Consuming Passions

Judith Williamson

• Publisher: Marion Boyars
• Year: 1988
• Print ISBN: 9780714528519
• eBook ISBN: 9780714522807
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Judith Williamson explores how our cultural tastes, in films, food, television, advertising, music poetry, song lyrics, photography, political movements and even the BritishRoyal Family influence our thinking and how we govern our own lives, and shape those of our children

HOLLYWOOD NIGHTS

TWO OR THREE THINGS WE KNOW ABOUT OURSELVES

A Critique of Riddles of the Sphinx and 3 Women

Images of women in (mainstream) films have been criticized frequently and intelligently1, but always in relation to a male spectator. There is a Real, voyeuristic man, who has reactions and desires, and a Celluloid, or rather Acetate woman, who is both symbolic and an object of ‘scopophilic’ pleasure. Sexist images of women, sexist forms of presenting those images, are ‘bad’ because of their effect on men. Obviously I don’t disagree with this. But women have to watch these same images, and their viewing position, or even their reactions, are rarely accounted for. The ‘look’ of the spectator is invariably constituted as a male look. Thus much film criticism reflects and perpetuates women’s situation of having to view ourselves always through men’s views of us.

My spectator is a ‘she’. She is used to battling with images of motherhood, of feminine mystique, of women as jokes, of women as consumers, of inarticulate women; but it is easier to reject such images when they appear, for example, on television or in mainstream sexist cinema, than when they arise in films that claim to be different. Of the two films I am looking at, Riddles of the Sphinx is more obviously ‘different’ since it is made and distributed outside the commercial cinema, and one of its makers is a woman. However, the very title of Altman’s film also makes a certain claim: at a time when the liberation of women is one of the primary issues in society, a film called 3 Women sets itself up as belonging within that arena. In any case, a film ‘about’ women, rather than men, is as unusual as a film ‘by’ a woman. What is disturbing in both cases is the idea that this ‘about’ and ‘by’ are somehow in themselves enough, or preclude criticism. This is really a patronizing attitude, although seeming deferential: especially with Riddles, an element of ‘being nice’ is involved (a woman made it) but supporting Laura Mulvey as an independent film maker, which I do, is different from ‘agreeing with’ her films. And far worse, the ‘compelling beauty’ which one male critic finds in 3 Women probably has to do simply with watching three attractive women. I don’t want to keep lumping the two films together, because they are different in many aspects, but they are both films whose involvement with women has given them an invisible halo which only criticism from a feminist position can dispel.

Riddles of the Sphinx is the more ‘serious’ film, yet its very title suggests the sort of Mystery of Woman which is precisely a male view of women. This mysteriousness is set up in the ‘stones’ section with blurry shots of the Sphinx accompanied by electronic music: it almost has the aura of a Turkish Delight advertisement, ‘full of Eastern Promise’. This use of the Sphinx can be seen as part of a strategy intended to evoke mystery and an image of inscrutable womanhood, as a preliminary to their ‘deconstruction’ with the later role of the Sphinx as a speaking subject: ‘she’ is given a voice. But this involves a fundamental misconception: you don’t dispel a myth by trying to make it speak, or reject an image by giving it a voice with which to deny itself. The film undercuts its own strategy, by not recognizing that the power of an image of Female Mystery is so strong that it functions in the most traditional way and is too strong to be undercut by anything later in the film – even if this were intended. (It is in fact built on in the ‘British Museum’ section). Using such an image at all is to acknowledge its validity; it is already too late to deny that it ‘fits’. No amount of formal strategy can undo the implicit admission of Sphinx-like mystique.

Not to realize this is to underestimate the ‘autonomy’ and general tenacity which is part of the nature of social symbols and which confronts the film maker trying to bend images to her own purpose. The Sphinx on the screen traverses time and space to imply that there are eternal qualities of women, that the questions don’t change and are not determined by actual social conditions. A question is different from a riddle, anyway, since it doesn’t contain its answer, while a riddle is a puzzle whose answer is found in itself and is essentially a joke. Although on the narrative level (i.e. in the Oedipus story) the Sphinx asks men questions, ‘she’ doesn’t question men; and the connotation of the story, in which ‘she’ speaks, is secondary to the image in which ‘she’ doesn’t speak but is overlaid with music. In this long showing of the Sphinx the necessity that women ask the questions becomes confused with the idea that women are the question. The Sphinx’s riddle is herself. ‘She’ is the eternal puzzle, unable to question actual oppression because, like real women, ‘she’ is not located socially but removed from history and used as a symbol, something women have had enough of. To assume that such a symbol ‘does not have a meaning, but it does have meaning within the shifting contexts set up for it by the film’s discourse’ (to quote one review), and to see the text as only ‘producing meanings’ (ibid), ignores the dangers of re-using, reproducing existing social meanings. Moreover the superimposition of a symbol from ancient Egyptian society onto one from our own (Greta Garbo) gives the latter an apparent inevitability. Similarly the whole Sphinx section throws a determinism over the rest of the film, mythologizing some of the real issues of the ‘Louise’ section.

It is in the ‘Louise’ section that the ‘Sphinx’ takes on ‘a questioning voice, a voice asking a riddle’.2 But this inner voice, inarticulately murmuring disjointed phrases and words … ‘Nesting … Acquiesced … Memory … Mystery …’ and so on, in the ‘gaps’ of the written narrative, is fulfilling exactly the role expected of it by a male society with a monopoly on coherent speech. Women are left to dredge up vague impressions, to recount dreams; relegated to a kind of underworld of the unconscious. In one scene the two women sit in a womb-like room, full of red velvet curtains and rich with womanhood, surrounded by mirrors, while one of them reads out a dream neither understands. ‘What does it mean? I can’t understand most of it’ … ‘Pieces of thoughts I put into words. Pieces of words which seemed to mean something …’ ‘What about this? What does this mean?’ … ‘I don’t know. It must be something I copied out of a book’ … ‘What does that mean, I wonder.’ ‘I don’t know exactly. That’s why I wrote it.’ Women not only have a mystical, symbolic, irrational speech: it is shown as being unintelligible even to themselves. (And why is it Maxine, the black woman, who has the strange, magical dream which they cannot make sense of?) In the British Museum shots we are shown a language (Egyptian) incomprehensible not only to men but to women too. The introduction expressly describes the Sphinx as ‘disordering logical categories’. All this justifies the prevailing ideological view of woman’s bounteous, timeless unreason and is completely complicit with the image of women which is inscribed in male rational discourse as the representation of its opposite.

It could be argued that Laura Mulvey’s speech, circumscribing the film, provides the cogency and outline for the rest of it, but this is accepting a privileged status for Laura Mulvey (whose access to a multiplicity of myths is indicated by the objects like the Greek vase, not to mention the globe, which surround her at the beginning) – and not for ‘Louise’, who is then ‘spoken around’. Certainly Laura Mulvey’s speech provides a framework for the other sections, but it is a framework which is self-negating because of what is said: most of all because of the idea that Oedipus represents the conscious, the Sphinx (Woman) the unconscious. Either this idea is not borne out by Laura Mulvey’s controlling speech, or, alternatively, it makes her speech just another of these symbolic manifestations of the unconscious. It cannot work both ways: to claim the speech of unreason is to deny the speech in which you claim it. This is what terrifies me, as a woman, in the face of any such general statement about womanhood: my speech is to be invalidated in terms of rationality. It is not conscious and social but comes from murky primeval depths hardly known to myself.

The answer to this is that one rejects the very terms of patriarchal rationality. But to perpetuate even the idea of such a division as Oedipus/Male/Conscious v. Sphinx/Female/Unconscious is to be within those terms and gratefully to speak in the only ‘language’ they offer to women. In using this ‘language’ and accepting an ‘inner’ role women continue to be symbolic: symbolic of the otherness required by the dominant logical order. Only by rejecting this symbolic status can women regain speech. Unfortunately it becomes harder than ever to reject the role of the ‘unconscious’ now that the unconscious and its structures have become such a fascinating area to both men and women. Also unfortunate is the connection of the Oedipus myth with supposedly timeless unconscious structures so that motherhood and mother/child relations continue to occupy the limelight in the arena of ‘womanhood’.

For here also there seems to me a mistake: the alternative to patriarchy isn’t an emphasis on motherhood. There is a confusion between an interest in mothers, (for example, it is important to examine the mother-structure as well as the father-structure of patriarchy) with an interest in being a mother, having babies. Again, the mother-and-child image is so powerful that no amount of family-breakdown-campaigning-for-nursery-schools narrative in the rest of the film is going to undermine it: all the classic connotations right down to Madonna-images are inevitably evoked. Laura Mulvey says that in our society ‘the place of the mother is suppressed’, but this is just not true, it is exalted into the only possible place for women. In Riddles motherhood seems a mysterious and fulfilling experience (despite the horror of having to part with baby when he/she goes to nursery) which excludes not only men but women who are not mothers. It is interesting that at the point of actual campaigning for day-care nurseries the narrative fizzles out into a brief dialogue concerning problems in the unions: we are not shown this struggle but we are shown mother-and-child images, over and over.

This is particularly claustrophobic because the title and framework of the film give an implied universality to everything in it: it clearly sets out to be about womanhood in general, yet most of its images are those that women have been fighting for years, and its ground is marked out within the most traditional ‘women’s’ areas – babies, bodies, feelings, vague memories, dreams, mystery – but now part of some sort of Lacanian theory. Women are never shown actually producing anything except babies; and there is a potential voyeurism in the ‘jugglers’ acrobatic sequence, which is so visually attractiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION: ‘CONSUMING PASSIONS’
• MODERN GIRL
• PICTURE THIS
• HOLLYWOOD NIGHTS
• DO NOTHING
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Copyright