in this case the protagonist is male. In a reversal of the normal active male/ passive female construction of Hollywood Laura Mulvey responds to in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film’, the story's hero Peter is dumped by his actress girlfriend Sarah Marshall, who’s career ambitions and success outstrip his, emasculating him. However while Sayuri of ‘Memoirs of Geisha’ is only permitted to find happiness in being the chosen mistress of a married man, the character of Peter replaces Sarah Marshall by choosing another, more likeable woman; re-asserting his dominant masculinity. He consequently becomes more successful than Sarah, whose career declines, whilst Peter is rewarded for realising his artistic potential and talent with the encouragement of a new more complimentary and subservient female, thus returning the status quo.
Whilst the male gaze is less apparent on the surface: the sex scenes of 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall' are more comical than voyeuristic, and the elaborate costumes and make-up of the women in 'Memoirs of a Geisha' are arguably stylised to appeal to more to western women than hot-blooded men, the gaze still shapes their narratives. These examples of Hollywood cinema respond to feminist concerns, but in a defensive, not positive way. Sarah Marshall’s career ambition is seen as hard-hearted and is ridiculed whilst Peter's transformation from victim status to his Ideal Ego is celebrated. Sayuri's passivity and subservience in 1940s Japan's oppressive patriarchy is romanticised. Both of these are modern films yet perhaps surprisingly they both re-enforce passive female characters with positive affirmations and, in the case of 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall' present a case of a man oppressed by feminism in its most common example: the career woman.
Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film 'Rear Window' addresses the same male concern. The male protagonist Jeffries played by James Stewart is emasculated by being wheel-chair bound while the female love interest, Lisa, is a jet-setting career woman. While even a viewer of the time, male or female, may have sympathised with the character Lisa's treatment, the male protagonist's behaviour is mostly justified in light of the fact that when we look at the context, and despite Hitchcock's pioneering style of filmmaking, Lisa is still a stock character. Without the use of his legs or more symbolically his phallus, Jeffries utilises the power of his gaze. It is important to note here that Jeffries is a photographer and therefore is an actively visual character and naturally a voyeur. Also, although struck virtually impotent, the character also verbally attests his power by patronising and shouting at the female love interest and defensively compares their two careers to assure himself that his is more challenging and therefore more worthy.
'Rear Window' is a classic example of the male gaze, one held up by Laura Mulvey herself as a prime example of male voyeurism. Despite being discouraged by the matriarchal character Stella, Jeffries' spying soon makes him a hero, proving that despite his supposedly unconventional or maverick approach, the male protagonist is almost always right. Instead of acting out his physical heroic acts, he instructs Lisa to act them out, she runs about under his direction in the opposite building which appears from this distance to be a doll's house or puppet set. By following his instruction, under his gaze she proves herself to be of substance and worthy of his approval beyond just sexual i.e. as a wife.
Hitchcock's other film 'Vertigo' also stars James Stewart who is also an afflicted hero as he has a fear of heights. This film arguably reveals Hitchcock to be an early commentator on the male gaze as Stewart's character Scottie shapes his own object of desire in the second half of the film in the manner of Pygmalion.
In conclusion the gaze is still an important tool in film theory, as I have established it is still present in Hollywood cinema. The gaze can also be seen across other male-orientated media such as comic books, and video games in an arguably more overt way as they are under less scrutiny than the Hollywood blockbuster.
Though Mulvey's theory is of it's time and ignores the important issues such as class and Homosexuality, it is still relevant in criticism of the many cultural products of our society which are still rooted in sexual-difference.
Bibliography
Texts
Roland Barthes, Mythologies London, Paladin (1972)
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Screen 16, no 3 London Autumn 1975
E. Ann Kaplan, Feminism and Film, Oxford University Press 2000
E. Ann Kaplan, Is the Gaze Male? Oxford University Press 2000
Video
Slavoj Zizek, The Perverts Guide To Cinema 2006
Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window 1954
Rob Marshall, Memoirs of a Geisha 2005
Nicolas Stoller, Forgetting Sarah Marshall 2008
