A PAPER FOR PRESENTATION AT THE

NATIONAL WOMEN'S STUDIES ASSOCIATION

MID-ATLANTIC REGION CONFERENCE

ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND

19-21 OCTOBER 1990

BY

JOANNE KLEIN

DEPARTMENT OF DRAMATIC ARTS

ST. MARY'S COLLEGE OF MARYLAND

ST. MARY'S CITY, MARYLAND 20686

The narrative functions of the male gaze and male desire have received instructive attention from feminist theorists: texts construct their readers as male-identified, becoming legible only if mediated by a male gaze that renders women objects in a male-governed field of signs, and male desire operates to inscribe women in accessory roles. Particularly in film studies, the confounded and compounded effects of these dominant conventions have been widely scrutinized and debated. In this paper, I shall examine spectator and narrative configurations in three films that attempt to disengage these two processes of objectifying women: Harold Pinter's The French Lieutenant's Woman, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, and Agnes Varda's Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi).

All three films employ Brechtian strategies of distanciation in order to foreground the apparati of their media and to re-situate the spectator in relation to the "story." Lee and Varda adopt a pseudo-documentary style that features reportage by characters who directly address the camera, thereby underscoring the artifices of storytelling and moviemaking and expelling the viewer from habitual identifications within the text. Although Pinter's script takes a different approach (diachronic narratives) toward meta-cinematic dislocation of spectating, in all three cases male desire is problematized by its presence in the nexus of discourses and by its absence as a trajectory toward closure.

When, in 1973, the pioneer feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema") traced the genesis of the male gaze and issued a call for dismantling "the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions," she was reacting against a "complex interaction of looks [by the camera, the audience, and the characters, themselves, that] is specific to film." She based her recommendation -- "to free the look of the camera into its materiality of time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment" -- on her argument that the conventions of film narrative operate "to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience." This process has traditionally operated to suture spectators to the male protagonist, whose look controls the film fantasy and thereby situates the identified spectator in a position of power, and to commodify female figures by rendering them as fetish objects or by demystifying, devaluing, punishing, or saving them in order to void their threat. Annette Kuhn (Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, 1982) identifies "the fundamental project of feminist film analysis" as centering "on making visible the invisible," echoing Mulvey's call for attention to the entire cinematic apparatus in its capacity for constructing meanings and ideologies that tend to disappear behind a presumption that cinema is "a neutral means of communicating already-constituted significations." In a 1988 number of The Drama Review, Elin Diamond reviewed the situation of feminist film theorists and linked their project with the aesthetic/political program of theatre theorist, Bertolt Brecht:

Brecht's attendance to the relationship between the spectator and the spectacle, his program for unstitching sutures by foregrounding the apparati of production, have great promise as solutions to the predicaments of theorists and makers of (post-feminist?) film. The three films I shall address in this paper are among many released since Mulvey's doctrine that constitute responses to her plea and liberate the spectator from passive bondage to the male gaze.

The French Lieutenant's Woman, a film based on the novel by John Fowles and released in 1981, is the first of three problematized titles I need to confront in this paper. As adapted by Harold Pinter and directed by Karel Reisz (and, no less, as originally written by John Fowles), the title or notion of The French Lieutenant's Woman is baldly exposed as a false construct that is deconstructed in various ways by the entitled work, itself. In the first place, the story of Sarah reveals that she herself has fabricated this apparent explanation of her nonconforming behavior in order to trap others in a set of expectations that allow her to act freely: by falsely representing herself as a culturally encodable object (the victim of an absent man), she creates her own freedom and subjecthood; she withdraws her story from their story. A less conspicuous deconstruction of the title, however, occurs on other levels of the narrative and exemplifies the role of "making visible the invisible" in a feminist poetics of film.

Although the Fowles novel contains its own deconstructive systems (and these clearly inspire Pinter's adaptation of the work for film), I shall restrict my arguments to Brechtian aspects of the film for the purposes of this paper. In its filmed version, The French Lieutenant's Woman is fundamentally a meta-movie: a movie about making a movie. Pinter's conceit for converting the novel's narrative misgivings, diachronic viewpoint, patchwork texts, and multiple endings into the medium of film results in an exemplary foregrounding of apparatus. The movie is precisely about its own production; mimesis becomes its subject not only within the story of Sarah's storymaking, but also through its emphatic disclosure of its own storytelling artifices. By intercutting the scenes of (familiar, but defamiliarized) Victorian romance with modern day scenes that trace the concurrent lives of the "film actors," Pinter focuses our attention on acting, faking, and posturing as a reiterated subject. Not only do the two stories predict, contradict, and interdict each other, but also they qualify each other by pointing at material codifications such as costuming, set dressing, and camera situation. In this way, the film moves toward deconstructing its own textual and cultural operations, toward dematerializing the ideology of material reality, in the manner invited by Mulvey and Kuhn.

The male gaze is dismantled both by the intercutting of stories (suture interruptus? -- side note: most people who have seen the film do not recall the presence of the modern scenes, apparently having deleted them from memory in favor of a more habitual relationship with phallocentric Victorian romance) and by other frustrations of identification with "hero" Charles's point of view. Male narrativity, elucidated through Charles's mistaken presumptions about Sarah ("a fallen woman must keep on falling") and "actor" Mike's insistence that "actress" Anna conform with the patriarchal morphologies of Victorian fiction, is fraught with disaster on all levels of this film. Our composite hero, Charles/Mike, is manipulated and marginalized by his own narrative desire in such a way that we spectators are expelled from identification with his subjectivity. He becomes the victim of his own phallocentric fictions in both periods of the film. Sarah/Anna, on the other hand, forms a dialectic (within and between each character) in which she is repeatedly fetishized and defetishized (eg. Anna cursing at "Sarah's" corset), so that any constitution of her as an accessory or object always renders itself an illusion.

Except for Sarah, who consistently invents the pattern of her life and who remains, nonetheless, a figment of fiction, each of Pinter's characters, Victorian or modern, obeys the restrictions of some extrinsic artifice. Although the dynamic between Pinter's diachronic plots retrieves and enriches many of the novel's techniques and concerns, its foremost achievement lies in its approximation of Fowles's alternative endings. Both writers, by means of similar pretexts, imply that perfect endings are the stuff of fiction. When Fowles withdraws his "narrator" and when Pinter withdraws his "script," the stories conclude otherwise, accentuating the artifices of fiction and imposed definition. Through this device of contradictory endings, both Fowles and Pinter extend the condition of inconclusiveness beyond the internal action of the story, referring the problem of closure, in all its dialectical complexity, to the reader or spectator. Thus, when Mike, detained by social obligations, searches for Anna he duplicates Charles's route to Sarah in the final scene of the fiction. Upon reaching her dressing room, however, he finds only her wig; she has changed from her Victorian costume and left. The final shot of the screenplay shows him at the window of his room in which their fictional reunion had transpired, watching her car disappear. His imperative shout, "Sarah!" reverberates as a demand that life imitate (phallocentric) art and as a lament over the impossibility of this prospect.

For all its clever disruption of insidious gender texts, The French Lieutenant's Woman was a major motion picture release, produced by mainstream institutions and conventionally renowned film artists. The following two films, She's Gotta Have It and Vagabond, are the work of "different voices" (an African-American and a French woman), both of which were developed through alternative apparati and adopt a pseudo-documentary approach to their narratives.

She's Gotta Have It was the first feature film by the independant, African-American filmmaker, Spike Lee, who wrote, edited, directed, and performed a principal role in the movie. Released in 1986, the predominantly black and white film was shot in twelve days on a budget of $175,000, and has subsequently earned over eight million dollars. Its conspicuously titillating title attracted me only by virtue of its capacity for ironic development, and, despite the current controversy over the gender text of Lee's most recent film, Mo' Better Blues (which I have not seen), I was pleased to discover a compelling deconstruction of the title's patriarchal baggage within the film, itself. Consistent with his (financially motivated?) choice of a black and white idiom for this treatment, Lee foregrounds the process of "documenting" his narrative: a study of the elusive, opaque Nola Darling and her relationship with four suitors. His pseudo-cinema verite, pseudo-documentary filmic idiom helps to obscure the object of desire (Nola) and focuses our attention on the suitors' efforts to define her. Ultimately, the fitful montage, which contains frequent Brechtian (distancing) interruptions that make visible both filmmaking conceits and character apologia, describes Nola's escape from narrative explanation driven by male-identified desire and the consequent entrapment of the "men" in their own (unavailing) stories.

The various structural conceits of this film diametrically oppose the tropes and conventions of "mainstream" (white male) cinema. Because Lee is himself a member of a marginalized group, he is sensitive to culturally constructed stereotypes and prejudices, as well as the role of narrative subjectivity in encoding "otherness." Consequently, he problematizes the cinematic convention of omniscient (insidious) narration by foregrounding his own exertions, as well as those of his various camera-confronted characters, at storytelling. (By playing one of the suitors, Mars Blackmon, in the film, he makes his presence disruptively apparent in our efforts to "willingly suspend our disbelief" and consume the story from our usual unproblematized hero-identified spectatorial situation.) Furthermore, he evokes certain cinematic figures (parts create wholes, wholes equal parts, Don Juans are male, males are individuated, females are composited) in order to overturn them.

From the opening moments of the film -- a prefatory citation by Zora Neale Hurston that critiques male desire and converts men into objects in a world in which women's dreams are truth and ". . . they act and do things accordingly,"¹ followed by a visual catalogue of the difficulties of observation (images of barriers, photographs, grates, fences, glimpses of things obscured by viewer/camera disadvantage) -- Lee's subject is subjectivity. Because the field of signs -- usually overdetermined by the male gaze -- is rendered conspicuously artificial through Lee's foregrounding of his own filmmaking, audience identification becomes an unsatisfiable project (except in the hardest cases of perverse male point-of-view habituation).

To some extent, Nola achieves subjecthood; more than any other character, she governs the field of signs and determines our view of developments. But Lee's artistic and political savvy, made manifest in his Brechtian penchant for keeping his choices prominent, enables him to skirt such presumption. Clearly, he situates Nola in a reverse Don Juan configuration in order to provoke questioning of the gender-based "double standard." Furthermore, it is apparent that Nola does not play the men against each other, however much the men prefer to construct (or condemn) her actions by explaining them in miscalculated phallocentric stories. The men again become the victims of their own macho mythologies (she's gotta have it), while the only conclusions we can draw from the film are that Nola has a healthy sexual drive (we have no reason to doubt the psychiatrist's statement to this effect) and that Nola's mind, body, and dream are her own to control.

The nature and purpose of Lee's narrative is less a story than an exemplification of Nola's opening and closing remarks. In her introductory direct address of the camera/viewer, she states her ground rules: "I can only do it in my own bed." The iconographic bed together with her ever-proliferating wall-painting collage (she is a layout artist by trade -- signifying not just the obvious joke of her sexual proclivities, but also the film's recurrent contention with the desire to draw conclusions from fragments, or form wholes from a jumble of parts) often serve to amplify Nola's subjectivity, such as when the camera pans to her mural recreation of Edvard Munch's "The Cry" as an elucidation of her reaction to rape. The array of men she confronts as suitors is evidently intended as comprehensive: another twist on mainstream cinematic (and cultural) conventions of narrowly typing women according to a phallocentric point of view. Lee's "dog-tagging" project (at one point in the film, we, as spectators rendered female?, are propositioned in rapid succession by direct addresses from characters identified only as Dogs #1 - #10) extends even to the inclusion of one female suitor (Opal), who is generally -- if arguably prejudicially -- equated with the three male suitors in her insensible persistence. Jamie Overstreet (the "sensitive" rapist) and Greer Childs (who suffers from Henry Higgins/Prince Charming rescue mission syndrome) both complain about what they perceive as Nola's regard for the three suitors as one composite being: "To Nola," Jamie explains to the camera, "we were all interchangeable parts of a whole." Here again, Lee has identified, articulated, and reversed one of the narrative traditions that drive the male gaze.

Much has been written about cinematic practices (image and montage) that result in the consumer-oriented dismemberment of women. In She's Gotta Have It, Spike Lee has addressed this issue in the total narrative spectrum of his film. Nola concludes the movie with the following statement: "He [Jamie] wanted a wife. It's about control. My body. My mind. Who's gonna own it? Them? Or me? I'm not a one man woman. There you have it, from a number of people, who all claim to know what makes Nola Darling tick. I think they might know parts of me. . . ." She is finally elusive, opaque, inaccessible, whole; and she is tragic only if we "read in" conditioned viewpoints that the film deliberately critiques, only if we join the suitors in their efforts to assemble fragmentary knowledge according to limited subjectivities, only if we fall into what the film has clearly designated as a trap. Here, male desire (for the female, for the linear, for closure) and male presumption (Jamie: "My eyes found you/Vulnerable in form;" Mars: attributes Nola's "boning" appetite to a bad relationship with her father) spell doom.

The French film, Sans toit ni loi, was released in 1986 and appeared in the United States retitled Vagabond. Once again, the title raises some questions for us, in this case because the original French title (which literally translates "without roof or law") lacks the prejudicial connotations of the English version, "vagabond," which tends prematurely to objectify the central female figure, whose objecthood is much problematized by the film. Of the three films in this study, it is the only one written and/or directed by a woman (Agnes Varda), and it is dedicated to the French new novelist, Nathalie Sarraute. Like She's Gotta Have It, the film consists largely in a pastiche of short-falling explanations, delivered to the camera by various characters who try to define the central Mona. In part due to its use of these "interviews," it also adopts a pseudo-documentary style (Varda's background is as a documentary filmmaker), and is structured as a post mortem investigation into Mona's obscure life, opening and closing with the scene of her (also obscure) death. (She is discovered frozen to death after a fall.) Thus, the process of filmmaking introduces itself again as a subject matter, and the film foregrounds its own conceits and production.

The question of spectator positioning -- of who orients our perceptions or controls the field of signs -- dominates the construction of this film. A "narrator," whose identity is never specified, but might be "Varda," initiates the investigation into Mona's life. Because Mona is already dead by the beginning of the film, our relationship to her is invariably determined by others, who create her story from their memories. Of course, all of their views are cast as contrived, false, contaminated by subjectivity. Mona's true function in the film is as a catalyst through which we learn about others while learning almost nothing about her; she is a surface configuration for the exploration of others: a nouveau roman tropisme. As a figure of enigma who reveals others, who is a cipher of their fears and desires, and against whom they define only themselves, Mona's opacity survives the film unchallenged, untamed, unfetishized, untragic. She is an instructive exemplification of Budd Boetticher's assessment that, in traditional films, "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. . . . In herself the woman has not the slightest importance."

Mona, however, is hardly coded for "looked-at-ness" and display as an object with erotic impact. As men in the film describe her, she is "scary" and "revolting." By the end of the film, it is almost impossible to be saddened at her death. She is so uncodifiable, so unmatriced, so without roof or law, that she is entirely alien and unconsumable. Her indifference (it is more passive than rejection) to the patriarchal institutions that govern her options (she not only abandons her job as a secretary because she's had enough of bosses, but also walks out on the hippie/M.A. philosopher/goat herder on whom she freeloads for a time) is never formulated as a position; she simply exists as a phantom in the glimpses that others provide of her. However much the other women figures envy her and the other stories serve as foils for her freedom, Mona attracts no spectator sympathy or identification. She merely solicits and denies judgment. Nonetheless, our spectatorial detachment is an uneasy one, as we are forced to confront our lack of sympathy for a character whose life has been so relentlessly documented, but is not (and cannot be) culturally or cinematically encoded in any familiar way. As Caryn James reviewed the film in the New York Times, ". . . the film's structure reflects Mona's unanchored life. The narrative loops back and forth among the characters, all the while pulling us toward her death. . . . [The scenario] creates its own fragmented reality and invites the audience to envision it whole."

Feminist theorists, working in the areas of film, literature, and theatre, have noted the operation of masculine narrativity toward linear structure and closure. Some have identified these characteristics with biological and cultural conditioning (the male sex act and his uninterrupted freedom to pursue objectives). Others have invited work toward formulating or historically researching a feminine morphology: tentatively identified as non-linear and without closure. Each of the three films discussed in this paper has moved in that direction by problematizing the functions of male desire and closure as subsuming issues in the "form and content" of their narratives. Further, each of them re-situates spectators by pointedly disrupting habitual identification with male protagonists, by marginalizing male perspectives and making their limitations a subject matter of the film.

Endnote

¹ Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some, they come in with the tide. For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

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