Women & Film

E. Ann Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134972401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

"Written with unequivocal enthusiasm for film, feminism and theory, "Women and Film" is a welcome and useful guide to a complex area."--"The Arts"

PART I

The classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema

1 Is the gaze male?

Since the beginning of the recent women’s movement, American feminists have been exploring the representation of female sexuality in the arts – in literature, painting, film, and television.¹ As we struggle towards meaningful theory, it is important to note that feminist criticism, as a new way of reading texts, emerged from the daily, ongoing concerns of women re-evaluating the culture in which they had been socialized and educated. In this sense. feminist criticism differs in basic ways from earlier critical movements which evolved out of reaction to dominant theoretical positions (i.e. out of a reaction which took place on an intellectual level). Feminism is unusual in its combination of the theoretical and (loosely speaking) the ideological (Marxist literary theory alone shares a similar dual focus. but from very different premises).

The first wave of feminist critics adopted a broadly sociological approach, looking at sex roles women occupied in various imaginative works, from high art to mass entertainment. They assessed roles as “positive” or “negative” according to some externally constructed criteria describing the fully autonomous, independent woman. While this work was important in initiating feminist criticism (Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was a ground-breaking text), feminist film critics, influenced by developments taking place in film theory at the start of the 1970s, were the first to point out its limitations. First, influenced by semiology, feminist theorists stressed the crucial role played by the artistic form as the medium for expression; second, influenced by psychoanalysis, they argued that Oedipal processes were central to the production of art works. That is, they gave increasing attention to how meaning is produced in films, rather than to the “content,” which had preoccupied sociological critics: and they stressed the links between the processes of psychoanalysis and cinema.

Before summarizing in more detail the French theorists whose influence shaped currents in feminist film theory, let me deal briefly with the reasons for using psychoanalytic methodology in chapters 2 to 5 of this book, those devoted to the Hollywood film. Why, given many feminists’ hostile rejection of Freudian and Lacanian theory, do I see psychoanalysis as a useful tool?

First, let me make clear that I do not see psychoanalysis as necessarily uncovering essential “truths” about the human psyche which exist across historical periods and different cultures. Making trans-historical generalizations about human psychic processes is difficult since the means for verifying those generalizations barely exist. Nevertheless, the history of literature in western civilization does show a surprising recurrence of Oedipal themes. We could say that Oedipal themes occur at those historical moments when the human family is structured in specific ways that elicit Oedipal traumas; for my purposes here, since I am concerned with a recent art form, film, and the recent theory of Oedipal problems (dating back to Freud), I am prepared to make claims for the relevance of psychoanalysis only to the state of industrial social organization characteristic of the twentieth century.²

One could argue that the psychic patterns created by capitalist social and interpersonal structures (especially the late-nineteenth-century forms that carried over into our century) required at once a machine (the cinema) for their unconscious release and an analytic tool (psychoanalysis) for understanding, and adjusting, disturbances caused by the structures that confine people. To this extent, both mechanisms (film and psychoanalysis) support the status quo; but, rather than being necessarily eternal and unchanging in the forms in which we have them, they are inserted in history, linked, that is, to the particular moment of bourgeois capitalism that gave both their birth.

If this is so, it is extremely important for women to use psychoanalysis as a tool, since it will unlock the secrets of our socialization within (capitalist) patriarchy. If we agree that the commercial film (and particularly the genre of melodrama that this book focuses on) took the form it did in some way to satisfy desires and needs created by nineteenth-century familial organization (an organization that produces Oedipal traumas), then psychoanalysis becomes a crucial tool for explaining the needs, desires, and male–female positionings that are reflected in film. The signs in the Hollywood film convey the patriarchal ideology that underlies our social structures and that constructs women in very specific ways – ways that reflect patriarchal needs, the patriarchal unconscious.

Psychoanalytic discourse may indeed have oppressed women, in the sense of bringing us to accept a positioning that is inherently antithetical to being a subject and to autonomy; but if that is the case, we need to know exactly how psychoanalysis has functioned to repress what we could potentially become: for this, we must master the terms of its discourse and ask a number of questions. First, is the gaze necessarily male (i.e. for reasons inherent in the structure of language, the unconscious, symbolic systems, and thus all social structures)? Could we structure things so that women own the gaze? If this were possible, would women want to own the gaze? Finally, in either case, what does it mean to be a female spectator? Only through asking such questions within the psychoanalytic framework can we begin to find the gaps and fissures through which we can insert woman in a historical discourse that has hitherto been male-dominated and has excluded women. In this way, we may begin to change ourselves as a first step toward changing society.

Using psychoanalysis to deconstruct Hollywood films enables us to see clearly the patriarchal myths through which we have been positioned as Other (enigma, mystery), and as eternal and unchanging. We can also see how the family melodrama, as a genre geared specifically to women, functions both to expose the constraints and limitations that the capitalist nuclear family imposes on women and, at the same time, to “educate” women to accept those constraints as “natural,” inevitable – as “given.” For part of what defines melodrama as a form is its concern explicitly with Oedipal issues – illicit love relationships (overtly or incipiently incestuous), mother–child relationships, husband–wife relationships, father–son relationships: these are the staple fare of melodrama as surely as they are largely excluded from the dominant Hollywood genres, the western and the gangster film, that melodrama compensates for.

Using the framework developed by Peter Brooks, we might say that the western and gangster genres aim to duplicate the functions that tragedy once fulfilled, in the sense of placing man within the larger cosmic scene. But Brooks points out that we are now in a period when “mythmaking [can] only be personal and individual” since we lack “a clear transcendent value to be reconciled to;” so that even these genres, broadly speaking, fall into melodrama. All Hollywood films, taking this large view, require what Brooks considers essential to melodrama, namely “a social order to be purged, a set of ethical imperatives to be made clear.”³

It is important that women are excluded from the central role in the main, highly respected Hollywood genres; women, and female issues, are only central in the family melodrama (which we can see as an offshoot of other melodramatic forms). Here Brooks’s definition of the way characters in melodrama “assume primary psychic roles, Father, Mother, Child, and express basic psychic conditions”⁴ seems particularly relevant, as is also his explicit linking of psychoanalysis and melodrama at the end of the book. Psychoanalytic processes themselves, he notes, reveal the “melodrama aesthetic” (we will see in chapter 11 that the directors of a recent feminist film, Sigmund Freud’s Dora, also view psychoanalysis as melodrama); but important for our purposes here is his comment that the melodramatic form deals with “the processes of repression and the status of repressed content.” Brooks concludes that “the structure of ego, superego and id suggests the subjacent manichaeism of melodramatic persons.”⁵

Laura Mulvey (the British filmmaker and critic whose theories are central to new developments) also views melodrama as concerned with Oedipal issues, but she sees it primarily as a female form, acting as a corrective to the main genres that celebrate male action. The family melodrama is important, she says, in “probing pent-up emotion, bitterness and disillusion well known to women.” For Mulvey, melodrama serves a useful function for women who lack any coherent culture of oppression. “The simple fact of recognition has aesthetic importance,” she notes: “there is a dizzy satisfaction in witnessing the way that sexual difference under patriarchy is fraught, explosive and erupts dramatically into violence within its own private stomping ground, the family.”⁶ But Mulvey concludes that if melodrama is important in bringing ideological contradictions to the surface, and in being made for a female audience, events are never reconciled at the end in ways beneficial to women.

So why is it that women are drawn to melodrama? Why do we find our objectification and surrender pleasurable? This is precisely an issue that psychoanalysis can help to explain: for such pleasure is not surprising if we consider the shape of the girl’s Oedipal crisis. Following Lacan for a moment (see definition 16 on p. 19), we see that the girl is forced to turn away from the illusory unity with the Mother in the prelinguistic realm and has to enter the symbolic world which involves subject and object. Assigned the place of object (lack), she is the recipient of male desire, passively appearing rather than acting. Her sexual pleasure in this position can thus be constructed only around her own objectification. Furthermore, given the male structuring around sadism, the girl may adopt a corresponding masochism.⁷

In practice, this masochism is rarely reflected in more than a tendency for women to be passive in sexual relations; but in the realm of myth, masochism is often prominent. We could say that in locating herself in fantasy in the erotic. the woman places herself as either passive recipient of male desire or, at one remove, as watching a woman who is passive recipient of male desires and sexual actions. Although the evidence we have to go on is slim, it does seem that women’s sexual fantasies would confirm the predominance of these positionings. (We will look shortly at some corresponding male fantasies.)

Nancy Friday’s volumes provide discourses on the level of dream and, however questionable as “scientific” evidence, show narratives in which the woman speaker largely arranges events for her sexual pleasure so that things are done to her, or in which she is the object of men’s lascivious gaze.⁸ Often, there is pleasure in anonymity, or in a strange man approaching her when she is with her husband. Rarely does the dreamer initiate the sexual activity, and the man’s large erect penis usually is central in the fantasy. Nearly all the fantasies have the dominance-submission pattern, with the woman in the latter place.

It is significant that in the lesbian fantasies that Friday has collected, women occupy both positions, the dreamer excited either by dominating another woman, forcing her to have sex, or enjoying being so dominated. These fantasies suggest either that the female positioning is not as monolithic as critics often imply or that women occupy the “male” position when they become dominant.⁹ Whichever the case may be (and I will say more about this in a moment), the prevalence of the dominance–submission pattern as a sexual turn-on is clear. At a discussion about pornography organized by Julia LeSage at the Conference on Feminist Film Criticism (Northwestern University, 1980), both gay and straight women admitted their pleasure (in both fantasy and actuality) in being “forced” or “forcing” someone else. Some women claimed that this was a result of growing up in Victorian-style households where all sexuality was repressed, but others denied that it had anything to do with patriarchy. Women wanted, rightly, to accept themselves sexually, whatever the turn-on mechanism.¹⁰ But simply to celebrate whatever gives us sexual pleasure seems to me both too easy and too problematic: we need to analyze how it is that certain things turn us on, how sexuality has been constructed in patriarchy to produce pleasure in the dominance–submission forms, before we advocate these modes.¹¹

It was predictable that many of the male fantasies in Friday’s book Men in Love show the speaker constructing events so that he is in control: again, the “I” of identity remains central, as it is not in the female narrations. Many male fantasies focus on the man’s excitement in arranging for his woman to expose herself (or even give herself) to other men, while he watches.¹²

The difference between this male voyeurism and the female form is striking. For the woman does not own the desire, even when she watches: her watching is to place responsibility for sexuality at yet one more remove, to distance herself from sex. The man, on the other hand, owns the desire and the woman, and gets pleasure from exchanging the woman, as in Lévi-Strauss’s kinship system.¹³

Yet, some of the fantasies in Friday’s book show men’s wish to be taken over by an aggressive woman, who would force them to become helpless, like the little boy in his mother’s hands. A tour of Times Square in 1980 (the organization Women Against Pornography runs them regularly) corroborated this. After a slide show that focused totally on male sadism and violent sexual exploitation of women, we were taken to sex shops that by no means stressed male domination. We saw literature and films expressing as many fantasies of male as of female submission. The situations were the predictable ones: young boys (but sometimes men) seduced by women in a form of authority – governesses, nursemaids, nurses, schoolteachers, stepmothers. etc. (Of course, it is significant that the corresponding dominanc–esubmission fantasies of women have men in authority positions that carry much more status – professors, doctors, policemen, executives: these men seduce the innocent girls or young wives who cross their paths.)

Two interesting things emerge here. One is that dominance–submission patterns are apparently a crucial part of both male and female sexuality as constructed in western civilization. The other is that men have a far wider range of positions available: more readily both dominant and submissive, they vacillate between supreme control and supreme abandonment. Women, meanwhile, are more consistently submissive, but not excessively abandoned. In their own fantasies, women do not position themselves as exchanging men, although a man might find being exchanged an exciting fantasy.¹⁴

The passivity revealed in women’s sexual fantasies is reinforced by the way women are positioned in film. In an interesting paper on “The ‘woman’s film’: possession and address,” Mary Ann Doane has shown that in the one film genre (i.e. melodrama) that, as we have seen, constructs a female spectator, the spectator is made to participate in what is essentially a masochistic fantasy. Doane notes that in the major classical genres, the female body is sexuality, providing the erotic object for the male spectator. In the woman’s film, the gaze must be de-eroticized (since the spectator is now assumed to be female), but in doing this the films effectively disembody their spectator. The repeated, masochistic scenarios effectively immobilize the female viewer. She is refused pleasure in that imaginary identification which, as Mulvey has shown, repeats for men the experience of the mirror phase. The idealized male screen heroes give back to the male spectator his more perfect mirror self, together with a sense of mastery and control. In contrast, the female is given only powerless, victimized figures who, far from perfect. reinforce the basic sense of worthlessness that already exists.¹⁵

Later on in her paper, Doane shows that Freud’s “A child is being beaten” is important in distinguishing the way a common masochistic fantasy works out for boys and for girls. In the male fantasy. “sexuality remains on the surface” and the man “retains his own role and his own gratification in the context of the scenario. The ‘I’ of identity remains.” But the female fantasy is first desexualized and second, “necessitates the woman’s assumption of the position of spectator, outside of the event.” In this way, the girl manages, as Freud says, “to escape from the demands of the erotic side of her life altogether.”¹⁶

But the important question remains: when women are in the dominant position, are they in the masculine position? Can we envisage a female dominant position that would differ qualitatively from the male form of dominance? Or is there merely the possibility of both sex genders...