It seemed to me that this reading was simply repeating itself but in different ways. Plain and simple, it all said one thing: in cinema women are sexual icons.
Of course. Everyone knows this. It's the oldest trick in the book. Sex sells. Everyone knows. But what seems to sell the most is the visual of a sexy, 'you can't have me' woman. The man on screen, and the men (and sometimes women) in the audience, are entrapped by the woman's appearance. This is the intent, of course, the draw the viewer into the film to want to know more. The director accomplishes this by not showing the woman as a woman, but as a sexual object. Something a man can have, can own, but must strive to get. He, and the audience, lust for her, want her with every fiber of their being. They must have her, control her. Then, in the end, he gets her. Now she isn't any fun anymore cus she wants him, too. Sure, he has 'control' over her now, but she isn't so hot anymore now that he has her.
This makes me think of a child wanting the latest, greatest toy on the market. They want it so badly that they'll beg, plead, even bitch at their parents until they get it. When they do, they suddenly don't think it's all that great anymore.
However, some people are happy to simply own it whether they do anything with it or not. 'It' being pretty much anything, living or inanimate.
And then there are those who obsess over something to the point of being pretty darn scary. This doesn't help when the woman on film is purposely turned into an object of desire. Not only can the man on screen become obsessed with the woman on screen, but the man in the audience can as well. The audience member would desire the woman on screen to the point of stalking the actress. He no longer sees the actress as an individual, but as the character portrayed on screen as an object to be had. He doesn't really care about her, even if he says he does, he simply wants to have her. Having her will fulfill a desire within him to have an object that will help him to live out his 'phantasies', whether she complies or not. Granted a woman can obsess over a man, a man over a man, a woman over a woman, and so on and so forth, but the majority of the time it is a man over a woman.
Woman has always been obsessed over by men. It's a story as old as the world itself, maybe even older. God originally was viewed as a woman until men took over religion and turned God into a man (mainly Christianity, but that's beside the point). Point being, when God was a woman, men wanted her love and power. Since God became a man, men still want His love and power, but others are also more aggressive towards Him than they were 'Her'.
I feel I'm beginning to ramble, but my main point is that man always wants what he can't have. Once he gets it, it isn't fun anymore. The woman as sexual object is the best example and the most overused. Hollywood may 'censor' this more than Indie films, but it is still plain as day what they're trying to do.
I thought at least one of her main points was that the ideological order represented in cinema is programatic to culture and individual subjectivity within culture. Altough viewership of Hollywood films is seemingly voyeuristic, passive, and detached, in actuality the cinema experience is communal and interractive - ideology is being reinforced, challenged, shaped, in a communal context in the theater and in the broader culture... for Mulvey, Hollywood cinema reinforces patriarchy by representing women in the castrating function as symbols, objects and effects in film instead of as autonomous persons with their own desire different from and independent of men - that in mainstream film women are a reflection of male desire and meaning instead of makers of their own desire and meaning.
ReplyDeleteShe then goes on to call for aesthetically avant garde film to function as a counterpoint to and critique of the mainstream Hollywood narrative and it’s ideological underpinnings. Alternative film must be a destruction of voyeuristic pleasure, like in the film we just watched in class on Monday (epilepsy inducing visual explosion, difficult close ups of crying, extremely personal/intimate scense, and mildly depressing or unsettling monologues, etc.)
The audience is an active part of the construction of meaning and "narrative", and the issues of representation and communication are directly addressed in the making and presentation of the film without hiding behind "Hollywood narrative" and the ideologies it expresses and reinforces. Desire breaks free from the codes of Hollywood narrative and ideology.
Later she writes about film as a mirror – about the Lacanian creation of virtual self, false wholeness, subjectivity, through the child’s gaze at herself in the mirror - and in the age of media, through media images. I found this interesting, especially for our contemporary media environment and youth culture. This mirroring/subjectivity constructing function of media has evolved far beyond what Mulvey could have imagined at the time of writing her essay - Generation Y culture is a media ecology of ubiquitous cameras, 3G networks, Facebook, lifestyle branding, and the new forms of surveilance, conformity, and control that come along with these things.
I believe that reality TV, social media, the internet, and hybrid miniaturized communicative/entertaintment technology have displaced traditional “voyeuristic” Hollywood cinema and television – and in the process of doing so have inverted mainstream culture’s relation to subjectivity and materiality. Mainstream American culture has transitioned from communities of persons, material bodies in space, dealing with external media as seemingly voyeuristic viewers to subjectivity as continuing work of cultural labor in creating and maintaining one's personal brand and social network through creating and distributing digital media content, getting tweets, hits, friends, what have you. For many, daily life is a full on immersion into a digital media matrix at the service and profit of global capital. The digital subjective and constructed self becomes the grounding for lived experience and social relations, and material reality in the lives of post-industrial Generation Y services digital network identities and personal brands. Harry Potter movies are there for you to get dressed up, filmed on cell phone cameras, uploaded onto Facebook and shared with the world – and in these images of yourself with friends and cultural entities, you form your identity – that image on the Facebook page, who is described in the profile and comments, IS ME. My consumer preferences and profile page are where I find myself…
It would be interesting to see what Mulvey has to say about the internet and scopophilia.