Rear Window

The 1998 Christopher Reeve remake is a bit different. "A recently paralyzed architect, Jason Kemp, believes he has witnessed a murder from his apartment window. Jason's colleague, Claudia, quickly becomes his partner in trying to solve the mysterious puzzle that lies in the apartment across the way. The more-than-patient detective, Moore, grudgingly responds to their repeated calls and accusations, but believes Jason's imagination is getting the best of him. Determined to uncover the truth, Jason continues to dig deeper - eventually finding himself locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse" (imdb) The movie was nominated for an Emmy and Christopher Reeve actually won best actor! quite rare for re-makes. I hadn't realized a re-make of this film had been done ...I digress.

Mulvey states "Woman then stands in patriarchal culture 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" (Braudy, 838). The below scene "The Kiss" seems to go against the idea that the female is never in control. She enters the room and he looks quite helpless stuck in his chair. She slowly initiates a kiss with him, pulls back, and on her time, goes in for a second kiss. When he clearly wants more, she steps back and begins to turn on the lights in the room. From this scene, it seems as though he is helpless without her. This might be giving a slightly different message, that women can only be in control when the man is incapacitated in some way. Modleski states "in Rear Window, the woman is continually shown to be physically superior to the hero, not only in her physical movements but also in her dominance within the frame: she towers over Jeff in nearly every shot in which they both appear" (Braudy, 853). Modleski admits that fashion does feed into patriarchal interests, but it also is part of Lisa's profession and personal preferences...fashion is far from representing woman's unproblematic assimilation to the patriarchal system, but functions to some extent as a signifier of feminine desire and female sexual difference" (Braudy, 853).




I thought when Mulvey stated "A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint" (Braudy 838). After just writing about Adorno on the midterm and his beliefs that no film was possible outside the ideological system- so many years later Mulvey believes we have made progress in this realm.

I understand what Mulvey was saying but I feel that just as Men gaze at women in films, both in the film, and in the theatre watching the scenes on screen, more than ever women are doing the same thing. How many films now do women go to just to see the leading man take his shirt off- most recently Duplicity and James Bond just as a few examples. A show like Sex and the City really seemed to reverse this idea that men dominated women. A character like Samantha Jones claimed to live her life just as a man would- how does this mix with Mulvey's ideas that the gaze can only be male?

Just this past weekend I went to go see, unknowingly a "Buddy Film"- I Love You Man.
According to the Journal of Popular Film and Television, buddy films emerged in the 1970s in response to the feminist movement. The journal reported, "To punish women for their desire for equality, the buddy film pushes them out of the center of the narrative and replaces the traditional central romantic relationship between a man and a woman with a buddy relationship between two men. By making both protagonists men, the central issue of the film becomes the growth and development of their friendship. Women as potential love interests are thus either eliminated from the narrative space or pushed into the background as side characters.

Which could lead one to ask- are female "buddy films" possible? Someone with a bit too much time on their hands tallied the top 2o films for each year to see how many had Two male leads, Male/Female, or two lead females. The findings found that:

"There were over sixty movies in the sample with two male stars top-billed. The only movies with two top-billed female roles, on the other hand, were The Devil Wears Prada and Scary Movie 4." And sure, there's Juno and Little Miss Sunshine, but are they the norm? He continues:
My cousin has been working on tallying (by hand!) all movies with two top-billed female stars. She reports that there are staggeringly few of them, and the roles fall mainly in two genres: mother-daughter.

According to Mulvey "Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, the cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between the film as controlling the dimension of time (editing narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, therby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged" (Braudy, 847). If this is in fact correct, my ideas that there are in fact strong, in control woman may all just be a trick that film creates for us? Have I been duped? Modelski says, "with the reverse shots finding both Jeff and Liza intently starting out the window...it seems possibly to consider Lisa as a representative of the female spectator at the cinema" (Braudy, 856). Is her relationship the same as Jeff's or is it in fact different?

http://jezebel.com/383311/does-the-female-buddy-movie-exist