In 2001, Five Star Production released Monrak Transistor directed by Pen-ek Ratanaruang. The film was enormously popular with Thai audiences; it won three Thailand National Film Association Awards in 2002 and it was nominated for two others. On the surface, the film appears to be merely the next in a population of post-1997 films that celebrated an ideology of the idyllic Thai rural setting. In her essay, “Transistor and Temporality: the Rural as Modern Thai Cinema's Pastoral,” Adadol Ingawanij makes clear that Pen-ek’s adaptation from its 1981 source novel “divorces itself from the concerns of the novel’s own time” and relocates the narrative into a post-1997 crisis, although the source text was not examined under the scope of research undertaken for this paper (Ingawanij “Transistor” 90-1). However, one need not look to the book to see how Monrak Transistor redefines post-1997 Thai film aesthetics. In her essay, “Challenging Grand Narratives on the Nation: ASEAN independent Filmmaker’s Indirect Participation in Development Discourses,” Veronica Isla concisely outlines how the 1997 Financial Crisis motivated a series of Thai films that idealized the Thai countryside and the ideology of domestic bliss, as well as identifying urban centres, particularly Bangkok, with Western corruption (Isla 15). Isla includes Pen-ek’s Monrak Transistor in this population of films, describing it as a film that idealized “the countryside as a place where Thai tradition is maintained in its purity, unsullied by the corrosive modern influences in the West, influences that have gripped the cities like Bangkok” (Isla 16). However, by defining Monrak Transistor in this way, Isla has overlooked the fundamental aesthetic and the satire in the film that challenge notions of a rural ideal. For all its superficial romance, tragedy, and convention, the film is quite comic and openly satiric. In Monrak Tansistor, Pen-ek Ratanaruang depicts an unsettling and ambiguous Thai culture in which both economic security and domestic security are absent, and the romantic hero cannot create a satisfying affirmative identity, challenging the dominant film ideology that celebrates a rural ideal.
Before the financial crisis of 1997, a schism already existed in Thai culture that polarized an illusion of urban superiority against rural idealism (Ingawanij “Blissfully” 121). Popular Thai film demonstrates ample evidence of the rural/urban dichotomy that was rising in Thai culture before 1997. According to Anchalee Chaiworaporn in his essay “Thailand: Endearing Afterglow” such films as those produced by Cherd Songsri, for example, attempted “to delineate Thai national identity with its basis in rural life and traditions” (Anchalee 454). However, following 1997, the tension within the rural/urban ideologies was overcome by the rural ideology. Poorly managed international (specifically Western) investment in Bangkok-based financial and real estate ventures was the underlying cause of the crisis (Siamwallat 69-70). The financial crisis effectively eliminated the ideology of urban pride and the rural ideal was empowered.
In this state of economic despair, the Thai populace turned to film for solace. A wave of movies emerged that celebrated the rural ideal as the only remaining vestige of national pride. This population of films includes Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Fun Bar Karaoke (1997) and 6ixty-nin9 (1999), Thanit Jitnakul’s Bang Rajan (2000), Yuthlert Sippapak’s Killer Tattoo (2001), and Prachya Pinkaew’s Ong Bak (2003). This initial film reaction to the panic caused by the financial crisis may or may not have served the purpose of soothing the populace. In any case, the fervor eventually gave way to the beginnings of a new film ideology marked by Pen-ek’s Monrak Transistor. This new ideology interrogates the rural ideal and renders the rural romantic hero risible, thereby robbing the Thai populace of its rural security blanket.
On the surface, Monrak Transistor is a romantic tragedy that upholds the depiction of the urban setting as corrupt and the rural setting as idyllic. At the outset of the movie, the young rural hero Pan is in the throes of passing a necklace that he has been arrested for stealing and that he swallowed in an effort to conceal it. The story is narrated by one of the prison guards who knows Pan from his village. The narrative then flashes back to the point at which Pan first met his wife Sadaw while singing at a local fair. At her home, he expresses his affection in song. Her father chases him off with a shotgun but he continues to pursue Sadaw with the gifts of a beautiful blue blouse and a transistor radio. Even in the face of Sadaw’s father’s rejection of Pan, they are eventually married. As they are expecting their first child, Pan is drafted into the army. Upon seeing an advertisement for a singing contest, Pan goes AWOL from the military to pursue a fantasy of fame and fortune as a singer. Pan wins the contest and is whisked away to the offices of a music producer named Suwat. Suwat is stereotypically corrupt and exploitative. Suwat houses Pan in a closet and sets Pan to work mopping floors for some 27 months. Pan finally gets a break when another established singer fails to show up for a scheduled concert. Having finally located her absent husband, Sadaw has travelled to see the performance. Pan and Sadaw enjoy a brief reunion before he is once again swept away by Suwat. At Suwat’s home, Suwat attempts a sexual assault on Pan. In their struggle, Pan accidentally kills Suwat. Pan escapes to a plantation where he labours in the most severe conditions. Sadaw sees this latest abandonment as a betrayal and denounces Pan as a traitor. Sadaw begins a romance with a playboy travelling salesman and eventually he fathers Sadaw’s second child with her. At the plantation, Pan befriends another labourer named Siew. While gambling with the plantation warden, Siew gets into a conflict from which Pan rescues him. They barely escape with their lives and return to the city, starving and bereft. Siew unloads a stolen necklace on Pan. Pan is chased by the police at which time he swallows the necklace to conceal it. The chase ends when Pan is hit by a car and sustains an injury to his leg. Pan is arrested and imprisoned. Here the narrative catches up with the opening scene of the movie. Pan passes the necklace he has swallowed only to be ridiculed that it is a fake. Following his two-year prison term, he rejects an offer by Siew to become a drug dealer and returns to Sadaw in the rural village. The narrative concludes with a sort of reconciliation between Pan and Sadaw in which she breaks down and sobs in his arms. The plotline superficially participates with the wave of films that idealize rural settings and valorize Thai conventions of national pride.
However, in Monrak Transistor, Pen-ek takes aim at a series of traditional Thai symbols of national pride. Pen-ek satirizes the political slogan that identifies Thailand as the “land of smiles” (Poshyananda 48). Pan maintains a relentless grin throughout the first part of the movie, even when facing the verbal wrath of Sadaw’s father. However, Pan is a paradigm of the Thai romantic fool. He picks a losing fight at the fair during the opening scenes of the movie. He swims in toxic water. He abandons his mandatory military service to follow a foolish fantasy of fame as a singer. When it is clear that the glory promised him by the corrupt music producer Suwat is not forthcoming, Pan continues mopping floors for over a year. When Suwat brings Pan to his home Pan is blind to the blatant homo-erotic seduction that Suwat attempts. Throughout the movie Pan ignores his own longing to return to his wife and child when there is no clear narrative contrivance barring him from doing so. After being imprisoned, he trips on his own injured leg and falls into a vat of human urine and feces. Pan is a buffoon of the most ridiculous nature. By locating the Thailand smile in such a romantic fool, Pen-ek criticizes the illusion that the slogan tries to uphold.
The romantic-tragedy in Monrak Transistor is openly satiric. It is peppered with musical interludes that Pen-ek borrows from the Bollywood convention in which disparate cast members participate in individual songs. However, the songs are incongruent. For example, in the soldier’s lament Pan sings of promising to return to Sadaw the following new year. He doesn’t. In his courtship song, he promises his heart. He fails to be entirely loyal. In the musical interlude sung by the soldiers, they celebrate the ideal of never forgetting. Pan seems to entirely forget the wife and child he has left behind. Once locked in the offices of the music producer, Pan sings another song about not forgetting and about the moon. “Don’t forget, don’t forget, as the moon never forgets the sky” (Ratanaruang). These songs romanticize loyalty and memory. Pan exemplifies neither of these tenets. Moreover, the songs are often inconsistent with the mood of the scenes in which they occur. They effectively interrupt the narrative and render their romantic content ridiculous.
Equally inconsistent with any interpretation of the narrative as serious is Pen-ek’s use of asides in which characters directly address the camera. At one point while gambling in the plantation camp, Yot looks directly at the camera and brags to the audience of his winnings. “I’ve got them!” (Ratanaruang). After a time ellipsis of “Two hours and forty minutes,” Siew gloats in a similar fashion, addressing the audience with “I got him!” (Ratanaruang). Following these comic moments, the drama resumes the fourth-wall and returns to an ostensibly realist style. However, these apostrophes displace the illusion of authenticity and satirically highlight the contrivance of the narrative. Any notion of the romantic or tragic aspects of the story line as realistic or credible cannot be taken seriously.
Using the framework of the romanticized rural/urban/rural journey, Pen-ek satirizes not only the rural romantic hero, but the entire rural ideal. Pen-ek’s rural setting in Monrak Transistor is far from ideal. Using visual aesthetics, Pen-ek suggests that the rural environment as toxic. Perhaps the most startling scene of the film depicts Pan swimming through the rural village river towards a clandestine evening rendezvous with Sadaw. The water through which he swims is a neon-green colour. The image is jarring and intimates that the water is toxic in some way. The pastel colour of the water is at the very least “unnatural” (Ingawanij “Transistor” 92). In this unnatural elixir, Pan writhes in comic ecstasy. The image of Pan swimming through it is unsettling and gives rise to a concern as to how he could survive in such a visibly unnatural setting, much less writhe in dance-like ecstasy, grinning all the while.
Pen-ek extends his interrogation of the rural ideal by creating a rural world rife with sickness and decay. There is no ideal healing power in the rural village. Quite the contrary, everyone is sick. Sadaw’s father complains of aches and pains. Pan replaces the labourer hired by Sadaw’s father because, according to Pan, he is “sick” (Ratanaruang). All this rural illness attracts a playboy travelling medicine salesman who occupies himself with healing local peasant children. The illness of Pan’s and Sadaw’s infant is the catalyst that allows the salesman to begin his seduction of Sadaw. By the end of the film, it appears that Sadaw’s father has succumbed to illness and died. Even the materialistic and consumerist symbols of enduring romance that Pan gave Sadaw during their fantasy courtship have succumbed to the toxicity of their environment. The transistor radio is rusted and beyond repair. The blue blouse is tattered and discarded. There is no satisfying resolution to the tragedy Pan and Sadaw have endured.
Pen-ek depicts a world poisoned by the feces of its own inhabitants. The opening scene shows Pan in the background during a humiliating interrogation in which he is attempting to pass the stolen necklace he had swallowed. Pen-ek ties his ‘shit’ motif to the toxic pollution in which Pan was swimming during his stay in prison. Pan is put to the hard labour of fertilizing fields with a mixture made of the feces and urine of the inmates. Stumbling over his injured leg under the weight of the yoke of his burden, he falls headlong into the foul mixture. Early in the film Pan is swimming in toxic rural water. At the end of Pan’s urban economic odyssey he finds himself literally swimming in his own feces. There seems no satisfying or healthy place for poor Pan in the world Pen-ek has created for him.
Caught between corrupt economic forces and a toxic rural environment, Pan is subject to a Thai culture that affords him no affirmative identity. He is not a soldier, nor a singer. He is not a janitor, nor a plantation labourer. He is neither a father nor a husband. He is no longer an imprisoned criminal. The only resolving identity Pan can construct for himself is a liminal one. Throughout the narrative, Pen-ek’s romantic hero is always on the run from the toxic culture that surrounds him, and he is never satisfied. Pen-ek at least provides Pan with a rural location to which to return, but it remains toxic and affords him no security, either romantic or financial. His relationship with Sadaw is far from recovered and his tenancy with her is questionable. He is expected to sleep on the porch in a home which houses both his own child and another child that is not his own. It is only in the liminal space in which Pan abandons both his desire to escape the toxic poverty of the rural setting and the hopeless oppression of the urban space where he achieves any sense of stability and the narrative can conclude.
While other post-1997 movies attempt to create a tangible identity for the Thai citizen based on rural ideal, Pen-ek challenges the ideology and unsettles any false security found in these illusions. Monrak Transistor repeats a motif of romantic ideology in song and desire, but none of these ideals is ever achieved. Pen-ek’s combination of satire and liminality conflate into an unsettling theme: the illusions of comfort - rural romance, urban corruption - can afford no affirmative identity for the Thai subject. Only in the unstable realm of liminality can Pan find an identity with which he is at peace, and only after an economic odyssey in which his illusions and fantasies are dispelled.
Monrak Transistor marks a shift in the post-1997 film aesthetic. The popularity of the film suggests Thai audiences were no longer seeking a filmic security blanket in the form of the rural ideal. By 2001, the wave of films celebrating the rural ideal had run their gamut and Thai audiences were ready for real, albeit unsettling, cultural solutions. Pen-ek addresses the issue by interrogating the rural ideal on screen with its own romantic structure. Pen-ek offers no solutions in Monrak Transistor. He certainly does not redeem the urban side of the urban/rural dichotomy but rather highlights the notion that idealization of any kind affords no affirmative cultural or economic solutions for Thai citizens. Monrak Transistor is a world rife with corruption, slavery, exploitation, and death. Pen-ek demonstrates the tragedy that has befallen a people preying on themselves in a divided urban/rural disharmony. In this way the film calls for unity and solidarity by unsettling a population in such dire need of a post-crisis security blanket.
Works Cited
Chaiworaporn, Anchalee. “Thailand: Endearing Afterglow.” Being and Becoming: the Cinemas of Asia. Ed. Aruna Vasudev, Latika Padgaonkar, Rashmi Doraiswamy. New Delhi: Macmillan, 2002. 441-461. Print.
Harrison, Rachel. “The Allure of Ambiguity: The ‘West’ and the Making of Thai Identities.” The Ambiguous Allure of the West. Ed. Rachel V. Harrison and Peter A. Jackson. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010. 1-36. Print.
Harrison, Rachel. “Amazing Thai Film: The Rise and Rise of Contemporary Thai Cinema on the International Screen.” Asian Affairs. Vol. 36 Issue 3 (2005): 321-338. Print.
Ingawanij, Adadol. “Transistor and Temporality: the Rural as Modern Thai Cinema's Pastoral.” Representing the Rural: Space, Place, and Identity in Films about the Land. Ed. Catherine Fowler, Gillian Helfield. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. 80-100. Print.
Ingawanij, Adadol. “Blissfully Whose? Jungle Pleasures, Ultra-Modernist Cinema and the Cosmopolitan Thai Auteur.” The Ambiguous Allure of the West. Ed. Rachel V. Harrison and Peter A. Jackson. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010. 119-134. Print.
Isla, Veronica. “Challenging Grand Narratives on the Nation: ASEAN Independent Filmmakers’ Indirect Participation in Development Discourse.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. 2010. Print.
Kitiarta, Pattana. “Muai Thai Cinemas and the Burdens of Thai Men.” Asia Research Institute. Working Paper Series No. 88. May 2007. Web. 27 October 2011.
Poshyananda, Apinan. “Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition.” Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions. New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1996. 23-49. Print.
Phongpaichit, Pasuk. Thailand’s Crisis. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2000. Print.
Ratanaruang, Pen-ek, dir. Monrak Transistor. Five Star Production, 2001. Film.
Siamwallat, Ammar. “Thailand After 1997.” Asian Economic Policy Review. Vol. 6 (2011): 68-85. Print.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Disclosure and the Fear of Women in the Workplace
The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed radical changes to gender identities and gender roles in America. In the 1970s and 1980s, specifically the professional and sexual identities of women underwent socio-political changes as part of the movement that has come to be known as second wave feminism. In the 1980s and 1990s, the simultaneous rise of computer technologies and of women in the corporate workplace prompted the articulation in film of social fears regarding how the latter might make use of the former. Both computer technology and women acquiring post-secondary education posed a threat to the job security enjoyed by a predominantly male workforce in the face of ongoing recession. At the same time, Michael Douglas was at the peak of his career. In the late 1980s and 1990s he starred in a string of films which all seemed to articulate fears regarding women with professional identities or who were exercising a new sexual liberation, including Fatal Attraction (1987) with Glenn Close, Basic Instinct (1992) with Sharon Stone, Disclosure (1994) with Demi Moore, and A Perfect Murder (1998) with Gwyneth Paltrow. Perhaps what is most startling about these films is the list of successfully professional female actors who chose to participate in them. In Disclosure, for example, Demi Moore is a rising executive in a computer technologies firm who is coded as both sexually and professionally malicious. Disclosure is a film that reacts against the social changes resulting from second wave feminism and that articulates social fears in the early 1990s regarding women’s sexuality and women in the workplace.
The late twentieth century was an era that saw the renegotiation of gender roles in the workplace. In a discussion of constructions of masculinity in the 1980s, Yvonne Tasker refers to “the changing definitions, within a shifting economy, of the roles that men and women are called on to perform, particularly in that critical arena of gender definition, the world of work” (Tasker 111). In addition to gender roles, gender demographics were also changing. In 1970, the Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. case in a U.S. Court of Appeals was pivotal in securing equal pay for women in the workforce as articulated in the Bennett Amendment on Chapter VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Luna 371). In 2009, New York Times columnist Casey Mulligan observed a polarity between the domestic sphere and the professional sphere in the shifting work roles assigned to women.
Years ago, women were a small percentage of the work force (outside the home). During much of the 20th century — especially the 1970s and 1980s — women’s share of the labor force increased. By 1990, the work force was 47 percent female and 53 percent male, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many view this as one of the most important and desirable social and economic transformations of our lifetimes (Mulligan).
In “The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family,” Claudia Goldin reports that the late 1970s was a period which saw massive increases in the number of women acquiring post-secondary education in such fields as medicine, law, dentistry, and business (10-11). Goldin goes on to report how women were increasingly moving into more lucrative professional positions traditionally held by men.
[E]arnings of women relative to those of men began to increase around 1980 after remaining flat since the 1950s . . . Much of the increase was due to women’s greater job experience and to their more market-relevant skills as reflected in the increased return to experience. Occupations shifted, not surprisingly, from those that had been considered traditional ones for women, such as teacher, nurse, librarian, and social worker, to a varied group of professions including lawyer, physician, professor, and manager (12-13).
The professional sphere was no longer an all-male enclave and movies such as Disclosure dramatized the social fears that resulted from such sweeping demographic changes.
Disclosure centres its narrative around the interruption of employment security and domestic harmony to a high-ranking male employee by a female executive in a computer technologies firm. It is not surprising that Disclosure was released when it was in 1994; both computer technologies and women’s participation in the corporate workforce were at an apex.
Female labor force participation rates . . . for women of almost all ages, education levels, and marital statuses seem to have leveled off since around 1990 after rising nonstop for at least the last century (Goldin 14).
In addition, an article entitled “History of Computers in the Workplace” published by ehow.com reports that between 1986 and 1990, “Many businesses began to realize computers could increase productivity and eliminate tedious manual tasks performed by employees” (History). Both women and computers represented a threat to the employment security enjoyed by the predominantly male workforce. However, computers are not measured as a threat to the job security of men in Disclosure. Instead, Disclosure focuses its narrative around the upper-middle classed, bourgeois, executive hero, Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas). The threat of job loss posed by computers is recast as the vehicle through which Tom maintains lucrative employment, albeit precariously, in a cut-throat corporate environment that is increasingly infiltrated by women.
Disclosure valorizes and normalizes a social construction in which the work of women is appropriately located within the domestic sphere. The film opens with shots that pan through an upper middle-classed suburban home. Traditional gender roles are established through the disembodied voices of Tom Sanders and his wife Susan. She verbalizes her observations that he is inept in domestic duties. “You can't take care of getting the kids ready for school. Don't say you can.” He responds by ceding the responsibility for domestic duties to his wife; to his children he says, “Listen to your mom.” As the good wife she is the domestic strength and doting mother. When we finally do see Tom and Susan on the screen, she is obviously responsible for taking the kids to school. Tom is only along for the ride while he heads off to the office. In the car Susan continues to chastise Tom for his disheveled tie, but she is complimentary of his position with DigiCom and characterizes him as one of the “top guys.” When she later learns of Tom’s involvement in a sexual scandal, she pretends to have known everything. “I support him 100 per cent.” She is maternal, domestic, and supportive of Tom, even in the face of his suspicious fidelity. From this point of departure the character of evil professional woman is readily imposed.
Disclosure polarizes the traditionally domestic sphere of the female worker against its professional counterpart. In an abrupt juxtaposition against the domestic bliss of Tom’s family life, the film promptly and unambiguously articulates the threat to male job security and established sexual politics that is posed by women in the workplace. While Tom is on his way to work a fellow commuter ironically predicts the outcome of Tom’s expected promotion. "You don't see it coming. You're just going right along and then one day there's no room.” As the good, hard-working breadwinner, Tom remains distracted by his business-based cellular telephone conversation. The unnamed man continues, “Boom. No more room for you. Smaller, faster, cheaper, better.” Tom offers to help this recently unemployed friend find work. Tom tells him to contact a woman in his office named “Cindy.” The man responds, “Cindy. Pretty name. Used to have fun with the girls. Nowadays she probably wants your job.” The changing sexual politics in the corporate environment have shifted in such a way that no longer provides for a coding of women as sexually subordinate and that has resulted in job loss for Tom’s misogynistic friend.
Tom initially appears unaffected by these shifting sexual politics. His professional misogyny is characterized as typical and harmless. As Tom enters his office building his attention is distracted; his eyes follow the bare legs of a young woman in a skirt ascending a stairwell. He grins at the delightful image and she is apparently none the wiser. The scene acts to mitigate his misogyny as victimless and locates women as the objects of sexual spectacle. In the next scene, Tom instructs his subordinate Asian female assistant “not to worry” about the status of his employment and gives her a smack on her backside. The inappropriate physical maneuver is immediately mitigated when he does the same to a male co-worker, although the focus of the camera framing renders it far less obvious. On the elevator the two men dismissively discuss the health of their respective wives. All of this condescending behavior towards women, however, is rendered trivial in the superseding context of Tom’s increasing suspicion that he will not achieve the promotion he had been expecting.
Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) is cast as Tom’s nemesis. Tom discovers that his boss, Garvin (Donald Sutherland) has decided to offer the promotion Tom was expecting to Meredith. There are even hints that Tom’s job has become redundant and that he might get fired. In this context, Meredith not only robs Tom of his hopes of advancement but also poses a threat to his ability to maintain his role as breadwinner for his family. When Tom’s wife, Susan, suggests he quit, he is uncomfortably dismissive. “I'm perfectly capable of supporting our family.” Later, during an argument regarding the difficult situation he faces at work, Susan questions Tom’s claim that he is most concerned about their children. Tom responds in a way that clearly articulates the construction of masculine identity in the film that is threatened. “Yeah my children, my children that I provide for.” Susan’s domestic innocence is set in direct opposition to Meredith’s professional malice as well. Meredith is entirely condescending to Susan’s sexual appeal and domestic station when she suggests that Susan “looks like she always has food in the refrigerator. Obviously she made a home for you.” Later, when the conflict between Tom and Meredith heightens, Meredith blames Susan for the misinformation that Meredith intentionally fed her. “If your wife can’t take a message then get a fucking answering machine.” Meredith poses a threat to both Tom’s professional security and his domestic harmony.
Disclosure conflates the threat represented by the professional female with a dangerous, unleashed sexuality. Meredith is unambiguously characterized as salacious and scheming. In the first scene in which Meredith appears, she verbalizes petty motives for her malice towards Tom as vengeance on romantic grounds. “He broke my heart.” Tom’s co-worker Mark (Dennis Miller) defines Meredith in almost exclusively sexual terms. “She's attractive. Great rack. Nipples like pencil erasers.” Mark goes on to reveal his suspicions that Meredith’s otherwise inexplicable rise to power was sexually motivated. “You think she's sleeping with Garvin?” Once Meredith has secured her authority in the company, she immediately makes aggressive sexual advances towards Tom. During her seduction she mounts him and moves his hands onto her bosom. She proceeds to perform fellatio on him while he protests, “No, no, no,” the whole while. The scene works to displace the sexual assault typical of patriarchal power onto women and characterizes men as always already victimized by their normal, natural, sexual drives. Poor Tom can’t resist her. He succumbs and becomes aggressive himself. “You wanna get fucked?” Her response is clear. “I want you inside me.” However, at the point of penetration, he recovers his senses and announces, “I'm not gonna do this” before fleeing her office. She threatens him. “You get back here and finish what you started or you are fucking dead.” The next morning, it is Tom who finds himself accused of sexual harassment.
Disclosure presents women in power as a dangerous perversion. Tom’s lawyer clearly states that “Sexual harassment is not about sex. It's about power.” Through Meredith, women are cast as unable to wield power without abusing it. During their interaction in Meredith’s office, she points out to Tom, “You have a lot more to lose than I do.” Later Garvin articulates the most sexualized fear that emerges with this new professional hierarchy. When Tom suggests that it is he who was sexually assaulted, Garvin is incredulous. “I never even heard of such a thing, a woman harassing a man.” At the moment Meredith’s harassment scheme is revealed, Tom’s lawyer states, “The only thing you've proven is that a woman in power can be just as abusive as a man. - You controlled the meeting.” Within the narrative, Meredith’s power is safely contained under Garvin’s superior authority. However, Garvin’s complicity with Meredith displaces the threat to Tom’s employment from a masculine source onto a female one. Garvin is never punished for his role in Tom’s professional dillemma. All of the punishment is visited on Meredith. Through Meredith, Tom is fully emasculated. Tom’s emasculation eventually manifests itself in a nightmare. In it, Garvin and Meredith are condensed into a single individual; Tom is sexually assaulted by Garvin in an elevator that visually echoes an interaction Tom had in the elevator with Meredith in which she condescendingly taunts him. “Don't tell me you're scared of me.” The homoerotic dream is shocking in the otherwise highly conservative narrative. It is offered as the nightmarish side-effect of the perverse situation in which women wield corporate power.
The remainder of the film follows the intrigue of the legal conflict surrounding the counter-claims of sexual harassment made by Tom and Meredith and Meredith’s attempts to professionally discredit Tom. Meredith unscrupulously employs such conservative stereotypes of ‘dangerous femininity’ as ‘crocodile tears.’ Her false accusations are exposed when an answering machine recording reveals that she was the sexual aggressor in the harassment case. She then plans to discredit Tom for weaknesses in DigiCom’s flagship product as a result of production shortcuts that she authorized in order to secure her promotion. Tom uses his superior computer savvy to expose her negligence and thwart her abuse of power, assisted by an anonymous “friend” online. Tom publicly exposes Meredith as a liar and a fraud using electronically collected surveillance information. In this way the film enacts a male fantasy of superiority in the use of technology – from answering machines to computers – and isolates such technical knowledge exclusively to the realm of men. The film also enacts a larger political fantasy of male dominance over women in the corporate sphere. Triumphal music underscores the scene in which his job is secured once again. In order to placate the disturbed male viewers mind even further, and warn women not to tangle with their male superiors, Tom gloats, “Did it ever occur to you, Meredith, that maybe I set you up?” Apparently, he was in control of the situation the entire time. The film concludes with Tom’s victory over Meredith as she is vanquished from the corporate environment.
However, women are not banished entirely from the professional environment in Disclosure. Instead, the film attempts to resignify appropriate roles for women in the new socio-political landscape that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. In “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’” Claire Johnston outlines the symbolic position she feels women occupy in popular cinema. “Within a sexist ideology and a male-dominated cinema, woman is presented as what she represents for man” (Johnston 33). Johnston explains that
woman represents not herself, but by a process of displacement, the male phallus. It is probably true to say that despite the enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema, woman as woman is largely absent (Johnston 33).
Johnston clarifies that “phallus” as a signifier of patriarchy need not specifically identify male genitalia, but it is interesting to note how the narrative of Disclosure is substantially concerned with descriptions of Tom’s penis. In melodramatic terms, Meredith has been moved out of the typical female lead-role position of love-interest and into the position of villain, both of which remain subordinate to Tom’s narrative of threat and redemption. Her professional future remains in question at the film’s closure. Women in the film who maintain their professional identity include Tom’s wife, who remains subordinate to Tom’s narrative and a signifier of domestic harmony – only once in the film is her profession even mentioned – and Tom’s lawyer, who remains subordinate to Tom’s narrative as a helping agent. Within Tom’s own professional environment the only woman who is superior to him in the corporate hierarchy that remains is the company’s chief financial officer, Stephanie Kaplan. She is entirely desexualized and visually coded as androgynous in contrast to Meredith’s hyper-sexualization; Stephanie wears an unflattering, flat, grey pantsuit and she is approaching her golden years. Furthermore, Stephanie is maternally subordinated to the interests of her son, and just as subordinated to Tom’s narrative as another of his helpers. Throughout the film she remains apparently aloof to Tom’s dilemma. In the film’s final moments she reveals that her son was the “friend” who helped Tom online in an effort to advance his own career. Stephanie goes so far as to openly state that the only reason she remains in Tom’s office is to spend more time with her son in University. She is rewarded for her role in Tom’s narrative. In his closing speech Garvin announces, “I have probably focused too much on ‘breaking the ceiling’ in hiring a woman when I should have been looking for the best person. That person is Stephanie Kaplan.” Garvin’s speech seems to be an attempt to offer a mitigating voice at the end of the misogynistic narrative. However, Stephanie’s power is even more powerfully mitigated. Signified as both sexually androgynous and maternally subordinate, Stephanie is safe. If she is the only woman with any authority, the corporate world is safe once again.
In the end, Disclosure presents a fantasy which delineates the right kind of woman for the professional workplace. The film valorizes the professional woman who is androgynous, maternal, and operating in the interests of her male co-worker. All wrongdoing within Disclosure’s fantasy of sexual intrigue and corporate politics is displaced onto the only sexualized female in the narrative. Meredith is duly punished with humiliation and banishment. Tom is characterized as morally, politically, and technically superior. Moreover, the threat to his masculine identity as it depends on his ability to maintain gainful employment and provide for his children is rendered benign. As the film ends, one of Tom’s children says, “Daddy I never believed what they said about you.” His role as father and provider, respected by his children, is re-secured. Disclosure speaks to the viewer with the recuperative language of the patriarchal system – a debate that is already won and with which the indoctrinated viewer is already complicit. From a patriarchal perspective, Disclosure may seem entirely common-sensical. From a feminist perspective it is simply ludicrous.
Works Cited
Disclosure. Dir. Barry Levinson. Perf. Michael Douglas, Demi Moore. Warner Brothers Picture, 1994. Film.
Goldin, Claudia. “The ‘Quiet Revolution’ That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family.” A.E.R. 96, May 2006: 1-21. Web. 1 April 2012.
"History of Computers in the Workplace." eHow. Demand Media, Inc., n.d. Web. 1 April 2012.
Johnston, Claire. “Woman’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 31-40. Print.
Luna, Gaye. "Understanding Gender-Based Wage Discrimination: Legal Interpretation and Trends of Pay Equity in Higher Education". Journal of Law & Education (19), 2000: 371. Print.
Mulligan, Casey B. “A Milestone for Working Women.” The New York Times. 4 January 2009. Web. 1 April 2012.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.
The late twentieth century was an era that saw the renegotiation of gender roles in the workplace. In a discussion of constructions of masculinity in the 1980s, Yvonne Tasker refers to “the changing definitions, within a shifting economy, of the roles that men and women are called on to perform, particularly in that critical arena of gender definition, the world of work” (Tasker 111). In addition to gender roles, gender demographics were also changing. In 1970, the Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. case in a U.S. Court of Appeals was pivotal in securing equal pay for women in the workforce as articulated in the Bennett Amendment on Chapter VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Luna 371). In 2009, New York Times columnist Casey Mulligan observed a polarity between the domestic sphere and the professional sphere in the shifting work roles assigned to women.
Years ago, women were a small percentage of the work force (outside the home). During much of the 20th century — especially the 1970s and 1980s — women’s share of the labor force increased. By 1990, the work force was 47 percent female and 53 percent male, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many view this as one of the most important and desirable social and economic transformations of our lifetimes (Mulligan).
In “The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family,” Claudia Goldin reports that the late 1970s was a period which saw massive increases in the number of women acquiring post-secondary education in such fields as medicine, law, dentistry, and business (10-11). Goldin goes on to report how women were increasingly moving into more lucrative professional positions traditionally held by men.
[E]arnings of women relative to those of men began to increase around 1980 after remaining flat since the 1950s . . . Much of the increase was due to women’s greater job experience and to their more market-relevant skills as reflected in the increased return to experience. Occupations shifted, not surprisingly, from those that had been considered traditional ones for women, such as teacher, nurse, librarian, and social worker, to a varied group of professions including lawyer, physician, professor, and manager (12-13).
The professional sphere was no longer an all-male enclave and movies such as Disclosure dramatized the social fears that resulted from such sweeping demographic changes.
Disclosure centres its narrative around the interruption of employment security and domestic harmony to a high-ranking male employee by a female executive in a computer technologies firm. It is not surprising that Disclosure was released when it was in 1994; both computer technologies and women’s participation in the corporate workforce were at an apex.
Female labor force participation rates . . . for women of almost all ages, education levels, and marital statuses seem to have leveled off since around 1990 after rising nonstop for at least the last century (Goldin 14).
In addition, an article entitled “History of Computers in the Workplace” published by ehow.com reports that between 1986 and 1990, “Many businesses began to realize computers could increase productivity and eliminate tedious manual tasks performed by employees” (History). Both women and computers represented a threat to the employment security enjoyed by the predominantly male workforce. However, computers are not measured as a threat to the job security of men in Disclosure. Instead, Disclosure focuses its narrative around the upper-middle classed, bourgeois, executive hero, Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas). The threat of job loss posed by computers is recast as the vehicle through which Tom maintains lucrative employment, albeit precariously, in a cut-throat corporate environment that is increasingly infiltrated by women.
Disclosure valorizes and normalizes a social construction in which the work of women is appropriately located within the domestic sphere. The film opens with shots that pan through an upper middle-classed suburban home. Traditional gender roles are established through the disembodied voices of Tom Sanders and his wife Susan. She verbalizes her observations that he is inept in domestic duties. “You can't take care of getting the kids ready for school. Don't say you can.” He responds by ceding the responsibility for domestic duties to his wife; to his children he says, “Listen to your mom.” As the good wife she is the domestic strength and doting mother. When we finally do see Tom and Susan on the screen, she is obviously responsible for taking the kids to school. Tom is only along for the ride while he heads off to the office. In the car Susan continues to chastise Tom for his disheveled tie, but she is complimentary of his position with DigiCom and characterizes him as one of the “top guys.” When she later learns of Tom’s involvement in a sexual scandal, she pretends to have known everything. “I support him 100 per cent.” She is maternal, domestic, and supportive of Tom, even in the face of his suspicious fidelity. From this point of departure the character of evil professional woman is readily imposed.
Disclosure polarizes the traditionally domestic sphere of the female worker against its professional counterpart. In an abrupt juxtaposition against the domestic bliss of Tom’s family life, the film promptly and unambiguously articulates the threat to male job security and established sexual politics that is posed by women in the workplace. While Tom is on his way to work a fellow commuter ironically predicts the outcome of Tom’s expected promotion. "You don't see it coming. You're just going right along and then one day there's no room.” As the good, hard-working breadwinner, Tom remains distracted by his business-based cellular telephone conversation. The unnamed man continues, “Boom. No more room for you. Smaller, faster, cheaper, better.” Tom offers to help this recently unemployed friend find work. Tom tells him to contact a woman in his office named “Cindy.” The man responds, “Cindy. Pretty name. Used to have fun with the girls. Nowadays she probably wants your job.” The changing sexual politics in the corporate environment have shifted in such a way that no longer provides for a coding of women as sexually subordinate and that has resulted in job loss for Tom’s misogynistic friend.
Tom initially appears unaffected by these shifting sexual politics. His professional misogyny is characterized as typical and harmless. As Tom enters his office building his attention is distracted; his eyes follow the bare legs of a young woman in a skirt ascending a stairwell. He grins at the delightful image and she is apparently none the wiser. The scene acts to mitigate his misogyny as victimless and locates women as the objects of sexual spectacle. In the next scene, Tom instructs his subordinate Asian female assistant “not to worry” about the status of his employment and gives her a smack on her backside. The inappropriate physical maneuver is immediately mitigated when he does the same to a male co-worker, although the focus of the camera framing renders it far less obvious. On the elevator the two men dismissively discuss the health of their respective wives. All of this condescending behavior towards women, however, is rendered trivial in the superseding context of Tom’s increasing suspicion that he will not achieve the promotion he had been expecting.
Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) is cast as Tom’s nemesis. Tom discovers that his boss, Garvin (Donald Sutherland) has decided to offer the promotion Tom was expecting to Meredith. There are even hints that Tom’s job has become redundant and that he might get fired. In this context, Meredith not only robs Tom of his hopes of advancement but also poses a threat to his ability to maintain his role as breadwinner for his family. When Tom’s wife, Susan, suggests he quit, he is uncomfortably dismissive. “I'm perfectly capable of supporting our family.” Later, during an argument regarding the difficult situation he faces at work, Susan questions Tom’s claim that he is most concerned about their children. Tom responds in a way that clearly articulates the construction of masculine identity in the film that is threatened. “Yeah my children, my children that I provide for.” Susan’s domestic innocence is set in direct opposition to Meredith’s professional malice as well. Meredith is entirely condescending to Susan’s sexual appeal and domestic station when she suggests that Susan “looks like she always has food in the refrigerator. Obviously she made a home for you.” Later, when the conflict between Tom and Meredith heightens, Meredith blames Susan for the misinformation that Meredith intentionally fed her. “If your wife can’t take a message then get a fucking answering machine.” Meredith poses a threat to both Tom’s professional security and his domestic harmony.
Disclosure conflates the threat represented by the professional female with a dangerous, unleashed sexuality. Meredith is unambiguously characterized as salacious and scheming. In the first scene in which Meredith appears, she verbalizes petty motives for her malice towards Tom as vengeance on romantic grounds. “He broke my heart.” Tom’s co-worker Mark (Dennis Miller) defines Meredith in almost exclusively sexual terms. “She's attractive. Great rack. Nipples like pencil erasers.” Mark goes on to reveal his suspicions that Meredith’s otherwise inexplicable rise to power was sexually motivated. “You think she's sleeping with Garvin?” Once Meredith has secured her authority in the company, she immediately makes aggressive sexual advances towards Tom. During her seduction she mounts him and moves his hands onto her bosom. She proceeds to perform fellatio on him while he protests, “No, no, no,” the whole while. The scene works to displace the sexual assault typical of patriarchal power onto women and characterizes men as always already victimized by their normal, natural, sexual drives. Poor Tom can’t resist her. He succumbs and becomes aggressive himself. “You wanna get fucked?” Her response is clear. “I want you inside me.” However, at the point of penetration, he recovers his senses and announces, “I'm not gonna do this” before fleeing her office. She threatens him. “You get back here and finish what you started or you are fucking dead.” The next morning, it is Tom who finds himself accused of sexual harassment.
Disclosure presents women in power as a dangerous perversion. Tom’s lawyer clearly states that “Sexual harassment is not about sex. It's about power.” Through Meredith, women are cast as unable to wield power without abusing it. During their interaction in Meredith’s office, she points out to Tom, “You have a lot more to lose than I do.” Later Garvin articulates the most sexualized fear that emerges with this new professional hierarchy. When Tom suggests that it is he who was sexually assaulted, Garvin is incredulous. “I never even heard of such a thing, a woman harassing a man.” At the moment Meredith’s harassment scheme is revealed, Tom’s lawyer states, “The only thing you've proven is that a woman in power can be just as abusive as a man. - You controlled the meeting.” Within the narrative, Meredith’s power is safely contained under Garvin’s superior authority. However, Garvin’s complicity with Meredith displaces the threat to Tom’s employment from a masculine source onto a female one. Garvin is never punished for his role in Tom’s professional dillemma. All of the punishment is visited on Meredith. Through Meredith, Tom is fully emasculated. Tom’s emasculation eventually manifests itself in a nightmare. In it, Garvin and Meredith are condensed into a single individual; Tom is sexually assaulted by Garvin in an elevator that visually echoes an interaction Tom had in the elevator with Meredith in which she condescendingly taunts him. “Don't tell me you're scared of me.” The homoerotic dream is shocking in the otherwise highly conservative narrative. It is offered as the nightmarish side-effect of the perverse situation in which women wield corporate power.
The remainder of the film follows the intrigue of the legal conflict surrounding the counter-claims of sexual harassment made by Tom and Meredith and Meredith’s attempts to professionally discredit Tom. Meredith unscrupulously employs such conservative stereotypes of ‘dangerous femininity’ as ‘crocodile tears.’ Her false accusations are exposed when an answering machine recording reveals that she was the sexual aggressor in the harassment case. She then plans to discredit Tom for weaknesses in DigiCom’s flagship product as a result of production shortcuts that she authorized in order to secure her promotion. Tom uses his superior computer savvy to expose her negligence and thwart her abuse of power, assisted by an anonymous “friend” online. Tom publicly exposes Meredith as a liar and a fraud using electronically collected surveillance information. In this way the film enacts a male fantasy of superiority in the use of technology – from answering machines to computers – and isolates such technical knowledge exclusively to the realm of men. The film also enacts a larger political fantasy of male dominance over women in the corporate sphere. Triumphal music underscores the scene in which his job is secured once again. In order to placate the disturbed male viewers mind even further, and warn women not to tangle with their male superiors, Tom gloats, “Did it ever occur to you, Meredith, that maybe I set you up?” Apparently, he was in control of the situation the entire time. The film concludes with Tom’s victory over Meredith as she is vanquished from the corporate environment.
However, women are not banished entirely from the professional environment in Disclosure. Instead, the film attempts to resignify appropriate roles for women in the new socio-political landscape that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. In “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’” Claire Johnston outlines the symbolic position she feels women occupy in popular cinema. “Within a sexist ideology and a male-dominated cinema, woman is presented as what she represents for man” (Johnston 33). Johnston explains that
woman represents not herself, but by a process of displacement, the male phallus. It is probably true to say that despite the enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema, woman as woman is largely absent (Johnston 33).
Johnston clarifies that “phallus” as a signifier of patriarchy need not specifically identify male genitalia, but it is interesting to note how the narrative of Disclosure is substantially concerned with descriptions of Tom’s penis. In melodramatic terms, Meredith has been moved out of the typical female lead-role position of love-interest and into the position of villain, both of which remain subordinate to Tom’s narrative of threat and redemption. Her professional future remains in question at the film’s closure. Women in the film who maintain their professional identity include Tom’s wife, who remains subordinate to Tom’s narrative and a signifier of domestic harmony – only once in the film is her profession even mentioned – and Tom’s lawyer, who remains subordinate to Tom’s narrative as a helping agent. Within Tom’s own professional environment the only woman who is superior to him in the corporate hierarchy that remains is the company’s chief financial officer, Stephanie Kaplan. She is entirely desexualized and visually coded as androgynous in contrast to Meredith’s hyper-sexualization; Stephanie wears an unflattering, flat, grey pantsuit and she is approaching her golden years. Furthermore, Stephanie is maternally subordinated to the interests of her son, and just as subordinated to Tom’s narrative as another of his helpers. Throughout the film she remains apparently aloof to Tom’s dilemma. In the film’s final moments she reveals that her son was the “friend” who helped Tom online in an effort to advance his own career. Stephanie goes so far as to openly state that the only reason she remains in Tom’s office is to spend more time with her son in University. She is rewarded for her role in Tom’s narrative. In his closing speech Garvin announces, “I have probably focused too much on ‘breaking the ceiling’ in hiring a woman when I should have been looking for the best person. That person is Stephanie Kaplan.” Garvin’s speech seems to be an attempt to offer a mitigating voice at the end of the misogynistic narrative. However, Stephanie’s power is even more powerfully mitigated. Signified as both sexually androgynous and maternally subordinate, Stephanie is safe. If she is the only woman with any authority, the corporate world is safe once again.
In the end, Disclosure presents a fantasy which delineates the right kind of woman for the professional workplace. The film valorizes the professional woman who is androgynous, maternal, and operating in the interests of her male co-worker. All wrongdoing within Disclosure’s fantasy of sexual intrigue and corporate politics is displaced onto the only sexualized female in the narrative. Meredith is duly punished with humiliation and banishment. Tom is characterized as morally, politically, and technically superior. Moreover, the threat to his masculine identity as it depends on his ability to maintain gainful employment and provide for his children is rendered benign. As the film ends, one of Tom’s children says, “Daddy I never believed what they said about you.” His role as father and provider, respected by his children, is re-secured. Disclosure speaks to the viewer with the recuperative language of the patriarchal system – a debate that is already won and with which the indoctrinated viewer is already complicit. From a patriarchal perspective, Disclosure may seem entirely common-sensical. From a feminist perspective it is simply ludicrous.
Works Cited
Disclosure. Dir. Barry Levinson. Perf. Michael Douglas, Demi Moore. Warner Brothers Picture, 1994. Film.
Goldin, Claudia. “The ‘Quiet Revolution’ That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family.” A.E.R. 96, May 2006: 1-21. Web. 1 April 2012.
"History of Computers in the Workplace." eHow. Demand Media, Inc., n.d. Web. 1 April 2012.
Johnston, Claire. “Woman’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 31-40. Print.
Luna, Gaye. "Understanding Gender-Based Wage Discrimination: Legal Interpretation and Trends of Pay Equity in Higher Education". Journal of Law & Education (19), 2000: 371. Print.
Mulligan, Casey B. “A Milestone for Working Women.” The New York Times. 4 January 2009. Web. 1 April 2012.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Meta-Scopohilia and the Construction of Femininity in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window
Alfred Hitchcock famously admitted that his formula for good film narrative was “Torture the women” (Fawell 680). He probably didn’t realize how far the implications of this statement might be metaphorically extended into an analysis of his own works. Given the implications of scopophilia as outlined by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and the feminine corollary articulated by Doane in “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” there seems to be no satisfying identity for the female cinema viewer. In “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)” Mulvey suggests that women can only occupy the subjective viewing position as cinema spectators (or within the diegesis of a film) during the occasional identification with the male gaze in a trans-gendered moment of sexual identity slippage. It appears that Hitchcock made an effort to provide at least two women with a semi-subjective perspective in his 1954 thriller Rear Window. Along with the blatantly scopophilic character Jeffries (James Setwart), Lisa (Grace Kelly) and Stella (Thelma Ritter) participate in his rear window voyeurism. Ultimately, however, the women are unable to maintain a subjective viewing position in the narrative of Rear Window and are otherwise coded as mere fodder for marriage, or for viewing pleasure, and little else. As such, Rear Window is a meta-scopophilic cinematic excursion in which the characters on screen act out the very gendered scopophilia that Mulvey and Doane assign to the cinematic viewer. Rear Window constructs femininity in a way that relegates the woman to the exclusively objective position as a signifier in the fulfillment of masculine marital relations or domestic needs, and as an object of the male gaze.
The opening scene of Rear Window establishes the movies two motifs: male scopophilic voyeurism, and an appropriate position for women in marriage and domestic pursuits. The roguish and dashing reporter Jeffries has sustained a leg injury and is convalescent in his apartment home. To pass the time he makes a habit of observing his neighbours in the courtyard and apartments adjacent his rear window. The panning long-shot which opens the film frames a young blonde beauty in the ludicrous posture of putting on her brassiere in front of a large picture window followed by her dance/exercise routine which frequently affords an ample view of her backside as she bends over facing perpendicularly away from the camera. The rest of the visible neighbours establish a fable of the feminine role in appropriate and desirable marriage. The scene pans across at least two married couples in different stages of wedlock – one pair of newlyweds, and a couple apparently longer established; a lonely woman pining for companionship whom Jeffries labels “Miss Lonelyheart” (She actually enacts the rituals of a goodly domestic wife with an imaginary husband in her desperate longing for a male companion.); an upper-class debutante socialite entertaining various suitors whom Jeffries describes as “a queen bee with her pick of the drones”; and another couple that breaches these illusions of marital bliss – a sedentary wife in the throes of “nagging” her husband while he carries out domestic duties (Rear Window). To clarify any ambiguity in the marital myth that might arise from the last couple, the wife, Mrs. Thorwald, is promptly eliminated from the narrative. It is later revealed that she was murdered. With the exception of Mrs. Thorwald and the half-naked blonde beauty (who is later absorbed into the marital domain of normalcy when her husband returns from his military absence), all women in the narrative are coded as appropriately hungry for marriage.
Enter Jeffries’ home-care nurse, Stella, to articulate these motifs. She scoffs at Jeffries’ resistance to marrying a woman that he describes as admittedly “too talented, too beautiful, too perfect” in her upper class lifestyle (Rear Window). Although Jeffries seems to feel that Lisa is above his class station, she is clearly coded as both fashionable and easy too look at. Stella behaves as an expert on marriage while poor Jeffries seems to be clueless, albeit confidently condescending, making comic of poor Stella’s authoritative posture. Stella at verbalizes an attempt to naturalize the marital myth regarding a fantasy past that never existed. She informs Jeffries that “every man is ready for marriage when the right girl comes along,” and laments the loss of the days when a person would simply “see someone, get excited, get married” (Rear Window). Hitchcock presents her nostalgic description as common-sensical, but considering arranged marriages and class-based marriages remained common in Western culture until as late as the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth, one wonders to what mythical past she refers.
Enter the heroine, Lisa, to exemplify the woman as both an object for viewing, and as a mere signifier in the male narrative of bachelorhood to marriage. Initially, Jeffries describes Lisa to his nurse-maid as a woman who expects him to marry her. To that point in the film, however, Lisa has not yet been present. Her motivations are narrated entirely by Jeffries’ voice of masculine authority. Lisa is given almost no agency in this regard and she is entirely objectified before she even appears on-screen. When she finally does appear she is framed in a soft-celled lens as a vision of beauty followed by a cut-shot of Jeffries’ eyes opening from his slumber to view her. His gaze is steady. Hers is distracted. Lisa becomes the metonymic microcosm of the scenes depicted in the courtyard – the appropriately subordinate object in the masculine narrative of marriage and the feminine object of the male gaze. Lisa voices her blatant acceptance of this objectified position. When Jeffries expresses concern that Thorwald might see them spying on him, she dismissively states, “I’m not afraid. I’ve been looked at before” (Rear Window). In this statement she characterizes women as in a submissive position in which they should delicately repress their feminine fear of the powerful male gaze, as foolishly naïve to the dangers of the outside world, and specifically as objects for viewing.
Rear Window provides two types of scopophilia for the male viewer. In her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey defines these types. The first “arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image” (Mulvey 62). The male viewer is able to enjoy the objectified beauty of such marriageable women as Lisa and the exercising beauty. The male viewer is also able to identify with the dashing but injured Jeffries as the driving force of the narrative and the central character. Within the diegetic confines of the film, Jeffries too exercises the voyeuristic scopophilia that Mulvey delineates. He enjoys viewing the micro-narratives of marriage and beauty that unfold before his rear window creating a cinematic meta-scopohilia. “In an analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen” (Mulvey 66, 67). Indeed the cinematic choices of framing and the diegetic performances of the tenants adjacent his rear window, particularly the scantily clad young beauty who regularly dances and performs in front of a ludicrously revealing picture window, clearly indicate a screen-framed performance space. Both the windows he looks into and the window out of which he looks create a framing of what he observes that is identical to that of the frame of the movie screen. Jeffries regularly pulls back from the window and into darkness out of his concern that he too might be seen emphasizing how the frame of his window might limit his field of view. The male viewer of the movie is provided the opportunity to identify with Jeffries in both the narrative of his relationship and as he engages in his own screen-framed voyeurism.
In Rear Window women are excluded from the subjective viewing position. Mulvey summarily excludes women from scopophilic positions when she states that “pleasure has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure” (62). Perhaps anticipating the need to reconcile the female viewer with scopophilic identification, Hitchcock initially locates two female characters in the subjective viewing position in Rear Window. Jeffries coaxes both Lisa and Stella to share in his voyeurism. Specifically Lisa becomes involved in the viewing as part of her ploy to move into Jeffries’ apartment. However, Hitchcock cannot maintain her position as viewer and must move her from the viewing arena (in Jeffries’ apartment) to the viewed stage (the courtyard and the apartment of the killer). Likewise, Stella is moved from her viewing perspective to the stage as well when she assists Lisa in digging up the garden. The subjective viewing position that Hitchcock initially establishes for these women succumbs to the narrative need to reposition them into an objective position of being viewed by Jeffries before they are absorbed back into their appropriate domestic settings.
Hitchcock uses the convention of woman as a mere signifier in the male narrative to highlight a masculine-work/feminine-domestic binary in Rear Window. In “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” Claire Johnston observes that “woman represents not herself, but by a process of displacement, the male phallus … [W]oman as woman is largely absent” (Johnston 33). Lisa fulfills this condition in two ways. Firstly, she represents an absence in that the details of her private life are left vague and are absent from the on-screen narrative. She is a socialite debutante but never seen in that environment on her own. She is only represented as an extension of Jeffries’ life – the nagging girlfriend that is pushing him towards fulfilling his masculine role as husband. He makes clear that he wishes to remain the other archetype available to men – dashing in his exciting career and vehemently independent (Johnston 35). Secondly, While Jeffries is debilitated from a leg injury, in the ‘incorrect’ positioning of Jeffries’ purgatory in the domestic space when he cannot fulfill his manly duties of working, he cannot escape effeminized emotional paranoia and curiosity. His male confidante, Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey) tries to placate him but Lisa continues to fuel his suspicions. In turn, he projects his phallus onto Lisa. She must perform the dangerous ‘work’ that he cannot. It is she who digs up the garden and it is she who infiltrates Thorwald’s apartment. For appropriating Jeffries’ masculine role, she is duly punished. She suffers an assault at the hands of Thorwald’s rage when he catches her in his apartment.
There is a sexual fetishism to Lisa’s movement into the objective viewing space (Mulvey 66, 67). At the beginning of Rear Window, Jeffries has little interest in the marriage that Lisa desperately wants with him. As she engages with him in the viewing of the courtyard, she manages to arouse enough interest in Jeffries that he allows her to spend the night. Johnston again accurately observes that “in order to be accepted into the male universe, the woman must become a man” (Johnston 35). However, Hitchcock does not wish to maintain this identity for Lisa and he safeguards her feminine role by highlighting her sexuality. She unpacks a tiny suitcase that seems to hold only lingerie. Once she moves into the courtyard and becomes the object of Jeffries’ male gaze, her peril allows Jeffries to feel a concern for her of which he was previously unaware. She is no longer the independently capable uptown socialite, but rather the vulnerable damsel in distress. In this ‘corrected’ position for her, as object rather than subject, Jeffries’ sexual interest is activated. The narrative ends with the intimation of her more permanent residence in his apartment – a 1950s allusion to sexual activity. The scopophilic objectification of Lisa is tied into her coding as sexual, marriageable.
Rear Window codes the feminine as an object for viewing or as an object for marrying. Doane states that “films demonstrate that the woman as subject of the gaze is clearly an impossible sign” (Doane 141). When Lisa takes up her position as viewer with Jeffries, she gets herself into trouble. Lisa is allowed to live but she is first assaulted, and then arrested before she is returned safely to Jeffries’ domestic sphere. In the closure of the film, even the micro-narratives valorize the feminine role in the masculinised romantic narrative. “Mrs. Lonelyheart” is ‘rewarded’ with male companionship for her behaviour-appropriate marital longing. The otherwise inexplicably single beautiful exercise-dancer sees the return of her male partner, who was apparently absent for military reasons. To signify feminine complicity with this codification the film ends with a scene that naturalizes Lisa within a male-work/female-marriage binary. Lisa reads an adventure magazine which momentarily locates her sensibilities in the sphere of masculinised activity. It is clear, however, that this magazine is only a ruse to mollify Jeffries against his concerns regarding their marital compatibility. As Jeffries slumbers, she discards the first magazine and takes up a fashion magazine, re-locating herself in a constellation of signifiers that codes women as passively feminine, fashionable, available for viewing, and marriageable. In this way, Hitchcock may have inadvertently tortured the women characters in Rear Window by relegating them to an objective position from which there appears to be no cinematic escape, at least not within the confines of 1950s popular cinema.
Works Cited
De Lauretis, Teresa. “Oedipus Interruptus.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 83-96. Print.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 131-145. Print.
Fawell, John. Hitchcock’s Rear Window: The Well-Made Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Print.
Johnston, Claire. “Woman’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 31-40. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 122-130. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 58-69. Print.
Rich, B. Ruby. “The Crisis of Naming in Feminist Film Criticism.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 41-47. Print.
Thornham, Sue. “Introduction to Part II.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 53-57. Print.
Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” The Dread of Difference. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1996. 15-34. Print.
The opening scene of Rear Window establishes the movies two motifs: male scopophilic voyeurism, and an appropriate position for women in marriage and domestic pursuits. The roguish and dashing reporter Jeffries has sustained a leg injury and is convalescent in his apartment home. To pass the time he makes a habit of observing his neighbours in the courtyard and apartments adjacent his rear window. The panning long-shot which opens the film frames a young blonde beauty in the ludicrous posture of putting on her brassiere in front of a large picture window followed by her dance/exercise routine which frequently affords an ample view of her backside as she bends over facing perpendicularly away from the camera. The rest of the visible neighbours establish a fable of the feminine role in appropriate and desirable marriage. The scene pans across at least two married couples in different stages of wedlock – one pair of newlyweds, and a couple apparently longer established; a lonely woman pining for companionship whom Jeffries labels “Miss Lonelyheart” (She actually enacts the rituals of a goodly domestic wife with an imaginary husband in her desperate longing for a male companion.); an upper-class debutante socialite entertaining various suitors whom Jeffries describes as “a queen bee with her pick of the drones”; and another couple that breaches these illusions of marital bliss – a sedentary wife in the throes of “nagging” her husband while he carries out domestic duties (Rear Window). To clarify any ambiguity in the marital myth that might arise from the last couple, the wife, Mrs. Thorwald, is promptly eliminated from the narrative. It is later revealed that she was murdered. With the exception of Mrs. Thorwald and the half-naked blonde beauty (who is later absorbed into the marital domain of normalcy when her husband returns from his military absence), all women in the narrative are coded as appropriately hungry for marriage.
Enter Jeffries’ home-care nurse, Stella, to articulate these motifs. She scoffs at Jeffries’ resistance to marrying a woman that he describes as admittedly “too talented, too beautiful, too perfect” in her upper class lifestyle (Rear Window). Although Jeffries seems to feel that Lisa is above his class station, she is clearly coded as both fashionable and easy too look at. Stella behaves as an expert on marriage while poor Jeffries seems to be clueless, albeit confidently condescending, making comic of poor Stella’s authoritative posture. Stella at verbalizes an attempt to naturalize the marital myth regarding a fantasy past that never existed. She informs Jeffries that “every man is ready for marriage when the right girl comes along,” and laments the loss of the days when a person would simply “see someone, get excited, get married” (Rear Window). Hitchcock presents her nostalgic description as common-sensical, but considering arranged marriages and class-based marriages remained common in Western culture until as late as the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth, one wonders to what mythical past she refers.
Enter the heroine, Lisa, to exemplify the woman as both an object for viewing, and as a mere signifier in the male narrative of bachelorhood to marriage. Initially, Jeffries describes Lisa to his nurse-maid as a woman who expects him to marry her. To that point in the film, however, Lisa has not yet been present. Her motivations are narrated entirely by Jeffries’ voice of masculine authority. Lisa is given almost no agency in this regard and she is entirely objectified before she even appears on-screen. When she finally does appear she is framed in a soft-celled lens as a vision of beauty followed by a cut-shot of Jeffries’ eyes opening from his slumber to view her. His gaze is steady. Hers is distracted. Lisa becomes the metonymic microcosm of the scenes depicted in the courtyard – the appropriately subordinate object in the masculine narrative of marriage and the feminine object of the male gaze. Lisa voices her blatant acceptance of this objectified position. When Jeffries expresses concern that Thorwald might see them spying on him, she dismissively states, “I’m not afraid. I’ve been looked at before” (Rear Window). In this statement she characterizes women as in a submissive position in which they should delicately repress their feminine fear of the powerful male gaze, as foolishly naïve to the dangers of the outside world, and specifically as objects for viewing.
Rear Window provides two types of scopophilia for the male viewer. In her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey defines these types. The first “arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image” (Mulvey 62). The male viewer is able to enjoy the objectified beauty of such marriageable women as Lisa and the exercising beauty. The male viewer is also able to identify with the dashing but injured Jeffries as the driving force of the narrative and the central character. Within the diegetic confines of the film, Jeffries too exercises the voyeuristic scopophilia that Mulvey delineates. He enjoys viewing the micro-narratives of marriage and beauty that unfold before his rear window creating a cinematic meta-scopohilia. “In an analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen” (Mulvey 66, 67). Indeed the cinematic choices of framing and the diegetic performances of the tenants adjacent his rear window, particularly the scantily clad young beauty who regularly dances and performs in front of a ludicrously revealing picture window, clearly indicate a screen-framed performance space. Both the windows he looks into and the window out of which he looks create a framing of what he observes that is identical to that of the frame of the movie screen. Jeffries regularly pulls back from the window and into darkness out of his concern that he too might be seen emphasizing how the frame of his window might limit his field of view. The male viewer of the movie is provided the opportunity to identify with Jeffries in both the narrative of his relationship and as he engages in his own screen-framed voyeurism.
In Rear Window women are excluded from the subjective viewing position. Mulvey summarily excludes women from scopophilic positions when she states that “pleasure has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure” (62). Perhaps anticipating the need to reconcile the female viewer with scopophilic identification, Hitchcock initially locates two female characters in the subjective viewing position in Rear Window. Jeffries coaxes both Lisa and Stella to share in his voyeurism. Specifically Lisa becomes involved in the viewing as part of her ploy to move into Jeffries’ apartment. However, Hitchcock cannot maintain her position as viewer and must move her from the viewing arena (in Jeffries’ apartment) to the viewed stage (the courtyard and the apartment of the killer). Likewise, Stella is moved from her viewing perspective to the stage as well when she assists Lisa in digging up the garden. The subjective viewing position that Hitchcock initially establishes for these women succumbs to the narrative need to reposition them into an objective position of being viewed by Jeffries before they are absorbed back into their appropriate domestic settings.
Hitchcock uses the convention of woman as a mere signifier in the male narrative to highlight a masculine-work/feminine-domestic binary in Rear Window. In “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” Claire Johnston observes that “woman represents not herself, but by a process of displacement, the male phallus … [W]oman as woman is largely absent” (Johnston 33). Lisa fulfills this condition in two ways. Firstly, she represents an absence in that the details of her private life are left vague and are absent from the on-screen narrative. She is a socialite debutante but never seen in that environment on her own. She is only represented as an extension of Jeffries’ life – the nagging girlfriend that is pushing him towards fulfilling his masculine role as husband. He makes clear that he wishes to remain the other archetype available to men – dashing in his exciting career and vehemently independent (Johnston 35). Secondly, While Jeffries is debilitated from a leg injury, in the ‘incorrect’ positioning of Jeffries’ purgatory in the domestic space when he cannot fulfill his manly duties of working, he cannot escape effeminized emotional paranoia and curiosity. His male confidante, Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey) tries to placate him but Lisa continues to fuel his suspicions. In turn, he projects his phallus onto Lisa. She must perform the dangerous ‘work’ that he cannot. It is she who digs up the garden and it is she who infiltrates Thorwald’s apartment. For appropriating Jeffries’ masculine role, she is duly punished. She suffers an assault at the hands of Thorwald’s rage when he catches her in his apartment.
There is a sexual fetishism to Lisa’s movement into the objective viewing space (Mulvey 66, 67). At the beginning of Rear Window, Jeffries has little interest in the marriage that Lisa desperately wants with him. As she engages with him in the viewing of the courtyard, she manages to arouse enough interest in Jeffries that he allows her to spend the night. Johnston again accurately observes that “in order to be accepted into the male universe, the woman must become a man” (Johnston 35). However, Hitchcock does not wish to maintain this identity for Lisa and he safeguards her feminine role by highlighting her sexuality. She unpacks a tiny suitcase that seems to hold only lingerie. Once she moves into the courtyard and becomes the object of Jeffries’ male gaze, her peril allows Jeffries to feel a concern for her of which he was previously unaware. She is no longer the independently capable uptown socialite, but rather the vulnerable damsel in distress. In this ‘corrected’ position for her, as object rather than subject, Jeffries’ sexual interest is activated. The narrative ends with the intimation of her more permanent residence in his apartment – a 1950s allusion to sexual activity. The scopophilic objectification of Lisa is tied into her coding as sexual, marriageable.
Rear Window codes the feminine as an object for viewing or as an object for marrying. Doane states that “films demonstrate that the woman as subject of the gaze is clearly an impossible sign” (Doane 141). When Lisa takes up her position as viewer with Jeffries, she gets herself into trouble. Lisa is allowed to live but she is first assaulted, and then arrested before she is returned safely to Jeffries’ domestic sphere. In the closure of the film, even the micro-narratives valorize the feminine role in the masculinised romantic narrative. “Mrs. Lonelyheart” is ‘rewarded’ with male companionship for her behaviour-appropriate marital longing. The otherwise inexplicably single beautiful exercise-dancer sees the return of her male partner, who was apparently absent for military reasons. To signify feminine complicity with this codification the film ends with a scene that naturalizes Lisa within a male-work/female-marriage binary. Lisa reads an adventure magazine which momentarily locates her sensibilities in the sphere of masculinised activity. It is clear, however, that this magazine is only a ruse to mollify Jeffries against his concerns regarding their marital compatibility. As Jeffries slumbers, she discards the first magazine and takes up a fashion magazine, re-locating herself in a constellation of signifiers that codes women as passively feminine, fashionable, available for viewing, and marriageable. In this way, Hitchcock may have inadvertently tortured the women characters in Rear Window by relegating them to an objective position from which there appears to be no cinematic escape, at least not within the confines of 1950s popular cinema.
Works Cited
De Lauretis, Teresa. “Oedipus Interruptus.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 83-96. Print.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 131-145. Print.
Fawell, John. Hitchcock’s Rear Window: The Well-Made Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Print.
Johnston, Claire. “Woman’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 31-40. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 122-130. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 58-69. Print.
Rich, B. Ruby. “The Crisis of Naming in Feminist Film Criticism.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 41-47. Print.
Thornham, Sue. “Introduction to Part II.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 53-57. Print.
Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” The Dread of Difference. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1996. 15-34. Print.
Mise-en Scene of Confinement in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 French film Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain is an innovative cinema-narrative experiment. Jeunet cross-employs conventions from genres other than melodrama such as an almost documentary style expository voice-over, and a meta-cinematic technique whereby the character visually acknowledges the camera. Equally innovative is Jeunet’s use of mise-en-scene, particularly in the scene between time signatures 27:43 and 30:30. Jeunet uses such techniques as contrast, setting, props, lighting, and framing to create an environment that is increasingly confined in both space and motion, and that draws Amelie towards the inevitable anagnorisis that she must escape such an insular existence.
The scene opens as Amelie ascends the winding and somewhat labyrinthine stairwell of her Parisien apartment complex. As she moves up the stairwell, she is interrupted by the voice of another tenant, Raymond Dufayel, in the doorway of his apartment on the landing below her. On his invitation, Amelie moves out of the more spacious stairwell into the confines of his apartment.
Upon entering his apartment, Amelie is drawn into an increasingly confined space. The lighting is dingy and yellow. In stark contrast to the empty stairwell, the apartment is noticeably cluttered and littered with myriad eclectic set pieces. In this environment, Amelie is initially framed in the uncomfortably narrow passage of Dufayel’s front hallway. She gingerly creeps into his main room in which archaic set pieces and his geriatric presence create a sense of decay. The suffocating and dungeon-like space seems to close in around her. As Dufayel discusses his painting collection, Amelie is visually drawn into the even more confined space of his even more cluttered closet. Rear shots of the two characters with the limited space of the closet between them are framed to exclude any external space creating the visual illusion that Amelie might be swept into this closet with no other space in which to escape.
Dufayel’s Renoir copies are the conversational focus of the scene in which Amelie is likened to “the girl with the glass of water” (Jeunet). As Amelie holds a glass of red liquid, the same colour as the liquid in the glass of the girl in the painting, she is centred in the rear of the shot between Dufayel and his canvas. Amelie’s face appears brightly painted with makeup compared to the grizzled face of the aged man. As a representation of Amelie, the painted girl is a clear metaphor. Dufayel explains that he has been painting the same image annually for years. He describes the difficulty he has had capturing the enigma of the “girl with the glass of water” (Jeunet). The girl in the painting is fossilized in endless iterations of the same enigma, never in motion, separated from the rest of the characters in the painting, and then locked in Dufayel’s closet. The similarity between Amelie and the girl in the painting highlights the notion that she runs the risk of becoming the girl in the painting – an inanimate enigma locked in a closet in endless iterations of the same futile and meaningless existence. The entire mise-en-scene of the scene is replete with representations that threaten to entomb Amelie in the confined space.
Amelie’s moment of realization comes when her enclosed proximity to Dufayel is at its most intimate and it almost appears that he might well physically absorb her into his isolation and decay. She flees his apartment with what dramatically appears to be a new outlook. Indeed much of the rest of the film concerns itself with how Amelie escapes from her fossilizing pattern through romantic intrigues. Jeunet incorporates elements of lighting, setting, and props into a symbolic and metaphoric environment to artistically complete this narrative outcome. All elements of the mise-en-scene support the theme of the larger narrative in which Amelie must break free from the solitude of her own past and shyness, from the confines of her Dufayel-like apartment, and from a Dufayel-like destiny of isolation, loneliness, and futile repetition in order to realize her romantic aspirations.
Works Cited
Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, dir. La Fabuleaux Destin, d’Amelie Poulain. UGC; Miramax, 2001. DVD.
The scene opens as Amelie ascends the winding and somewhat labyrinthine stairwell of her Parisien apartment complex. As she moves up the stairwell, she is interrupted by the voice of another tenant, Raymond Dufayel, in the doorway of his apartment on the landing below her. On his invitation, Amelie moves out of the more spacious stairwell into the confines of his apartment.
Upon entering his apartment, Amelie is drawn into an increasingly confined space. The lighting is dingy and yellow. In stark contrast to the empty stairwell, the apartment is noticeably cluttered and littered with myriad eclectic set pieces. In this environment, Amelie is initially framed in the uncomfortably narrow passage of Dufayel’s front hallway. She gingerly creeps into his main room in which archaic set pieces and his geriatric presence create a sense of decay. The suffocating and dungeon-like space seems to close in around her. As Dufayel discusses his painting collection, Amelie is visually drawn into the even more confined space of his even more cluttered closet. Rear shots of the two characters with the limited space of the closet between them are framed to exclude any external space creating the visual illusion that Amelie might be swept into this closet with no other space in which to escape.
Dufayel’s Renoir copies are the conversational focus of the scene in which Amelie is likened to “the girl with the glass of water” (Jeunet). As Amelie holds a glass of red liquid, the same colour as the liquid in the glass of the girl in the painting, she is centred in the rear of the shot between Dufayel and his canvas. Amelie’s face appears brightly painted with makeup compared to the grizzled face of the aged man. As a representation of Amelie, the painted girl is a clear metaphor. Dufayel explains that he has been painting the same image annually for years. He describes the difficulty he has had capturing the enigma of the “girl with the glass of water” (Jeunet). The girl in the painting is fossilized in endless iterations of the same enigma, never in motion, separated from the rest of the characters in the painting, and then locked in Dufayel’s closet. The similarity between Amelie and the girl in the painting highlights the notion that she runs the risk of becoming the girl in the painting – an inanimate enigma locked in a closet in endless iterations of the same futile and meaningless existence. The entire mise-en-scene of the scene is replete with representations that threaten to entomb Amelie in the confined space.
Amelie’s moment of realization comes when her enclosed proximity to Dufayel is at its most intimate and it almost appears that he might well physically absorb her into his isolation and decay. She flees his apartment with what dramatically appears to be a new outlook. Indeed much of the rest of the film concerns itself with how Amelie escapes from her fossilizing pattern through romantic intrigues. Jeunet incorporates elements of lighting, setting, and props into a symbolic and metaphoric environment to artistically complete this narrative outcome. All elements of the mise-en-scene support the theme of the larger narrative in which Amelie must break free from the solitude of her own past and shyness, from the confines of her Dufayel-like apartment, and from a Dufayel-like destiny of isolation, loneliness, and futile repetition in order to realize her romantic aspirations.
Works Cited
Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, dir. La Fabuleaux Destin, d’Amelie Poulain. UGC; Miramax, 2001. DVD.
Interview with the Vampire and the American Perspective
One of the most popular movies following a renewed interest in the vampire myth in the 1990s is Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994) based on Anne Rice’s 1973 novel. Rice is also credited with penning the screenplay for the movie. Rice’s narrative participates with the rising representation of sympathetic vampires visible in such films as Coppola’s 1992 version of Dracula. Moreover, Vivian Sobchack, in her essay Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange refers to a late twentieth century trend in horror film marked by a “mutual spatial relocation to the American landscape and temporal relocation to the present” (Sobchack in DD 145). Historically, most vampires were a foreign threat. By the 1990s, the vampire was ripe for sympathetic appropriation into the geography of American culture.
Indeed, this film is concerned with an American perspective. The opening pan-shot highlights a blood-red neon sign that identifies the location as San Francisco. The narrative is framed in that American location as Louis explains his life as a vampire to a San Francisco journalist. The narrative within that framework is also framed in America. Louis’ tale begins on a 1790s Louisiana plantation and it is to America he will return at the end of his narrative.
On a smaller scale, the cinematography also highlights a preoccupation with perspective. Following the opening pan-shot, the camera moves into the city and follows what appears to be the first-person perspective of Louis as he silently weaves his way through the crowds and traffic of the night-time streets of San Francisco. Jordan repeats this pattern at the end of the movie from Lestat’s perspective. Using both narrative framework and cinematography, Jordan effectively creates a domestic American perspective.
Works Cited
Sobchack, Vivian. “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange.” The Dread of Difference. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 143-163. Print.
Indeed, this film is concerned with an American perspective. The opening pan-shot highlights a blood-red neon sign that identifies the location as San Francisco. The narrative is framed in that American location as Louis explains his life as a vampire to a San Francisco journalist. The narrative within that framework is also framed in America. Louis’ tale begins on a 1790s Louisiana plantation and it is to America he will return at the end of his narrative.
On a smaller scale, the cinematography also highlights a preoccupation with perspective. Following the opening pan-shot, the camera moves into the city and follows what appears to be the first-person perspective of Louis as he silently weaves his way through the crowds and traffic of the night-time streets of San Francisco. Jordan repeats this pattern at the end of the movie from Lestat’s perspective. Using both narrative framework and cinematography, Jordan effectively creates a domestic American perspective.
Works Cited
Sobchack, Vivian. “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange.” The Dread of Difference. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 143-163. Print.
Dracula 1931
Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula presents the viewer with a meta-cinamatographic narrative that carries with it a subtle didactic function. By marrying silent film convention with audio dialogue, Browning has created a bridging film that educates audiences how to accept narrative with the new advent of sound, much in the same way Sabine Hake describes Nosferatu (1922) as demonstrating “a kind of promotional self-referentiality that draws attention to the cinema and foregrounds its means” in order to “show audiences how to appreciate the cinema in its increasingly sophisticated products” (37-38). Dracula covertly educates audiences to understand narrative not only in the conventional visual way established in the era of silent films, but also in the newly available ‘talkie’ format. The narrative in Dracula is carried in two distinct ways: visually and through spoken dialogue.
The convention of inter-titles from the silent film era is present in different formats that seem to ease the viewer out of such conventions into other expository forms. Early in the film, spoken narration is introduced as an important element. The verbal warnings of the village peasants to Renfield are almost exclusively expository. They inform the listener/viewer (via dialogue with Renfield) that Dracula’s castle is a house of vampires and that to travel there is certain doom. In this way, the dialogue takes the place of the traditional inter-title that would have formerly provided such exposition as information from an omniscient narrator, or as dialogue presented in a textual form, on-screen. In fact, the convention of the inter-title is maintained in several ways early in the film. Visuals which provide the audience member with the perspective of the reader on-screen make use of newspaper articles that fill the position formerly occupied by the inter-title. From printed newspaper articles the viewer is informed of the tragedy on the ship on which Dracula traveled, amongst other things.
Other visual conventions are also present. While the opening scene is dialogue-laden, much of the early part of the narrative contains very little dialogue. The characterization of Dracula is accomplished with sweeping histrionic movements, slow and deliberate. His white shirt and pale face float through scenes in which his black clothing renders his body invisible against a black background. Most scenes are filmed by a stationary camera positioned as the theatrical fourth wall. Dracula, however, is often shown in close-up creating the sense that he is threateningly too near, closing in. The camera occasionally sweeps towards him creating the illusion that he is gliding across the room in a supernatural movement (an image to which Coppola paid homage in his version of Dracula (1992) when Oldman sweeps across the room). The only other character seen in such ominous close-up is Mina, and only once she has become a vampire herself.
The thematic juxtaposition of Dracula against Von Helsing is also visually deployed. They are both elderly, powerful figures that dictate what happens to poor Mina. They are visual foils. Von Helsing is white haired while Dracula’s hair is jet black. Von Helsing is almost always in the light and in the civilized confines of a Victorian home. Dracula is almost always enshrouded in darkness and mist, and usually outdoors, or in his castles of wild foreign origin or ruin. Dracula takes residence in the wild ruins of Carfax Abby, a setting to which the viewer is only exposed towards the end of the film. Its threatening backdrop is a strong contrast to the otherwise secure setting of Mina’s home, otherwise invaded by open windows and wild bats. The wild outdoors is a visual foil to the civilized indoors.
However, the conventional visual of the silent film is married into a new form of juxtaposition. Dracula and Von Helsing are likened as foils through speech. They are the only two characters who carry ‘foreign’ accents. All of the other characters have normalized Victorian British accents. They are both verbally bombastic, authoritative, and patriarchal. This similarity allows the thematic difference of the scientific Von Helsing to be more effectively contrasted against the archaic wildness of Dracula. The latter half of the film maintains the visual conventions established in the earlier parts of the film, but is laden with far more dialogue. Through dialogue we learn of Dracula’s weaknesses, his designs on Minna, the methods by which he can be thwarted, and the superstition come science that Von Helsing believes he represents. The use of newspaper inter-titles is abandoned entirely as the climax of the film approaches, and audiences have been conditioned to follow the narrative through dialogue. However, the dialogue remains largely expository, and carries only the esoteric details of the narrative, while the emotional impetus of the film is carried through visual convention. Shakespearean text-based narrative, this is not, but rather a unique representation of the changing artform of film at the cusp of the silent film era, and the ‘talkie.’
The convention of inter-titles from the silent film era is present in different formats that seem to ease the viewer out of such conventions into other expository forms. Early in the film, spoken narration is introduced as an important element. The verbal warnings of the village peasants to Renfield are almost exclusively expository. They inform the listener/viewer (via dialogue with Renfield) that Dracula’s castle is a house of vampires and that to travel there is certain doom. In this way, the dialogue takes the place of the traditional inter-title that would have formerly provided such exposition as information from an omniscient narrator, or as dialogue presented in a textual form, on-screen. In fact, the convention of the inter-title is maintained in several ways early in the film. Visuals which provide the audience member with the perspective of the reader on-screen make use of newspaper articles that fill the position formerly occupied by the inter-title. From printed newspaper articles the viewer is informed of the tragedy on the ship on which Dracula traveled, amongst other things.
Other visual conventions are also present. While the opening scene is dialogue-laden, much of the early part of the narrative contains very little dialogue. The characterization of Dracula is accomplished with sweeping histrionic movements, slow and deliberate. His white shirt and pale face float through scenes in which his black clothing renders his body invisible against a black background. Most scenes are filmed by a stationary camera positioned as the theatrical fourth wall. Dracula, however, is often shown in close-up creating the sense that he is threateningly too near, closing in. The camera occasionally sweeps towards him creating the illusion that he is gliding across the room in a supernatural movement (an image to which Coppola paid homage in his version of Dracula (1992) when Oldman sweeps across the room). The only other character seen in such ominous close-up is Mina, and only once she has become a vampire herself.
The thematic juxtaposition of Dracula against Von Helsing is also visually deployed. They are both elderly, powerful figures that dictate what happens to poor Mina. They are visual foils. Von Helsing is white haired while Dracula’s hair is jet black. Von Helsing is almost always in the light and in the civilized confines of a Victorian home. Dracula is almost always enshrouded in darkness and mist, and usually outdoors, or in his castles of wild foreign origin or ruin. Dracula takes residence in the wild ruins of Carfax Abby, a setting to which the viewer is only exposed towards the end of the film. Its threatening backdrop is a strong contrast to the otherwise secure setting of Mina’s home, otherwise invaded by open windows and wild bats. The wild outdoors is a visual foil to the civilized indoors.
However, the conventional visual of the silent film is married into a new form of juxtaposition. Dracula and Von Helsing are likened as foils through speech. They are the only two characters who carry ‘foreign’ accents. All of the other characters have normalized Victorian British accents. They are both verbally bombastic, authoritative, and patriarchal. This similarity allows the thematic difference of the scientific Von Helsing to be more effectively contrasted against the archaic wildness of Dracula. The latter half of the film maintains the visual conventions established in the earlier parts of the film, but is laden with far more dialogue. Through dialogue we learn of Dracula’s weaknesses, his designs on Minna, the methods by which he can be thwarted, and the superstition come science that Von Helsing believes he represents. The use of newspaper inter-titles is abandoned entirely as the climax of the film approaches, and audiences have been conditioned to follow the narrative through dialogue. However, the dialogue remains largely expository, and carries only the esoteric details of the narrative, while the emotional impetus of the film is carried through visual convention. Shakespearean text-based narrative, this is not, but rather a unique representation of the changing artform of film at the cusp of the silent film era, and the ‘talkie.’
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Rory's first paycheque ever: FAIL!
You know your son is dull when . . . How dumb do you have to be to make such a mistake!? Who do you know named "Bory!?"
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