One Male's Take on the Male Gaze

Rear Window explicitly foregrounds the topic of looking and its effect on women, as many others have pointed out in the blog and our book. The male gaze proves powerful, drawing Stella and Lisa into Jeffries’s game that turns out to be true. Women are made to cater to the whim of the man, essentially forced to volunteer for the spectacle seen through the “portable keyhole,” as when Lisa chooses to climb into Lars’s window / onto Jeffries’s/our screen. Stella is definitely de-feminized, but I do not think Lisa is: she, as a reward for her valor, becomes nurse-like and gets her beau. She threatened, like all (beautiful?) women do, to destroy the story (“the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish” – Mulvey, 847), but has chosen participation instead. While Jeffries is punished for his looking with another broken leg, Lisa is rewarded.

Nevertheless, I didn’t feel the male gaze as powerfully in Rear Window as in Godard’s Le Mepris/Contempt. Godard’s film uses Brigitte Bardot as the end point of the gaze, thoroughly objectifying her even as she asserts her subjectivity and alters the diegesis (I’m thinking of the faux-bath scene in the apartment). In contrast, Stella and Lisa largely focus their looks at another man (Lars), though they are themselves objects on our screen (i.e. they’re in a film). In other words, I think Contempt is more male-gaze oriented (contemptible?) because objectifying women is more harmful to women and reinforcing of the film’s male gaze than is the female appropriation of the male position (i.e. woman gains power by becoming man). While the latter option for women might be more pernicious, the former is more overt. I say the “appropriation-of-male-gaze” position works in the depths, subconsciously, while the “male-gaze-objectifies-women” position operates on the surface, consciously, and altering the mindsets of the spectators in a blatant way. I think Mulvey and Kaplan would disagree with me, arguing that each position is equally damaging to the feminist project, and that the two buttress each other.

I am not defending the male gaze. It makes me mad. I’m suggesting that, because the subjugation seems to be operating unconsciously and unstoppably [Matt is right, there’s no group of rich, white film executives that sits down and decides what the cinema is going to be like and how it will operate as a vehicle for their dominant ideology. But the status quo is less fight-able because it is operating from our collective unconscious—it is “the unconscious of patriarchal society [that] has structured film form” (Mulvey, 837)], perhaps one form of oppression is better than another. I’d rather have women gain some power, even on male terms, than be sheer objects.

As Matt asks, (how) does the camera treat women differently from men? Is it the same gaze on all? The apparatus itself does not change, but perhaps techniques such as close-ups of the female face place an undue focus on the materiality of women, a focus filtered through the subjectivity of men. Is it too simplistic to think of films being dominated by the male gaze because women are just flat-out better looking than men, whose figure is brutish at best and grotesque at worst? Is this question too naive for latter half of a semester of film theory? Is it possible that we might sift through all of the theorists and come out with film as a neutral, transparent medium? (I doubt it—good luck returning to a state of mindless entertainment—but something to think about.)

When it comes to the subjugation of women in and by the cinema, is it what is pictured or how the picturing is shot that matters? Content or form? Kaplan answers it’s form regardless of content that subjects women to the male gaze (without allowing them to become subjects themselves): “screen images of women are sexualized no matter what the women are doing literally, or what kind of plot may be involved” (311). I’m not so sure. I think content is crucial, and that’s why Mulvey calls her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” After all, as the theorists who have devalued the intelligence of the spectator over the course of the semester might argue, most people will not “get” the level of artistic form (except as it manipulates them subconsciously), while content is more accessible (deadly?) to all. Whether it’s worse for a film to subconsciously manipulate or poisonously affects the conscious thoughts of its viewers is another matter.

Change the content, change the form? Changing content has proven difficult enough; Theresa seems right, there’s a dearth in movies of strong, feminine and feminized leads that both control the action within the film and give women a screen surrogate to identify with. Maybe men are consciously or unconsciously blocking any change. I believe Mulvey is correct when she says, “[m]an is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like” (842). I tend to (positively or negatively) identify with a man on the screen who’s interacting with women, but men who insist on being seen on their own as objects rather than subjects disrupt my sense of the screen surrogate. For instance, gratuitous male nudity (see the relatively recent trend in There’s Something about Mary, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and, so I’ve heard, Boogie Nights and Wild Things) takes me out of the movie and foregrounds my “watching-a-movie-ness.” However, by letting the unseen be seen, the camera objectifies the male figure, exploiting him, usually for laughs. Maybe the objectification turned backwards is what’s unsettling for a male spectator watching male nudity in the theater (or even at home). Perhaps this is a way of evening the cinematic playing field for women on both the form and content levels, of empowering women by exposing men within the narrative and of broadening the gaze of the filmic apparatus. Or maybe nobody wants to see that. Jeffries can scratch whatever is underneath his cast, but that’s it, please.

I’m not sure if changing the male gaze is possible (I’m staying tuned for next week), or if the feminist project has made/will make some headway. However, I do agree that fighting for change matters, as life can and will imitate art (Kaplan, 311), as much as, if not more than, the reverse.