Studying Feminist Film Theory

Studying Feminist Film Theory

Terri Murray
Cinematic entertainment is often understood as being neutral with respect to
values, especially so for genre films – they are ‘just entertainment’. The problem
with this view is that it prevents critical examination of cinematic practices, under
the presumption that any sexist values identified lie not in the specific institutional
conditions that produced the text but in the uses we make of them, or in the way
viewers interpret them. It is rare to find discussions of cinema institutions that pay
serious attention to the ideological framework underlying them.
Studying Feminist Film Theory is aimed at introducing media and film students to
the basics of a complex theory that is nonetheless essential for the critical study
of the moving image. No prior knowledge of the theory is required, as Terri Murray
explains key terminology and the contributions of influential theorists whose
seminal texts have influenced our understanding of gender representations, such
as John Berger and Laura Mulvey. Case studies from popular cinema are used
to offer students an opportunity to consider the connotations of visual and aural
elements of film, narrative conflicts and oppositions, the implications of spectator
positioning and viewer identification, and an ideological critical approach to film.
Case studies featured are designed to be accessible to those new to the subject,
and include Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, Jane Campion’s The Piano and the
work of such directors as Spike Lee (She Hate Me, BlacKkKlansman), Claire Denis
(Beau Travail) and Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Elle).

Terri Murray studied Film & Television at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. A former
documentary filmmaker, she teaches Film Studies at Hampstead College of Fine Arts,
London, and has written on film and philosophy for over a decade.

Studying Feminist Film Theory

Terri Murray
Auteur Publishing
www.auteur.co.uk
Terri Murray

Auteur Publishing

AuteurPub
ISBN: 978-1-911325-79-6
Cover photograph: Elle (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 2016) © SBS Productions
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First published in 2007 as Feminist Film Theory: A Teacher’s Guide.
This revised edition first published in 2019 by
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Copyright © Auteur Publishing 2007, 2019

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN paperback: 978-1-911325-79-6

ISBN cloth: 978-1-911325-80-2
ISBN ebook: 978-1-911325-81-9
Contents

Chapter 1 Feminist Film Theory: An Introduction.................................................................7

Chapter 2 Exploring the ‘Male Gaze’.....................................................................................31

Chapter 3 Censorship and Patriarchal Ideology..................................................................45

Chapter 4 Female Power Uncensored..................................................................................69

Chapter 5 Unexpected Heroes of Feminist Cinema............................................................97

Exam Practice Questions.....................................................................................................132

Bibliography...........................................................................................................................133

Index.......................................................................................................................................135
 STUDYING FEMINIST FILM THEORY
Chapter 1 Feminist Film Theory: An Introduction
This book is aimed at helping media and film studies teachers introduce the basics
of feminist film theory. No prior knowledge of feminist theory is required, but it is
expected that readers will be familiar with the basic language of film form. The
intended readers are secondary school and university undergraduate teachers
and students of film and media studies. Areas of emphasis include spectatorship,
narrative and ideology. Many illustrative case studies are used to offer students
an opportunity to consider the connotations of visual and aural elements of film,
narrative conflicts and oppositions, the implications of spectator ‘positioning’ and
viewer identification, and an ideological critical approach to film.
The book begins with ‘potted versions’ of the contributions of two influential authors
whose seminal texts have fostered new understanding of gender representation
in the visual media – John Berger and Laura Mulvey. The theoretical material will
be illustrated with reference to case studies. Explanations of key terminology are
included. Each chapter begins with key definitions and explanations of the concepts
to be studied, including some historical background, where relevant. A list of
practice questions is provided at the end of the book and these could be used for
essays or tests.
Cinematic entertainment is often understood as being neutral with respect to
values. As studio boss Sam Goldwyn famously said, ‘If you want to send a message,
call Western Union.’ Many students (and teachers) may feel that cinematic
entertainment is generic with respect to gender and values. The trouble with this
view is that it prevents us from questioning cinematic practices themselves, under
the presumption that any sexist problems lie not in specific institutional practices,
but in the uses we make of them, or in the way viewers interpret them. It is rare to
find discussions of cinema institutions that pay serious attention to the ideological
framework underlying them. But viewers can only interpret or use what is there in
the first place.
In the 1980s and ‘90s media scholarship interrogated why some kinds of media
representations persist and others are absent. It asked how corporate-owned
media created markets and shaped its products, thus contributing to how
consumers perceive gender, race or class. Media scholarship attended to the
ideologies of media forms. By contrast, the more recent paradigm shift in neoliberal
academia has been towards viewing media consumption patterns as indicative of
the consumer’s intrinsic interests. The belief that consumers are ultra-resilient,
unimpregnable and completely free and active in their viewing choices has
supplanted the focus on the industrial supply side of the relationship.
Limiting the focus of film studies to formal codes and techniques for producing
them directs our attention to means and away from an evaluation of ends. I realise
that some might see gendered film studies as a controversial attempt to change

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STUDYING FILMS
an industry that already exists and works very well. Perhaps some pedagogues
would prefer film and media studies to be evaluated within their own spheres,
acknowledging their economically-proven potential to contribute to public
entertainment. Arguments about ends may not seem relevant, but such criticism
begs the question because it presupposes that a decontextualised evaluation of
cinema is an adequate one. When we attempt to analyse cinematic meanings
‘in their own sphere’ what we are doing is tacitly and uncritically sanctioning the
values’ status quo. This seems to fall short of the pedagogue’s traditional role of
encouraging questioning and critical reflection. Those who control the questions
control the answers, and educators should not preclude attempts to frame the
issues in alternative and enlightening ways.
A culture is more than its institutions, laws or religious beliefs. It consists in the
unspoken assumptions and values of its members. Despite claims to objectivity
and value neutrality, the Hollywood film industry has an identifiable ‘language’
with customs, codes and conventions that have developed over time. Many of these
conventions developed historically in the absence, or partial absence, of women as
creators. Over time, the cultural habits, norms and values produced through this
industry have contributed to fostering a culture of opposition to women’s equal
participation. Media products come from a culture and reflect its moral norms
and values. On the other hand, media products also speak to that culture, either
reinforcing and legitimising its norms and customs, or subverting and interrogating
them. Movies have the potential to spark the audience’s imagination, to arouse or
sway its emotions, or to provoke new thoughts and ways of seeing the world.
Film-makers who attempt to increase women’s participation (both in the production
process and within media products) might be seen as aspiring to reform the
cultural institutions. These efforts range from understanding subtle gender biases
in hiring practices, for example, to restructuring the conventional language and
codes through which films communicate. This is not to suggest that there is an
intrinsic ‘male’ way of seeing because of some biological perceptual difference
in all people of the male sex, or vice versa. The point is not to reify the male way
of doing cinema (i.e. proclaim a natural or biological cause for it). This would
imply that there is an intrinsically masculine way of ‘seeing’ or ‘representing’ the
world. Rather it is to interrogate how we arrived at so many assumptions about
‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’ in the first place and to point to a certain bias that any
human being has in seeing the world through the prism of their own experiences
and their own culture.
If cinema (and television) have been complicit in constructing gender stereotypes,
then we can begin to ask by what particular mechanisms it has succeeded in doing
so.

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 STUDYING FEMINIST FILM THEORY
Pluralists generally do not attend to the ways in which huge multi-national
conglomerates control the flow of ideas. They focus instead on the consumer and
the audience, emphasising the ability of the consumer to select media products
according to their own gratifications and needs. They stress the active role of
audiences and reject the idea that audiences might be passively manipulated by
media messages. Postmodernists argue that there is a wide proliferation of media
products not exclusively under the control of the major conglomerates. They argue
that there has been a dissemination of power and ideas due to improved access to
technology by ordinary citizens.
However, much evidence supports the (not outlandish) theory that what people are
taught by their cultural institutions has enormous effects on the way they see the
world. There is now a consensus that exposure to media violence is a risk factor
for actual violent behaviour. In 2005, the Lancet published a comprehensive review
of the literature on media violence to date. The weight of evidence from dozens of
studies supported the view that exposure to media violence leads to aggression,
desensitisation towards violence and lack of sympathy for victims of violence,
particularly in children. The United States surgeon general, the National Institute
of Mental Health and multiple professional organisations – incuding the American
Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American
Psychological Association – all consider media violence exposure a risk factor for
actual violence.
The remote Himalayan nation of Bhutan makes an interesting case study.
Bhutanese life, which is steeped in Himalayan Buddhism, was transformed
dramatically when television was introduced for the first time to this nation in June
1999. A cable service provided 46 channels of round-the-clock entertainment. By
April 2002 Bhutan began to see for the first time a crime wave including burglaries
and violence, broken families, school dropouts, and other youth crimes like
shoplifting. Many Bhutanese citizens began writing in to the national newspaper,
Kuensel, complaining that TV is very bad for the country and attributed these social
changes to television.
Despite the evidence, current media scholarship has almost completely absolved
the film industry of any role in shaping culture. Discontent with the simplicity of
the ‘hypodermic’ model of media effects, a cluster of academics in the mid-’90s
ditched media effects altogether and instead of pointing out particular flaws in
the theory, opted for a wholesale rejection of the model. This effectively put an
end to theoretical analysis of how media representations (e.g. of human sexuality,
masculinity, femininity, race or age) work within a global economic system that
often serves to define the nature of the content produced. Consequently, media
studies academics now start from the premise that media texts are ‘polysemic’
(open to multiple meanings). As such, there is literally no ‘thing’ to study. But as
professor Gail Dines has pointed out, this is like saying there is no such thing as a

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STUDYING FILMS
car industry because there are lots of different types of cars on the road.
Media scholars seem to have substituted biological determinism in place of cultural
determinism, thus conceptually transforming cultural products into ‘unmediated’
reflections of ‘intrinsic’ human nature. This has fed into the common belief that
the film industry is totally democratic and therefore its products are an objective
reflection of what human beings are like.
But if you feed kids on a steady diet of sugar, advertise sweets all over the place to
encourage them to buy more, distribute free samples, open candy stores on every
corner, and then claim that kids ‘naturally’ prefer sweets to healthy nutritious food,
you’re insulting my intelligence. And just as the huge variety of sweets all contain
very generous helpings of sugar and artificial ingredients and very little nutritional
value, likewise the many varieties of films in the world (particularly those produced
by Hollywood) seem to stick faithfully to remarkably common leitmotifs and
conventions.
American graphic novelist Alison Bechdel’s famous test (unsurprisingly known as
‘The Bechdel Test’ or the ‘Mo Movie Test’) first appeared in her 1985 comic ‘Dykes
to Watch Out For’ under the title ‘The Rule’. This test provides a very simple means
of measuring whether females are meaningfully represented in a film. It sets a very
low bar, because to ‘pass’ the test, a film needs only to meet three very minimal
criteria:
1. It must have at least two (named) female characters
2. Who talk to one another
3. About something other than a man.
The test does not even require that the women in the film are non-stereotypical
characters. They could talk about doing laundry or recipes. The test only measures
whether women are meaningfully present in a film at all; it does not require
that the film is feminist or that it in any way presents women positively. The only
requirement is that there are women in the film who have some kind of an interior
life independent of men. It is astonishing how many major Hollywood films do not
pass the test, including many Oscar-nominated films.
But things are almost as bad when females are represented in films, since the ways
in which they are depicted do not go very far towards suggesting that they have
interior lives or minds. Almost a quarter of all female characters in family films are
undressed or partially nude, compared to 4% of male characters.1
In their analysis of 200 top grossing films of 2014 and 2015, The Geena Davis
Institute on Gender in Media found that in 2014 only 11% of them featured a
female lead and in 2015 only 17% of the top grossing films had a female lead. Male
characters were twice as likely to speak as female characters in the top grossing

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 STUDYING FEMINIST FILM THEORY
films. Overall, male characters spoke 31.8% of the time in films compared to
14.5% of the time for female characters. On average, the top 100 grossing non-
animated films of 2015 earned $90,660,000 each. Films with female leads made
considerably more on average than films with male leads: $89,941,176 for female
leads compared to $75,738,095 for male leads. Films led by women grossed 15.8%
more on average than films led by men. Even though women played leading roles
in action blockbusters such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Daisy Ridley), The
Hunger Games Series: Mockingjay Part 2 (Jennifer Lawrence), and The Divergent
Series: Insurgent (Shailene Woodley), overall, male characters appeared and spoke
on screen three times more often than female characters in action films.
The sheer scale of the film industry has important cultural implications. The
entertainment industries constitute our hegemonic culture and our norms of
acceptable behaviour. The hegemonic Marxist approach to cinema suggests that
media industries operate within a structure that reinforces the dominant ideology.
Cinema has grown into a major industry with sophisticated marketing, technologies
and global distribution networks, as well as cross-media promotion and production
available to conglomerates such as Disney. Like other major industries that
generate potentially harmful social impacts, the film industry creates a discourse
that nurtures public confidence in its products and practices. The role of the media
scholar is to interrogate the presuppositions latent in this discourse, and to unpack
the relationships of power implicit in it.
Most film studies and media studies students are familiar with the formal codes
of film language – editing, framing, camera movement, lighting, sound, etc. These
formal aspects of cinema work together to make meaning in ways that are familiar,
or conventional, to media consumers. Consequently, it makes sense to speak of
the cinema as having its own ‘language’. Paradoxically, media and film studies
courses involve a process of helping students to recognise (and talk about) the
codes and conventions that they already know. Most students know how to ‘read’
the conventional codes from which a cinematic text is constructed, which is why
they can enjoy these texts prior to studying them. In similar fashion, most English-
speaking children can understand and tell stories in English long before they have
ever heard of a preposition, a pronoun, an epithet or a metaphor. To study film form
without engaging in critical analysis of its messages and values is analogous to
studying English grammar without ever studying English literature. The former is
about understanding the structure of the language, the latter is about the various
uses to which this language is deployed within social or political contexts.
No dichotomy between form and content need be presupposed. It is common
to conceive of form as a container and content as something more substantial
contained within it. This distinction is questionable, however, when we consider how
the formal components work together as a ‘meaning system’ to create the whole
pattern that is perceived. Subject matter and abstract ideas are an integral part

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STUDYING FILMS
of the total system of the text. They may influence our expectations or cue us to
draw certain inferences. The subject matter and abstract ideas take on a meaning
that is specific to the work. For example, a historical subject such as ‘the Vietnam
war’ is not content-neutral but is placed in relationships with other elements.
Platoon (1986) is a story about two regiments of American soldiers. It addresses
moral questions about individual conscience versus group loyalty and patriotism;
it questions the legitimacy of authority, racism, xenophobia and the American
soldiers’ experience of disillusionment. All of these issues are woven into the fabric
of the film’s formal codes of meaning. Apocalypse Now (1979) or The Deer Hunter
(1978) may have the same subject matter, and yet be shaped quite differently by the
film’s formal construction and our perceptions of it.
Since films are human artifacts, film-makers cannot avoid relating their works
to the social, political, historical and visual culture in which they are situated.
Existing works, or aspects of existing works, influence the development of new
ones. Traditions, popular forms, trends and styles develop through the imitation and
repetition of certain elements. These common modes of representation become
conventional or generic. The relationship between the artwork and the world in
which it is situated is a reciprocal one. Conventions and genres may influence the
artist’s output, but likewise the artwork produced from this matrix of meaning
becomes a part of the matrix that will influence other artists, and our perception of
‘reality’ itself.
Cinematic texts do not give us direct access to the world. Although cinema
generally attempts to imitate ‘real life’, it presents us with a constructed world,
fabricated through a carefully selected set of representations. Students might
be asked: what version of ‘normality’ is offered in the film? What threatens this
normality? What oppositions are established? The answers to these questions
shape our ways of thinking, and so our very perception of the world. Often it is
unclear whether art imitates life, or life imitates art. Films may reflect or inject
values, myths and ideologies. Students should be encouraged to interrogate the
social functions of our stories and myths.
Gendered film studies looks at cinematic codes and narratives not just as a
language but as discourse. Ideas about discourse can be traced to the French
philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84). Foucault introduced the idea that language,
far from being neutral, creates meaning by the ways in which it is used and, in
particular, the ways that it is used to wield power. Discourse analysis allows
students to recognise film language as a medium through which relationships of
power between different groups are maintained, reinforced, exposed, subverted
or re-negotiated. Such analysis encourages students to question how ideas
are represented systematically. It also sheds light on the struggle over ideas
represented by competing discourses.

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 STUDYING FEMINIST FILM THEORY
This book will help teachers explore the various ways in which ideas about gender
have been represented in the predominant Hollywood narrative tradition. This
tradition represents a hegemonic system of meaning. The notion of hegemony can
be traced to the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). Gramsci argued that
control by one minority social/political group or ideological system over its rivals
need not involve force, since people can just as easily be lulled into compliance
by a powerful set of messages, to which they consent in the belief that they are
‘better off’. The idea of hegemony allows for flexibility in ideas over time, although
always with the same group in power. According to Gramsci, the dominant groups
constantly adapt their messages in order to inject them with fresh appeal in order
to maintain the consent of those they dominate. The major Hollywood studios
have been described as hegemonic because of the power they exert through their
overseas trade organisation, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). No
one literally coerces audiences to consume Hollywood films. However, in reality we
have little choice since Hollywood dominates the market. Even if we may disagree
with, say, the pro-American (perhaps even xenophobic) subtext of many Hollywood
action films, we nevertheless feel that we are ‘better off’ consuming the box office
hits than missing out on the hyped films that command public attention (and box
office takings).
Since the sexual revolution (and global visual media explosion) of the 1960s, sex is
more than what we do in private to make babies. Sex is not just a biological fact; it is
an idea, or set of ideas, about men, women, biology, the ‘natural’, the ‘normal’, the
‘perverse’, etc. It is a public concept, constructed and consumed in a proliferation
of contexts. It is no longer just a biological category, but a constructed category of
experience that functions within historical, political, religious and cultural contexts.
This does not mean that there is no biological dimension to human sexuality.
However, the biological dimension is open to multiple interpretations. This book
examines the role of institutional practices and discourses in the formation of ideas
about sexuality.
Feminism, strictly speaking, is a doctrine or movement that advocates equal rights
for women. This is what the word denotes. Denotation is the ‘common sense’
definition or meaning of a word. Connotations, by contrast, are implicit or suggested
meanings that are not a part of the literal meaning of a word.
• A father and son were in a car accident. The father died and the son was
rushed to hospital. Upon seeing the boy, the surgeon proclaimed, ‘I can’t
operate on this boy, he’s my son!’ Was the surgeon lying?
If this riddle stumps students, then the point is clear – the word ‘surgeon’ must
carry the secondary connotation ‘male’. The solution, of course, is that the surgeon
is the boy’s mother. But often people get hung up trying to figure out how the boy
could have two fathers because they automatically assume that surgeons are male.

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STUDYING FILMS
Connotations are associations or ideas that are somehow conjured up by a word
in the minds of people who interact with it, even when that word or sign bears
no literal relationship to those ideas. For example, the word ‘maiden’ connotes
modesty, but that is not part of the word’s definition. Red roses conjure up ideas
about romance, despite there being nothing in the definition of a red rose that
automatically makes it ‘romantic’. When you hear the word ‘feminist’, what comes
to mind? It is rather strange that the word ‘feminism’ has become loaded with
negative connotations.
You might begin discussing feminism by asking your students how many of
them are comfortable being identified with the ‘feminist’ label. The opposite of
feminism is male sexism. Sexism is discrimination on the basis of sex, especially
the oppression of women by men. Sexism may also mean the oppression of men
by women, though this use of the word is relatively uncommon. Being a feminist
simply means being against male sexism. It seems rather odd, then, that the word
has come to carry negative associations.
As feminist Tom Digby has noted, ‘while there are important differences between
sexism and racism, I could not help wondering why, if antiracists aren’t presumed
to hate whites as a group, why should antisexists be presumed to hate men as a
group?’ (Digby 1998: 15). One has to wonder whether the demonising of ‘feminism’
is symptomatic of male sexism within academic and media institutions. If not,
then how did feminism come to be so misrepresented? In assessing the claim that
feminists hate men, Digby says:
Considering the absence of supporting evidence or argument, it is hard to take
the substance of the assertion that feminists hate men seriously; nonetheless,
because it has been such a weapon of choice among anti-feminist polemicists, its
rhetorical context is worth examining. (Digby 1998: 16)
Firstly, the idea that feminism is an exclusively female movement is a gross
misrepresentation. Not all females are feminists and not all feminists are female.
Some of the key feminists have been men. Nor is it true that all male sexism is
perpetrated by men. Scores of women collude in the oppression of women by men.
Many women have contributed to public perceptions that feminism is a marginal
and unnecessary ‘man-hating’ doctrine. It is crucial to be clear from the start that,
just as not all females are feminists, not all feminists are female. And just as not all
males are sexist, not all sexists are male.
Feminist film studies, or ‘gendered film studies’, is intended to explore the ways
in which women (and men) are represented by visual media, and film in particular.
When we speak of film as a medium of representation we mean that it does not
merely record reality, but constructs an image of reality through the use of codes,
myths, conventions and signs. Media re-presents information to its audience, who
are encouraged to see its output as a ‘window on the world’. This is misleading, as

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 STUDYING FEMINIST FILM THEORY
the process of representing information is highly selective.
Feminists argue that media representations of gender perpetuate and reinforce
the values of patriarchal society. Men tend to be cast in strong, active roles while
women are shown as passive and merely ‘pretty’. Film, like any discursive medium,
generates meaning on two levels. The explicit message or interpretation is that
which is consciously intended. For example, John Singleton, in describing his film
Boyz N the Hood (1991) said, ‘My main message is that African American men need
to take more responsibility for raising their children, especially boys.’
A film’s implicit meanings are less stable, and may involve contested interpretations
that go beyond the intention of the film-maker. For example, many critics and
commentators see the film noir movies of the 1940s as evidence of a movement
within American social history and culture. More specifically, they see film noir as
a reflection of post-war feelings of disillusionment and despair. They describe the
‘femme fatale’ as a masculine construction of femininity at a time when the social
place of women was being challenged by the women who had gone to work outside
the home during the war. Similarly, the social ideology of the typical Western
constructs a positive image of the white population as the custodians of ‘progress’
and ‘civility’ while representing the indigenous Native American culture as ‘savage’
or ‘primitive’. These meanings are not literally written into the script, but they can
be read out of its subtext. The subtext refers to the unstated message conveyed
through the form of a book, film or picture.
Sexuality has to do with anatomical differences between women and men. Most
of us are born with a determined set of reproductive organs (penis and testes, or
ovaries and vagina), although a fraction of the population are born with both male
and female genitalia. In any case, whether male, female or inter-sex, an individual’s
sex is a given. It is something with which we are born. Sexuality may, however, be
changed through surgical procedures. Gender, by contrast, refers to those socially
constructed ideas about ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, and the ways in which society perceives
the differences between the sexes. We could almost say that ‘sex’ refers to what’s
between our legs while ‘gender’ refers to what is between our ears. Gender refers
to the set of beliefs about characteristically ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ behaviours,
traits, mannerisms and attitudes.
Gendered film studies looks at the social purpose(s) of our stories and myths. Ideas
and images of ‘the masculine’ or ‘the feminine’ are social constructions, and so
we must attend to them as such, and ask who is creating these images. Whom
do they benefit? Language is not a neutral medium of communication. Discourse/
language is the medium through which social power relations between different
groups are reinforced or re-negotiated. We need to ask what kind of world the film
constructs and whose values and ideas are being expressed through it. Do the
film’s representations challenge or affirm our own experiences of the world? Do

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they construct a world of appearances that does not reflect our experiences? What
purpose do the film’s representations serve? Whose interests are best served by
it? The key here is to remember that films (and other media) do not merely record
the world as it is. They construct an image of the world, a mediated version of the
world.
Following theorists such as Sarah Gilligan, it should be fairly clear that women have
historically functioned within mainstream cinema as the following:
• Victim.
• Girlfriend.
• Damsel in distress.
• Angelic mother.
• Whore.
• Sexual object.
• Erotic distraction.
• Femme fatale/monster.
• Castrating mother.
Looking at the list above, we see that the stereotypical role of the female in the
traditional Hollywood film has not been that of an agent. She does not drive the
narrative action, nor is she involved in changing the storyline. As Sarah Gilligan
says, ‘her role within the film is to look good and to make the male protagonist look
even better. Women are rarely cast in positions of power, and when they are, they
are punished for their power. . . Woman’s traditional role is to be helpless, need
rescuing or agree with the actions and decisions of the male protagonist’ (Gilligan
2003: 18).
There should be a woman, but not much of one. A good horse is much more
important. (Max Brand in Avni 2005)
Feminist critics point out that these cinematic representations are mediated
through the eyes and desires of the male director. The crucial point to remember is
that woman exists as both a construction and a reality. ‘Woman’ is both a category,
defined in opposition to men, and an individual physical person. We need only
look around us at a few real women to understand that the image ‘woman’ does
not always reflect the reality, and vice versa. Real individual women can, and do,
perform ‘womanhood’ (as an image) but this image is not one that women have
traditionally had a role in constructing. She is imitating an idealised and eroticised
male construction of what women ‘should’ be. ‘Woman’ comes to represent not
one person of the female sex, but a stereotype, a category defined by men and in

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opposition to men. Stereotyping is not always negative, but it tends to preserve
and perpetuate power relations in society. It is in the interests of those in power to
continue to stereotype those with lower status in a negative or expedient light, thus
preserving the status quo (Nelmes 2003: 227).
Even today, women have a relatively small role in constructing public images of
‘womanhood’. A recent survey carried out by the UK Film Council and Skillset,
the Sector Skills Council for the Audio Visual Industries, found that women in the
British film industry are paid less than men even though they are better qualified.
The survey found that women made up a third of the industry but 35% of women
earn less than £20,000 a year, compared with 18% of men. At the same time,
the number of men earning more than £50,000 nearly doubles the female figure.
Women in the film industry were more likely to be graduates than men (60%
compared with 39%), and while 17% of men have no qualifications, the same is true
for just 5% of women. A June 2015 report by the UK Commission for Employment
and Skills showed that in 2012 only 26% of employees in the digital and creative
industries were female, substantially lower than the national average of 47%, and
down from 33% in 2002.2
In her study of employment figures for behind-the-scenes women working on the
top 250 domestic grossing films in 2004, Dr Martha M. Lauzen of San Diego State
University found that 21% of the films employed no women directors, executive
producers, producers, writers, cinematographers or editors. Yet not a single one of
the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2004 failed to employ a man in at least one
of these roles. The study also found that women comprised only 5% of all directors
working on the top 250 films of 2004. This represents a decline of 6 percentage
points since 2000 when women accounted for 11% of all directors. Women
accounted for only 12% of writers working on the top 250 films of 2004. In addition,
female actors generally earn less than male actors.
The majority of directors in Hollywood are male and the majority of producers
are male. This probably holds true in cinemas around the world. The movies
that get the publicity budgets are made within male genres–blockbusters, war,
science fiction or thrillers. These films seem to feature a central male character
who is facing a male villain, and has a male best friend (who often gets killed
by the villain in the penultimate reel, justifying the hero’s killing of the villain).
The female characters are there to titillate, to be in distress and rescued, and
occasionally to guarantee the heterosexuality of the hero. (Butler 2002: 42)
Lauzen’s figures for 2011 were equally grim, with women comprising only 18% of all
directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors
working on the US top 250 domestic grossing films. This represents an increase of
1 percentage point from 1998. Women accounted for 5% of directors, which is half
as many as were directing films in 1998. Ninety-four per cent (94%) of all the films

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in the study had no female directors. Of the 1,200 top-grossing films from 2007
to 2018, only 4.3% were directed by women, according to a study released by the
Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
In addition, female actors generally earn less than male actors for equivalent sized
roles, with Angelina Jolie (the highest paid female actor) making $33 million per
film on average, roughly the same amount as the two lowest-ranked leading men
Liam Neeson and Denzel Washington. Of the 16 biggest paychecks earned by actors
per film in 2013, not a single one was earned by a female actor.3 In 2015 a hack
of Sony Pictures emails revealed that Jennifer Lawrence was paid only 7% of the
profits of American Hustle’s (2013), whereas both of her male co-stars (Christian
Bale and Bradley Cooper) were paid 9%, as was director David O. Russell.
Like other ideological constructions, representations of a society or of gender
are not stable; their political and cultural importance are such that they are sites
of considerable competition. As Graeme Turner has noted, ‘To gain control of
the representational agenda for the nation is to gain considerable power over
individuals’ view of themselves and each other’ (Turner 1988: 136–7).
There appears to be an unspoken belief in the Hollywood film industry that
somehow male-centred narratives are universally entertaining, or inherently more
valuable and/or more lucrative than female-centred narratives which are seen
as peculiar or of limited interest to the broad majority of viewers. This claim, of
course, presupposes that certain types of narrative are inherently ‘masculine’ while
others are ‘feminine’. For example, action adventure is thought of as an essentially
male genre, while romantic comedies are often described as ‘chick flicks’. Tom
Digby suggests that romantic comedies arise as social means of reinforcing
gender oppositionality, which in turn serves the social function of reinforcing
heterosexuality. The same gender oppositionality that ensures we are attracted to
the opposite sex, by exaggerating the differences between men and women (and
then eroticising them), also produces inter-gender mystification, which, says Digby,
‘is sure to result in enough mutual aggravation between females and males to
strongly reinforce oppositionality between them’ (Digby 1998: 25). In other words,
while romantic comedies appear only to comment upon pre-existing gender
oppositionality, they in fact help to create it.
The question for feminist film studies students is whether categorising films into
‘male’ and ‘female’ genres has to do with what real men and women enjoy, or
whether different genres themselves represent stereotypes of men and women
in ways that are flattering to one sex more than another. In other words, do the
films create the gender-specific audiences (by appealing to, and reinforcing, social
stereotypes), or are the films a mere reflection of the way nature has made us?
Would male audiences still love science fiction films if the majority of them featured
a central female heroine who (1) faces a threatening female/alien villain, and (2) has

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a cute ‘helpful’ boyfriend on the side whom she rescues?
Would female audiences raised from childhood on strong, active, powerful images
of women be different kinds of women? Would they have different expectations
and tastes in the kind of ‘entertainment’ they consume? Would the target audience
for Hollywood movies suddenly become 16–24-year-old females, who grow ever
more confident in themselves and have ever more spending power? Would women
suddenly be the main consumers of films in the science fiction genre? If females
controlled Hollywood, is this what most science fiction films would look like? Would
females actually have an opportunity to control Hollywood, because they (and
their male peers) had been raised watching empowering images of females, and
denigrating images of males? These are dangerous questions, because they hint at
the social power interests that lie behind our myth-making industries.
Within the film industry, the ‘target audience’ for big budget films is generally 16–24
-year-old males. It is as though there is some unwritten rule that says stories of
interest to this group are the ones with widest human appeal.
The paucity of female directors is such that the title ‘director’ has become a
gendered term, associated with males in the same way that the word ‘surgeon’
or ‘pilot’ or ‘millionaire’ connotes masculinity, although ‘male’ is not part of the
definition of any of these terms. We do not have to specify that a director is male
by adding a prefix (‘male director’) because the director’s masculinity has become
normalised, or assumed. However, we do not find it unusual to speak of ‘female
directors’. Here the prefix is needed to set female directors apart from the norm.
Feminist theorist Claire Johnston (1980: 34) has pointed out that the female within
patriarchy is seen as the irrevocable ‘other’. Masculinity is the tacit ‘norm’ from
which all deviations are defined as ‘other’ or ‘less’.
The film director works very closely with a whole team of specialists (screenwriters,
set designers, production managers, casting agents, actors, stunt men and
women, editors, composers, make-up artists, effects specialists, etc.) who together
collaborate to produce the final product, but the director is seen as the creator, the
mastermind behind the magical process that results in the cinematic event – the
final movie. As Sarah Gilligan has pointed out, ‘this magical process can be seen to
be coded as male’ (Gilligan 2003: 16).

John Berger
First published in 1972, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing was one of the twentieth
century’s most influential books on art. Because it appears that Berger’s insights
provide much of the groundwork for later feminist theorists, including Laura Mulvey,
I have decided to include some of his insights in this book. Ways of Seeing was based
on the BBC television series of the same name, in which Berger began to start a

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process of questioning art, and the constructed meanings that images convey.
For the teacher of feminist film studies the most important chapter in Berger’s
book is Chapter 3, dealing with the female nude. The chapter is made up of both
text and images. It would be worthwhile to assign this chapter in its entirety.
Alternatively, or to supplement this chapter, teachers could show a video of the
BBC programme which treats this chapter as a discrete unit.
Berger examines the usage and conventions of the European oil painting from
about the late fifteenth century, in which women were the principal and ever-
recurring subject. What follows is a summary of Berger’s essay.
He begins by noting that the social presence of a woman is different in kind from
that of a man. A man’s presence depends upon the ‘promise of power’ which he
embodies. This power may be:
• Moral.
• Physical.
• Temperamental.
• Economic.
• Social.
• Sexual.
The object of man’s power is external to himself – a power which he exerts on
others. A woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself and defines what
can and cannot be done to her. Presence to a woman is so intrinsic to her person
(as an object of men’s actions) that men tend to equate it with her body. To be born
a woman is to be born into the keeping of men. We can still see vestiges of this in
the traditional Christian wedding ceremony, in which the father, having been asked
by the groom for permission to marry his daughter, officially ‘gives her away’ to the
keeping of her husband.
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied
by her own image of herself. From earliest childhood, she has been taught and
persuaded to survey herself continually. The surveyor and the surveyed within her
are the two constituent elements of her identity as a woman. Her own sense of
being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.
Men survey women before treating them. This determines not only most relations
between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves. To recap:
• Men act and women appear.
• Men look at women.
• Women watch themselves being looked at.

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The surveyor of women in herself is male – thus she turns herself into an object
– and most particularly an object of vision, a sight. The mirror was often used in
Renaissance paintings as a symbol of the vanity of woman. You painted a naked
woman because you enjoyed looking at her. You put a mirror in her hand and you
called the painting ‘vanity’, thus morally condemning the woman for your own
pleasure.
The real function of the painting was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive
in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.
Berger draws a distinction between nakedness and nudity in the European tradition.
The nude, he says, is always conventionalised. These conventions derive from a
particular tradition of art. What do these conventions mean? What does a nude
signify?
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not
recognised for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become
a nude. Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be
without disguise. To be nude is to have the surface of one’s own skin turned into a
disguise. Nudity is a form of dress.
In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never
painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
Everything is addressed to him. It is for him that the figures have assumed their
nudity. Consider the Allegory of Time and Love by Bronzino (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

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Venus is depicted kissing cupid. But the way their bodies are arranged has nothing
to do with their kissing. Her body is arranged in this way to display it to the man
looking at the picture. The picture is made to appeal to his sexuality. It has nothing
to do with her sexuality.
Sometimes a painting includes a male lover. How then, can we accept Berger’s
claim that the protagonist is not depicted? Berger argues that almost all post-
Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal – either literally or metaphorically
–because the protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it. Quite often the
female is depicted so as to be surveyed by both the man depicted in the painting
and by the spectator/owner. The absurdity of this male flattery reached its height in
the public art of the nineteenth century.
Berger does, however, acknowledge that there are a few exceptions to the
conventions of the European tradition of oil painting. As an example, Berger
suggests we examine Rembrandt’s painting of Danäe (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2
The way the painter has painted her includes her will and her intentions in the
very structure of the image, in the very expression of her body and face. The image
includes her agency, a promise of power that is usually relegated to the domain of
the ‘masculine’. Because of this, says Berger, the spectator cannot deceive himself
into believing that she is naked for him. He cannot turn her into a nude.
Today, the attitudes and values that informed that tradition are expressed through
the conventions of other more widely diffused media:

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• Advertising.
• Television.
• Movies.
• Music videos.
• Pornography.
Women are still depicted in quite a different way than men – not because the
feminine is different from the masculine – but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is
always assumed to be male.

Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (first published in 1975)
appropriated psychoanalytic theory, particularly that of Freud and Lacan, to
demonstrate the ways in which unconscious forces in patriarchal society have
structured film form. Drawing on Freud’s descriptions of scopophilia, Mulvey
argued that this impulse could explain one of the central pleasures of the cinema.
Scopophilia had been isolated by Freud as one of the component instincts of
sexuality. He associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting
them to a controlling and curious gaze. Fetishistic scopophilia, says Mulvey,
provides an avenue of escape for the male unconscious, which is threatened by the
female figure insofar as it represents castration (the absence of a penis). By turning
the female figure itself into a fetish, either through over-valuation or possessing her
as an object of ‘sight’, her appearance becomes reassuring rather than dangerous.
The other avenue of escape for the male unconscious, says Mulvey, is voyeurism –
investigating the woman, penetrating her privacy, uncovering and demystifying her
mystery. This investigation of the woman is counterbalanced by the devaluation,
punishment or saving of the guilty object. This voyeuristic impulse has associations
with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with
castration), asserting control, and subjugating the guilty person to the controlling
power of punishing or redeeming authorities.
Cinematic spectatorship, by its very nature, plays on voyeuristic fantasies. The
audience are ensconced in darkness, enhancing their sense of separation from
the magic world that unfolds in front of them, indifferent to their presence. The
darkness also isolates the spectators from one another. The whole experience
creates the illusion of a privileged perspective, from which the spectator can safely
look in on a private world, while no one looks back at him.
Mulvey identifies three voyeuristic/scopophilic kinds of look associated with the
cinema:

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• The look of the camera and crew as they record the action.
• The look between the characters on screen.
(Let’s call this a diegetic look.)
• The look of the audience watching the film.
(Let’s call this the extra-diegetic look.)
All three kinds of look are predominantly masculine or associated with the male.
Females are objectified by cinema as the object of desire. The audience identify
with the male hero/protagonist’s desire for the female (voyeuristically). In a world
ordered by sexual imbalance, says Mulvey, pleasure in looking has been ordered
along an active/male and passive/female divide. Women are simultaneously looked
at and displayed. In an echo of Berger, Mulvey says that woman displayed as sexual
object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle, such that her very appearance is code
for ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. The female as spectacle both plays to and constitutes
male desire. Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned as both erotic object
for the characters within the film and as an erotic object for the spectator in the
cinema.
But voyeurism is not the only pleasure that cinema offers. Cinematic stimulation
also produces narcissistic pleasures – the spectator identifies with the object seen.
The term ‘narcissism’ comes from Greek mythology. Narcissus was a beautiful
youth who fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool. He pined away, rooting
himself to the spot, becoming the flower that bears his name. The film spectator
can likewise become enthralled by a fantasy of his own omnipotence, attractiveness
and/or prowess. Much of the pleasure of cinema revolves around the vicarious
pleasure of living ‘through’ our heroes, whilst remaining oblivious to the realities
of our real lives. Both voyeurism and narcissism pursue indifference to perceptual
reality, creating the fantasised, eroticised concept of the world that assuages the
neurotic needs of the male ego while rejecting empirical objectivity.
Females function within the classic film narrative as passive objects of the action.
Just as pleasure in looking has been ordered along an active/male and passive/
female divide, so too has the narrative structure been divided into active/male
and passive/female roles. The man’s role is the active one of forwarding the
story, making things happen. The man emerges in cinematic narrative as the
representative of power. The story is typically structured around a main controlling
figure with whom the spectator can identify.
‘What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is
the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he
feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not
the slightest importance.’ (Budd Boetticher in Mulvey 1975: 3)

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The spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, his screen surrogate,
giving him a satisfying sense of omnipotence.
Viewers identify with the male’s active resolution of the narrative (narcissistically).
Women are seldom essential to the plot or represented as capable of resolving
the narrative conflicts unaided. Traditionally there are few instances of female
characters actively driving the narrative and thus competing for the audience’s
narcissistic identification. The result is that the male view is the only perspective
from which the narcissistic pleasure of narrative can be derived. Female audiences
experience phallocentric pleasure. Women have to psychologically ‘cross dress’
when they go to the cinema.
Linda Williams (in Turner 1988: 118) has argued that many films do represent
females as powerful, only to then punish them for making use of their power. Her
examples are Psycho (1960) and Dressed to Kill (1980), but Thelma & Louise (1991)
also conforms to this rule. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004) exhibit extreme
sadism towards the powerful female protagonist (as well as other powerful female
characters), despite the fact that the female protagonist does eventually triumph
over her male lover/rival. What is interesting here is the excessively high price she
must pay in suffering to accomplish her victory. At one point she literally has to dig
herself out of a grave, having been buried alive. But this is only one of the many
unspeakable horrors inflicted on her body throughout the course of her ordeal. The
message this sends to viewers, who narcissistically identify with the heroine, is that
fighting against a man, if you are a woman, is a masochistic endeavour. In Thelma &
Louise it is a fatal one.
Mulvey herself has acknowledged that the representation of women is far more
complex than she had recognised in her early theory. Melodrama is one genre in
which she says women do have key roles as subjects rather than objects. Mulvey
may be correct, but, as Warren Buckland writes, ‘melodrama can be said to turn
its female character into a victim’ (1998: 81). One problem with Mulvey’s theory is
that it draws on Freudian psychoanalysis, which does seem to presuppose some
sort of essentialist model of gender. This suggests that a male gaze is inherent
in male nature, rather than in the institutional power that men exert in having
dominated the representational media. If this were the case then women, even
with institutional power, would probably not represent men in similar ways. But the
case studies we will examine in this book suggest that it is possible for both male
and female directors to ‘reverse’ the allegedly ‘male’ look. What this suggests, of
course, is that the use of a particular form of power (via the ‘look’) has less to do
with the sex of the director than with the power of the director to represent the
world according to his or her fantasies and desires, and these are not necessarily
intrinsic in nature. They are just as likely to be products of upbringing and culture.

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Conclusion
Neither of the above theoretical approaches can function as a thoroughgoing
explanation of gender representation in art or cinema. In today’s global film
industry, new theoretical models might emerge that are better suited to aid our
understanding of how gender representations work within and upon social and
economic power relations. From today’s perspective, we could probably find a
handful of exceptions to the patriarchal modes of representation described above.
Berger and Mulvey may seem a bit dated, but many of their insights still resonate
with readers, and can be found and studied in the products of past eras, if not in our
own. These are, of course, only theories, and summarised ones at that. But we will
look in the following chapters at some of the ways in which the male gaze/male look
and the power of patriarchal narratives have influenced cinema then and now.

Chapter Summary
• This book does not assume that a decontextualised evaluation of cinema is
an adequate one. Sex is here examined not just as biological fact, but as a
public concept, or set of ideas, about men, women, biology, the ‘natural’, the
‘normal’, the ‘perverse’, etc.
• Since films are human artifacts, film-makers cannot avoid relating their
works to the social, political, historical and visual culture in which they
are situated. Traditions, popular forms, trends and styles develop through
the imitation and repetition of certain elements. These common modes of
representation become conventional or generic.
• Although cinema generally attempts to imitate ‘real life’, it presents us
with a constructed world, fabricated through a carefully selected set of
representations. Students should be encouraged to interrogate the social
functions of our stories and myths.
• Discourse – Foucault introduced the idea that language, far from being
neutral, creates meaning by the ways in which it is used, and in particular
the ways that it is used to wield power. Discourse analysis allows students to
recognise film language as a medium through which relationships of power
between different groups are maintained, reinforced, exposed, subverted or
re-negotiated.
• Hegemony – Hegemonic discourses or ideologies are those that achieve
ascendancy or domination within a global or international industry, economy
or culture. Antonio Gramsci argued that control by one minority social/
political group or ideological system over its rivals need not involve force,
since people can just as easily be lulled into compliance by a powerful set of
messages, to which they consent in the belief that they are ‘better off’.
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 STUDYING FEMINIST FILM THEORY
• Denotation is the ‘common sense’ definition or meaning of a word.
Connotations, by contrast, are implicit or suggested meanings that are not
a part of the literal meaning of a word. Students should be encouraged
to reflect on the connotations of words like ‘feminist’ and ‘director’. The
word ‘feminist’ carries misleading connotations of womanhood, when this
is not in fact part of the definition of the term. Similarly, the title ‘director’
has become a gendered term, associated with males. The film director’s
masculinity has become normalised or assumed.
• As a medium of re-presentation, film does not merely record reality, but
constructs an image of reality through the use of codes, myths, conventions
and signs. Feminists argue that media representations of gender perpetuate
and reinforce the values of patriarchal society.
• The explicit message or interpretation is that which is consciously intended.
• A film’s implicit meanings are less stable, and may involve contested
interpretations that go beyond the intention of the film-maker. These
meanings are not literally written into the script, but they can be read out of
its subtext. The subtext refers to the unstated message conveyed through the
form of a book, film or picture.
• Sexuality has to do with anatomical differences between women and men.
Sex is a given. Gender, by contrast, refers to those socially constructed
ideas about ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, and the ways in which society perceives the
differences between the sexes.
• The stereotypical role of the female in the traditional Hollywood film has not
been that of an agent. Women have played very little part in constructing
public images of femininity. Women tend to imitate an idealised and
eroticised male construction of what women ‘should’ be. ‘Woman’ comes
to represent not one person of the female sex, but a stereotype, a category
defined by men and in opposition to men. Feminist critics point out that
cinematic representations of women are mediated through the eyes and
desires of the male director.
• John Berger’s Ways of Seeing was one of the twentieth century’s most
influential books on art. Berger’s insights provide much of the groundwork
for later feminist theorists.
• Berger began by noting that the social presence of a woman is different in
kind from that of a man. A woman is almost continually accompanied by
her own image of herself. From earliest childhood, she has been taught and
persuaded to survey herself continually. Her own sense of being in herself
is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another (male)
spectator. The surveyor of women in herself is male.

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STUDYING FILMS
• Berger looks closely at the visual conventions that inform the typical
European oil painting, and in particular the female nude. Berger notes the
ways in which the paintings were intended to flatter the male spectator-
owner, for whom they were made, turning the female nudes into objects of
sight for his pleasure. As in the conventional European oil painting, women
are today depicted in quite a different way than men – not because the
feminine is different from the masculine – but because the ‘ideal’ spectator
is always assumed to be male.
• Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ appropriated
psychoanalytic theory, particularly that of Freud and Lacan, to demonstrate
the ways in which unconscious forces in patriarchal society have structured
film form. Drawing on Freud’s descriptions of scopophilia, Mulvey argued
that this impulse could explain one of the central pleasures of the cinema.
• Fetishistic scopophilia, says Mulvey, provides an avenue of escape for the
male unconscious, which is threatened by the female figure insofar as
it represents castration (the absence of a penis). By turning the female
figure itself into a fetish, either through over-valuation or possessing her
as an object of ‘sight,’ her appearance becomes reassuring rather than
dangerous.
• The other avenue of escape for the male unconscious, says Mulvey, is
voyeurism – investigating the woman, penetrating her privacy, uncovering
and demystifying her mystery. Cinematic spectatorship, by its very nature,
plays on voyeuristic fantasies. The whole experience creates the illusion of
a privileged perspective, from which the spectator can safely look in on a
private world, while no one looks back at him.
• Mulvey identifies three voyeuristic/scopophilic kinds of look associated with
the cinema:
a. The look of the camera and crew as they record the action.
b. The look between the characters on screen.
c. The look of the audience watching the film.
• All three kinds of look are predominantly masculine or associated with the
male.
• Mulvey claims that pleasure in looking has been ordered along an active/
male and passive/female divide.
• Cinematic stimulation also produces narcissistic pleasures – the spectator
identifies with the object seen. The spectator identifies with the main
male protagonist, his screen surrogate, giving him a satisfying sense of
omnipotence. Traditionally there are few instances of female characters
actively driving the narrative and thus competing for the audience’s

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narcissistic identification. The result is that the male view is the only
perspective from which the narcissistic pleasure of narrative can be derived.

References
1. Source: ‘What We Look Like’ by Elizabeth Moor and Robyn Chapman, TruthOut org., Tues., May 8,
2012, accessed online on 5 Sept. 2017 at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/8968-what-we-look-
like-a-comic-about-women-in-media

2. See Evidence Report 92, ‘Sector Insights: Skills and Performance challenges in the digital and
creative sector’.

3. Source: New York Film Academy report, ‘Gender Inequality in Film’ (2013) and Women’s Media Center
report, ‘The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2014’.

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Chapter 2 Exploring the ‘Male Gaze’
Chapter 1 introduced us to the three kinds of cinematic ‘look’ that Laura Mulvey
associated with the ‘male gaze’. If you will recall, Mulvey was following in the
footsteps of John Berger, who argued that the reason virtually all post-Renaissance
sexual imagery is frontal, and features women, is that the ideal spectator/owner of
this art was assumed to be male. A central point in both of these theories was that
women and men are positioned differently in relation to visual media, whether in
art or cinema. Here is what Graeme Turner has said about the representation of the
female in Hollywood film:
‘Conventions have built up around the representation of the female in films.
Particularly in Hollywood film since the adoption of colour, the female is shot in a
different way to her male counterpart. There is more emphasis on individual parts
of the body, even to the extent of cropping out the head or face; more attention
to the moulding produced by lighting; and a greater use of mise-en-scène for
display. Hollywood film has turned the female form into a spectacle, an exhibit
to be scanned and arguably possessed by the (male) viewer. … In films we are
offered an impossible image of female beauty as the object of male (and even
female) desire.’ (Turner 1988: 81)
In Chapter 1, we saw how Berger argued that almost all post-Renaissance
European sexual imagery is frontal – either literally or metaphorically – because
the protagonist is the male spectator-owner looking at it. Everything is addressed
to him. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. The ideal spectator
is assumed to be male. The usage and conventions of the European oil painting, in
which women were the principal and ever-recurring subject, are still seen today not
only in cinema, but in advertising, television, magazines and pornography. These
conventions are still present in many film publicity posters (see Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1

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Both men’s and women’s magazines use these patriarchal visual conventions to
sell their product. The image of ‘woman’ is offered to male consumers as sexual
object, to reassure him of his heterosexuality and entice him with the promise
of scopophilic and voyeuristic pleasures. Why then, do women’s magazines also
appeal to these conventions? Could it be, as Berger has suggested, that the
surveyor of women in herself is male? Thus, she turns herself into an object, and
most particularly an object of vision, a sight.
Also in Chapter 1, we saw that Laura Mulvey has argued that narrative film, as it
had so far been developed at the time of her writing, places all viewers (male and
female) in the position of the male voyeur. Mulvey’s psychoanalytic examination of
the pleasures generated by cinema included both voyeuristic/scopophilic pleasures
and narcissistic pleasures. Mulvey argued that fetishistic scopophilia, unlike
voyeurism, emphasises the physical beauty of the object (female), transforming her
into something satisfying in itself, quite apart from story and character involvement.
She exists not merely as something over which to assert narrative control through
the assignment of guilt and punishment, as we saw in film noir. In addition, she
exists as a screen image for the spectator’s undiluted appreciation. Here, says
Mulvey, the pictorial space enclosed by the frame takes precedence over the
narrative or the identification process.
As an example, Mulvey points to the work of Josef von Sternberg, as it contains
many pure instances of fetishistic scopophilia. In the opening sequence of Blonde
Venus (1932) the camera lingers on a group of nude women bathing in a pond
outdoors. The camera imitates a peeping tom, literally peeking through the foliage
to see the women as they swim through the water (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2

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Then along come the men, fully clothed, and they spy on the bathing women. Like
the cinema voyeur, they want to see without being seen. They are active (looking)
spectators positioned opposite the passive (looked at) spectacle. The camera’s look
imitates the diegetic look of the male characters. We see the men gaping at the
nude women, craning their necks to see more, and then we cut to an eyeline match,
giving us the point of view of the men (Fig. 2.3).

Fig. 2.3
Later, when Helen (Marlene Dietrich) visits the offices of the club owner to apply for
work as a stage performer, the camera’s gaze is once again aligned with the male
spectator within the film. Her prospective employer says to Helen, ‘Show me what
you got, baby’. He does almost all of the talking in the scene, and all of the looking.
He has complete control over Helen, who does exactly as he says without protest.
She is made to lift up her skirt and show her legs. The boss sits opposite Helen,
who is standing. He tells her to lift her skirt still higher. This is one of the few times
in the film when Helen has her back to the camera, so that the audience cannot see
what she reveals to the man. Instead we are given a medium long shot in which we
see Helen from behind and him looking at her legs. However, if we look at the mise-
en-scène, the wall behind the club owner is full of framed photos of showgirls with
their legs on display. The photographs mimic Helen’s actions and her posture as
she ‘shows him what she’s got’ (Fig. 2.4).
This is an example of mise-en-abyme, a literary device in which one part of the text
must, literally, at least in part (as well as metaphorically), reproduce the other. What
we see in the tiny frames on the wall is a sort of mirror image or reproduction of
what the man is seeing. This device also allowed the producers to include some
nudity without the censors objecting, since the spectator sees not an actual nude
character, but only some small photographic reproductions of nude characters. In
other words, the censors were fooled into allowing this (smaller) representation

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Fig. 2.4
of female ‘immodesty’, but not the other one. The framed photographs are
reproductions within a reproduction. So, the image of the women in the
photographs have been mediated, or re-presented, twice: once by the photographer
or graphic illustrator, and a second time by the cinematographer. In like fashion,
the club owner’s sexual overtures are thinly disguised with double entendre, making
his intentions ambiguous enough to pass the censors, but not vague enough to fool
the discerning viewer, for whom his remarks provide sexual titillation.
In a later scene, Helen (the ‘Blonde Venus’) is performing on stage at the nightclub.
Nick Townsend (Cary Grant) is sitting in the audience as Helen performs her routine
while singing the song ‘Hot Voodoo’. We see Townsend gaze at Helen, whom he
sees for the first time. Again, viewer identification is with him, so we see Helen as
though through his eyes. As Mulvey says:
Sternberg produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful
look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film), is broken
in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the
woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of
guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, is
the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look. Sternberg
plays down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-dimensional,
as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers, etc., reduce the visual
field. There is little or no mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male
protagonist. (1975: 4)
We do not see the male gaze within the screen at this point. His absence is, like
the absence of the true protagonist in Berger’s oil paintings, intended to flatter the
spectator/owner/cinemagoer – the real protagonist. In Blonde Venus the sequence

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does begin with some medium close-ups of Townsend at his table, watching the
show, followed by an eyeline match, giving the cinema spectator Townsend’s point
of view. But there is the moment when Nick Townsend’s look is broken in favour of
undisrupted shots of Helen, and it is as if Nick has temporarily disappeared. We can
easily convince ourselves into thinking that the show is completely for our erotic
benefit. At this point the linear narrative flow is suspended in favour of the look
alone. During this sequence not much happens. We simply take time out from the
plot to watch Helen’s performance. When we see the crowd in the club, it is never
from Helen’s point of view. The female point of view is rendered irrelevant.
Mulvey also discusses Hitchcock, but contrasts him with Sternberg because the
former self-consciously incorporated the look into the plot, and drew the audience
into a voyeuristic identification with the screen hero, whose voyeurism parodied the
viewer’s own position in the cinema. While Sternberg merely presupposes male
scopophilia or voyeurism, Hitchcock is more aware of these phenomena, and also
wants to say something about them.
We see this most clearly in Rear Window (1954), where the viewer is metaphorically
identified with the protagonist, L.B. Jefferies, who is confined to his wheelchair.
Jefferies (James Stewart) is identified from the outset as the active male hero.
His job as a photojournalist involves travel and risk, and we learn from a phone
conversation in the first act that he resents being confined indoors with nothing to
do. He has broken his leg precisely because he is so good at his work, and will do
virtually anything to get a good action photo. Meanwhile, Jeffries’ girlfriend Lisa
(Grace Kelly) is identified as the exhibitionist, constantly modelling new clothes
and always looking impeccable. The narrative action takes place in the apartment
block opposite (i.e. a metaphor for the movie screen). Lisa is constantly trying to
attract his attention, but Jefferies barely notices her, until she crosses the line from
spectator to spectacle, by entering the apartment block opposite. It is only at this
point that she becomes eroticised as an object for his scopophilic gaze (see Fig.
2.5). In addition, she has entered the narrative as the guilty woman, an intruder in a
stranger’s apartment, who discovers her and threatens to punish her.
Mulvey points out that Hitchcock makes the look, or a fascination with scopophilic
eroticism, the subject of films such as Vertigo (1958), Marnie (1964) and Rear
Window. Vertigo is the best example, as the entire narrative revolves around what
Scottie (James Stewart) sees or fails to see. Although not mentioned by Mulvey,
Psycho is also an interesting example, especially since it was so influential in the
development of horror/slasher genre conventions. Through a close study of Psycho,
we can see how the scopophilic and narcissistic pleasures on offer create a fantasy
world that satisfies the neurotic needs of the male ego.

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Fig. 2.5
As the plot begins, audience sympathy is with a female protagonist, Marion Crane
(Janet Leigh). In the first sequence inside the hotel room, both Marion and her
boyfriend (John Gavin) are partially nude, and both are on display for the look of the
audience. Before long, Marion commits a crime against her male boss (stealing the
money), and is transformed into someone over whom male characters will assert
narrative control through the assignment of guilt and punishment.
Once Marion arrives at the Bates Motel, however, audience identification is split
between Marion and Norman (Anthony Perkins). During her discussion with Norman
in his parlour, Marion implies that she is going to redeem herself, and drive back to
Phoenix with the money. (‘I got myself into a private trap back there, and I’m going
to drive back and try to get myself out of it, before it’s too late for me too.’) When
Marion leaves the parlour the camera does not go with her, but stays with Norman,
who now realises that Marion lied about her name and her place of origin when she
checked into the motel. This is a somewhat shocking moment since the narration up
to this point in the film has been restricted to Marion’s point of view. Until this point
we have not been given more narrative knowledge than Marion has. Now, however,
we see Norman remove a picture from his wall, revealing a small peephole. When
Norman looks through the hole, we get an eyeline match, giving us Norman’s point
of view. We see Marion undressing in her room, and this change in perspective
encourages audience identification with the male villain, even though Marion has
until this point been the central character for audience empathy (see Figs. 2.6 & 2.7).
Momentarily, Marion exists as a screen image for the spectator’s undiluted
appreciation. Marion is facing the camera as she steps out of her clothing, and the
frame is vignetted so that it is as though we are looking (with Norman) through the
peephole.
As she begins to shower, the editing speeds up. When ‘mother’ arrives there are
almost no point-of-view shots from Marion’s perspective but many from the killer’s.
The fetishistic spectacle of Marion’s nudity is here combined with the narcissistic
‘pleasure’ of assuming narrative control over her – through her punishment. She is
killed with a sharp, body intrusive weapon that allows the killer to make close

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Figs. 2.6 & 2.7

contact with the victim. The knife is a phallic extension of the killer’s body.
Traditionally, there are few genres in which female characters actively drive the
narrative and thus compete for the audience’s narcissistic identification. The result
is that the male view is the only perspective from which the pleasure of narrative
can be derived. Horror films are no exception. Audiences who enjoy horror films
generally experience phallocentric pleasure of a particularly sadistic nature.
The audience for the horror/slasher genre is predominantly young males. Yet of all
the genres that have been identified as ‘male’, the horror/slasher is the only one
that offers a female central character. This might at first suggest a kind of role-
reversal in which young men choose to see films that position their sympathies
with female characters for gratification (see Clover 1992). However, the generic and
narrative conventions of horror/slasher films indicate that the pleasure on offer
conforms to the phallocentric pleasures of patriarchal cinema. As Andrew Butler
says, ‘Equally, though, it is possible that young men like watching young women
being stalked and menaced, and the many point-of-view shots encourage their
identification with the villain rather than the victim’ (2002: 68). Most films within
the slasher sub-genre conform to the patriarchal pattern established in Psycho.
They position the female character as victim, the male antagonist as dangerous or
threatening, and virtually omnipotent. They encourage audience identification with
the male killer/monster through the use of point-of-view shots. They turn female

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victims into (a) scopophilic spectacle, by including gratuitous female nudity, and
(b) objects for the voyeuristic/sadistic impulse, by turning her into an object of guilt
over which the male killer asserts violent control. Conventionally, the female’s
sexual agency, depicted as promiscuity, is the ‘crime’ that ‘justifies’ her violent
punishment.
Halloween (1978) created a pattern that was followed in many horror/slasher
films of the 1980s. The film opened with a murder of the sexually active sister of
Michael Myers. The murder was filmed as a point-of-view long take, positioning the
audience with the (male) killer as he murders the (mostly nude) female victim with a
body intrusive weapon (a knife). Since Halloween, horror audiences expect a female
character to be positioned as ‘the final girl’. She is typically ‘the clean-living virgin’
as opposed to her sexually active peers, who will be picked off by the killer one by
one. As Andrew Butler says,
There’s a pattern to the victims: anyone who has had sex is fair game, as are
people who smoke or drink. Anyone separated from the others is also dead meat.
Finally there is just one or two victims left, usually a virtuous female (a clean-
living virgin) who makes a last stand and appears to defeat the killer, although
often it’s revealed that she has the wrong man, or that he hasn’t died after all
(cue sequel…). (2002: 67)
Sexually active male characters are not placed on display as spectacle before being
murdered. Female nudity in horror/slasher films, as with all genres, is completely
disproportionate to male nudity. The female nudity in horror/slasher films is usually
gratuitous. The plot does not demand the nudity; rather, the plot is altered to
accommodate it.
The ‘final girl’ in Halloween was played by Janet Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee
Curtis. Halloween’s plot is ordered around the monster’s stalking and killing several
teenage characters. Each of the killer’s assaults is reminiscent of the night he killed
his sister after she had sex with a local boy. Halloween established the narrative
‘rule’ of punishing sexually active characters, a convention parodied in Scream and
its sequels. Laurie is singled out by the killer. Unlike her teenage friends, Laurie is
sexually innocent, and genuinely kind. As in many horror films it is the ‘good girl’
who both attracts the killer’s special attention and threatens to overpower him in
the end.
One of the pleasures of genre films is that they allow viewers to live vicariously
‘through’ a character without being subjected to the realities and complications that
exist outside the cinema. The horror audience can safely explore the figure of ‘the
monster’ while escaping the inner and outer censors. Horror/slasher films offer
a safe outlet for sexual energies that are repressed and denied in our society. For
young males, the figure of the monster offers the psychological pleasures of escape
from social laws and taboos through narcissistic identification with the villain.

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But at the same time, the sadism of these pleasures is made socially acceptable
through the reassurance that the monster is an apparent ‘other’.
In Wes Craven’s shrewd film, Scream 2 (1997), which is really a commentary on
the horror genre and its audiences, a male character takes his girlfriend to the
cinema. He wants to see the film ‘Stab’, but she is reluctant to see a horror film.
He says to her, ‘Scary movies are great foreplay.’ She disagrees. Some critics have
speculated that the pleasures of the horror/slasher genre also derive from teenage
audience viewing patterns. Perhaps young girls enjoy role-playing the frightened,
vulnerable girl who needs protection from her boyfriend. Andrew Butler says, ‘Both
the directors and the audiences know what is expected: people have to be killed
in increasingly graphic ways, there has to be enough titillation to get the audience
horny whilst the next scare encourages audience members to turn for reassurance
to their partners’ (2002: 68).
A good many Hollywood films do conform to Mulvey’s observations about the three
‘looks’ of the cinema being constructed as ‘male’. However, non-Hollywood films
by feminist directors (both male and female) provide examples of how the male
gaze can be subverted, or even inverted. British director Andrea Arnold has done
this with a good degree of success. In her 2006 film Red Road, Arnold very self-
consciously reverses the male gaze.
Red Road narrates the perspective of a woman, Jackie (Kate Dickie), who works as
a CCTV operator in Glasgow, so right from the start the narrative is about female
‘looking’. The plot follows her story from when she recognizes a man from her past
on the CCTV monitor and begins to ‘stalk’ him, first by (ab)using her voyeuristic
occupational instruments of power and later following him (on foot) and insinuating
herself into his world.
The viewer is left to wonder why Jackie is fixated on Clyde (Tony Curran), the object
of her stalking. The story traces a gradual revelation of details about Clyde, none of
which gives viewers full understanding of what he is like or what he is doing. Nor do
we understand what Jackie is doing or why. Everything she discovers is fragmented
while viewers are made to actively struggle to piece together the ‘thread’ or
meaning of Jackie’s investigation.
Red Road is all about a woman who is investigating a man, penetrating his privacy,
assigning guilt to him, and taking revenge on him for something in his past. The
entire film is about Jackie’s looking, watching (while not being seen), and exploring
the details of this stranger’s life, all without him being privy to the fact that he
is under investigation. He is a pure object of a female gaze. Because the film is
narrated from Jackie’s perspective, the audience is also constructed as female. All
three of Mulvey’s cinematic ‘looks’ are constructed as female.

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The story is told through restricted narration, so that viewers never know more
than Jackie does. As is normal in crime investigation films, we know exactly as
much as the protagonist knows and find things out only when she does. However,
this restricted narration is presented from the perspective of an almost omniscient
character. Her job as a CCTV operator greatly amplifies her voyeuristic powers,
giving her a “God’s eye view” on the world. Her job is a typically male occupation,
as we see from the surroundings at the CCTV station, where her colleagues are all
men.
Jackie has become detached from life, from her own past, her family and even from
her present life (and feelings). She is a woman apart. In a sense, then, although
Clyde is the ‘victim’ of her stalking and her voyeuristic gaze (which is explicitly
sexual on one occasion), she too is the victim of her own powerful position over
others. She is a pure spectator, and is not really ‘present’ in her own life. We later
find out why.
Similar film characters who inhabit this other-worldly power perspective can be
found in surveillance films such as The End of Violence (1997) by Wim Wenders and
The Lives of Others (2006) by Von Donnersmarck. When Jackie has sex with lover
Avery in his work van we see Jackie’s impassive facial expressions through the
glass of the car window, as if to suggest her separation from him and from her own
body. She is absent from her own life and from the lives of those who love her. We
see in one scene, at a relative’s wedding, that family members implore her to ‘come
round’ but she is evasive and non-committal.
The film allows us to watch Jackie as she watches the world, and Clyde. She is in
a uniquely powerful position because she operates cameras, and our awareness
of this creates another meta-film or layer of meaning over and above the actual
story. Jackie decides which part of the world she (and we) will see, and we watch
her make these selections, moving the cameras with her controls, zooming in or
out and selecting which camera to view (similar to editing). Watching Jackie is a
metaphor for watching a film director at work. She is choosing from the world what
to highlight or to zoom in on, how long to look at it, in what order, and in which
framing or shot. She has tremendous power over what she sees and, since she is
our proxy, over what we see too. She mediates our view on the world. In a sense
then, Jackie is a metaphor for Andrea Arnold (the film director).
Jackie’s power is (to use Foucault’s term) ‘knowledge power’, since she uses her
surveillance to find out information about Clyde (and others) while he remains
oblivious to her ‘project’. Ultimately Jackie leaves the CCTV monitors, goes into
Clyde’s world and uses sex as her tool of revenge. She later repents of her abuse,
and finally heals herself by forgiving Clyde. This allows the viewer to sympathise
with her character despite her morally dubious choices. At the end of the film she is
redeemed, when the audience finally discovers her motives. Red Road is a powerful

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example of how cinema can break the conventions of a ‘male gaze’ while also
achieving complex representations in a riveting story.
Arnold’s 2009 film Fish Tank is another example of the female gaze. The film was
a very personal project that Arnold both wrote and directed. As with Red Road,
Arnold’s story unfolds on a council estate, with working class characters. She
sets Fish Tank on the Mardyke Estate in Havering, the town of Tilbury, and the A13
motorway. Arnold employs some of the same directorial choices, again constructing
the viewer’s gaze through the perspective of a female protagonist, Mia Williams
(Katie Jarvis), and aligning her audience with a damaged, but ultimately likeable,
character.
Throughout the film 15 year-old Mia is watching people, and we constantly watch
with her, gaining insights into how she sees the world, and the limited options
available to her. In an early scene we see her observing some other teenage
girls from her estate while they practise a dance routine. Typically watching
women dance (especially in sexually suggestive ways) is narrated through a male
perspective, with viewers internalising a male point of view on women. Here Mia is
the sole judge of the girls’ moves, their bodies (they’re not wearing much), and their
dancing. Consequently, viewers see the girls from a female’s gaze and internalise
Mia’s perspective.
Later we see Mia perched above the estate on a balcony that overlooks the streets
and the other council buildings. Again we share her view on this world and on the
gang of boys who amble along the street below. Soon after this Mia is dancing
seductively to a rap song on TV in her own kitchen when she meets Conor (Michael
Fassbender), her mum’s lover, who has been spying on her. Although this might
suggest a male gaze, the viewer is never given Conor’s point-of-view shots in an
eyeline match, so we are not positioned to view Mia as an object of his gaze. Rather,
we realise, along with her, that she has been watched during an intimate moment
that she thought was private. Only a minute later, Mia will reverse the look, not
only allowing her gaze to linger upon Conor’s shirtless torso while he makes tea,
but also his bum as he goes up the stairs. It is interesting that these shots are
constructed to give the viewer Mia’s eyeline match, so the audience is ‘constructed’
to identify with a female gaze, with Conor’s body being its object.
We also become privy to Conor’s intimate life, and spy on him (from Mia’s point of
view) when he is having sex with Mia’s mum, Joanne. Again, during this intimate
moment, we get an eyeline match aligning us with Mia’s point of view. Her gaze is
also voyeuristic, since Conor and Joanne are unaware of being observed, and since
Mia is spying on them during a sexual act. Mia has the full power of the gaze since
no one is looking back at her.
On other occasions, we also see Mia looking through Conor’s wallet, his home and
his things. This compares well to Jackie’s investigation of Clyde in Red Road, in

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which a female character is probing into a man’s life, his privacy, and judging it or
using it for her own purposes or empowerment. Mia follows Conor to some extent,
and insinuates herself into his work and home lives, without his consent on either
occasion. She has been subjected, without her consent, to a new member of her
household (Conor). But she is not passive about accepting her new circumstances
and this new invasion of her privacy. She is not without any agency or say in the
matter, despite her apparent impotence to change it. She empowers herself by
finding out about Conor and what he does in his private life. At the same time, she
is intrigued by this man – the only person who has offered her any affection or
kindness. Her intrigue is conflated with her budding adolescent sexual curiosity,
and she harbours a growing crush on him that threatens to set her in conflict with
her own mother (with whom she already has a dysfunctional, abusive relationship).
We are again given a ‘female gaze’ on women in a scene where Mia’s mum Joanne
is sexily dancing to ‘Show Me Love’ in her kitchen, wearing only underwear. Joanne
is literally framed through an opening in the wall between the kitchen and the
living room, allowing us to see a frame-within-the-frame. This cinematographic
choice reminds us, through this very explicit use of mise-en-scène, that Joanne’s
objectification is framed by and for Mia. The audience is deliberately constructed as
female since we see her dance from Mia’s point of view.
Later Arnold reverts to the self-conscious use of technology to empower characters
by means of looking, as she did in Red Road. Conor gives Mia a video camera so
that she can film herself dancing for an audition demo tape, and this prop device
allows Arnold to (again) comment on the construction of the ‘world’ by means of
characters’ use of visual technology. Mia does film her own dance demo tape, but
she also uses Conor’s camera voyeuristically, filming him getting dressed, and later
playing it back for her own enjoyment in the privacy of her own room.
Mia is a novice and we see her innocently struggling to learn how to use a camera
for the first time. When she records herself dancing, this is an explicit act of self-
empowerment. She is the agent, not the object, of her video recording, filming
herself and highlighting her ability to move, not her ability to be a sex object or
spectacle. Conor’s secret betrayal of Mia and her mum is revealed by means of
the same video camera later on, again revealing how possession of the camera
empowers its owners and/or users.
Mia’s resistance to being objectified is reinforced later on when she goes to the
dance rehearsal and realises that it is not a legitimate dance competition, but an
audition for erotic dancers for a sleazy local bar. While the ‘judges’ are both male
and female, Mia refuses to go ahead with her dance after being asked whether
she has more ‘revealing’ clothes to wear for it. She realises that she is not like
the other dancers at the ‘audition’ since they are all flaunting the highly gendered
construction of “femininity” typical of pornography. By contrast, she is a good

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dancer and did not expect to have to imitate the smutty pornographic dance moves
displayed by her competitors at the audition.
Arnold is quickly establishing herself as an auteur director, with a consistency in
quality and form that includes some of the best independent films of the naughties.
Arnold often writes her films as well as directing them. She sets her stories within
a working class milieu and shoots in a realist style, often using street casting for
key roles. She presents us with strong but flawed female characters who, despite
being often hemmed in by circumstance or economic constraints, are courageous
and resilient, with rich inner lives. She often puts her female protagonists into
vulnerable sexual situations with men, building tension in the audience, before
revealing complex male characters that choose not to abuse the power they
possess. What is striking about Arnold’s male characters is how often they could,
but do not, abuse women. This kind of scenario was also present in her most recent
film at the time of writing, American Honey (2016). Certain visual motifs also recur
throughout Arnold’s work. She frequently includes powerful wind within the mise-
en-scène, as well as dogs. Her characters typically dance at some point in the film
as a form of bonding or personal expression. In addition, Arnold seems to have
an obsession with licking, as both humans and animals are often seen using their
tongues in various ways. Formally, Arnold uses a realist style with lots of hand-held
camerawork, location settings and expert use of popular music tracks, especially
in the hip-hop genre, often with the sound source emanating from within the film’s
diegetic world rather than being added as a soundtrack in post production.

Chapter Summary
• Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic examination of the pleasures generated by
cinema included scopophilic, voyeuristic and narcissistic pleasures. This
chapter looks at each of these pleasures in turn, with reference to cinematic
examples as well as print advertisements.
• Mulvey argued that fetishistic scopophilia, unlike voyeurism, emphasises
the physical beauty of the object. The object is transformed into something
satisfying in itself, set apart from story and character involvement. She
becomes pure spectacle. This is illustrated with reference to Helen Faraday
(Marlene Dietrich) in Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus. Despite the story
being about a woman and her predicament in patriarchal society, viewer
identification is exclusively with male characters, and Helen is always an
object for male spectators within the film and within the cinema.
• Von Sternberg is contrasted with Mulvey’s other key example, Hitchcock.
Instead of merely presupposing male scopophilia/voyeurism, Hitchcock
knowingly comments on these phenomena, making them the subject of his
films (e.g. Rear Window, Vertigo).

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• Though not mentioned by Mulvey, Psycho is offered as a case study in how
the horror/slasher genre developed conventions that generated scopophilic
and narcissistic pleasures for male viewers, perhaps catering to violent male
fantasies.
• The slasher (‘slash her’) sub-genre generally conforms to the patriarchal
pattern established in Psycho, positioning the female character as victim
and the male antagonist as dangerous, threatening and virtually omnipotent.
Slasher films encourage viewer identification with the male killer/monster
through the use of point-of-view shots. They turn female victims into (a)
scopophilic spectacle, through the inclusion of gratuitous female nudity,
as visual ‘foreplay’ for her annihilation and (b) objects for the voyeuristic/
sadistic impulse, by turning her into an object of guilt over which the male
killer asserts violent control.
• Andrea Arnold’s film Red Road makes an excellent case study because it
shows how a director can reverse the ‘male gaze’ and all three of its ‘looks’.
This film and Fish Tank are excellent examples of a ‘female gaze’.

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Chapter 3 Censorship and Patriarchal Ideology

‘[Truth and narrative] both have power over us. But how that power works is not
straightforward: the truth affects us whether it’s knowable or not; narratives
affect us whether they’re truthful or not.’ (Bjorn Patricks 2005)

Theoretical models for the study of narrative

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss examined the social function of myths.
Based on his observations of ancient and primitive cultures, he concluded that
one of the functions of myths and legends was to explain away the contradictions
and injustices in experience. Strauss noted that mythologies involve conflicts
between two mutually exclusive sets of ideas or categories. These he called
‘binary oppositions’. He explained this as a way of understanding our world, by
seeing things in terms of similarities or differences. In a way, patterns of binary
oppositions are built into our way of defining things in the world around us. To
comprehend what something is, we also understand what it is not. So, ‘light’ is
the absence of ‘dark’, and vice versa. ‘Adult’ means ‘not a child’, ‘man’ means ‘not
woman’, ‘inside’ means not ‘outside’, and so on. One of the reasons that feminists
have focused on constructions of gender difference is that gender oppositionality
tends to begin from the premise that ‘man’ is ‘not woman’ and then moves to the
general principle that whatever men are, automatically, women are not . So, if the
man is strong, then the woman must be weak. If men are active, then women must
be passive.
The oppositions continue in familiar forms:
Male Female
Strong Weak
Independent Dependent
Rational Emotional
Reliable Unstable
Mature Childish
Dangerous Unthreatening
Important Petty/trivial
As the items pile up under these columns we can see how the tally of negatives on
the female side is a product of the original assumption that male and female are
opposites. To continue with this pattern is to end up with good (male) versus bad
(female).

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Narrative revolves around conflict. Most films start by establishing the lines of
conflict that determine or motivate the action and events of the story. Conflict is
often set up between opposing forces that are mutually exclusive. The hero of the
story will be aligned with one side of the conflict, and the audience will naturally
sympathise with him in his efforts to overcome the opposing obstacles, limitations
or forces. Opposed systems of values are operating in the conflict, and the audience
will be drawn into sympathy with one set of values or the other. The myths,
beliefs and values of a particular culture or group are embodied in the stories
they produce. Through the narrative, value systems are reinforced, repeated or
subverted.
Another theoretical model that can be useful in analysing how narrative structure
encodes ideological messages comes from Tzvetan Todorov (1977). Todorov’s model
is a linear one in which the narrative begins with a state of equilibrium or plenitude,
which is then disrupted by a force that brings about disequilibrium. The narrative
action is then motivated by the need to overpower or demolish the disruptive force
to restore the state of equilibrium. But the second state of equilibrium is not exactly
the same as the first, and may be better in terms of character development or
growth, or the fulfilment of a character’s romantic desire in addition to restoring the
peace. For example, in Jaws (1975), Chief Brodie does not only vanquish the killer
shark, thus restoring the seaside town to safety, he also overcomes his lifelong
fear of water. Most action-adventure films do seem to adhere to this pattern, and
we can easily see how our sympathies are moulded to conform to the film’s guiding
ideology. Whomever or whatever brings about the disruption is ‘bad’ while the
(usually male) hero is the one who restores the good state of equilibrium.

Genre and ideology

The genre film can be seen as performing social and pedagogical functions.
Genre films can be studied as cultural rituals, by looking at the ways in which the
recurring patterns in a particular genre offer audiences answers to their basic
questions, anxieties and problems. Through the patterns discerned in cultural
myths we can learn much about a culture’s preoccupations and values. Genre films
do not only reveal cultural problems or preoccupations, they also suggest solutions
and reinforce social values:
The genre film offers a lesson in how to act within society and how to deal with
current problems and anxieties. But it does not offer neutral ways of dealing with
social problems: instead it prescribes a preferred set of values: those of capitalist
ideology, with its emphasis on the individual – the individual’s right of ownership,
private enterprise and personal wealth; the nuclear family with the wife staying at
home and the husband working, the necessity of conforming to moral and social
laws, and so on. (Buckland, p. 80)

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Genre films offer imaginary and idealised solutions to real problems. This is
another of the pleasures of narrative cinema. Cinema performs a function similar
to religion in that it gives us moral instruction in how to live, and a temporary sense
that somewhere in the universe is an order that can make things right. Cinematic
narratives present us, temporarily, with a sense of closure and complete resolution
to complex problems or injustices that, in reality, may never be fully resolved.
Nine to Five (1980) showed working women getting revenge on their sexist male
boss. The women in the narrative turn the tables on their egomaniacal boss, and
make him see what it feels like to be exploited while they make the decisions.
Women have long been exploited in the workplace, and have not been fairly
rewarded for the work that they do. Women viewers (especially those who work in
offices with and for men) feel a sense of triumph as the heroines in the film wreak
their revenge, but the pleasure they experience must stand proxy for any real
triumph over inequitable pay rates and institutionalised corporate sexism, as these
persist. If these injustices did not exist in the real world, the pleasure for women in
seeing a film like Nine to Five would diminish considerably, and such films would
not be made.

Censorship and narrative control

For a period of about two decades, from the early 1930s until the late 1950s,
American commercial film was subject to rigid regulation from within the industry.
In 1934 the Hollywood film industry came under pressure from the 11-million
strong Catholic Legion of Decency, whose oath of obedience not to attend
condemned films was recited in churches across America during Sunday mass.
Under threat of mass boycott, the major studios had little choice but to comply
with the Production Code. All film scripts had to be sent to the Studio Relations
Committee before shooting began. The censors had the power to distort the film’s
cause-effect logic in order to make the narrative comply with their moral ideology.
Censorship enforced a unified moral message. At the level of the shot and scene,
potentially offensive events had to be depicted in an indirect way. This sometimes
resulted in ambiguous forms of representation, with elliptical sequences that left
out much of the offensive material, by simply skipping over it. The audience often
had to read between the lines in order to follow the plot.
At this point it would be a good idea to study the content of the production code
(see page 65). The Hays Code defined the moral and ideological limits of the classic
Hollywood film for a period of about 20 years. This went well beyond just issues
of sex and violence to encompass law and order (producers were not allowed to
portray criminals in a sympathetic light), religion (no film could ‘throw ridicule
on any religious faith’ and ‘ministers of religion could not be depicted as villains
or comics’) and patriarchal values (films had to be sympathetic to marriage as

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an institution and ‘impure love’ could not be represented as attractive). Where
‘impure love’ (which included, of course, adultery) was depicted within the story,
the characters had to suffer within the scenario as a result of their behaviour. This
way of punishing immoral characters within the plot was known as the rule of
‘compensating moral values’. According to this rule, if a character committed an
immoral action, this action had to be compensated for within the narrative either
through the punishment of the character or the redemption of her evil ways. The
rule of compensating moral values was rigidly enforced by the Production Code
Administration.
In Psycho Marion is having a secret affair with a man to whom she is not married.
Although the man is separated from his wife, Marion’s behaviour was nevertheless
regarded as ‘indecent’. Moreover, Marion steals a large sum of money from her
boss. She is punished with death in the scenario. Although Psycho was made in
1960, after the Production Code was no longer legally binding, the studio’s censors
were notoriously breathing down Hitchcock’s neck and made him cut some of the
more salubrious material. In scores of American classic movies, we see how the
‘bad’ girl (i.e. the one who is independent, active, sexual, immodest, manipulative or
conniving with a male villain) suffers for her ‘crime’. Meanwhile, the apple pie girl
(who is typically modest, servile and helpful, as well as being the love interest for
the male protagonist) gets the man, and lives happily ever after.
Censorship imposed an ideological set of narrative conventions on studios that
made films whose subject matter was deemed transgressive. Again Blonde Venus
makes an interesting case study. Although produced in the pre-Code era, the
censor’s suggestions were implemented, and this affected the film’s cause-effect
logic. Blonde Venus also exemplifies how the rule of ‘compensating moral values’
reinforced the patriarchal ideology. The film is a melodrama, a genre which has
been described as a woman’s genre, because the narrative is usually dominated
by a central female character who has to face difficulties, worries or dilemmas
because of her position as a woman living in a male-dominated (patriarchal) society.
Another feature of melodrama is that characters’ emotions are expressed through
music, often over-punctuating or over-dramatising the already obvious feelings
displayed. The word means literally music (melos) and drama. Melodrama is all
about excess. In addition to music, characters’ moods, emotions or personalities
are often enhanced by dramatic/expressionist lighting, costume or mise-en-scène.
The subject matter of the melodrama is often families and relationships. The plot
usually involves repressed secrets, chance events or meetings, and dramatic knots.
Melodrama generally positions the central active female as a victim, and is narrated
from her perspective. Warren Buckland describes melodrama as follows:
Historically, melodrama has replaced religion as a way of thinking through moral
issues and conflicts. As with religion, the function of melodrama is to clarify the

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ethical choices we have to make in our lives. This is why the conflict between
good and evil is central to melodrama. But rather than focusing on the sacred, as
religion does, melodrama focuses on moral issues and conflicts as experienced
by ordinary people on a personal, everyday basis. (1988: 81)
The central character in Blonde Venus is Helen Faraday, a German stage performer
who marries a chemist, Ned Faraday, and comes to America to live with him.
They have a son, Johnny, and Helen becomes a full-time mother. Ned develops
chemical poisoning and must go to Europe for treatment, but he can’t afford it.
Helen decides to go back to her work as a cabaret performer in order to raise the
money necessary. At the nightclub where she works, she attracts the attention of
an urbane millionaire, Nick Townsend who offers to pay her $300 if she’ll sleep with
him. Helen takes him up on the offer and uses the money to send Ned to Europe
for treatment. While Ned is away, Helen prolongs her affair with Townsend (the
main secret). Ned arrives home from Europe early, and discovers that Helen has
not been living in their apartment. Ned confronts Helen when she comes home to
collect the mail, and realising he has been betrayed, threatens to take custody of
Johnny. In order to keep her son, Helen goes on the run, with Ned’s detectives in
hot pursuit. Helen soon finds herself poverty-stricken and desperate, and has to
resort to prostitution to survive. Eventually she is found by one of Ned’s detectives
and Johnny is returned to Ned’s custody. Ned bitterly pays Helen back the money
she had given him for his treatment and leaves her to her fate. After hitting rock
bottom, Helen returns to Europe where she rebuilds her career as a successful
cabaret star in Paris. In a chance encounter, she meets Nick Townsend in the club
where she’s performing, and they rekindle their friendship. Townsend is on his way
back to America. Seeing that Helen is not truly happy, he persuades Helen to come
back to the States with him to see her son. The two of them arrive at the apartment
where Ned lives with Johnny, and Townsend persuades Ned to let Helen see her
son. When Helen sees Johnny, she decides to stay with her family. This is the story,
but this is not how this story is plotted and presented at the level of shot and scene.
The film’s central character, Helen, is confronted with a woman’s dilemma: stay
home and be a dutiful wife and mother in a less than idyllic marriage; or sacrifice
motherhood and duty for independence, freedom and romantic/sexual gratification.
Townsend is played by leading male Cary Grant. For audiences there is no question
who is the better catch. Townsend is the rich, powerful alpha male while Ned is a
dull, depressing figure, not rich and not particularly handsome, and now dependent
on his wife. The film narrates a female predicament and how the leading female
chooses to act will be instructive for female audiences – a lesson in how (or how
not) to behave. Lea Jacobs includes Blonde Venus in her compelling study of ‘the
fallen woman film’, a genre which she describes as follows:
These films concern a woman who commits a sexual transgression such as
adultery or premarital sex. In a traditional version of the plot, she is expelled from

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the domestic space of the family and undergoes a protracted decline. (1991: x)
Looking at the story of Blonde Venus it is not surprising that the censors found
much of the story objectionable.
The plot was carefully re-constructed so as to ensure that Helen’s immoral
behaviour (her adulterous affair with Nick, prostitution) is compensated for by the
end of the story. The way in which closure is achieved, and conflicts are resolved,
suggests to us which values are best to adopt. These are very clearly patriarchal
values. As we noted above, the ‘rule of compensating moral values’ dictated that
Helen would have either to suffer or reform her immoral ways within the narrative.
In the case of Blonde Venus she does both. During her exile from domestic life she
must constantly hide. She is, for a while, a fugitive in the patriarchal world, in which
she can find no respectable place. She is destitute and is constantly threatened with
arrest. She has to become a prostitute in order to survive. These are punishments
she faces for rejecting her domestic role and the sanctity of marriage. But in the
end she also must sacrifice her love for the male lead, and the independence and
freedom she had as a cabaret performer. She is also depicted giving away all of her
money (earned soliciting) to a destitute woman in a shelter. What is so interesting
about Blonde Venus from the point of view of feminist film studies, is that this
series of events was not the way the original script ended. Rather, the censors,
primarily Paramount production head Ben P. Schulberg, changed the narrative in
order to ensure that it conformed to patriarchal censorship rules. An early version
of the script had Helen paired off with the romantic lead at the end. This is morally
justified by the fact that her husband, Ned, is supposed to have had an affair with
the housekeeper. In this version of the ending the central woman keeps her career,
keeps her son and marries the man of her dreams. But Lamar Trotti, the industry
censor in charge of the film, was morally offended by this ending. He wrote:
It does not seem proper to have (Helen’s) affair justified in the minds of the
audience by tearing down the character of the husband, who, up to this point, has
been a decent man who was deceived by his wife. (In Jacobs 1988: 22–31)
Trotti was upset at the way the studio’s version undermined Ned, a character who,
for him, represented a sympathetic male position. Trotti was clearly concerned that
the ‘law’ of compensating moral values had been somehow misinterpreted. He was
unhappy with one bad act (Helen’s adultery) being balanced by another, worse, act
(Ned’s affair). What bothered Trotti the most was that Helen’s affair was made to
look good in relation to her husband’s adultery.
As a result of the controversy, a compromise was reached and the final draft of the
script has Helen’s affair compensated for by her sacrifice of both the romantic lead
and her career. Ned is represented as an innocent victim, while his wife, who rebels
against her female duties, pays for her sins.

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Even the censored story that Paramount eventually produced, however, contained
subject matter that had to be shown indirectly. As noted above, this sometimes
made the narrative difficult for audiences to follow. Instead of showing Helen
sleeping with Nick Townsend in order to raise the money for her husband’s
treatment, we see her in the dressing room with him, where he makes Helen his
offer. Then there’s a close-up of Nick’s hand writing the cheque, and then a shot
of Helen arriving home in a taxi very late. The audience have to infer the offensive
events. Later, when Ned is away in Europe, the audience do not see Helen accept
Townsend’s offer to give her an apartment. Instead, we see Helen arriving at her
old apartment to collect some mail, and the nosey neighbours seem disapproving,
but there is no direct depiction of Helen’s moving in with Townsend. The one scene
where we do see Helen in her new apartment shows her looking very guilty. The
room is very dark, suggesting that there is something wrong about her being there.
After Ned returns and finds out about the affair with Townsend, Helen goes on
the run with her son, Johnny. In Sternberg’s original script she had to resort to
prostitution to survive. In the actual film, however, this is never explicitly shown.
Instead, the audience has to read between the lines, some of which do hint at her
true occupation. But what the audience actually see is not, as in the script, Helen
walking the streets soliciting. Instead we see her and Johnny travelling in the back
of a hay wagon, a cut to a typed card from the Bureau of Missing Persons stating
that Helen has been sighted, and then Helen being brought in front of a judge
charged with ‘vagrancy’. The only time we actually see Helen soliciting is when she
is trying to entrap (and embarrass) the detective who is looking for her. The censors
did allow this because the purpose of her soliciting was not to get money for sex,
but to confront her captor, and thus give herself (or rather, her son) up. The result
of all of this censorship is that the plot is narrated to the audience through elliptical,
ambiguous sequences that impact on the cause-effect logic of the film.

Film noir and the ‘femme fatale’

Film theorists are not agreed as to whether ‘film noir’ is a genre of its own or a
style within the crime/thriller genres. I tend to teach film noir as a genre, simply
because it has some definite recurring narrative patterns, themes, locations and
character types. In any case, we can delineate some of the common stylistic and
narrative characteristics typical of the films noir of the 1940s and ‘50s. Many of the
film noir directors were German ex-patriots, so it should not be surprising to find
the influence of German Expressionism in the mise-en-scène. Chiaroscuro lighting,
sharp contrast, shadows, fragmented light, silhouettes and tilted camera angles
were typical stylistic features.
The earliest films noir were detective thrillers based on popular novels by pulp
writers such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett or James M. Cain. The

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plot usually revolves around a crime and its investigation. The settings tend to be
urban – offices, bars, dark streets, apartments, etc. The narrator or commentator is
usually prominent, and may tell us the story with voiceover or through flashbacks.
There tend to be lots of second-string characters who are morally ambivalent and
are related to the main characters or motivate the action in unexpected ways.
Although the American film industry had been the only national cinema to weather
the storms of war unscathed, and domestic audiences were at a record high, the
‘Paramount Degrees’ of 1948 put a serious damper on Hollywood’s golden era. The
US government challenged the monopolistic structure of the majors and forced
them to sell off their exhibition interests. This meant that the Big 5 and Little 3
studios could no longer rely on the practice of block booking and so had to compete
with independent producers for exhibition slots. Film production had also become
costlier after the war, as the rate of inflation rose. Other national markets ceased to
allow free access for American films. The Eastern European market was lost when
the Cold War shifted into high gear. In the early 1950s television arrived, and this
meant that even viewing habits at home were changing, giving the Hollywood studios
another medium to compete with for viewers’ attention. Noir films were cheap to
make, so they were well suited to the changing economic situation in Hollywood.
Films noir are seen by genre critics as an outgrowth of the kind of disillusionment
and despair that followed WWII. Partly influenced by Italian Neorealists like Roberto
Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, films noir tended to be less idealistic and more
realistic. Films noir are often seen as symptomatic of the social and economic
upheavals that occurred in America during the 1940s. While the men were away
fighting the war, women went to work in factories and kept the economy going.
The men came back to find women less willing to be confined to the home,
having ‘invaded’ the traditionally male workplace. Women’s potential economic
independence was a threat to male power and identity, which had been constructed
in a sexist socio-economic context in which women’s roles (financially dependent
wife and mother) had been defined by men. Films noir, as the French called these
hard-boiled detective thrillers, told stories of men who were frustrated outsiders,
often victimised by manipulative women in a world that cared little for the halcyon,
morally simple days depicted in earlier Hollywood movies. The central male hero
was usually a lone figure, an outsider who had to fight against criminals, the femme
fatale and inefficient government organisations.
Unlike melodramas, films noir are often narrated from the male perspective
and position the male detective/hero as a victim. Typical themes were despair,
disillusionment, paranoia and isolation. One of the main characters in the film
noir is the femme fatale. Screen women in this era were generally depicted as
either dutiful, loyal, loving and dependable or as femme fatales. The femme fatale
was mysterious, devious, disloyal, seductive, sexy, unloving, predatory, tough,
cold-blooded, untrustworthy, desperate and manipulative. She is desirable but

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dangerous. She represents a challenge to patriarchal values and male authority.
The plot usually involves a power struggle between a transgressive femme fatale
and the alienated detective/hero. Occasionally the hero is destroyed, but more often
he overcomes the desirability of the femme fatale and destroys her.
The important thing to emphasise in teaching gendered film studies is that the
femme fatale is a male construct. She represents male anxieties about women’s
changing roles in society, and particularly their sexual and economic autonomy.
In a sense, the threat she represented was a very real social threat – the loss of
sexist double standards. Women’s awareness that male erotic desire made men
vulnerable to their sexual prowess represented a power shift in sexual relations.
Sexuality was a power that females also possessed, and could use as active agents.
Female sexuality was no longer just another item for male consumption and
gratification.
Double Indemnity (1944) is a good case study as it contains virtually all of the typical
stylistic and narrative features of film noir. Based on the novel by James M. Cain,
Double Indemnity is narrated in flashback by Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an
insurance salesman who falls for the gorgeous wife of a client. Together Walter and
Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) devise an insurance scam that will get rid
of Phyllis’s husband and allow the two lovers to collect on his life insurance policy.
But there are complications and the scam doesn’t pan out. In a final sequence the
lovers are left in a power struggle against one another. Walter has arranged to meet
Phyllis at her home, where he plans to murder her. What he doesn’t know is that
Phyllis has plans of her own to get rid of him. After a frank talk in which he accuses
Phyllis of plotting against him, Walter closes the shutters in the living room,
preparing to murder her. Just then a shot rings out and the audience realises that
Phyllis has shot Walter, but not fatally. He walks over to Phyllis.
Walter: Why don’t you shoot again baby? Don’t tell me it’s because you’ve been in
love with me all this time.
Phyllis: No. I never loved you Walter, not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the
heart. I used you just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me, until a minute
ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot. I never thought that could happen to
me.
Walter: Sorry baby, I’m not buying.
Phyllis: I’m not asking you to buy. (She throws herself into his arms.) Just hold
me close.
Walter: Good bye baby. (He shoots her.)
Double Indemnity begins at the end of the story. In the opening sequence we see
Walter Neff’s car as it speeds through the city streets of Los Angeles at night. We
see Walter get out of the car and enter his office building. He makes his way into an
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office and begins recording a memorandum to his boss, Keyes, the claims manager
at the insurance company. Walter’s ‘confession’ to Keyes narrates the perspective
of the victim, even though Walter is guilty of criminal acts. The narrative allows the
audience to sympathise with Walter, by identifying with him in the story that will
follow (told through flashback). Even though Walter is a criminal by the legal and
moral codes of American society, and even though he acted as a free agent, his
guilt will largely be displaced onto the femme fatale, Phyllis.
In their final tête-a-tête, Walter recalls his first meeting with Phyllis in that same
living room where he plans to kill her. He tells her that he was thinking about the
anklet she was wearing, while she was thinking about murder. This is reminiscent
of an early scene in the first act, just after Walter has met Phyllis for the first time.
He is driving back to his office intoxicated by her hair, anklet and perfume.
Walter ( V.O.): It was a hot afternoon and I can still remember the scent of
honeysuckle all along that street. How could I have known that murder can
sometimes smell like honeysuckle? Maybe you would have known, Keyes, the
minute she mentioned accident insurance. But I didn’t. I felt like a million.
Walter’s decision to commit to the murder plot is motivated by his lust for Phyllis
and his desire to ‘save’ her from a marriage to a cruel and stingy man that she
claims is destroying her. Of course, the audience will later infer that her husband is
not really bad. Rather, she has merely described her life in this way to manipulate
Walter to help her. Once he has crossed the moral line by reaching the decision
to help Phyllis, Walter is in danger of getting caught. The audience, since their
sympathies are aligned with Walter, half want him to get away with it. Suspense
is generated by the question, ‘Will he or won’t he?’ (get away with his crime). The
femme fatale is portrayed as Walter’s only liability. She represents a risk that he
can’t afford, because she is erratic and untrustworthy, and her behaviour threatens
to expose the crime. The threat she represents to Walter is foreshadowed in the
same moment that he decides to help her:
Phyllis: I can’t stand it anymore. What if they did hang me?
Walter: They’re not going to hang you baby.
Phyllis: It’s better than going on this way.
Walter: They’re not going to hang you because you’re going to do it and I’m going
to help you.
Phyllis: Do you know what you’re saying?
Walter: Sure, I know what I’m saying. We’re going to do it and we’re going to do
it right. And I’m the guy that knows how. (Squeezing her arm tightly.) There’s not
going to be any slip-up. Nothing sloppy, nothing weak. It’s gotta be perfect. (They
kiss.)

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Of course, it is Phyllis who is sloppy and whose weakness nearly leads Keyes to find
them out. It is Phyllis who draws attention to them in her (weak) desperation to see
Walter more often than is safe. Finally, Walter realises that she is not only sloppy,
she is also disloyal to him. He must get rid of her. His plot to kill Mr Dietrichson
has been justified in the narrative by his weakness/lust for Phyllis Dietrichson
and his noble desire to ‘save’ her from a bad marriage. But the fact that she has
misled Walter about who was at fault for the bad marriage, makes her role in the
murder plot far more sinister than Walter’s. Walter has no past relationship to Mr
Dietrichson. He is like a fly in the spider’s web, and is innocent in comparison to
the kind of woman he has fallen for. Walter learns from Phyllis’s stepdaughter,
Lola, that Phyllis’s first husband also died in suspicious circumstances. By the end,
Phyllis has no redeeming qualities, whereas Walter is a guy who was unlucky and
made some relatively minor mistakes. The message that comes across in Walter’s
confession (and so in the entire narrative) is that, although Walter is no angel, a
woman is to blame for the terrible mess he’s in.
Mildred Pierce (1945) combines the stylistic and thematic elements of film noir
with the narrative conventions of melodrama. The story is narrated (in flashback)
by a central character, Mildred (Joan Crawford). Her problems as a woman living in
patriarchal society form the basis of the story. Yet the story also contains elements
of the film noir. The plot involves crime and investigation, and there is a femme
fatale (who represents a threat to both the female protagonist, who is a victim, but
also to patriarchal values). Quite often films noir combine an investigation of a
crime and investigation of a woman. Like Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce starts
at the end of the story, and is narrated in voiceover through the central character’s
flashbacks.
Mildred Pierce begins in the narrative present. We see a beach house at night. We
see a murder, but do not know who is responsible. The victim is a man, and he
murmurs Mildred’s name as he dies. This sets up an enigma. Is she the murderer?
Mildred is seen on a dock where she meets an acquaintance, Wally, who invites her
for a drink. She lures Wally back to the beach house and leaves him there, locking
him into the house. Wally discovers the victim’s corpse, and attempts to flee the
scene, but the police arrive and take him away as a suspect. Cut to Mildred arriving
home, where she is greeted by her daughter, Vida, who is looking worried. The police
show up at the house and ask Mildred to come down to the station for questioning.
At the police station several more enigmas arise: why is Mildred’s ex-husband, Burt,
at the police station? Mildred is told by a detective that she is not necessary, as Burt
has been accused of the crime. What is the evidence against Burt? Mildred attempts
to defend him. She says that Burt could never kill anyone, because he is too kind and
gentle. The detective asks, ‘If he’s such a nice guy, then why did you divorce him?’
This begins the investigation of a woman, a leitmotif in film noir. The two questions
that drive the narrative in Mildred Pierce are (1) who committed the murder?

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(investigation of a crime) , and (2) why did Mildred divorce Burt? (investigation of a
woman). Mildred begins to tell the detective about events in her past. In telling her
story Mildred is going to show us why she was (in her own words) ‘wrong’ to divorce
Burt. This provokes her first flashback. She begins, ‘I married Burt when I was
seventeen. My whole life was cooking and cleaning and washing.’
The central conflict for Mildred Pierce is whether she ought to be loyal to her
role as a wife and mother, and raise her daughters accordingly, or to reject these
patriarchal values, indulge her daughter in a more ‘selfish’ lifestyle, and suffer
the consequences. At the beginning of the film Mildred gives us her dilemma. She
is presented as a good wife and mother, and we see her in her kitchen wearing a
flowery apron.
Mildred’s voiceover explains how hard her life was, constantly cooking and cleaning.
After a spat with her husband, who is unemployed and implicitly having an affair
with Mrs Biederhoff, Mildred is left in the family home to fend for herself and her
two daughters. She goes to work as a waitress at first, but eventually saves some
money, and with the help of her husband’s former business partner, Wally, is able
to buy a place and start her own restaurant. The trajectory of the narrative shows
Mildred’s rise and fall as a businesswoman, mother and female.
She gradually rises to the top of her career, owning several successful restaurants
and earning enough to meet Vida’s lavish expectations, but in the end, she is
double-crossed by two selfish men and by her shameless daughter, Vida, who is
secretly involved in an affair with one of them.
The closure of the film is achieved by Mildred’s recognition that she should never
have rejected her husband, Burt, nor indulged Vida in her rebellious ways. The film
ends with Mildred and Burt leaving the police station arm in arm, and Vida being
taken away by the police. This ending offers the audience a patriarchal solution to
the central female’s dilemma – the mistake Mildred made was to reject Burt (and
traditional patriarchal values). She also made the mistake of aligning her loyalties
to her daughter Vida, the femme fatale who is also the murderer. Vida represents
the ‘new woman’ of the post-war era. She belongs to the next generation of women.
As such, her character is thoroughly despicable. She is spoiled (by Mildred, not
Burt), selfish, vain, manipulative, greedy for money and material status symbols,
sexually manipulative, impudent and pertinacious in her ‘modern’ ways. Vida’s
complete disregard for her mother’s feelings suggests that modern femininity
will mercilessly destroy everything that went before. It is clear that Vida is not
only committed to an entirely different set of values than those of her mother and
father, she is ashamed of her mother’s best qualities. Mildred’s virtues are those of
patriarchal society – she is humble, extremely hard-working, selfless, modest, kind,
caring and utterly decent in her sexual behaviour. These qualities are fine, but they
do not equip her to succeed in the dirty business affairs of the male world unaided.

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In the affairs of the world, Mildred has struggled, and the brief success she has had
came to her through the aid of men who wanted to use her. Her foray into the male
business world makes her look like a fish swimming amongst sharks.
As I said earlier, the femme fatale in this film (Vida) represents a threat to both the
female protagonist and patriarchal values. The achievement of narrative closure by
the punishment of the femme fatale, and the resolution of the central conflicts by
the reunion of Mildred and her estranged husband, signal a safe and happy return
to patriarchal values. The moral of the story is that Mildred’s life would have been
better, and all of her troubles could have been avoided, if only she hadn’t rejected
her traditional roles and indulged her daughter in her morally vacuous ‘modern’
ways. The ending also implies that Mildred should have indulged her husband’s
infidelity and forgiven him for making her take on his role as the family breadwinner.
The final resolution reminds the viewer that, for a woman, marriage – even to an
unfaithful and unemployed husband–is far better than economic independence and
the ‘modern’ alternatives.
In the 1990s, several male film directors posed ‘feminist’ challenges to this
ideological framework in their ‘neo-noir’ films, as exemplified by John Dahl’s The
Last Seduction (1994) and Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992). Both films reflect
a postmodern awareness of the film noir genre, and a playful or ironic treatment
of its codes and narrative conventions. For example, at one point in The Last
Seduction, Bridget Gregory (the femme fatale) gives her name as ‘Mrs Neff’– an
intertextual reference to Double Indemnity. What is interesting about both of these
films, and what sets them apart from the traditional film noir, is that the femme
fatale is an anti-hero who is allowed to reject phallocentric/patriarchal values
without being punished or redeemed for her transgression. In other words, the
patriarchal rule of ‘compensating moral values’ is absent.
The Last Seduction tells the story of Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino), a beautiful,
intelligent and tough New York telemarketing manager who is married to doctor
Clay Gregory (Bill Pullman). The two concoct a plan to sell medicinal cocaine to
some drug dealers so that they can buy a Manhattan penthouse. But when Clay
returns to their apartment with the money, Bridget isn’t interested in sharing his
domestic dream and she makes off with the cash ($700,000) while Clay is in the
shower. No sooner is she out of the apartment than she’s got her wedding ring off.
Clay, now furious and desperate to pay off some loan sharks, if he wants to keep his
appendages, swears he will find Bridget and the money. He hires a private detective
to track her down. Bridget goes on the lamb in middle American suburbia, adopting
the alias ‘Wendy Kroy’. In the small town of Beston, she meets local lover boy Mike
(Peter Berg) who falls for the sexy city slicker. She starts a relationship with Mike,
using him to hide from Clay.

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Bridget is everything but the ‘apple pie’ girl of the Hays Code era. In many ways
The Last Seduction is a dark comedy that satirises the stereotypical gender roles
depicted in mainstream American movies of the twentieth century. The lead woman
in these films was a wholesome figure, and there was no innuendo about her sexual
agency or exploitation. She was passive, unthreatening, modest, nurturing and
pliant. In The Last Seduction, Bridget is the antithesis of the ‘good wife’. We see
her in Mike’s suburban kitchen only once, and she isn’t cooking. The only thing she
uses the stove for is to light her cigarette. She makes a phone call to her lawyer,
Frank, and pulls an apple pie out of Mike’s refrigerator. Here’s the dialogue from
the scene. Notice how the ‘apple pie’ (the symbol of ‘Americana’) is incorporated for
iconoclastic effect (see Fig. 3.1):
Frank: Bridget! Always a pleasure.
Bridget: You still a lawyer, Frank?
Frank: You still a self-serving bitch?
Bridget: Friend needs advice. I’ll set it up for ya.
Husband and wife do a one-time drug deal. The goal’s a wholesome one... (she
picks at the pie and puts a piece in her mouth).
Frank: Kids’ college fund?
Bridget (spitting out the pie): No! The wife wants new digs. Comes off without a
hitch, only the wife decides the new house would be happier without the husband.
Frank (sarcastically): Sharing was never her specialty.
Bridget: She’s anxious to start spending.
Bridget stubs out her cigarette in the pie, which has a note on top reading ‘Love
Granny’.
Bridget/’Wendy’s’ relationship to the innocent small-town boy is a deliberate
reversal of gender stereotypes. In this relationship ‘Wendy’ adopts stereotypically
‘male’ characteristics and Mike is portrayed as having traditionally ‘feminine’
characteristics. Here is the dialogue from a scene where Mike and ‘Wendy’ have a
lovers’ quarrel, except that the traditional roles are reversed:
Wendy: Got your note.
Mike: Five days ago.
Wendy: Apology accepted.
Mike: Apology expired.
Wendy: Mike. . . a woman has to protect her standing at the office, you know that.

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Fig. 3.1
Mike: Look, I was wrong to touch ya. But you were wrong to send me to the gas
chamber.
Wendy: So maybe I overreacted a little bit. (moving closer) You wanna see my new
place, hm? On your back?
Mike: I thought we were going to be more than sex partners. I thought we were
going to be friends.
Wendy: And this entails?
Mike: Talking, sharing, clueing me in to whatever makes you run so hot and cold.
Wendy: Can I trust you?
Mike: You know you can trust me.
Wendy: OK, here it goes. Someone steals a million bucks, but there’s a dilemma.
She spends it!
Mike: (interrupting) Ahhh! You see, this is exactly what I’m talking about!
You’re scared to talk about real things. You’re scared to reveal yourself. Tell me
something I want to know – what brought you to Beston?
Wendy: I don’t know Mike, what brought me to Beston? You’re so goddamn
intuitive, why don’t you tell me?
Eventually Clay’s detective does locate Bridget, but she manages to outsmart
him, by playing on his male insecurities. For the second time in the story Bridget
manipulates a man by asking him to expose himself and show her the goods.
The irony here is that the diegetic look is constructed as female, and audience
identification (and hence pleasure) is derived from adopting the female (i.e.
Bridget’s) perspective.

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Here is the dialogue:
Harlan: How the fuck do you stay up here? I mean, these people... I go in the store
this morning for cigarettes, the guy ducks under the counter. What, do they plant
these people or do they just grow out of the ground? And they look at me like,
hell, I don’t know.
Bridget: Well, you know, they’re not used to seeing guys like you around here, if
you know what I mean.
[pause]
Bridget: Is it true what they say?
Harlan: What?
Bridget: You know, size?
Harlan: Is it true what they say about white women?
Bridget: What’s that?
Harlan: No ass.
Bridget: Oh, come on. I was wondering for real. Let me see it.
Harlan: Fuck you. Drive.
Bridget: I’m sorry.
Harlan: About what?
Bridget: About your shortcoming.
Harlan: I’m not gonna play this game.
Bridget: Is that why you carry a big gun?
Harlan: The Freudian mind-fuck isn’t gonna work either.
Bridget: Ooh, touchy. I’m sure your woman is very understanding.
Harlan: Exactly how is it that we end this phase of our relationship?
Bridget: By you showing it to me. Come on, let me see it. I’ve never seen one
before.
[pause]
Bridget:I’ll show you my ass.
Harlan: What makes you think I wanna see your bony ass?
Bridget: Show me.
Harlan: Show me.
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Bridget: I’m driving. You go first.
Harlan: No, you go first.
[pause]
Harlan: You’ll shut the fuck up if I show you?
Bridget: I’m sure I’ll be too stunned to speak.
Harlan: I don’t believe this. You’re crazy. Shit.
[he exposes himself]
Harlan: Okay, there, you happy?
At this point, Bridget, knowing the car is fitted with a driver-side airbag, smashes
the car into a pole, killing Harlan. In the following scene in the hospital Bridget/
Wendy is being questioned about the incident by a police officer. She makes it
look as though Harlan was about to rape her when the accident occurred. This
scene ridicules the racist attitudes that are supposed to typify middle America. It
is implied that the reason the detectives in Beston believe her story is that they
subscribe to stereotypical views of women (as innocent victims) and racist views of
black people (as criminals/sexual predators). Again, one of the pleasures of the film
is the way that it comments on the heterosexual white male’s traditional worldview
(and Hollywood as a set of patriarchal white institutions) and sends it up for ridicule.
In a number of key scenes, protagonist Bridget/Wendy occupies the traditionally
‘male’ viewpoint. This reversal of the diegetic ‘look’ turns the male body into an
object for her (and the audience’s) inspection. The effect is that the audience is
positioned as female voyeur – a rare treat for the female viewer, and perhaps
a disorientating one for the heterosexual male viewer. Since the audience
narcissistically identifies with Bridget, they are positioned to see things from a
female point of view. The Last Seduction self-consciously reverses male voyeurism
and male narcissism, making the male viewer psychologically ‘cross-dress’ in order
to derive pleasure from the film. In one scene the audience is permitted to see
Mike’s nude body, although the shot is not frontal. ‘Wendy’, fully dressed, follows
him into the bathroom and watches him shower. Here both the diegetic and extra-
diegetic ‘looks’ are constructed against the grain of phallocentric pleasures (and
audience expectations).
Mike: I’m starting to feel like a...
Bridget: Sex object?
In many ways The Last Seduction is a ‘knowing’ film, playing with the audience’s
recognition of the sexist (and racist) conventions that have structured the classic
Hollywood narrative film, and exploiting this recognition to achieve its comic effect.

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Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct likewise reverses the conventions of the classic
film noir and suspends the law of compensating moral values. The femme fatale is
Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) and she, like Bridget in The Last Seduction, will
get away with murder. Basic Instinct is discussed in depth in Chapter 5.
Thelma & Louise makes an interesting case study because it is an example of a
male director voluntarily upholding the rule of ‘compensating moral values’ in
today’s industry, where the Hays Code no longer dictates this kind of prescriptive
patriarchal narrative. In this case, it might be argued that economics demanded
that the film conform to a phallocentric/patriarchal structure. This is especially
interesting because Thelma & Louise is explicitly about female oppression within
America’s unjust patriarchal institutions (law and family). The plot revolves around
the lives of two women who attempt to break free of patriarchal institutions and the
limits imposed on them because of their sex. Thelma & Louise is part buddy movie,
part road movie and part melodrama.
The film’s opening sequences establish the oppressed situation of the two heroines
as ‘normality’. Their situation is the state of equilibrium (to use Todorov’s model).
Thelma (Geena Davis) is married to Darryl, a man she fears. Darryl is a possessive
chauvinist who expects his wife to serve his every whim, while he (implicitly) cheats
on her and does what he pleases. Louise (Susan Sarandon) is a waitress at a
coffee shop, where she has to politely put up with the usual sexual advances from
customers and bosses, while serving them food. And all this for barely a living
wage. The two women decide to go away for the weekend to have some fun.
The disruption (or ‘inciting incident’) occurs when the two friends decide to stop at
a country and western bar for a drink. At the bar, a cowboy called Harlan hits on
Thelma, and later attempts to rape her in the parking lot. Louise attempts to save
Thelma, but things get out of hand, and Louise shoots Harlan dead. This incident
creates the narrative disruption and represents the women’s rejection of patriarchal
oppression. (We later learn that Louise had been raped in the past.) The women
know that the law will not protect them, even though the shooting might be seen as
self defence from a female point of view. The law will not see it from a female point
of view. The two are now fugitives from the law, and they have to get some money in
order to make their next move. With the help of her lover (Michael Madsen), Louise
manages to get the money they so desperately need. But a setback occurs when
Thelma convinces Louise to pick up pretty boy J.D. (Brad Pitt), a charming thief
who steals their money after having sex with Thelma in her hotel room. Thelma
attempts to make it up to Louise by robbing a roadside shop, and the pair decide to
head for the Mexican border. But the robbery leads the feds right to their trail, and
the police intercept the two before they can make it to freedom. Deciding that death
is better than ‘going back’ they drive into the Grand Canyon.

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The script for Thelma & Louise was written by Callie Khouri. She had also hoped to
direct the film, but instead Ridley Scott was handed the job. The producers filmed
two alternative endings: the existing one, which has Thelma and Louise narratively
punished for their transgressions, or a more ‘upbeat’ version in which they escape.
The test audiences in America opted for the narrative punishment of the heroines.
But even that ending was criticised as somehow supporting female violence
towards men. This response suggests that Americans are not ready or willing to
evolve beyond limiting representations of gender, even though they are free to do
so. This was especially interesting given the narrative closure of this film.
Thelma and Louise represent two very different kinds of women, but both are
united by their common situation as women in a man’s world. At the beginning
Thelma is a typical ‘victim’. She is not very clever, and her need for male attention
is a liability for the stronger and more self-assured Louise. In the first place, it is
Thelma who gets involved with Harlan, a man whom Louise recognised as trouble
from a mile off. Secondly, Thelma falls for the deceitful charms of J.D. who exploits
her sexual weakness/desire in order to steal Louise’s money. By contrast, Louise
is level-headed, intelligent and decisive. She represents female strength. While
Thelma is the cause of the problems both women face, Louise will bear the brunt
of the consequences. It is Louise who shot Harlan, Louise whose money was stolen
and Louise who has protected Thelma so far. However, during the course of their
quest for freedom, Thelma’s character undergoes a gradual transformation. Their
relationship poses the question: will the weaker or stronger female prevail? One
could almost see these two women as two sides of a single woman. If this is the
case, then the question is whether individual women will persist in their Thelma-
like weakness and vulnerability, or whether they will adopt a Louise-like maturity.
The gradual development of Thelma’s character from a victim/sex object to a
feminist/sexually empowered hero is represented partly through costume, as she
and Louise shed their flouncy feminine clothes for a more rugged, natural look (see
Figs. 3.2 & 3.3).

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

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Her sexually gratifying encounter with J.D. and her decision to rob the roadside
shop signal a crucial turning point for Thelma. She has finally had a pleasurable
sexual experience and as such is seen as possessing the newfound power of
a sexual agent. Sex will be for her pleasure from now on, not merely for the
gratification of men. This is when she casts her lot fully with Louise and decides
to let go of her past. There’s a scene towards the end of the film when the two
are driving and Thelma says she feels ‘awake’ for the first time in her life. Her
newfound freedom leads her to conclude that she was already ‘dead’ in her past
life. She also recognises Darryl’s double standards. There is no longer any question
of going back to her marriage. By the time they reach the final decision – to keep
on going or ‘get caught’–Thelma is the one who recognises that death is preferable
to her old life. On the one hand, this ending represents a victory (in an existential
sense) because the pair decide that death is better than living in a culture of
misogynistic oppression. This is one way to ‘read’ the ending. But another reading
encapsulates the two within the patriarchal law, because it dictates that death is
the only option for those who reject its institutions. Perhaps it was this ambiguity
in the film’s narrative closure that led some American viewers to doubt the
wholesomeness of the film’s values.

Chapter Summary
1. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used a theoretical model of ‘binary
oppositions’ to describe how myths involve conflicts that set up a way of seeing the
world in terms of similarities or differences. Narratives depend upon conflict as it
motivates the action. Feminists have noted that gender oppositions (the opposition
of male and female) have traditionally exaggerated the differences between men
and women.
2. Tzvetan Todorov provides another, linear, model for the analysis of narratives.
The narrative begins with a state of equilibrium, which is then disrupted by a force
that brings about disequilibrium. The narrative action is then motivated by a need
to overpower the disruptive force to restore the equilibrium. This formula makes it
easy to understand a film’s guiding ideology, or value system: whatever causes the
disruption is ‘bad’ while the (typically male) hero who restores it is ‘good’.
• For a period from the early ‘30s until the mid-’50s, Hollywood films were
subject to regulation by censors who had the power to alter the cause-
effect logic of the narrative in order to make it comply with their patriarchal
moral ideology. This included the rule of ‘compensating moral values’, which
assured that a character who committed an immoral action had to be either
punished or redeemed within the narrative. Case studies: Blonde Venus &
Psycho.

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• Melodramas position the central female character as a victim, and are
narrated from her perspective. Melodramas, like any genre film, are social
rituals. The melodrama narrates a female predicament and offers female
viewers a lesson in how (or how not) to behave. Case study: Blonde Venus.
• Films noir are typically narrated from the male perspective and position
the male detective/hero as a victim of female manipulation or betrayal. The
‘femme fatale’ is a male construct. She represents male anxieties about
women’s changing roles in society, especially her sexual and economic
independence. Case Study: Double Indemnity.
• Mildred Pierce is a hybrid of the melodrama and the film noir. Through a
close study of this film, we see that the film’s closure and the resolution
of the conflicts that it has established send a strong message about the
importance of preserving the patriarchal status quo.
• Neo-noir films such as those of director John Dahl have reversed patriarchal
cinematic and narrative conventions. They deliberately subvert the rule of
‘compensating moral values’ and offer female viewers a rare opportunity to
derive pleasure from narcissistic identification with the femme fatale. The
diegetic ‘look’ is constructed as female and the male body is turned into
an object for female scopophilic/voyeuristic pleasure. Case study: The Last
Seduction.
• Contemporary Hollywood films are no longer subject to direct industry
censorship, however, male directors voluntarily uphold the rule of
‘compensating moral values’ either because they aren’t aware that there
is any other way to see the world, or because they fear that unconventional
narratives will fail at the box office. Case study: Thelma & Louise.

THE HAYS PRODUCTION CODE

General Principles
1. No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who
see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of
crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and
entertainment, shall be presented.
3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for
its violation.

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Particular Applications
I. Crimes Against the Law
These shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime
as against law and justice or to inspire others with a desire for imitation.
1. Murder
a. The technique of murder must be presented in a way that will not inspire
imitation.
b. Brutal killings are not to be presented in detail.
c. Revenge in modern times shall not be justified.
2. Methods of Crime should not be explicitly presented.
a. Theft, robbery, safe-cracking, and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc.,
should not be detailed in method.
b. Arson must subject to the same safeguards.
c. The use of firearms should be restricted to the essentials.
d. Methods of smuggling should not be presented.
3. Illegal drug traffic must never be presented.
4. The use of liquor in American life, when not required by the plot or for proper
characterization, will not be shown.

II. Sex
The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures
shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing.
1. Adultery, sometimes necessary plot material, must not be explicitly treated, or
justified, or presented attractively.
2. Scenes of Passion
a. They should not be introduced when not essential to the plot.
b. Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and
gestures, are not to be shown.
c. In general passion should so be treated that these scenes do not stimulate the
lower and baser element.
3. Seduction or Rape
a. They should never be more than suggested, and only when essential for the plot,

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and even then never shown by explicit method.
b. They are never the proper subject for comedy.
4. Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.
5. White slavery shall not be treated.
6. Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.
7. Sex hygiene and venereal diseases are not subjects for motion pictures.
8. Scenes of actual child birth, in fact or in silhouette, are never to be presented.
9. Children’s sex organs are never to be exposed.

III. Vulgarity
The treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant, though not necessarily evil, subjects
should always be subject to the dictates of good taste and a regard for the
sensibilities of the audience.

IV. Obscenity
Obscenity in word, gesture, reference, song, joke, or by suggestion (even when likely
to be understood only by part of the audience) is forbidden.

V. Profanity
Pointed profanity (this includes the words, God, Lord, Jesus, Christ – unless used
reverently – Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd), or every other profane or vulgar expression
however used, is forbidden.

VI. Costume
1. Complete nudity is never permitted. This includes nudity in fact or in silhouette,
or any lecherous or licentious notice thereof by other characters in the picture.
2. Undressing scenes should be avoided, and never used save where essential to
the plot.
3. Indecent or undue exposure is forbidden.
4. Dancing or costumes intended to permit undue exposure or indecent movements
in the dance are forbidden.

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VII. Dances
1. Dances suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent passions are
forbidden.
2. Dances which emphasize indecent movements are to be regarded as obscene.

VIII. Religion
1. No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith.
2. Ministers of religion in their character as ministers of religion should not be used
as comic characters or as villains.
3. Ceremonies of any definite religion should be carefully and respectfully handled.

IX. Locations
The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.

X. National Feelings
1. The use of the Flag shall be consistently respectful.
2. The history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry of other nations shall be
represented fairly.

XI. Titles
Salacious, indecent, or obscene titles shall not be used.

XII. Repellent Subjects

The following subjects must be treated within the careful limits of good taste:
1. Actual hangings or electrocutions as legal punishments for crime.
2. Third degree methods.
3. Brutality and possible gruesomeness.
4. Branding of people or animals.
5. Apparent cruelty to children or animals.
6. The sale of women, or a woman selling her virtue.
7. Surgical operations.

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Chapter 4 Female Power Uncensored
We have outlined how the male gaze and the male camera construct images of
gender oppositionality and phallocentric pleasures. We have seen how they fetishise
the female body as a spectacle quite apart from any narrative meaning. Let us turn
now to the female camera.
Since the beginning of the film industry in the late nineteenth century, women
were mostly excluded from the technical roles, and assigned to the traditionally
‘feminine’ aspects of the trade, such as costume, make-up and production assistant
positions. However, there were exceptions, such as Alice Guy, who worked for
the French camera manufacturer Gaumont, and so had access to the necessary
equipment. Guy wrote, directed and produced many films, including In the Year
2000 (1912), a futuristic fantasy in which women rule the world. If she only knew!
Before 1930 there were at least 26 women directors in America, but many more
were probably uncredited. The first American female director was Lois Weber, who
wrote, produced and acted in her own films. Her output was prolific. She has more
than 75 films to her credit, many of which dealt with social issues affecting women,
such as abortion and divorce. Dorothy Arzner was the first woman to direct a talkie,
Manhattan Cocktail (1928). Arzner worked in Hollywood during the ‘30s, directing
hits such as Christopher Strong (1933) and earning a temporary place on the ‘top
ten’ directors list. She was the first woman to join the Director’s Guild of America.
Alma Reville was married to Alfred Hitchcock and often collaborated with him in
scripting and producing his films.
Is there indeed a different way of seeing that is distinctive of female directors? If
so, does this mean that men and women are in fact as different as essentialists
say they are? Do men and women see the world differently because of inherent
differences in their brains? Or do female directors simply give us a different
perspective on the world, because females have a different experience of
themselves and of men than those recounted to us in the patriarchal myths
produced by and for males? Do female directors produce a different kind of
pleasure, perhaps more pleasing to female viewers than to male viewers? Do their
films turn men into spectacle, presupposing a female spectator? In this chapter we
will look at the work of four female directors working today: Kathryn Bigelow, Jane
Campion, Claire Denis and Céline Sciamma.

Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Bigelow started her career as a fine artist. She attended the San Francisco
Art Institute and later won a scholarship to create art on the Whitney Museum’s
independent study programme. She then went on to earn a degree in film from
Columbia University. Kathryn Bigelow is arguably the most successful female

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director working in Hollywood today. She has also distinguished herself by working
in a genre that is considered typically ‘male’– action thrillers. However, when critics
and commentators discuss her work, they almost invariably mention her marriage
to successful Hollywood director James Cameron. A 2002 article in The Guardian
newspaper on the release of Bigelow’s film K-19: The Widowmaker begins like
this: ‘In 1997 James Cameron made Titanic, a film about the real-life disastrous
maiden voyage of a state-of-the art ocean liner across the north Atlantic. Five years
later Kathryn Bigelow has the same sinking feeling as her former husband.’ Before
Bigalow’s film K-19 is even mentioned it is relativised and compared to Cameron’s
film. By opening the article in this way the reader automatically gets the impression
that Kathryn Bigelow is somehow trying to imitate, or compete with, her former
husband.
Although Bigelow is famous in her own right, she has often been referred to as
‘James Cameron’s wife’. Despite the fact that discussions of Bigelow so frequently
relate her to her former husband, her body of work is impressive in its own right.
Her filmography includes:
• The Set-Up (1978)
• The Loveless (1982)
• Near Dark (1987)
• Blue Steel (1990)
• Point Break (1991)
• Strange Days (1995)
• The Weight of Water (2000)
• K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
• The Hurt Locker (2008)
• Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
• Detroit (2017).
Strange Days may seem an odd choice for a close study, because it is one of the
films in which James Cameron’s creative input is most clearly evident. Bigelow
and Cameron collaborated on Strange Days, which was a big-budget ($42 million)
production with A-list stars. Bigelow directed the script written by Cameron and
Jay Cocks. Ralph Fiennes plays Lenny, an ex-cop turned ‘clip’ dealer who still
pines after ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis). Set in a (then) futuristic and dystopic
Los Angeles at the turn of the new millennium, the plot involves a new technology
(SQUID) that allows users to ‘borrow’ other people’s experiences. By playing back
a recorded clip, the user can simulate a past experience (their own or someone

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else’s). As black market clip dealer Lenny explains to one of his prospective clients,
‘This is like TV only better. This is life. Pieces of somebody’s life. Pure and uncut,
straight from the cerebral cortex. I mean, you’re there, you’re doing it, you’re seeing
it, you’re hearing it, you’re feeling it.’ The thrill of the illegal technology is the
degree of verisimilitude it offers, taking voyeurism to a new level. It allows users to
experience a lifelike feeling of being someone, or somewhere else.
The narrative is about verisimilitude and vicarious pleasures, and so becomes a
self-referential statement about cinema, directed at the audience and involving
them in a self-reflective process that they probably intended to escape by going to
the movies. In this sense Bigelow’s film bears comparison to Peeping Tom, Michael
Powell’s 1960 slasher film about a man who concealed a knife in the tripod of his
camera, and then filmed his female victims as they died. In many ways Strange
Days is a modern re-working of this British classic, which was almost universally
despised at the time of its release. Film critic Roger Ebert has speculated that the
critics and the public hated the film ‘because it didn’t allow the audience to lurk in
the dark, but implicated us in the voyeurism of the title character’ (1995).
Instead of ignoring the audience as most classic narrative films do, Strange Days
pushes the audience’s voyeurism further, giving them more verisimilitude than they
bargained for, by closing the ‘safety buffer’ between the spectator and the filmic
world. As in Hitchcock’s films, fetishistic scopophilia and voyeurism themselves
become the subject of the narrative.
In Peeping Tom, the film’s visual strategies denied spectators the conventional
enjoyment of cinematic voyeurism. The opening shot is through the protagonist’s
viewfinder. Powell’s basic strategy is always to suggest that we are not just seeing,
but looking. As Ebert says, ‘His film is a masterpiece precisely because it doesn’t
let us off the hook, like all of those silly teenage slasher movies do. We cannot
laugh and keep our distance’ (ibid.). Using a similar visual strategy, Strange Days
opens with a close-up on a human eye. We hear a man’s off-screen voice say, ‘OK,
boot it’ and then we are ‘in’ the SQUID (Super Conducting Quantum Interference
Device) clip. We are ‘jacked in’ or ‘wire tripping’ on an experience that is not our
own, but feels as though it is. By means of point-of-view camerawork, the viewer
is positioned as a guy who is in the act of robbing a restaurant with his mates.
The police arrive at the scene and then ‘we’ (positioned as the robber) attempt to
escape. The whole ‘clip’ is shot with point-of-view camera, so that the viewer is
positioned as the one who fails to escape from the police. Hence the clip we see is
of a particularly illegal variety – the ‘snuff’ clip.
Bigelow uses a variety of formal techniques to reproduce the playback of the
SQUID clips. Firstly, there is a ‘shredding’ of the image on screen accompanied
by a static sound, which signals to the viewer that we are entering into the ‘clip’
sequence. Bigelow had a special camera built in order to simulate the agility of

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the human eye during ‘playback’. The effect is somewhere between the shaky look
of a hand-held shot and the smoothness of a Steadycam. She uses point-of-view
camerawork throughout the clip, with no editing to disrupt the sensation of human
vision. The camera’s movement replicates human movement and we are kept close
to the action, as though we are within the film’s diegetic world, not sitting at a safe
distance from the action. Characters address us directly. These techniques work
together to produce a convincing likeness of subjective human vision.
These techniques effectively close the screen barrier between the viewer and the
action. The point is driven home by the narrative when Faith says to Lenny (our
screen surrogate), ‘so, you gonna watch or you gonna do?’ The spectator’s eye is
there, in the film’s space, in the heart of the vision. The spectator experiences the
film as actor/agent, rather than as passive voyeur. The viewer is made to feel that
he is part of the cause and effect logic of the narrative, thus being implicated in the
film’s violent outcomes. The message is crystal clear: consuming violence is itself
a violent act; you cannot separate the act of consuming violence from the act of
committing it.
The analogy between ‘wire tripping’ and cinema is the constant point of reference
throughout the film. Lenny’s sales pitch is directed at a potential SQUID clip
customer, but the cinematic voyeur recognises that he and the client are
interchangeable. Lenny tells him: ‘It’s about the stuff that you can’t have, right. The
forbidden fruit, hmm? Like running into a liquor store with a 357 magnum in your
hand. Feeling the adrenaline pumping through your veins. Huh? Or, um, you see
that guy over there with the drop-dead Filipino girlfriend? Wouldn’t you like to be
that guy for twenty minutes… the right twenty minutes? I can make it happen and
you won’t even tarnish your wedding ring.’ Later, when describing his own role as
a dealer in this kind of visual narcotic, Lenny says, ‘I’m your priest. I’m your shrink.
I’m your main connection to the switchboard of the soul. I’m the magic man, the
Santa Clause of the subconscious. You say it – you think it – you can have it.’ The
analogy between Lenny and the film-maker, or even video supplier, is equally clear.
Following the opening shot – the playback clip of the robbery – the viewer is
positioned with protagonist Lenny, whom we now realise has been wire tripping. We
become aware that we have seen the clip through Lenny’s eyes. We are identified
with the voyeur inside the film’s world, since we have seen the events depicted
in the SQUID clip from his point of view. Lenny is both dealer and consumer of
voyeuristic pleasures.
In Strange Days, Bigelow and Cameron make cinema transparent, and demand
that we reflect on our role as viewers. They bring us into the equation by making
the protagonist an anti-hero who represents our voyeuristic pleasure. The mise-
en-scène leaves little doubt that looking and seeing are thematic preoccupations.
The set is full of mirrors, TV screens, car windscreens, rear view, binoculars, even

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a telescope. A pair of eyes is drawn on the cover of one of Lenny’s SQUID clip
disks. The dialogue also reinforces the visual theme. When the bouncer at the
club ‘Retinal Fetish’ prepares to slug Lenny, he raises his arm to protect his eyes,
saying, ‘please, not the eyes’. Faith says of Lenny that she loves his eyes, ‘I love the
way they see.’ Mace (Angela Bassett), the character who saves Lenny, is named
after a spray that injures the eyes and disrupts vision. This name suggests her role
in the film: she cures Lenny of his voyeurism addiction. The killer, after murdering
Iris, opens her eyelids and stares into her eyes, so that we see his reflection in her
pupils.
Lenny is a voyeurism addict to be sure, but he has redeeming qualities, since the
experiences he wants to re-live are from his own past. The allure for him is to re-
live an image of his once happy relationship with Faith that has since deteriorated.
Lenny also sees beneficial ways to use the technology. He gives a clip of a man
running on a beach to a disabled friend confined to a wheel chair. But Lenny’s
full redemption comes when he finally decides to give a clip containing damning
evidence of police misconduct to his best friend Mace who in turn wants to show it
to the police commissioner, the one cop in the LAPD who seems to have scruples.
Lenny is in a dilemma, since even possessing a clip is illegal, never mind producing
and dealing them, but when Lenny decides to act for the greater good he wins both
audience approval and Mace’s respect.
In studying this film, students should be made aware of the historical context
of its production, as it makes indirect reference to actual events. In March 1991
a passerby videotaped four white Los Angeles police officers as they brutally
assaulted Rodney King on the side of a Los Angeles freeway. The videotape was
released to news agencies and broadcast on television. The public saw shocking
raw footage of unbridled police brutality, and the attack was largely seen as proof
positive of the LAPD’s legendary racism. The American public were left to ponder
the mass media’s simplistic representations of ‘respectable’ police officers pitted
against (mostly black) ‘criminals’. The incident also drew attention to new forms of
media (such as the personal video camera) as potential weapons in the battle for
social justice and civil rights. Big Brother may watch the citizen, but the Rodney
King incident also proved the reverse could happen.
Just over a year later, on 5 April 1992, a mostly white jury acquitted the four cops.
The verdict sent shock waves through the African American community in South
Central Los Angeles. In the six days of chaos that followed, 54 people were killed,
and more than 2000 were injured. The National Guard was called in and more than
13,000 citizens were arrested. A 1992 report by Amnesty International accused
the LAPD of ‘widespread use of excessive force, sometimes mounting to torture’.
The Rodney King incident was only one of a string of high-profile police brutality
cases in America in the 1990s. In New York City, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s ‘zero
tolerance’ policies virtually gave police carte blanche to abuse their authority. The

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Abner Louima torture case in 1997 and the Amadou Diallo shooting in 1999 both
followed the release of Strange Days, and made its central issues (police racism
and brutality) appear more prophetic than ever.
The main plot of Strange Days revolves around crime and investigation. Lenny
has received a snuff clip from an anonymous source depicting the brutal rape and
murder of his friend Iris. The playback of the rape/murder of Iris is particularly
disturbing to watch, partly because the viewer cannot achieve the comfortable
distance from the action that routinely reassures them of their ‘otherness’ or their
distance from the action they are viewing. As Lenny explained to his client, ‘you’re
doing it.’ The sequence would be almost too disturbing to watch were it not for the
editing. Here Bigelow breaks the rule applied elsewhere, and cuts away to reaction
shots of Lenny as he plays back the clip, showing his disgust at what he sees. At
this point Lenny’s reaction to the clip (hopefully) mirrors our own.
The clip reaches new heights of perversity when the rapist/murderer (with whom
we are positioned in point of view) places a SQUID device on the victim’s head, so
that she will experience her own rape and murder from the perpetrator’s point
of view. This is a brilliant metaphor for the violence and perversity that is done to
the female cinema spectator every time she watches female characters on screen
being brutalised or punished. The female cinema spectator (especially vis-à-vis
the horror genre) is put in an analogous position: she is made to watch her screen
surrogate’s rape/murder from a male point of view. Most films offer only one option
for the pleasure of narcissistic identification, and that is with the male character,
even when he is the murderer. As mentioned earlier, the horror or slasher genre
seems to offer us the reverse, by presenting us with a female protagonist for viewer
identification. But at the crucial moments, when characters are killed, the camera
tends to give us point-of-view camerawork from the killer’s viewpoint, so that we
dissociate ourselves from the female victim and adopt the perspective of the (male)
monster. For the female cinema spectator, as for the on-screen victim in this
playback clip, the sensation is a revolting mixture of (male) narcissistic ‘pleasure’
and (female) terror. The film offers the adolescent male voyeur the thrill of rape and
violence from the socially respectable position of a ‘mere spectator’ who watches
the monster (the ‘other’) do the crime.
Strange Days uniquely confronts the contradiction by which the consumer of violent
and misogynist product is taken out of the equation, when it is his appetite for
misogynistic, violent content that fuels the producers and determines their output.
The film refuses to collude in the myth that the ‘monster’ is the source of violence,
and instead turns its narrative investigation to the psychology of the consumer of
violent and misogynist media.
In Strange Days, the romantic subplot revolves around Lenny’s relationships – to
his past girlfriend, Faith, and to his friend, Mace, who harbours secret feelings for

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him. Lenny is in love with an image of Faith from his past, but he cannot make the
actual Faith of his present experience conform to his fantasy. He is so nostalgic
for this image of his ex-girlfriend that he is blind to Mace’s love for him. We see
Lenny at a nightclub (aptly named ‘Retinal Fetish’) where he stares across the
crowd to gaze upon Faith as she performs a seductive solo number called ‘I Can
Hardly Wait’. As in Blonde Venus when we see Nick watching Helen’s performance
at the club, we see Faith’s performance from Lenny’s point of view. But we also
get moments where the narrative flow is suspended and replaced by the female
as spectacle, in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. Faith wears a skimpy,
figure-hugging dress revealing lots of leg. Her body is stylised and fragmented by
close-ups. These fetishised images of the female body temporarily become the
content of the film. The sequence begins with Lenny watching the performance,
and we see his eyeline of Faith singing (from a high angle point-of-view shot).
Then the camera moves around Faith and there are edits giving us both front and
back views of her performing. The camera has moved away from Lenny’s point of
view and is now just giving the spectator the best possible vantage point of Faith’s
body as she performs. The shot then cuts back to a slow tilt shot up from Lenny’s
legs to his face, showing us that he is mesmerised by his ex-girlfriend. Spectator
identification (and sympathy) is again with Lenny as he drinks in the view. Of course,
this sequence is giving us important narrative exposition about Lenny’s character
and his relationships.
In the following sequence, Lenny goes to Faith’s dressing room to talk to her. The
mise-en-scène works along with the dialogue to emphasise Lenny’s psychological
state. The director uses a mixture of shot-reverse-shot, and two-shots for this
section of dialogue. But in each of the two-shots, we see Lenny and Faith framed
in a mirror, creating an image within the image, a frame within the frame. What
is interesting is that each of the two-shots is a reflection, an image in a mirror.
But these two-shots are broken by medium shots of either Lenny or Faith talking
to one another in shot-reverse-shot, not reflected in the mirror. This device tends
to enhance the sense that this ‘couple’ only exist as such in Lenny’s psyche, as
an image. One of these mirror images is broken by graffiti written onto the mirror
itself, suggesting that Lenny’s perfect image of their relationship is falling apart,
breaking. Lenny tells Faith that her new boyfriend, Gant, ‘uses the wire too much;
he gets off on tape, not on you’. Faith retorts, ‘That’s a good one, coming from you.’
At this point in the story we have already been made privy to Lenny’s habit of wire
tripping on clips of himself and Faith. When Faith takes her top off, we see Lenny (in
the mirror) avert his eyes, a modest gesture that seems intended to remind us that
he is not merely interested in Faith as sex object, but as this too takes place in the
‘frame’ (suggesting an image rather than the reality) we have to wonder whether
Lenny also has a false image of himself.

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The characters and narrative in Strange Days offer viewers a rare exception to
the stereotyped roles assigned to men and women. Most of the female characters
(whether good or bad) are tough, independent and effectual, whereas Lenny is
somewhat dependent and needy. As the relationship between Lenny and Mace is
revealed to us, we come to understand that Mace is the stronger of the two and it is
Lenny who needs rescuing. When in danger, the roles are reversed – Lenny is the
‘damsel in distress’ and Mace is the heroic figure who saves him (see Fig. 4.1). Faith
is also a wilful woman. Despite being portrayed as someone who harbours inner
insecurities about her self-worth, she has a tough exterior and uses her sexuality
to manipulate men. During their conversation in the dressing room, she tells Lenny,
‘Stop trying to rescue me. Those days are over. I’ve changed. I’m a big girl now.
I don’t need saving. Just give up on me.’ As her name implies, Faith represents
Lenny’s (false?) beliefs about women in general, and about her in particular. He is
in love with his own beliefs about her, and not with the real person she has become.
Despite Lenny’s best hopes, Faith is not the innocent woman he wants her to be, as
he discovers in the final act.
It would seem that representations of gender in Strange Days are products of both
Cameron and Bigelow’s sensibilities. Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
featured a very tough mother figure – Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). Bigelow
rarely makes films about women, but when she does, they are tough characters.
As Stuart Jeffries says, ‘Take Blue Steel (1990), in which gym-buffed Jamie Lee
Curtis plays a rookie cop suspended for killing on her first day and then stalked by a
psychopath. Curtis’s cop is no victim – she fights back against her oppressors with
intelligence and physical strength’ (ibid.).
The penultimate sequence in Strange Days, set in Faith’s hotel suite, is of particular
interest for an understanding of Strange Days as a meta-fiction. It is a fictional work
about fictional works. Laura Riscaroli, in her essay on Strange Days, describes
this sequence as the ‘explosion of mirrors’. The sequence is introduced by a short
scene in which Lenny and Mace arrive at the hotel. It is the last hour before the new
millennium and people are already partying in the streets. A youth jumps on Mace’s
car and kicks in the windscreen, shattering the glass. Rascaroli notes that this
broken windscreen is ‘clearly an anticipation of the main figurative theme of the last
section of the film’. Indeed the abundance of shattered mirrors and windows in the
hotel room sequence is linked to the narrative development. Up until this point in
the film, Lenny has been living in a world of images, representations of reality that
have blinded him to the present facts. But this scene is a turning point for Lenny
because his image of Faith is finally shattered. He goes to the hotel room to rescue
Faith, and finds a SQUID clip waiting for him on the coffee table. Although he knows
it is bait left for him by the killer, he plays it back in his desperation to find and save
Faith. Both Lenny and the spectator are forced (via the SQUID clip) to adopt the
point of view of the unknown killer. We are led to think, as Lenny does, that Iris’s

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Fig. 4.1
murderer is now showing us a snuff clip of Faith’s murder. But, just as we think
the worst is going to happen, suddenly we (and Lenny) realise that Faith is only
pretending to be the victim. She has colluded with the villain (Iris’s murderer) to
set Lenny up. At this point there is a final battle between Lenny and the killer in
which shattered glass and shattered mirrors constantly punctuate the action. This
sequence resolves the romantic sub-plot by ending Lenny’s obsession with Faith.
In the final scene it is Mace who actively resolves the crime investigation plot, first
by delivering the damning clip of police misconduct to the police commissioner,
and then by confronting the racist cops in a showdown. When Lenny arrives on the
scene, Mace’s actions have already brought the two corrupt cops to justice. Lenny
finally acknowledges Mace as his real love, and when they kiss, this is the first real
(not playback) instance of human intimacy in the film. Lenny has finally learned to
love a real woman instead of an image.
The film’s groundbreaking originality stems from its refusal to allow the spectator
to ignore their own role in the film’s violence. The spectator is not permitted simply
to watch. Bigelow explains, ‘The interlocking story of Lenny and Mace becomes
a parable in noirish disguise, a story about the pervasive need to watch, to see. It
calibrates the fragile balance between viewer and viewed, screen and audience,
spectacle as medium and subject. It puts us all in the picture’ (quoted from the DVD
insert). Scopophilia and voyeurism are interrogated not only by the film’s plot but
also by its formal visual techniques. Strange Days belongs in the cannon of self-
reflexive films that tell us something about cinema itself (or voyeurism) along with
Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo.
Strange Days has not received nearly the critical acclaim that such a masterful
statement on cinematic violence deserves, with significant critical approval only
being bestowed on Bigelow for her more ideologically conventional film, The Hurt
Locker (2010).
Our close study of Strange Days has suggested how its makers deliberately chose
to deny the spectator the pleasures and distance of (typically male) voyeurism,
and how the (male authored) narrative was constructed partly as a critique of

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this phenomenon. We have seen how the characters represent a reversal of the
stereotyped gender representations typical of mainstream Hollywood cinema. Two
men, James Cameron and Jay Cocks, wrote the story. It certainly appears that
these men have collaborated with a female director to make a film that challenges
the male voyeuristic conventions of Hollywood cinema. What does this tell us about
the degree to which men participate in feminist film-making? Students should note
that men can, and do, play key roles in feminist film-making.

Jane Campion
Jane Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1954. After earning degrees
in anthropology and fine art, she went to the Australian School of Film and
Television, where she turned her hand to film-making in the early 1980s. Her first
short film, An Exercise in Discipline – Peel (1982) won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes
Film Festival in 1986. She was the first woman director to be awarded the Palm
d’Or at Cannes for The Piano (1993). Vivienne Clark has called Campion ‘an obvious
candidate for the label of auteur, because of her recurrent concerns and themes’
(Clarke 2001). Indeed, many commentators have noted that her work draws upon her
background in fine art and her interest in anthropology. Her filmography includes:
• Tissues (1980) – short
• Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest (1981) – short
• An Exercise in Discipline – Peel (1982) – short
• A Girl’s Own Story (1984) – short
• Passionless Moments (1983) – short
• After Hours (1984)
• Sweetie (1989)
• An Angel at My Table (1990)
• The Piano (1993)
• The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
• Holy Smoke (1999)
• In the Cut (2003)
• Bright Star (2009)
• Top of the Lake (2013–17).
It was The Piano that earned Campion international recognition. In addition to
earning Campion the Palme d’Or, the film won Oscars for Best Original Screenplay

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(Campion), Best Actress (Holly Hunter) and Best Supporting Actress (Anna Paquin).
It was both critically and financially successful, without compromising its artistic
vision.
Set in the nineteenth century, The Piano tells the story of Ada, an elective mute
woman who is sent from Scotland to New Zealand with her daughter Flora. Ada’s
father has arranged her marriage to Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill), a colonial settler
in New Zealand whom she has never met. Ada and Flora arrive in New Zealand
with Ada’s beloved piano, her preferred means of self-expression. The piano causes
immediate tension between Ada and Stewart, and perhaps because of his lack
of sympathy, Ada refuses to consummate the marriage. Instead she develops a
relationship with her husband’s land agent, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), who
is of lower social standing. Baines is everything Stewart is not. Whereas Stewart
remains apart from the native Maoris and treats them as yet another part of the
landscape to be exploited, Baines has integrated himself into their culture and lives
in close proximity to them. The contrast between Stewart and Baines is enhanced
by costume and mise-en-scène. The trees at Stewart’s home are dead and leafless.
He is often seen carrying an axe and chopping down trees. He seems to see nature
as something to tame, or as something to which he is in opposition. By contrast,
Baines’s home is surrounded by green living trees. The representation of the Maori
people in the film has been criticised for being too sterotypical. However, I disagree
with this criticism. Stewart’s patronising attitude to the Maoris is set up for ridicule
within the narrative when he attempts to give them buttons, and they retort by
telling him they are not children. To be fair, it is Stewart, and by extension European
colonisers, who are represented as racist and condescending, not to mention
repressed and destructive. The melodrama sets up narrative oppositions, which
could be analysed in binary terms as:

Baines & Ada Stewart

The Maoris/native people The settlers/colonisers
Natural/free Unnatural/repressed
Uncivilised Civilised
Nature-loving Destructive of living things,
disharmonious with natural
surroundings
Good/life-affirming Bad/morbid

The Maoris’ approval of Baines and disapproval of Stewart (they call him ‘old dry
balls’) signals to the viewer yet another crucial difference between the two men.
Baines’s integration into the native culture, and his willingness to adapt, are
portrayed as virtues.

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Stewart’s clothes are too tight for him, and make him appear restricted and
uncomfortable. He attempts to maintain his European clean-cut image by keeping
his hair cut short and neatly combed. In an early scene we see Stewart making the
difficult journey through the boggy undergrowth to the beach, where he will meet
Ada for the first time. He carries a tiny oval framed photo of Ada, which he takes out
of his pocket to admire, and then uses the glass as a mirror in which to comb his
hair. His attempt at vanity delays the entire entourage, yet Stewart is barely aware of
the effects his actions have on the others.
This scene gives us important exposition about Stewart’s character. Firstly, we see
that Stewart possesses Ada’s image, but does not know the person connected to
it. Upon seeing Ada, Stewart says, ‘You’re small; I never thought you’d be small.’
Shortly after this Stewart asks Baines, ‘So, what do you think?’ Baines looks at
Ada and says she looks tired, but Stewart is not interested in how she feels. He is
disappointed in the goods he has been delivered: ‘She’s stunted, that’s one thing.’
Stewart shifts seemlessly from assessing Ada to taking inventory of her things.
Together Ada and her belongings constitute Stuart’s ‘property’. He begins to ask her
what is in various boxes, as though she and her belongings were all of a piece. This
foreshadows the possessive nature of Stewart’s relationship to Ada. In Stewart’s
mind, she is an object to be admired and possessed, not an agent with a will of
her own. Ada’s fate has been determined by the patriarchal structures of Victorian
society. She has been literally ‘sold’ to Stewart by her father. Her body, as well as
her belongings, now belong to Stewart, as we see when he callously sells her piano
to Baines for a piece of land.
Secondly, when Stewart attempts to comb his hair in the ‘mirror’ of the glass
frame, his vanity looks ridiculous because of its futility. He is ankle deep in mud,
and surrounded by wild nature and strong winds. In these surroundings, his
attempt to look like a ‘gentleman’ appears especially ridiculous. Stewart wears
an impractical top hat and a vest with a pocket watch, for which there is no use in
these surroundings. By contrast, Baines and the Maoris wear loose-fitting clothes
more appropriate to their surroundings, and appear more comfortable. Baines
wears his hair long and allows it to flow wildly.
On a metaphorical level, the use of Ada’s framed image as a mirror for his own
vanity speaks volumes about Stewart’s psychology (if not of patriarchy in general).
Stewart’s ‘relationship’ with Ada is impossible precisely because he envisions it
as a one-way affair. Ada, as his wife, is expected to love him and to care about his
desires, but Stewart immediately establishes that her desire (symbolised by the
piano) is dispensable. Ada almost literally is just an image, a thing to be looked at
and not heard. Stewart only sees himself and his own needs when he looks at Ada
– not hers.

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Fig. 4.2
By contrast, Baines shows interest in Ada’s piano playing. He listens (see Fig. 4.2).
When Flora asks about her father, Ada tells her, ‘he became frightened and stopped
listening’. This is offered as the key to why Ada did not marry him. The piano is
almost a symbolic extension of Ada’s person. It is her means of self-expression. To
take this away from her is tantamount to taking away her agency. And yet Stewart
seems content that Ada be treated as a pet, with no free will of her own. At one
point, Stewart says to one of the lady servants, ‘There’s something to be said for
silence.’ She replies, ‘There’s nothing so easy to like as a pet, and they’re quite
silent.’ Stewart’s inability to listen is crystal clear when he demands that Flora play
a song on the piano and then overpowers her playing by thumping on the piano in a
feeble attempt at ‘accompaniment’.
The Piano, like Strange Days, works on one level as a critique of patriarchal media,
representation and the male gaze. Almost immediately upon their arrival back at
Stewart’s home, he arranges for a photograph to be taken of the ‘family’. Once
again we can see Stewart’s attempt to confine Ada to an image, by creating a new
photo which now includes himself. We see an extreme-close-up of the men’s
eyes looking through the camera’s primitive viewfinder. This photography session
seems like an impotent attempt to make an image of Ada in the vain hope that
she will conform to it, since she failed to live up to Stewart’s first image. Within
Campion’s narrative world, the camera functions as a means of objectifying Ada.
The photograph is Stewart’s means of possessing an image of their marriage – one
that is unconnected to the reality.
At first, Baines attempts to exploit Ada’s attachment to her piano for sexual favours.
His game begins as a barter in which he holds all of the power, since Ada’s need
for her piano is greater than his need for Ada. However, we soon discover that
Baines’s desire to express his love (sexually) for Ada is at least as great as her desire
to express herself through her piano. In this sense the piano, as extension of Ada,
is particularly phallic. As Jill Nelmes has noted, ‘Campion undercuts conventional
audience expectations of gender in the development of their relationship’ (2003: 300).
Campion effectively eroticises gender equality by making Ada’s desire and sexual

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agency as central as her male counterpart’s. Many feminist critics see a reversal of
patriarchal cinematic conventions in the love sequences between Baines and Ada.
A female camera gives audiences a different perspective on sexuality and gender
than we normally get in Hollywood cinema. Baines’s body is put on display first. The
camera does not fetishise Ada’s body by cropping it or positioning her to display her
nudity to the cinema spectator. Both Ada and Baines are nude, but there is no sense
of their bodies being deliberately positioned for the ‘male gaze’. Both characters are
represented as sexual agents. Baines is made vulnerable by removing his clothes
before Ada does, and she (and the viewer) looks at his body. As Nelmes says, ‘as we
see this sequence from her point of view, we cut to a reaction shot which is at first
startled but she does not look away, in fact her eye-line suggests a downward look.
In this case the gaze, the look, is not male but female’ (ibid.).
Ada’s acts of undressing and re-dressing are elaborate ordeals. The nature of
Victorian clothing is such that she is virtually imprisoned in her clothes. Her
skirt is like a cage, covered in layer upon layer of undergarments, as if to protect
her husband’s most sacred property from intruders. While waiting for her
new husband’s party to arrive, Ada and Flora use the skirt as a tent to protect
themselves from the elements. And after her first tryst with Baines, we see him
helping her back into her elaborate system of hooks and buttons. Ada’s clothes
are designed in such a way that she appears restrained by them. By contrast,
when we see her playing with Flora on their bed in her underwear, she appears
uncharacteristically liberated.
The inclusion of the male ‘look’ within the narrative, both in the action and the
dialogue, is a recurring motif. Male re-presentation of women is seen within
the narrative as a way of trying to take away female characters’ agency or self-
expression and re-cast them in a more phallocentric mould. The link between
re-presentation of misogynistic violence and actual misogynistic violence is
established when the Bluebeard play (a primitive horror show) foreshadows
Stewart’s use of an axe to sever Ada’s finger. The use of the white sheet and
silhouette to produce a simulation of murder is a primitive Victorian precursor to
the modern horror film.
By the same token, the female look is represented within the story as a threat to
male power. When Ada tries to make excuses to Flora for why she cannot watch
her mother give Baines ‘piano lessons’, she tells her Baines is ‘very shy, and a
beginner’. Flora reassures her mother by saying, ‘I won’t look at him.’ And when
Stewart attempts to have sex with a sleeping Ada, he is stopped when she opens
her eyes and looks at him. On another occasion, Ada attempts to be intimate with
Stewart, but he is excruciatingly uncomfortable with Ada’s agency, which she
expresses both through gazing at his nudity and touching him. Here the camera
gives us a female point of view on male nudity. Here is how Jill Nelmes describes
the scene:

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It is unusual in film for the male body to be explored and eroticised in this way.
Stewart is bathed in warm light and has a passive position enforced upon him by
Ada, when he attempts to be active Ada rejects him. (2003: 301)
Flora discovers her mother’s illicit relationship to Baines when she spies on the
couple. This is a kind of sexual awakening for Flora, who immediately imitates what
she has seen. She is transformed by her voyeurism into a sexual agent. She and
the Maori children enact this sexual awakening by kissing and rubbing themselves
against tree trunks. Stewart catches them doing this and scolds Flora, teaching
her shame, and making her wash the trunks with soap. Flora’s position is perhaps
indicative of the predicament of females born into a patriarchal society. She is born
into a dilemma between loyalty to her sex (and her mother) on one hand, and her
obligation to comply with the rules and laws of patriarchal society on the other.
Flora has to warn her mother of the consequences of breaking Stewart’s rules,
and it is she who betrays her mother to Stewart, thus protecting herself from
punishment. But she also suffers vicariously when Stewart takes revenge by cutting
off Ada’s finger. Critics read this act as a symbolic castration or clitoridectomy.
Stewart’s aim is to rein in Ada’s sexual autonomy. He wants her to be passive, not
an active sexual agent.
But Flora’s is not the only act of voyeurism depicted in the film. Stewart also spies
on Ada and Baines while they make love (see Fig. 4.3). Audience identification is
temporarily with Stewart as he looks through the peephole, but it does not remain
with him. The sequence cross-cuts between interiors of Ada and Baines, and
exteriors of Stewart watching. It ends with a shot of Stewart looking up at them
through the floorboards as a button from Ada’s dress falls through a crack onto
Stewart’s face. Stewart’s impotent voyeurism is sent up for ridicule.

Fig. 4.3
The Piano became controversial because audiences interpreted the resolution of the
narrative in various ways. In the final act, we see Ada on a boat with Baines, Flora
and the piano, which is virtually sinking the boat. Ada then suddenly announces that
she wants the piano thrown overboard, but her foot becomes entangled in a rope,
pulling her into the water with it. After a tense moment, we see her free herself

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from the rope and swim to the surface. Her voiceover tells us ‘my will has chosen
life’ and then we cut to a scene on the mainland in Nelson, where she is living
happily with Baines as a piano teacher and learning how to speak. It would seem
that her symbolic attachment to the piano is suddenly obsolete, and that she has
merely exchanged one form of domesticity for another, less exploitative, one.
Just when we think the film has ended we cut away to a medium shot of the piano
at the bottom of the sea. The camera pulls back to reveal Ada’s body floating above
it, the rope still around her ankle. In voiceover she tells us ‘at night, sometimes I
think about my piano in its ocean grave, and sometimes of myself floating above
it’. The cinematography in the final scenes, especially the scene of Ada’s rescue, is
highly stylised, with slow motion and visual effects breaking the realism. We are left
to wonder whether Ada’s drowning, or her life in Nelson, is the dream.

Claire Denis
Few female directors have been given the opportunity to bring their representations
of women to the screen, let alone to construct their own romanticised, eroticised or
neurotic images of men. With films and television programmes to her credit, Claire
Denis has built a reputation as one of Europe’s leading female directors working
today. For Beau Travail (1999) Denis teamed up with cinematographer Agnès
Godard to create a loose adaptation of a Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. Described as
‘a powerful examination of masculinity’ (Taylor 2000) and as ‘a paean to the beauty
of men’s bodies’ (Zacharek 2000), Beau Travail combines a sublime mix of poetry,
literature, music and dance to take viewers into the strange world of the French
Foreign Legion. Set in the east African outpost of Djibouti in the present day, Beau
Travail gives an undramatic rendering of the ritualistic lives of the legionnaires.
Their existence is one that has ‘lost its function and degenerated into sterile rivalry’
(Taylor 2000).
Here is a plot summary by Jeff Vorndam of aboutfilm.com:
Galoup (Denis Lavant) is their taskmaster, assiduously prepping the men with
drills and exercises under the cryptic eye of the Commander, Bruno Forestier
(Michel Subor, who played a character of the same name in Jean-Luc Godard’s
Le Petit Soldat). Into this grueling routine arrives a newcomer, the fresh-faced
and handsome Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin).
Sentain inspires an irrational jealousy in Galoup after Sentain saves the life of
a fellow Legionnaire. It’s not clear whether Galoup’s mounting obsession and
hatred of Sentain is due to a denied homosexual attraction or if Galoup believes
Sentain is diverting favor from the Commander that he used to bask in himself.
No matter, the story of the movie is the march toward the inevitable moment
when Galoup reaches his breaking point. (Vorndam 2000)

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Denis cuts between the repetitive and pointless routine of the legionnaires in the
harshly beautiful African landscape, and Galoup’s present civilian life in Marseilles
after he has been discharged. Galoup’s voiceover narration reveals that the scenes
in Africa are his remembered past, and we soon learn that the story is about his
remorse.
Galoup says he has ‘plenty of time to kill’, and we watch him as he attempts to
impose a rigid fetishism of order on a life in which he no longer feels purpose.
There’s a conditioned, clinical precision in the way he carefully stubs out a cigarette
or irons his clothes. But these mundane routines have become detached from the
community that once made them satisfying.
For students of feminist film studies, what makes Beau Travail interesting are the
ways in which Denis and Godard use the camera to deconstruct and represent
the opposite sex much as their male counterparts have in the past. For female
viewers, what makes Denis’ work most exciting is her unapologetic objectification
of the male body (Hundley 2000). The cinematic perspective (or ‘gaze’), so long
dominated by men, has slowly but surely been attained by female directors (ibid.).
Julie Rigg (2002) has noted that what Denis chooses to place on display for the
camera suggests a ‘very politically uncomfortable proposition – that hers is a very
female gaze. Can you imagine a male director showing us men, with great care and
tenderness, hanging their washing on lines, smoothing beds, ironing like a ballet in
the desert?’
In the work of directors like Denis and Campion, who are unafraid to represent male
(and female) characters according to their own observations and desires, we begin
to discern (1) a re-claiming of female sexuality and (2) the sexualisation of the male
actor by the female director.
Jessica Hundley (2000) has traced the curious transformations female sexuality
has undergone as it has been depicted through a male-dominated lens. She notes
that the male-dominated film industry has always worshipped, and objectified,
women. We have seen the era of the sexually powerful goddesses such as Dietrich
and Greta Garbo, who were sexy but unattainable, and intimidating. Then there
were the wisecracking feminine tomboys like Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn,
born of the post-war realisation that females have (a very threatening) subjectivity
and privacy, and so are more ‘like’ men that men had supposed. Then came the
backlash against all this dangerous equality, and so the de-clawed, voluptuous
sex kittens like Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe were invented to replace wit
with bewilderment. The 1960s produced the sexual adventurers who were sexually
willing sidekicks to male heroes. The ‘70s saw the return of the waif, perhaps
in response to the growing feminist movement. The ‘80s saw the emergence of
‘power bitches’, proving once again that if women had power, they had too much
of it. The 90s produced some quirky but vulnerable girls, often played by Winona

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Ryder. Hundley says, ‘In an industry that has traditionally functioned almost entirely
as an outlet for the creative visions of male directors, writers and producers,
what the stereotypes have illustrated is the way men (at least moviemaking men)
see women. And the way they’ve seen them, traditionally, has been with a potent
mixture of adoration, lust, loathing and fear’ (2000).
So, what we see with emerging female directors, few though they are, is a
reclaiming and reconstructing of the feminine. And equally empowering is a new
fearlessness about constructing masculinity according to the way women see (or
want to see) men.
Neither Campion nor Denis shy away from depicting male frontal nudity. Denis is
especially willing to deploy a fetishistic gaze to study and sensualise the male form,
at times with only aesthetic, rather than narrative, motivation (see Fig. 4.4). As
Hundley says, ‘After too many years, it’s finally our turn to objectify, sexualize, fear,
worship, loathe, adore and, best of all, lust after’ (ibid.).

Fig. 4.4
However, what is lacking in Beau Travail is a female protagonist who might be
offered for viewer identification and narcissism. For this reason, the film is only
a partial reversal of the male camera, or the male ‘look’. Beau Travail offers us
Galoup’s (and at times Bruno Forestier’s) mediating perspective within the narrative
world of the film (Figs. 4.5 & 4.6).
This image of the torso of a topless legionnaire is excerpted from a long tracking
shot that is used to introduce us to the men. We see this torso before we see any of
the men’s faces (Fig. 4.7). This image is accompanied by Benjamin Britten’s trance-
like non-diegetic soundtrack.
Denis offers us a male (and seemingly homoerotic) perspective on other men, rather
than simply an extra-diegetic female gaze. In one scene Bruno Forestier is watching
four topless legionnaires iron their uniforms. He says, ‘We are taught perfect
elegance in and under our uniforms. Perfect creases are part of this elegance.’ And
in another sequence Galoup tells us in voiceover about his growing resentment for
Sentain: ‘Sentain seduced everyone. He attracted stares . . . I was jealous.’

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Fig. 4.5

Figs. 4.6

Fig. 4.7
Galoup is presented as the only candidate for our narcissistic identification (and
pleasure). Female characters are virtually absent from the narrative, and when
they do appear they are silent and peripheral to the plot. If there is anyone with
whom the viewer is positioned to identify, it is Galoup, the narrator. It is Galoup
who exerts the power of the gaze within the narrative, over another male (Sentain).
Galoup watches the men ironing their shirts and in voiceover he says, ‘Here I am
commandant, like a watchdog, looking after your flock.’ However, Galoup is himself
put on display for the gratification of the viewer, especially in the final dance
sequence where he is alone in the frame (see Fig. 4.8).

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Fig. 4.8
Consequently, it is unclear how far Beau Travail reverses the male gaze, replacing
it with a female (or homoerotic) one. Beau Travail offers viewers a privileged view of
an all-male world, but does not deploy a female narratively to mediate the power of
the look within the filmic world. Nor does a female character narratively punish the
male transgressor, as would be expected if this were a reversal of the voyeuristic
pleasures of classic Hollywood narrative cinema. Whether this film’s ‘gaze’ is
constructed as homoerotic or female partly depends upon the extent to which the
viewer identifies with Galoup. Denis leaves room for viewers to distance themselves
from Galoup, partly by deploying an extra-diegetic gaze that turns him into an
object, and partly by making him less than heroic.
None of these observations make Beau Travail any less interesting. In fact, the
film could be read as a female director’s reflection on male power, whether this
was her intention or not. Or perhaps we have Melville to thank for that. Once
again, this ought to show just how difficult it is to define either ‘feminist’ or ‘sexist’
representations within the collaborative processes between male and female
creative contributors. It is not easy to prove that particular representations of
gender are the product of one sex or the other.

Céline Sciamma
Another French director who deserves mention for her deployment of an
empowering ‘female gaze’ is Céline Sciamma. Her 2014 film film Girlhood narrates
the point of view of a teenager from a Paris suburb, Marieme (Karidja Touré). It
deconstructs conventional gender representations on many levels, including:
• How uniform is used in the opening sequence.
• Easily passes the Bechdel Test
• Depicts women’s relationships with one another, instead of always relative
to men/boys. Intra-female relationships are represented as mostly positive.

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• Represents issues that impact women disproportionately because of their
gender: domestic abuse, double standards about female sexual agency
(girls are ‘sluts’), sexual exploitation, single parenthood.
• Visual conventions – uses a ‘female gaze’.
How viewers ‘read’ the opening sequence may depend upon the degree to which
they are familiar with the sport of American football, its place in culture and
the uniform/kit as symbols. The ‘kit’ is a highly gendered symbol of masculine
athleticism, power and aggression. The uniforms can be seen as a symbol of
typically American male ‘machismo’ – the helmet is both evocative of gladiatorial
combat and an important piece of protective equipment. Shoulder pads (also
necessary for protection) exaggerate and enhance the male physique. The uniform
as a whole signifies the hyper-masculine. When we first see the players in uniform
in Girlhood, their gender is not immediately obvious. We see two groups of players
competing, with action, athleticism and physical contact (all part of the sport).
Again, these images might carry gendered associations that we would normally link
with ‘masculinity’. But we gradually realise that we are watching female players,
which may well jar with our culturally conditioned expectations.
Sciamma’s opening makes viewers ponder gender by contrasting it (background
beliefs about men and women) with the women on screen. The sequence cuts
against gendered assumptions, and prepares us for a film about young women
who will go on to do the same, exhibiting personality traits that have traditionally
been constructed as ‘male’. The female characters, especially Marieme, will assert
themselves as agents:
• Sometimes threatening (not just threatened)
• Sometimes violent (not just victims)
• Exhibiting group-bonding (traditionally associated with males)
• Sexual subjects (not objects)
• Independent
• Strong (as opposed to Ismael, who doesn’t stand up to Djibril)
• Protective (and not protected by men).
Not only does Girlhood pass the Bechdel Test within the first ten minutes, but it
contains many scenes in which there are at least two women talking to each other
about something other than a man. As such, this film measures well against the
test for female presence in a movie.
The first sequence where we see this is when Marieme goes home and interacts
with her younger sisters. In their shared bedroom, Marieme and her sister share an
intimate moment talking about the younger one’s breasts, and Marieme does try to

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‘look’ at them. While this could be seen as a sexual objectification of the little sister,
Marieme also ends the tender game with a more serious warning to ‘wear a baggy
top’ so that the bullying and (possibly sexually abusive?) older brother, Djibril, will
not notice.
Other sequences in which female characters talk to one another include: when the
school counsellor (off screen) talks to Marieme; when Lady, Fily and Adiatou first
approach her; when Lady tells Marieme to repeat the words ‘I do what I want to do’;
when the ‘girl gangs’ fight amongst themselves in Paris and in the café; when the
other girls in her gang try to dissuade Marieme from working for Abou; or when
Marieme and the prostitute share a conversation over breakfast in their shared flat.
We might note that the conversations between female characters are not always
supportive – they can also be threatening or competitive, or indifferent (as with the
school counsellor).
The girls fight, steal, intimidate others but love and support each other. Marieme
and the girls grow close and she eventually begins to act and dress just like Lady,
Adiatou and Fily. By stealing, the entire group of girls are able to pay for a hotel
room, drink alcohol, dance, lip sync to ‘Diamonds’ by Rihanna, and hang out all
night long. At the hotel Lady encourages Marieme to ignore her abusive older
brother’s phone calls, encourages her to believe that she can do what she wants to
do and gives her a gold necklace with the name ‘Vic’ for Victory.
(Reminder: the Bechdel Test does not measure whether a film is feminist or even
good, it only measures whether women are ‘represented’ in the film at all, in any
meaningful way. In theory, even a sexist film could pass the test.)
In a vast majority of films and television shows, women are depicted as competing
against one another for the attention of men. Men and/or male attention/approval
represent the ‘goal’ of the female character’s lives. Unfortunately, this is especially
true in genres that are considered specifically targeted at female audiences (rom-
coms and ‘chick flicks’). Perhaps this is unsurprising when we consider that women
made up a dismal 10% of the entire workforce of film writers, according to a 2014
study conducted by womensmediacenter.com. The writer of Girlhood’s screenplay
was its director, Céline Sciamma. In this film, we do have women competing against
one another, but significantly never for a man’s sexual/romantic approval. If fact, it
is Abou who has to compete (with a woman) for Marieme’s interest – and he fails.
When girls in the film fight, it is for their own reputation or credibility, or for the
‘honour’ of one of their mates. Likewise, when women are depicted dancing they
do so with one another, and not as ‘spectacle’ for male voyeurs. They dance for
the enjoyment of their own bodies, and not for men’s enjoyment of their bodies as
objects of male desire.

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Fig. 4.9
Positive and negative inter-generational female relationships are also depicted,
with Marieme and her sister forming a close bond of mutual protectiveness and
affection. Likewise, Marieme and her ‘sisters’ in the girl gang form a protective
bond amongst themselves, based on mutual support, respect and protection from
‘outsiders’ (both male and female). This is a very rare thing to see in films, and
links back to the Bechdel Test, since relationships usually involve dialogue between
characters.
Girlhood also represents problems that affect women disproportionately, including
domestic violence, social prejudices/norms about female sexuality that involve
double standards, single-parent families and sexual exploitation.
Domestic violence is a key problem in both Marieme and her sister’s lives. The
older brother Djibril is a frightening presence in the household and only once shows
approval of Marieme, after hearing that she won a street fight. He exerts control
over her and implicitly also over her little sister, who hides her developing breasts
from him in order to resist being sexualised and thus preyed upon (sexually?) or
controlled. Implicitly, Djibril sees Marieme as either his responsibility, at best, or
his possession, at worst. His irrational jealously over her sexual independence and
‘coming of age’ suggest it may be a bit of both and that he may even be abusing
her sexually. He certainly uses excessive body contact in asserting his control
over her, whether wrapping his arm around her neck or forcing his knee between
her legs while pressing her down on the sofa. His younger ‘friend’, Ismael, is
also intimidated by Djibril, to the extent that he will not have a relationship with
Marieme, despite wishing to. This is important because it shows that both a boy and
a girl of similar age can be physically intimidated by men, and become ‘victims’ of
their violence, or threats.
Marieme is ‘slut shamed’ by her brother who forbids her to express her sexual
autonomy. This is a common stigma faced by women, due to patriarchal cultural
taboos around female sexuality, a taboo not applied to male sexuality. Women are
not supposed to be sexual agents, and traditional cultures show strong disapproval
towards female sexuality except in the context of marriage. We understand that this

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is the case with Marieme’s culture/family, because Ismael offers to marry her in
order to validate their sexual relationship within their community.
While the issue of sexual exploitation is not central to Girlhood, it certainly applies
in the last quarter of the film, when both Marieme and the other prostitute are seen
working under Abou, a local gangster. First, we see this choice as a last resort, or
the least of two evils, not a ‘happy’ decision, but a necessary one. The prostitute tells
Marieme that although she has chosen to deal drugs rather than to do sex work,
she is nevertheless Abou’s ‘bitch’ (a term applied to dogs and to female humans).
She means that both of them depend on Abou for a living, and have to do things they
would otherwise not choose to do. Marieme is depicted as dependent upon a man,
but it is interesting that the film shows her as ‘one of the boys’ who work for Abou,
showing that men too are exploited by other men. Marieme is seen dressing up in
a hyper-feminine outfit to take drugs into parties. She is showing that ‘feminine’
attire is a costume, a ‘passport’ into certain social circles, without which she
would be excluded. This calls attention to the fact that all feminine dress (stilettos,
dresses, lipstick, etc.) is a form of costume, not ‘natural’ but serving social purposes
and opening doors. The same job, then, requires different gender conventions for
different places, and different roles. Later, however, we see Marieme changing
back into her ‘masculine’ attire, and blending in with the guys in order to avoid
being sexualised when she is dealing drugs in the street. We also see how the
guys dealing in the projects sexually harass a young woman passerby. Marieme
is forced to side with them (against the girl) because if not she will lose her own
position with the guys, narrowing her options significantly and possibly forcing her
into prostitution as a last resort. This shows the price she pays for being ‘one of the
guys’: she has to betray her own sex, and her own sexuality, as we see when Ismael
rejects her. This also allows us to get insight into the culture of male machismo and
the pressure on men and boys to conform to male ‘bonding’ behaviour.
Insight also comes from Ismael’s response to Marieme’s new ‘look’. His negative
reaction to her rejection of a ‘feminine’ dress code suggests that he is incapable
of loving Marieme – the individual person – and is in love as much with an image
of ‘femininity’ as with her. However, perhaps a woman can love her for who she is
(not just as a ‘feminine’ sex object)? Sciamma suggests this when a relationship
between Marieme and the prostitute seems about to ignite, but Abou stamps out
the sparks when he sees that his ‘bitches’ might have sexual autonomy beyond his
control. He asserts his control but is rejected, and mortified when Marieme refuses
to be submissive. Other men prevent him from beating her, but we are left not
knowing how this will end (in the long run).
Many more women than men raise families as single parents. A 2015 study showed
that there were nearly 2 million lone parents with dependent children in the UK.
According to a report by the Office of National Statistics, in Britain in 2015, women

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accounted for 90% of lone parents with dependent children. In 2015, there were
1.5 million single-parent families in France, of which 85% had female heads of
household. We see that Marieme’s mother works outside the home as an office
cleaner. She is perhaps the sole bread-winner for the family, although we never
know whether or not Djibril also contributes. We see Marieme coming home from
school to cook and clean for her younger sisters. The mother’s absence from the
household means that the abusive Djibril is left in charge, despite the fact that
he does not take on household responsibilities (cooking, cleaning) that we would
normally associate with someone in a nurturing role in the home. Instead we see
him playing X-Box while Marieme is left to assume these chores. Again, the double
standard: a man wanting the positive benefits of being the authority figure but not
the attendant responsibilities.
The visual conventions used by director Sciamma also cut against the visual
conventions deployed in the vast majority of films. On many occasions we see the
women’s bodies on screen, most notably when they are playing football, dancing,
and fighting. In all of these activities, the girls’ bodies are shot without a male point
of view and often with the reverse. Onlookers and voyeurs are female characters,
from when Marieme is looking up her sister’s top to when the girls have a ‘dance
off’ in an outdoor concrete ‘park’. Not once in the film is the spectator given a
male’s point of view on a woman undressing or wearing very little, even during sex
scenes and even when Marieme is changing clothes in a car with a man. In fact, in
both of these potentially ‘male gaze’ moments, Sciamma reverses the ‘look’ so that
the spectator sees Ismael’s body, from Marieme’s point of view, or the eyes of the
guy in the car from her point of view but not Marieme’s body.
In the sex sequence with Ismael, Marieme is portrayed as the ‘agent’ who has gone
to get what she wants from him. She calls the shots, quite literally telling Ismael
to ‘undress’ and to ‘keep going’ and to ‘turn over’ – thus putting him in a passive
position normally reserved for female characters in sex scenes.
The cropped shots of the girls’ crotches (framed in medium close-up) during the
dance-off sequence do bring viewers’ focus to sexual areas of the body, but only
to display them as active, and not from a male point of view. We are invited to
admire their sexual moves, not to identify with a man who is admiring them and
thus mediating our gaze. The absence of a male ‘mediator’ in the construction of
these sequences invites us to view them as sexual actors, not as sexual objects. We
identify with them, and admire them for ourselves, not with a man who is watching
them for his gratification.
While Marieme’s story does not resolve all of the conflicts and problems that her
autonomous and unconventional female behaviour raise, it leaves her in charge
of her destiny. We are left not knowing how things will turn out for her. Sciamma’s
open ending not only makes us hope that things will turn out well for this appealing

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character, but also allows us to feel concern for other women whose options are
similarly limited by culture with its sexist taboos and economy of exploitation.
This chapter has explored various ways in which female directors have constructed
gender in their work. Looking at the examples above, it is clear that the
stereotypical gender representations and perspectives discussed in Chapter 1
are neither inevitable nor ‘natural’. We have seen that the gender stereotypes and
phallocentric ways of seeing which we tend to think of as ‘obvious’ or ‘common
sense’ are not so at all. In fact, in feminist, rather than patriarchal hands, the world
(as represented in cinema) is revealed to be very open and undetermined, especially
where gender is concerned.

Chapter Summary
• This chapter presents case studies of the work of four contemporary female
directors from world cinema. Only one of these works in Hollywood. The
purpose of these case studies is to reflect on whether there is such a thing
as a ‘female gaze’ that can be distinguished from the ‘male gaze’.
• Case study 1. Strange Days self-consciously interrogates the contradiction
by which the voyeuristic consumer of violent and misogynist ‘entertainment’
is taken out of the equation when assigning responsibility for these cultural
phenomena. This interrogation of voyeurism takes place at both the formal
and narrative levels. Because of the formal camera techniques chosen by
Bigelow, the viewer cannot easily achieve the comforts of ‘distance’ that
ordinarily accompany their viewing, and reassure them of their separateness
from the on-screen events they witness. This is a very original film because
it intends to look directly back at the spectator and implicate them directly in
the violent acts they so enjoy watching.
• Strange Days also offers a unique exception to stereotypical gender roles we
would expect to find in a Hollywood action film. This is clear from looking at
the relationship between the characters of Mace and Lenny.
• Case study 2. The Piano sets up a binary opposition between two men,
each of them representative of an attitude towards themselves, women
and nature. By means of the narrative conflict and its resolution, Campion
was able to make a feminist critique of an outdated and patriarchal way
of seeing women. The ideology she sets up for ridicule sees women as
radically ‘other’, passive, possessions or objects for male visual and sexual
gratification, and lacking agency. Feminists have also seen a reversal of
phallocentric cinematic conventions in the sex scenes between Ada and
Baines.

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• Case study 3. Beau Travail is an example of how the female camera can
deconstruct and represent the male sex in similar ways to how men have
represented women in the past. The narrative flow is interrupted to present
the male form for apparently no other reason than its pure beauty and
sensuality. We see the camera cropping men’s torsos, and drawing the
spectator’s attention to their physical attributes, at times with little narrative
motivation, and accompanied by Benjamin Britten’s non-diegetic music,
suggesting an idealised or romanticised vision of masculinity – the product
of female fantasy. But the story of Beau Travail is essentially a male one,
narrated to us by a man who gazes upon other men with admiration and
jealously competes for other men’s stares, suggesting that the film is best
interpreted as homoerotic fantasy, as in the novel upon which it was based
(Melville’s Billy Budd).
• Case study 4. Girlhood is an example of how a female writer-director can
construct cinema that breaks gender stereotypes, uses a ‘female gaze’ in its
cinematography and represents women’s problems and issues in a complex
and compassionate way. Sciamma’s film is a great example of positive but
complex representations of female relationships.

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Chapter 5 Unexpected Heroes of Feminist Cinema
Paul Verhoeven and Basic Instinct (1992)
Basic Instinct (Fig. 5.1) is an unlikely
candidate for a ‘feminist’ text, given the
film’s reception. Even before it opened
across the United States in March 1992,
Basic Instinct was attacked by both liberal
and conservative groups who described the
film variously as ‘misogynistic’,
‘homophobic’ and ‘indecent’. In California
homosexual activist groups Queer Nation
and Act Up blew whistles and hurled paint
bombs, while in Toronto gay activists taunted
lines of cinema-goers queuing to see the
film. The activists claimed that Basic Instinct
perpetuated negative stereotypes of
homosexuals, by portraying them as
unequivocally ‘bad’ without balancing these
representations against more positive ones.
Fig. 5.1 Meanwhile, in Maclean’s magazine a
spokeswoman for the National Organization for Women (NOW) described Basic
Instinct as ‘one of the most misogynistic films in recent memory’ (in Sova 2001: 35).
Time magazine quoted members of Queer Nation as labelling the film a ‘clearly
homophobic, lesbophobic film that once again inverts the reality of our lives’ (ibid.).
Ultimately even Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter, buckled under the gay activists’
pressure and attempted to re-write the script to accommodate them. Luckily the
director, Paul Verhoeven, refused. This caused Eszterhas to publicly declare that he
no longer supported the film. Ironically, Eszterhas had been paid $3.3 million for
the script, the highest amount ever paid for a screenplay at the time. The film was
finally released with an ‘R’ certificate in the US without changes to the script (but
with numerous cuts).1
It is curious that the protests against Basic Instinct were so universal – to the point
of uniting queer activists and ‘family values’ campaigners in a common cause. For
whatever reason, Basic Instinct was deeply disturbing, and the hysteria surrounding
it suggests that it struck at some sacred cow(s) in American culture. The film is
now remembered most for its famous ‘crotch shot’ (‘Did we see that or didn’t we?’
Viewers can’t seem to agree.). But this (alleged) flicker of porn alone cannot explain
the film’s iconic status and enduring popularity. Basic Instinct is a groundbreaking
film, a neo-noir masterpiece that plays with, and transgresses, the narrative rules
of film noir.

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Films noir typically feature a detective hero in a crime-investigation plot, who is
enticed into dark deeds by a femme fatale (e.g. Double Indemnity). The femme
fatale, like Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct, is sexy and seductive,
but dangerous. She leads the detective hero, typically a loner, into immoral territory
and may attempt to use him to further her own interests. But in the typical film noir
narratives of the mid-to-late 1940s, the detective eventually overpowers the femme
fatale and either destroys her or reins her in – restoring the patriarchal order where
women know their place (e.g. Mildred Pierce). The traditional film noir was framed
by the ideological (and patriarchal) values of the Hays Code (see Chapter 3). The
cause-and-effect logic of the narrative was influenced by the rule of ‘compensating
moral values’. As we have seen, this meant that where the film depicted ‘impure
love’ or immoral behaviour, these had to be compensated for in the narrative, either
through the punishment of the immoral character or the redemption of her evil
ways.
Basic Instinct is a traditional film noir in many respects, but instead of destroying
the femme fatale, the alienated detective hero is (implicitly) destroyed by her. In
this sense, Basic Instinct is a precursor to The Last Seduction. Both neo-noir
films tell the story of a femme fatale that surprisingly triumphs and destroys the
men who seek to capture her and punish her for her crime. The Last Seduction is
as scandalous as Basic Instinct in its refusal to conform to the patriarchal rule of
‘compensating moral values’.
Although queer activists are correct to point out that all three of the lesbians in
the film are depicted as killers, to conclude from this that the film’s message is
homophobic is baseless. What these critics ignore is that all of the lesbians in the
film don’t have to be killed off in order to remind viewers what happens to ‘bad’
girls. In fact, Basic Instinct is one of the most feminist and homophile films I have
ever seen. It is pro-lesbian, not ‘lesbophobic’. Its visual pleasures are constructed
against the grain of male voyeuristic pleasures and actually offer lesbians a rare
chance to dissect and ridicule heterosexual male sexism and homophobia, as
well as voyeurism. Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) is a virtual icon of American
masculinity – riddled with contradictions, desperate to prove his potency through
physical, often violent, force, with an insatiable appetite for conquest, and deluded
by fantasies of omnipotence.
Basic Instinct is a self-conscious reversal of Hollywood sexism and misogyny and,
if anything, ought to have provoked sexist straight white males to picket the film
(as some certainly did). That myopic lesbians and straight women joined their
protestations is the height of irony. The best parallel I can imagine would be if
black Americans, upon viewing a blaxploitation film in the 1970s, had picketed the
film because the black hero killed the racist cops and escaped capture. Instead
of arguing that the black characters are represented as killers, black Americans
celebrated the fact that cinema was finally representing racial injustice, and then

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representing them in the narrative as victorious over the (real) injustices.
Basic Instinct’s narrative follows the typical film noir storyline of a detective’s
investigation of a crime and a woman. The film is narrated from the detective’s
point of view. As in most crime-investigation films, our knowledge is restricted
to detective Nick Curran’s, so that we never know more than he does. The only
exceptions to this are the very beginning of the film and the very end.
The opening scene depicts the murder of Johnny Boz, a retired rock star who is
stabbed with an ice pick in his own apartment while having sex. Audiences get some
narrative information here that the protagonist, detective Curran, does not. We
see a blonde woman (face obscured) murder her lover while having sex with him.
Detective Nick Curran and his partner Gus (George Dzundza) arrive at the scene of
the crime and begin to examine the evidence.
When we first see the main suspect, Catherine Tramell, she is sitting on a balcony
jutting out from a cliff that overlooks the sea. It is for the panoramic view that spots
like this are coveted by the rich and powerful. We see Catherine from Nick’s point
of view as he looks down on her from above. Although she is framed below the
cops, who look down on her, she shares their power – the power of the look. As
they gaze down on her, she simultaneously looks down at the ocean view. Although
the detectives are temporarily sharing it with her, she owns this view. Nick Curran
begins to introduce himself and his partner, but she cuts him off, speaking for
the first time in the film. She says, ‘I know who you are.’ These first words are
significant, because Catherine’s power over Curran will stem directly from her
‘knowledge-power’, to use a term coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Catherine’s reaction to the news of ex-lover Boz’s murder is anything but hysterical.
She seems unmoved, as a (stereotypical) male would. Catherine Tramell is
unashamed about her casual relationship with the victim, or ‘fucking’ Boz, as she
puts it. She does not conspire in the double standard that says it’s healthy (indeed
recommended) for men to have casual sex with the women they desire while it
is morally ‘bad’ and ‘dirty’ for women to do the same. Quite simply, she does not
respond the way we (and they) expect a woman to respond to the suggestion that
there is something wrong with her sexual and emotional behaviour. Nor does she
lament Boz’s death. She says she liked having sex with him. That is what she’ll
miss.
The sexist double standards are evident later when Nick becomes a suspect
in the shooting death of his collegue, Nilsen. During his interrogation, Nick is
asked whether he thinks Lt. Nilson deserved to die. He has the same ‘cold’ lack
of emotion as Catherine, when he says, ‘I didn’t know him well enough. I won’t
miss him.’ The male officer questioning Nick does not seem to balk at his lack of
emotion towards his colleague. In another scene Nick tells his lover Beth Garner,
‘we slept together maybe what, ten, fifteen times. That doesn’t make me obligated

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to you.’ Yet the detectives in the film clearly expect Catherine (as woman) to react
with shame and grovelling apologies for the very lack of emotion that is ‘normal’ in
her male counterparts.
The reason for this must lie in an essentialist definition of ‘the feminine’ as
inherently possessing more ‘sensitivity’ and ‘emotion’ than masculine nature.
The DVD commentary features male members of the film crew discussing what
makes Basic Instinct such a special film. Descriptions of Catherine Tramell as
‘masculine’ abound here. This shows that male film-makers regard certain aspects
of behaviour as intrinsically male. They themselves are constructing her behaviour
as ‘masculine’ by talking about her character as though she possessed some
inherently ‘masculine’ behaviours. This reveals that they too hold an essentialist
theory about gender, when it could be that she is only imitating a construction of
masculinity perpetuated by socialisation and popular culture – chiefly Hollywood
films, television and sports. According to constructionist theory, the male
characters would also be imitating this constructed masculinity.
On their first meeting with Tramell, the two detectives stand in Catherine’s field
of vision, while she sits comfortably in her chair, looking at them. Despite the
fact that she is sitting and they are standing, she seems more powerful than they
do. This informal ‘interrogation’ hardly seems to ruffle the cool Catherine. She
begins asking them questions (‘How was he murdered?’) and this shifts the power
relations of the interrogation to her advantage. Right away, she is the one asking
the questions, and they are answering. When they threaten to take her downtown
she calls their bluff, saying they’ll have to read her her rights and arrest her.
She knows the law and this silences the detectives. She is the one who ends the
conversation, saying, ‘Look, I don’t really feel like talking anymore.’ She tells them
that they can either arrest her, ‘otherwise get the fuck outta here ... please’.
The women in this film are threatening precisely because they know too much
about men. (Camille Paglia even states in her commentary on the DVD: Catherine
projects an almost ‘supernatural omniscience’, but this is perhaps to assume too
much about what is or is not a ‘natural’ amount, or kind, of knowledge for females
to possess.) Both Dr Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and Catherine Tramell have this
‘knowledge-power’ over Nick. Dr Garner is the police psychiatrist and Nick is her
patient. He is on probation for some drinking problems and an incident involving
‘excessive force’. Dr Garner is given her power by the (traditionally male) institution
of law enforcement, and hence she is seen as less dangerous than Catherine,
who has acquired her power independently of any collusion with patriarchal
institutions. In fact, Beth’s power is seen as relatively limited, and we can see how
Nick comforts himself with this fact when he feels threatened by Catherine. Unlike
Catherine, Beth has to play by the patriarchal rules. She is on the police payroll,
and is thus rendered ultimately powerless by her economic dependence on male
institutions. This is an important difference between Beth and Catherine, whom

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we learn is independently wealthy, in fact, loaded. Beth plays the ‘apple pie’ girl
to Catherine’s femme fatale, only it is she who is ultimately punished within the
narrative, not (as tradition would have it) the femme fatale ‘villain’.
Curran constantly thinks he can regain control of women, and assert his power
over them, by virtue of his sexual prowess. He need only conquer them in bed (as
he has done with his female psychiatrist) in order to feel ‘in control.’ Following his
first (disconcerting) meeting with Catherine, Nick tries to recover his male identity/
potency through his interaction with Dr Beth Garner. While the relationship between
he and Beth is one of intrinsic inequality – she is the doctor, examining her ‘patient’
– he has reversed the power relations by sleeping with her and then (it is implied)
rejecting her. Nick withholds his look from her when she tries to lock him in a loving
gaze. Nick turns his back. She says, ‘I still miss you Nick.’ Nick bolts out of her
office, and brags about Dr Garner’s lingering desire for him to his partner, Gus. This
gives us exposition about his character – he is cocky, insensitive and chauvinistic,
traits he shares with his partner Gus, who comments, ‘Boy, when that girl mates,
it’s for life’ [my emphasis]. This is also significant because Catherine will later
reject Nick after a few casual sexual encounters with him. He will later occupy
Beth’s position, as a desperate conquest of the macho (female) ‘man’. This reversal
of traditional roles will highlight the sexist double standards all the more.
The investigation seems to take a positive/normal turn for detective Curran, as
he learns all kinds of things about Tramell. We cut to a scene at the police station
where we see the detectives gathered in their office discussing the evidence. We
hear one of the cops saying that the scarf (used to tie the victim’s hands to the
bedposts) was expensive, and he mispronounces the designer ‘Hermès’, revealing
his philistine dullness, an in-joke for more fashion savvy (gay) audiences. This
in-joke allows female and gay audiences to have a laugh at the expense of macho
straight males who (stereotypically) know nothing about haute couture. This,
again, highlights their relative ignorance for female and gay male audiences, who
get pleasure from knowing more than the characters stereotypically depicted as
powerful ‘heroes’.
Nick Curran gets his knowledge about the case through the power of the institution
(law enforcement/police) and this seems to temporarily restore his omniscience
(and his fantasy of omnipotence). A police psychiatrist is called in to assess the
evidence, especially the seemingly unlikely coincidence that Johnny Boz’s murder
is identical to a murder described in one of Tramell’s novels, ‘Love Hurts’. This
gives the cops (and Curran) a justification to bring Tramell in for questioning. Nick
and Gus arrive at her impressively grand beach house with a renewed sense of
confidence.
The first thing Nick notices upon entering Catherine’s beach house is an old
newspaper about a scandal in which he was directly implicated. The headline reads:

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‘Cop Cleared in Tourist Shooting, Grand Jury Says Shooting Accidental.’ There is a
photograph of Nick on the page too. Nick is visibly uncomfortable about being on
display in this way. He realises that Catherine has been doing some investigating of
her own. On the other hand, Catherine is comfortable being on display and seems
unperturbed by the investigation. She changes into a dress in view of Nick and he
moves so that he can better see her body through an open door. His voyeurism
temporarily reassures him of his advantage. As they leave the house, Gus tells
Catherine, ‘You have the right to an attorney.’ She replies, ‘Why would I need an
attorney?’, a remark that, once again, emphasises her independence from male
institutions and protection.
On the way to the station, she occupies the back seat of the car, giving her an
immediate advantage, as the men are in her field of vision, but they cannot easily
see her. She taps Nick on the shoulder and says, ‘Do you want a cigarette?’ He
replies, ‘I don’t smoke,’ to which she retorts, ‘Yes you do.’ He says, ‘I quit.’ She says,
‘congratulations’. She offers him her cigarette case a second time. He repeats, ‘I
said I quit!’ and she retorts, ‘It won’t last.’ This foreshadows Nick’s lack of resolve
and gives us insight into flaws in his character. The second cop, Gus, tilts the rear-
view mirror to see Catherine. He is uncomfortable with her seeing him while he
cannot see her. He tries to taunt her:
Gus: ‘It must really be somethin’ makin’ stuff up all the time.’
Catherine: ‘Yeah, it teaches you to lie.’
Gus: ‘How’s that?’
Catherine: ‘You make stuff up. It has to be believable. It’s called suspension of
disbelief.’
Gus: ‘I like that! Suspension of disbelief!’
Film studies teachers will recognise the reference to ‘suspension of disbelief’. In
the context of this story, this remark is directed at (male-dominated) Hollywood
movies in general. They too are lies, especially in their narcissistic construction
of masculinity as invariably heroic, invincible and good, while making women look
dependent, helpless and (when they don’t conform to phallocentric stereotypes) evil.
In another reversal of sexist male cinema, Catherine Tramell completely controls
the narrative. The detective hero learns that Catherine is writing another book,
‘Shooter’ (this also happens to be the nickname Curran has earned for himself,
owing to his trigger-happy past). Her book is about a detective who falls for the
wrong ‘girl’. Basic Instinct’s narrative will gradually be taken over and controlled
by Catherine’s (internal) ‘Shooter’ narrative. Nick’s worst fear is that her story will
eventually dominate and eclipse his, since the girl in Catherine’s novel eventually
kills the detective. As we will see, this is precisely what happens in Basic Instinct.

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Catherine’s narrative control functions on a secondary level as a critique of
the narcissistic male-dominated Hollywood narratives we are accustomed to.
‘Shooter’ could as easily be a reference to the literal film shooter (an allusion to a
cameraman). Even if this were not Eszterhas’s intended reading, it is not difficult
to read it this way when we actually see the camera pointing at Tramell in the
interrogation room, and the detectives inform her that they will be filming the
session that follows.
In the interrogation room scene the female antagonist will completely turn the
tables on her seemingly all-powerful male onlookers. She occupies a lone chair
placed directly in front of a row of fascinated men who are hungry to examine
her and to increase their knowledge of her hidden secrets. They literally want
to penetrate her with their collective gaze. Everything about the mise-en-scène
suggests that she is being put on display in an analogy to the cinematic presence
of women. She is there for their view, in the same way that she is there for our view
on the cinema screen. The arrangement of their seats opposite her mimics our
voyeuristic position as cinema spectators. The mise-en-scène here is dark, and
low-key bluish lighting creates a pattern of shadows on her face and on Nick’s.
Catherine is then positioned under a brighter light to enhance the sense that she is
an object to be seen. The cops remain half hidden in the darkness, another parallel
to the cinema spectator (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2
Stone fills the screen with her brazen smirk and her immaculate white dress
and silky skin. Not since Grace Kelly in Rear Window has an actress had such
astonishing screen presence. In an ironic twist on the pornographic posture of the
female exhibitionist, Tramell does (apparently) flash her crotch for the male view,
but mocks their prurient voyeurism at the same time. We (and they) soon realise
that it is she who is asking the questions. It is as if she is looking out of the screen
at us and interrogating us.
She is outnumbered and in their territory now. But Catherine disarms the cops by
being far more frank than they expect. Tramell wears all white (the iconography
connotes innocence) in this scene where the cops want to uncover her guilt. She is

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an open book, but they are hypocritical, and so she wants to expose their secrets,
disrobe them, scrutinise them. She averts their probing by giving them more
information than they ask for, and again, by asking them questions which throw
them off guard. Knowing that they will perversely enjoy asking her all about her
sex life with Johnny Boz, she stuns them by supplying more details than they ask
for. When the assistant D.A. asks her whether she and Johnny Boz ever engaged in
any sado-masochistic behaviour, she leans forward, looks him directly in the eyes,
and replies, ‘What exactly did you have in mind?’ Again, she is accused of having
casual sex with men she does not love, and again, she turns the tables, asking
Nick if he didn’t have sex with other people when he was married. This throws Nick
off balance again, because he realises that she knows things about him. In fact,
she apparently knows so much that the other officers ask, ‘Do you two know each
other?’
In the next scene the detectives hover over television monitors to gaze at Tramell as
she is submitted to the lie detector. But she reverses the look once again, looking
straight back into the camera lens at her scopophilic captors (Fig. 5.3).

Fig. 5.3
It soon becomes apparent that Nick believes in his own lies. After her interrogation,
Nick insists that Tramell has successfully fooled the lie detector. The other police
officers don’t believe it is possible to beat the machine, and they ask Nick why he is
so sure. He says, ‘because I’ve known people who’ve done it’. (Implicitly, this means
him, when he was questioned about shooting the tourists.) Nick volunteers to give
Catherine a lift home. Here is the dialogue between them in the car on the way to
her house:
Nick: Rough day?
Catherine: Not really.
Nick: Beating that machine can’t be easy.
Catherine: If I was guilty and I wanted to beat that machine, it wouldn’t be hard.
Ha! ha! It wouldn’t be hard at all. (A BEAT) You took a lie detector test after you

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shot those two people, didn’t you?
Nick: I passed.
Catherine (sarcastically): You see? We’re both innocent, Nick.
THE CAR PULLS UP IN FRONT OF TRAMELL’S HOUSE AND STOPS.
Nick: You seem to know an awful lot about me.
Catherine: You know a lot about me.
Nick: I don’t know anything that’s not police business.
Catherine: You know I don’t wear any underwear, don’t you, Nick? (she takes off
her heels and opens the car door) Thanks for the ride.
The implication is that they are both guilty and this scene signals yet another
chink in Nick’s outwardly lawful armour. His legitimacy as a police officer is now
undermined. We know he’s a bad cop and so does Catherine.
Once again, Nick rushes back to the safe world of male institutions. He goes to the
bar to hang out with his police buddies and (for the first time in months) orders a
drink. A colleague, Lt. Marty Nilsen, provokes him and a fight ensues, but just then
Beth enters the bar and intervenes.
Curran, in his frustrated state of sexual lust for Tramell, displaces his pent-up
libido onto Beth, not because he desires his old conquest, but because (unlike
Catherine) he cannot have just anybody he might desire (i.e. Catherine). He picks
up Beth in the bar, takes her home and virtually rapes her. He pushes her over the
sofa, head down and takes her from behind. Beth is the typical victim, unable to
look at him. By deliberately positioning her so that her face is away from him, he is
able to gaze on her without being looked at. His male power as voyeur is restored
(Fig. 5.4).
Beth’s humiliation and anger are a stark contrast to Catherine’s confident pleasure.
Implicitly, Beth’s resentment of the very male power that she has conspired to
create by obeying the ‘rules’ of the male game reveals the contradictory position
occupied by most female ‘victims’, both on screen and off. The criticism this film
launches at male sexism is not directed at men alone, but also at a type of woman
who (like Beth) helps to perpetuate a culture of male sexism.
Beth Gardner is Catherine’s opposite, in that she is always seen in the male world
(police station, bar). Even after her near-rape by Nick she is seen lying on the sofa
in the position where he is looking at her and she is looking out at the camera (Fig.
5.5), to be seen both by him and by us (the male spectator).
She says to him, ‘You weren’t making love.’ Nick’s resolve is now beginning to
completely unravel and this is signalled by his urge for a cigarette.

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Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5
Soon after this, Curran puts Catherine under surveillance, yet another attempt to
contain her within the power of the male gaze and re-assert his masculine power
over her. Often, when we see Nick doing his investigating, he hides behind his dark
sunglasses, which allow him to see out without being seen.
After a long day of tailing Catherine, Nick enters Catherine’s property at night,
and sees her undressing through a huge picture window. Again, the mise-en-
scène here is carefully constructed to remind us of the cinematic voyeur. The
lights in Catherine’s pool flicker on Curran’s face as he gazes up at the window
in which Catherine is framed, making him look just like a cinematic spectator
with the flickering light on his face as he gazes upwards. The window in which
Catherine is framed is like a screen within the screen, reminding us that we (like
Nick) are voyeurs, gazing at the female on display. The mise-en-scène is carefully
constructed so that the window she occupies is lit with a reddish glow as are the
two windows on either side of hers, resembling a strip of celluloid.
The following day Nick goes to Catherine’s beach house again, and we see him
peer through the window, attempting to spy on her. This act is interrupted by
Catherine, who spots him and steps outside, just as he is about to peer through
the window at her (Fig. 5.6). Once again she interrupts his voyeurism and reverses
the look. The spectator becomes the spectacle. Now he is seen by her and is visibly
uncomfortable.

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Fig. 5.6
As he invades her space, to investigate and interrogate her, Nick sees her collection
of newspaper articles about him, and so is made to look at himself, framed in
newspaper clippings. This is a powerful and shocking reversal, not only for Curran,
but for the male-identified spectator.
Again, he realises with dismay that he is the one who is being inspected. This again
ridicules male double-standards. He tells Catherine he has a few more questions to
ask her and she says she has a few to ask him too, for her book.
Just as Nick starts to feel sexually potent by using his male strength to subjugate
Catherine, she outwits him by alluding to his wife’s suicide. But even more
disturbing to his sense of macho dominance is that she asserts her own version
of the same machismo. A friend of Catherine, Roxy, has entered the room. This
reminds Nick that he is now in Catherine’s territory, her private life. She pulls Roxy
towards her, taunting him with her shameless lesbianism, and feels Roxy’s breast –
a decidedly male gesture. It is her implicit identity with him, as macho, that he (and
the male viewer) finds most disturbing. She asserts her equality by treating women
as he does -– as objects of her sexual desire, voyerism and predatory lust.
Psychologically, the male voyeur identifies with the male ‘hero’ (Nick) who desires
a woman. But, because the object of his lust (Catherine) codes as male, there is
an implicit question mark hanging over his heterosexuality. Nick storms out of the
house and back to the safe world of the police station, where he throws a temper
tantrum, trying to regain his now threatened masculinity by violence and shouting.
Nick is convinced that his least favourite colleague, Nilsen, has sold his private file
to Catherine. He leaves the station and gets into his car, followed by his buddy, Gus.
It is clear from his violent reaction that Catherine has ‘penetrated’ him, emasculated
him by plundering his safe male institutional world (of law enforcement). She
has gained the upper hand by virtue of her penetrating gaze and her knowledge.
Catherine has tapped into the ultimate male fear – of being feminised. I suspect this
is the real explanation for the right wing critics’ horror of Basic Instinct. The opening
murder is an act of female penetration. A passive male victim is literally penetrated

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during a sexual act by an active female killer (with an ice pick).
Nick is homophobic. His phobia stems from (1) the fragility of his masculinity
(precisely because it is not an inner power but an artificial, socially constructed
set of institutions and macho mannerisms with no foundation within the actual
male individual), and (2) the independence of (some) women, and the consequent
obsolescence of men for sexual gratification, financial gain or protection. Nick’s
deepest fear is loving his equal (i.e. someone he identifies with, namely, another
‘man’). Nick also fears the real possibility that he, like Johnny Boz, could become a
victim of female penetration (in the form of an ice pick/phallus). Nick has a self-
destructive streak, however, and that is his Achilles’ heel. It is the reason he drinks,
smokes, snorts coke and desires dangerous women.
Dialogue between Nick and Gus (outside the police HQ):
Nick: I’m tired of being played with.
Gus: You got a real conclusive way of demonstrating that.
Nick: She knows where I live…everything. She’s coming after me, Gus.
Gus: What is it you got between you?
Nick: I don’t know.
Gus: Something though.
Nick: Something… yeah.
(He drives home and watches TV.)
What we see here is that she ‘knows’ him, intimately…personally. Her knowledge is
superior because it takes not only the form of data, or information, about Nick, but
also a kind of personal identification with him. The question of knowledge as power
is at the heart of the film’s message. He (or she) who knows more has more power.
Seeing is power because it is a means of gathering knowledge. Is he afraid because
she is just like him, understands his motivations, has insight into his psyche? It
seems so.
It is interesting that Nick consoles himself with television, another parallel between
Nick and the male voyeur. As he falls asleep, drunk, we see and hear the screams
of a helpless female victim in a horror film playing in the background.
Nick is awakened by the phone. He is called out to the scene of a crime – a crime
he is suspected of committing. His partner Nilsen is found dead, shot with a pistol
like the one Nick owns. After his visible fight with Nilsen at the police station, Nick
now realises that the tables are turned and it is he who is under the microscope.
Nick ends up sitting in the same interrogation room where Catherine was
interrogated earlier, occupying the same seat. He tries, not very successfully, to

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mimic Catherine’s cool responses to her interrogators, even stealing her line ‘What
are you going to do, charge me with smoking?’ And, like Catherine, who would have
to be ‘pretty stupid’ to announce herself as the killer by writing about the crimes
she commits, Nick argues that he would have to be dumb to kill Nilsen right after
storming into his office in the middle of the day in front of everybody.
Beth again ‘rescues’ Nick, by providing an alibi for him. She tells the officers she
had stopped by Nick’s apartment at about the time of the killing and found Nick to
be calm and sober (a lie).
In a subsequent scene, when Nick arrives home at his own apartment, he finds
Catherine waiting for him, and she has again found out much about him. He keeps
his sunglasses on so that she can’t see him, penetrate him (Fig. 5.7).

Fig. 5.7
He feels safe because he can see her without being seen. She enters his apartment
and looks at it, commenting that ‘you oughtta put some warmth into the place. You
don’t want it to reflect too much on your personality.’ This is telling, as Catherine
herself has been described as ‘cold’ by officers during her interrogation. Nick goes
to break some ice with an ice pick (phallus), but Catherine has to help him, because
she is better at it than him. On the one hand this gesture, following as it does her
comment on Nick’s ‘cold’ personality, is a symbolic deconstruction/destruction of his
icy exterior/ his ‘cool’ male image, and a symbol of her invasion of his ‘cold’ space.
But it also represents a threat to his masculinity, as it implies that she is more
sexually potent and more penetrating than he, more sexually powerful. She says to
him, ‘you like watching me do it, don’t you?’ (Given the phallic subtext of this line, it
could be a comment to any male viewer on his enjoyment of watching lesbian sex, as
we see when Nick gets turned on watching Catherine and Roxy dancing together and
kissing at the nightclub.) After breaking the chunk of ice, she smokes a cigarette, as
one does after sex, again suggesting that the ice pick is symbolic of a phallus.
A further blow to Nick’s masculinity comes when he learns that Dr Beth Garner is
also Catherine’s sexual conquest. This completely undermines Nick’s dominance
over women, since even his own conquests are fair game for Catherine.

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Nick is officially taken off the case, and now is free to party with Catherine on his
own terms. She invites him to continue following her around. At the nightclub Nick
spots Roxy dancing, and follows her into (not surprisingly) the Men’s room. The
traditionally male space is literally invaded by all kinds of bisexual, transvestite and
lesbian characters. We see Tramell in a stall and Roxy mounts her, straddling her
as if she had a penis.

Fig. 5.8
As Nick gazes at them, Catherine looks back at him, then literally denies him his
voyeuristic power by shutting the door on his (and our) gaze (Fig. 5.8). Back on the
dance floor, Catherine and Roxy kiss and dance together seductively. Nick attempts
to mimic this lesbian gesture by kissing Catherine in the same way that Catherine
kissed Roxy, but she pulls away and refuses to kiss him, dancing provocatively
instead. Nick’s attempt to reassert his position as the active agent controlling
female pleasure and being the one to initiate a sexual encounter only makes him
look silly. He is implicitly threatened and challenged by watching Catherine behave
the way men are supposed to behave. By kissing her he hopes to restore his
relationship to Catherine to a familiar sexist order. She finally does kiss him back,
but with her eyes open, still looking at him.
Back at her house, Nick tries to have conventional (male-dominant) sex with
Catherine, in the missionary position. She continues to look at him even when he
gives her oral sex. Interestingly, Nick consents to performing a stereotypically
lesbian act, and he is literally in the submissive position. Fellatio is typically used
to humiliate/subjugate women, by positioning them as sexual servants, performing
an act solely for male gratification that offers the female no sexual gratification.
Nick consents to this submissive ‘female’ role, if somewhat reluctantly. He is clearly
playing by Catherine’s rules. As spectators we are very unaccustomed to seeing
male characters in this submissive role. There is almost a ‘contest of looks’ in this
sequence. The details of this sex scene are narratively significant, not a gratuitous
attempt to boost the film’s sexual content. The two grapple in bed and seem to fight
for the top position. Nick asserts his dominance by thrusting his penis inside of
her. Catherine winces, whether in pleasure or pain is not clear. While he is on top,

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Catherine scratches his back, drawing blood. The blood could be read as symbolic
of Nick’s sexual naivety/virginity. Soon afterwards, Catherine is again on top
pressing him down and dominating him. He has earlier pinned her arms down and
penetrated her, but now she is on top and ties his arms to the bedposts, thrusting
herself against him hard and making him submit to her control of the sexual act.
This makes him wince just as she did, and again they are equals.
At this point the detective in Nick is gripped with the sudden fear that he will
be penetrated, by her ice pick/phallus. He is still uncertain whether she is the
murderer and he knows he is in danger, causing great tension in the scene for the
male-identified viewer.
Later, Nick goes to the bathroom and washes his face in the sink. When he looks up
from the sink he sees Roxy, fully clothed, gazing at him (Fig. 5.9). The mirror is like
a movie screen within the screen, where he is naked, on display and thus feminised.
Because of the mirror, he is made to look at himself as object, on display for the
female gaze.

Fig. 5.9
Nick asks Roxy, ‘How long have you been here? Do you like to watch?’ Roxy says,
‘She likes me to watch,’ thus asserting her ‘masculinity’ by identifying with the
male voyeur. But even worse, because Catherine also likes Roxy to watch, she
is identified with the (stereotypically male) exploiter, having put Nick on display
without his consent. In this dialogue between Nick and Roxy, he sarcastically calls
her ‘Rocky’ and says ‘let me ask you something, man to man.’ This signals that
Nick has identified Roxy as the ‘butch’ partner in the relationship between she and
Catherine. This suggests that he identifies Catherine as ‘the woman’. This is a very
stereotypical (and naive) way of viewing lesbian relationships. Nick suddenly feels
safe and secure because he thinks (mistakenly) that Catherine’s orgasm indicates
her femininity (and his conquest). This is a grave mistake. Nick has underestimated
the danger Catherine represents. He later says to Catherine, ‘maybe she [Roxy] saw
something she’s never seen before.’ (Like what? An orgasm? He must be kidding!)
Catherine hardly reassures his swaggering sense of conquest, and tells Nick that
Roxy has watched her have sex with many men.

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The next scene brings us to a Country & Western bar where Nick meets up with
his buddy Gus. Nick dons a Stetson (which he has taken off of Gus’s head), a
symbol of old-fashioned, outdated, macho ‘masculinity’. He later reveals to Gus in
a diner, ‘I’m not afraid of her.’ We sense that this is because he no longer sees the
possibility of being penetrated (by her ice pick) as a threat. Or perhaps it is because
conquering women in bed is his usual method of achieving security. He has put
her, via the sexual act, in her (feminine) place, and so has successfully (he thinks)
differentiated her from himself. Until now, he had identified with something in her
(her ‘masculine’, predatory, ‘cold’ nature, as well as her ‘killer instinct’).
Tramell’s sexuality is portrayed as her own power, not as a means of male
empowerment, as Curran discovers when he attempts to reassure himself that the
intercourse they had was indeed ‘the fuck of the century’. She assures him that it
was good ‘for a beginning’, as if to tell him that he obviously has a lot to learn. It
clearly was not as special for her as it was for him. She says to him, ‘Did you really
think it was so special?’ Tramell’s self-esteem is not measured by the pleasure she
gives to men. Her remark implies the opposite: that it is he who could use more
experience.
She can have good sex when and with whom she desires, and she doesn’t feel guilty
about it – which is what really makes this film a threat to American (sexist and
homophobic) values. The reactions to the film, not the film itself, were assaults on
feminism and lesbianism. Among the most negative reactions was Sneak Peeks
host Michael Medved’s claim (in Sova 2001: 36) that the film was an indecent
assault on traditional American values. These traditional American values include
sexism and homophobia, so I have to agree with Medved on this point. But there are
some values that should be threatened, or at least challenged. Cinema has long
been a powerful tool in the arsenal of the underdog, the minority, the outcast. In the
60s white critics reacted to Norman Jewison’s film In the Heat of the Night (1967)
in much the same way, but that didn’t prevent it being both a fantastic film and an
important precedent for more fair cinematic representations of African Americans.
And it gave African Americans a lot of pleasure to watch.
Catherine reversed the power relations by getting on top of Nick in bed. Again,
he has been made to occupy a stereotypically ‘feminine’ position, so he feels
almost gay (according to traditional heteronormative accounts of what makes
men ‘gay’)! That it is this act (her act) that he later describes as ‘the fuck of the
century’ suggests narrative approval of this less conventional sex act, and also
of the gay subtext. It also suggests his (perhaps subconscious) approval of being
feminised, which is no doubt what made traditional male viewers feel particularly
uncomfortable.
Moreover, Catherine’s sexuality is defined neither by men nor by the penis. She
has lesbian lovers both before and after her fling with Nick, which suggests (God

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forbid!) that the penis is not the ultimate instrument of female gratification. Roxy
is implicitly as good a lay as Nick, despite his swaggering attitude towards her and
his attempt to flaunt his conquest in her face. When Nick leaves Gus at the country
and western bar, he is nearly run down by a black car. A chase ensues and he
manages to run the driver off the road. Nick goes to see who was driving the car
and discovers Roxy (now dead) behind the wheel.
The death of Roxy was the one thing that lesbian viewers protested most. Nick
has sex with Catherine and wins while Roxy has sex with Catherine and dies. How
typical! The revelation that Roxy killed her younger brothers with a razor when she
was 16 gives her death some moral justification within the narrative, but it also
indicates that all of Catherine’s lesbian friends (Hazel Dobkins and Roxy) are vicious
man killers. So, Roxy is punished for her crime/sins within the narrative. While
lesbian critics are correct to point out that this is typical of mainstream Hollywood
ideology, with its ‘compensating moral values’, we need to examine it within the
context of the entire story. Hazel Dobkins, also a lesbian and a man killer, has been
released from jail and now lives happily ever after. But most important of all, the
lesbian (bisexual?) femme fatale (Catherine) is the real winner in the end. Her story
(and our film) will end as she decides, and we already know that her story is about a
detective who falls for the wrong woman, and so gets himself killed. We should also
note that, although Catherine did not cry when she heard the news of Johnny Boz’s
death (presumably because she killed him), she does shed tears for Roxy.
Tramell has a lesbian lover and she literally refuses Nick the voyeuristic fantasy that
this fact exists for his titillation by closing the door in his face, literally refusing him
(and the male spectator) the spectacle of lesbian sex. We also have rare male nudity
when Curran’s butt becomes the spectacle not only for our female gaze but also for
the lesbian gaze within the diegetic world of the film. It is inconceivable to me that
lesbians could have thought this film homophobic. Tramell often allows her female
lover, Roxy, to watch her having sex with men. Here, it is men who are on display for
the pleasure of women. Women consume the spectacle of male nudity for their own
power/amusement (not because he is exposing himself to them). Moreover, Roxy
appears behind Curran in the bathroom mirror, and this is significant because it
puts him in the position of women, who generally watch themselves being looked at
by men. Here Nick is forced to see himself as spectacle, as an object for the female
look.
As John Berger and Laura Mulvey have argued, the social presence of a woman is
different to that of a man. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost
continually accompanied by her own image of herself. The surveyor of woman in
herself is male. In this scene the social situation of women is reversed – she looks
at him and he watches himself being looked at. He is turned into an object of vision,
a sight. The surveyor of male in himself is female! He appears disturbed by this
position, and washes his face in the sink. She is still there, watching. He cannot

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erase her gaze by cleaning his face … his own image does not belong entirely to him
anymore. This scene is revolutionary in the history of cinema.
Basic Instinct’s representation of gender marks a self-conscious and
groundbreaking departure from the male construction of gender that has
dominated the Hollywood screen. This is evident if we compare it to the other box
office hits of 1992: Lethal Weapon 3, Unforgiven, Under Siege, The Bodyguard,
Reservoir Dogs and Patriot Games all have predictable phallocentric plots, with
either no female characters, or minor ones who do nothing to impact the cause-
and-effect logic of the narrative. Other films of that year featured female characters
but represented them either in a sexist (Aladdin) or unthreatening (Home Alone 2:
Lost in New York, Sister Act, Batman Returns, The Last of the Mohicans) light.
We could compare Basic Instinct to Thelma & Louise. Thelma and Louise, like
Catherine, turn their backs on the sexist world of patriarchal institutions, except
that the film’s closure reassures the male viewer that this rejection is ‘criminal’ and
that women can’t get away with it. Ridley Scott did not have the courage (or desire)
that Paul Verhoeven had to stick to his feminist guns, and so Thelma & Louise did
not challenge the narrow ideology of ‘compensating moral values’. Basic Instinct
does not close with this reassuring message, and in fact suggests the opposite.
Maybe Catherine can get away with it? Where there is homophobia in Basic Instinct,
it comes from characters who are represented as weak and hypocritical within the
narrative. The film’s closure can be read by discerning audiences as a triumph of
feminism (or lesbianism) over patriarchal values. The ending of Thelma & Louise
sends the message to female viewers that ‘this is what happens to women who
challenge the patriarchal order’. The ending of Basic Instinct sends the message
that ‘this is what happens to men who are stupid and sexist’.
In Basic Instinct, the viewer is prepared to get the typical Hollywood closure,
whereby the male detective hero outwits the baddie, eliminates the criminal
and gets the girl as his prize. The typical Hollywood ending sees the patriarchal
order restored. But this ending (and this male dominated narrative) is subverted
by Catherine’s (female dominant) narrative (‘Shooter’) which is not going to have
a Hollywood ending. Instead we have the twist ending, where we see that the
traditional ending is a male fantasy – and Nick’s undoing.
The closure of Basic Instinct is therefore deeply disturbing to the male viewer. While
Nick Curran is portrayed as a public hero (as he would like to see himself) his self-
image is shown to us (through omniscient narration) to be gravely mistaken. This
allows us to read this film as a satirical (or even scathing) critique of Hollywood’s
male narcissism and the male voyeurism that is part and parcel of being a cinema
spectator (pace Mulvey). This is emphasised by the way that Nick tries to make up
his own ending to Catherine’s story. He wants the typical Hollywood closure, and we
are led, momentarily, to think that he is going to get it. Nick and Catherine are in his

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bed. He tells her that he has an ending for her book. ‘How does it end?’ Catherine
asks him. He responds, ‘they screw like minks, raise rug rats, and live happily ever
after.’ Nick believes that he has finally made his difficult sexual conquest – that
now Tramell wants him, and will let him control the narrative, as has been his past
experience with women. His ending is literally an attempt to incorporate her into his
male fantasies of omnipotence, and to domesticate her. But her response to this is
‘I hate rug rats’ and to turn her back on him in bed (a reversal of his refusal to look
at Beth when she was smitten), where he lies looking particularly self-satisfied and
smug. At this point the narration changes from restricted to omniscient so that we
are given a privileged view beneath the bed and made privy to narrative information
that Nick lacks. For the first time, we know more about his suspect than he does.
When the camera cranes down and we see the ice pick beneath the bed, we know
that Catherine is the murderer, and that she has the final decision in how the story
will end. This ending confounds the expectations of the phallocentric viewer.
We (male and female spectators alike) are accustomed to seeing male fantasies of
omnipotence played out on celluloid. This ending refuses the usual male pleasures
of the standard Hollywood closure, i.e. heroic male restoring the equilibrium
through the violent death of the villain, then consummating his love with the female
victim/heroine whom he has either rescued or seduced.
In the final act, after Beth has been killed and (wrongly) identified by police as
the ice-pick killer, a senior officer says, ‘You just can’t tell about people, can you?
(turning to Nick) … even the ones you think you know inside and out.’ This is, of
course, a reference to the fact that Nick has ‘known’ Beth in the most intimate way,
and yet failed to recognise anything sinister in her. Once again, the knowledge-
power of the male sexual conquest is thrown into doubt. This is reminiscent of
Catherine’s earlier remark to Nick, ‘Just because I have an orgasm doesn’t mean
I’m going to reveal all of my inner secrets.’ Sex was, up until this point in his life,
Nick’s failsafe assurance of knowledge, of penetrating a woman’s deepest secrets,
and thus having power over her.
Basic Instinct interrogates the psyche of the macho homophobe. It explores
the horror of homosexuality, deconstructing the phobia and revealing it to be a
projection of inner insecurities about heterosexual male power. Homophobia is
virtually equated with the fear of equality. I would argue that Basic Instinct is not
homophobic, but it is about homophobia and the kinds of internal contradictions
that male machismo conceals. Nick is a deeply flawed character and fails in
his detective mission to capture the femme fatale and bring her to justice. The
most natural reading of Basic Instinct is to see the hero’s failure as a comment
on his over-inflated male ego. Nick fails because he is too confident, and has no
authentic personal claim to the power he wields. His sexist underestimation of
female knowledge-power is sent up for ridicule, or horror, depending on the viewer
identification.

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If anything, Basic Instinct pokes fun at heterosexual males, who are portrayed as
slow, utterly simple, easily manipulated, generally selfish, yet deluded and cocky
despite these flaws. Dare I say that this is a much more realistic, and feminist,
representation of masculinity than the typical Hollywood fare, which almost
invariably portrays men either as charming and ‘cute’ or invincible and heroic. To be
fair, however, this film was written and directed by men, which just shows that men
sometimes make better feminists than women, and can be the best critics of their
own social constructions and myths.
That Basic Instinct’s box office success depended almost entirely on a ‘crotch shot’
(and the reactionary scandal of it) only confirms the film’s message – that men are
so blinded by their appetite for pornographic voyeurism that they rush out to pay for
it, failing to recognise that they’ve been had. In this case, men paid to see a film that
deconstructs their sexist myths and exposes their voyeuristic lust for narcissistic
power. And the fact that the so-called ‘pussy shot’ worked as bait for the male
viewer just proves all the more that heterosexual male voyeurs are not as clever as
they imagine. The real scandal of Basic Instinct for censors and critics like Medved
and Cardinal Mahoney was arguably not Stone’s infamous crotch shot, but the fact
that this film portrays male sexism (‘family values’ and all) in such a brutally honest
light.

Paul Verhoeven and Elle (2016)

At first glance, Elle (2016) might seem a far cry from a feminist treatise. Throughout
his career, Paul Verhoeven has consistently represented empowered female
characters in films such as such as Showgirls, The 4th Man, and Black Book, to
name just a few. Elle (Fig. 5.10) is no exception. Verhoeven’s most recent release is
about how resilient, smart, capable and sexually powerful women are nevertheless
disempowered and participate (unwittingly) in their own subjugation.
Verhoeven is not out to diminish women with his film, but rather to dissect and
analyse cultural female disempowerment and why feminism fails. This is not a
patriarchal film but a film about patriarchy, its detrimental consequences and why
it persists. Feminists can learn a lot from Verhoeven’s film if they will look past first
impressions and read the subtext.
Elle is ostensibly about a psychologically damaged woman, Michèle (Isabelle
Huppert) who, together with her business partner Anna, runs a successful video
games company. Through childhood trauma inflicted by her murderous father,
Michèle has internalised a monstrous image of herself constructed by the news
media. So implicated has she become in her patriarch’s guilt, and so thoroughly
complicit in her culture’s transference of his crimes to herself, that she can no
longer escape the vicious cycle of sadomasochism. She is sadistic towards the

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Fig. 5.10
other women who share in her degradation, yet also thoroughly masochistic in her
self-loathing.
Since childhood, Michèle has been a passive receptacle of, first, her father’s
commands, and later, public shame (for obeying them). Despite having done
nothing blameworthy (she was a child at the time of his crimes, and unaware of
what her actions meant), Michèle’s despicable self-image, once appropriated,
so thoroughly colours her self-conception that alternatives to it become literally
inconceivable for her. As her surname – Leblanc – suggests, Michèle is a blank
slate written upon by others, including her society’s invasive tabloid press, with no
innate core of her own.
All of Michèle’s male and female relationships are thoroughly tainted by her dual
addiction to misogyny and self-destruction. She is having an affair with her best
friend and colleague Anna’s utterly narcissistic husband, Robert. She lusts after
her own rapist and lets him dominate and abuse her body while being unfaithful to
his own wife. She indulges her feckless, financially dependent son, and treats his
girlfriend derisively. She employs a virtually all-male team of jealous and resentful
(even perversely misogynistic) employees who design sexist scenarios in the games
they produce for her company while also harbouring perverse sexually violent
fantasies about her. She has a seemingly close friendship with her ex-husband,
Richard, but he has apparently ditched her for the excitement of younger female
lovers. Meanwhile, she herself is also responsible for the creation of ever more
sexually violent, misogynistic content through her job in the gaming industry.
Because she despises herself, Michèle cannot escape the cycle of being both a
producer and an object of misogyny. We see female models at the games company
being manipulated and photographed like dolls by male game designers, but we
also see Michèle pushing her team to brainstorm ever more perversely violent
misogynistic scenarios.

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The intra-female disrespect (a seemingly inevitable divide-and-conquer leitmotif in
patriarchy’s cultural dominance) that leads Michèle to sleep with Anna’s husband,
drives these two businesswomen apart, making potentially powerful allies compete
against one another for the apparent ‘privilege’ of being used and exploited by the
same man (Robert).
Michèle also has contempt for her elderly mother, whose self-esteem is so
completely defined by her stereotypically sexist ‘attractiveness’ to men that she
undergoes all manner of facial surgery and bust-enlargement to appear middle
aged. She succeeds in attracting a younger lover to whom she bequeaths her
apartment (thus disinheriting her own daughter) after he exploits her desperation
by marrying her in the twilight of her life with an eye to becoming her heir.
Elle shows how women, due to their internalised normalisation of female
degradation and self-loathing, have accepted their own abuse at such a deep level
that resistance is literally futile. After a stranger breaks into her home and sexually
violates her, Michèle appears neither surprised by this event, nor hysterical.
Verhoeven does not present a stereotypical damsel in distress nor a feminine
weakling who calls on a man for help. Quite the opposite; Michèle is not sufficiently
emotionally detached from female sexual abuse to react in horror. This is her
normal. Women’s debasement is, after all, the stuff that she has made a living from
producing, in concert with an almost all-male team of ‘creatives’ who get paid for
feeding the consumer demand for misogynistic content.
Verhoeven’s film subtly suggests that it is also our normal. Michèle is ‘Elle’ (Her):
a metaphor for women in general and the impossibility of feminism in a world
that from birth indoctrinates us all – men and women alike – with misogyny. As
the film’s third-person title suggests, women are estranged from themselves (like
Michèle), because they grow up in a world saturated with images of themselves
(women) constructed by men. As such, they learn to see themselves as ‘the other’,
the way men do. They internalise a self-image as marginal ‘others’. This situation
infects women with self-objectification: so that they become psychologically
detached from themselves: they are ‘her’ (elle), not ‘I’ or ‘me’. They cannot and do
not identify with one another because they do not identify with themselves; their
very ‘selfhood’ is mediated by the patriarchy.
The way Verhoeven represents the key women in the film does not suggest that
they are fragile pushovers, but rather jaded agents who know the advantages in
going along with the patriarchy as clearly as the disadvantages in resisting it. They
are desensitised to themselves, because they have learned to see themselves
from a male perspective, and yet Verhoeven is careful not to present them from a
stereotypically voyeuristic ‘male’ perspective of his own.
As in his other films, and unlike standard Hollywood fodder, Verhoeven presents
strong female protagonists (subjects, not objects) who have goals and interests

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other than marriage and/or motherhood. His female characters are sexual agents
and seek satisfaction of their own sexual desires. They are not merely eye candy
for the male gaze, present only to feed male characters’ sexual appetites. In a
particularly unconventional reversal of male voyeurism, Verhoeven shows Michèle
spying on Patrick with a pair of binoculars while masturbating (Fig. 5.11). She wants
him and she pursues him, aggressively. Through the use of an eyeline match, the
audience is positioned with Michèle’s point of view and, because she is sexualising
Patrick, the audience also sees him as a sex object.

Fig. 5.11
At the same time, because Verhoeven wants to examine patriarchy and how it
infects the female psyche, Elle represents women as both objects and producers
of male misogynistic fantasies. Male misogyny is first internalised and then
reproduced by females, and this is the film’s whole point – women are deeply
complicit in their own (and other women’s) oppression because they cannot even
imagine things (or themselves) any other way. Michèle is just a very specific and
extreme example of a situation that impacts all women (and men). In the patriarchal
culture of which the gaming industry serves as a key example, men learn to hate
women and women unconsciously learn to hate themselves and other women.
Verhoeven is also an expert in Christian theology, so perhaps it is not surprising
that Elle also subtly implicates Catholicism’s historical role in nurturing patriarchy.
Patrick’s wife, a devout Catholic, is permissive towards his ‘problem’. Her
awareness of Patrick’s dirty little vice (infidelity and/or rape), and her nonchalance
about it, expose her own self-loathing and hypocrisy, and perhaps serve as an
oblique reference to the Catholic Church’s notorious permissiveness vis-à-vis child
sexual abuse.
Verhoeven’s film suggests that female self-loathing is not the fault of women, but
a legacy of social patriarchy. All of the men who have some kind of sexual desire
for Michèle are depicted as deeply infected by patriarchal misogyny, whether it is
Robert using Michèle as a mirror for his own narcissistic self-adoration, employee

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Kevin harbouring secret violent sexual fantasies about humiliating her, or rapist
Patrick, who is literally incapable of sexual arousal except when inflicting sadistic
violence or humiliation.
Michèle hopes finally to confront the man (her father) who bequeathed to her
this miserable state of affairs, but it is too late. He is already dead, the damage
already done. Just when Michèle has finally found the strength to confront him,
her father commits suicide, robbing her of the one thing that might have healed
her psychological sickness. Verhoeven’s film suggests that the ultimate sting
of patriarchy is that the men who set up this situation in the past are no longer
present or accountable. Yet their enduring legacy cannot be undone.
In patriarchal culture, female self-love comes at a cost because women and men
are both born into a sexist culture that encourages male dominance and female
submission, so it would seem that fulfilling her own sexual desires inevitably
entails masochism because relationships with men are relationships for and about
men and their desires. When Michèle at last learns the identity of her rapist and
confronts him with the simple question ‘Why?’, he responds ‘It is necessary’. This
might seem cryptically simplistic, but this concise answer brings a key issue into
sharp focus. The natural necessity of sexism has indeed been the recurring trope
through which propagandists of patriarchy have historically rationalised male
superiority. A theory of biological determinism explains why patriarchy is not a
political issue but biological necessity.
Sociobiologists like E.O. Wilson insist that patriarchy persists because genes
anchor culture. Freud rooted patriarchal culture in the penis and vagina (mostly
the penis). Christian traditionalists attached patriarchal social arrangements to
reproductive functions as given in ‘Creation’, defining women’s social roles as
mother and wife accordingly. The story of Eve’s transgression and punishment by
God further reinforces females’ subservient relationships to their husbands.
It was only when existentialists gave the lie to this myth after the Second World War
that significant progress was made towards gender equality. Feminists like Simone
de Beauvoir distinguished what’s between your legs (sex) from what’s between your
ears (gender). You were born with the former. The latter you were taught. What was
put between your ears got there by means of patriarchal cultural indoctrination.
When women have tried to work their way into roles or positions that were the
preserve of men, propagandists of patriarchy have always resorted to ‘nature’ to
reinforce the patriarchal system. This tactic works because the cultural landscape
is so saturated with sexist stereotypes that they do seem almost ‘natural’.
The only optimism Verhoeven’s film offers is that women will eventually be so
battered down by their wretched circumstances that they will find solace in one
another, as friends, equals, and possibly lovers. The film’s ending suggests that
the two female business partners, Michèle and Anna, may end up together in a

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romantic partnership. They’ve previously had one pass at becoming lesbian lovers
and briefly discuss resuming it.
Like his other feminist movies, Verhoeven’s latest film deserves more appreciation
from male and female feminists for its deep and complex treatment of how both
media and religious culture impact all of us.

Spike Lee: She Hate Me (2004) and BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Director Spike Lee has been a rather frequent target for the ‘sexist’ label. Looking
across the films in Lee’s body of work, however, a case can be made that the
opposite is true. Lee first achieved recognition as a director with his independent hit
She’s Gotta Have It (1986). The story is about Nola Darling, a free-spirited Brooklyn
graphic designer, who is pursued by three possessive male lovers. The film is
arguably a comical attempt to address the issue of women’s sexual and political
autonomy in an American culture that has traditionally frowned upon female sexual
agency, viewing it as a threat or a vice. Nola Darling is a liberated 80s woman,
unashamed of wanting sex, and equally unashamed of being unattached to a single
male partner in order to ‘have it’. At the end of the film she says: ‘It’s about control.
My body – who’s going to own it . . . them or me?’
Lee revisited his feminist themes in 1996 with Girl 6, a comedy flop that was almost
universally panned by the critics. Girl 6 stars Theresa Randle as a struggling actor
who winds up taking employment in a phone sex call centre but ends up enjoying
her job a little too much for her own good. The script, penned by Suzan-Lori Parks,
depicts the phone sex business as leading to the heroine’s victimisation by a
sinister misogynist. It also suggests that women internalise male ways of seeing
themselves, both sexually and racially. The heroine wears a blonde wig because
the call centre boss tells the ladies that this is the clients’ ideal fantasy. Despite
the unpopularity of Girl 6 (Lee’s least successful film), it represents a sincere
attempt by the director to treat female social disempowerment and its causes.
In general, Lee’s treatment of sensitive social or political issues has been overly
didactic. He is often accused, but especially in the case of Girl 6, of attempting
to conjure a gravity that is unconvincing. In one scene the protagonist goes to an
audition and is pressured into baring her chest for a cocky film director (played by
Quentin Tarantino). But the critics were swift to point out that Lee himself didn’t
shrink from showing his viewers her breasts in the same scene. Other critics,
such as Roger Ebert, found the premise itself too phallocentric – that a phone sex
girl would become addicted to her job (as opposed to the power over men or the
money) seems like wishful thinking from a male perspective. But it seems to me
Lee is grappling with the very thing that has made sexism so difficult to overcome
in Western culture – women get off on it as much as men do, despite the fact that
it keeps women disempowered. Laura Miller, writing for Salon.com, says, ‘Lee has

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always been most at home in the foggy realm of gender politics, and his treatment
of sex – a topic that seems to bring out the preacher in almost everyone – benefits,
refreshingly, from his suspension of judgment and his genuine sympathy for
women.’ In both She’s Gotta Have It and Girl 6, Lee presents his viewers with female
protagonists who relate to sex in ways conventionally reserved for men, neither
punishing nor condemning them for it.
She Hate Me (2004) tells the story of Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie), an executive
in a pharmaceutical firm who decides to blow the whistle when he realises that
his colleagues are involved in an illegal cover-up. He is fired and then blackmailed
by the company, whose powerful connections extend all the way to Washington.
The plot is inspired by the real-life story of Frank Wells, the security guard who
discovered the break in at the Watergate hotel and later died an obscure and poor
man, seemingly forgotten by the history books.
When Jack finds that his assets have been frozen, his ex-fiancée Fatima (now a
lesbian) returns to his life to solve the cash flow problem. She and her business
partner/lover Alex (Diana Ramirz) both want to have babies and Fatima callously
decides that Jack is the perfect sperm donor. The entrepreneurial Fatima arranges
to provide Jack with a constant stream of lesbian ‘clients’ who want to get pregnant
the old fashioned way. Jack’s piece of the action is $10,000 per client. Critics were
almost unanimous in describing this part of the story as an unrealistic ‘male
fantasy’. Sarah Warn of AfterEllen.com described the film as a ‘frustrating fantasy’
made for straight males who like to think lesbians secretly enjoy, or at least don’t
mind, sleeping with men. Her criticisms included:
• Confusing bisexual women with lesbians.
• Reinforcing the idea that lesbians want to sleep with men.
• Bringing to the big screen the lesbian motherhood story that has been
played to death on television.
Warn admits that the representation of lesbians in the film isn’t all bad. Lee does
give us lesbian characters that are complex, attractive and sympathetic. The
director even hired a ‘female sexuality expert’. He also held test screenings for
lesbian audiences. Despite his attempts to get the image of lesbians and women
right, reviewers were generally not convinced. The following is a comment from the
Hollywood Reporter:
Hard to imagine anything more tasteless or tacky than these scenes of
supposedly gay women screaming in erotic ecstasy while having sex with a
well-endowed stud. But there are other problems with this male fantasy. It may
be news to Lee and Genet, but the preferred method of achieving motherhood
by most gay women is artificial insemination. Furthermore, multiple sessions
of sexual intercourse by a single male, assuming the man can even achieve

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arousal that many times, would virtually ensure that his sperm count would be
too low to accomplish the desired results for most of the women. Finally, what
woman would want to be last in line for a male who has just had a dozen bouts of
unprotected sex? (in Warn 2004)
Andrew Billen, writing in the Times (14 June 2005) called the film ‘incredibly
misjudged’ and noted that the film’s representation of the seemingly endless sexual
stamina of the black male stud was also playing on the stereotype of the hyper-
sexual black male.
However true these criticisms of Lee’s story may be, in his defence we might note
that Lee’s characters do not necessarily represent the way Lee himself feels. To
represent sexists is not necessarily to be a sexist oneself. To represent racists is
not necessarily to be racist oneself, anymore than one has to be fat to represent
fat people. When analysing a film’s messages and values it is crucial to distinguish
between depicting sexism and promoting it. A film about sexism, or containing
sexist characters, is not necessarily a sexist film. We need to attend to the way in
which certain ‘types’ are represented within the story as a whole. In his depiction of
lesbian sex, Lee breaks the taboo with refreshingly authentic sex scenes, in which
lesbian sex is depicted with raw power and realism rather than ‘tender’ or effete
romanticism. His characters are complex, neither wholly innocent nor simplistically
vicious.
She Hate Me may be flawed, but there is a scene in the film which did not receive
the critical attention it deserved as a groundbreaking contribution to feminist film
studies. The scene I am referring to comes in the second half of the story, when
Jack is being ‘sold’ as a sperm donor to a group of prospective lesbian ‘clients’.
Fatima is presenting the terms of the business transaction and the product (Jack)
to the group. This is especially degrading for Jack as he is the only man and the
women have clearly reduced him to a mere physical object, a means to their end.
This is apparent in the way that they ask Fatima questions about Jack in third
person, as though he were not there. As the women begin to write their checks,
one of them hesitates, demanding her right to inspect the ‘goods’ before paying
$10,000.00. When Jack begins to protest one woman says, ‘Just strip, bitch.’ This is
clearly intended to reclaim the derogatory epithet ‘bitch’ typical of sexist American
black male culture. The term is re-claimed and re-deployed in a reversal of its
usual context. After a few protestations, Jack begins to slowly strip in front of the
assembled women (see Fig. 5.12). Jack is still our protagonist, and our sympathies
are aligned with him, but in this scene viewers are positioned to see Jack through
the lenses of a female gaze.
This reversal of the male gaze is truly pioneering, for not only are the shots
constructed for female voyeuristic pleasure, but the diegetic gaze also aligns
viewers with the female characters who fetishise and eroticise Jack’s body. Here the

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Fig. 5.12
camera moves away from the male protagonist to the female voyeur within the
narrative, much as Hitchcock’s camera in Psycho left Marion and gave us Norman’s
point of view on her while she undressed. Throughout the sequence, several close-
ups allow us to see Jack’s emotions. He appears either uncomfortable, or angry,
or both. As he begins to strip, we get a long shot of Jack’s entire body, facing the
camera. What is interesting about this shot is the way Jack is clearly on display,
for both the women in the film and for the cinematic audience. We are positioned
behind a row of women who look on as Jack strips, and we can also see women on
the sides of the frame, looking on with us as we watch Jack. The composition of this
shot, showing the backs of the female spectators’ heads, mirrors the ‘cinematic
position’ we’re in.
Lee gives us several reaction shots of the women’s faces as they gaze on Jack. We
then cut to a rear view of Jack, shirt off, with female spectators looking on in the
background. This time the row of female spectators face the camera, and Jack. One
woman then says, ‘Can you drop your drawers, please?’ Jack does so, but covers his
genitals with his hands. Another woman shouts, ‘C’mon nigga! Show us your tube
steak, your man stick!’ The shot cuts to a close-up on Jack’s face, reacting to this
humiliation. As he uncovers his privates, a woman says ‘sold’. Another says, ‘Can
you rotate slowly so that everyone can get a good look?’ Audiences are accustomed
to this kind of scene, except that the character on display is usually female (as in
Blonde Venus and Girl 6). Male audiences may find it shocking and disconcerting to
see the male protagonist positioned as a sex object in such a degrading manner. As
the protagonist, Jack, has been offered to audiences for narcissistic identification,
they may find that this scene makes them uncomfortable. Female audiences may
find it shocking that this is happening to a man, instead of a woman, as would be
expected. A female character then says to Jack (and implicitly to the male audience
who narcissistically identify with him), ‘Now you know what it feels like to be a
sexual object.’ The power of this scene is precisely that it completely inverts the
male gaze, forcing the viewer to adopt a female ‘look’ (both diegetic and extra-

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diegetic), and presents us with a male object of sight. I cannot think of any film that
has so deliberately and unambiguously interrogated the power of the male gaze.
Lee’s attempt to address this power makes him yet another male candidate for the
title ‘feminist film-maker’.
In his more recent film BlacKkKlansman (2018), Lee tells the story of Ron
Stallworth (John David Washington), a black recruit in the Colorado State Police
Department who is assigned an undercover job spying on legendary civil rights
spokesman Stokley Carmichael (a.k.a. Kwame Toure). Later, in another undercover
infiltration operation, Stallworth poses (over the telephone) as a white recruit to the
Ku Klux Klan. Along with the help of detective Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), who
assumes the persona of ‘Ron Stallworth’ for face-to-face meetings with Klansmen,
the pair infiltrate the Klan and foil a terrorist attack on black student activists.
Lee does not miss the opportunity to draw a contrast between the Black Power
movement’s treatment of women and that of the white supremacist community.
Whereas the Klan is explicitly a brotherhood that excludes women from decision-
making and relegates them to servile, domesticated positions, the Black Power
movement saw ‘sisters’ as integral to the cause and as key players with positions
of responsibility. In the film, the wife of one white Klansman is used by her husband
and his allies to do the dirty work that they do not want to do (and for which she
ends up serving prison time), while Kwame Toure declares that he needs strong,
smart black women in the movement. Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier) is both the
President of the Colorado College Black Students Union and the organiser of the
speaking engagement at which Toure delivers his message. She takes orders from
nobody. When Stallworth introduces himself to her, he says, ‘I’m a black man who
wants to get to know a strong, intelligent, beautiful black sister.’
Lee shows how the two radical groups’ respective attitudes towards women
are paralleled in the wider black and white cultures, where white males make
‘othering’ women and boasting about their sexual exploits a primary form of group
bonding. This is especially true of the culture within white, male-dominated law
enforcement, where macho police officers describe black men as sexual predators
despite themselves being disproportionately responsible for the objectification and
sexual harassment of women.
This difference in cultures is highlighted soon after Stallworth joins the Colorado
State Police Department as its first black male officer. A white colleague is leafing
through a magazine and comments on a photospread of Cybill Shepherd, asking
Ron what he ‘thinks of her’. When Ron replies respectfully, ‘I think she is a very
good actress’, the white officer’s lame attempt at using sexism as male bonding
flops. Stallworth’s non-sexualised way of seeing women is apparently totally alien
to the white cop, who replies, ‘C’mon! You know you want some ‘a that!’

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Likewise, the same crooked cop (Landers) who harasses Stallworth on the job with
low-level bullying jibes, also pulls Patrice and her friends over to harass them for
the well-known crime of ‘driving while black’. Landers exploits the opportunity to
grope Patrice under the pretext that he’s merely frisking her. The lewd behaviour
of white cops is seen in contrast to Ron, who always treats Patrice as an equal and
becomes her friend and ally, as well as her lover (Fig. 5.13).

Fig. 5.13
Moreover, since Ron refuses to adapt to the department’s misogynist culture in
order to strengthen his ‘bond’ with the white cops, he ends up being treated in
much the same way as a female colleague would be in a 1970s white male work
environment – as an inferior who has to put up and shut up if he wants to keep his
job. It is after he refuses to join in the sexist ‘banter’ that he ends up doing grunt
work and pulling files in the record room, all while taking thinly-veiled racist verbal
abuse from Landers.
From the outset, the hiring officer explains to Ron that it will not be easy in a
culture where many cops still don’t look upon black men as equals and that the
weight of that will be on Ron alone, as the senior officer (apparently) cannot fathom
the possibility of breaking ranks. When Stallworth confronts Jewish colleague Flip
about Landers’s abuses of authority, the white cop acknowledges that ‘Landers has
always been crooked’, then adds the revealing caveat, ‘We’re family, and right or
wrong we stick together’ (meaning cops). The so-called ‘blue wall of silence’ is only
questioned later on, when some of Ron’s close colleagues in the undercover unit
begin to respect his excellent police work and see past external differences to the
man’s character. Towards the end of the film, Landers and Stallworth nearly come
to blows after Landers calls the latter ‘boy’. The use of this diminutive insult to refer
to adult black men is comparable to how adult females are (still today) referred to
as ‘girls’. Nevertheless, by the end of the film, the good cops in the undercover unit
join together to exclude (and even entrap) the crooked cop. But it takes Ron’s slow,
steady and patient graft to bring his colleagues around to his way of seeing things
and to finally change the culture within the force.

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When the Klansmen go out to do some target practice with their guns, homophobic
banter is seen to be another integral part of heterosexist white male bonding.
Lee shows how male identity is fundamentally defined in opposition to women.
They do not define themselves primarily through positive personal attributes, but
as members of a gender group, the contours of which are defined in contrast to
women, who are perceived as opposite to men (in every way, not just reproductively
or biologically). In a similar vein, Flip, who is a non-practicing Jew, remarks after
hanging out with the KKK’s anti-Semites that whereas before he never even thought
about his Jewishness, now he has become obsessed with it, even fetishising its
rituals and customs. Before, he was able to ‘pass’ as just another guy, but the
Klan’s hatred has crystallised his self-image as ‘Jewish’, and made this previously
unimportant part of his identity its most definitive feature. Similarly, misogyny and
homophobia go hand-in-hand with ‘masculinity’ insofar as the latter is defined
around hatred of what it is not. Accordingly, if men do anything akin to what
women do (e.g. love other men), then they are ‘not male’. This binary construction
of gender (layered over biological sexual differences) builds up a colossal set of
mythical distinctions between men and women, or masculinity and femininity, that
is culturally circulated, learned and then ‘performed’ (see Judith Butler, Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990).
Lee’s script (co-written with Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott,
and based on the memoir by Ron Stallworth), allows yet another parallel to be
inferred between the situations of black and female minorities in the ways that both
internalise beauty myths that make them dislike their own bodies, while idealising
an image of beauty constructed and disseminated by white men but consumed and
internalised by everyone else. Kwame Toure’s speech to the Colorado College Black
Students Union about embracing ‘Black Beauty’ resonates with feminist viewers
who will discern similarities between what Toure says about black beauty and what
feminists have said about female beauty. Toure tells his audience that,
It is time for you to understand that you, as the growing intellectuals, the Black
intellectuals of this country, you must define beauty for Black people. Beauty is
defined by someone with a narrow nose, thin lips, white skin. You ain’t got none
of that. If your lips are thick, bite them in. Hold your nose! Your nose is boss, your
lips are thick, you are Black and you are beautiful! We want to be like the white
people that oppress us in this country and since they hate us, we hate ourselves.
Historically, female philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex
and Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth, have also exposed the extent to which women
internalise their own inadequacy and inferiority in relation to an ideal of ‘feminine
beauty’ that has been socially constructed by white men. De Beauvoir famously
stated that ‘a woman is not born a woman; she becomes one’, by which she
meant that women are not just born biologically female, but that they also become
‘feminine’ by learning (and internalising) the roles and conventional ‘appearance’

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that men have constructed for them. Women are expected to strive for an image of
‘beauty’ that is defined by what men desire women to be, which is quite different to
what real women are by nature. Women adapt to these all-pervasive expectations,
making themselves hairless, ornamental and modest/passive rather than animal,
virile and active. American author Naomi Wolf has expanded upon these insights,
also noting that entrenched ‘myths’ about what it means to be an ideal woman, as
well as keeping women docile and insecure, also make men rich and women poor.
Wolf explains that the beauty myth is political and social, and that money does the
work of history more efficiently than sex. Low self-esteem may have value to some
individual men but it has a financial value to all of corporate capitalist society. She
goes on to detail the whopping annual turnovers of the cosmetics, diet, plastic
surgery and porn industries, which soar into the billions. She reminds her readers
that all of these industries feed on people’s insecurities.
Lee’s juxtapositions illustrate the hypocrisy of white men who project their own
worst attitudes and behaviour patterns onto black men (who do not share them).
Lee underscores this by cross-cutting between David Duke’s Klan meeting and a
Black Students event at which Mr. Jerome Tompkins (played by civil rights legend
Harry Belafonte) tells the true story of Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old mentally
retarded black youth who in May 1916 was tried for the rape and murder of a Miss
Lucy Fryer. After an all-white jury deliberated for only four minutes, Jesse was
convicted and then brutally lynched, tortured and dismembered by a white mob.
A photographer named Gildersleeve
photographed this image of Jesse Washington’s
mutilated body. Lee’s script explains that
photos from the 1916 lynching and torture were
sold as ‘post cards’ as though it had been a
festive event (see Fig. 5.14 – source:
WikiCommons).
Lee is not content to skirt over the surface
of racism (and sexism) but digs deeper to
expose its ideological roots in religion and
pseudo-science. In the opening sequence, a
(fictional) narrator for an archaic Ku Klux Klan
public ‘service’ documentary belittles blacks
by accusing them of being ‘...determined to
overthrow the God-commanded and Biblically-
inspired rule of the white race’.
Fig. 5.14 Later, at David Duke’s all-male ritual ceremony
to initiate new recruits, the pomp and sanctimony is redolent of a Catholic mass.
The white-robed Duke incants the name of God like a priest to lend validity and

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gravitas to his claptrap, reverently reciting mantras like ‘God, give us true white
men’. Stallworth, over the phone to Duke, mockingly repeats the Klan’s quasi-
religious motto: ‘God Bless White America.’ Spike Lee doesn’t miss a teaching
moment and this is an important one, since Christianity and its traditions have
played a key legitimating role in keeping both black people and women in their
places. The Bible contains passages that have been used to justify slavery (St. Paul’s
letter to the Ephesians 6:5-7), the exclusion and subordination of women (St. Paul’s
letter to the Colossians 3:18) as well as the murder of homosexuals (St. Paul’s letter
to the Romans 1:32).
In the same vein, Lee’s film lays bare the historical role played by male pseudo-
science (especially essentialist theories) in ‘explaining’ why blacks and women are
‘naturally’ inferior, when he has top Klansman David Duke quote American physicist
William Shockley’s (1910-1989) genetic essentialism:
My brothers in Christ, Nobel Prize recipient and co-creator of the transistor and
my dear friend, William Shockley, whose scientific work ushered in the Computer
Age, has proven through his research with eugenics that each of us have flowing
through our veins the genes of a superior race. Today, we celebrate that truth.
In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, likewise
found a ‘science’ to confirm the contemporaneous social thinking, rendering
colonisation, the class system and the subservience of women a scientific necessity.
Galton was of the opinion that ‘women tend in all their capacities to be inferior
to men’ (see ‘Eugenics and Feminism: a Brief History’ at Dangerous Women.
org, 28 February, 2017, accessed online at: https://dangerouswomenproject.
org/2017/02/28/eugenics-and-feminism/).
By including these unpleasant realities in his film, Lee unravels the ways in which
both religious and scientific institutional authority have been put into the service of
racial and patriarchal politics. BlacKkKlansman cements Spike Lee’s reputation
as a director who has consistently championed both anti-racist politics and female
empowerment throughout his career.
The above case studies show that male directors can represent gender in
challenging ways that transgress the boundaries of conventional gender
constructions that have dominated Hollywood cinema in the twentieth century. This
suggests that there is not an intrinsically ‘male’ or ‘female’ way of seeing. Men may
simply have more invested in conventional representations of gender than women
do. Perhaps they also have more to lose when gender stereotypes are challenged
or exposed as fictions. However, if this is the case, then perhaps men deserve even
more praise than women for daring to question them.

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Chapter Summary
• This chapter challenges critics readings of films as ‘sexist’ with two
illustrative examples. One possible reason for false accusations of ‘sexism’
is a failure to distinguish between treating/depicting an issue (e.g. sexism)
and promoting it.
• Case study 1. Basic Instinct and Elle.
Basic Instinct was widely regarded as misogynistic and ‘lesbophobic’.
Liberal critics and queer activists protested the film before and upon
release. Basic Instinct is a neo-noir film that scandalously refuses to
conform to the patriarchal rule of ‘compensating moral values’. Moreover,
its visual pleasures are deliberately constructed against the grain of male
voyeuristic pleasures and offer women (especially lesbian women) a rare
opportunity to dissect and ridicule male sexism, homophobia and voyeuristic
power.
• The film’s plot centres around the power of knowledge. The femme fatale
(Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct is threatening because of what she knows
about men, and especially about the male detective (Michael Douglas).
Viewers identify with the detective hero, but conventional narcissistic
pleasures are frustrated when the femme fatale codes as ‘male’, throwing
the detective’s (and by extension, the viewer’s) heterosexuality into doubt.
• While the conventional film noir sends the message that bad things happen
to women who are disloyal to the patriarchal order, Basic Instinct sends
the message that bad things happen to men who are sexist. Through
its narrative closure, Basic Instinct defies expectations, and inverts the
conventions of the genre. Instead of the male lead outwitting the femme
fatale, eliminating crime, getting the girl as his prize and restoring the
patriarchal order by means of his prowess, Basic Instinct’s closure implies
that such an ending is a fantasy of sexist and deluded men.
• Basic Instinct interrogates the psyche of the macho homophobe.
• Elle is a much more subtle and complex critique of how women’s self-
image is ‘mediated’ by patriarchal culture, and the film makes explicit
or oblique references to tabloid journalism, the gaming industry, and
religion in the construction of a total culture that presents women as
‘others’ not only to men but also to themselves. In this way Verhoeven is
able to implicate women in the production and perpetuation of the same
gendered stereotypes, roles and self-destructive behaviours that keep them
oppressed.

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• Case study 2. She’s Gotta Have It, Girl 6, She Hate Me and BlacKkKlansman.
Spike Lee has been a frequent target for the ‘sexist’ label. Here it is
argued that this is unfair, given Lee’s relatively frequent attempts to make
films about female sexual empowerment (or the causes of female sexual
disempowerment). These three examples suggest that Lee has in various
ways attempted to represent females as empowered sexual agents, and to
address social double standards erected by men to possess women through
the possession of their bodies.

References
1. Fourteen years on, Basic Instinct 2 (2006) appeared, to public indifference and a largely dismissive
press. Michael Caton-Jones directed a script by Leora Barish and Henry Bean. The plot follows
Catherine Tramell (Stone) to Scotland, where she is placed under the scrutiny of Scotland Yard-
appointed psychiatrist Dr Andrew Glass (David Morrissey).

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Exam Practice Questions
In answering these questions, students should refer in detail to appropriate films
and film extracts that they have studied during the course.
1. MGM tycoon Louis B. Mayer famously said: ‘Movies are for entertainment. If you
want to send a message, send a telegram.’ To what extent do you agree with this
statement?
2. What do you consider to be some of the limitations in the argument that cinema
is dominated by the ‘male gaze’?
3. Discuss two case studies in which a critical approach based on the way women
are represented has made you see those films differently.
4. How do men and women usually function within a film? What, if anything, can
this tell us about the wider social/institutional power exerted through gender
representation?
5. Feminists assert that women in narrative cinema are traditionally there as visual
distraction for the satisfaction of the ‘male gaze’. Is this true of the films you’ve
studied?
6. ‘Most of the big-grossing films are full of special effects, they are big budget
blockbusters and for some reason women are not considered suitable for this.’
Would you agree that some genres are perceived to be ‘masculine’ and others
‘feminine’?
7. ‘It will surprise nobody that Ms. Bigelow once posed for a GAP ad. She holds her
body regally, and her manner is self-possessed. No angst furrows her brow. There
are no fluttering hands. “She’s bigger than life,” says Angela Basset, another star of
Strange Days. And yet one gets the sense that the stately Ms. Bigelow (she stands
an inch under 6 feet) is taking refuge in the cerebral.’ (Jamie Diamond, New York
Times, 1995)
With reference to this comment, discuss either the representation of women, the
representation of men, or both, to explore how your critical studies have opened
up new insights into gender and the visual media.
8. ‘Cinema essentially constructs the audience as male voyeur.’ To what extent do
you believe this statement to be true? Make reference to specific case studies in
developing your answer.
9. Linda Williams (1984) demonstrated how many films do recognise the female’s
power and depict them making use of it, only to then punish them for doing so. With
reference to specific case studies, explain to what extent you believe this to be true.
10. ‘Whether or not a film presents a “realistic” portrait of women is irrelevant,
since people know that movies are just fiction.’ Discuss.

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Bibliography
Avni, S. (2001) ‘Ten Hollywood Films that Get Women Right’, August 12, http://www.
alternet.org/story/24026
Billen, A. (2005) ‘Racist? Sexist? Nah, just tryin’ to do the right thing’, in The Times
(London), 14 June.
Buckland, W. (1998) Teach Yourself Film Studies. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Butler, A.M. (2002) The Pocket Essential Film Studies. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books.
Clover, C.J. (1993) Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.
New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Digby, T. (1998) ‘Do Feminists Hate Men? Feminism, Antifeminism, and Gender
Oppositionality’, in Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol XXIX, issue 2.
Doane, M.A. and Mellencamp, P. (eds) (1984) Revision: Essays in Feminist Film
Criticism, American Film Institute Monograph series. Frederick, Maryland:
University Publications of America.
Ebert, R. (2004) ‘She Hate Me’ review, Aug. 6, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/
pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040806/REVIEWS/408060304/1023
Gilligan, S. (2003) Teaching Women and Film, Teaching Film and Media Studies
series. London: BFI Education.
Hundley, J. (2000) ‘Where the Boys Are’, Salon.com, March 22, http://archive.salon.
com/people/feature/2000/03/22/directors/index.html
Jacobs, L. (1988) ‘The Censorship of the Blonde Venus’, Cinema Journal 27, Spring
1988.
Jacobs, L. (1991) The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film 1928-
1942. Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press.
Jeffries, S. (2002) ‘I like to be strong’ in The Guardian, October 21.
Johnston, C. (1980) ‘The Subject of Feminist Film Theory/Practice’, Screen, Vol. 21,
issue 2.
Miller, L. (n.d.) ‘Spike Just Ought to Have Fun’, Salon.com, www.salon.com/10/
reviews/spike.html
Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, Vol 16, issue 3.
Mulvey, L. (1989) ‘Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Visual
and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nelmes, J. (1999) An Introduction to Film Studies, Second Edition. London:
Routledge.

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Rigg, J. (2001) ‘Vendredi Soir; Sex is Comedy; 11/9/01; Reno; The Quiet American:
Toronto Film Festival Report’, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/
s694812.htm
Riscaroli, L. (1997) ‘Strange Visions’ presented at the VI Annual Conference on
Cross-Currents in Literature and Film: ‘Metafictions’, School of Language and
Literature, University College, Cork.
Taylor, C. (2000) Beau Travail review, Salon.com, 31 March, http://archive.salon.
com/ent/movies/review/2000/03/31/beau_travail/index.html
Turner, G. (1993) Film as Social Practice, Second Edition. London and New York:
Routledge.
Vorndam, J (2000) Beau Travail review, AboutFilm.com, May, http://www.aboutfilm.
com/ movies/b/beautravail.htm
Warn, S. (2004) ‘She Hate Me a Frustrating Fantasy’, AfterEllen.com, July, http://
www.afterellen.com
Zacharek, S. (2000) The Virgin Suicides review, Salon.com, April 20, http://dir.salon.
com/story/ent/movies/review/2000/04/21/suicides/
Sova, D.B. (2001) Forbidden Films: Censorship Histories of 125 Motion Pictures.
New York: Checkmark Books.

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Index
Arnold, Andrea........................................................................................................39–43
Basic Instinct (1992)......................................................................... 57, 62, 97–116, 130
Beau Travail (1999)........................................................................................... 83–88, 94
Bechdel Test, The....................................................................................... 10, 88, 89–90
Berger, John............................................................ 7, 19–22, 24, 26–28, 31–32, 34, 113
Bigelow, Kathryn...................................................................................... 69–77, 94, 132
BlacKkKlansman (2018)..................................................................... 121, 125–129, 131
Blonde Venus (1932).................................................... 32–35, 43, 48–50, 64–65, 75, 124
Buckland, Warren............................................................................................. 25, 46, 48
Butler, Andrew.......................................................................................... 17, 37–39, 127
Campion, Jane................................................................................. 69, 78–84, 85, 86,94
censorship..............................................................................................................45–68
connotation.............................................................................................................13, 27
Denis, Claire..................................................................................................... 69, 84–88
denotation...............................................................................................................13, 27
Dietrich, Marlene.............................................................................................. 33, 43, 85
discourse (analysis).......................................................................................... 12, 15, 26
Digby, Tom.............................................................................................................14, 18,
Double Indemnity (1944).........................................................................................53–55
Elle (2016)................................................................................................... 116–121, 130
female gaze.................................................................................................. 88, 111, 113
film noir....................................................................... 15, 32, 51–57, 62, 65, 97–99, 130
Fish Tank (2009)................................................................................................ 41–42, 44
Foucault, Michel............................................................................................... 12, 26, 99
Gilligan, Sarah........................................................................................................16, 19
Girl 6 (1996)......................................................................................... 121–122, 124, 131
Girlhood (2014)................................................................................................. 88–94, 94
Gramsci, Antonio....................................................................................................13, 26
Halloween (1978)..........................................................................................................38
Hays (Production) Code, The.....................................................47–48, 58, 62, 65–68, 98
hegemony...............................................................................................................13, 26
Hitchcock, Alfred...................................................................................................35, 43,
ideology........................................................................ 7, 11, 15, 45–48, 64, 94, 113–114

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Last Seduction, The (1994)......................................................................... 57–62, 65, 98
Lawrence, Jennifer.................................................................................................11, 18
Lee, Spike........................................................................................................... 121–131
Lévi-Strauss, Claude..............................................................................................45, 64
male gaze.......................... 25–26, 31–44, 69, 81, 84, 87, 93–95, 106, 119, 123–125, 132
Mildred Pierce (1945).................................................................................. 55–57, 65, 98
Mulvey, Laura.............................................7, 19, 23–26, 28, 31–32, 34–35, 43, 113, 115
patriarchy.....................................................................................19, 45–68, 80, 117–120
Piano, The (1993).............................................................................................. 78–84, 94
Psycho (1960).....................................................................25, 35–37, 43–44, 48, 64, 124
Rear Window (1954).................................................................................. 35, 43, 77, 103
Red Road (2006)......................................................................................................39–44
representation.................... 7, 12, 14, 25–26, 31, 33, 47, 79, 81, 114, 116, 122–123, 132
Sciamma, Céline............................................................................................. 69, 88–94,
scopophilia...........................................................................23, 28, 32, 35, 43, 71, 77, 86
She Hate Me (2004).................................................................................... 121–125, 131
She’s Gotta Have It (1986).......................................................................... 121–122, 131
stereotype(s)................. 8, 16–18, 27, 58, 76, 78, 85, 93, 95, 97, 102, 120, 123, 129–130
Strange Days (1995)........................................................................... 70–78, 81, 94, 132
Thelma & Louise (1991)........................................................................... 25, 62–65, 114
Todorov, Tzvetan.....................................................................................................46, 64
Turner, Graeme................................................................................................ 18, 25, 31
Verhoeven, Paul.............................................................................97, 114, 116–119, 130
Vertigo (1958).................................................................................................... 35, 43, 77
voyeurism................................................................. 23–24, 28, 32, 35, 43, 61, 71, 73, 77,
82–83, 94, 98, 102–103, 107, 115–116
‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’...............................................................23, 28
Ways of Seeing........................................................................................................19, 27
Williams, Linda.....................................................................................................25, 132

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