Women, Can't Live with 'Em...

After watching Rear Window, I immediately proceeded to the bonus features where I heard the most interesting quote from a Hitchcock himself in a radio interview: "These women in business, they're almost like men some of these women!" Alfred Hitchcock was obviously born in a different era, but the changes in male/female relations is astonishing. It's a tough race, but I think Rear Window might be the most perfectly aligned film for a week's reading in our course yet. 

There are so many fascinating elements at work. How many films have you seen that take place entirely, every scene, in one apartment? And yet, many spectators might not be aware of this fact until someone tells them. In a week entitled, "Male Gaze," we find a "castrated" male (unable to even make a sandwich for himself) who spends all his time gazing out a window into a Manhattan apartment complex (and what an unbelievable set by the way. The documentary also mentioned that the crew had the set lit for four different times of day simultaneously, so Hitchcock never had to wait around for lighting setup). We also have Grace Kelly, the PRINCESS OF MONACO, to gaze at (especially in that opening shot) throughout. At the end of the film, with the murderer in his own apartment, Jimmy Stewart's character, a photographer, defends himself with the tools of his trade, flashbulbs. He is using the instrument of enlightenment to blind the villain (and the audience through a special red filter wipe). And don't even get me started on the suture going on (1. Shot of Jimmy 2. Shot of neighbor with binocular or camera filter 3. Jimmy's reaction). And, it's a very entertaining film by a true auteur in color and English. Bravo.

Mulvey writes, "The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies" (Mulvey 837). It's like she's writing about Grace Kelly's Lisa. Lisa lacks the masculine adventure spirit that Jimmy's life as a photographer represents (fish heads, Finland's cold, Brazil's rain) - of course, this is only when LB is not wheel-chair bound. Lisa wants to demonstrate that she can overcome this lack, and in the climax of the film she boldly breaks into the murderer's apartment (all while being watched by LB, helplessly looking on with a long-lense camera - use your imagination). After she returns to the apartment, Hitchcock cuts back to LB gazing at her in one of Stewart's only close-ups in the film, echoing the loving gaze into the camera that Kelly gives in her introduction shot. Of course, Hitchcock keeps the ending ambiguous as Lisa pretends to read a book on the Himalayans until LB falls asleep and she grabs her trusty Bazaar glamour magazine. Who has agency now?

I was blown away by Kaplan's admission on 315 "Of these two possibilities, the first seems to me to be true." She is referring back to the sentence, "psychoanalysis is a discourse shot through with bourgeois ideology, functioning as almost as an Ideological State Apparatus with its focus the individual, outside of real history and real struggle" (Kaplan 315). The questions of female gaze in cinema therefore need to be viewed through an entirely new, gender-neutral system of discourse (or perhaps feminine-identified to counterbalance psychoanalysis). We have quite a bit of work ahead of us...