Norman K. Denzin - The Cinematic Society - The Voyeur's Gaze (1995) PDF
Norman K. Denzin - The Cinematic Society - The Voyeur's Gaze (1995) PDF
Norman K. Denzin - The Cinematic Society - The Voyeur's Gaze (1995) PDF
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 13
The Birth of the Cinematic Society
2 42
The Voyeur's Desire
3 64
The Comic Voyeur's Gaze
4 88
The Asian Eye: Charlie Chan and Mr Moto Go to the
Movies
5 114
Flawed Visions: The Obsessive Male Gaze
6 139
Women at the Keyhole: Fatal Female Visions
7 162
Paranoia and the Erotics of Power
8 190
The Voyeur's Future
References 223
Index 240
About the Author 248
Page vi
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mike Featherstone and Stephen Barr for
their support of this project. Interactions in the Unit for Criticism
and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, and
conversations with Mitch Allen, Robert Carringer, William R.
Schroeder, Bryan Cooke, Ben Agger, Carl Couch, David
Altheide, Patricia Clough, Laurel Richardson, James Carey,
Avaid Raz, Katherine Ryan, Nate Stevens, Johanna Bradley,
Richard Bradley, Rachel Denzin, Dilip P. Goaonkar, Larry
Grossberg, Stanford M. Lyman, and Norbert Wiley helped to
clarify my arguments. I wish to thank Rosemary Campbell for
her careful copy editing and her patience and assistance
throughout the production process and Paul Benson for his
meticulous reading of the page proofs and the production of the
index.
Portions of the materials in Chapter 1 appeared in Norman K.
Denzin, 'The Birth of the Cinematic Society', Current
Perspectives in Social Theory, 14, 1994; portions of the materials
in Chapter 4 appeared in Norman K. Denzin 'Chan is Missing:
The Asian Eye Examines Cultural Studies', Symbolic Interaction,
17 (1): 6389, 1994; portions of the materials in Chapter 5,
Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 appeared in Norman K. Denzin, 'The
Voyeur's Desire', Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 13:
13958, 1993; and in Norman K. Denzin, 'The Conversation',
Symbolic Interaction, 15 (2): 13549, 1992.
NORMAN K. DENZIN
Page viii
For now we see through a glass darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known.
I Corinthians, 13:12
I was brought up to be a spectator . . . I was raised to be a voyeur.
John Irving, The World According to Garp, p. 1
Page 1
Introduction
Voyeur: One who derives gratification from surreptitiously watching sex
acts or objects; a Peeping Tom; one who takes a morbid interest in
sordid sights; one who sees; may also be called a spy, reporter, peeper,
detective, psychoanalyst, sociologist, or anthropologist.
The Voyeur's Gaze: 'Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each
individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he
[she] is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this
surveillance over, and against him[her]self. A superb formula: power
exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost'.
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 155
Cinematic Society: That twentieth century social formation that knows
itself through the cinematic apparatus.
I'll bet you that nine out of ten people, if they see a woman across the
courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his
room, will stay and look; no one turns away and says, 'It's none of my
business.' They could pull down the blinds, but they never do; they stand
there and look.
Alfred Hitchcock quoted in Truffaut, Hitchcock: The Definitive Study of
Alfred Hitchcock, p. 216
The postmodern is a visual, cinematic age; it knows itself in part
through the reflections that flow from the camera's eye. The
voyeur is the iconic, postmodern self. Adrift in a sea of symbols,
we find ourselves, voyeurs all, products of the cinematic gaze.
Between 1900 and 1995 Hollywood made at least 1,200 films
1in which the warranted and unwarranted voyeuristic activities of
one or more of the main characters has been presented as a
problem which the character, the film, and by implication the
other members of society self-consciously struggle to resolve.
Hollywood's voyeur, comes in multiple forms: reporter,
detective, sleuth, spy, psychoanalyst, sexual pervert, psychopath,
murderer, rapist, photo-journalist, cameraman, accidental tourist.
In this book I study the voyeur's film and its place in the
cinematic society. Four generic questions organize my analysis.
First, how has this gaze been regulated by gender, race and social
class, such that only particular types of individuals are given the
right to look at others? Second, what motivates this gaze? The
voyeur's perverse desire to look and see what others are unable,
or unwilling, to see is always directed to a valued, cultural end
and structured by personal and social motives. What are these
motives and goals? Third, what functions, or purposes does this
Page 2
gaze (in each historical moment) serve for the larger society?
Fourth, what are the costs and consequences of this gaze for the
individual and society?
The contemporary cinematic society was born in the 1900s, with
the first moving picture shows (see Mayne, 1988: 3). This
society capitalized on the camera's gaze as a method of creating
and documenting reality. The voyeur implemented this gaze
which became central to the workings of the new surveillance
societies of the twentieth century (see Foucault, 1980). From the
early silent Peeping Tom films of the 1900s (Uncle Josh at the
Moving Picture Show (1902); The Story the Biograph Told
(1904)), to such contemporary productions as sex, lies and
videotape (1989), Silence of the Lambs (1990), Pacific Heights
(1990), Sleeping with the Enemy (1990) and What About Bob
(1991), the voyeur and his or her difficulties have been a central
preoccupation of the Hollywood filmmaker. 2
Hollywood's reflexive treatment of the voyeur has vacillated over
the years, criss-crossing genres, film categories, and dramatic
forms, moving between newspaper, reporter and private eye
films (Front Page, Harper, Salvador), to spy and espionage
movies (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the James Bond
series), women's films (Rebecca, Suspicion, The Cat. People,
Stella Dallas, Betrayed, Black Widow, I've Heard the Mermaids
Singing), avant-garde cinema (Meshes of the Afternoon), Gothic
melodramas (Psycho, Secret Beyond the Door), unclassifiable
classics (Citizen Kane), family melodramas (Ordinary People,
Terms of Endearment), murder mysteries with happy endings
(Rear Window), to comedies (High Anxiety, Cheap Detective,
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, Stakeout), sport dramas (The
Natural), biographies (If You Could See What I Hear), horror
(Dracula), science fiction (Fahrenheit 451, The Prisoner, (the
TV series)), documentaries (Man with a Movie Camera, The
Thin Blue Line) and westerns (Pale Rider). In these texts the
voyeur's obsessive desire to look defines the gaze of normal
human beings. Films such as those analysed in this work serve as
distorted reflections of the filmmaker's preoccupations with the
truth and accuracy of the cinematic gaze and the necessity of the
voyeur's look for an understanding of society.3
I study a category of cinematic productions, called reflexive-
voyeuristic cinema (see below and Chapters 1 and 2).4The
voyeur, a key to such texts, becomes a metaphor for the knowing
eye who sees through the fabricated structures of truth that a
society presents to itself. This is the cinematic version of
Foucault's gaze. That gaze which each of us has interiorized.
That gaze which has been institutionalized in contemporary,
postmodern everyday life; the gaze which I may pay you to
perform for me; that gaze which you may ask me to perform for
you. This is the gaze of surveillance, the gaze of power, the gaze
which unveils the private and makes it public. It is the
ethnographer's and the fieldworker's gaze; the gaze which seeks
to expose the social and reveal the hidden truths that lie therein.
It is the camera's gaze instantiated in cinema and TV.
This investigation differs from earlier studies (Everson, 1972;
Todorov, 1977; Tuska, 1978, 1984; Penzler, 1977; Rubenstein,
1979; Gamman, 1989;
Page 3
Gamman and Marshment, 1989), which have been guided by
purely historical, structural, or popular concerns. These earlier
works have not sought to anchor the voyeur's presence within an
interpretive framework that transcends the particularities of a
specific genre, for example the spy, detective, reporter, murderer
or sexual pervert film (but see Mulvey, 1989; Burch, 1990; and
Mayne, 1990). With few exceptions, these investigations have
not analysed Hollywood as a meaning-making institution and
examined the systems of discourse that have shaped the creation
and production of the voyeuristic subject. Nor have they
followed the evolution and development of the voyeur in the
cinematic society and in American film. 5
The Voyeur's Discourse
While the voyeur's film presumably speaks to the untoward,
obsessive gaze in contemporary life, it does so by creating a very
specific type of discourse. The voyeur is presented as a
'diseased', often paranoid, violent individual who violates the
norms of everyday life. Films validate these depictions of the
voyeur by having persons in power (family members, editors,
supervisors, the police) articulate how and why the voyeur is a
sick or deviant person and why his or her gaze is inappropriate.
These tellings shape the public understanding that surrounds the
abnormal gaze and the voyeur's presence in society.
These films make voyeuristic looking a problematic activity, but
they do so in a very specific way. A taken-for-granted double
and triple reflexivity organizes these texts. The cinematic
apparatus of course turns the spectator into a voyeur who gazes
at the screen. This gaze is focused in the voyeuristic gazing of
the voyeur, so a voyeur watches a voyeur gaze. Often, however,
the voyeur's gaze is returned by an on-screen voyeur (for
example the early reciprocated gaze between the protagonist and
the villain in Bedroom Window), in which case a third level of
voyeurism occurs as the spectator is drawn into the gaze that
connects the two voyeurs gazing at one another. In such
moments the viewer-in-the-theatre may experience the emotions
of shame, embarrassment and fear that are felt by the illicit
looker who has been caught looking (see Goffman, 1963: 67).
Each version of the voyeur and the gaze makes a spectacle out of
this individual and simplistically equates visual knowledge with
interactional interpretive understanding (see Chapters 2 and 8).
Each version deploys a particular version of the voyeur's desires
to look and to know. These desires are multiple: erotic, political,
scientific, medical, investigative, criminal, personal. Their
analysis and their place within the voyeur's agenda, as practised
in the current historical moment, should make those of us who
act as voyeurs more sensitive to the looking eye that casts its
gaze on us and our reflective practices.
Page 4
This Work
This work begins where Images of Postmodernism: Social
Theory and Contemporary Cinema (Denzin, 1991a) ended; with
the voyeur and the eye of the postmodern. As I did in this earlier
work, I analyse the most popular of the popular, 6examining
award-winning films for the time period of my study 7(basically
1940 to the present).8
Selecting the Films
I am analysing what I regard as the best exemplars of the
reflexive-voyeuristic film. All of the films analysed share one or
more of the following characteristics. They (a) are regarded as
classics (for example, the Hitchcock texts), (b) are included on
the lists of other researchers, reviewers and critics (for example,
Gamman, 1989; Everson, 1972; Penzler, 1977; Tuska, 1978;
Springer, 1991; Ryan and Kellner, 1988), (c) have been
nominated for awards, or (d) were (and are) top video rentals, or
big moneymakers when they were released. (I use these criteria
as measures of the film's popularity and importance.)9
In the eight chapters which follow I take up the
institutionalization of the cinematic apparatuses in American
society (Chapter 1), the voyeur's aesthetic, the history of the
voyeur's film and the emergence of the voyeur as a valued, yet
feared social type (Chapter 2). Chapter 3 examines a select
number of reflexive-voyeuristic comedies (Broadcast News
(1987), Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), Blue Velvet (1986),
sex, lies and videotape (1989)) from the classic and
contemporary periods, I argue that in the comedy form the
dangers of voyeurism are neutralized, making voyeurism, in its
multiple forms (detective, reporting, political, spies, erotic)
acceptable to the members of the surveillance, cinematic society.
These films also present the female gaze as an inevitable
supplement to the masculine eye and the male project.
Chapters 4 and 5 examine the positioning of the voyeur during
Hollywood's classic, and postwar periods (193066). Chapter 4
investigates the minority group member who is given this
privileged gaze (Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), Mr Moto's
Last Warning (1939), Chan is Missing (1982)). These films
show how the pre and post-World War II cinematic American
Society made a place for the 'foreign' voyeur, turning his 'evil'
eye to good use.
Chapter 5 studies the voyeurism of the classic, mid-century male
photographer-detective. I examine Hitchcock's Rear Window
(1954) and Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966). These two modernist
directors make their voyeur a part of the spectacle that is filmed.
They explore the malevolent uses of the camera in the
surveillance society. They mourn the loss of community that the
cinematic society experiences as it comes increasingly to rely on
images for its understandings of how everyday life operates.
Chapters 6 and 7 move to the contemporary period. These
chapters
Page 5
interrogate the obsessive, postmodern gazes of female (Fatal
Attraction (1987), Black Widow (1986)) and male voyeurs (The
Conversation (1974)), who are on both sides of the keyhole,
watching one another, women watching women, men watching
men. Following Irigaray (1985), I suggest that the female voyeur
often experiences a form of self-knowledge that is not available
to the male. The conspiratorial film, as a type of masculine,
voyeuristic text, is examined in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 offers
reflections on the future of the voyeur and the cinematic society.
Here I review various ethical codes that have been brought to the
voyeur's project, while developing arguments for a post-
pragmatist epistemology that does not solely rely on the voyeur's
look.
Throughout, I attempt to deal with the multiple forms of the
voyeur's gaze. In so doing my purpose is to expose the cultural
logics which have led the postmodern self to interiorize this
investigative gaze. This investigative gaze is more than a gaze, it
is the exercise of power in its rawest, yet most sophisticated
forms. This gaze unmasks all of us, and makes each of us a
willing participant in the regimes of surveillance, deterrence,
power and control that threaten to destroy the very fabric of
postmodern life.
A loosely knit framework organizes the eight chapters that
follow. I seek a reflexive framework which will objectify and
make problematic the ideological presuppositions that underwrite
the cinematic society, and the traditional, realist cinematic,
scientific, literary and ethnographic voyeuristic texts this society
appears to require. A brief overview of this framework is
necessary.
Interpretive Framework
As indicated, the voyeur is a recognizable social type. He or she
takes morbid pleasure in looking at the sordid, private activities
of others. 10The voyeur and his or her gaze come in the
following forms: the clinical gaze of medicine, psychoanalysis
and science (including archaeologists, anthropologists,
sociologists, psychologists, physicists, etc.); the investigative
gazes of the police state, including crime detection, and the work
of the private investigator and the spy; the informational gaze of
news reportage, including the reports and work of news and
criminal reporter and photo-journalists; the erotic, violent gaze of
Peeping Toms, usually men looking at the bodies of
women;11and the accidental, unexpected gaze of innocent by-
standers, including children who happen to see what others don't
want seen; the inquisitive, assertive, peering gaze of the tourist
(Urry, 1990).12
Five complex, and interrelated propositions organize my analysis
of this figure and his or her place in the cinematic society. The
first asserts that the figure of the voyeur, in whatever form,
defines personal, sacred, private spaces in social life. By
invading these spaces, the voyeur keeps alive the concept of a
private world that is distinct from the public spheres of
Page 6
everyday life. 13The cultural logics of capitalism and democracy
require that these two spheres be clearly separated and protected
(see Baran and Sweezy, 1973: 122; Zaretsky, 1976: 65; Mayne,
1988: 69). Together the ideologies of capitalism and democracy
reproduce and inscribe the concept of the free, interacting,
autonomous individual. This individual, and his or her private
spaces, are central to the mythologies of the capitalist-democratic
society. The voyeur simultaneously challenges and protects the
spaces this individual inhabits.
My second proposition is epistemological and concerns claims
about truth and knowledge. I propose that throughout the
twentieth century, cinema, and society's voyeurs, in their gazing,
investigative actions have progressively elaborated the
epistemologies of scientific realism (see Chapters 1 and 2). This
epistemology argues that truthful statements about the world can
be made. These statements will be based on direct observation
and the methods of induction and deduction. However, the
methods of proof of the voyeur have always gone beyond strict
deductive, hypodeductive reasoning. They have traditionally
been pragmatic, moving always from consequences (dead
bodies, committed crimes), back to the causes of those effects
(on pragmatism and its history see Denzin, 1991a; on the
scientific methods of detection of the detective see Truzzi, 1976).
The cinematic apparatus introduced into American society new
methods of proof and verification, most importantly the picture,
or the image, of a person, event or thing. The camera provided
solid evidence of the events that the investigative voyeur
attempted to explain. He or she then worked back from the scene
of the crime (its consequences) to its causes. The voyeur
implemented the pragmatic method and made pragmatism, and
its ways of knowing and verifying truth, a central part of the
American way of life (on the history of pragmatism in American
philosophy see West, 1989). The voyeur taught Americans how
to be both scientific and furtive in their daily investigative
activities.
The pragmatic method of knowing is now under assault. This
method, which the cinematic apparatus has elaborated, through
its development of the voyeur's film, always depended on the
ability of the voyeur to faithfully reproduce reality, either
through the direct gaze, or through the camera's lens. Since the
modern period reflexive-voyeuristic cinema has systematically
attacked this assertion. Starting in the modern period, with films
like Blow-Up, and The Conversation, and continuing to the
present, with conspiratorial texts like Rising Sun and JFK,
Hollywood has systematically attacked the assertion that reality
can be unquestionably captured with the camera. This attack
undermines the voyeur's pragmatic epistemology, for
consequences can no longer be firmly established. Dead bodies
disappear, pictures are destroyed, and reality, as it was previously
known is erased.
Accordingly, the postmodern period confronts an
epistemological crisis. Firm claims about truth, knowledge,
consequences, causes and effects can no longer be made. The
postmodern voyeur searches, then, for a new
Page 7
epistemological framework. Holding still to the pragmatic
method, the voyeur searches (without success) for a pragmatism
fitted to the cinematic age. This is the topic of Chapter 8.
My third proposition argues that Hollywood progressively
incorporated the voyeur into its own cinematic apparatus. The
history of Hollywood's treatment of the voyeur reveals the
progressive formation, development and elaboration of a film
genre, here called the reflexive-voyeur film. 14This type of film
builds upon and draws from several film genres, or categories,
including the detective, news reporter, thriller and Gothic
romance traditions (for recent discussions of film genre theory
see Altman, 1984/1986, 1987; Neale, 1990; Schatz, 1981;
Brunette and Wills, 1989; and the discussion below). However,
the film noir tradition is perhaps most central to the history of
this type of film (see Krutnik, 1991; Kaplan, 1978; Schrader,
1972/1986; Place and Peterson, 1974/1976; Telotte, 1989, for
discussion of this genre).
Following Altman's (1984/1986: 324; 1987: 95) structural
approach to genre study, I propose that the voyeur's film is
defined by the following semantic (common traits, attitudes,
characters, shots, locations) and syntactic (structural-relational)
elements. Many of these features derive from the film noir
tradition:
a preoccupation with the illicit gaze;
the use of cameras, sophisticated recording equipment, wire-taps,
and so on;
an epistemology which assumes that the truth can be discovered
through a logical process of cause and effect deduction (see
Gledhill, 1978: 14); and knowledge gained through visual
means, including spying;
characters (reporters, psychiatrists, policemen, everyday
voyeurs) called Peeping Toms by their peers;
titles which suggest danger, looking and gazing (Rear Window,
Bedroom Window, Stakeout, sex, lies and videotape);
A visual code borrowed in part from film noir, is deployed and
includes the use of: long, telephoto lenses, wide, high-angle,
subjective, shot-reverse and close-up camera shots, the reflexive
use of off-screen space (i.e. windows); scenes lit for night and an
emphasis on oblique and vertical lines and vertical slits; actors
hidden by shadows; tension emphasizing visual paranoia and
claustrophobia which is created by compositional, cinematic
manipulations and not physical action (that is, claustrophobic
framing devices such as doors, windows, shadows, framed
portraits and mirror reflections. See Schrader, 1972/1986: 1758
on these noir stylistics; also Place and Peterson, 1974/1976: 335;
and Telotte, 1989, Chapter 1).
This visual code violates the compositional principles of
traditional narrative cinema, creating fear and 'a mise-en-scene
designed to unsettle, jar, and disorient the viewer' (Place and
Peterson, 1974/1976: 333).
Page 8
The voyeur's film deploys an investigative narrative structure,
often presupposing a male hero 'in search of the truth about an
event that has already happened, or is about to come to
completion' (Gledhill, 1978: 14). This code stresses the
importance of:
'action defined in male terms with violence connoting the male
sphere' (Gledhill, 1978: 14);
women as the object of the male's investigative activity;
a romantic triangle with women treated either as femmes fatales
or wives and long-suffering girl friends.
Within this framework the voyeur's film, again borrowing from
film noir, 'probes the secrets of female sexuality and male desire
within patterns of submission and dominance' (Gledhill, 1978:
15). 15
My fourth proposition suggests that as an emerging genre type,
Hollywood's treatment of the voyeur has passed through four
interconnected aesthetic, historical and structural phases, termed,
following Jameson 16(1990: 15566) realism, modernism, late
modernism, and postmodernism.17This history of the genre
suggests that it, like all genres, is always in a process of
formation and change (Altman, 1987: 98). Furthermore, this
change has occurred at the intersection of the syntactic and
semantic dimensions which define the form; namely the
coalescence and solidification of a narrative and visual style
focused solely, or primarily on the voyeur's situation. This
emerging coherence in the genre reflects and constitutes 'the very
site of negotiation between Hollywood and its audience, and thus
between ritual and ideological uses of [the] genre' (Altman,
1987: 98).
The voyeur under realism is represented by the naïve, innocent
blatant voyeurism of early primitive cinema (19001920; see
Burch, 1990: 20243). This voyeurism is transformed into the
repressed, never openly acknowledged voyeurism of modernist
and classic Hollywood narrative cinema, the 19301960 period
(see Bordwell et al., 1985, Parts Five and Six; that is Hitchcock's
Rear Window and Vertigo).
The modernist voyeur, in turn, is to be contrasted to the voyeur
of the late modernist period (19601970), given, for example, in
Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), a direct parody of Hitchcock's
style. The postmodern voyeur appears in the late 1970s and
continues to the present, given in De Palma's Hitchcock parodies
(Obsession (1976), Blow Out (1981) and Body Double (1984)),
Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape
(1989), and Stone's JFK (1991).
The postmodern treatment of the voyeur returns to the blatant
voyeurism of the primitive and realist period, only now the
audience is openly drawn into the voyeur's activities. At the same
time, pastiche, not parody, comes to define the filmic treatments
of this figure. Pastiche, a defining feature of the postmodern
aesthetic (Jameson, 1990: 156), reflects a nostalgia for earlier
treatments of voyeurism, while locating the voyeur's
Page 9
practices squarely in everyday life (for example, Bedroom
Window (1987), Sleeping with the Enemy (1990)). 18
These four film phases (primitive cinema/realism, modernism,
late modernist, postmodernism) roughly correspond to the three
major structural phases of capitalism in the twentieth century:
local, monopoly, and multinational-consumerism (Jameson,
1990: 156). Each film phase carried out specific ideological tasks
for capitalism and its surveillance needs. Primitive-realist cinema
introduced the cinematic gaze and the screen voyeur into
American culture. Modernist cinema kept the camera's gaze alive,
but distanced it from everyday life. Under late modernism this
gaze was parodied. With postmodernism the gaze is openly
acknowledged, and its presence everywhere, including in the
living room, is treated as commonplace.
Accordingly the genre called the voyeur's film may be seen as
emerging within each of the above moments. Transformed in
each phase, the voyeur's film emerged most clearly in the early
Hitchcock era, was parodied in the late modernist period (De
Palma), and is now treated with pastiche in the contemporary,
postmodern moment. In each phase the voyeur's gaze was kept
in front of American film-going audiences, serving always to
remind them that even as they gazed on another, they too were
being gazed at.19
My fifth proposition extends the above argument. I want to use
the voyeur's cinematic text as a backdrop for reading current
(and historical) interpretive practices in the social sciences,
especially the practices of ethnography and cultural studies (see
Clough, 1992).20The cinematic apparatuses of contemporary
culture stand in a two-fold relationship to ethnography and
cultural studies. First, the cultural logics of the post-video,
cinematic culture define the lived experiences that a critical
culture studies project takes as its subject matter. Television,
cinema, ethnography, and the panoptic gaze of the cultural
voyeur are the keys to the production of these authentic, realistic
accounts of lived experience. Secondly, in these texts, there is a
subtle and sudden switching of surveillance codes, from
Foucault's panopticon to a system of deterrence (Baudrillard,
1983b: 53), where the person gazed upon is the person doing the
gazing; the voyeur as newsmaker, tourist, travelling
ethnographer.
The voyeur moves back and forth between both forms of
textuality, the cinematic, visual representation of reality, and the
ethnographic text. The unstable relationship between the
ethnographer, the cultural subject, the ethnographic text and
cinematic-video representations cannot be avoided. However,
current cultural critics of ethnography and cultural studies have
yet to seriously interrogate and question their own licence to
gaze. They appear, that is, to justify the gazing eye of the
voyeuristic, cultural critic by appealing to the politics of
resistance that they attempt to write. They remain, accordingly,
under the protective umbrella the surveillance society has
traditionally made available to the voyeur disguised as
ethnographer or fieldworker. My goal is to unmask this voyeur.
Page 10
Notes
1. This figure is tentative, and meant to be indicative, not
definitive. It is taken from The American Film Institute and
Magill's Cinema Annual Cumulative Indexes: 19821986, and
catalogue codes for films listed under the categories of
columnists, newspaper reporters, journalists, photographers,
police, psychoanalysts, detective, espionage, film noir,
filmmaker, horror, law, lawyers, trials, murder, mystery, and
obsessions (see Munden, 1971; Krafsur, 1976: Magill, 1986).
2. It can be easily argued that Alfred Hitchcock established this
preoccupation for Hollywood (see discussion in Chapters 5 and
8). The contemporary director most directly influenced by
Hitchcock appears to be Brian De Palma whose films
consistently elaborate Hitchcock's violent, voyeuristic themes
(e.g. Sisters, Carrie, Obsession, Dressed to Kill). Hitchcock's
films have also been central to feminist theory and criticism,
especially theories about 'male voyeuristic and sadistic impulses'
(Modleski, 1988: 12; and see discussion in Chapters 2 and 5).
3. Throughout this investigation I assume that films define,
mediate, contradict and create new understandings of reality.
These understandings mirror and distort the realities of everyday
life, which are themselves often contradictory. In opening up
previously unexamined corners of reality, and by exaggerating
particular sets of experiences over others, films perpetuate
stereotypes, fears and anxieties that exist in the culture at large.
Subversive readings of films, like the one offered here, are
intended to expose these tensions and contradictions (see Denzin
1991b: 1011, 25562 on the structure of such readings). All
interpretations are subject to multiple readings, and necessarily
the site of political and ideological controversy. Subversive
readings are neither right nor wrong, but they do attempt to
exhaust, or illuminate the multiple (consensual, conflictual,
negotiated, oppositional) meanings that can be brought to and
extracted from a text.
4. Briefly, reflexive-voyeuristic films include any mainstream,
popular film which critiques from within its own political
ideology, refuses the demands of narrative closure, and positions
the voyeur (and the spectator) in the unstable position of
doubting what has been seen.
5. Burch's (1990) comparative analysis of the modes of
representation, and the treatment of the voyeur and the spectator
during the primitive (18951909) and institutional (19091950)
moments in cinema's history is a major exception to this
statement.
6. With the exception of the films examined in Chapter 3
(including the Charlie Chan movies, and The Conversation),
every movie is listed on Variety's 1990 list of 'All-Time Film
Rental Champs, by Decade' (Variety, 1990). In many cases the
films won awards, or were nominated as the outstanding films of
their decade.
7. Following Ray (1985) I divide my study into three basic time
periods: classic Hollywood (193045); the postwar period
(194666) and the contemporary period (1967present). In
Chapter 1 I complicate this breakdown, drawing on Burch
(1990: 186201), adding the phases of primitive and silent cinema
(18951932), early classic (193245), classic (194562), early
postmodern (196272), the middle postmodern period (197280),
and the contemporary period (1980present).
8. Two of the films taken up in Chapter 3 fall in what I call the
pre-classic phase of Hollywood production (193046). In making
these temporal designations I am mindful of the problems
involved in specifying both historical moments and genre types
(see also footnote 1 above, Chapter 1, and Brunette and Wills
(1989: 368)).
9. Each decade since the 1940s has seen the production of at
least one major annual top moneymaking Hollywood reflexive-
voyeurism film: (1940s, Spellbound; 1950s, Rear Window,
Vertigo; 1960s, Blow-Up; 1970s, High Anxiety, Taxi Driver,
Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, China Town; 1980s, Broadcast
News, Stakeout, Field of Dreams, The Big Chill, The Killing
Fields, Blade Runner, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, sex, lies and
videotape; 1990s, JFK, In The Line of Fire, Final Analysis, Basic
Instinct (see Variety, 1990)).
10. Frequently this figure is presented as suffering from, or
exhibiting psychopathological and psychoanalytic deficiencies
(e.g. a fear of women based on faulty motherson relations,
Page 11
and so on). Silence of the Lambs, the story of a man who
sexually molests, murders and then skins women is a recent
(1991) example of this theory.
11. In Chapter 2 I take up the post-Mulvey discourse on the
voyeur's gaze (see Mulvey, 1975/89, 1989 and Modleski, 1988).
12. The sociologist-as-voyeur has used each of these forms of
the gaze.
13. As Mayne (1988: 128, 147) observes, the detective's
itinerary typically involves a movement from private to public,
the 'disentangling of the private sphere from the public' (1988:
128) via the efforts of the protagonist (usually male). The Gothic
mystery (i.e. Psycho) exaggerates this preoccupation with the
private by assigning special significance to the Gothic mansion
and the female's place in that setting and its (and her) connections
to the world outside (see Mayne, 1988: 128).
14. I do not wish to enter into a complex argument over what
constitutes a film genre. I am simply attempting to identify a
category, or type of film which privileges the voyeur's gaze in
ways that transcend the ordinary treatment of the gaze in
mainstream, narrative cinema (i.e. Mulvey's gaze; on the gaze in
classical, mainstream Hollywood cinema see Bordwell et al.,
1985, Part Five; but see also Mayne, 1988: 78).
15. Additional characteristics of the voyeur's film will be given
in Chapter 1, and in the discussion below. Despite its reliance on
the noir tradition, the voyeur's film is not to be confused with
this genre. Missing (or down-played) in the voyeur's text are
such standard noir features as the influences and themes of
German expressionism, postwar existential disillusionment,
documentary realism and the hard-boiled detective tradition.
(Often, for example, the voyeur's story is told within a comedic,
or black comedy frame, i.e. Rear Window, Stakeout, Blue Velvet.)
Preoccupations with problems of crime, political corruption,
police routine, psychotic action, suicidal impulses and street
crime, while often present, are also de-emphasized. Finally, the
use of voice-over/flashbacks, excessive subjective cameras and
the documentary-realist visual style are seldom seen in the
voyeur's film (on these features see Schrader, 1972/1986;
Telotte, 1989: 1139).
16. Robert Carringer suggested the use of Jameson in this
context.
17. Definitions of terms realism: the attempt to accurately
reproduce a real, objective world of objects (see Jameson, 1990:
158); modernism: high art, including abstract expressionism, the
modernist poetry of Pound and Eliot, the international style of
Joyce, Proust and Mann, the films of Hitchcock, Fellini,
Bergman, and Kurosawa (see Jameson, 1990: 159; 1983:
11112); also a historical moment, from the 1920s through the
1960s; postmodernism: a nostalgic, eclectic, elaboration of
modernist and realist tendencies, often through the use of parody
and pastiche (Jameson, 1991: 1617); that historical moment that
extends from the 1960s to the present; a movement in the arts
and architecture (see Denzin, 1991a, Chapter 1).
18. Following Jameson (1991: 1617) I define parody as
burlesque and imitation with a satiric thrust (i.e. the shower and
casket scenes in De Palma's Body Double). Pastiche is blank
parody, a potpourri composition made-up of bits and pieces of
other works, or the imitation of another's style, but without the
biting edge of satire. Parody presumes an original (e.g. the high
modernist style) which can be mocked, while pastiche operates
within a system (the postmodern) characterized by great stylistic
diversity, the absence of clear-cut originals, unique, private,
aesthetic styles, the predominance of reproductions and
simulations of the real, and an eclectic, nostalgic longing for the
past (see Jameson, 1983: 11416). For the sake of explication,
consider Hitchcock as a high modern original, De Palma, as late-
modern parody and Lynch (Blue Velvet) as postmodern pastiche.
19. It can be seen that the voyeur is a historical, cultural, medical
and ideological construction. Films produced during the silent
era (190025) reflected the puritanical values of the temperance
movement. These early films stressed Peeping Tom, risqué
situations where women undressed in front of windows,
unfaithful husbands cheated on their wives, and were peered
upon through keyholes, and detectives discovered sick criminals
who were menaces to women, children, family and the state (e.g.
Peeping Tom 1901; Getting Evidence, 1906; Sherlock Holmes in
Deadly Danger, 1908; see Mayne, 1990: Chapter 5; Everson
1972: Chapter 2). Films made during prohibition and the jazz era
(191934) elaborated (and overlapped
Page 12
with) the sexual themes of the silent era, bringing to the screen
private investigators and news reporters who balanced
Peeping Tomism with an official sanction to look in the name
of the public (e.g.; Bull Dog Drummond, Charlie Chan, Hildy
Johnson, Dr Mabuse, 1922; Star Reporter, 1921; Headlines,
1925; Telling the World, 1928; the Thin Man series, Paths to
Paradise, 1925; While the City Sleeps, 1928; Curtain at Eight,
1934; see Everson 1972: Chapters 3 and 5; Pitts, 1979, 1990).
The two World Wars brought to the screen the FBI agent (the
J. Edgar Hoover series), film noir and other detectives (Philip
Marlow, Philo Vance) and the state spy (e.g. Spies, 1928; The
Thirty Nine Steps, 1935; Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 1939;
Foreign Correspondent, 1940; Casablanca, 1942; Watch on
the Rhine, 1943; Cloak and Danger, 1946; Iron Curtain,
1948). This figure would be transformed during the cold war
era (North by Northwest, 1959; Dr No, 1963; Ipcress File,
1965; see Rubenstein, 1979: 2213; Pitts, 1979; Parish and
Pitts, 1974, 1986, 1991) and feminized in the 1960s (e.g.
Modesty Blaise, see Penzler, 1977: 910), The aftermath of the
Civil Rights movement and the race riots of the 1960s brought
black (African-American) private eyes and super spades to
film (In the Heat of the Night, 1967; Shaft, 1971; Shaft's Big
Score, 1972; Shaft in Africa, 1973; Cotton Comes to Harlem,
1970; Lethal Weapon, 1989, 1990). The American and British
conservative backlash to the liberal protests of the late 1960s
produced throughout the 1970s and into the 1990s (e.g., Q &
A, 1990; Hard to Kill, 1990), law and order, loner cops, and
militaristic films, including those starring Bruce Lee, Chuck
Norris, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood and Steve Seagal
(see Ryan and Kellner, 1988: Chapters 7 and 8). Finally, the
emergence, by the end of the 1980s, of third-world
investigative films which position the 'spectator in the role of
the cultural outsider by virtue of techniques that encourage
identification with the reporter protagonist' (Springer, 1991:
168). Films in this grouping include The Year of Living
Dangerously (1982), Last Plane Out (1983), Under Fire
(1983), The Killing Fields (1984), Salvador (1985), Cry
Freedom (1987) and Deadline (1987).
20. Borrowing from and modifying Stacey (1994: 223) I make a
distinction between the textual (cinematic) and the empirical
(ethnographic) voyeur. This is arbitrary because the two versions
of the voyeur are hybrids, folded into and derivative of one
another.
Page 13
1
The Birth of the Cinematic Society
Almost all sciences owe something to dilettantes, often very valuable
view-points. But dilettantism as a leading principle would be the end of
science. He who yearns for seeing something should go to the cinema,
though it will be offered to him copiously today in literary form . . .
Nothing is farther from the intent of these thoroughly serious studies
than such an attitude.
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1p. 29
All great and unusual men and women sooner or later march through
the lens of the sound-recording camera to appear and talk to all the
peoples of the earth. Everybody everywhere by grace of the motion
picture enterprise eventually can meet face to face every living person
of interest or importance.
Hayes, quoted in Davis, Response to Innovation: A Study of Popular
Argument about New Mass Media, p. 67
Thus the mechanical eye reproduced the naked eye, becoming, in the
process, a 'hearing gaze and a speaking gaze . . . a moment of balance
between speech, [vision] and spectacle'.
Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p. 115
In the space of 30 years (190030) cinema became an integral part
of American society. Going to the movies became a weekly
pastime for a majority of Americans. American films were
regularly exported to Europe. Motion pictures became a national
institution. Hollywood stars became personal idols, fan clubs
were formed and a movie theatre with its marquee was a
permanent part of virtually every American community. A new
visual literacy was being produced. Americans were learning to
look and see things they hadn't seen before.2
The sociological impact of cinema on the newly industrializing
societies and its import for social theory was virtually ignored, or
slighted by the great classical social theorists, as illustrated by
Weber's remarks, quoted above. Only the American pragmatists
paid attention to this new industry and its effects on society. They
(Cooley (1902/1922, 1909); Mead (1925/1926/1964); Park
(1926/1967); Blumer (1933)), like their German counterparts in
the 1930s (the Frankfurt School) and C. Wright Mills in the
1950s, viewed the movies with distaste and disdain (see below
pp. 1920 and Denzin, 1991a, Chapter 8).
Hollywood's cinematic apparatus ushered into American civil
society a
Page 14
new scopic regime which initially privileged the visual over the
aural (see Jay, 1988: 3). This visual culture muted the voice of
the other, producing a loss of aurality (silent film), a privileging
of imagery over sound. But quickly this loss of voice was
overturned, merging the panoptic with the panauditory. The
cinematic, surveillance society soon became a disciplinary
structure filled with subjects (voyeurs) who obsessively looked
and gazed at one another, as they became, at the same time,
obsessive listeners, eavesdroppers, persons whose voices and
telephone lines could be tapped, voices that could be dubbed,
new versions of the spoken and seen self. 3A certain madness of
vision and sound (Jay, 1988: 19) was created, a complex, new
scopic and ocular culture based on an overarching gaze that
turned each individual into a surveillance agent for the state, the
self and the other.
American cinema created a space for a certain kind of public,
communal urban life. Inside the new movie palaces Americans
entered the public realm. But this was a self-contained realm, the
public made private by the darkness of the theatre, and here in
these dark places a version of Bakhtin's carnival was enacted
(Bakhtin, 1968; Stam, 1989, 1991). In these darkened spaces
utopian stories, political fantasies and mythic narratives were
told. These stories effectively erased the corrosive consequences
and features of an oppressive racial and gender stratification
system in the United States. The kernels of utopian fantasy
contained in these stories 'constituted the fulfillment of what was
desired [yet] absent within the status quo' (Stam, 1989: 224); that
is, an emotionally harmonious gender and racial system that had
successfully integrated racial and ethnic differences into the core
emotional elements of the American self.
It can be argued, modifying Stam (1989: 224) who elaborates
Bakhtin, that these stories were heard and seen within the
framework of the 'carnival'. In the carnival glitter of the theatre,
the 'dystopian realities of contemporary urban life under . . .
capitalism [were] . . . through an artistic ''change of signs"
turn[ed] into the simulacrum of a playful and equalitarian
communitas, a world characterized by communicative
transparency and "free and familiar contact"' (Stam, 1989: 224).
As Nasaw (1994: 10) suggests 'All felt equally welcome inside
the picture palaces because all were equally out of place.' The
embourgeoisement of the movies made them safe places for
family entertainment. Thus did cinema create its particular
version and vision of public, civil society.
Cinema made voyeurs out of spectators (Metz, 1982: 94). In the
shadows of the theatre is reproduced the concept of a private,
sacred space which the spectator enters. In that darkened space
the spectator voyeuristically enters the public and private worlds
that the on-screen voyeur trespasses.4A double reflexivity of
vision and experience was produced. The spectator could
simultaneously (and vicariously) experience the thrill, desire,
dangers and invasions of being both a voyeur and the subject
gazed upon. At the same time, the cinematic apparatus operated
as a technology of gender (and race) which reproduced the
structure of
Page 15
patriarchy (and racism) by implementing a concept of looking
and spectatorship which often made women (and non-whites) the
objects of the male (white) gaze (de Lauretis, 1987: 15). Thus
did the movies create the gender and race-biased cinematic eye
and an attendant cinematic imagination fitted to the values of the
larger American culture.
Cinema elaborated the epistemology of scientific realism already
deeply rooted in American culture. This epistemology held that
faithful, direct and truthful knowledge of the actual world could
be produced. This system was firmly established in nineteenth
century American religion, philosophy, science and technology,
and it had quickly taken hold in journalism and photo-journalism
(Persons, 1958: 332). It elaborated the pragmatic, instrumental
set of beliefs that organized American popular culture (West,
1989: 5), a 'hotel civilization' 5impatient with abstract theories
and obsessed with mobility and new inventions (West, 1989: 5).
It found its expression in literary works, especially the novels of
Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore
Drieser, that were both naturalistic and realistic (see Persons,
1958: 3327). Cinema reproduced a realistic and naturalistic
discourse about the universe of experience and appearance.
The movies became a technology and apparatus of power that
would organize and bring meaning to everyday lives. They
would function as adjuncts to the twentieth century surveillance
societies, deploying the cinematic gaze and its narratives in the
service of the state.6Cinema would create a new social type,7the
voyeur,8or Peeping Tom, who would, in various guises
(detective, psychoanalyst, crime reporter, investigative journalist,
innocent, by-stander, sexual pervert) elevate the concept of
looking to new levels (see Chapter 2).9This voyeur, as argued in
the Introduction, would gaze into the sacred, hidden places of
society. By invading private spaces the voyeur defined the
sanctity of such spaces, even as their presence was being erased
by the surveillance structures of the democratic societies.
The archaeological and genealogical history of how this
happened is my topic in this chapter. This history is complex,
and can be told many different ways.10Following Comolli
(197172/1985) I examine the links in the ideological and
historical chain that begins with Thomas Edison's kinetograph,
and moves through the birth of the picture palace, the
Hollywood scandals of the 1920s, the birth of sound and colour
film, production codes, and early narrative cinema. I then cycle
back into the archaeology of the camera's gaze, the new visual
codes that followed from this gaze, and the insertion of this gaze
into everyday American life.
I ask how this figure of the voyeur and his or her gaze became a
central part of the contemporary cinematic society. The cinematic
gaze, visual and auditory to the core, instantiates and defines the
medical, psychiatric, military, criminological, ethnographic,
journalistic and scientific gazes that Foucault (1980: 148) locates
at the centre of today's disciplinary societies.
Page 16
In the Beginning
The active promotion of motion pictures in the United States was
begun on June 13, 1891 (Davis, 1976: 12). On that date George
Parsons Lathrop, the son-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and a
prominent magazine writer of the day, announced in Harper's
Weekly that Thomas Edison had invented the kinetograph, a
combination of 'the moving picture machine and the phonograph'
(Davis, 1976: 1213). 11This machine, Lathrop argued, was a
device to 'set down and permanently record exact images of men
walking, trees waving in the wind, birds flying, machinery in
active operation . . . just as though we were looking at reality'
(Davis, 1976: 13). This new machine would project the figures
from its lens 'greatly enlarged, upon a screen, where they may be
shown, if need be, as of life, size' (Davis, 1976: 13).
This machine was immediately linked with science. It was a
perfect tool for recording reality with precision (Branigan,
1979/1985).
The 1902 Sears catalogue described the Kinetoscope as follows:
, moving picture machine, giving
THE UNRIVALLED EDISON KINETOSCOPE
2
The Voyeur's Desire
I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. I am
alone . . . all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking
at me! What does this mean?
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 25960
The cinematic voyeur's gaze is violent, political, sexual and
personal. Several theories of the voyeur's gaze have been
offered. Feminist film theorists, elaborating Mulvey's now classic
arguments (1975/1989), have built complex psychoanalytic
interpretations of the masculine gaze as it is articulated in classic
narrative cinema (see Metz, 1982; Mulvey, 1975/1989; Bellour,
1974; Doane, 1987; de Lauretis, 1987; Modleski, 1988;
Gamman and Marshment, 1989; Penley, 1989; Mayne, 1990;
Tseëlon and Kaiser, 1992; Clough, 1992; Stacey, 1994). Recent
feminist theorists of women's films (including those made by
women) have further developed these arguments (see Mayne,
1990; Johnston, 1975/1988; Bergstrom, 1979/1988; Penley,
1988; Erens, 1990a, especially the chapters in Part IV, and Erens,
1990b).
Alongside the psychoanalytic, feminist readings of the gaze (and
its pleasures) exist Sartre's phenomenology of the look (Sartre,
1943/1956: 252302; Schroeder, 1984: 186202); Lacan's (1988)
reworking of Sartre's gaze (see Silverman, 1992; Bozovic,
1992); Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception (1962,
1964a, 1964b; see also Andrews, 1978/1985, 1984: 17290; and
Robbe-Grillet, 1958), and Foucault's political gaze (1980,
14665). 1These theories will be examined as they bear on my
central questions concerning the cinematic representation and
regulation of the gaze, its functions, and its costs and
consequences for the voyeur and society. Theories first, then the
voyeur's place in the cinematic society.
Mulvey's Voyeur and His Pleasures
In a now classic article, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'
(1975/1989, 1989) Laura Mulvey applied Freudian
psychoanalysis to interpret how 'the unconscious of patriarchal
society has structured film form' (1975/1989: 14) in particular
classical narrative cinema which has coded 'the erotic into the
language of the dominant patriarchal order' (1975/1989: 16).
This is a theory of the voyeur and the pleasures that are derived
from his gaze. It rests on the following assertions. Women in
classic Hollywood cinema are treated as objects of male
voyeuristic and sadistic
Page 43
impulses. Women exist to fulfil the desires of the male spectator.
Women spectators can only have a masochistic relationship to
classic cinema which offers the basic pleasure of scopophilia
(pleasure in looking); a pleasure which takes other people as
objects of a controlling and curious gaze. Women are cast in the
classic role of exhibitionist; they are looked at and displayed as
sexual objects. They have a looked-at-ness which turns them into
the site of the screen's spectacle, from strip-tease 'to Ziegfeld to
Busby Berkeley she holds the look, and plays to and signifies
male desire' (1975/1989: 19).
Cinema produces three types of looks: the gaze of the camera as
it records events, the look of the audience as it watches, and the
looks of the characters as they watch one another. Narrative
cinema denies the first two gazes, subordinating them to the third
(1975/1989: 25). In this world visual pleasure is organized in
terms of the active and passive voyeuristic mechanisms that turn
the woman's body into a spectacle of desire. Visual pleasures,
then, are masculine, for the spectator is always masculine.
Mulvey's theory has been attacked on the following grounds: its
uncritical use of the psychoanalytic model (de Lauretis, 1984:
45; Tseëlon and Kaiser, 1992); its simplistic conception of the
female spectatorship position (Hansen, 1986); its failure to
adequately deal with masochism and voyeurism (see Deleuze,
1971; Studlar, 1985); its use of the male sexual pervert as its
model of the gaze (Tseëlon and Kaiser, 1992); its conflation of
spectacle and narrative, and its unquestioning acceptance of the
'screen' as a fixed ground where narrative and spectacle are
played out (Mayne, 1990: 3840); its biased reading of the
Hitchcock's films as support for the theory (Modleski, 1988: 2;
Lurie, 19812; Wood, 1989; Rose, 19767/1988); its over-
emphasis on binary opposition (Hansen, 1986; de Lauretis,
1984: 145; Kaplan, 1988: 5; Mayne, 1990: 45; Gledhill, 1978;
Penley, 1989: 11; Cowie, 1979/1988; Bergstrom 1979/1988); its
inability to interpret those films where the categories of the gaze
collapse and male and female figures interchangeably identify
with and gaze upon one another (Tseëlon and Kaiser, 1992); and
its conflation and potential confusion of the textual and empirical
spectator (see Stacey, 1994: 2431 for a review of the most recent
criticisms of Mulvey's theory and its revisions). 2
Clearly Mulvey's theory of the voyeur and his pleasure is too
narrow for present purposes. It is based on a limited conception
of looking and voyeurism. It ignores alternative models of
spectatorship and gazing. It fails to articulate the interaction and
interplay between desire and identification, which often involves
multiple identities for the male and female figure. It does not
conceptualize any positive version of the female gaze, or the
female character (beyond transvestism and the masquerade).
(Nor does it present the male gaze in a favourable light.) It
represses female desire, while clinging to a single meta-narrative
about male and female sexuality. It does not permit, that is, an
active, interactional relationship between the spectator, the gaze,
narrative, spectacle and the screen.3
Page 44
Conclusion
As a cultural creation, Hollywood's treatment of the voyeur and
voyeurism has been shaped by the following:
the temperance movement and its sexual, puritanical, Victorian
legacies (Gusfield, 1963)
the production (1900 onwards) in popular culture of the idea of a
criminal underclass, often connected to membership in a racial or
ethnic minority group (see Manning, 1977)
the nineteenth century creation and legitimation of the science of
criminalistics (1860s), the centralized police department (1850s)
and the concept of the private detective (1900) (see Haycroft,
1972; Mayne, 1988)
World War I and the need for special agents and spies who could
monitor the activities of the international German enemy
the jazz era (192634), including its attendant liberalizing of
sexual relations between males and females (Room, 1985),
coupled with the concept of females being able to move freely in
public spaces, leading to the female investigator (Perils of
Pauline) as well as the female who gets in trouble
the rise in popularity of the newspaper and private eye film in the
1930s (Halliwell, 1990)
Hollywood's (and the popular culture's) turn to psychoanalysis as
a psychology capable of explaining the disturbed, criminal mind
(see Gabbard and Gabbard, 1987)
World War II and the German and Asian scare (see Rubenstein,
1979, Chapters 7 and 8)
progressive elaborations in Hollywood's Motion Picture
Production Code (1922, 1930, 1934, 1938, 1940, 1955, 1960)
permitting the showing of increased violence and sexuality on
screen (see Cook, 1981; Leff and Simmons, 1990)
the Cold War era (195062) and the perceived communist threats
to the American way of life (see Bell, 1960)
the Civil Rights movement (195070), leading to new leading
roles for minority actors and women in mainstream cinema (see
Lyman, 1990c)
the conservative decades of the 1970s and 1980s, emphasizing
criminal assaults on women, and the family, and a corresponding
greater need for official voyeurs who could monitor the doings
of the violent voyeur (see Ryan and Kellner, 1988, Chapters 5
and 8)
transformations in the cultural logics of late, multinational
capitalism, which brought Third World peoples into the centres
of postmodern discourse (Hall, 1988), while making
international tourists out of the white middle class (see
Featherstone, 1990; Urry, 1990)
the sustained production of literary and novelistic works
focusing on the voyeur and his or her doings (for example
Gothic thrillers, spy novels, detective stories, etc.)
Page 61
the desire by filmmakers to turn such works into mainstream
films
the creation of an audience of filmgoers who would attend such
productions and the ability of Hollywood to make money from
them.
Cinema's serious voyeur is a moral, compassionate being who
saves people in danger. A logical, rational, objective observer of
social life, he or she exposes the brutality and stupidity of the
state and its official agents. Not above using surveillance devices,
this individual attempts to capture the truth about reality,
exposing, in the process, corruption and evil in the social world.
Speaking always in the language of the ordinary person, this
voyeur shows contempt for pettiness and official protocol.
Operating with a private morality, these persons justify violence
in the name of justice. Not above erotic temptation, they will
sometimes become Peeping Toms and fall in love with good and
bad beautiful women (and men). They pay a price for their
voyeurism, including insanity, alcoholism and death.
On occasion the voyeur's gaze can be a laughing matter. I turn
now to those film voyeurs who make their looking a topic of
comedy. Such persons mock the above conventions.
Notes
1. There exist, as well, recent poststructural, Derridian (and
postmodern) readings of the camera, the gaze and the cinematic
text (see Kaplan, 1988: 5; Tseëlon and Kaiser, 1992; Derrida,
1972/1981; Brunette and Wills, 1989; Mayne, 1990: 456).
2. Stacey fits female spectatorship to the actual cinematic
experience, showing that British female movie fans in the 1940s
and 1950s actively used filmic images of women for purposes of
utopian fantasy and personal identification. There is thus a gap
between textual studies of the spectator and empirical studies of
real people watching movies.
3. As Kaplan (1988: 5) argues, it is time to abandon the
binarisms, and sexual determinisms of psychoanalysis and its
theoretical interpretations of the voyeur's gaze.
4. Throughout this section I am indebted to William Schroeder
for our discussions of these four theorists.
5. Of the four, Merleau-Ponty most directly addresses the
cinematic experience of watching the screen.
6. Silverman (1992: 129) argues for a sharp distinction between
the look and the gaze, the former referring to Lacan's eye, that
which sees only from one point of view, while the gaze is
grounded in otherness, that which is outside the person.
Silverman (1992: 130), after Lacan, situates the look in desire,
and the gaze in otherness, noting that the 'French language does
not . . . sustain my distinction, offering only one word le
regard in place of two primary English signifiers of vision: look
and gaze' (1992: 129). Silverman's look, following Lacan
(1973/1978: 845) is always within desire, while her gaze remains
outside desire. I will use look and gaze somewhat
interchangeably, anchoring desire in both activities, viewing the
gaze as the look of the other. My look becomes a gaze for you,
and your look a gaze for me. Looking and gazing are thus
always interconnected processes anchored in the subject's field of
vision. In this field you and I are, respectively, spectator and
spectacle to one another. Neither one of us owns the look and the
gazes that come from it, nor can either of us ever escape
specularity.
7. Bozovic (1992: 167) argues that Sartre and Lacan disagree on
whether or not a window constitutes a gaze.
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8. Andrews (1984: 212, 34, 934, 176) describes other theorists
who have continued Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological
approach to vision and cinema, including Bazin, Cavell, Morin,
Perkins, Mitry, Poulet and Ricoeur.
9. These contexts of gazing parallel Glaser and Strauss's (1964)
four contexts of awareness (open, closed, suspicion, pretence)
which refer to the total combination of what each interactant in a
situation knows about the identity of the other and his own
identity in the eyes of the other.
10. Hence the attraction of cinema, for those 'moving pictures'
supposedly fill in the spaces that have occurred since the last
frame was shot.
11. On the problem of full presence ever being given see
Brunette and Wills (1989: 58) who develop Derrida's position on
this point.
12. This voyeur's gaze (clinical, investigative, informational,
erotic, accidental) would be fitted to the 'whodunit', thriller,
and/or suspense formats outlined earlier.
13. Cinema, of course, as argued in the last chapter, did not
invent voyeurism by itself; it also took psychoanalysis and the
rise to power of the investigative sciences, including sociology,
anthropology, psychology and medicine (for earlier accounts of
the voyeur and the gaze in history see Foucault, 1975). In this
century phenomenology made the voyeur's gaze and the act of
perception central to one's being in the world (see Robbe-Grillet,
1958, 1991). Cinema, though, took the voyeur to new heights.
In the 1901 film Peeping Tom a hotel porter looks 'through the
keyholes of a series of rooms, with keyhole masks imitating his
vision' (Mayne, 1990: 169). Primitive cinema repeatedly returned
to the voyeur looking through the keyhole, or the male spectator
looking through a window at a woman undressing.
14. Recall the meanings of vision, and visible: the act of seeing,
being visible; the Visible Church, a look, a glance, a person of
great beauty, an apparition; visionary capable of seeing visions;
voyeur a Peeping Tom, and; eye the organ of sight; voir to see.
15. In some cultures the eye is akin to a sexual organ, where
looking too intently at a woman is akin to 'ocular rape' (Flam,
1991: 3).
16. See Sanders (1976: 2) on the similarities between the
detective and the sociologist.
17. Haycroft (1972: 31218) suggests that the detective story
emerges as a literary form with the rise of democracy and the
modern police organization, and in that moment when the
citizen's sympathies shifted to the side of law and order and not
to the criminal who attempted to escape from justice. He dates
the beginnings of this genre from Voltaire's Zadig (1748),
marking Poe as the father of the detective story, with help from
Dickens, Collins, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Stevenson, and most
importantly Conan Doyle (see also Frisby, 1992; Benjamin,
1973, 1989; Ginzberg, 1986; Thompson, 1993 and Kracauer,
1971). As noted in the last chapter the word detective enters the
modern English language in 1843. As the detective genre
developed it assumed several forms, including the Doyle
derivatives, the police procedural, the hard-boiled detective, the
romantic and Gothic melodrama, the psychoanalytic detective,
the priest as detective, the attorney as detective, and more
recently the gay detective, the recovering alcoholic detective and
the hard-boiled female private eye. In each decade of the
twentieth century this genre has fitted itself to the major social
problems of the day; from Hammett's concerns with labour
conflicts and political corruption in the 1920s and 1930s, to the
more contemporary concerns for organized crime, drug wars,
serial murders and violence against women and children. But
nearly always an Oedipal framework has organized the narrative,
coupled with a psychopathological view of criminal human
nature. The espionage novels of Ambler, Greene, Le Carre, etc.
mapped the underside of the world political system during the
world wars. These texts, and the others just cited, then were
turned into major films.
18. A variant on this theme is the spy, secret agent and double
agent, who, in the over 450 spy films produced by Hollywood
since the silent era, have been presented as part hunted man (The
Thirty-nine Steps), deadly agent of the state (North by Northwest,
Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, Quiller
Memorandum, Manchurian Candidate, Killer Elite) a secret
agent, a super spy (James Bond), and a cynic (The Spy Who
Came in From the Cold). Rubenstein (1979) presents a reading
of this figure, who, in his trapped, hunted version, was a
favourite topic in the Hitchcock films (see also Parish and Pitts,
1974, 1986).
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19. He attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in
1981, claiming he was doing it for his lover, Jodie Foster, who
he had repeatedly watched in Taxi Driver.
20. Front Page would inscribe in American culture a recurring
image of the journalist as a romantic hero, a man always
involved and at odds with, a beautiful, independent woman. The
Front Page format would be repeated, with variations, in nearly
every decade, through films like It Happened One Night (1934),
Mr Deeds Goes to Down (1936), His Girl Friday (1940),
Woman of the Year (1941), Teacher's Pet (1958), Lonelyhearts
(1959), Front Page (1974) and Switching Channels (1988).
Ehrlich (1991) offers an analysis of these variations on the Hildy
Johnson character, and Barris (1976) treats the depictions of the
journalist in a variety of subgenres (reporter as crime buster,
reporter as crusader, the overseas reporter, the reporter as human
being, the sob sisters, editors and publishers and the newsman as
villain).
21. On the lies that the police tell see Hunt and Manning (1991:
52, 67). Schopen describes lies and the work of the private
investigator, 'I spend most of my time trying to get information
people don't want to give me. This means most people lie to me.
I lie to them' (1989: 141).
22. However, as Ross Macdonald observes of Lew Archer, he 'is
a hero who sometimes verges on being an anti-hero. While he is
a man of action, his actions are largely directed to putting
together the stories of other people's lives and discovering their
significance. He is less a doer than a questioner, a consciousness
in which the meaning of other lives emerge' (1973: 234). This
means, as Donnelly notes, that 'most of Archer's descendants . . .
act as characters who precipitate the actions that resolve the
puzzle and yet remain separate from the consequences of the
action once it is set in motion. They may express grief at the
tragic nature of the outcome, but it is difficult to sustain a
significant change of character within the series format' (1990:
13).
23. A major exception would be the Woody Allen comedies
(e.g., Crimes and Misdemeanors).
24. This scene is preceded by another scene where Harry spies
on a naked woman in her apartment.
25. Koch (1973) explores the complex relationship between
filmic voyeurism and pornography, especially in the films of
Andy Warhol.
26. There was a third series, with Boris Karloff as Mr Wong (see
Chapter 4).
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3
The Comic Voyeur's Gaze
In the comedy form, as argued in the Introduction, the dangers
of voyeurism are neutralized, mocked, and parodied, thereby
making the voyeur's activities acceptable to the members of the
surveillance society (see Schatz, 1981, Chapter 6, and Horton,
1991a, b on the major forms of film comedy). Cinema's voyeur
is a favourite Hollywood comic figure. This character is the
frequent focus of mixed-genre comedies, including comedies
about detectives for example, screwball comedy (The Last of the
Secret Agents (1966), The Big Store (1941)), reporters
(Broadcast News (1987)), families (I Love You to Death (1990)),
cowboys (for example, the western, Destry Rides Again (1939)),
gangsters (Crimewave (1954)), musicians (for example, the
musical A Hard Day's Night (1964)), scientists and the military
(for example, the black comedy, Dr Strangelove or How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1969)), ordinary
lovers (for example, the romance comedy, Roxanne (1987)), and
people defined as craze, or insane (for example, the comedy of
manners, Harvey (1950), also High Society (1977)).
In such films the screen's comic voyeur emerges as a figure with
whom the audience identifies, as they laugh at the complications
his, or her voyeuristic activities produce. From the bumbling
Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther (1964), and Shot in the
Dark (1964) series, to the mad scientist in Dr Strangelove, to
Steve Martin's private eye in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, to
Woody Allen's mournful Cliff Stern, the documentary filmmaker
of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), laughing matters are
produced out of the comic voyeur's ability to see and not see
what is obvious to others.
How comedy works its effects on the voyeur's project is the topic
of this chapter. I offer detailed readings of four highly popular,
recent films: Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), Blue Velvet
(1986), sex, lies and videotape (1989) and Broadcast News
(1987). 1Each of these films, in its own way, mocks and ridicules
the voyeur's situation. Each struggles with the meanings of
voyeurism, while attempting to locate the voyeur's activities in
the contemporary moment. Each deals with the voyeur as a
recognizable, and gendered social type. In each film the voyeur
is a detective, a news reporter, or an innocent bystander who
then becomes erotically involved with the object of his
attention.2
While 'affectionately dedicated to all the brilliant technical and
creative people who worked on the films in the 1940s and
1950s', Dead Men Don't
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Wear Plaid is essentially a pastiche-like parody of the 'lone wolf'
and 'psychotic actor' private eye, film noir movies of the 19456,
and 194953 periods of Hollywood production (on these films
see Schrader, 1972/1986: 1779; also Krutnik, 1991: 16, 182,
226). Blue Velvet, a black comedy, coming of age Gothic thriller
that borders on the soft pornographic, represents male and
female sexual and investigative gazes in ways which are comic
and serious (on its comedy elements see Jaehne, 1987; Biga,
1987; Denby, 1986; and Hoberman, 1986). 3Sex, lies and
videotape, also a dark comedy, undermines, as argued in Chapter
1, the current cultural impulse which turns ordinary people, with
their video cameras, into filmmakers (see Benson, 1989 on the
film as a psycho-sexual comedy). Broadcast News, a romantic
comedy, and a recent extension of Front Page, the classic
journalistic-reporter film (see Ehrlich, 1991), humorously
distorts the investigative, editing and reporting gaze of the female
news producer. Taken together these four texts reflect, and
reflexively deconstruct the postmodern, post-television gaze and
the desire to find a firm, and valued, if only laughable place for
the voyeur in this society. Each, in its connection back to
modernist formulations, moves back and forth between parody
and pastiche.
The Comedy Project
General matters first: the following themes organize the
relationship between voyeurism and comedy. Gender norms, as
argued in Chapter 2, traditionally structure the female's gaze in
passive forms, as in Sandy's supplemental-investigative gazes in
Blue Velvet. Similarly, the female's comic and shocked reactions
to events that males find non-troublesome further illuminates this
passive dimension of the gendered gaze. For example, Veta
Louis Dowd, the matronly sister of Elwood, faints when she sees
Harvey, the over six-foot-tall rabbit, and Sandy nearly faints
when she confronts the hysterical Dorothy in her mother's front
yard. Life is messy, or untoward things are not to be seen by
women.4Males can gaze where females cannot.
Comedy unravels the voyeuristic eye, showing that such persons
miss what is obvious to others, while they spend their time
looking at things that either don't matter, or do matter, but in
ways that the voyeur does not understand. In this sense the
comic voyeur's gaze is guided by a misdirected social realism
based on an inability to see and hence understand the obvious.
Clouseau, for example, fails to see the clues which point to Elke
Sommer as a murderess (every time she leaves a room a dead
body appears).
At the same time, the comic voyeur's gaze often produces
embarrassing situations (Inspector Clouseau in the nudist
colony). Their untoward eye moves them and their body into the
wrong spaces. This exposes them to the reverse voyeur's gaze;
they become the figure gazed upon. In violating
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the norms of civil attention that operate in everyday life
(Goffman, 1963: 8398), they expose the taken-for-granted
meanings that organize the underlying visual structures of daily
interaction. This becomes a laughing matter. The audience
identifies with the looks that fall upon the person who is caught
looking when they shouldn't be.
Comedy reflexively attacks, mocks and satirizes the sombre
conventions, as outlined in Chapter 2, that organize serious
voyeuristic texts; in particular those norms stressing truth,
rationality, objectivity, compassion, violence and erotic
attachment. 5(In this sense comedy, in its most critical forms, is
always parody.) Often a double visual reflexivity organizes the
texts. The audience sees what the protagonist does not see. Two
versions of reality exist on the screen at the same time. Humour
arises from this situational incongruity. A double laughter
ensues. The audience laughs at what the protagonist does not see,
while laughing at what is seen, which may be quite painful, or
frightening. Thus, for example in High Anxiety (1977)6two
psychoanalysts, Mel Brooks (Thorndyke) and Harvey Korman
(Montague), are talking with a patient (Mr Cartwright) who has
dreams about werewolves and suffers from a severe pain in his
neck. As Brooks talks with the patient, Korman takes on the face
and actions of a werewolf and shoots rubber bands at the
patient's neck, causing sudden pain. The audience, but not
Brooks, observes Korman's actions. The patient who had
previously reported doing fine, suddenly takes on the symptoms
of his illness. Brooks decides he needs more treatment. Here the
audience laughs both at what Brooks cannot see, and at his
diagnosis of the patient.
By simultaneously presenting at least two versions of a situation,
the comic text, following Todorov (1977: 83), establishes its own
verisimilitude, or relationship to reality and what is real. What is
perceived as a presence by the audience is an absence, or non-
presence of the voyeur. What is a presence for the voyeur is
negated, or overruled, by the audience, for it sees what the
voyeur cannot see. An incongruous, often ironic situation is
produced, permitting the appearance of ludicrous, amusing
sequences of action that build upon themselves. Of course one of
humour's impulses arises out of incongruity; that is incongruity
complements comedy's unique version of verisimilitude.
Together these processes introduce a new level of reflexivity into
the text, allowing the audience to achieve a measure of
superiority over the voyeur, thereby mocking, laughing at and
diminishing the seriousness of his or her project.
Comedy undermines the image of the voyeur as a gifted,
rational, objective, compassionate, larger-than-life hero or
heroine. For example, Inspector Clouseau (Shot in the Dark) is a
bumbling, irrational detective taken in by the beautiful
murderess, while his supervisor is the insane, rational, logical,
objective observer. Charlie Chan's dimwitted Number One Son
saves the wrong woman from murder, or always solves a crime
after the real criminal has been killed. Groucho Marx in The Big
Store (1941) ridicules Holmesian deductive logic when he
convinces a man who
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has lost six of his 12 children in the department store that a man
with his salary could not possibly have so many children.
Comedy presents the voyeur's gaze as painless solace for the
lonely, anhedonic, sorrowful (usually male) individual (on
anhedonia see Lyman, 1990b). Thus Richard Dreyfuss's early
investigative-erotic gazes at Madeleine Stowe (Stakeout, 1987)
are justified because his girlfriend has just left him. (He flips the
pages of Playboy as he looks through his telescope.) Similarly,
the tragic, but comic, voyeuristic moments in Monsieur Hire
(1989) come when the lonely, sad, bald Peeping Tom suddenly
realizes that the object of his gaze has returned his look. In like
fashion, James Spader's pathetically aggressive voyeuristic
camera gazes (sex, lies and videotape) are mocked by Cynthia.
'Are you kidding! He gets it off by photographing women
talking about masturbation!' Pathos and a loss of innocence
surrounds this gaze and the reactions to it. (Charlie Chaplin's
little tramp was a master of this gaze.)
This gaze, and its desires are structured by a paradox and a fear.
The sexual voyeur seeks more than the anonymity of
pornography (parodied in Stakeout). He desires intimacy. He
wants to know the person he gazes upon. But he cherishes the
image, the fantasy of the other, and fears that the image will not
match up with reality. Moore (1989: 4) elaborates this point in
her discussion of sex, lies and videotape. The 'voyeur's darkest
fear is peculiarly double-sided: that the object of desire is not
what it seems, in which case he loses control over the fantasy,
and that the object is exactly what it seems, in which case total
separation is hard to maintain'. Comedy is produced when these
two images clash. Thus Jane Craig (Broadcast News) experiences
enormous conflict when she realizes that the object of her sexual
desire, Tom Grunick, while dashing and handsome, is dull,
boring, unethical, unfaithful and unintelligent.
The negative reactions to the voyeur's gaze produce and reveal a
loss of innocence about the world. This innocence is commonly
connected to voyeuristic gazes of the female body. The voyeur
gazes on a woman who is above (seldom below) his (or her)
position in the class structure. The voyeur is inevitably punished
for this seemingly innocent act. In Stakeout, Dreyfuss, finally
caught in his voyeurism, 7is rejected (later to be taken back) by
Stowe as a dirty Peeping Tom. Underneath the voyeur's gaze, of
course, exists the reality that the sexual privacy of the spied upon
person has been violated. Hence, while the comic voyeur's gaze
reveals truths that others do not want to confront (Hire discovers
the real murderer), it can only do this by transgressing, or
violating sexual and class (and racial) boundaries and proprieties.
A double or triple slander, or slight is produced. The voyeur's
gaze has attacked two sacred structures (sexuality and class)
which should not be questioned. The punishment such gazes
receive underscores the deeper belief that the gaze held too long
is never appropriate. But then comedy's voyeur is always
misinterpreted, and these misinterpretations reveal the serious
meanings voyeuristic gazing is given in everyday life. The lesson
is clear. There can be no purely innocent gaze.
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Blue Velvet is filled with voyeurs and their multiple gazes: Jeffrey
Beaumont's sexual and aggressive investigative looks; Sandy's
passive, supplemental gazes; Dorothy's aggressive sexual gaze;
Frank and Ben's perverted sexual gazes; and the investigative
looks of the police. Filled with pastiche and parody, Blue Velvet
returns to the classic-modernist film noir image of the voyeur
who looks with lust, violence, guilt and fear.
The story-line, by now all too familiar, need not be elaborated
here. Suffice it to say this black comedy, coming of age film is a
put down of 1950s middle-American popular culture. Handsome
young man meets beautiful young woman. Young man becomes
involved with a sexually attractive older woman, becomes
implicated in and solves a series of violent crimes, and returns to
the arms of his young love.15
My concerns focus on the voyeur's shifting presence in Blue
Velvet and less on the narrative structure of the film. A single, but
complicated thesis, anticipated earlier, organizes my comments.
Lynch's film serves as a pivotal transition between two film and
cultural moments: high modernism-early postmodernism, and
contemporary late postmodernism. His text reaffirms the
centrality of the voyeur in contemporary culture, while it mocks
and makes fun of earlier high modernist, and early postmodernist
treatments of this figure (late Hitchcock, De Palma). Blue Velvet's
voyeurs reassert the primacy of a traditional gendered system of
looking and gazing. A dangerous text, because of its uncritical
cult following, the film is patriarchal and sexist to the core.
But it is a multi-levelled text which challenges the spectator's
relationship to what is seen. As such it complicates, even as it
replicates, traditional conceptions of the voyeur and his or her
gaze. In this it is, as Biga (1987: 47) argues, a 'case study of how
women watch men and how the relation of a person looking and
a person looked at may depict formulations other than control
and power (scopophilia and fetishism, as Laura Mulvey has
described them)'. Seen thusly, underneath his sexist text, Lynch
creates multiple subject positions for the male and female voyeur.
His film contains meanings that challenge conventional theories
of the male and female gaze.
Three extended key scenes, Jeffrey in the closet, Sandy looking
up at the building where Dorothy lives, and Sandy and her
mother gazing on naked,
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hysterical Dorothy in their living-room establish the film's
traditional, albeit complex, treatments of the voyeur.
Jeffrey in the Closet
Sandy starts all of this ('You shouldn't do this. It's crazy and
dangerous. My God I should never have told you'). We first meet
her through her portrait hanging on the wall of her family living-
room. Minutes later, she emerges out of the evening darkness,
her voice first, 'Are you the one who found the ear?', then her
image, full screen confronts us, the mirror-image of the portrait
hanging in the living-room. She is the immediate object of the
spectator-voyeur's gaze, a gaze suddenly shifted to Jeffrey, who
asks, 'How did you know?' A natural voyeur herself (her father
is Detective Williams), eavesdropping Sandy sends inquisitive
Jeffrey to the address of Dorothy ('I don't know if you are a
detective or a pervert'. Jeff: 'That's for me to know and you to
find out').
The extended closet scene begins and ends as a dark dream
sequence, defined throughout by violence, perverse, sado-
masochistic sexuality and reflexive voyeurism: Jeffrey staring at
Dorothy, Dorothy staring at Jeffrey, Frank gazing on Dorothy,
Jeffrey watching the two of them in violent sexual intercourse,
Jeffrey as voyeur going through Dorothy's private documents
(her marriage certificate), Dorothy watching Jeffrey search
through her belongings, and Dorothy imploring Jeffrey to touch,
feel and look at her body, and the audience as spectator, gazing
nearly always over Jeffrey's shoulder, or into his eye.
The voyeur's hiding place: a closet (an intimate space) with a
slatted door one can peer through, shadows cast back on the face
from the slats, the face now a reflection of what is being peered
through. From this vantage point Jeffrey looks out into a
darkened room, onto a near-naked Dorothy (black bra and black
panties). Jeff makes a noise in the closet. Dorothy goes to the
kitchen and returns with a butcher knife.
It happens in a flash, the voyeur's degradation. Roaring,
dangerous music fills the soundtrack. Light from the living room
shines on Jeff's eye as he looks through the slats. Discovered by
Dorothy, forced, at knife point to undress, Jeffrey is turned
immediately into a sexual object. The voyeur now becomes the
one who is looked upon. She touches his penis and caresses his
inner thighs ('Do you like that?'). He reaches out to touch her:
'Don't touch me or I'll kill you. Don't look at me. Get over there.
Lie down.' She climbs on top of him on the sofa and they begin
to kiss.
This is only the beginning. Frank arrives, pounding on the door:
'Let me in!' Naked, Jeffrey, sent scurrying back to the closet like
a rodent, clothes-in-hand, hides again. Fearfully assuming the
voyeur's stance, spying through the door, he witnesses Dorothy
playing the part of the sexual slave. Frank starts in on Dorothy:
'Don't you fucking look at me. Don't you fucking look at me'
(the camera cuts to Jeffrey's lighted eye peering through the
slats). Frank continues. 'Baby wants to fuck. Baby
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wants to fuck. Don't you fucking look at me.' Inhaling bourbon,
face attached to a mask, he continues, 'Daddy's coming home.
Don't look at me!'
It doesn't end here. A second scene of degradation completed,
Lynch now brings Jeffrey out of the closet. The third scene
begins, taking its own turn into reciprocal voyeurism and sado-
masochism. Jeffrey attempts to help Dorothy. She pleads, 'Hold
me, I'm scared.' They embrace. She asks, 'Do you love me?'
'Yes,' Jeffrey softly replies. The camera turns to her face, red lips
highlighted: 'Do you like the way I feel? See my breast. You can
knead it. See my nipple. You can touch it. Do you like the way I
feel? Hit me. Hit me!' He refuses. In near darkness he retreats,
dressing, making preparations to leave. She moves away.
Drawn back into his investigative role, Jeffrey now searches
through her papers under the sofa as she watches quietly in the
corner. Escaping from her apartment, we watch him descend the
dark staircase into the night, where, standing in the blackness, his
fearful face is suddenly illuminated by a street light. The
soundtrack once again fills with roaring sounds. Frank's
injunctions and screams are heard. Dorothy screams, 'Hit me, hit
me.' From a dream Jeffrey awakens, quivering like an animal in
his darkened bedroom. The next evening he recounts part of the
story to Sandy who tells him of the dream she had the first night
they met. This is her robin dream, an account of evil in the
world, and how the robins were set free and there was the
blinding light of love.
The closet scene is thus bracketed by two dreams, the one Sandy
had the night before Jeff entered the apartment, and the dream
Jeff has after being there. Told out of temporal order (we should
have heard Sandy's dream first), the juxtapositioning of the two
dreams within the film's narrative serves to underscore the
dream-like world Jeffrey, as voyeur, has entered. This world is
defined by the opposing forces of evil (violence, Dorothy,
Frank) and good (Sandy and her loving robins). It is mediated
by the voyeur who sees both evil and good.
Take up the three sequences of voyeurism in reverse order. Third
scene first: 16gendered voyeurism moves between the active and
passive poles in this scene. Here Dorothy directs Jeffrey to be the
sexual voyeur who explores, sees, touches and feels her body.
He becomes the object who furnishes the touches she desires. In
their reciprocal voyeurism they turn one another into sexual
objects, although it is her body, not his, that is explored. When
she exhorts him to hit her he refuses. Her request shatters and
challenges the passive voyeurism he has assumed for himself.
She takes voyeurism to Frank's level of sado-masochism. Jeffrey
is afraid to follow. He will look, but not be violent, not
understanding that looking is as violent as being physically
violent. The voyeur can look and touch, but not hit; only later
will Jeffrey be seduced into Frank's violent version of
voyeurism. As the scene closes Dorothy has the last look, so to
speak, for it is her gaze which defines the illicit nature of
Jeffrey's search through her documents.
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Now the second scene: active male voyeurism defines the
primary action. The audience either looks through Frank's eyes
or sees what he prohibits Dorothy from seeing. Reconsider
Frank's injunctions, 'Don't you fucking look at me!' and then, in
his moment of climax, 'Daddy's coming home. Don't look at me!'
A moment of privacy at the centre of violence. Dorothy cannot
see Frank come. She cannot enter his world of private ecstasy,
yet his eyes and body can control her movements and her
experiences. She is his slave. 'Show it to me!' he shouts. 'Lay
down!' he commands. And she does, her eyes become vacant,
her red-lipped mouth opens, expressing sexual pleasure and fear.
She sucks the blue velvet cord that connects her mouth to his.
Like blind Double Ed, the elderly black employee in Jeffrey's
father's hardware store, Dorothy knows, without seeing, where
things ought to be. She becomes the blind voyeur. Jeffrey is the
impotent male-child viewing this primal scene, and like a child
his voyeurism is guilt-ridden and full of fear. He knows he is
viewing a taboo scene.
Finally the first scene: Dorothy's phallic knife (Biga, 1987: 46)
dramatizes the connection between looking, power and sexuality.
With her knife she controls his gaze, which cuts to the core of his
sexuality. By denying him his look, she 'turns the tables on
him . . . [and] appropriates a male gaze and [its] sexuality' (Biga,
1987: 46). She becomes the sexual aggressor, the identity
previously held by Jeffrey. She needs a knife to do this;
apparently the female gaze cannot command without
supplemental force.
In its raw, brutal connection of looking with violence,
domination and power, this extended closet scene shows, as
Sartre argued, that the power to control the look of the other
defines their presence in the situation. More deeply, when the
other is told not to look, they are stripped of their own
subjectivity, for they are unable to see their own presence
reflected back in the face and actions of the other. They become
an object, not a subject, and in that transformed visual status,
their bodies (and minds) become objects to be manipulated by
the other, a slave to the master who controls their gaze. The
closet scene, then, reveals what happens to the person when the
power to look is denied. Here that loss of control over the look is
directly connected to the violent, erotic side of the voyeur's
project. Fear, submission and self-degradation are produced.
This complex sequence transforms Jeffrey from naïve,
investigative voyeur, to sexual predator. Intoxicated by Dorothy's
violent sexuality, his subsequent journey is into a world of
darkness made visible by the violent voyeur's desires. He will
love and then fear what he learns to see and feel. His visual
journey will lead out of this darkness into the sun-lit worlds of
robins and Sandy.
Sandy's Investigative Journey
Sandy's investigative, voyeuristic journeys will parallel Jeffrey's;
her gaze, like his, will first see the blackness of evil and then the
sunny side of
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goodness. However, while she initiates his project, her gaze will
soon become supplemental to his active investigative project.
Furthermore, she will see what his actions have produced. In this
her gaze contrasts to the violent, aggressive looks of Dorothy.
Sandy moves, then, from the standpoint of the ineffectual gazing
bystander, to the gazing participant who reacts with horror to
what the wayward and temporarily evil male has created.
Her journey also starts outside Dorothy's apartment house.
Resisting his directions to leave and go home, telling him, 'I'm
gonna wait here til she comes. I'm gonna honk four times. Then
you'll hear it and know she's on her way up.' She waits patiently.
Observing Dorothy return home, she honks four times, just as
Jeff, inside the apartment, flushes the toilet. He doesn't hear her
honking. Her looking, like water down the drain, was for
naught.
This will not be the case the next time she sees Dorothy. Chased
by Frank and his friends to his parents' house, Jeffrey and Sandy
step out of the car to see a naked, hysterical, Dorothy, emerge
centre screen from the darkness. Sandy, bewildered, speaks,
'Dorothy Vallens?' Battered and bruised, Dorothy falls from the
front porch into Jeffrey's arms. Sandy, looking puzzled and
pained, lowers her eyes as Jeffrey helps Dorothy into the car.
Sandy then covers Dorothy's breasts with her shawl. They drive
to Sandy's house. Entering the front door, Sandy fearfully backs
across the living room, calling for her mother (Mrs Williams) as
Jeffrey and naked Dorothy follow. Her mother enters the room,
and daughter and mother, in the lower left-hand part of the
screen, stare at naked Dorothy, who is centre screen. Evil has
entered the living room.
Dorothy hugs Jeffrey, turning to Sandy, who continues to look
pained, she screams 'Don't get the police!' and then to Jeffrey, 'I
love you!' and then to Sandy, 'He put his seed in me!' Sandy's
mother turns her head away as Sandy pulls back, mouth twisted
in agony, and attempts to catch her breath, as if she were about to
faint. Sandy's mother gets a coat to cover Dorothy. Sandy,
'Jeffrey. What's going on here?' A silent, Edvard Munch like
scream on her face, softly sobbing, she nearly collapses in her
mother's arms. Her immediate, aggressive reaction, a slap across
Jeffrey's face, after Dorothy is taken away by the ambulance, is
supplemented in the next scene.
Shot over her shoulder, her voice on the phone, her face
reflected in her bedroom mirror, Sandy tells Jeffrey, 'You lied to
me.' Jeffrey replies, 'Forgive me. I love you'. Sandy, 'Jeffrey, I
love you' (the camera pulls back to reveal her softly lighted, pink
and white bedroom), and then, positioning her centre screen,
sobbing, 'I couldn't watch that.' The scene closes with Sandy
caressing the phone, which rests on her breast, crying, she
speaks, 'He's my dream'. Two scenes later she is on the phone to
the police, angrily demanding that they find her father so he can
help Jeffrey. 17
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Women Staring at Women
The Dorothy-Sandy-Mrs Williams (mother) sequence reveals a
complexly gendered social interaction. The feminine space the
three women occupy, and the gazes they deploy, constantly move
back and forth between the active and passive poles. They each
take turns recoiling at the other's presence. The centre of the
screen is pulled in two directions at the same time. Dorothy and
Jeffrey on one side, mother and daughter on the other. The space
in the middle of the scene cannot be crossed, the distance
between the voyeur and her subject must be maintained lest she
become overwhelmed by her subject (see Metz, 1982: 60; also
Creed, 1988: 107).
The typical controlling male gaze is absent, as Jeffrey is visually
coded with passive-evil Dorothy. In this he occupies the space
usually reserved for the passive-female subject (on this space see
Creed, 1988: 103). Dorothy, on the other hand, is presented as a
threat, her naked body taints the pure feminine space occupied
by mother and daughter. It is not endowed with fetishistic
qualities, instead it is treated with abhorrence. She has violated a
deep social code; appearing naked and bruised in public.
At the same time, Sandy and her mother are accorded the
position of active voyeurs, Dorothy being the passive subject of
their gaze. After all she (and Jeffrey) have invaded their private
space. But they refuse to take up this active, aggressive position,
reacting first with 'traditional' feminine alarm and shock to this
untoward scene, and then with fear, disdain, disgust and anger.
Always their desire is to clothe the naked Dorothy, thereby
stripping her of her contaminating, but at the same time sexual-
erotic appeal. Their passive-aggressive reaction to her presence
is, accordingly, aligned with Dorothy's own passive-intruder
identity in the situation. They refuse to be the bearer of the
voyeur's look. Yet their refusal to look, and their vocal reactions
to Dorothy's presence, succeed in keeping her locked in the
passive, gazed-upon position; the audience now shares the horror
of the mother and daughter as they bear witness to this scene.
This sequence's summary meaning is given in Sandy's statement
'I couldn't watch that'. This statement signals both her purity and
her unwillingness to be a voyeur. Her journey into looking has
taken her too far. Fittingly, we last see her gazing on the robin on
the kitchen window ledge. She will only look at goodness.
Blue Velvet's Voyeur
The multiple subject positions Lynch creates for his voyeurs
undermine, while they support, taken-for-granted theories of the
male and female gaze. The four principal voyeurs in Blue Velvet
are organized in terms of two dyads, Jeffrey and Sandy, Frank
and Dorothy. These dyads enact, as Creed (1988) argues, Freud's
three primal scenes: sexual origin (Frank raping Dorothy),
castration (Dorothy threatening Jeffrey) and sexual difference
(Dorothy seducing Jeffrey). Their respective participants engage
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in their own versions of the sadistic-masochistic, passive-active
gaze (the extended closet and living-room scenes).
It works thusly. Jeffrey deploys the active and passive sadistic
and masochistic gazes in his interactions with Dorothy, Frank
and Sandy. Frank is never passive in his gazing activity. His
looks are constantly aligned with the active-masochistic gaze.
Dorothy's looks are both active and passive, sadistic and
masochistic. Sandy, in contrast, is the constantly passive voyeur,
who only becomes aggressive in her scenes of sexual interaction
with Jeffrey.
By creating multiple viewing positions for his women Lynch
opens up the female voyeur's field of vision. At the same time he
closes this field down by consigning Sandy to the traditional,
passive identity. Importantly the wild looks of Dorothy are only
present when she is under Frank's control. At the end of the film
she has reassumed the traditional looking identity of the passive,
maternal female (watching Little Donny walk toward her in the
park).
Thus in, and through, its film noir, comedy-like comedy
structures (the exaggerated violence, Ben, the 'drag queen', Aunt
Barbara, Double Ed) Blue Velvet creates new problems for the
female spectator. She is free to gaze wildly, actively and violently,
but only when she is under the control of a violent male.
By weaving these various gazes through his dark comedy Lynch
turns back on and mocks the comic voyeur's project. Bumbling,
slightly irrational Jeffrey discovers what is hidden from normal
view, mocks the police force in its investigative work, creates
embarrassing situations for himself, becomes erotically attached
to an evil woman, loses his innocence and ends up back in the
arms of pure, innocent Sandy. Secure in its mocking conclusions,
Blue Velvet keeps the high-modernist-Hitchcock version of the
voyeur alive, and ends by endorsing a very traditional,
conventional view of this film figure. In this conclusion he is,
with all his pastiche, less daring than Carl Reiner in Dead Men
Don't Wear Plaid, the last film to be considered in this chapter.
18
Unlike Blue Velvet Reiner's film is all parody. While it mocks the
film noir tradition that it steals from, it does so with reverence
and a sympathy for the 18 or more 1940 and 1950 film noir
originals that it steals from, including Double Indemnity, The
Lost Weekend, The Killers, The Bribe, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely
Place, Dark Passage, Suspicion, Notorious, Deception, The
Postman Always Rings Twice, The Glass Key and White Heat. As
a comedy in the noir tradition, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid,
repeatedly deploys noir's visual and narrative codes, as discussed
in the Introduction (wide- and high-angle, shot-reverse-shot, and
close-up camera shots, a preoccupation with the illicit gaze, the
reflexive use of off-screen
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space, scenes lit for night, action defined in male terms, women
as the object of investigative activity, the noir heroine filmed for
her sexuality, etc., Gledhill, 1978: 19).
In praise of the investigative voyeur's gaze, Dead Men dovetails
footage from the above films into its narrative, as Steve Martin,
the hero (Rigby Reardon), is shown interacting with the likes of
Ava Gardner, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Ray
Milland, Barbara Stanwyck, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart,
Lana Turner, Fred MacMurray, Charles Laughton, Brian
Donlevy, Edmond O'Brien and Vincent Price. He even plays a
torrid love scene (in drag) with Fred MacMurray (the Stanwyck
role in Double Indemnity).
The narrative is really irrelevant. It is a spoof, a vehicle for
paying homage to the film noir tradition. The story is told largely
through Martin's voice-over narration, flashback scenes, and
scene upon scene consisting of shots from the above films, fitted
to Martin's current situation. 19Played straight-faced, the story-
as-a-comedy on the surface reinscribes noir's patriarchal
treatment of women, including the femme fatale (the Stanwyck
clips from Double Indemnity), the hysterical female (the
Stanwyck bedroom scene in Sorry, Wrong Number), and the
loving, luscious female associate (Bette Davis fixing Bogart a
meal in Deception). The tough-guy noir male is also kept alive
through Rigby's dialogue ('She was real all right', 'Kissing Juliet I
thought of nothing but hanging up my gun and spending the rest
of my days in that ivy covered cottage'), his violent, courageous
acts (sucking bullets out of his shoulder), and the Cagney, Kirk
Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Bogart clips.
By comedically honouring the film noir tradition Dead Men
Don't Wear Plaid preserves, while it challenges and criticizes, the
visual and narrative codes of the genre. This is the promise of
high modernist and early postmodernist parody, but it is a risky
business, for in so doing it also maintains the stereotypical sexual
conventions of the genre (Gledhill, 1978: 1416). By celebrating,
while laughing at, and with, the classic elements of the genre, the
film destabilizes its own possibilities of critique.
But it should be read as critique. Three key scenes support this
reading. Two minutes into the film Juliet walks into Rigby's
office and faints. He picks her up and lays her on his couch. He
asks, 'Was she real? Only one way to find out. I remembered
Marlowe's words (cut to a sign on the wall) ''Never fall in love
with a client." What the hell does Marlowe know? She was real
all right.' He then caresses her breasts. She asks, 'What are you
doing?' He replies, 'Adjusting your breasts. They've shifted. All
out of whack.' Juliet, 'Thank you'. In this dialogue Rigby and
Juliet play to, while distancing themselves from, the Marlowe
canon. Rigby's actions are de-sexualized, and accepted by Juliet
as something that needed to be done.
In two drag scenes he secures valuable information about the
case, and uses that information to protect another character. In
the first scene he plays a beautiful blond (Barbara Stanwyck)
who seduces Fred MacMurray (as Walter Neff) and finds the
passenger list to the SS Immer Essen (the
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cruise ship that destroyed Carlotta). In the second drag scene he
plays Jimmy Cagney's mother from White Heat and tells him that
'The friends of Carlotta are after you'.
Martin's in-drag impersonations make heroines of famous noir
femme fatale characters. In this reversal of tradition he
undermines the negative sexual identity assigned this flawed
female character. He uses her presence (and identity) to positive
ends, suggesting that her presence can be deployed for positive,
active investigative purposes. More deeply, he gives a camp,
homo-erotic twist to his impersonations. He suggests that the
male playing the female has power that would not be given if the
straight female, or male role were played. In this move he further
defines and elaborates the noir tradition (for example, making a
bad woman good). He thereby challenges the tradition's negative
treatment of females and homosexuals. In this he goes beyond
Lynch, for his women, even as they are played by men, are free
to go places that Lynch's women would never dare.
Reiner seems to be saying that there is more to these old films
than previously thought. By reworking and redefining the
tradition he 'periodizes' its patriarchal biases and fits those
stereotypes to the contemporary moment. Marlowe will never be
the same again. Reiner's reflexive text thus turns noir's voyeur
into a comic figure. In laughing at this long Hollywood tradition
of filmic representation Reiner seems to be saying that this
version of the voyeur can no longer be taken seriously. But
comedy-as-parody is high praise. In exposing the visual and
narrative conventions that underlie this tradition Reiner brings it
to a new level of development, a level that has yet to be
transcended.
Laughing Matters
Back to the beginning and multiple versions of the voyeur: Jane
Craig and Ann Bishop Millaney with their cameras, Dorothy and
her knife and blue velvet robe, Jeffrey looking out of the closet,
Sandy outside Dorothy's apartment, wild Frank, Detective
Williams, Graham hiding behind his camera, Rigby Reardon
interacting with all those famous detectives from the past and
Rigby Reardon, voyeur in drag.
And multiple subject positions: active, passive, supplemental
reciprocal, sadistic, masochistic. Always gendered, these
positions shift and take on various levels of comedy in the hands
of each filmmaker. Laughing matters seem to involve the degree
to which the female character is able to transcend the patriarchal
gaze and its all-encompassing power. The voyeur exposed by the
comic text is thus a figure who is both less and more noble than
his or her more serious filmic counterpart: less noble because
comedy smashes the sombre conventions that prop up the
serious business of 'real' voyeurism (the norms of rationality,
truth and objectivity); more noble because in laughter reflexive
distance is gained from these same
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conventions. In that distance the viewer sees the mythic ideals
this figure aspires to, and sees also just how dangerous,
powerful, generous and self-aggrandizing this character really is.
The following chapter circles around this figure from another
standpoint. I turn next to the serious and comic versions of the
gaze of the minority group member, in this case the Asian eye
which moves from Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936) to Wayne
Wang's Chan is Missing (1981).
Notes
1. I have offered earlier readings of Blue Velvet and sex, lies and
videotape in Denzin, 1991a, Chapters 5 and 8. These readings
did not focus, as I do here, on the voyeur's place in the film's
text.
2. In order of treatment, I begin with Broadcast News, then turn
to sex, lies and videotape, then Blue Velvet, and end with Dead
Men Don't Wear Plaid, a film which leads logically into the
investigative, private eye, detective films discussed in Chapters 4
and 5.
3. Krutnik (1991: 16) also locates Blue Velvet in the recent (last
two decades) return to the film noir tradition by mainstream
Hollywood (e.g. Chinatown (1974), Farewell, My Lovely (1975),
Taxi Driver (1976), Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) and Blue
Steel (1989)).
4. Fainting becomes a convenient marker for loss of vision, for
with it comes the loss of consciousness.
5. Shot In the Dark offers a mocking catalogue of these
conventions: cameras blow up in the detective's face; Clouseau's
self-inflicted injuries bear no relationship to the usual violence
detectives receive; his misplaced erotic attachments lead him to
misperceive the identity of one of the murderers; his supervisor's
insanity produces violence usually confined to villains or heroic
voyeurs; Clouseau's irrational commitment to one solution to the
crimes finally proves to be correct.
6. A film Brooks dedicated to 'the master of suspense, Alfred
Hitchcock'. It is described, on the video rental box as 'another
satire from the comic mind of Mel Brooks, the story spoofs
classic mystery/suspense director Alfred Hitchcock'. The film
makes a parody of many Hitchcock films, including Psycho,
Birds, Frenzy and North by Northwest, as well as Blow-Up.
7. Stowe discovers his telescope and the blown-up, topless photo
of her that he and his fellow-officers have nailed to a wall. She
observes the 'exclamation' marks they have placed on her breasts.
8. Written, directed and produced by James L. Brooks; released
by Twentieth-Century Fox; cinematography by Michael
Ballhaus; cast: William Hurt (Tom Grunick), Albert Brooks
(Aaron Altman), Holly Hunter (Jane Craig), Robert Prosky
(Ernie Merriman), Joan Cusak (Blair Litton), Jack Nicholson
(Bill). Academy nominations for Best Actress (Holly Hunter),
and Best Supporting Actor (Albert Brooks).
9. In the interest of space this story will only be glossed. One of
Tom's last stories at the Washington Bureau involves an interview
with a young woman who was raped on a date. This interview
elicited high emotion and tears on the part of the woman and
Tom. Aaron questioned the story's accuracy and suspected that
Tom, contrary to his claim, used two cameras, not one, for the
story. (The first camera shot the woman from the front, leaving
Tom off-screen as the interviewer. The second camera shot Tom
after the story was done. In the second shot he produced tears
which were then spliced into the final story.) Aaron conveys his
doubts to Jane who replays the tapes of the interview. She
confirms Aaron's doubts. Tom in fact used two cameras and
manufactured the tears after the interview had been shot. She
nearly cries when this discovery is made. She confronts Tom
with this discovery in the airport as they are about to leave on a
week's vacation. Jane: 'I'm not going. I saw the taped out-takes of
the interview with the girl. I know you acted your reactions after
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the interview . . . It's terrible what you did. . . . You could get
fired for things like that.' Tom: 'I got promoted for things like
that.' Jane: 'Working up tears for a newspiece cut-away. You
totally crossed the line between what is news and what is
garbage. It's incredible. You commit this horrible breach of
ethics, and then you act as if I'm giving you a hard time about
nothing.'
10. This commitment to authenticity produces the comic scene
over Aaron's story about the soldier returning home from
Angola. At the last second Jane races to splice into the footage a
shot from Norman Rockwell's painting of a homecoming. This
Rockwell shot is contrasted to the shot of the lonely, angry
soldier stepping off the bus in Omaha. This produces a sense of
irony and sadness that would otherwise not be present in the
story. Pure dramaturgy, Jane's story however had an honest,
human touch. It was a good story.
11. Jane secures all the facts, nothing is staged or inauthentic.
She organizes and inserts into the story historical information on
the bombing site, first-hand reports from participants, actual
footage of the crisis, reports from the White House, an interview
with the pilot shot down in 1981, shots of Gadaffi, footage of the
planes in action, a shot of the actual area bombed, its name and
the name of the base commander. The emotional, personal touch
is given in the interview with the pilot. Repeating Jane's lines,
Tom asks, 'What's it like to be in a real dog fight? How do you
know when you are hit?'
12. Written and directed by Steven Soderbergh; produced by
Robert Newmyer and John Hardy; released by Miramax Films;
cinematography by Walt Lloyd; cast: James Spader (Graham),
Andie MacDowell (Ann), Peter Gallagher (John), Lura San
Giacomo (Cynthia). Winner of 1989 Cannes Film Festival Best
Picture and Best Actor Awards, and International Critics Award.
13. I omit a summary of the narrative (see Denzin, 1991a:
10914), except to note that this is a study in looking, in gendered
voyeurism, in men looking at women on videotape and women
looking at themselves on videotape. The central voyeur, Graham,
is sexually impotent, and compensates by having women tell him
sexual stories about themselves.
14. Written and directed by David Lynch; produced by Fred
Caruso; released by De Laurentis Entertainment Group;
cinematographer, Frederick Elmes; cast: Kyle MacLachlan
(Jeffrey Beaumont), Isabella Rossellini (Dorothy Vallens),
Dennis Hopper (Frank Booth), Laura Dern (Sandy Williams),
Dean Stockwell (Ben), George Dickerson (Detective Williams),
Hope Lange (Mrs Williams). Winner of National Society for
Film Critics Best Film Award, Best Director, Best Supporting
Actor (Hopper) and Best Cinematographer (Elmes), 1986;
Academy nominations for Best Director.
15. In American popular culture, and in contemporary cultural
and cinema studies literatures, Blue Velvet has achieved almost
canonical status as the postmodern film of the 1980s, and its
director David Lynch has been accorded the distinction of being
one of America's leading postmodern filmmakers (see Denzin,
1991a, Chapter 5 for a review of this literature. See also
Jameson, 1991: 28796; Brunette and Wills, 1989: 13971;
Connor, 1989: 17880; Graham, 1991: 11718; Creed, 1988; Biga,
1987).
16. Lynch's text throughout this sequence, may be read, as Creed
(1988: 96, 112) argues, as presenting three primal/sexual
fantasies involving the origins of individuals (parental
lovemaking), their sexuality (seduction) and their concept of
sexual difference (castration). Creed (1988: 112) connects each
of these fantasies to a particular version of the voyeuristic gaze:
castration with the sadistic look, parental love-making with
masochism and seduction with an exchange of looks of both
forms. She also suggests that these looks may not be
'deterministically linked to gender' (1988: 112); passive and
active gazes can shift from female to male, and back again.
17. Sandy will appear three more times in the film. Frightened,
she will appear, with her father, in Dorothy's apartment just after
Jeffrey shoots Frank, then she will be seen embracing Jeffrey in
front of Dorothy's apartment house. Finally, she and Jeffrey will
appear in the family kitchen, looking at the mechanical robin on
the window ledge eating a bug.
18. Directed by Carl Reiner; screenplay by Carl Reiner, George
Gipe and Steve Martin; produced by David V. Picker and
William E. McEuen, for Aspen Film Society, released by
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Universal; cinematographer, Michael Chapman; cast: Steve
Martin (Rigby Reardon), Rachel Ward (Juliet Forrest), Carl
Reiner (Field Marshall VonKluck).
19. Rigby is hired by Juliet Forrest to find her father, John Hay
Forrest, who, prior to his disappearance, had been experimenting
with a number of dangerous cheeses. Aided by his assistant
Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), Rigby goes on the trail of a
mysterious woman, Carlotta. It turns out that Carlotta is a South
American island which strangely dissolved while a cruise ship
was sailing by. In South America Reardon discovers that Forrest
is being held captive by a group of Nazis, led by Field Marshall
VonKluck (Carl Reiner), who wants to use Forrest's deadly
cheese to dissolve the United States (Slide, 1983: 135). Rigby
shoots VonKluck and the film closes with he and Juliet
embracing.
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4
The Asian Eye:
Charlie Chan and Mr Moto Go to the Movies
Thunder crashes. The wind howls. Sinister shadows play across
the landscape. Lightning divides the black sky. The camera cuts
to a darkened asylum, light reflects from a single large room.
Boris Karloff, hair askew, is madly pounding the piano, singing
grand opera. Rain batters the shoulders of a shivering night-
watchman who gazes at Karloff. Shutters bang against stone
walls and Karloff's wailing voice carries, like a pained scream,
into the night wind. These are the opening shots and sounds
which establish Charlie Chan at the Opera as part 'whodunit,
part horror [and part Gothic] film' (Hanke, 1989: 83).
The story is old and straightforward enough, although
unravelling what happens is not so easy. A woman murders her
unfaithful husband and his lover. These are not ordinary people:
they are opera stars. The city is Los Angeles: the date, 1936. A
partial reworking of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the film
stars Warner Oland as Charlie Chan and Boris Karloff as
Gravelle, a 'crazed' operatic baritone, and the first husband of
Lilli. 1
In the following dialogue Charlie solves this murder-mystery:
Proof most elemental. Fact in deduction . . . if Gravelle guilty, must
have both knives on person before singing . . . Previous examination
of costume disclose no tell-tale blood stains. Madman not use
Barelli's knife, having one of own . . . Method devised by re-
murderer born in rational mind. Use presence of maniac in theatre as
perfect alibi to cover own guilt. Conceal murder knife after first
crime. . . . Fact that Madame Barelli in wings during final singing
final link in chain of evidence [camera shot of Anita]. You are
murderess [she jumps up]. You were only one who knew Gravelle
planned to sing the Mephisto role tonight . . . so avail self of perfect
opportunity to avenge intrigue which cause you so much
humiliation . . . you conceal knife on person after murder of
husband.
Confronted with the facts, Madame Barelli confesses. The film
ends, as it opened, in darkness. Only now Charlie and Number
One Son are racing to catch the boat to family and home in
Hawaii. With a police escort lighting up the night, sirens
shrilling, Charlie and son, the pragmatic voyeurs, have solved
another crime. Now it is time for family.
As argued in Chapter 2, the gaze of the voyeur is structured
along racial and ethnic lines. Only privileged members of racial
and ethnic minorities are allowed to gaze on majority group
members. The concept of a colour (see Blumer, 1965/1988: 208;
Lyman, 1990b) and gender line (see
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Gamman, 1989) operates in this context, assigning to white and
non-white males and females different gazing positions in the
social order. Charlie Chan at the Opera and the other films in the
Chan series simultaneously transgress and are confined by this
colour and ethnic line.
In this chapter I examine famous racial and ethnic voyeurs, in
particular Charlie Chan and Mr Moto. I will contrast the Chan
and Moto film series to the experimental, 1981 film Chan is
Missing, 2a text which undoes the Asian stereotypes perpetuated
by the Charlie Chan and Mr Moto characters. I will take one film
from each of the Chan and Moto series (Charlie Chan at the
Opera (1937),3and Mr Moto's Last Warning (1939)).4Each is
representative of their respective series and currently available
for video rental.5Each is also representative of a particular type
of detective/investigative fiction. The Chan series are 'whodunits',
the Moto films are thrillers, and Chan is Missing merges the
'whodunit' formula with the suspense format (see Todorov, 1977:
50).6This examination of the privileged, minority male gaze in
the pre- and post-classic periods should help to establish my
argument that Hollywood's treatment of this figure has moved
from a repressed voyeurism, through parody, to a blatant
voyeurism characteristic of the contemporary period.
While the Oriental sleuth was virtually ignored in silent film, he
became a staple of the Hollywood screen with the third Chan
movie, Behind That Curtain (1929) (Everson, 1972: 723;
Hanke, 1989: xiii). Until the Chan figure, the concept of an
Oriental hero was unthinkable. For the American audience the
ultimate 'Yellow Peril' was the insidious Dr Fu Manchu, Sax
Rohmer's Oriental master criminal (see Penzler, 1977:
43).7Indeed, Asians were generally missing in early cinema, or if
present only as laundrymen or lowly paid workers (for example,
Chinese Laundry Scene, 1894; see Musser, 1991: 434, 76, note
13).8However, Chan's third appearance opened the door for
America's unique version of the Oriental sleuth.9Over the next
20 years there would be more than 60 films starring Charlie
Chan, Mr Moto and Mr Wong (48 for Chan, 8 for Moto, 6 for
Wong).10
To study this figure is to study ourselves, for through his persona
are filtered all the arguments we as Westerners give ourselves for
looking and gazing upon others.11We are the Asian voyeur. But
today 'Chan is missing'12and the warrant to look the way Charlie
once looked is no longer automatically given. How did this come
to be? What happened? Or has anything really happened?
A single, yet complicated, thesis drawing from Jameson (1990),
Said (1979, 1989), Stam (1991), Bakhtin (1981, 1986), Shohat
(1991) and Hall (1981) organizes my discussion. Modifying
Edward Said (1979), I suggest that between the years 1929 and
1949 Hollywood aided in the containment of America's Asian-
American population through the production of the more than 60
films featuring the Chan, Moto and Wong characters.13These
Oriental sleuths neutralized previous negative images of the
Asian-American, and offered to Asian-Americans (and
Americans) a particular Americanized version of who they were
and who they should be. In this
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Hollywood operated as an 'Orientalizing' agency for the larger
American culture. Hollywood cinema worked, that is, as an
institutional apparatus which described, taught, and authorized a
particular view of Asian culture, Asian men, women, and Asian
family life. It created a system of discourse which constituted the
'Orient' and the Asian as 'imaginary others' who were
simultaneously categorized, exteriorized, excluded and included
within the Western framework. 14
These films contained a kernel of utopian fantasy (see Jameson,
1990: 34; Shohat, 1991: 222). As such they may be seen as sites
of ideological struggle for they projected a world where
Americans and Asians could happily interact within a unified
culture where the facts of bigotry, racism and discrimination
were, if not absent, at least easily negotiable (see Desser, 1991a:
383). In this they operated as ethnic allegories which, even when
'narrating apparently private stories, managed to metaphorize the
public sphere, where the micro-individual is doubled by the
macro-nation and the personal, the political, the private and the
historical, are inextricably linked' (Shohat, 1991: 234; see also
Jameson, 1990: 323). Chan, Moto and Wong became positive
stand-ins for the negative Asian other, and the 'Yellow Peril',
even as their characters critiqued and made a parody of the
ethnocentric, Eurocentric, racist stereotypes15which were
ascribed to them (see also Shohat, 1991: 238).
These texts and their heroes, however, were in Bakhtin's terms
(Stam, 1991: 253) complex discursive constructions. A
polyphonic play of voices, from the ethnic margins and the
centres of white society, interact in each film to produce
characters who are not just unitary essences, but rather three-
dimensional, flesh-and-blood entities (see Stam, 1991: 253,
2578). The characters cannot, that is, be read as flat stick figures.
Charlie, Wong and Moto were always at the centre of 'conflicting
and competing voices' (Stam, 1991: 257), voices which
constituted them as subjects within clashing racial and ethnic
contradictions. At different moments within any of these films
the heroes could be 'traversed by racist and antiracist discourse'
(Stam, 1991: 257). Each figure became a complex construction
whose dialogical angle of vision on the American-Asian ethnic
order was always at the very core of the 'American experience'
(Stam, 1991: 259). By being folded into the centre of crises
produced by Americans, they were able to live racism from
within, inside looking out, as they were outsiders brought into
the inside.
On the surface Hollywood's Orientalist discourse distinguished
the Oriental/Asian from the Western/European figure, in terms of
cultural and racial stereotyping (K. Lee, 1991: 1). The
European/American was presented as the culturally-known,
familiar comfortable other; the Asian as the unknown,
dangerous, devious other. The European/American other was
rational, virtuous, mature and normal; the Oriental was irrational,
depraved, fallen, childlike, immature, a danger to society (K.
Lee, 1991: 1; Said, 1979: 300). In these ways American cinema
perpetuated its version of Orientalism, which, Said reminds us, is
the 'corporate institution for
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dealing with the Orient . . . by making statements about it . . .
ruling over it: in short Orientalism is a Western style for
dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient'
(Said, 1979: 3; see also Barthes, 1982; Kristeva, 1977; Doane,
1991, Chapter 9).
In the Chan, Moto and Wong movies Hollywood offered the
American audience a superficial, stereotyped image of the
neutered, slant-eyed, greased-down hair, thin moustached (the
Fu Manchu moustache), calm, implacable Oriental detective.
(The three series seldom dealt with other Asian stereotypes,
including the Asian drug kingpin and the exotic China doll see,
for example, Cimino's Year of the Dragon and Marchetti's (1991)
discussion of these stereotypes.) This figure would work in the
service of law and order, peace and justice. He would protect the
world from sinister criminals, and take pleasure in solving crimes
and catching criminals who eluded the dimwitted police.
It is no accident that the Asian male would find acceptance in
American culture as a voyeur and a sleuth, for there is a long
tradition connecting Orientalism with voyeurism and at times
scopophilia (see Doane, 1991: 180). His earlier image, after all,
was as the sinister master criminal Dr Fu Manchu. It remained to
capture this Oriental gaze and to put it to Western uses. As
Foucault (1980: 155) implies, twentieth century regimes of
power and surveillance turned the observed into the observer, the
deviant into the one who studies and controls deviants.
Consequently, a major power strategy involved the state's
recruitment of minority group members as surveillance agents. In
the guise of these three male figures (Chan, Moto and Wong) the
master Oriental criminal was turned into a master sleuth, a person
who could use his sinister qualities for positive purposes.
He was then invested with all of his culture's negative and
positive characteristics. He carried the weight of being Asian
upon his investigative shoulders, using his oriental eyes as a way
of being (and seeing) the truth that others could not see. He was
forced to rely upon his wit as a vehicle for disarming cultural
criticisms of his ethnic origins. While self-deprecating ('All my
life I study to speak fine English words. Now I must strangle all
such in my throat, lest suspicion rise up. Not a happy situation
for me') his wit was always barbed, and passively aggressive
('Silence big sister of wisdom', 'Tongue often hang man quicker
than rope'). (Penzler, 1977: 47). Thus did he attack with words
his Western aggressors.
However, in its representation of the Oriental sleuth, Hollywood
inverted the usual stereotyped picture of the Asian male. It gave
this figure precisely those Western/European/American traits
which had been previously denied the Asian other. Chan, Moto
and Wong were rational, virtuous, mature, normal men who were
paired and pitted against irrational, depraved, childish, violent,
immature Westerners. 16In this move the Asian male was
simultaneously excluded from, and included inside, a Western-
Orientalizing discourse which made him stranger and friend at
the same time.
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The comedy format of the Asian detective series facilitated this
textual displacement, for these films must be read as comedy. In
this they took their place in a long Hollywood history, for as
Musser (1991: 43) argues, 'ethnic-based comedy has been a
feature of American cinema from its beginnings until the
present'. Ethnicity being Asian is presented in this series as a
'constraint and a construction from which characters and
audiences can be at least temporarily liberated' (Musser, 1991:
43). Thus Charlie, Wong and Moto, in key moments in every
film, are momentarily released from their Asian identities and
turned into serious sleuths, often preceded by their movement
into a disguise (for example, clown, shopkeeper, etc.). (The
comedy basis of the Chan series is obvious, of course, given in
the usual capers of Number One Son.) In the movements back
and forth between serious detective film and comedy, the Asian
detective films exaggerate ethnic stereotype through speech and
dress patterns, and through dialogue directed to the Asian
detective (for example, chop suey).
Through these comedic gestures the filmmakers exercised a form
of social control over the non-Western figure, arguing that he
should be made to accommodate the central features of Western
culture. Thus these texts operated in an assimilationist manner,
wiping out in a single stroke all of the distinctive, positive
features of Oriental culture. Indeed, the fact that each Oriental
detective was a master at disguise further reinforced the cultural
message that the Oriental should be made to fit into American
culture (see Musser, 1991: 55). This demand would be most
evident in those situations where the detective would be forced to
assume a 'false mask of politesse when waiting on the
condescending and self-absorbed' Westerner (Musser, 1991: 57).
It is clear that the Oriental voyeur, unlike Sherlock Holmes, Bull
Drummond, Nick Carter, Mike Hammer or Hercule Poirot, had
to overcome an ethnic identity before he could be a detective. So
Chan, Moto and Wong had to be given ethnic identities that
Americans could feel comfortable with. These identities had to
be, on the surface at least, firm and certain. They could not
threaten the identities of others. Thus Chan, Moto and Wong first
appear as wooden, cartoon characters with little depth. Their
private lives were apparently irrelevant, all that needed to be
known about them was that they were good at solving crimes.
However each carried a history from one film to the next, a
history of previous crimes solved. This history gave substance
and depth to their personal biographies.
As a consequence they were never presented as personal, or
sexual threats to the white other. They became feminized Asian
men, even eunuchs (see Marchetti, 1991: 290 on the stereotype
of the Asian male as sexual threat). Still, as Eugene Franklin
Wong argues (1978), and Marchetti repeats (1991: 289),
ethnicity is never neuter. Images of race, ethnicity and sexuality
are always intertwined. Indeed racial and ethnic hierarchies are
often maintained 'through fantasies which reinforce those
differences through references to gender. Thus fantasies of
threatening
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Asian men, emasculated eunuchs, alluring Asian ''dragon ladies,"
and submissive female slaves all work to rationalize white, male
domination' (Marchetti, 1991: 289). Sexually passive Charlie, Mr
Wong and Mr Moto reinforced the sexually dominant position of
the white males in the text. (Only Number One Son would be
permitted to flirt, and his sexual games were harmless, written
off to his adolescent genes, not his ethnicity.)
In these ways the series would foreground and then displace and
repress ethnic identity and ethnic difference. Audiences could
accept the Oriental detective as a familiar 'white' other, who was
at the same time different. (Mr Moto would often disguise
himself as a 'white man'.) In these ways the films played different
ethnic and racial identities off against one another, even Charlie
had a black chauffeur! But in so doing it maintained a rigid
ethnic hierarchy, which placed whites above non-whites.
A double spectacular structure organized these texts. The centre
of any given film in the series would often unfold around, and
be marked by, moments of spectacle. There would be operatic
performances, vaudeville acts, the unveiling of new
archaeological discoveries, carnival displays of dramatic
violence, murders on stage and so on. The ethnic hierarchy of
selves would then typically be realized through a 'spectacle of
discovery' wherein Chan, Moto or Wong would ceremoniously
unmask the murderer or villain. This would often occur in a
group situation, where all of the suspects were brought together
(sometimes in a locked room). The detective would then create
anxiety by pointing out how each suspect could have been the
murderer. (Typically the anxiety was sufficient to lead the 'real'
murderer to confess.)
The spectacle of criminal discovery would occur within this
larger specular (and spectacular) structure. It would allow for the
'contemplation of the racial and ethnic Other as an object,
separated from and under the visual control of the viewer
positioned with the camera, in power, as the eye of the dominant
culture' (Marchetti, 1991: 287). In the moment of discovery
Charlie, Wong or Moto would invariably be distanced from the
Westerners in the film, simultaneously object and subject of his
own (and ours) investigation. In this way the films would
reinscribe racial and ethnic difference, and usually sexual
difference as well. In his spectacular moment of discovery the
Oriental detective became spectacle and, by implication, his
ethnicity became spectacle too.
Thus were the Asian detectives orientalized. Their ethnicity was
ubiquitous, yet textually submerged, as they were given fixed,
yet mutable, ethnic identities. Never really pitted against the
culturally dominant group, they were always outsiders on the
periphery who were brought into the cultural centre when a crisis
appeared (see Shohat, 1991: 217 on the centre-periphery issue).
Once they entered this inner, sacred space of the culturally
dominant group they performed their function with dispatch,
humour and grace. Their ethnic identities were submerged and
stitched into the dominant colonialist discourse which was itself
turned into the discourse of crime, punishment and discovery.
Through a dialectic of
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presence and absence (Shohat, 1991: 222), the Hollywood films
on the Asian detective allowed this Asian other to be both
present and absent at the same time. As he moved from disguise
to disguise he became first you, and then me and then someone
else. In this way the investigative and comedic codes which
contained these narratives undertook to speak for the
marginalized Asian culture.
A superficial form of cultural integration was thereby produced.
At one level these films simply inserted new heroes, 'drawn from
the ranks of the subaltern, into old functional roles' (Stam, 1991:
263). The implication was clear. By playing the part of detective,
or law enforcer, Chan, Wong and Moto had an Asian link to the
American and international 'power structure' (Stam, 1991: 263).
But of course this was 'quite out of keeping with the actual
configuration of social power' (Stam, 1991: 263).
The hegemony of the comedy and investigative narrative codes
included and excluded the Asian spectator. It gave such viewers
only one subject position to assume the position of seeing
themselves through the larger, dominant culture's eyes. These
viewers, like their American counterparts, thus learned quickly
how to master the 'presumed codes of a foreign culture, shown
as simple, stable, unself-conscious, and susceptible to facile
apprehension [and representation]' (Shohat, 1991: 225). The
Asian eye thus read its culture through the codes developed by
the dominant culture. The oppositional nature of ethnic and
cultural life was minimized, as a fixed, stereotypical picture of an
isolated minority group was pitted against a fixed, 'white-
American power structure' (Shohat, 1991: 217). The image of
overlapping, conflicting de-centred circles of ethnic identities
was never considered (Shohat, 1991: 217). Such an image of the
Asian-American identity would not appear until 1981 with
Wayne Wang's Chan is Missing.
This is how the Asian detective movie series worked. It
simultaneously contained and released the Asian eye to be just
like you and me, while he was always different, foreign, strange
and somewhat distant from our own experience. Now Charlie
Chan at the Opera.
The first story, the film as it presents itself to the viewer, is the
story of what 'appeared' to have happened. The second story
(plot), the story of investigation, is the story of how the
investigator (Charlie) and the viewer (you and I) come to know
what 'really happened' (Todorov, 1977: 45). In the second story
Charlie (the narrator) re-presents to us what actually happened
(for example, re-playing the opera scene). The first story follows
the natural progression of time, effects follow causes (see
Todorov, 1977: 45). The second story inverts time, with results
(dead bodies) coming before causes (the real murderer). Charlie
serves as the mediator between these two stories, explaining to us
what we did and did not see when we saw what we thought we
saw.
In classic fashion the film has a geometric architecture: two
murders, four suspects, four sets of clues and four interrogations.
In order: two dead bodies (Enrico, Lilli); four suspects (Phil,
Whitely, Gravelle, Anita); four clues (blood on the hands of Phil;
Whitely's fingerprints on the card to Anita; Gravelle's oiled knife
with no blood stains; Anita's second costume belt which has
blood stains, and the second, hidden knife, with blood on the
handle); and four interrogations, wherein, following the
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hypo-deductive method, Charlie systematically eliminates each
suspect until he comes to Anita.
This geometric structure builds on an earlier architecture,
involving Charlie's discovery of Gravelle's real identity and the
relationship between Phil, Kitty, Gravelle and Lilli. Two clues are
the key to each puzzle. For Gravelle this involves the wirephoto
sequence and the earlier prediction that the heel on the photo
signalled a relationship between the escaped maniac and Lilli.
The discovery of the family relationship involved Charlie
observing Phil and Kitty asking to see Lilli and overhearing
Gravelle's discourse to Kitty about a lost daughter. When Charlie
puts these two pieces of the puzzle together he is able to exclude
Phil and Gravelle as murder suspects.
The film's geometric structure, including Charlie's use of the
hypo-deductive method, serves to place reason and rationality on
the side of this particular Oriental eye. It underscores the text's
commitment to the position that every event has a cause, every
cause an effect, and every effect is the cause of another effect
(see Haycroft, 1972: 249; Todorov, 1977: 49). But, like a
pragmatist, Charlie always works from consequences back to
causes.
Everyday Pragmatic Voyeurism
He could not do this if he were not a voyeur. But Charlie is a
particular kind of voyeur. His are not the secretive and hidden
gazes of the criminal. His looks do not carry violent, sexual, or
erotic overtones. His looks are sudden, quick, done in the
immediate presence of others, focused always on small physical
details (an unburned cigar in an ashtray, a note card in a
wastebasket) overheard words, untoward gestures, footprints,
smells and odours. Like Sherlock Holmes, he deduces
information from the traces left by human actions (see Truzzi,
1976: 65; and earlier discussion in Chapter 2, pp. 534). In this he
makes the ordinary, immediately at-hand, taken-for-granted,
physical world problematic and visible. He is a voyeur of the
visible, of the could-be-seen, but not noticed, everyday world.
His commitment to the pragmatic investigative method leads him
to be constantly alert to clues and traces of action which would
point to meanings that others want to suppress. His method of
inquiry is progressive, processual and transformative (on the
pragmatic method see Farberman and Perinbanayagam, 1985:
89; Farberman, 1991: 480). The entire point of any one of
Charlie's investigative activities is to produce an interpretive
account of past action which squares with the facts. Facts are
based on the consequences of actions. For example who could
have been present in this room at this time and have had the
motive and method to kill this person?
Charlie's pragmatic method becomes hypo-deductive when he
hypothesizes motives for action. Doubt and scepticism operate at
every
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step of the way. Charlie doubts any individual's account and he is
sceptical of his own interpretive procedures. Every hypothesis
(and account) is fallible, 'since it is open to future experience that
may well refute it' (Farberman and Perinbanayagam, 1985: 9).
Charlie's pragmatic theory of truth assumes that 'the best
hypothesis is the one which best explains past experience and
most comprehensively predicts future consequences' (Farberman
and Perinbanayagam, 1985: 9). In this he aligns himself with the
pragmatism of Charles S. Peirce. But his pragmatism goes
beyond Peirce, and merges with that of William James who
argued that what is meaningful is what is true for the individual
(see Farberman and Perinbanayagam, 1985: 10). Charlie
understands that each person's interpretation of a situation works
because it gives an account of actions. But this account may be
false, hiding the real facts of the situation. The real facts of a
situation can only be uncovered by creating an emotional
situation which shatters the deceiver's false account.
Here is how this Works in Opera. Charlie has all the suspects
(except Gravelle) in the same room. (Gravelle has been shot by
the police and taken off by the medics.) Sergeant Kelly has
charged Charlie with endangering the life of Anita, 'Egg foo
yung! The guy who pulls rabbits out of the hat sends a woman
out there to let a guy stick a knife in her. Well Chief, that about
closes the case.' Charlie contradicts him: 'Contradiction please.
Case still wide open, like swinging gate . . . will demonstrate
with hypothesis.' He then lays the two knives side by side on a
table. He continues:
Proof most elemental. Fact in deduction . . . if Gravelle guilty, must
have both knives on person before singing . . . Previous examination
of costume discloses no tell-tale blood stains. Madman not use
Barelli's knife, having one of own. . . . Method devised by re-
murderer born in rational mind. Use presence of maniac in theatre as
perfect alibi to cover own guilt. Conceal murder knife after first
crime . . . Fact that Madame Barelli in wings during final singing
final link in chain of evidence [camera shot of Anita]. You are
murderess [she jumps up]. You were only one who knew Gravelle
planned to sing the Mephisto role tonight . . . so avail self of perfect
opportunity to avenge intrigue which cause you so much
humiliation . . . you conceal knife on person after murder of
husband.
Confronted with the facts, Madame Barelli confesses: 'You're
right. I used it on Lilli when I came back with the smelling salts
and found her alone'. Then, turning to Whitely, she states, 'You
knew what was going on, but you weren't man enough to do
anything about it'.
Charlie's investigative method is in full presence in this scene.
Facts, deductions, motives, methods and opportunities for crime
are all assembled. Gravelle is logically eliminated as a suspect
because he did not have both knives on his person. Whitely is
excluded because he did not know Gravelle and his presence
during the performance could be accounted for. Phil was earlier
excluded because of Kitty's account about wanting to see her
mother. (Phil got the blood on his hands when he
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attempted to move Lilli.) Only one suspect remains, Madame
Barelli. By having her recreate her role in the opera Charlie
created the emotional scene which would lead her to confess.
For all practical purposes the film ends with the above speech,
although the obligatory last scene with Number One Son who
rushes in with the missing clue (no longer needed) must be
inserted into the finale. Just before this occurs Sergeant Kelly
apologizes to Charlie, 'You're alright. Just like Chop Suey, a
mystery, but a swell dish. By the way, I didn't get that Chinese
lingo you sprung on us before you asked Madame to sing'.
Charlie, 'Ancient Chinese proverb meaning when fear attack
brain, tongue wave in distress'. Kelly, 'I get it. You made her sing
with Gravelle just to scare her into talking'. Charlie, 'Yes'.
With these lines the film closes, as it opened, in darkness. Only
now Charlie and Number One Son are racing to the harbour to
catch the boat to Hawaii. With a police escort lighting up the
night, sirens screaming in the air, Charlie and son, the pragmatic
voyeurs, have solved another crime. Now it is time for their
Oriental family.
Racial Overtones
Consider the following lines, they are all spoken by the William
Demarest character, Sergeant Kelly, or his immediate superior,
Inspector Regan (Guy Usher). They reference the film's
underlying racism. Kelly: 'You haven't called chop suey in on the
case have you Chief?' Regan: 'No, but it's not a bad idea and take
your hat off. You can learn a little politeness from the Chinese'.
Kelly: 'I can pick him out, he's Chinese'. Kelly: 'If that Chinese
dick knows where he is . . .' Kelly: 'He's [in reference to Charlie]
hitting the pipe again'.
These lines occur in those pivotal investigative moments when
Charlie's methods and techniques are contrasted to those
employed by Sergeant Kelly. In each sequence Charlie's methods
are shown to be superior to those employed by Kelly. For
example, in the film's opening sequence, when Charlie enters
Regan's office, Kelly attempts to keep him off the case. Charlie
immediately shows Kelly to be a fool when he establishes a link
between the photo found in Gravelle's room, and the picture of
Lilli. Charlie continues to establish his superiority when he
suggests that Kelly has been criticized by Regan. Charlie: 'Small
things sometimes tell large stories. For instance, very obvious
here that many men indulge in nervous tic. Perhaps unfortunate
assistant receiving dressing-down on carpet . . . when policeman
on small pay discard large cigar after two puffs, sure sign of
distress'.
These barbed exchanges serve four functions. They establish
Charlie's superior investigative powers, while allowing him to
speak his famous lines, which embody kernels of Chinese
wisdom. These signature lines mark the film as a Charlie Chan
movie. But most importantly they allow the racial subtext to be
continually present. Even as Charlie rebuffs each of
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Kelly's charges, the charges, and their bigotry still stand. Thus
the film is able to superficially transcend its own racism at the
same time as it depends on these racist lines to establish Charlie's
superior skills. In these conversational exchanges the film
simultaneously places Charlie inside and outside mainstream
America. It aligns him with Asian stereotypes, while using these
same stereotypes as a means of overcoming the stereotypes and
their negative moral implications. I turn next to Mr Moto,
another Oriental sleuth who also confronts racist bigotry.
Mr Moto
There were eight Mr Moto films made in the two years, 19379.
Peter Lorre starred in all of them, which were based on the four
John R. Marquand novels (No Hero, Thank you Mr Moto, Think
Fast, Mr Moto, Mr Moto is So Sorry). Mr Moto's Last Warning
(1939) is the seventh in the series, which took its initiative from
the highly popular Charlie Chan films. The series was finally
dropped because Lorre went on to bigger and better roles, and
the World War II situation made 'acceptance of a Japanese hero
dubious' (Everson, 1972: 82).
Unlike Chan, Mr Moto, who was Japanese, worked under cover,
was a master of disguises, often used doubles (or persons who
looked like him so he could hide in disguise), was between 35
and 40, a ju-jitsu expert, adept at magic, and worked for the
International Police. Like Chan, Mr Moto's syntax was distinct,
immediately conveying Hollywood's stereotype of an Asian
speaker, 'I am so very, very happy' or 'You must not make
sound, please'.
Mr Moto's Last Warning (1939) is set in the Mediterranean, in
Port Said, in the midst of World War II. The visual style has
much in common with the film noir tradition, including the use
of lighting, shadows and off-screen space to suggest distance and
danger. France and England are allies against the German army
and navy. A group of foreign conspirators (led by Ricardo
Cortez (Mr Fabian) and George Sanders (Eric Norvel)) are
attempting to sabotage the French fleet as it steams through the
Suez Canal and blame this on the English, thereby breaking the
alliance. Mr Moto has been dispatched by the International Police
to avert this disaster. Sending a Japanese look-alike on board the
SS Himilay, Moto identifies Norvel as a member of this gang,
and suspects that Mr Fabian, who is passing himself off as a
ventriloquist, is its leader. Duped by Moto's double, whom he
has killed, Fabian thinks that Moto (who is disguised as a small
shop owner named Mr Keroke) is out of the picture. Yet he
begins to suspect Moto, who disguises himself as a clown and
listens in on Fabian giving his gang directions. Moto identifies
himself to Danforth (John Carradine), a member of Fabian's
group, who is a secret British agent. Fabian begins to suspect Mr
Keroke when his girlfriend Connie describes 'a little bitty
Japanese man who played ping pong with a
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couple of bruisers'. Fabian has Danforth killed. He then bombs
Moto's shop, but fails to kill him. Moto is subsequently captured
by Fabian, dropped in the canal, escapes in time to save the fleet
and wrestles with Fabian, who is shot by his girlfriend Connie.
This is the story. The publicity for the film described it as
follows:
'The indestructible pint-sized detective fights his greatest battle'
'Mr Moto, the crafty, implacable operative of the International
Police'
'Mr Moto with more lives than a cat, works within a colourful
Egyptian
background to avert disaster and uncover the sinister plot'
Moto embodies mid-century Asian male stereotypes. He is short
(pint-sized), good at ju-jitsu (indestructible), dignified in
appearance (implacable), deferential to everyone and a person
who upholds the law. He has no trouble with English but can
speak a broken dialect if required to do so. He is always more
than he appears to be (crafty, more lives than a cat), hence giving
the illusion of being duplicitous. He has no sex or love life, work
is everything. He is devoted to international law and justice
(averting disaster and uncovering sinister plots). He is the sinister
Oriental other, animal-like, smaller than ordinary humans, yet
indestructible. He exists for, and his existence is justified because
he can deploy his sinister skills in averting disaster for the white
world. He can protect this world against its own kind (foreign
master spies like Fabian). Mr Moto's ability to use disguises is
thus deliberate, for he must pass himself off as a white other in
order to use his 'oriental' skills of crime detection.
Moto's investigative, voyeuristic activities involve furtive
looking, eavesdropping, often with technological aids (hidden
microphones), the use, as noted above, of look-alikes and
disguises as he passes himself off as an ordinary human being.
He is not above violence and is able to put his martial arts skills
to good use when required to do so. His voyeuristic skills, which
allow him to see what others cannot see, are contrasted with the
skills of the police and the military. The generals in the film are
bumbling caricatures of British and French ineptness. These
protectors of law and order need the Mr Motos of the world, as
long as these foreign others are kept in their place.
The world of 'otherness' that Mr Moto inhabits, like Chan's
world, is filled with upper, middle and lower class non-Orientals,
for example, French, British, German and Egyptian men, women
and children. These people are either in the leisure class, the
military, the police or the entertainment or service occupations
(vaudeville performers, bartenders, bar owners). This is a world
of strange foreigners, united in their dislike of strangers and
foreigners. (At one point a British sea captain refuses to drink
with Moto because he 'can't stand strangers and foreigners!'.)
Moto's foreignness thus stands out in this group. He is the only
Asian and the only person called foreign, suggesting that the
Asian other is the only foreigner to the British or the English in
this film. Thus his being Asian
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places him in a permanent outsider and subservient position to
this world of white others who know who they are.
The Mr Moto character, unlike Charlie Chan, had no personal or
family life (Pitts, 1979: 195). A mystery character, he went from
film to film changing identity: a Japanese merchant and amateur
detective (Think Fast, Mr Moto), in the employ of a Chinese
princess (Thank You, Mr Moto), a Japanese detective running a
school of criminology (Mr Moto's Gamble), a ju-jitsu expert
posing as an archaeologist (Mr Moto Takes a Chance) and,
finally, a member of the International Police.
Mr Moto's Last Warning as Thriller
The Moto films are thrillers, not whodunits. In the thriller, as
Todorov (1977: 4951) argues, the detective's life is placed in
danger, killers are professionals and action focuses on danger,
pursuit and combat. There is little mystery, only suspense; that is,
will the villain kill the protagonist? A story's climax typically
involves a final battle between the protagonist and his or her
arch-enemy. The protagonist, having already solved the crime,
emerges a double victor. The person or persons who attempted to
kill the protagonist are killed, and in that act law and order are
restored to the situation. Vengeance and justice are merged in this
single, violent act. In such stories (and films), investigation takes
a second place to violence.
Mr Moto is a violent voyeur. While he will, on occasion, deploy
investigative methods, he does not routinely use the pragmatic
and hypo-deductive logics of Chan or Holmes. His project is
never one which leads to the non-violent solving of a crime.
Indeed the narrative structure of the Moto films is one which
minimizes the detective project. The audience typically knows,
even before Mr Moto, who the criminal is, and what dangers he
poses for our protagonist. The films, then, make violence and
danger their topic.
As an Oriental expert in the martial arts, Mr Moto represents one
of the first of many Oriental, and later American, martial arts
experts that Hollywood would present to American society.
These figures, from Mr Moto to Modesty Blaise, James Bond,
Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and most recently Steve Seagal, keep
the Chinese-Oriental and Asian connection alive in American
culture. These violent figures, who use Asian methods of
combat, continue the Orientalizing project started with the Chan
series. The Asian Eye, now deployed and taken over by Norris
and Seagal, fights the worldwide communist and Asian
conspiracy associated with terrorism, drug cartels, white slavery,
pornography and pro-Vietnam fantasies concerning veterans
who return to Vietnam to free American POWs. These same
right-wing cultural icons also take stands against drug pushers,
underclass violence toward the police and sexual violence against
middle-class American women. These films, as Ryan and Kellner
observe, represent a 'curious mixture of anti-authoritarian
individualism and extremely conservative law and order
moralism that characterizes the
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populist American male' (1988: 227). This was the door that
Charlie Chan and Mr Moto opened.
To summarize, while Mr Moto's identities changed from film to
film (and within films), underneath each of these changes was a
firm understanding. This tiny Asian male knew who he was,
knew his place in society and felt pride in his ability to always
right a situation that had gone wrong. Of these things he was
certain. In this certainty he shared with Charlie Chan the belief
that he occupied a particular and special place in American
society. All of this is undone in Chan is Missing.
Chan Is Missing
Several Chans are missing in this film. Mr Chan Hung, a
Taiwanese businessman who owes Jo (a humorous, soft-spoken,
sweet-tempered middle-aged Chinese American cabdriver) 19and
his young Freddie Prinze-like, 'Americanized' nephew Steve,
$4,000, cannot be found. He has been missing for 22 days. (Jo
and Steve decided to sublease a licence from an independent
owner. Mr Chan Hung was to deliver $4,000 to finalize the deal.)
Charlie Chan and the Chan mystery series are missing, although
the series is ridiculed by Jo, who says, 'Those old films are a
source of cheap laughs'. Charlie and Number One Son are not
here, but their absence is several times noted, and their presence
mocked. Laughingly, Jo and Steve, for example, introduce
themselves to Mr Chan's daughter as Charlie Chan and Number
One Son. In this film no clue leads anywhere and a mystery, in
the conventional sense, is never solved. What's not here seems to
have just as much meaning as what is here. Nothing means what
it seems to mean.
But these easily identifiable absences are not what the film is
about. Self, in its Asian-American versions, and its empty
centres, are the topic at hand. On the surface this is a 'whodunit',
but more deeply it is a 'whoisit'. Its topic is epistemological. 'How
do we know the self and its meanings' and are these meanings
ever certain? The film first.
The city is San Francisco: the setting, Chinatown: the time, now.
The style is cinema verité, film noir, grainy screen, dark
shadows, back-lit scenes, voice-over narration. Mosaic-like,
Chan is Missing is a collage of over-laid images, pictures, and
close-up camera shots, many viewed through the front
windscreen of a cab which glides through the streets of
Chinatown, its window reflecting the scenes that pass by: stoop-
shouldered, aged-Asian males and females shuffling along the
sidewalk, young Asian-American children holding their parents'
hands waiting for a bus, Kung-Fu warrior posters outside movie
houses, pagoda roof tops in the distance, Chinese and Italian
restaurants, smoked chickens hanging in cafe windows, signs in
Chinese, a Christmas decorated Buddha with tinsel and flashing
lights, Chinese rock and roll ('Rock Around the Clock') and
suspense music in the background, as a Pat Suzuki version of
Rogers and
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Hammerstein's 'Grant Avenue' plays over the film's credits. A
voyeur's film from start to finish, the text is filled with shots of
Jo gazing either directly into the camera, or slightly off-screen
into the distance. His voyeurism yields nothing.
Jo and Steve set out to find the missing Chan. Steve wants to go
to the police, but Jo resists. Their journey brings them in contact
with four clues and more than 12 persons who know, or knew
Chan. Although he is never found, by the film's end the $4,000
is delivered to Jo and Steve by Mr Chan's teenage daughter,
Jenny.
What is missing is the firm and steady, easily assimilated
Chinese-American character embodied in the Chan films. Indeed
the film offers a virtual dictionary of contemporary Asian-
American identities: Chinese Richard Pryors, Chinese cooks who
wear 'Samurai Night Fever' T-shirts and sing 'Fry Me to the
Moon', FOBS (fresh off the boat), Kung-Fu warriors, China
dolls, Chinese scholars with hot tubs and their Loy Fong
girlfriends, jade-faced rich old men, young Asian males with the
GQ look, two-faced schizophrenic Chinamen, Oakland Hill Wah,
Ho Chi Minh look alikes, young Asian males who eat US
certified food (cows ears and mushrooms from Des Moines,
Iowa), PRCs (People's Republic of China), Pro-Taiwan rich men,
Asian males who sell Chinese-American apple pie, young Asian
women who dress like American women, old Asian men and
women who look like mainland peasants, young, streetwise
Asian males wearing baseball caps, and so on.
These multiple images add up to one conclusion: there is no
single Asian-American identity. The film's mystery seeks to
unravel and find a solid core to this identity. The voyeur's project
thus lies in the discovery that there is no Chan who can be
missing, for every Chan (Asian-American) has an identity, even
the three Chans, as Jo notes, who everyday appear on the
missing person's list in the Police Department. What is missing is
a centre to this identity.
Jo summarizes this struggle to define self. To Steve, he states, 'It's
hard enough for guys like me who've been here so long to find
an identity. I can imagine Chan Hung's problem, somebody from
China coming over here and trying to find himself'. Steve
protests, 'That's a bunch of bullshit man! That identity shit. That's
old news. Man that happened 10 years ago'. Jo retorts, 'It's still
going on'. Steve argues, 'Shit! I ran into this old friend from high
school down town. We used to run together. He's all dressed up
in his fuckin' GQ look with his Lo Fong girlfriend. He didn't
want to talk to me man. He knew who I was. He's playing a
game man. Fuck the identity shit. He knew what he was doin', I
know what I'm doin'. I coulda kicked his fuckin' ass. Chinese all
over this fuckin' city. Whatdaya mean about identity? They got
their own identity. I got my identity!'
This absence of a singular identity is itself political, for the
Asian-American must take a stand on the American experience
that is either Pro-Taiwan and assimilationist, or anti-American
and pro-People's Republic of China. But this politicized identity
is also mocked. For every character
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in the film has been deeply touched by the San Francisco version
of the Asian-American experience, even the 83-year-old Asian
male who murders his 79-year-old Asian neighbour over which
flag should be carried in the Chinese New Year's Parade.
The film, then, mocks these popular culture, standardized,
stereotypical Asian-American identities. It also mocks social
science and those scholars who point to language as being central
to cultural differences. The following Lily Tomlin-like
monologue is a key to this position. The speaker is a female
Asian-American attorney. She is attempting to find Mr Chan,
who had an automobile accident, just days before he
disappeared. She is speaking to Jo and Steve. They are at
Chester's Cafe. The young attorney is dressed in a black
masculine-style suit, with a white shirt and dark tie.
You see I'm doing a paper on the legal implications of cross-cultural
misunderstandings [nods head]. Mr. Chan's case is a perfect example
of what I want to expose. The policeman and Mr Chan have
completely different culturally related assumptions about what kind
of communication about communication [shot of Steven, then Jo]
each one was using. The policeman, in an English speaking mode,
asks a direct factual question 'did you stop at the stop sign?' He
expected a 'yes or a no' answer. Mr Chan, however, rather than
giving him a yes or a no answer began to go into his past driving
record how good it was, the number of years he had been in the
United States, all the people that he knew trying to relate different
events, objects or situations to what was happening then to the action
in hand. Now this is very typical. . . . The Chinese try to relate
points, events or objects that they feel are pertinent to the situation,
which may not to anyone else seem directly relevant at the time. . . .
This policeman became rather impatient, restated the question, 'Did
you or did you not stop at the stop sign?' in a rather hostile tone,
which in turn flustered Mr Chan, which caused him to hesitate
answering the question, which further enraged the policeman, so that
he asked the question again, 'You didn't stop at the stop sign, did
you?' in a negative tone, to which Mr Chan automatically answered
'No'. Now, to any native speaker of English 'No' would mean 'No I
didn't stop at the stop sign'. However to Mr Chan 'No I didn't stop at
the stop sign' was not 'No I didn't stop at the stop sign' [Jo shakes
head, looks away]. It was 'No, I didn't not stop at the stop sign'. In
other words 'Yes I did stop at the stop sign'. Do you see what I'm
saying? [camera pans room]
Jo (voice-over) 'Chan Hung wouldn't run away because of the
car accident. I'm feeling something might have happened to him'.
As Jo and Steve go looking for Chan, no two individuals
describe him the same way. To his wife he is a man who never
properly assimilated to the American way of life. To his daughter
he is an honest and trustworthy man. Presco, the manager of the
Manilla Senior Citizen's Center calls Mr Chan 'Hi Ho' and thinks
he is an eccentric. George (who is marketing a version of
Chinese apple pie), thinks Mr Chan is too Chinese. Amy thinks
he is a hotheaded political activist. Frankie thinks he returned to
the mainland. Mr Fong thinks Chan is a genius because he
invented a Chinese word processing system. Mr Lee says he is
dim-witted and an old man in Chan's hotel says Chan is a
paranoid.
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The film itself refuses a single identity. Reviewers called it a
gumshoe thriller (Rickey, 1982), an original, eccentric,
anthropological comedy (Gelmis, 1982), not a neatly-plotted
Oriental mystery (Winsten, 1982), a detective mystery that
becomes a meditation on Chinese-American identity (Denby,
1982), a Chinatown mystery (Thomas, 1982), a dark comedy, a
light melodrama, and existential mystery (Sterritt, 1982), a re-
make of Citizen Kane, (Studlar, 1983: 115; Ansen, 1982), a film
in the tradition of the French New Wave (Horton, 1982), a very
Chinese mystery (Thomas, 1982) and a 'homely and funny
cousin to The Third Man' (Denby, 1982). These descriptions
point to the film's refusal to present a stereotypical picture of the
Asian-American community. In its attempts to deconstruct and
criticize previous images of the Asian-American subject, Chan is
Missing suggests that the Asian-Oriental other will no longer
stand still and allow itself to be seen and understood through
Western eyes.
Four key clues organize Jo and Steve's investigation. In Chan's
jacket, which was left at the Manilla Senior Citizen's Center, they
find a newspaper story about a fight which occurred between
pro- and anti-communist supporters during the Chinese New
Year's Parade. In Chan's hotel room they discover a photo
clipped from the paper showing the fight itself. Along with this
photo is the story of 82-year-old Sun Kim Lee who was charged
with murdering his 79-year-old neighbour, Chung Wang. Also
in his room they observe a missing picture on the wall, a picture
which later turns out to be of Chan. In Chan's car they find a gun
and a letter from mainland China. The letter leads them to an
address where they learn that Chan had separated from his wife
and daughter six months ago to live with another woman. These
four clues take them back and forth through the streets, piers,
shops and cafés of Chinatown and San Francisco.
The clues add up to nothing. Chan is never found. This is a
Chinese mystery, so says Jo. 'The murder article is missing. The
photograph's not there. The other woman is not there. Nothing is
what it seems to be.' Disclaiming his own identity, Jo states, 'I
guess I'm not Chinese enough. I can't accept a mystery without a
solution'. He returns to lines spoken earlier in the film by Presco.
An old Chinese piano player who went crazy had reported that
the only person who could fix him was the man who looked at
him in the rain puddle on the ground. Presco tells Steve and Jo,
'Well, you guys lookin' for Mr Chan, why don't you look in the
puddle?' As these lines are spoken the screen dissolves into a
shot of glimmering water, ripples overlapping one another, to be
replaced by a kaleidoscopic sequence of scenes which repeat the
film's main narrative moments: the interviews with Presco, Mr
Lee, Mr Fong, Mrs Chan, Amy, Henry, Frankie, George, Jenny,
the old man.
Jo continues speaking. He is back in his cab. The windscreen
reflects street scenes. 'The problem with me is I believe what I
see and hear. If I believe that with Mr Chan, I'll know nothing
because everything is so contradictory. Here's a picture of Chan
Hung'. We see a photo of a
Page 107
somewhat overweight Asian male, smiling, a second man in the
shadows, then a shot from Chan's apartment where the missing
picture once hung. With these lines Jo stops speaking. Pat Suzuki
begins to sing 'Grant Avenue' and the screen once again fills with
images from Chinatown (old men and women on the sidewalk,
haggard, faded brick apartment buildings, torn curtains blowing
through broken-out windows):
They call it Grant Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA. Look for
Chinatown. You travel there in a trolley, up you climb, dong-dong,
you're in Hong Kong, having yourself a time. Sharkfin soup,
beancake fish, the girl who serves you your food is a dish, you know
you have a Grant Avenue way of living. That's where it's at. San
Francisco, California, USA. A western street with eastern manners,
tall pagodas with golden banners, you can shop for precious jade, or
silk brocade, or see a bold and brassy night club show on the most
exciting thoroughfare I know they call it Grant Avenue, San
Francisco, USA.
The viewer's ears are flooded with the sounds of these American
Chinatown stereotypes, which are undercut by Wang's old men
and women staring into the camera. Leaving these contradictory
images in the viewer's field of vision, the film cuts to its credits.
Biting parody and pastiche, this film satirizes what it imitates and
critiques, the 'neatly plotted oriental mystery' (Winsten, 1982),
the 'Charlie Chan Orientals' (Rickey, 1982). Its jumbled, collage-
and pastiche-like mosaic structure refuses to imitate the Chan
mystery tradition which it draws upon. Chan is Missing, with its
absent protagonist, is like Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), Reed's
The Third Man (1949) and an Antonioni philosophical puzzle
(Blow-Up, The Passenger). The 'mystery evaporates in the face
of the uncertainty of knowing anything for sure' (Denby, 1982:
72). Jo, like the investigative protagonists in The Third Man and
Citizen Kane, is more interested in discovering who Chan was
than in either getting his money back or finding the real missing
man. With Citizen Kane the film is a story of contradiction. 'The
riddle, not the solution is the point' (Gelmis, 1982: 11), the
'whodunit' dissolves into a 'whoisit' (Horton, 1982), a discourse
on the mystery that lies behind every life and the faces people
wear. This is not a TV mystery, Jo muses, for if it was 'an
important clue would pop up at this time and clarify everything'.
Yet much is revealed, for the many-sided Chan Hung becomes
the perfect metaphor for the many-sided, complex Chinese-
American community (Denby, 1982: 72).
It matters little if the plot reveals a murder, a gun, a missing
photo and set of clothes that may or may not have been
connected to Chan's disappearance. These absences and
occurrences tell us, as Jo says to Steve, to 'use the negative to
emphasize the positive', and to look into the puddle to find
ourselves. What is absent is present, and what is present lacks
substance, and hence is absent.
As parody and spoof Chan is Missing refuses the utopian
fantasies of the Orientalizing Chan series. Its multi-voiced
(polyphonic) text isolates
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Chinatown from San Francisco's version of American society,
and offers no assimilationist solution to the Asian-American
experience. Indeed the film suggests that Chinatown has enough
problems of its own. It does not need to be part of the larger
society which demands conformity to America's version of the
Asian other. Racism is right here, at home, with Asians who hurl
racist epithets at one another (two-faced schizophrenic
Chinaman, jade-faced rich old men, FOBS). No heroes or
heroines are here. There are no stars, no cultural models, for
every model is a stereotype and every stereotype itself a
stereotype. Here in Chinatown there are no perfect Western
others who would stand as a measure of the Asian self. This self
has become so thoroughly westernized no otherness is any
longer possible. That is why 'Chan is missing'.
At the centre of the film are multiple images of overlapping,
conflicting, decentred circles of ethnic Asian-American identities:
Chinese Richard Pryors, Chinese cooks singing 'Fry Me to the
Moon', GQ-dressed young Asian males, young women dressed
like American teenagers, sad old Asian men and women, brass
Steve, philosophical Jo, quizzical Presco, and Chinese-American
apple pie salesman George. These multiple identities do not
cohere into a single structure, for every Asian-American finds
him- or herself only by looking into Presco's puddle of muddy
water. And this self which is reflected back is always missing,
always different, for the next time I look I will look different. It's
always a different puddle.
No successful sleuths, no masters of mystery, but a mystery is
solved. In the film's odd, idiosyncratic way it confronts its own
spectacle of discovery. This occurs when Jo realizes that he is
'not Chinese enough'. He can't accept a mystery without a
solution. He now understands that his problem is that 'I believe
what I see and hear. If I believe that with Mr Chan I'll know
nothing because everything is so contradictory'.
Three puzzles are solved. Jo discovers that you cannot be
Chinese enough. You can no longer use the negative to
emphasize the positive. And, you must believe more than you
can see or hear. If you only believe what you can see and hear
then you are confined, like Charlie Chan's pragmatic voyeur, to a
world of solid facts. In Jo's 'pure' Oriental-Chinese world there
are no solid facts, only mysteries, puzzles and things that are not
there. By not being Chinese enough, Jo recognizes the failure
and poverty of the Charlie Chan orientalizing project. This
project, which uses the negative to emphasize the positive,
creates a world where Chinese men make American apple pies,
and, as George argues, 'take the good things from our
background, and the good things from this country to enhance
our lives'. This produces Steve's world where that 'identity shit
becomes old news, something that happened 10 years ago'.
That old news was not news to Rogers and Hammerstein. On
their (and Ethel Merman's) Grant Avenue, San Francisco, USA
you can still have yourself a time, sharkfin soup, China dolls,
precious jade, and silk brocade. And so the film, Flower Drum
Song (1961), which contained Rogers and Hammerstein's song,
is now critiqued in Wang's last gesture.
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There are no flower drum songs, wise Asian patriarchs, obedient
sons and daughters and arranged marriages in his Chinatown, or
on his Grant Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA.
Here at the end of the film as viewers stare at the blank space on
the wall where Chan Hung's picture once hung, they are told to
accept a mystery without a solution. The old world that Charlie
Chan inhabited no longer exists. Chan is not missing. Chan is
dead. And in that death dies the Oriental sleuth, the ever-present
Oriental eye, always ready to solve a crime for the Western other.
Wang's message is clear. To the Americans in his audience he
says, 'We have enough problems of our own. Stop asking us to
help you solve your crimes. We did that for too long and look at
where it got us'.
5
Flawed Visions:
The Obsessive Male Gaze
To see you is to love you, and I see you everywhere. To see you is to want
you and I see you all the time . . . and you're never out of sight . . . and
I'll see you in the same old dreams tonight.
Bing Crosby, lyrics from 'To See You is to Love You' in Rear Window
We've become a race of Peeping Toms.
Stella to Jeff, in Rear Window
The camera hidden behind a keyhole is a tell-tale eye which captures
what it can. But what about the rest? What about what happens beyond
the limits of vision?
Antonioni, Blow-Up, a Film by Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 11
They don't mean anything when I do them (his paintings) just a mess.
Afterwards I find something to hang onto. . . . And then it sorts itself out.
It adds up. It's like finding a clue in a detective story.
Bill, the painter, describing his paintings to Thomas, the photographer,
in Blow-Up
In this chapter I examine the obsessive male gaze of the
photographer, the photo-journalist and the amateur detective
during Hollywood's classic and postwar period (194666). I focus
on two key texts, Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), 1and
Antonioni's Blow-Up (1962),2which offer (respectively)
modernist and late modernist conceptions of this figure.
The voyeurs (Jeff and Thomas) are both photographers who set
out to document and solve crimes discovered through their
unwarranted, voyeuristic activities.3One of the two (Jeff) is
called a Peeping Tom, and the other's name (Thomas) is clearly
connected to this voyeuristic label (see Rifkin, 1982: 107, 187;
also Huss, 1971a, b). Each suspects (and uncovers) a crime
through photographic enlargement. The two photographers each
'shot' a murderer (and his victim, or traces of the victim) with
their camera. Both men are bored and distracted by everyday life.
Jeff, like Thomas, resists commitment to a permanent, intimate
relationship. Thomas, like Jeff, desires to be elsewhere (Thomas:
I've gone off London this week. Doesn't do anything for me. . . .
Wish I had tons of money, then I'd be free'), and neither appears
able to complete a project or a task.
Both men discover that the search for visual truth can be
dangerous, and wrestle with the problems of involving
themselves in the lives of those they photograph. Each man faces
his own impotence. Jeff ultimately acts
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to save his own (and Lisa's) life, but Thomas remains unable to
involve himself in his own, or another's life (Samuels, 1971: 18).
Each uses his photographic skills to see more than the human eye
is supposed to see. They both confuse reality with fantasy, and
each resists going to the police. The two photographers violate
the private space of others (including the private space of an
intimate couple in the public spaces of a park) and are overly
cocky concerning their right to do this. Each pays a price for this
obsession, including doubting his own sanity.
Here the similarity ends, although Antonioni's film has been
connected to Hitchcock's project and one reviewer (Crowther,
1967) explicitly recalled Rear Window in his review (see also
Alpert, 1967: 303; and Samuels, 1971: 17 for a rebuttal of this
reading). Hitchcock's voyeur captures reality and proves a crime.
Antonioni's photographer finds reality slip through his fingers
and all proof of a crime disappears and he is left with the
conclusion that reality is but an illusion. Jeff finds his worst fears
confirmed. A murder really did occur. Thomas learns that reality
will always elude him. Real murders can occur, but never be
proven. His photographic art can never be more than an illusion
(see Rifkin, 1982: 106).
6
Women at the Keyhole:
Fatal Female Visions
What happens when women are situated on both sides of the keyhole?
The question is not only who or what is on either side of the keyhole, but
also what lies between them, what constitutes the threshold that makes
representation possible?
Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and
Women's Cinema, p. 9
Hello Dan . . . Part of you is growing within me . . . I feel you. I taste
you. I think you. I touch you. . . . You're a cocksucking sonofabitch. You
don't even like girls. I scare you. I know I do. You are a gutless,
spineless sonofabitch, a fucking faggot.
Alex to Dan, on tape, Fatal Attraction
Like her mid-century counterpart, Hollywood's contemporary
female voyeur has fallen on hard times. Her gaze is still defined
by the masculine eye, even as recent texts expose the limits of the
male look and give women the power to gaze on themselves and
the male figure. Multiple viewing positions for the female were
opened up, as argued in Chapter 4, by the end of the 1980s in
films like Broadcast News, Blue Velvet and sex, lies and
videotape.
The female investigative and erotic voyeurs in these texts
exposed the power of the feminine gaze as it appropriated the
eye of the camera, and turned that eye back on the powerful
male. These texts made women active, aggressive voyeurs. They
were able to transcend the supplemental, passive, gazing
positions cinema had traditionally assigned to women. But in the
end, each woman (Jane, Dorothy, Sandy, Ann) found her gaze
and her body coded in patriarchal terms, she remained the object
of the male's look (see Gamman, 1989: 12).
In this chapter, borrowing my title from Mayne (1990: 9), I
examine two highly influential and controversial late 1980s
films, Black Widow (1986) 1, and Fatal Attraction (1987)2.
These texts reverse conventional imagery by placing women on
both sides of the keyhole. With Mayne (1990: 9) I ask what
'happens when this occurs?' Alexandra Barnes (Black Widow), is
a Justice Department investigator who pursues husband-killer
Catharine, and Alex Forrest (Fatal Attraction) is a successful
book editor who pursues Dan Gallagher, a happily married
lawyer. Alexandra Barnes (she prefers Alex) and Alex Forrest
are simultaneously voyeurs and the subject of a woman's (and
man's) gaze.
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Both texts struggle to give women a powerful gaze which
overrides the male's look, thus continuing the struggle within
mainstream Hollywood cinema to create a space for the
aggressive, voyeuristic female. 3Each film is simultaneously
panoptic and panauditory. Alexandra and Alex create scopic and
ocular observational regimes as they spy upon their victims,
thereby merging vision and sound as the primary sites for their
surveillance conduct. Both films have overtones of Hitchcock
and De Palma (see Konigsberg, 1988: 118; Hoberman, 1987:
Denby, 1987).4Each recalls earlier texts, including the violent
female voyeur of Play Misty for Me (1971), and the women
investigators in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) (Charlie), Spellbound
(1945) (Ingrid Bergman as the psychiatrist), and Persona (1966)
(Alma the nurse). Each film follows the film noir tradition of
creating a femme fatale (see Katovich and Haller, 1993; McLean,
1993; Gledhill, 1978).5
Following Mayne (1990: 9) and the Bakhtinian analysis of the
Asian Eye given in Chapter 5, I investigate the multiple subject
positions both women play in these voyeuristic dramas. I argue
that the cinematic screen, the narrative logic, and the visual fields
in each text complicate the feminine gaze and the image of
woman that is thereby produced. She becomes something more
than a simple object of male desire. The two women, both named
Alex, occupy ambivalent, ambiguous sexual positions vis-à-vis
the objects of their gaze, Catharine for Alexandra, Ann, Ellen
and Dan for Alex.
Four propositions organize my analysis. The first is not new,
merely supplementary to earlier arguments (Mayne, 1990: 8;
Doane, 1991: 3; Clover, 1992: 8). These two films superficially
present the feminine gaze, on both sides of the keyhole, as being
fatally flawed. Even when it takes up the traditional, masculine
investigative project, the female look is never benign. It is always
coded in obsessive, neurotic terms, and this look is inevitably
anchored back in sexuality and sexual desire. But underneath this
gaze shifts and takes on multiple forms, making it impossible to
clearly define who is subject and who is object, who is sane and
who is insane. (On two occasions Dan loses control, bulging-
eyed, red-faced he nearly strangles and kills Alex.) Thus, when
given the power to look, the female voyeur unleashes a gaze
which disrupts the social order, erasing the boundaries between
male and female, law and order, investigator, criminal and
victim.
My second proposition elaborates the conclusions of Chapter 6
concerning the essentially pornographic features of the
contemporary visual field. Antonioni and Hitchcock (also De
Palma) took violent sexuality to new levels, exposing the
transgressed sacred boundaries of the public and the private in
the late modern age. Filmmakers in the late 1980s and 1990s
exploited this rupture, erasing forever these sacred boundaries.
Not surprisingly, women took the lead here. Their bodies and
their gaze would now be the site for this final deconstruction, the
place where the female gaze, feminine sexuality and murderous
violence finally flow together as a
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single unity. Under the sign of family, law and order, female
voyeurs would usher in a new era of soft pornographic,
investigative cinema. The female investigative voyeur becomes
the queen of pornography. 6
The third proposition, drawing from Bakhtin (1981, 1986),
Derrida (1982), and Irigaray (1985) thickens this interpretation.
The gaze of the female voyeur is multi-perspectival, or multi-
sensual. It goes beyond pure vision and specularity to privilege
the other senses, including touch, hearing and taste.7On the other
side of the masculine looking glass, on the 'other side of the
mirror, behind the screen of male representations, is an
underground world' (Jay, 1993a: 533). This is the 'dark night of
[the feminine] soul' (Irigaray, 1985: 103, quoted in Jay, 1993a:
533). If women only identify with the narcissistic subject created
by the masculine, flat mirror, 'they are imprisoned in a male
specular economy in which they are always devalued as inferior
versions of the male subject, as mere objects of exchange, dead
commodities' (Jay, 1993a: 533). The two Alexes reject this
monolithic, narcissistic identity. Deploying all of their
sensibilities, they move to the dark side of the feminine and
masculine soul.8
The fourth proposition elaborates the third. It is utopian. This
dark side of the feminine soul calls into question the power of
the masculine gaze. This harkening exposes and illuminates the
need for an empowering, multi-sensual feminine subjectivity.
This subjectivity embraces a field of experience that is more than
just visual. When released into society, this multi-sensual field of
experience threatens the status quo. But this is an unstable threat,
for the feminine gaze must always fight to resist the masculine
pull, which is the pull of law and order and family.
Black Widow and Fatal Attraction, accordingly, are complex
discursive constructions. A polyphonic play of voices and gazes
from the sexual margins and the centres of patriarchal society
interact in each film to produce women who are not just unitary,
sexual objects. Both women are at the centre of conflicting,
overlapping and competing voices and gazes; each is
simultaneously defined by sexist and non-sexist discourse. Both
women are given the power to gaze on the other, while both
become the passive (and active) object of the gaze of this
selfsame other.
Each woman becomes a complex discursive and visual
construction. Their contradictory angles of vision virtually define
the contradictory core of the late 1980s feminist and anti-feminist
American sexual order. By being folded into the centre of the
sexual crises produced by the 1980s (Alex and AIDS, see
Williamson, 1988; Hoberman, 1987; Petley, 1988), the two
women live sexism from within, struggling at all times to escape
the pervasive presence of patriarchy and the male gaze.9Inside
looking out, like Charlie Chan, they are outsiders brought into
the inside. Their battle is to define a woman's place within, or
alongside the edges of the inner structures of marriage and the
family, within the visual, panoptic apparatuses of law and order.
On the surface, Hollywood's visual, sexist discourse (like its
Orientalist discourse) distinguishes the violent femme fatale from
the normal, sane,
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feminine figure (see Doane, 1991: 1). The sane feminine figure
is presented as the culturally-known, familiar, comfortable other.
Her vision is defined as stable and aligned with law and order,
family and truth. She is superficially contrasted to the
stereotyped image of the sexually alluring, erotic, dangerous and
violent female (Sharon Stone of Basic Instinct, Beth versus Alex,
Alex and Catharine). The violent woman is the unknown,
devious, unstable, secretive, deceptive other obsessed with
scopophilia. The tamed woman is rational and virtuous; the
violent, predatory woman is irrational, depraved, fallen, a danger
to society. The good woman is the sexually unthreatening Girl
Friday, neutered, the sometimes calm, implacable female
detective or voyeur who works on the side of law and order
(from Miss Marple to TV's Emma Peele of 'The Avengers' to
Angela Lansbury of 'Murder She Wrote' and Maudie of
'Moonlighting'). This woman works in the service of law and
order, peace, family and justice. She protects the world from
sinister women (and men). She takes pleasure in solving crimes
and catching criminals who elude the police. In these ways
American cinema perpetuated its version of an Orientalizing,
visual sexism which serves to keep women in their proper place,
on the right side of the keyhole.
Unlike her Asian counterpart, it has been difficult for the female
to find her place in American culture as an investigative voyeur
and sleuth. While her white male counterpart (Marlowe) virtually
defined law and order through his voyeurism, the female voyeur
either had to take a supplemental part to this figure (Sandy in
Blue Velvet), or be defined totally outside the sexual mainstream
as a frumpy, unattractive, but intelligent woman. Not
surprisingly, then, the female voyeur would occupy the position
of femme fatale, aligned with the Oriental, foreign other, the
dragon lady of the East (see Doane, 1991: 3). Only recently has
she been invested with positive attributes, but typically her
strengths would be used to bring down the sinister figure of
another woman, not a male.
The investigative female voyeur carries the weight of being a
woman upon her shoulders. She uses her female intuition (like
Chan's Oriental eyes) as a way of seeing the truth that others
cannot see. She is forced to rely upon her wit, charm and
sometimes her beauty as vehicles for disarming cultural
criticisms of her sexuality. Thus the female voyeur embodies a
double negativity: she must overcome her sexuality in order to
use it in a positive way. She can never escape sexual desire but it
must never be seen as a threat to the established social/sexual
order. She becomes a masculinized woman (Ingrid Bergman in
Spellbound), only on call sexually when a 'real' man seeks her
pleasures. She is more brother (or sister) than sexual lover.
As with the films containing the Oriental sleuth, films about the
female voyeur are organized around double spectacular structure.
Inevitably this structure is focused on sexuality, where the female
body is a site of multiple gazes. (Beth and Alex in Beth's
bathroom, Alex and Catharine's image in Alex's bathroom.) This
gaze is anchored (usually) in an erotic or
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investigative spectacle which is aligned with family, or the law, a
wedding, lovemaking, the police station, a bath, the dinner table.
The sexual battle between the good and the bad woman is then
realized through a 'spectacle of discovery' and violence wherein
the good woman overcomes her evil counterpart. This often
occurs in a group situation, where the representatives of proper,
civil society are present. (Exhausted Dan passively watches as
Beth murders Alex.)
This spectacle of law and order occurs within a larger specular
structure which isolates the sexual other as a threat to society.
The femme fatale falls under the visual control of the camera and
she is presented as an alien, fatally flawed, dangerous figure, a
victim of her own sexuality and desire. (Alex stabs herself as she
attempts to kill Beth.) In this decisive moment of justice the
positive virtues of the investigative voyeur are celebrated. She
has saved the day, and at the same time reinscribed the value of
sexual difference.
Thus are female voyeurs sexualized and orientalized. With
Charlie Chan, they are outsiders brought into the centre of civil
society when a crisis appears. Their sexual identity is submerged,
in the moment of justice, stitched into a larger sexual discourse
connected to family, crime, law and order. This produces a
superficial form of cultural and sexual integration. Women
voyeurs, if they play their cards right, really do have a place in
this culture. Now the films: Fatal Attraction first, for here the
aggressive, sexually charged, female voyeur creates the crisis that
must be resolved by the good woman and the law.
Fatal Attraction
Set in the late 1980s first in Manhattan, and then in the
Connecticut countryside, it is a fairy-tale story, straight out of the
Brothers Grimm (Raschke, 1988). Family man and successful
lawyer, Dan Gallagher, 10-years married to beautiful Beth, with
five-year old daughter Ellen, has a weekend fling with a frizzy-
permed Medusa named Alex, the archetypal witch, the
murderous phallic mother (Taubin, 1987). The wicked seductive
woman won't go away. What for Dan was a one-night stand
('Two adults saw an opportunity and took advantage of it') for
Alex is the beginning of a family. Refusing to let him go, she
begins a relentless visual and auditory surveillance attack,
phoning him at all hours, at work and home. She happily
announces her pregnancy to him ('you are alive in me'), spies on
him, harasses his secretary over the phone, shows up at his
office, visits his wife and attempts to buy their old apartment,
leaves a tape cassette for him at work, kidnaps Ellen for an
afternoon, boils Ellen's rabbit in a pot on the kitchen stove,
invades the family house, attacking Beth in the bathroom with a
large butcher's knife, finally to be killed by Beth, a bullet to the
heart. The bad witch from the West, the lovelorn psycho, is
annihilated. Alex, the bad virus that threatened to infect and kill
the
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family, has been destroyed. Order and peace can be restored.
Damaged father Dan is reunited with his vigilant, strong wife
(they embrace) and loving daughter (he tucks her in). The police
leave the house as the camera lingers on the family photo, Ellen,
Beth and Dan, the perfect threesome of the 1980s. There is a
clear message, the application of Murphy's law to the extramarital
fling, everything that could go wrong did (Hoberman, 1987).
Alex is not a passive voyeur. From her first gaze which settles on
Dan's body at a cocktail party (Jimmy, 'I think she tried to
undress me'), to her final look, the violent, volcanic eruption,
knife in hand, from the family bath tub, she is the sexual
predator, using her eyes, her body and her voice to control,
manipulate and finally destroy Dan. Alex's aggressive
voyeurism, her intrusive surveillance and constant intrusions (the
ringing telephone) creates an ominous presence in Dan's happy
domestic life. She is everywhere and nowhere.
Here Howard Atherton's (the film's cinematographer) camera
functions as an extension of her gaze. Even when she is not
present we sense her lurking presence. She has got inside Dan's
head and turned him into a voyeur who can't escape his own life,
let alone hers. Indeed he is driven to spy on her. The voyeur's
ultimate victory.
The Looks of Fatal Attraction
Thus, on the surface, the film's seduction lies in its vivid
portrayal of the victim who becomes the voyeur. But underneath,
Fatal Attraction is a study of the late 1980s yuppie gaze and its
multiple forms. The text isolates, interrogates and distinguishes
the gaze, or look, attached to the loving, nuclear family
formation, the impassioned gaze of lustful sexuality, the insane
look of the mad woman (and man), the murderous and
investigative gaze of law, order and family. Four pivotal and
extended scenes (and sequences) fitted to the film's three main
acts (seduction, harassment, murder) illuminate these four looks.
Each scene focuses on Alex's aggressive gaze and its
progressive, destructive effects on Dan.
The multiple looks of the text are cinematically accomplished
through clever editing, the skilful use of subjective and POV
shots (zooms, close-ups), as well as a mobile camera, which
becomes an extension of Alex's omnipresent gaze. The camera
seeks out its subject and isolates Dan, Beth, Ellen and Alex in
tightly framed scenes, cutting them off from the outside world.
Bathrooms, water, heat, fire, telephones and knives are central to
the story's visual and auditory symbolism.
Act One
The Loving, Lustful Look
Like Rear Window the story begins inside the closed walls of an
apartment. The camera pans the evening skyline of New York
City, slowly approaching a lighted window in a large building,
where the shade is pulled, and the action begins. We cut back and
forth from Daddy Dan (in underwear), daughter Ellen and
family dog Quincy in the living-room, and
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mother Beth (T-shirt and panties) in the bathroom, water running
in the sink, fixing her face for a party, checking panties and bras
hanging on the shower bar. She and Dan are about to go out,
leaving Ellen with the friendly teenage babysitter. The film will
begin and end (for all practical purposes) in the family bathroom,
recalling Psycho and Dressed to Kill.
This loving, graceful, cluttered, chummy, romantic look of the
perfect family is quickly shattered. Minutes later at a publisher's
party (a Japanese author has just published a Samurai
cookbook), after assuring Beth that her hair looks fine, Dan and
Jimmy (one of Dan's law partners) are visually inspected by
sexually alluring Alex, who, overhearing their discussion, scorns
them with a withering look of disgust. Side-by-side at the bar,
Dan finds Alex looking at him, introductions over, he is caught
by Beth's look that says they have to leave. As the perfect couple
moves through the crowded room, Alex holds them in her gaze.
Dan is called to work on Saturday morning 10where he is
introduced to Alex. Caught in a rainstorm after the meeting, Dan
finds himself under Alex's umbrella. Together they seek a cab.
Over drinks and lunch Dan accepts Alex's invitation ('How
discreet are you?') to come and play in her loft apartment (bare
and white), set in the smoke and fire-illuminated (flames leap out
of barrels), rainy and dank meat-packing district. ('A nocturnal
landscape of carrion and fire' (Hoberman, 1987).) Atherton's
camera circles the coupling duet as they make love in the kitchen
(against the sink, water running behind them), the bedroom and
the elevator. Dan sneaks home the next morning, taking a
shower, the phone rings. Alex wants him to come back and
spend the day. The camera cuts to the Connecticut countryside,
Beth's mother watering bright flowers in a greenhouse. Beth
won't be home until the next day. The new couple play in the
park with Quincy, dine to the sounds of Madame Butterfly, and,
attempting to leave, Dan is confronted by an Alex who has
slashed her wrists. Her blood stains his white shirt. The camera
lingers on the blood, on the bathroom floor, the knife, and the
sounds of the thunder storm outside. Rain pounds against the
bedroom window and Dan places a call to Beth after showering.
A dazed bedridden Alex, wrists wrapped, white telephone on
bedstand, listens to his proclamation of love to Beth.
Act Two
The Insane, Harassing Gaze
The violent virus has entered Dan's life, it lives in Alex's womb,
carried now along telephone wires, erupting in ringing phones,
embodied in her physical presence in Dan's life world. He
becomes a vigilante, a man out to save his safe family from this
destructive threat. He spies on her apartment and enters one
morning after she leaves for work. The hand-held camera
follows his investigations of her personal life, creating the sense
that we as viewer have invaded this insane woman's home
(Konigsberg, 1988: 119). As if in retaliation, she spies on him in
his parking garage. We see her lurking behind posts and just as
he approaches
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his car she throws acid on the hood. The car bursts into smoke
and flames. She tails him to the country as he listens to her tape.
He joins his happy family in front of the burning hearth (we look
through the picture window). Alex is behind us, also looking in,
Stella Dallas-like, turning away in revulsion at the sight of the
perfect family, vomiting on the green spring grass.
Her gaze, which we share, has penetrated the protective walls of
Dan's house. It remains for the virus to now enter the family
home and make its presence known. And so we get the boiled
rabbit, the trip to the amusement park with Ellen, and the final
bathroom scene.
The meaning of the boiled rabbit goes beyond a dead bunny. It
produces Dan's confession to Beth, who asks him to leave. The
confession gives the virus to Beth. Her happy family is shattered,
faithful Dan is sick, he has betrayed her. 11Home from the
hospital, now reconciled with Dan, Beth will tell Alex (over the
phone) that she will kill her if she ever comes near her family
again. Thus the virus strengthens Beth, while it continues its
destructive effects on Dan.
Act Three
The Murderous Gaze
Denouement
Doors locked, Ellen tucked into bed, police alerted about Mad
Alex, solicitous Daddy Dan leaves Beth in the steam-filled
bathroom, water running over the plugged drain (Psycho). He
and Quincy are off to the kitchen to fix her a cup of tea.
Downstairs the kettle boils on the stove. Upstairs water fills the
bathtub, Beth examines her face in the steam-covered mirror. We
glimpse first her bruised eye and, as she wipes the mirror clean,
Alex's face appears. Beth screams, pulls back, knocking bottles
and pictures to the floor. The kettle whistles in the kitchen. Water
from the tub drips through the ceiling, sleepy-eyed, thirsty
Quincy on the floor of the dining-roon licks it up. Alex,
butcher's knife in hand, punctures her right thigh with the knife
point, blood flows, Beth screams again. Alex asks, 'What are you
doing here? Why are you here? He tried to say goodbye to me
last night, but he couldn't, and I feel the same way about him'.
She pokes her leg with the knife. 'You meet somebody for the
first time, and you know they are the one'. The camera cuts to the
kitchen. Dan is looking at the fire. Quincy is still drinking. Alex
continues: 'I understand what you are doing. You thought you
could move him to the country away from me and play the
happy family'. Water runs over the edge of the tub. Quincy gets
up. Mad-eyed Alex continues speaking, 'You are so selfish. He
tells me about you. You are so stupid'. The kettle whistles. Beth
screams again. She and Alex fight for the knife. The kettle
screeches. Alex stabs Beth. Boiling water erupts from the kettle.
Beth and Alex fight on the floor. Beth screams again.
Dan races upstairs, crashing into the bathroom, knocking Alex
against the mirror which shatters. Alex stabs Dan. He begins to
bleed, falling back against the wall above the bathtub. More
pictures fall to the floor. Dan
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grabs Alex and submerges her in the bathtub. Her bloody feet
kick above the end of the tub. The water turns blood-coloured.
He holds her under the water, her beautiful hair fans out in the
water framing her face (shades of Charles Laughton's Night of
the Hunter), air bubbles gurgle out of her mouth, water drips
above her head from the faucet. The camera gives a close-up of
Alex's hand on the bottom of the tub, still holding the knife.
Dan's face is seen looking through the bloody water. Dan slumps
against the wall and wipes his face. Water drips over Alex's head.
Only the sound of dripping water is heard. Suddenly Alex erupts
out of the tub (shades of Friday the 13th), knife in hand. A shot
rings out, blood appears in the centre of her chest, she slumps
against the wall, smearing blood against the tile. The camera
turns. Beth is standing in the doorway, gun in both hands. Alex
slides down the wall. Her head slips into the polluted bloody
water in the corner of the tub.
The camera cuts to the front of the house. The police leave. Dan
is framed in the middle of the garden gate. He enters the hallway
of the house. Beth embraces him and they exit into the kitchen. A
close-up of the family photo merges with the credits, the screen
darkens, white on black, like Alex's apartment.
The Female Voyeur's Watery, Bloody Look
The panoptic structure of Fatal Attraction enfolds the
murderous, bloody gaze of the mad, female voyeur into the inner
fabric of the loving, nuclear family. This gaze-as-a-virus follows
the treacherous pathways of lustful sexuality, coding illicit sex
with violence and death. But Beth's violent sexual gaze is not, in
the usual sense, pornographic.
Turning back on itself, the film creates two victims, Alex who is
transgressed by Dan, and Dan, who is transgressed by Alex. But
never wavering, the text makes itself clear. Dan, not Alex, is the
victim. This is so because he has more to lose (Ellen and Beth).
Refusing to keep her place in society, Alex, this pregnant SWW,
must be given a gaze that moves from casual, sexual lust, to
visual and vocal harassment, to murderous rage. Alex's gaze will
move along each of these dimensions, as it is progressively
coded as insane and out of control. So she is given a special
violent sexual gaze, and it is not the gaze of the soft
pornographic (Basic Instinct).
Alex's is the watery look of hysterical female insanity. It is
everywhere and nowhere, constantly flowing, erupting, taking
new forms, like an out of control mountain stream, darting in
one direction and then taking a sudden turn elsewhere, following
its victim in and through the routinized channels of his life. This
watery gaze follows its victims to its own source, the cleansing,
purifying waters of the family bathroom.
The film is firm on this. Alex's gaze is repeatedly associated with
water: the spring rainstorm that joins her and Dan on the
weekend of their affair; the water that flows in the sink as they
make love; the thunderstorm that
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follows her slashed wrists; Dan's shower that washes her effects
from his body; the early morning rain that falls on her shoulders
as she leaves her flat the day Dan breaks in; the night time fog
that hides the family home when she spies on Dan, Ellen and
Beth; Dan peering out into the rain as he confesses to Beth;
Alex's final watery grave in the Gallagher bathtub.
Alex embodies the two tensions, creation and destruction, that
together form the cluster of symbolic meanings historically
brought to water (see Eliade, 1958: especially, 18890, 2045,
21213; Biedermann, 1991: 3725). 12She is creation (fertility,
birth) and its antithesis (the flood, death). She is a water nymph
who dwells above fire and water, a dangerous nymph given to
stealing children and driving men crazy with her sexual charms.
She has nymphomania, a madness connected to her
uncontrollable sexual desire. A nymphomaniac, she infects Dan
with nympholepsy, a violent emotional state, a state of frenzy
caused by her presence. She is the goddess of night, a nymphaid
butterfly who traps, smothers and attempts to kill her prey.
Dan's initial contacts with Alex are rejuvenating and
regenerating. He comes alive sexually, and the rain and the water
that flows over and into the two lovers is generative, and in
Sumerian (ancient Babylonia) water means sperm (Eliade, 1958:
190). The spring rain impregnates the water nymph, but the
foreboding thunder storm that follows the act of creation signals
the violence that will come from this transgressive sexual act.
The rains and storms that follow reinscribe this original sin. Dan
cannot be washed clean and Alex's polluted waters follow
wherever he goes. She grows into a monster, the monster who
guards sacred waters.
Her invasion of the family country bathroom, where the film
ends (just as it began in the bathroom in Manhattan), pollutes the
clear, clean water that washes over the bodies of the Gallagher
family. This virus from the city must be killed, immersed in
water, drowned, as in the flood (and the tub floods over),
submerged in her own polluting waters. Her immersion in the
tub signals Dan's doing away with this ugly part of his recent
past. He must kill what he has created in Alex's body. And she
must die, but she rises from the water, not purified but defiled by
her own bloody water. She must be shot by a gun held by Beth
and fall back into the bloody tub.13And so Dan is absolved of
his crime against family and nature, purified by Alex's final
submersion. Healed, he arises from out of this watery maze, a
forgiven and new man. The mad, untamed nymph has been
killed.
And so the cycle of life and death is replayed in the Gallagher
bathtub. It is the fate of all forms to be dissolved, in order to
reappear anew, cleaned and cleansed of past sins. Water takes
back that which it created. Dan is reunited with the rhythms of an
ancient universe, Alex's death a site for springtime ritual bathing
that brings health and fortune to the Gallagher family.
Thus the film confirms the usual, stereotypical picture of the
femme fatale, contrasting this figure with the sane, rational,
safely erotic Beth. Alex's gaze, in its many forms, is never
presented as being rational, or
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socially acceptable. The looks of a 'Single Working Woman' have
no place in the late 1980s yuppie world. They are always
associated with calamity and destruction (see also Faludi, 1993:
121).
Black Widow
The viewer enters this retro film noir through the feminine eye.
The film opens with a shot of two feminine eyes, a split screen, a
mirror, a hand applying eye-liner to each eye, comparing one eye
to the other. A loud roar intrudes into the soundtrack. A
helicopter hovers close to the ground, its searchlight casts a
glowing circle (a large eye) on the rain-covered runway, a
glamorous woman steps to the ground, enters the dark night and
quickly slides into a waiting limousine. The black widow, sultry
serial murderess Catharine (Theresa Russell), has just returned
from the funeral of her Mafioso husband. 14Days later 31-year-
old tomboy Alex Barnes (Debra Winger), a top-notch Justice
Department investigator, rushes to work, two hours late. She's
been studying obituaries, noting an odd pattern. Several wealthy,
late-middle-aged men have died recently of a rare disease,
Ondine's Curse, caused by the lack of oxygen to the brain during
sleep. Soon another death appears (Dennis Hopper), again with
Ondine's Curse, and Alex suspects that these deaths are caused
by the same woman. (When they later meet, Catharine will share
with Alex her history of dead husbands, 'I was a professional, I
loved every one of them deeply, honestly'.) Alex follows
Catharine to Seattle but is too late to prevent the next murder
(Nichol Williamson). (Bruce (Alex's boss), 'She's obsessed with
killing and you're obsessed with her. You're as whacky as she
is'.)15The chase moves to Hawaii where Alex hires a private eye
to track down Catharine, whom she soon meets. The two women
go scuba diving together and share the same lover, Catharine's
next victim, Paul. Catharine murders the private eye and marries
Paul, provoking a jealous outburst from Alex, who gives her a
black widow brooch as a wedding gift. (Catharine: 'The black
widow. She mates and she kills. Your question is does she love?
It's impossible to answer that question unless you live in her
world'.) Catharine poisons Paul's wine and frames Alex who is
charged with Paul's murder. Visiting Alex in jail, Catharine is
confronted by Paul and blurts out a confession. Alex leaves
prison, fashionably dressed, into the full sunlight of a bright
Hawaiian day, and the film ends.
A double plot structure operates here, two female voyeurs spying
on one another, two stories, a series of crimes and their
investigation. A woman's story told by a man (Bob Rafelson).
Black Widow is an examination of the feminine voyeuristic self
and its obsessions with work, duty, appearance, femininity and
masculine ideals of beauty (see Heung, 1987; Sweet, 1987).
Narrated from the feminine point of view (with hints of erotic,
lesbian attraction; see Mayne, 1990: 468; Heung, 1987), this is a
story of a female investigator wanting in 'feminine' qualities who
chases,
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becomes obsessed with, and captures a femme fatale, a beautiful
creation 'of male fantasies and fears' (Heung, 1987: 54; see also
Hogan, 1988; Sawyer, 1987; Benson, 1987; Williamson, 1987;
Denby, 1987; Ebert, 1989d; McGrady, 1987; Combs, 1987;
Edelstein, 1987). Thus is the good, but unattractive, female who
is wedded to her job, with no man in her life ('a problem of
timing'), pitted against the dangerous, inscrutable other woman,
who throws off wealthy husbands once she has trapped and
married them.
The Looks of the Black Widow
Catharine and Alex are both on both sides of the keyhole; each is
spied upon, and each spies on the other. Black Widow's
superficial appeal lies in this voyeuristic exercise which makes
the woman the object of the female gaze. But the gazes that
structure the text are neither simple nor pornographic. They go
beyond one woman looking at another. Film director Bob
Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces (1971), The King of Marvin Gardens
(1972), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)) and
cinematographer Conrad L. Hall (Harper (1966), Marathon Man
(1976), Tequila Sunrise (1988), Class Action (1991)) enter Black
Widow through the eye of Catharine, the evil reflexive eye
looking at itself. This narcissistic gaze is quickly complicated. In
rapid sequence the film articulates feminized panoptic and
panauditory surveillance regimes that move from the purely
technological, through the predatory, the erotic, to the traditional
masculine looks of the law and the state.
Alex and Catharine are inside each of these gazing structures.
Alex's looks are aligned with law and order, Catharine's with the
circumvention of this order. Yet as Alex becomes Catharine, her
gaze is progressively connected to the erotic and the narcissistic.
Her passion for Paul and her obsession with Catharine displace
the looks of law and order. Only in the end, as she leaves the
courthouse, after Catharine's confession (in full glare of the
photographer's camera) is her gaze returned to the side of justice
and the state. Thus the film is a study of the trajectory of the
feminine gaze, a gaze which struggles to find its own subjectivity
and subject matter within the confines of family, law, personal
intimacy and masculine defined feminine beauty.
This trajectory unfolds through the film's three main acts:
suspicion, confirmation and seduction and entrapment. Black
Widow's investigative journey is set by Catharine's project which
is to find a new victim, kill him and then move on to the next.
Catharine's project defines Alex's, which is to catch this woman
before she kills again. In each act the narcissistic, technological,
predatory, erotic, and legal gazes entangle and inform one
another. Each woman takes up each of these looks, and in the
film's final act these multiple gazes come together to place each
woman on the other side of the other woman's 'keyhole'. 16 The
message is clear. The feminine investigative gaze, unlike its male
counterpart, is always subjective and
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fatally narcissistic. The female voyeur cannot separate herself
from her prey. She becomes the erotic object of her own gaze.
And so Catharine and Alex are both losers, both doomed to pay
the cost of their feminine narcissism. Six extended,
interconnected scenes support this conclusion.
Act One
The Technological Apparatus and the Narcissistic, Suspicious
Look Alex is a surveillance expert, displaying the standard set of
private eye investigative and technological skills which quickly
allow her to zero in on Catharine as the black widow. She
assembles newspaper photos of the weddings of the victims of
Ondine's Curse. She does computer runs on the statistical
likelihood of single women in Catharine's age bracket being
married to wealthy middle-aged men. She does blow-ups of
Catharine's wedding pictures. She tracks down and interviews
the living relatives (female) of Catharine's dead husbands. She
stakes out Catharine in Seattle, hides behind posts and in parked
cars and even rides the same boat with her.
Act One ends with Alex's inspection of a series of wedding slides
of Catharine and her previous husbands. The scene opens in
Alex's bare living room, a white wall, a table on which sits the
slide projector. The glare of the projector's light defines a white,
empty screen. Alex moves into the white screen, a full shot of
her face framed by the white wall. The slide projector clicks into
motion, a scene is projected, a male (left side of screen) and
Catharine (right side of the screen) who is holding his arm.
Alex's image blends with Catharine's, whose head is turned.
Another male (Dennis Hopper) enters the screen. There is a shot
of Alex's face, then a split screen with two images of Catharine.
Alex once again enters the screen, blocking out Dennis Hopper.
Alex reaches up and touches Catharine's face as the camera turns
back to the slide machine which hides in the dark, its orange and
black lips pulsing like a breathing mouth. The next shot is of
Hopper, Catharine and Alex in the far left hand corner of the
screen. Catharine's head is covered with a wedding veil. Alex
enters the screen and touches Catharine's face. The lips of the
projector continue to breath and pulse, in and out. Alex shifts
position, covering the man in the slide, now the screen projects
Alex and Catharine side by side. Now Catharine's face covers
Alex's, who is standing in front of her. Catharine's face and eyes
are projected through Alex's back which is to the screen. Her
face blanks out Catherine's gaze. Alex moves to the side of the
screen, her image still on the wall. Catherine's arm is slightly
lowered, her hand and wrist are crossing her waist. Alex pulls
back the bottom of her night shirt placing her hand on
Catharine's arm, which crosses Catharine's waist, nearing her
genital area.
The camera suddenly moves to Alex's bathroom, a small lighted
room at the end of a short hallway. Alex stands in front of the
mirror, touching her nose. The camera shifts back to the living
room. Catharine is projected on the wall, then there is a split
screen shot of Catherine on the wall and Alex in the bathroom
mirror. The next shot shows Alex pulling her hair
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back in front of the mirror, as the slide projector is heard in the
background. Alex slumps, arms on the sink, darkness behind
her, the slide projector clicking.
Several things are operating at the same time in this slide
sequence. One female surveys another. This selfsame female
surveys herself surveying another woman. The object of this
gaze (Catharine), in turn is seen looking back on the voyeur, for
when Alex turns from her bathroom mirror back to the living
room screen, there is Catharine on the wall, gazing at her. In this
enlivened space, this tiny screen play within the film, Alex's
investigative gaze turns erotic, she is drawn to Catharine.
And here Alex assumes a variety of subject positions in
relationship to Catharine. She stands in the position of husband,
she touches Catharine's image 'in a way strikingly similar to the
boy at the beginning of Persona' (Mayne, 1990: 47) and she
blends her image with Catharine's. As Mayne observes, this
screen play 'isolates and combines with dizzying rapidity three
modes of desire: substitution (for the husband), merging (in the
child's fantasy of fusion), and the narcissistic identification'
(1990: 47). Alex-as-husband wants to be captured by Catharine.
She wants, at the same time, to protect Catharine, even as she
desires to show her off as a possession.
Alex-as-Catharine wants a man at her side. Alex-as-Catharine
desires to be beautiful, alluring, strong, confident. She wants all
that Catharine has. But it is not to be, she is not beautiful
Catharine. This is what the bathroom scene establishes. The
mirror scene reflects Alex's tarnished self-image back against the
beautiful face of Catharine. Alex becomes the surveyed female,
the object of the voyeur's gaze, and she is the dirty, tainted,
inadequate voyeur.
But Alex has become Catharine. She identifies with Catharine,
she desires Catharine. What started out as an investigation of
Catharine's multiple looks in her many marriages has suddenly
turned into a narcissistic experience. Alex has become the object
of her own gaze, and the subjectivity she perceives in the gaze is
lack, emptiness. Catharine is full woman, Alex, empty woman.
Still, Alex has something Catharine lacks. Alex has a moral
conscience. She knows what is right and what is wrong. The law
is on her side. And the law may not be beautiful, but it is right.
Or so Alex believes.
Act Two
The Predatory Gaze Meets the Legal Look
Certain now that Catharine is a killer, Alex sets off for Seattle,
and in an extended scene in the Seattle Police Department her
predatory look confronts the legal gaze of the police. A police
training film is projected, slightly off-centre, on a screen in front
of a group of policemen. A man fires a gun on screen. Someone
shouts for Lou to fix the screen, as the title of the film, 'Survival
Shooting Techniques' flashes on the wall. A voice from the film
is heard, 'Just because you can't see a suspect doesn't mean he
can't see you'. The screen now divides, the men watching the
film on the one side, and Alex in
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front of the desk of a detective with a map of Seattle on the wall
behind him. The two scenes go on at the same time. Alex is on
both sides of the law. She has placed her newspaper clippings
and photos of Catharine on the policeman's desk. While
admitting there is a resemblance in the photos, the detective
refuses to take action. Alex moves, walking into the screen of the
film playing on the other side of the room. Her image is on the
wall, slightly off-centre, as a policeman fires a shot at a suspect.
The detective explodes, 'You want me to go to one of the five
richest men in the state and tell him some ding-bat thinks his
wife's a murderer when nobody else thinks there's been a
homicide!?' Alex retorts, 'I just spent the whole morning
showing you the God Damned evidence . . . I know I'm right'.
Two days later Catharine kills her next victim.
This brief screen play projects two versions of the law, the
masculine and the feminine. Male law is violent, certain and
quick, guns, bullets, survival techniques that will take out hidden
suspects. This is not the law that Alex projects. Her villain is a
woman who poisons her husbands. Her villain is in full sight.
Alex's off-centred screen image aligns her with this unacceptable
version of the law.
This, of course, is a traditional theme, the private eye confronting
the stupid police (see Symons, 1985: 54). But here it is given a
new twist, for the private eye works for the Justice Department
and he is a woman. But the police will not accord her the status
of a man, she's a ding-bat. Thus in this second play within the
film Alex experiences herself as lack: a double failure, neither an
attractive female, nor an acceptable officer of the law. She must
now pursue her villain alone, and so she takes off, undercover,
for Hawaii, in pursuit of the elusive black widow. Two extended
water scenes erotically and violently draw the two women
together.
Act Three
The Violent Erotic Gaze
Under an assumed name, Jessica Bates, Alex meets up with
Catharine (now named Remi Walker) at the poolside in a scuba
diving lesson. As partners they must share an air regulator and
give each other mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It is in this first of
two water scenes that Alex draws closest to Catharine, pretending
that her watery kiss during mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is not a
real kiss. (Alex: 'You aren't taking this seriously, are you?'
Catharine, 'Don't worry'.) So, a kiss is not a real kiss, this is a
joke, no sexual desire here.
The poolside scuba scene is soon extended to the real thing.
Days later Alex and Catharine, air tanks on their backs, are
underway, off-shore, swimming in and around coral reefs and
schools of colourful fish. Alex picks up a black coral. She and
Catharine play catch as Catharine swims behind her and
dislodges her air hose. Alex struggles for air. Catharine looks
back. Alex panics. Catharine reappears and suddenly gives her
an air hose. The two women struggle to the top of the ocean.
Unaware that Catharine nearly killed her, Alex thanks her,
'Scared the shit out of me back there! Thanks for not having
your back turned back there'.
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Violence displaced, erotic attraction still beneath the surface,
Alex continues her surveillance of Catharine. Catharine, in turn,
is spying on Alex, breaking into her room, smelling the scent on
her handkerchief, holding it tenderly to her cheek. Watching Paul
and Catharine from afar, across the pool, at their wedding, Alex
approaches Catharine, giving her the black widow brooch,
Catharine abruptly grabs her and kisses her violently on the
mouth. Alex coldly pulls back, turning the kiss into an act of
hostility (see Heung, 1987).
The film's penultimate scene brings the two women together in
the jail. Alex is behind the screened partition, a policeman stands
nearby. Catharine gloats, 'Are they treating you OK? You know
they think you were obsessed with me . . . I killed him [Paul] to
frame you . . . You know of all the relationships I look back on
in 50 years time, I'll always remember this one'. As Catharine
turns to leave Paul steps into the room. Catharine gives him a
kiss and is taken off by the police.
Here the viewer is asked to accept the reciprocal attraction
between the two women (Heung, 1987), an attraction mediated
by the law, for Alex's gaze is finally vindicated. Her obsessive
lapse into narcissism and her erotic attraction to Catharine are
now justified. 17 The crack Justice Department investigator has
trapped her victim. In the process she has been feminized, made
beautiful, suggesting that the ends do justify the means. After all
we've got a complete woman here at the end.
Two Voyeurs:
Catharine as Retro Femme Fatale
Black Widow traces the investigative journeys of two female
voyeurs. The story line moves back and forth between Alex's
surveillance of Catharine, Catharine's surveillance of her next
victim and Catharine spying on Alex. These three investigative
structures privilege Alex's project, displacing the deceitful means
Catharine uses to trap her next victim. Her methods are not that
different from Alex's. She studies newspaper clippings and
stacks of books which allow her to bone up on her next victim.
She clips photos, fabricates identities, tries on new identities,
breaks into rooms, searches Alex's luggage, uses a private eye,
spies on and tails Alex, and uses her feminine wiles to trap her
next victim.
As a retro femme fatale Catharine is outside the law, even as she
uses the surveillance methods of the law to accomplish her next
violent act. But unlike Alex of Fatal Attraction, her sexuality is
secondary to her predatory purposes. Erotic, sensuous love is not
central to her project. She traps her victims with her mind, not
her body. Eroticism, and erotic voyeurism only appear in her
relationship with Alex, where her seductiveness proves to be a
trap. As the black widow she in fact mates with Alex, their
obsessions coalesce into a single attraction, each wants to trap the
other.
Here the film departs from its traditional male counterpart, where
the detective's only goal is to bring the criminal to trial. Like
Persona,
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Catharine merges with Alex, perhaps desiring to be a strong
woman who doesn't need a man, just as Alex merges with her.
By placing Paul and Alex together, Catharine substitutes herself
for Paul in the relationship, as she narcissistically identifies with
Alex in the handkerchief scene.
Both women become the surveyed woman for the other. Each
places herself on the other side of the other's keyhole. Each
surveys herself from the vantage point of the other. In these
moves the film delineates, but refuses to endorse, lesbian
attraction (Mayne, 1990: 48). At the same time the multiple
screen scenes within the text function as a 'trope for women's
cinema that refuses to be married to the law' (Mayne, 1990: 48).
These screen scenes, that is, complicate the feminine gaze and the
gazes that are directed at the figure of the woman. She becomes
more than pure spectacle for male pleasure. Her voyeurism
yields more than scopic pleasure: it produces positive self-
fulfilment.
Fire, Rain and the Violent Female Gaze
As with Fatal Attraction water is everywhere and clearly
associated with the feminine self, sexuality, creation, destruction
and death. Rain and water are repeatedly present, from the film's
opening shot of Catharine leaving a helicopter in the rain, the
cemetery scene in the rain, overcast Seattle, ferry rides across
Seattle's waterfront, the scuba diving lessons in Hawaii,
Catharine and Alex's underwater scuba diving adventure that
nearly ends in Alex's death, Catharine and Paul's lovemaking in a
swimming pool, to Catharine's using the bathroom sink as the
site for destroying all evidence of the poisons she inserts in her
husbands' toothpaste, brandy and wine.
While Catharine and Alex appear as water nymphs, it is
dangerous Catharine who dwells both near and in water and fire.
She even takes Alex to the top of the volcanic mountain which
erupts in red smoke and fire. And it is in the water scenes where
Alex draws closest to Catharine, pretending that her watery kiss
during mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is not a real kiss.
Primal nature, the rain forests of Hawaii, earth, sea and sky, are
contrasted to civilized (artificial swimming pools) nature, where
water and its forces are controlled and carefully managed. The
two female characters embody these contrasting views. More
natural Alex clashes with contrived, superficial Catharine.
Natural Alex makes love with Paul in a rain forest. Artificial
Catharine seduces Paul in an indoor swimming pool. Thus are
the negative features of nature and water symbolically associated
with the femme fatale. And while Alex Forrest will go to a
violent, watery grave, the iron grasp of the law (in the form of
Alex Barnes) will take Catharine off to jail. Thereby aligning this
properly feminized Alex with patriarchy and the state. Two
parallel solutions to a domestic crisis.
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Retro Noir Femme Fatales
Black Widow seeks to recast the noir tradition while invoking
many of the expected noir themes including, role reversals,
transferences, doublings, double-crosses, misplaced guilt and
innocent persons charged with the crimes of others, betrayals,
murder and violence. Following, and elaborating, the lead of
recent films (Body Heat, The Jagged Edge, Prizzi's Honor)
where femme fatales and Single Working Women are intellectual
superiors to the men they victimize (Williamson, 1987; Combs,
1987), Black Widow pits two strong women, both neurotic about
men, against one another. (Heung, 1987; Combs, 1987).
Catharine, like Alex Forrest, is a virus. She infects and then
destroys the men who fall in love with and marry her (see
Williamson, 1987). A threat to society, she must be stopped. But
Alex's neurotic, obsessive identification with Catharine (shades
of Persona, see Benson, 1987), the man's woman (Heung,
1987), makes her the victim, not the aggressor. Thus, like Jagged
Edge, the strong professional woman on the side of the law falls
under the spell of the evil other.
Alex and Catharine are doubles, both are skilled at what they do.
(Catharine: 'You never really figure you're quite there . . . Well, I
used to think of it as my job . . . I was a professional'.) As Alex
gets closer to Catharine (her new prey), the two women share
dresses, are clothed in the same colour scheme (red, blue, black),
go to the same hairdresser, exchange erotic kisses, fall in love
with the same man and in the end Alex is charged with
Catharine's crimes (see Heung, 1987). Alex is feminized by her
erotic identification with Catharine, she seeks Catharine's beauty
(Alex: 'We spent most of the day in the pool: you come out
looking like that and I look like this . . . Can I borrow your
hair?') The dedicated female investigator is unfulfilled woman
(femme manquee): the femme fatale is all-woman, a man's
woman (Combs, 1987). So, in the end, this noir experiment fails.
It 'exploits the full-blown iconography of the femme fatale based
as it is on the fetishism of the female body and the mythology of
woman's unfulfilled sexuality and her willingness to control men'
(Heung, 1987).
The Worldly Feminine Look
Back to the beginning and the four propositions. Mayne (1990:
227) speaks of the ambivalent threshold that is created when
women are on both sides of the keyhole. As both subject and
object of another woman's look, the figure of the gazing (and
gazed upon) woman is multiply coded: as fatally flawed; as
supplemental to the male look; as the object of erotic desire; as
multi-sensual; as maternal; as narcissistic, and obsessive; as an
affront to the male look; as a threat to the law, family and the
state; and as embodiment of family and traditional femininity.
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Each of the women voyeurs (the two Alexes, Beth, Ellen) work
against and within a male specular economy. Each seeks an
empowering, feminine subjectivity that transcends the visual.
Here mirror scenes become critical (see La Belle, 1988: 179).
Each woman struggles to find a mirrored self-image that is not
controlled by the male mirror. Each seeks a multifaceted
specularity that is uniquely feminine. And they cannot find this
gaze in the look of the male other.
Alex Forrest sees and feels her reflection in Dan's seed that
grows inside her womb. Beth sees a maternal and erotic self
reflected back from her dressing table mirror. (Even as Dan
hangs over her shoulder.) Alex Barnes sees herself in Catharine's
photographs and rejects her own mirrored image. Each time
Catharine approaches the bathroom sink and pours poison down
the drain she avoids her own mirror image. It is as if this poison
which kills her husbands were a vile bodily fluid.
The look and the subjectivity that is sought by each woman is
given, in the end, by another woman. This gaze and its feelings
are born out of violence. Beth's fully maternal love gaze (and
self) return only after she has done battle with, and killed, Alex
in her bathroom. Alex Barnes's complete turn away from
Catharine occurs only after the violent under water scuba scene
and her gift of the black widow. Two acts of violence (near
death) and the betrayal of affection, produce this resolute change
in self (and gaze). Alex Forrest's final violent, maternal screams
echo from the acoustical mirror in the Gallagher bathroom. Out
of the fog and the steam her face displaces Beth's. Alex's
murderous intentions are clear. She must kill Beth who has taken
her place with Dan.
In turn, Catharine must act to kill Alex Barnes. Alex has become
Paul's lover and she knows what the black widow has done. But
more deeply, for a moment, Catharine has become Alex. She has
been touched by this unattractive woman who has chased her to
Hawaii. Tables turned, now the hunted, not the hunter, Catharine
opens up to Alex, sharing her past history, shedding her masks,
revealing a version of herself that has never been shared with a
man. She becomes a whole woman, near-naked in front of Alex
in her skimpy bathing suit, touching her in the water, sitting next
to her as the sun sets on the beach: two lovers two women in
search of the same thing, wholeness, self-unity.
On the surface these self-changes are produced by the voyeur's
gaze, for it is the gaze that brings each woman to the edge of the
other's keyhole. And it is the gaze that startles and catches the
other off-guard, exposing them in their interactional, intimate
and primal pursuits. But these changes are not produced by the
exposure of the other. Such exposure is the traditional province
of the investigative, erotic or illicit gaze.
Instead, confrontation with the other produces self-awareness
and fuels self-desire. This transcends narcissistic identification,
obsessive involvement in the other. The feminine gaze produces
its own self-understanding. In the speculum of the other woman
each woman finds herself. But this is not the concave speculum
used by gynaecologists to investigate the female
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genitalia, for what is found exceeds sexuality. Each woman's
body and self is beyond 'the tain of the mirror, outside of any
specular representation' (Jay, 1993a: 534; Irigaray, 1985: 146).
Each woman is excess, more than her corporeal self. Yet she has
always previously defined herself within the structures of that
corporeal self-body image. She has not understood that she is
outside specular representation, more than what the silver
backing of the mirror reflects. So in the moment of self-
discovery each woman does more than take the mirror, which
reflects the other, into her own hands. She remakes herself inside
the self-understandings awakened by the reflected, refracted
images of herself which collide with those of the other woman.
She does more than see herself through the eyes of the other. She
discovers herself through her own eyes. Thus the mirror that is
used neither reflects nor contains her specularity. It creates
specularity which knows no reflected boundary.
Bergman's Persona provides an example. Alma is speaking to
Elisabeth Vogler, 'That evening when I had been to see your
film, I stood in front of the mirror and thought, ''We're quite
alike". Don't get me wrong. You are much more beautiful. But in
some way we're alike. I think I could turn myself into you if I
really tried. I mean inside. Don't you think so? And you wouldn't
have any difficulty, of course, turning into me. You could do it
just like that' (Bergman, 1972: 578). That night, after this speech,
Elisabeth enters sleeping Alma's room and 'caresses her cheek
with her lips. Her long hair falls forward over her forehead and
encloses their faces' (Bergman, 1972: 601). Days later Elisabeth
begins her recovery which will return her to her husband and her
work. Elisabeth recreates herself through this concave mirror that
Alma has given her.
This is a new form of specular self-knowledge, a knowledge that
feels its own self-understandings and transcends the immediate
present. This awareness arises precisely at that moment when
each woman renounces male specularity. Thus it can be seen that
Alex Barnes begins to awaken in that pivotal living-room scene
when she inserts herself next to Catharine, displacing the
husband who marks this place and relationship in masculine
terms. But this is only the beginning of the journey that Alex
Barnes must take. She is still defined within the male mirror.
Her rejection of this mirror begins at the poolside in Hawaii
when the relationship with Catharine takes shape. Still seeing
herself through male eyes, when she compares her hair and body
to Catharine's, Alex begins her transformation when she and
Catharine leave civilization and enter the primal sea or sit on the
beach near the rain forest. Gazing into the setting sun, the male
mirror is burned away and replaced by the calm reflection of the
ocean waters. Together Catharine and Alex discover a feminine
subjectivity that is not defined in male terms. This is given by the
mirror of nature.
In this act of renunciation, each woman embraces the 'dazzle of
[a] multifaceted speleology, a scintillating and incandescent
concavity, of language, also, that threatens to set fire to fetish-
objects and gilded eyes'
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(Irigaray, 1985: 143). She passes through the tain of the mirror
(Irigaray, 1985: 149) to the other side of language and self-
imagery. She burns away 'the fetishized woman-as-object seen in
[and created] by the [masculine] glass . . . the "gilded eyes" of
[male] mirror-mindedness [are] replaced by eyes that search
deeply into the hidden caverns of female selfhood' (La Belle,
1988: 17980).
Thus do Catharine and Alex experience conflict. They have
burned through the male looking-glass and discovered a form of
being that has never before been experienced. Under water, and
now beside the sea, they have been united by the sun's rays and
the water's gaze. But each remains trapped by what the male
body can give. And so they fight over Paul. Self-discovery has
only been partial. The male mirror still reflects back on their
shared consciousness. And now their journeys go in different
directions.
Alex Barnes seeks to be united with an embodied, felt self-image
that is 'nothing less than a state of consciousness defined through
its constant commingling with corporeal being' (La Belle, 1988:
180). And this being embraces the world, becomes one with the
world. In this new world that Alex embraces there are two
mirrors, the law/mirror of the father, the state, the law, and the
newly emerging law/mirror of feminine subjectivity.
Catharine has betrayed this first law. She cannot transcend the
masculine mirror and its flawed reflections so she must be
destroyed, captured, brought behind the mirrored bars of prison.
The trap is set. But all is not lost, for Catharine learns too. Full
feminine self-awareness is finally announced in the film's
penultimate moment, when she confesses, and then tells Alex
that she will never forget this relationship. What she has taken
from Alex can never be given by a man.
Alex triumphs, exults in her moment of victory. She has learned
a new law, the law of the feminine mirror, and this law is fully
compatible (for her) with the law of the father and the state. She
hasn't thrown away the mirror of the world, she has remade it in
her own collective self-image. The mirror is no longer tyrant, the
dominant male/mirror. She marches proudly through the glare of
the lights from the photographers' cameras into the full glare of
nature's sun, whose rays reflect back against the courthouse, the
site of the law of the father. Thus does the feminine worldly
mirror transform itself.
These are some of the things that can happen when women are
on both sides of the keyhole. In the next chapter I explore what
happens when males take up this position. The lessons are less
promising.
Notes
1. Directed by Bob Rafelson; Studio: Twentieth-Century Fox;
screenplay by Ronald Bass; cast: Debra Winger (Alexandra
Barnes), Theresa Russell (Catharine); Sami Frey (Paul), Dennis
Hopper (Ben), Nicol Williamson (William), James Hong (Shin).
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2. Directed by Adrian Lyne; studio: Paramount; Screenplay by
James Dearden; cast: Michael Douglas (Dan Gallagher), Glenn
Close (Alex Forrest), Anne Archer (Beth Gallagher), Ellen
Hamilton Latzen (Ellen Gallagher).
3. For example: Gilda, Rebecca, She's Gotta Have It, Blue Steel,
Prince of Tides, Desperately Seeking Susan. Here my focus
differs from Mayne's (1990) who analyses the female voyeur in
non-mainstream, 'women's films', including I've Heard the
Mermaids Singing, and Illusions.
4. Both Fatal Attraction and Psycho begin with the camera
panning the skyline of a large city (New York and Phoenix
respectively), then switch to the inside of an apartment. The
Close character locates her father in Phoenix (see Konigsberg,
1988: 118). Fatal Attraction draws on horror film techniques
(knives, shower-bath room scenes, à la Psycho). The obsession
Winger's character displays mirrors that of earlier Hitchcock and
De Palma characters (Scottie of Vertigo; Cliff Robertson in
Obsession). Winger's voyeurism is matched, in part, by Charlie's
gaze in Shadow of a Doubt, while Russell's character, in a play
on De Palma, is dressed to kill. Hitchcock's investigative, female
voyeurs (Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt, Doctor Constance
Petersen in Spellbound) were comfortable in their female
identities. Charlie, the female, attractive, inquisitive, thoughtful
adolescent complements the attractive, dreamy, maternal
Constance Petersen, a psychoanalyst who leads Gregory Peck
(John Ballantine) out of his amnesia and frightening nightmare.
Both women use their powers of feminine intuition and
compassion to save lives and discover a real murderer. Their foes
are males. They are females on the masculine side of the keyhole.
Their gazes are not flawed. They are supplemental to the male
gaze. Each deploys the traditional masculine look of law, order
and/or psychiatry. Their gazes are not sexual, and they are
seldom spectacle for the male gaze. They embody the classic
image of the female voyeur. She is not a threat to self, society or
other. She is the good woman. Hitchcock reverses this imagery
in Psycho. The object of Norman Bates's gaze is doubled back
through the look (and exhortations) of his dead mother,
producing the famous shower scene where the watery eye of
dying Janet Leigh is mirrored in the floor drain.
5. Katovich and Haller (1993) distinguish the femme fatale of the
1940 film noir tradition (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always
Rings Twice) from the retro fatale of the retro noir nostalgia (la
mode retro) tradition (Jameson, 1991: 190) of the 1980s and
1990s (Body Heat, Black Widow, Fatal Attraction). Noir's femme
fatale manipulated men without committing violence. The retro
fatal is obsessive, fanatical, violent, acts out of self interest,
breaks the law and in her subversive identity (Thelma and
Louise), flees from male authority.
6. This is taken to a new level in Paul Verhoeven's 1992 highly
controversial, erotic, soft pornographic, anti-gay and lesbian
thriller, Basic Instinct. Here the bisexual retro femme fatale
(Catherine Tramell), played by Sharon Stone, is a man-eating,
sadomasochistic, nymphomaniac, serial murderess. Stone
blatantly exploits the latent bisexuality perfected by Marlene
Dietrich in Blue Angel (1930). The Stone character writes
mystery novels, her most recent being about a violent, damaged
cop. Other films in this recent tradition include Final Analysis,
The Temp, and to a lesser degree Single White Female.
7. Hence Alex's taped message to Dan 'I taste you, part of you is
growing in me'.
8. Not surprisingly in Basic Instinct this merger produces a
violent bisexual.
9. Williamson (1988) speaks here of the 'Single Working
Woman' (SWW) stereotype, a recent representation in American
movies. This woman, recently played by Debra Winger and
Glenn Close, has permed-crinkly hair, is good at her job, is
neurotic about men and, in films like Fatal Attraction and 9 1/2
Weeks, is fitted into a text that deals, on one level with yuppie sex
life and on another with body-horror (The Fly). The SWW
becomes the AIDS virus, the 'Horror' that will destroy the yuppie
nuclear family. According to Faludi (1993, Chapter 5) these
films display Hollywood's 1980s backlash against the women's
movement. Richard Bradley called my attention to Faludi's
analysis.
10. A client of his firm, a publisher, is being sued. A
Congressman who has had a number of affairs is claiming that
the female author of a new book has written about him.
11. The confession follows an earlier erotic scene between Dan
and Beth where Dan nestles his face next to hers in the mirror as
she sits in panties and bra at her dressing table.
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12. I thank Joanna Bradley, Rachel Denzin, Richard Bradley,
Katherine E. Ryan and Nate Stevens for their assistance in this
discussion of water and its symbolic meanings.
13. In the original ending of the film Beth commits suicide (see
Faludi, 1993: 11723). The second ending, which audiences
preferred, exploits the Friday the 13th cliché with the villain who
is never really dead (Ebert, 1989c: 249).
14. Theresa Russell's character takes on several names in the
film: Catharine (the wife of a Mafioso); Marielle (the wife of a
toy manufacturer); Margaret (the wife of an anthropologist);
Remi Walker (a playgirl who romances a hotel developer in
Hawaii). Winger's character takes on the name of Jessica Bates
(after Norman Bates of Psycho?) when she goes undercover to
investigate Russell's character in Hawaii. Following Heung
(1987) I will refer to Russell's character as Catharine.
15. The film mocks psychoanalytic explanations. Just before she
leaves her job to work full-time on Catharine's case, Alex
recounts to Bruce the story of her father who was violent and
who keeled over one day after beating Alex with a steel spatula.
'This woman [Catharine] has the same deep resentment against
older men. Ha! Ha! A lot of crap. Nobody knows why anyone
does anything!'
16. The gazes of Black Widow (like those of Fatal Attraction) are
cinematically produced through clever editing, split screens and
subjective and selective POV shots. Also, like Fatal Attraction,
bathrooms, water and fire play central parts in the story's visual
symbolism.
17. Even to the point of making love with Paul, raising the
question, is she Paul or Catharine in this relationship?
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7
Paranoia and the Erotics of Power
I have no interest in human nature. I listen. I'm not responsible. I just
run the tapes. It's a business.
Harry Caul, The Conversation
The American people have yet to see the Zapruder film. 1Why? The
American people have yet to see the real photographs and X-rays of the
autopsy. Why? There are hundreds of documents that could help prove
this conspiracy. Why have they been withheld or burned by the
Government?
Jim Garrison, JFK
In this chapter I examine paranoia and the erotics of power, the
paranoic obsession with the gaze, the belief that one is being
gazed upon, the desire to contain the other within a 'new and
more generalized sensory space in which there are no longer
any . . . hiding-places of any kind' (Jameson, 1992: 66). This
obsession presumes the malevolent uses of the panoptic and
panauditory gaze by the state and its agents in the contemporary,
postmodern period. The paranoid gaze merges with the erotics of
power, those scopic pleasures derived from the power of the
look. These pleasures go beyond the purely sexual. But they
always work outward from the body, its containment, its
presence in the situation, its sights and sounds, its erotic appeal,
its sensuality, the flesh.
Building on the analysis in Chapters 5 and 6, I continue my
investigation of the male mirror, the masculine gaze and the
obsessive desire to capture political and everyday life in all their
plenitude. I look at men on both sides of the keyhole, men
watching men (and occasionally women). Again I select two
texts for intensive analysis, Francis Ford Coppola's brilliant and
disturbing 1974 film The Conversation 2called by some critics
'one of the darkest and most disturbing films ever made in this
country' (Farber, 1974: 13) and Oliver Stone's equally
controversial and disturbing 1991 film JFK3(see Zelizer, 1992:
20114; also Stone and Sklar, 1992, Part II: 187529). Stone's
film, of course, is a re-telling of the Kennedy assassination, what
Don DeLillo (Libra, 1988) calls 'The story that won't go away,
the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century'.
Stone's film, as noted in Chapter 1, turns on the use of other
visual texts including newsreels and photographs and, most
importantly, the Zapruder film to establish its own theory of the
assassination. Thus is history re-
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written within another version of the cinematic simulacrum.
Fittingly, I end this study with JFK for it documents the final
spasms of the cinematic apparatus in the twilight of the twentieth
century.
The following propositions organize my argument. The first
elaborates arguments given in Chapter 5. Hitchcock and
Antonioni brought the voyeur into the early postmodern period.
Their projects provide the backdrop for Coppola and Stone.
Hitchcock and Antonioni delineated the spaces the cinematic
voyeur could inhabit. Both directors rejected the notion of the
objective observer and each made the voyeur part of the
spectacle that was witnessed. Both directors also announced the
end of privacy in the early postmodern age. Each told 'classic'
detective stories (as elaborated in Chapter 4) involving a victim, a
lone detective and a villain. Their stories would turn on two tales,
the murder (what appeared to happen) and its investigation (what
really happened).
Hitchcock's camera, as argued in Chapter 5, was guided by two
principles and two pleasures. The camera indulges the spectator's
desire for scopic pleasure, which is joined with the need for the
revelation of moral truth. At the same time the camera must act as
a moral authority (revealing final truth) and the film must tell a
story that shows how those who violate these moral laws are
punished and brought to justice. Antonioni rejected these
principles. His camera, while courting the sexual gaze, does not
answer to a higher moral truth, and his voyeur is not an agent of
the law.
As leading filmmakers of the generation that built on Hitchcock
and Antonioni, Coppola and Stone explore the misanthropic,
malicious, conspiratorial uses of the cinematic apparatus in the
late postmodern surveillance society. Stone adheres to
Hitchcock's moral principles, his camera is an agent of political
truth, the narrator of history for a post-Vietnam generation.
Coppola is more closely aligned with Antonioni's project,
wrestling with the moral dilemmas produced by the new
information technologies, worrying about the higher truths to
which these technologies must answer. Stone seeks certain truths,
Coppola wonders if such truths are any longer possible.
My second proposition concerns the emergence and meanings of
the reflexive cinematic text in the postmodern period. Stone and
Coppola produce versions of what Jameson (1992: 3) calls the
'conspiratorial text'. Such texts, as allegorical film narratives,
attempt to discover the truths, or lack thereof, that are embedded
in the late twentieth century American histories surrounding
Vietnam, Watergate, the political assassinations of John and
Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Nixon tapes, and, by
implication, the political cover-ups of the Reagan/Bush
Presidential administrations (Irangate, etc.).
The conspiratorial text takes as its subject matter the new
surveillance society, or what Marx (1986; 1988: 221; 1992) calls
the maximum-security society, a society filled with undercover
agents, human and computer informers, computer hackers, and
sneakers (Sneakers, 1992), vigilantes and
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for-hire paramilitary networks attached to multinational
corporations who ignore the geo-political boundaries of nation-
states, hidden video and audio cameras in public places,
electronic leashes, electronic article surveillance (EAS) systems,
personal truth technologies (body fluids, DNA matches),
anticipatory and high-tech surveillance systems, computerized
mailing lists and dossiers, electronic, stalking on public and
private E-mail systems (Compuserve, Internet and Bitnet, etc.),
wiretaps, hidden microphones and video cameras in the walls of
private homes (The Firm, 1993; Sliver, 1993), automatic
telephone switching systems (Three Days of the Condor, 1975;
Sneakers, 1992), satellite surveillance systems (Patriot Games,
1992), chemical tracking, hidden beepers, a mandatory national
ID system (Marx, 1988: 216), an electronic leash implanted in
the brain of every person (Clockwork Orange (1971) and in the
film of Orwell's 1984), private and state security guards outside
every door.
This is the stuff of the conspiratorial film. Examples include The
Manchurian Candidate (1962), Z (1968), Klute (1971),
Executive Action (1973), The Conversation (1974), The Parallax
View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Taxi Driver
(1976), All the President's Men (1976), Who'll Stop the Rain?
(1978), Blow Out (1981), Missing (1982), The Year of Living
Dangerously (1983), Under Fire (1983), Salvador (1986),
Betrayed (1988), JFK (1991), Sliver (1993), In the Line of Fire
(1993), Ruby (1992), Love Field (1992). Such films are
preoccupied with attempts to re-tell and come to grips with
contemporary history and the cover-ups and symbolic meanings
attached to this history (Vietnam, Kennedy's assassination,
Watergate; toxic and nuclear waste sites, Latin American guerrilla
wars of national liberation, etc.).
Third, these texts reflexively interrogate the new information
technologies and those who control them. They argue that these
technologies, in conjunction with the media and a private and
public power elite (Mills, 1956), conspire to tell only one version
of history. This is a self-serving version of history which
perpetuates the power elite. Reflexive, conspiratorial cinema is
premised on the belief that a true history can be uncovered, a true
reality lies beneath the simulacrum. Reality is more than it is
presented as being. There is a real truth to history. A reflexive
paranoia is at work here. These films are preoccupied with the
belief that those in power always lie and distort the truth.
Thus these films reproduce the camera theory of reality discussed
in Chapter 1. They argue that there is a body of fixed truths in
the social world that can be dug out and verified by the reflexive
filmmaker. These truths are aligned with the doctrines of a free,
open, democratic society. They must be told, if democracy is to
persist. So Oliver Stone has Kevin Costner (as Jim Garrison)
speak the following lines in his closing speech in JFK. 'The truth
is the most important value we have because if the truth does not
endure, if the Government murders the truth . . . then this is no
longer the country in which we were born and this is not the
country I want to die in . . . And this was never more true than
for John F.
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Kennedy whose murder was probably the most terrible moment
in the history of our country'.
If the viewer didn't get the message, Stone repeats it, minutes
later, in the film's closing moment. This following slogans appear
on screen: 'STUDY THE PAST', 'PAST IS PROLOGUE', 'ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF LIBERTY',
'DEDICATED TO THE YOUNG, IN WHOSE SPIRIT THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH MARCHES ON' 'THE END '.
The Conversation
Noon, December 2, Union Square, San Francisco. An attractive
young couple, Ann and Mark, clandestine lovers, weave in and
out of a crowd, having what appears to be a banal conversation
about Christmas presents. A man with a hearing aid and a
shopping bag follows them. He in turn is followed by a mime in
white face. High above the square another man with a telescopic
lens watches their every movement. A fourth man, Harry Caul,
the best bugging expert on the West Coast, enters a van where
tape recorders play fragments of the couple's conversation
(Farber, 1974: 13). The sounds of other conversations, mingled
with a saxophone solo, fill the air as the couple walks around the
square and an off-screen band plays 'When the red, red robin
comes bob, bob, bobbin along'.
Thus opens Frances Ford Coppola's The Conversation. Started in
1966 and finished in 1974, the film's history spans the Vietnam
War years, the shattering revelations of the Pentagon Papers and
the Watergate scandals (Einstein, 1981: 515). This is a political
text. It remains ominous in its devastating statements about the
unchecked new communication technologies which threaten to
destroy our democratic heritage by eroding our fundamental civil
liberties concerning the right to privacy (Einstein, 1981: 515).
Clearly influenced by Antonioni's Blow-Up, The Conversation
demonstrates that technological prowess can only detect, it
cannot comprehend or feel or form moral judgements. It
produces a pornographic ecstasy of communication in which the
invisible (the private) becomes visible (public) and nothing is
any longer secret or sacred.
Harry Caul, his name a play on 'call' for he monitors telephone
calls, is a voyeur, an anti-hero. 4Forty-two years old, single, a
Catholic, his birthday is December 2.5He abhors profanity ('Stan,
don't use those words!'). He has no valued personal possessions,
just the key to his apartment and his saxophone. He takes morbid
pleasure in spying on others, in wire-tapping their phones and
using the latest technologies to
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capture their private conversations which occur in public places.
He works for anyone. He espouses no moral conscience: 'I once
placed a bug in a parakeet. I don't care what they're talking
about, all I want is a nice, fat recording. You get a better track if
you pay attention to the recording, not what they're talkin' about.
Just do the job. Never ask questions. Do it right. Keep your eyes
and your mouth closed'. But he is haunted by a prior case where
at least one murder occurred as a result of his bugging.
Harry is a man of contradictions. An expert on recording the
conversations of others, he is unable to communicate with
anyone. Rain or shine he wears a transparent plastic raincoat, 'as
if for prophylactic protection against society' (Canby, 1974: 11).
His universe is defined by sounds and their recordings. He is
riddled with guilt, yet feels disconnected from the three murders
that resulted from one of his jobs. 'I just turned the tapes.' He is
alone and paranoid, triple locks the door to his sparsely and
cheaply furnished apartment (alarms go off when he opens the
door), makes love with his shoes on, listens to the sounds in his
girlfriend's apartment before he knocks on her door and is
unable to feel or to trust other people. His fear of 'being
overheard is as intense as his compulsion to eavesdrop on others.
His favourite position is ''outside the door"' (Silverman, 1988:
88). His only release comes from playing his saxophone 'in
accompaniment to a jazz album a live recording which ends with
a cheering crowd' (Einstein, 1981: 516).
Undoing The Conversation
Like David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Pakula's Klute and DePalma's
Blow Out, Coppola's film enters reality through the ear, through
the sounds of the human conversation, itself an acoustic mirror
which 'permits the speaker to function at the same time as the
listener' (Silverman, 1988: 79) to the sounds of their own and the
other's voice. 6A story about auditory and visual surveillance and
what the listener shouldn't hear (and see), The Conversation
moves quickly. His tapes in hand, Harry goes to his workshop
and shapes the sounds into a coherent conversation. The young
couple's words form full sentences.7Harry places a phone call
(pay phone) and asks to speak to the Director. A male assistant
tells him to bring the tapes the next afternoon. That evening
Harry visits his girlfriend, Amy, who begins to ask him questions
about what he does. He tells her that he has no secrets. The next
day he goes to the Director's office, where the assistant attempts
to take the tapes, warning Harry that they are dangerous. Leaving
the office Harry sees Ann and Mark. He returns to his workshop
and listens to the tapes again. More information is heard.
Something sinister is going to happen on Sunday at 3.00 p.m. in
room 773 of the Jack Tar Hotel. Harry deciphers a line spoken
by Mark, 'He'd kill us if he got the chance'.
The next sequence of scenes takes the viewer to the annual
surveillance convention, a national meeting, a carnival of the
nation's top wire-tappers
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and security men. In this group Harry is a legend. He learns that
his best assistant (Stan) has left him and his girlfriend has
changed her telephone number. That night he sleeps with a
woman (Meredith) who steals the tapes. His intimate talk with
her is recorded and broadcast as part of a practical joke. In a
flashback, Dali-like dream sequence, he relives the recording
sequence in Union Square. He then follows Ann through a fog
up a hill, recalling his childhood, he tells her that he is not afraid
of death, only murder. Unable to let go of the information about
what is going to happen in Room 773 of the Jack Tar, Harry
goes to the hotel at the appointed time. Entering the empty hotel
room, he hears water running in the toilet. As he flushes the toilet
blood flows out and covers the bathroom floor. Ann and Mark
have killed the Director, Ann's husband. Reading the newspaper
headlines he learns that the death has been disguised to look like
a car crash.
Harry is now implicated in the murder. He becomes the hunted,
not the hunter. Through a sequence of flashbacks he sees the
dead Director's body on the bed in the hotel room. His life
begins to fall apart. He is the only man outside the Company
who knows the real details of the death. His own life is now in
danger. He returns home to find that it has been bugged. The
telephone rings and the Director's assistant tells him 'We know
that you know. For your own sake don't get involved any farther.
We'll be listening to you'. In a manic, paranoid rage he destroys
his apartment, looking for the bug, pulling the floor apart, board
by board, even smashing a statuette of the Virgin Mary. A victim
of his own craft, he is unable to discover how the bugging was
done. In a final, dismal, nightmare-like scene, Harry sits in the
rubble of his possessions, playing his saxophone, as the camera
pans the destroyed apartment.
Structures of Surveillance and Harry's Nightmare
The Conversation is one long study in the surveillance of the
other. Its subject is the act of observation itself (Kolker, 1980:
196): Harry recording and bringing meaning to the taped voices
of Ann and Mark; the Director's firm tailing Harry; Harry's co-
workers taping his voice; Harry's landlady reading his mail and
letting herself into his apartment; Harry spying on Amy; Amy
getting a new unlisted telephone number so Harry can't call her;
Harry confessing to the priest; Ann and Mark watching
themselves being watched, trying to escape surveillance; Harry
attempting to live a totally private life where nobody can observe
or know him. At the same time the film parades before the
viewer the latest techniques of audio and video surveillance,
including voice and motion activated recording devices.
Four gazes are central to the film's surveillance system: Harry's
technological, auditory gaze which weaves sentences and stories
out of sound bites; the organizational gaze of the Director's firm,
which penetrates closed walls; the gaze of intimacy, which joins
Ann and Mark in the park, Harry and Amy in her bedroom,
Harry and Meredith for one
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night in his work place; and finally the moral gaze of guilt, the
church, a heavenly surveillance system 'which might at any
moment be turned against [Harry]' (Silverman, 1988: 89).
These multiple gazing structures are united in a single roving
eye, the eye of the viewer, for we are the central voyeur in the
film. We are studying other voyeurs, as if they were in captivity,
insects or mice chasing around inside the glass walls of a
contained, anonymous space. However, underneath this visual
system of surveillance lurks the always present human voice and
its recording, the voice of Ann as she calls out to Harry. Haunted
by her description of the drunk on the park bench ('He was once
somebody's baby boy'), Ann's maternal voice speaks through
him, calling him back to his own childhood ('I was very sick
when I was a boy'). Her voice awakens his moral conscience and
sets him on his journey to stop a murder ('I'm not afraid of death.
I am afraid of murder'). Thus does The Conversation give
control to the female voice, more control than it is usually
granted (see Silverman, 1988: 97).
Ann's voice activates a reverberating acoustical mirror which
allows Harry to project himself into her situation with Mark. As
he re-listens to the tape, the word us in 'He'd kill us if he had the
chance', is reinterpreted to include Harry, thus does he insert
himself into this murderous plot (see Silverman, 1988: 90;
Kolker, 1980: 198). He thinks he can save them, and if he can
save them, he can save himself. (At the same time by preventing
the death of Ann and Mark he can achieve some relief from the
guilt that he feels from the earlier murders that occurred because
of his tapes.)
Ann's voice and her presence structure each of the four gazes
that define the film's surveillance system. These four forms of
looking are each filtered through Harry's eyes and ears.
Harry's Technological Gaze
Ann's description of the drunk on the park bench occurs in the
middle of her conversation with Mark. Her words take shape for
Harry as he sits at his workbench, replaying the sounds from the
three hidden microphones. The equation is complete (Einstein,
1981: 516). Harry is the man on the bench, he was 'once
somebody's baby boy, and he had a mother and a father who
loved him'. These lines become part of Harry's conversation with
himself as he puts this conversation together. The next day the
line 'He'd kill us if he got the chance' emerges from the tape.
That night, after the party, as he stretches out on a mattress (again
like the drunk on the bench), he replays the tapes. Meredith
makes love to him as we again hear Ann's description of the
drunk and the lines, 'He'd kill us'. The film segues into Harry's
dream sequence. He recounts his childhood and his fear of
murder to Ann who remains beyond his grasp atop the hill in the
fog. This dream sequence moves forward in time. Harry is
outside the door to room 773 of the Jack Tar Hotel. Harry sees
Ann standing against the glass doors leading to the balcony, a
noiseless scream is seen as the Director attacks her. A reverse
shot shows the
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curtain smeared with blood which also stains the walls of the
bathroom (see Silverman, 1988: 92). Harry has failed to save
Ann.
Days later Harry actually goes to the Jack Tar. He rents the room
next to 773. Underneath the sink, next to the toilet, he drills a
hole through the wall, inserting a microphone into the next room.
He hears excerpts from the Union Square tape, including the
words 'I love you'. For Harry these words come from room 773,
for the listener they come from the tape. As Silverman (1988:
93) notes, Harry's psychic auditory apparatus is now confused
with the film's cinematic and sound apparatus. His mind has
become this exterior apparatus. The machinery of Harry's mind
has created the sounds he wants to hear, the call of Ann's
maternal voice, the 'I love you'. Her voice is inside Harry's head.
The 'voices of Ann and her friend have been produced by Harry
all along we have never heard them except through either his
technological or psychic "apparatus"' (Silverman, 1988: 93).
Harry climbs out on the balcony and looks towards room 773.
He now sees another 'imaginary' scene, a replay of the earlier
murder scene, only now Ann's back is to the camera and
someone else is being murdered. An electronic scream drives
Harry back to the bedroom. He huddles under the covers in the
darkness of the room. When he opens his eyes a Flintstone
cartoon is playing on the television screen. Fred is taking his
wife to the hospital to have a baby. Another retreat into
childhood for Harry.
Undaunted, he now actually enters room 773, flushing the toilet
an electronic scream wells up as blood and tissue spew onto the
floor. Harry escapes from the room. He enters a crowd of people
(reporters, work associates of the Director) who are asking Ann
about the future of the Corporation. Harry now mentally replays
the conversation from Union Square. Ann is heard, 'I don't know
what to get him for Christmas', and Mark says, 'He doesn't need
anything anymore'. As Harry listens to the imaginary tape he
'sees' the Director's corpse on the bed, wrapped in a plastic body-
bag, and next he sees the bloody struggle that he had dreamed
twice before. Once again he hears Mark, 'He'd kill us if he had
the chance'.
Ann's maternal voice drops from the tape. She has betrayed
Harry, and now she will kill him if she has the chance. He
retreats to the shelter of his room, only to receive the ominous
phone call, 'We know that you know'. He has no recourse other
than to destroy his own room, seeking the bug that has bugged
him, forgetting to ever look inside his saxophone, his last site of
solace, lonely music played inside a destroyed room.
The camera zooms in on Harry, now the man inside the room, no
longer outside the door. Trapped, the voyeur in the corner. The
message is clear. The film began from the outside, the exterior
shots of Union Square, Harry in control of hidden cameras and
tape recorders. At the end we now see and hear Harry through
someone else's eyes and ears (Silverman, 1988: 98). Harry has
no auditory control over anything. He has created everything he
heard. This psychic apparatus, his mind and his imagination,
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have manufactured his own destruction. He is not exterior to the
sounds he records and manipulates. He is deeply implicated in
them, indeed he has created what he wants to hear (Silverman,
1988: 96).
The Organizational Gaze
Harry has been duped from the outset. He was being bugged and
tailed from the time the Director hired him to tail and record Ann
and Mark. He was followed by Martin Stett (Harrison Ford) and
Meredith was sent to steal the tapes from him. Bernie Moran's
dirty little trick of recording Harry's intimate conversation with
Meredith also played into the Director's hand, for it heightened
Harry's paranoia, and made him the victim, not the voyeur, the
not-so-good-natured subject of another hidden surveillance
system.
So The Conversation inverts the traditional work relationship that
Harry finds so comfortable. The usual triangular structure of
voyeur, subject and client no longer operates here. The client, the
Director, is also a voyeur. The traditional voyeur (Harry) is now
the subject of the client's gaze, and the subject, Ann and Mark,
are the real villains. Their villainy merges, in the end, with the
Corporation, who is, it appears, complicitous with them.
The Look of Intimacy
There are four moments of voyeuristic intimacy in the film: the
intimate conversation of Ann and Mark that is recorded, Harry's
bedroom scenes with Amy, and Meredith, and Harry's dream
sequence with Ann. Each sequence draws out Harry's need for,
but fear of, intimacy. He will not tell Amy what he does, she
does not know that today is his birthday, he will not reveal his
age, she doesn't know he is planning to visit her, he won't let her
call him, and he challenges her for asking him 'all these
questions'. He must be in control of his visits to her, even as she
listens for him listening outside her door.
When Amy changes her phone number and withdraws from
Harry he approaches Meredith, 'Would you go back to a man
who never tells you anything?' Seduced by Meredith, prostrate
on his mattress, inside his wire work cage, Harry plays his tapes
and drifts off into his dream of Ann and the impending murder.
He only knows intimacy through the sounds he creates in his
own mind. These are the intimate sounds that others make.
The Moral Gaze
'I have sinned' Harry says as he steps into the confessional booth.
'It's been three months since I confessed my sins. I took
newspapers without paying. I've had impure thoughts. My
work's been used to hurt people, two young persons. Before,
people have been hurt by my work. But I just listen. I'm not
responsible.'
In the presence of this omnipresent heavenly surveillance system,
Harry expresses his guilt. A haunted, moral man, Harry seeks
solace in another voyeur's place, the confessional of the priest.
He wants another voyeur to hear his sins, to be the site of his
confession. So he brings the silent sounds of his internal
conversations to the priest. But once here, he cannot go beneath
the surface of his own thoughts, he is not responsible for what
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happens to his tapes. He cannot share with the priest the
conversation he has taped.
So this study of dreams and surveillance systems comes to an
end. Without intimacy, no one to confess to, heard by unseen
ears, this lonely loveless man, a guilty victim of his own
nightmares and the nameless surveillance systems of others is
beyond redemption. Betrayed by his own technology, he is led,
like a lamb to the wolves (The Silence of the Lambs), by the
meanings he brings to Ann's words, 'I love you. . . . He was once
a baby boy. . . . I was very sick when I was a boy . . . [my
mother] put holy water . . . on my body'.
And here the film plays one more trick, for surely, as Silverman
(1988: 95) observes, Harry's last name (Caul) is a word play on
amnion, or the inner membrane protecting the foetus before
birth. And surely he is drawn to the maternal voice and the
spaces it inhabits. In addition, he desires to control that voice, to
manipulate it, to make it bring the words 'I love you' into his life.
Most certainly he fails to either recover or control that voice.
But it is inappropriate, as Silverman proposes, to solely read The
Conversation as a text 'which attests more powerfully than any
other to the ways in which the female voice becomes the
receptacle of that which the male subject throws away and draws
back toward himself' (1988: 87). Such a psychoanalytic reading
('Harry attempts . . . to make good his symbolic castration'
(Silverman, 1988: 95)) aligns the film's treatment of Ann with
'an unpleasurable and disempowering interiority' (1988: 100). At
the same time this reading connects the film to the 'larger cultural
disavowal of the mother's role both as agent of discourse and as
a model for linguistic (as well as visual) identification' (1988:
100).
Harry's relationship to the maternal voice is complicated by the
moral guilt he brings into this situation from his earlier case
where people were murdered because of his work. He seeks to
prevent another murder. Ann's remarks about the drunk on the
bench reminds Harry of his own childhood, his own
(presumably) lost mother and father. He seeks to neither control
nor manipulate Ann's voice, only to understand it so he can stop
the murder.
Ann betrays him. In the end he has nothing. He did not stop a
murder. Amy has left him and the woman he wanted to save is a
murderess. His apartment is bugged, and he has nowhere to hide.
The more he tries to withdraw from the world, the more he is
seen. The more he 'attempts to look into the privacy of . . . [Ann
and Mark], the more he traps himself in his guilt and his
vulnerability' (Kolker, 1980: 197).
Harry's suffering reflects a larger cultural situation that Coppola
wants to identify (Kolker, 1980: 198). Harry is not to be pitied,
vilified, or dismissed. He is not an agent of evil. His plight is to
be read as symbolic of the 'destructiveness of the act of
surveillance for all concerned' (Kolker, 1980: 198). This is an
allegory, a tiny moral tale. Harry's infatuation with Ann's voice is
but one small part of that larger story. To focus solely on Ann
and her voice is to miss this larger picture.
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A Tiny Moral Story
Like Blow-Up and later Blow Out (1981), which also have their
murders, The Conversation leaves the protagonist-investigator
without proof of his secret, guilty knowledge. In a variation on
Antonioni's photographer, Coppola's Harry anticipates a murder
before it occurs. He is 'like a filmmaker, putting together bits and
pieces to make a whole. But what he puts together is the wrong
movie' (Kolker, 1980: 198). However, unlike Antonioni,
Coppola keeps a moral focus on his voyeur (Kolker, 1980: 198).
And, unlike the Hitchcock of Rear Window, Coppola does not
'morally implicate the audience in its voyeuristic role' (Kolker,
1980: 196). Coppola's voyeur has heard and seen the truth, but
his tapes are now gone and what he has heard and seen no longer
exists. His technology turns against him. The legendary wire-
tapper has been bugged by someone even better than he is. We as
audience merely watch. We are not called to action.
Here Coppola extends Antonioni's project. His subversive effects
involve more than just saying the new technologies of listening
are evil. This is not news (see Carey, 1989; Couch, 1990). At one
level, as Ebert notes (1989b: 1545), The Conversation is about
'paranoia, invasion of privacy, bugging and also about the
bothersome problem of conscience. The Watergate crew seems,
for the most part, to have had no notion that what they were
doing was objectively wrong. Harry wants to have no notion.
But he does, and it destroys him'.
This is the level of meaning that is easily gained by the viewer's
identification with Harry's plight. This interpretation suggests
that if the wire-tappers had moral consciences, they would only
use their craft in those situations which were morally correct. But
whose morals? Good people, as Everett Hughes (1963) observes
do dirty work. Harry is a good person who does dirty work. His
values are ours, the Watergate crew thought they were good
people doing good work.
But Coppola's movie is about more than good people and their
moral consciences. It is about a world where there is no longer
any privacy, a world where 'everything that's ever been said . . .
might still be echoing somewhere . . . [a world where one day]
there will be equipment sensitive enough to retrieve and record
humankind's oral history. In 24 abridged volumes it would make
a perfect introductory offer to a book club. Or even a book club
all of its own' (Canby, 1974: 11).
No, this is not what the film is about, although this is surely one
of its stories. The Conversation is a moral tale about the human
gaze, the voyeur and the fundamental inability to ever unmask
the simulacrum, 'the truth which conceals that there is none'
(Baudrillard, 1983a: 1). Coppola explodes the myth which holds
that the simulacrum 'conceals the truth' (Baudrillard, 1983a: 1).
There is no truth other than the truth that there is no truth. The
new information technologies are predicated on the assumption
that the real, when captured, will convey the truth of the event
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in question. The actual conversation when recorded or the life
event when telecast is the real conversation or event in question.
8
JFK
Now JFK. Stone disagrees with Coppola. He wants more than a
simple conspiratorial film. More than paranoia, although it is
paranoia that drives the story he tells. Stone is after the truth, the
truth of JFK. The truth that will halt the steady, silent march of
fascism in America. His conspirators are everywhere: within the
power elite; the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Council, the
Defense Department, the Secretaries of State and Defense,
paramilitary organizations, Cold Warriors in the Pentagon, the
Dallas Police Department, the White House, President Lyndon
Johnson. The murder of John Kennedy was a coup d'état,
backed by Lyndon Johnson and executed at the highest levels of
the American government. Kennedy wanted to withdraw from
Vietnam, was soft on communism. Billions of dollars in defence
contracts were at stake. No one liked the Kennedy brothers. It
had been done before: Lumumba in the Congo, Trujillo in the
Dominican Republic, attempts on Castro's life.
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Contextualizing Stone's Story
Stone is the detective. He had already re-written the 1960s and its
aftermath (Salvador, Platoon, The Doors, Born on the Fourth of
July, Wall Street). It remained to write the history of Kennedy's
assassination. He will track down the killers, reveal the plot
against the American people, show that they, like JFK, have been
victims of a murderous plot. After all, if JFK had not been killed
there would have been no Vietnam, no slayings of Robert
Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the racial conflict of the 1960s
would not have happened. The politics of the counter-culture
would have prevailed and the new frontier would have been
reality.
Set primarily in New Orleans, beginning in 1963 with the
assassination, and ending in 1969 when Jim Garrison brings
Clay Shaw to trial, the film is a dramatic reshaping of history, a
piece of cinematic history. (Stone: 'I consider myself a person
who's taking history and shaping it a certain way, like
Shakespeare shaped Henry V' (Stone quoted in Anson, 1992:
221)). JFK is Oliver Stone solving the big mystery of the 1960s,
'Who Killed JFK?', Kevin Costner Dancing with the Facts, a
Jimmy Stewart-like character goes to Washington and discovers
the truth about his corrupt government.
There are three interconnected stories here: the re-telling of the
assassination by Stone, which blurs with Stone's telling of Jim
Garrison's version of the assassination, which blurs with the
private story of Jim Garrison, his life with Liz and his children
and the effects of this story on their shared lives. Thus we see
Stone's version of JFK's story through Garrison's eyes. This is a
personalized tale, part mystery and part detective story, that
shows how Garrison inserted his own biography via Stone into
this national nightmare.
In keeping with the format of the conspiratorial film (detective,
villain, victim), JFK pits Garrison and his team of stalwart
investigators against the American government (the
conspiratorial villains), as they open up this unsolved mystery
(we know who was killed, but not why) which had been
investigated many times before. Jim and his men (and women)
are the detectives. Soon they must confront the conspiratorial
enemy, the press, the FBI, the CIA, as they attempt to bring the
government to trial. On trial is Garrison's quickly evolving
theory that Oswald did not act alone, that JFK's murder was
organized by persons high in American government.
Thus the film is a story of one of the many conspiracy theories
about the assassination. It unfolds in three parts: the
assassination, the Warren Report, and Garrison's investigation
which results in the trial of Clay Shaw. The text remains entirely
within the conspiracy genre, attempting to prove that a
conspiracy exists, and that none of us can be free from those
who control the gaze that radiates throughout the surveillance
society. At the same time the film is utopian. Like a Capra film,
Stone imagines a time when no conspiracy exists, the new
frontier. And so it is part of the conspiracy discourse that it
attempts to explode and discount. 13
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The film is based on two key texts, Garrison's (1988) On the
Trail of the Assassins and Jim Marrs's (1989) Crossfire: The Plot
that Killed Kennedy, as well as the Warren Report (1964), public
sources on the assassination and its investigation and interviews
with key participants and conspiracy experts. The story is both a
whodunit and a whydunit. Stone describes the project, 'On the
Trail of the Assassins read like a Dashiell Hammett whodunit. It
starts out as a bit of a seedy crime with small traces, and then the
gumshoe district attorney follows the trail, and the trail widens
and widens, and before you know it, it's no longer a small-town
affair. . . . The D.A. [is] somewhat like a Jimmy Stewart
character in an old Capra movie' (Stone quoted in Anson, 1992:
213).
More than a mystery, like Kurosawa's Rashomon, Stone creates a
kaleidoscope of possible realities, a complex montage, cinema
verité in the grand Hollywood manner. He re-creates history,
transposes scenes, presents composite characters (Willie
O'Keefe), creates imaginary situations (the three marksmen who
fired at Kennedy), weaves real newsreel texts and documentary
footage with flashbacks, constructed events and dramatic re-
stagings (some in sepia-tone, others in black and white). JFK's
assassination is shown over and over again, in slow motion, on
the Zapruder film, in news footage, in simulated form, 'from the
vantage point of different witnesses and possible participants'
(Denby, 1992: 50). Alternative versions of history, what might
have happened, are shown (Oswald in the movie theatre, in his
landlady's house). Witnesses report odd occurrences (the hobos,
the man with the umbrella, the phony Secret Service men). The
motorcade rounds Dealey Plaza, one more time and this time we
see the three teams of trained shooters. All of these pieces of
visual (and auditory) information are knitted together, creating a
story that comes to a single conclusion: the single assassin theory
will not stand up.
Into the Film
JFK begins on an ominous and allegorical note. All of the
symbols that collectively define the early 1960s are brought
before the viewer. A seven minute sequence of documentary
images set the stage for JFK's presidency: President Dwight D.
Eisenhower's farewell address, warning Americans about the
growth of the military-industrial complex; news clips from
Kennedy's early presidential days; schoolkids reciting the Pledge
of Allegiance; WPA farmers harvesting the Texas plains; shots of
J. Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe, families leaving church;
voice-overs detailing Kennedy's 1960 Presidential election; Bay
of Pigs, Secret War and Nuclear Test Ban imagery; the Cuban
Missile Crisis; shots of Martin Luther King, Teddy, Rose and Joe
Kennedy; John Kennedy campaigning; Jackie in San Antonio,
Houston, Fort Worth, in the plane/descending on Love Field,
coming toward the Dallas/Fort Worth plain.
A dramatic black-and-white sequence suddenly appears on
screen. Out
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of a moving car carrying two Cuban males, a screaming woman,
Rose Cheramie, tumbles to the ground, bleeding in the dust. In
the next shot Rose is pleading with a policeman, 'They're going
up to Dallas . . . to whack Kennedy. Friday the 22nd, that's when
they're going to do it. In Dealey Plaza . . . You gotta call
somebody'. Rose's warning is discounted by a doctor, 'Higher'n a
kite on something'.
Documentary images reappear, close-ups of Kennedy on Love
Field, the downtown streets of Dallas, people lining the
sidewalks. A voice-over reports on Kennedy's efforts to establish
a dialogue with Castro, his civil rights bill in Congress, Bobby
Kennedy's prosecution of the Mafia, Jack's fight with the steel
companies, a Kennedy dynasty, Bobby Kennedy in 1968, Teddy
in 1976. Archival footage carries the Kennedy party to the
dreaded Dealey Plaza. Documentary tapes intersect with dramatic
restagings, as Stone sets up what is to come, the murder of
Kennedy. We hear sirens, screeching tyres, the crowd runs
towards 'The Grassy Knoll'. We see a glimpse of the Zapruder
film. Mrs Kennedy reaches for help. An agent climbs into the
car. JFK slumps forward and then is hit by another shot. Mrs
Kennedy silently screams.
In a crowded neighbourhood bar people are gathered, watching
the news coverage of the assassination. Walter Cronkite is
talking, 'President Kennedy died at 1.00 p.m. Central Standard
Time . . . some 38 minutes ago'. Two drunken men, former FBI
agent and right-wing militant Guy Bannister and his part-time
assistant, Jack Martin, argue and fight, expressing hatred of
Kennedy. Oswald is arrested in Dallas and charged with the
murder of Kennedy and Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Jim
Garrison is in his office. Lou, his chief investigator, enters the
room, 'Boss, the President's been shot. In Dallas. Five minutes
ago'.
And so begins the story. In quick order the key players are in
place: Oswald, Ruby, Bannister, Martin, David Ferrie, Clay
Bertrand/Shaw, Willie O'Keefe. Garrison immediately learns that
Oswald was in New Orleans during the summer of 1963 handing
out pro-Castro leaflets. He begins an investigation to determine
Oswald's New Orleans connections. Two days later Jack Ruby
kills Oswald. David Ferrie is brought into the office. He is
questioned about his knowledge of Oswald. We see the Kennedy
funeral.
It is three years later. The Warren Report, which concluded that
Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin, has been published. On a
plane Senator Russell Long confides to Garrison that Oswald
was a patsy. In an epiphanic experience Garrison burns the
midnight hours reading the 26-volume Warren Report. This
report (as presented by Stone) argued that Kennedy was killed
by Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted alone and who fired three
shots in 5.6 seconds from the Book Depository at the
Presidential limousine as it entered Dealey Plaza. One shot
missed the car entirely. Another shot hit Kennedy's head, killing
him. Still another shot produced seven wounds on the bodies of
Kennedy and Connally. (Garrison calls this the magic bullet.)
After firing these three shots
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Oswald left the Book Depository, returns to his rooming house,
kills Officer Tippit, and then entered the Texas Theatre where he
was arrested. Two days later, acting as a patriot, taking
vengeance on the man who killed his President, seeking to spare
Jackie from having to testify at a trial, Jack Ruby, a Dallas
nightclub owner, kills Oswald as he leaves the underground
garage of the Dallas Police Station. Ruby is convicted of killing
Oswald. He dies under unusual circumstances (which Stone re-
dramatizes) just after he is granted a retrial for his conviction.
Convinced that something is fishy with this official story,
Garrison backtracks to Jack Martin, who places Ferrie and
Oswald in Bannister's office in the summer of 1963. Garrison
lunches with Dean Andrews, the attorney Clay Bertrand
allegedly asked to represent Oswald. Later Willie O'Keefe, a
convicted male prostitute, tells Garrison that he and Bertrand
partied with Ferrie (and a right-wing, kinky sex group), where
Ferrie openly discussed killing Kennedy. Here Stone takes
artistic licence as he dramatizes this homosexual party (leading to
homophobic charges against Stone, see Yarbrough, 1992).
Garrison and his staff travel to Dallas and re-enact the
assassination. They conclude, given Oswald's shoddy
marksmanship skills and the age of his rifle that he could not
have fired all the shots in the allotted time. They now see the
plaza as an ideal site for a crossfire shooting by a team of
marksmen. Back in New Orleans Garrison's investigators
discover that Bertrand is actually Clay Shaw, a businessman with
CIA connections. They plan to bring Shaw to trial, charging him
with conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination. Suddenly
everything unravels. Garrison's offices have been bugged. His
investigation is leaked to the news media. His staff is harassed by
the FBI. Ferrie, a key witness, turns up dead. Liz, Garrison's
wife, becomes disgusted with his obsession with the case.
Garrison meets 'X' in Washington DC. X, a former member of a
secret Pentagon military-intelligence unit, tells him (ála Deep
Throat) that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy involving the
CIA, the military and others in government who wanted
Kennedy out of the way. (Flashbacks recreate secret meetings
with high ranking Pentagon officials.) Garrison returns to New
Orleans, convinced that he has a case. He brings Shaw to trial. A
network television special discredits Garrison's investigation. Liz
takes the children and leaves him.
And now the moment everyone has been waiting for. The
Zapruder film. The camera cuts to a movie screen in the
courtroom. A hush comes over the room. The film lasts 25
seconds. We see JFK's body lurch forwards and backwards as it
is hit by bullets. Garrison begins his argument, noting that the
Warren Commission thought it had an open and shut case: three
bullets, one assassin. But facts, he argues, disprove this theory.
The Zapruder film leaves no doubt (Garrison argues) that four
shots were fired. Garrison moves to his discussion, complete
with charts and a pointer, of the magic bullet theory. This bullet,
he says, 'enters the
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President's back, headed downward at an angle of 17 degrees [he
illustrates its downward movement], then moves upward to leave
Kennedy's body from the front of his neck'. The bullet waits 1.6
seconds. It then turns right and continues into Connally's body 'at
the rear of his right armpit'. It then 'heads downward at an angle
of 27 degrees, shattering Connally's fifth rib . . . [and] then
enters Connally's right wrist [wound number six] shattering the
radius bone. It then enters his right thigh . . . from which it falls
out and is found in ''pristine" condition on a corridor of Parkland
hospital. That's some bullet.'
Garrison then calls key witnesses who attest to hearing one or
more shots being fired from behind the picket fence. Flashbacks
reconstruct doctors examining Kennedy in the Dallas hospital.
Another flashback cuts to the Bethesda autopsy room, where an
army general orders an end to the examination of Kennedy's
head. Garrison next recites details concerning the autopsy photos
(never released to the public), President Johnson ordering the
blood-soaked limousine to be washed and rebuilt and the
disappearance of Kennedy's brain. He then takes the jury
through his version of the assassination, with mock-ups and
flashbacks, and the three teams of shooters.
The camera moves in on Jim then a shot of Liz, who is sitting
behind him. Oswald's actions are reconstructed and more
witnesses are brought forth. Oswald's capture in the theatre is
shown and then his murder by Jack Ruby. Garrison offers his
summation, 'Official legend is created and the media takes it from
there. . . . Lee Oswald, a crazed lonely man who wanted attention
and got it by killing the President, was only the first in a long
line of patsies. In later years Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther
King . . . We have all become Hamlets in our country, children of
a slain father . . . The ghost of John F. Kennedy confronts us
with the secret murder at the heart of the American Dream'.
He concludes, 'Do not forget your young President who forfeited
his life. Show the world this is still a government of the people,
for the people, and by the people . . . It's up to you'. The jury
returns with its verdict, 'We find Clay Shaw not guilty on all
counts. We believe there was a conspiracy, but whether Clay
Shaw was part of it is another kettle of fish'.
The screen turns black, information is given on Garrison, his
marriage, the Vietnam War and the mottoes chiselled on the walls
of the National Archives in Washington DC: 'Dedicated to the
Young, In whose Spirit the Search for Truth Marches On. THE END'
Whose Gaze? Whose Story?
Within the first year of its release, Stones $40 million budget
film was viewed by over 15 million people (Mankiewicz, 1992:
189). It was immediately devoured by the popular culture.
Publishers re-issued assassination related literature. Trading cards
appeared. A five-part series on the 'Today Show' examined
alternative conspiracy theories. A movie
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about Oswald (Libra) began production in 1992 and another
film, Ruby, appeared in March of 1992 (Zelizer, 1992: 210). 14
JFK is the story that will not go away, and this is so, because, as
Zelizer points out, from the beginning, 'the assassination record
lacked closure' (1992: 111). This lack of closure surrounding 'the
assassination tale [has given] rise to an on-going contest for
authorization, by which different groups attempted to promote
their version of what happened in Dallas in order to promote
themselves' (Zelizer, 1992: 201).
Indeed, each decade since Kennedy's murder has had its
competing versions of what took place on November 22, 1963 in
Dallas, Texas, from the Warren Report in 1964 and the
immediate criticisms of that report in the mid-1960s (see Zelizer,
1992: 10611) to the House Select Committee investigation in
1976, the Rockefeller Commission study in 1977, the
Department of Justice inquiry of 1988, and most recently, the
1992 Joint House and Senate Resolution to open the files of the
assassination.
Journalistic, historical and popular culture texts exist alongside
these governmental inquiries, each telling one or another official
(or unofficial) version of what happened. Life would re-publish
stills from the Zapruder film in 1966. As noted above, p. 162,
this film would be re-shown by Geraldo Rivera in the mid-1970s
on 'Good Night, America', and also in the mid-1970s the
Assassination Information Bureau would draw 'thousands of
people to Massachusetts for the first major public showing of
[the] film' (Zelizer, 1992: 113). Soon after the Warren Report
was released Dan Rather would offer his verbal description of
the film on CBS News and later admit to a mis-reading of the
text (Zelizer, 1992: 242).
Contradictory accounts, for and against the conspiracy theories,
would be offered from the mid-1960s onwards by celebrity
politicians, newsmakers, journalists, historians, novelists,
filmmakers and assassination buffs including Gerald Ford, Dan
Rather, David Halberstam, Theodore White, Walter Cronkite,
Michael Kurtz, Mark Lane, Tom Wicker, Gary Wills, Robert
MacNeil, Daniel Boorstein, William Manchester, Jim Marrs, Jim
Garrison, Sylvia Meagher and Gary Owens, Tom Petit, Harrison
E. Salisbury, Arthur Schlesinger, Don DeLillo, Nora Ephron,
Barbara Walters, Ellen Goodman, Pete Hamill, Dwight
MacDonald, Martin Scorsese and Alan J. Pakula.
Stone's film enters this discourse, it feeds on it, criticizes it and
takes its own stance on who killed Kennedy and why. Of course
Stone brought considerable stature, advance media interest,
money, and celebrity talent to the project (Zelizer, 1992: 202).
Predictably, the movie met with immediate negative reaction. It
was called 'Dallas in Wonderland'. The New York Times carried
over 30 articles, op-eds, letters, addenda, editorials and columns
criticizing the film. Attacks were launched by CBS, Dan Rather,
Tom Wicker, Gerald R. Ford, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Arthur
Schlesinger Jr and Alexander Cockburn (see Stone and Sklar,
1992; Zelizer, 1992: 20114). George Will attacked the film when
it was still in script form.
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Stone's film would be read as a docudrama (Ebert, 1992: 250),
and he would be accused of many sins: not having the proper
credentials to tell this story, confusing history with fact,
endorsing the crackpot theories of Garrison, 'an unscrupulous
publicity-seeker who drummed up his celebrated case against
Clay Shaw out of thin air' (Ebert, 1992: 250), misusing visual,
media materials, taking artistic licence, holding to one true
version of history, not respecting the hard facts of history, not
using the hard evidence of the journalist, being homophobic and
being critical of journalists who had previously written the
master narrative of this story (see Zelizer, 1992: 20313).
These criticisms turn on two questions: who owns the gaze and
who will tell the story of how and why JFK was murdered on
November 22, 1963? This story, as Zelizer (1992: 51) argues,
resolved into five key moments: Kennedy's shooting; the events
at the hospital where Kennedy was taken; Johnson's swearing in;
the follow-up to the killing, including the arrest and murder of
Oswald; and Kennedy's funeral.
The original tellings of Kennedy's killing were hampered from
the beginning. There was no original, professional text of the
event; all of the photos were taken by amateurs. This meant that
all tellings of this story had to be reconstructions (see Zelizer,
1992: 515). Zapruder's film thus became the key text, the only
'real' record of the murder. Reporters and journalists would build
their reputations on their 'nearness' to the event. Media celebrities
were created. Journalists fought over who had the most
credibility to report the event. Celebrity-hood was built for those
reporters who exhibited the most dedication to the telling of this
tragedy, to those who appeared to be the first in telling it and to
those who were the best and the most professional in their
original tellings (see Zelizer, 1992: 193).
But no one had an actual record of what happened. Everyone
missed the biggest scoop of a lifetime. The stories that were told
had to rely on secondhand witnesses. Reporters had to address
the charge that they (the reporters) had interfered with history
and had fallen victim to a failed technology (no photo records
(Zelizer, 1992: 6775)). Hence the stories that were told stressed
the reporters' triumph in overcoming these obstacles (being first,
the best, the most dedicated). All tellings were based on
secondary sources, the usual journalistic criterion of truth could
not be applied. Because the event was witnessed by amateurs, not
professionals, there was only questionable eyewitness testimony.
Journalistic accounts became narrative constructions, involving
personalization (nearness to the event), synecdoche (one part of
the story stood for the whole story) and the omission of critical
information from other media sources (for example, radio (see
Zelizer, 1992: 3745)).
The hospital scene was different. Journalists were present, but
direct eye-witness evidence (as there would be for the swearing
in) was still difficult to obtain. There was immediate confusion
over the nature of Kennedy's head wound and whether or not
one bullet could have done all of the damage (Zelizer, 1992:
556). The murder of Oswald was equally
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confusing. Reporters were charged with interfering with events
(they convicted Oswald before he was brought to trial). Some
contended that the reporters' presence in the Dallas Police Station
created the circumstances that allowed Ruby to shoot Oswald
(Zelizer, 1992: 91). But at least in this instance, they had the
murder on film, for Oswald was murdered in full glare of
photographic and television cameras (Zelizer, 1992: 60). The
mourning became a national affair. Private citizens came by the
thousands to view the casket. NBC News devoted nearly 42
hours to the continuous coverage of this event (Zelizer, 1992:
62).
This five-part story without closure, or a consensual ending, is
the national drama Stone re-tells. No wonder it was criticized, for
bits and pieces of it were owned by persons who had a personal
stake in how it would be told. The following issues (including
the story's prior ownership, its lack of closure and the absence of
an original record) are at work in this conflict of interpretation.
First, Stone proposed to take the story away from those who had
previously controlled its telling. Second, this produced a 'biased
reading' of his text. His film was read as a 'factual' docudrama
that deliberately got the facts wrong (see Ebert, 1992: 250). Tom
Wicker would complain, for example, that when Stone shows the
assassination of Robert Kennedy, he makes it look like Kennedy
was 'shot at the end of his California victory speech, rather than
shortly after' (Ebert, 1992: 250). Ebert comments, 'Does Wicker
think Stone was trying to deceive us on this point?' Newsweek
continued this line of criticism, 'Only the alert viewer will be able
to distinguish real documentary footage from reconstructed
events' (quoted in Ebert, 1992: 250).
The film is not a docudrama. It is not a historical study or a
courtroom presentation of the evidence supporting Stone's thesis.
JFK is a 'movie that weaves a myth around the Kennedy
assassination a myth in which the slain leader was the victim of a
monstrous conspiracy' (Ebert, 1992: 25). JFK is a complicated
re-telling of this five-part national drama, using all of the tools of
Stone's trade, from jump-cuts to flash-forwards, sound and
image bites, showing the same events in different ways from
different points of view, a mixture of first-hand testimony with
flashbacks, possibility and conjecture mixed together (see Ebert,
1992: 252). Stone's myth undoes the long-standing lone assassin
myth.
Third, Stone is not telling his story to the members of the JFK
generation who can remember, with vivid accuracy, where they
were at the moment they learned of the assassination. His telling
is a myth for that generation for whom JFK is a paragraph in a
high school history text book, a generation with high visual
literacy, well-schooled on the hyperreal cinematic techniques
(and realities) of television and computer video games. He wants
to capture this generation (generation X) and have them demand
that the truth of JFK's murder be told. Hence, the critics of the
film are speaking for the wrong generation. But they are
protecting their own history, a history Stone wants to challenge.
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Fourth, in his myth-making Stone has no reservation about
inventing history, about putting the facts of history together in
new and novel ways. His myth expands beyond the five days
following the murder. It tells the story of the generation that was
shaped by Kennedy's assassination. His myth encompasses the
subsequent deaths of Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy and Martin
Luther King and the tragedies that followed from Vietnam. This
is his warrant as a filmmaker and this warrant flies in the face of
those who want to stick to the socially reconstructed 'factual'
history of the assassination as previously told. Stone will have
none of this, hence his dedication of the film (as previously
quoted) to 'the young, in whose spirit the search for truth
marches on'.
Fifth, Stone believes that the filmmaker can accurately tell
history. By taking this stance he challenges the culture's official
historians. Cinema can tell the truth of history, and this history,
Stone's 'mystory' (Ulmer, 1989), 'his story', can make a
difference. This utopian tale believes that conspiracies can be
exposed. This myth believes people can make history, that people
can overturn the technologies of surveillance that capture all of
us within its gaze. Stone believes that we can technologically
undo history and make it tell the truth. We can put the
apparatuses of surveillance to democratic use, even as we
understand that 'media technology, far from providing a hotline
to the truth, makes it easier for information to be controlled and
disseminated' (Billson, 1992: 35).
This is what the Zapruder film does. This shaky, grainy 25-
second 8 mm tape captures the real and in its frames are the truth
of JFK. And so Stone's film rests on a firm belief in the
cinematic theory of reality. The real can be captured and the
truth, made public, will free us.
Stone and Coppola on Both Sides of the Keyholes of History
Stone, like Coppola, is on both sides of the keyholes of history, a
voyeur looking at the official voyeurs. Men watching men make
history. Men watching men manipulate and control the
apparatuses of surveillance that the post-security society has
come to rely on. The erotics of power: men taking visual, scopic
pleasures in the production of rich, thick, audio and visual
documents that record the transgressions of others: men playing
God. The paranoid gaze is everywhere, the voyeur is gazed
upon, nobody can be trusted. And the truth is always socially re-
constructed, events reformatted to fit a master narrative telling of
what really happened on this date, in this place, to this person.
The who, what, where, why and how of classic journalism are
now re-framed, re-photographed, and re-told. A new (or old)
myth argues that no conspiracy operates in this version of
history.
Modifying Hitchcock, Stone's camera indulges the scopic
pleasures that come from manipulating the texts of history. At the
same time Stone's camera searches out the truth and punishes the
villains, the men who
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distort history. He exposes the conspiracy, interrogating, as does
Coppola, the new information technologies that seek to discover
certain truths about everyday life. Like Harry Caul, Stone-as-
Garrison, is a man trapped in a corner of a tiny room. His back
to the wall, he throws up on the screen the Zapruder film. 'See',
he says, 'the magic bullet theory can't be true. This film proves it.'
And here he rises above Harry's paranoid impotence. Garrison,
the publicity-seeking DA from New Orleans, a man branded as
crazy by his wife and co-workers, weaves a counter-theory of
history. This theory rests on a story that makes Stone-as-Garrison
the hero, not the victim of this larger historical conspiracy and its
surveillance apparatuses. In a carnival of specularity (the
courtroom), using all of the tricks of his cinematic trade, Stone-
as-Garrison re-tells history. And even if he lost the case he won
the big battle. No despair, alienation or loss of hope here. Truth
is on his side.
But what truth? I argued earlier that the male on the other side of
the keyhole embodies a fatally flawed gaze. The masculine gaze
is unable to produce a depth and form of understanding that goes
beyond detailed glimpses of the pathetic masculine subject
reflected in the flat historical mirror. He cannot, unlike his female
counterpart, plumb the depths of another's soul and discover and
understand the rage, the fire, the emotionality, and the meanings
that move another to action.
Stone-as-Garrison and Coppola-as-Harry Caul only confront
images of the other, representations of them as given on tapes, in
photographs, news reels, in dreams. Stone and Coppola's
voyeurs seldom come face-to-face with their enemies or those
they record. When they do confront the other these males are
trapped in their own voyeuristic, investigative identities, staring,
talking at the other, affirming prior suspicions and fears.
Here they stand in stark contrast to the female voyeurs examined
in Chapter 6. Alex Forrest, Alex Barnes and Catharine directly
confront the other who haunts their dreams. Out of this
confrontation comes self-awareness, self understanding, a truth
about the self and the other that goes beyond mirrored
reflections, overheard voices on audio tapes and visual
representations given in pictures and photographs. This self
discovery, as argued in Chapter 6, is made in that moment when
the voyeur re-discovers herself through her own eyes.
This form of self understanding is withheld from the male
voyeur. Consequently he can never fully understand the male
other he pursues with all of the vengeance and power contained
in his apparatuses of surveillance. In the end neither Harry Caul
nor Jim Garrison knows why a murder was committed. They
don't even know the identity of the murderer. Of course Harry
Caul knows he doesn't know. Humility is on his side. Jim
Garrison thinks he knows, or could know, and this certain
hubris, which inevitably defines the male voyeur's project,
always invites disaster. The consequence goes beyond comedy,
farce, or tragedy. It points
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to a fatal flaw in that epistemological framework that says certain
truths can always be discovered if one is objective and has the
right tools of observation. More on this in the next chapter.
Notes
1. This is the 8 mm, 25-second film of the Kennedy
Assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas dressmaker.
It is the only live photographic documentation of this event. Life
bought all rights to the film from Zapruder for $150,000 and ran
a four-page photographic spread in its November 29, 1963 issue.
The film was then locked up in Time-Life's vaults and not shown
publicly until Jim Garrison's 1969 subpoena forced its release. In
1975 Time-Life sold the film back to the Zapruder family for $1.
In 1975 Geraldo Rivera aired the film on his network television
show (see Stone and Sklar, 1992: 1512; Zelizer, 1992: 389, 689,
113). Corliss (1991: 66) reports that Stone paid $40,000 for a
copy of the film.
2. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola; screenplay by Francis Ford
Coppola; cinematographer: Bill Butler; studio: Paramount; cast:
Gene Hackman (Harry Caul); John Cazale (John); Frederic
Forrest (Mark); Cindy Williams (Ann); Teri Garr (Amy);
Harrison Ford (Martin Stett); Robert Duvall (the Director).
Although still a popular video rental, it was not successful at the
box office and failed to make the Top Twenty list for its decade
(Ray, 1985: 328).
3. Directed by Oliver Stone; Screenplay by Oliver Stone and
Zachary Sklar, based on the books On the Trail of the Assassins
by Jim Garrison and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by
Jim Marrs; cinematographer: Robert Richardson; studio: Warner
Brothers; cast: Kevin Costner (Jim Garrison); Sissy Spacek (Liz
Garrison); Joe Pesci (David Ferrie); Tommy Lee Jones (Clay
Shaw); Gary Oldman (Lee Harvey Oswald); John Candy (Dean
Andrews); Jack Lemmon (Jack Martin); Ed Asner (Guy
Bannister); Walter Mattau (Senator Russell Long); Donald
Sutherland (X); Kevin Bacon (Willie O'Keefe); Brian Doyle-
Murray (Jack Ruby); Jim Garrison (Earl Warren). Stone won the
Golden Globe for best director and was nominated for the
Director's Guild America Award. JFK received eight Academy
Award Nominations (best director, best adapted screenplay, best
picture).
4. As Silverman (1988: 95) notes, 'Caul' is also a play on 'the
amnion or inner membrane enclosing the foetus before birth . . .
the amnion is the same membrane which subsequently becomes
the afterbirth'. Silverman reads this as suggesting that Harry's
name conveys his desire to be enveloped in 'pure [maternal]
sonorousness' and his desire to control sound, to be exterior to it.
She sees Harry as being obsessed with the complete control over
the sounds (voices) of others, while he is irrationally drawn to
the female voice 'which activates in him the desire to be folded in
a blanket of sound' (1988: 87).
5. The date of the first nuclear chain reaction, December 2, 1942.
6. The voice of the acoustic mirror (Silverman, 1988: 80), unlike
the gaze in the looking-glass mirror, is perpetually in effect for
the subject can always send and receive the sound of their own
voice. Alan Pakula's Klute (1971) disembodies this relationship
between voice and the subject by having Bree's conversation
taped by Cable, who then plays it back to her (see Silverman,
1988: 813 on this film).
7. In one part of the conversation Ann's words describing a
drunk asleep on a bench are recorded, 'That's terrible . . . Oh
God . . . he was once somebody's baby boy, and he had a mother
and a father who loved him . . . and now there he is half-dead on
a park bench. And now where are his mother and father and all
his uncles?' (Silverman, 1988: 89).
8. But see Silverman's (1988: 8798) feminist, psychoanalytic
interpretation (footnote 4) which bypasses the above issues.
9. Coppola reflexively and relentlessly turns the concept of the
taped conversation back on itself, showing that all of us have
something to hide in the talk we take for granted. It is not clear
that the ethnomethodologists have done this.
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10. As Raymond Schmitt, a reviewer, points out (in
conversation) this reflexive turn in Coppola's text treats talk as a
cultural and a commodified object, while revealing how
dramaturgically produced talk can make a difference in everyday
life.
11. Michael Katouich, another reviewer, suggests (in
conversation) that Harry has lost all hope of control over 'the
response of the other'. His loss of privacy reflects this loss, for
now he is under the control of others who are defining his
situation for him. Yet, as still another reviewer notes, Harry's
terror does not arise from the information revealed. His terror is
focused on the intrusion itself, on the form of the invasion, not
on the content of what is revealed. Here is Coppola's point. The
new information technologies have no respect for content, they
are entirely focused on form pure information. There appears no
desire, either within the technological society or academia, to
separate these two interests.
12. It is unclear whether Harry's paranoia and anhedonia arise
from his work, or whether he was like this before he took up
wire-tapping. Silverman's reading (1988) suggests the latter,
arguing that he seeks always to get back to the missing maternal
figure in his life, a figure who momentarily left him in childhood
nearly causing his drowning in a bathtub hence his obsession
with Ann's voice on the tapes. This reading can be easily
supported by the dream sequences but it does not put to rest the
broader argument that no one is immune to this technology that
Harry attempts to master.
13. Within two weeks of the release of the Warren Report,
conspiracy theories were circulating (Zelizer, 1992: 106). As
Zelizer (1992: 34) observes, 'nearly 200 books that were
published within 36 months of the tragedy have since been
joined by over a thousand periodical pieces and books, dozens of
television retrospectives, at least twelve newsletters, and
numerous bookstores specializing in assassination literature'.
14. Other Kennedy-related films would also soon appear (Love
Field, 1992; In the Line of Fire, 1993), recalling connections
back to earlier JFK-assassination texts (Executive Action (1973),
Nashville (1975), Taxi Driver (1976) and The Parallax View
(1974) which ends with a Governmental Commission
concluding that a lone assassin killed a United States Senator).
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8
The Voyeur's Future
Basically it was journalism, that capital invention of the nineteenth
century, which made evident . . . the utopian character of this . . .
gaze. . . .
It was the dream of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of
its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 152, 162
surveillance and spectacle may be widely decried, but the power of
visuality has certainly survived the attack
Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century
French Thought, p. 594
today there is a pornography of information and communication . . . it is
no longer the obscenity of the repressed, the obscure, but of the
visible . . . it is the . . . obscenity of that which no longer contains a
secret
Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p. 22
It remains to return to the beginning, to take up again the task of
offering an interpretive framework for the understanding of the
voyeur's place in the American cinematic society. A critical,
interpretive interactionism (Denzin, 1989b), based on a feminist
cultural studies approach (Morris, 1988: 2; Franklin et al. 1991:
175) to the contemporary postmodern situation (Carey, 1989: 46;
Denzin, 1991a: 18) requires a framework that analyses the
cinematic apparatuses that reproduce and represent society back
to itself.
I come back to the cinematic (and ethnographic) version(s) of
Foucault's gaze (1980: 155). This is the panoptic and
panauditory gaze of surveillance transformed into a self-
deterring code, the gaze of power that has also been internalized,
the gaze which unveils the private and makes it public. It is the
ethnographer's and the fieldworker's gaze (see Rosaldo, 1986:
92), 1the gaze which seeks to expose the social and reveal the
hidden truths that lie therein (Atkinson, 1990: 27).
I seek a reflexive ethnography appropriate to a critical cultural
studies project; a project which makes a spectacle of the voyeur,
and in so doing objectifies and makes problematic the ideological
presuppositions which underwrite the traditional, realist
ethnographic and cinematic text (see Van Maanen, 1988, Chapter
3; Rose, 1990).2This discussion necessitates a reflection on the
preceding seven chapters and the films that have been examined.
If interpretive sociology is to gain a stronger, more ethical
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footing in the next century then the basic elements of a post-
visual theory of interpretive understanding and enquiry require
presentation.
In this conclusion I offer preliminary observations on the
voyeur's place in the cinematic, surveillance society and the
human disciplines. I will also discuss vision and alternative ways
of knowing and understanding the other and outline the ethics
and epistemologies of voyeurism and a post-pragmatist social
criticism.
The Voyeur's Place
A single problem, moving in four directions at the same time,
has guided this study. I have sought repeatedly to interrogate the
gender and ethnic biases, the forms, motivations, costs,
consequences and functions of cinematic voyeurism for a post-
surveillance society. In this society, each individual has
interiorized the hearing and visual gaze of an 'objectified',
external, generalized, nameless, often faceless, other. This
technological other is everywhere and nowhere, in hidden
cameras and recording devices, in telephone answering
machines, electronic mail systems and home burglar alarm
systems.
Multiple forms of the voyeur's gaze have been discussed:
medical, investigative, technological, informational, erotic,
accidental, inquisitive, comic, paranoid, obsessive, masculine,
feminine, passive, active, direct, indirect, supplemental, legal,
illegal, secret, illicit, loving, hostile, aggressive, official,
regulated, unregulated, indifferent. Each of these forms of the
gaze is engendered, fitted to masculine and feminine codes of
looking.
These structures of the gaze have evolved through the major
historical and aesthetic phases (realism, modernism, late
modernism, postmodernism) of the cinematic society in the
twentieth century. This history has come full circle. It starts with
the blatant, open voyeurism of early primitive cinema, turning to
the repressed gaze of modernism (Hitchcock's camera) and then
shifting to the parodies in late modernism (Body Double, Dead
Men Don't Wear Plaid). The rampant voyeurism of the
postmodern, contemporary period suggests that the strictures and
guilt that operated in primitive and modern cinema are no longer
relevant. A pornography of the visible is now everywhere.
Nothing is any longer hidden. Guilt connected to illicit, secret
looking has all but disappeared. It has been replaced and
displaced by the fear that if one's personal surveillance system is
not in place, he or she will be attacked by the hidden, invisible
other.
In each of its historical phases the cinematic society has
systematically elaborated and institutionalized a surveillance and
deterrence code that privileged the voyeur's place in public and
private places. The tricks of the official, legal voyeur's, trade
protected the members of the society (the public) from those
conspiratorial agents who would do harm to them,
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their families or the state. Here the moral neutrality of the
surveillance apparatuses came into play. Official and unofficial
voyeurs used the same surveillance techniques on one another.
In its serious, legal form, the voyeur's gaze has been structured
by a set of official norms or conventions which stress rationality,
truth, objectivity and compassion. (As argued in Chapter 3, the
comic voyeur's text challenges these norms.) Yet the voyeur's eye
has always been complicitous with patriarchy and racism. It has
been attuned to a form of spectatorship that turns the female and
alien ethnic or racial other into a site for the scopic and
investigative pleasures of the state and the masculine eyes of the
police, the Peeping Ton or the private investigator. 3The voyeur's
gaze is supposedly motivated by these scopic, investigative and
personal pleasures, while often answering to a higher truth or
morality, defined as justice.
Those who are given (or who take) the warrant to gaze pay a
high cost for this privilege. They suffer from what I have called
fatal flaws. Some give their lives to it (Fatal Attraction), others
lose their families (JFK), their sanity (The Conversation), the
ones they love (sex, lies and videotape, Broadcast News, Blue
Velvet), their personal identity (Chan Is Missing). Others find
their lives endangered by their voyeurism (Dead Men Don't
Wear Plaid, Rear Window, Black Widow, Fatal Attraction) or find
that they no longer have a firm contact with what is called reality
(Blow-Up, The Conversation).
These are small costs for a cinematic society that is committed to
the belief that voyeurs are needed. These persons reveal the
truths others are afraid to expose (Black Widow, JFK). They
protect our private, sacred spaces from the violence that lurks
everywhere (Rear Window). They perpetuate the illusion that
there are still private places where we can all hide. At the same
time voyeurs expose the freedoms that are lost because of the
new information, surveillance technologies (The Conversation),
and they show how certain truths can still be revealed if these
technologies are correctly used (Broadcast News). And
underneath all of this discourse lurks the ever present possibility
that the voyeur can never discover the truth about anything,
except the truth that no truth can be discovered (Chan is
Missing). Sometimes we need to be reminded of this.
The voyeur's film, what I have called the reflexive text,
reinforces the above assumptions. These films, as 'progressive or
subversive texts'4(Klinger, 1984/1986: 745; Comolli and
Narboni, 1971/1976: 27), undermine from within the realist
illusion that reality can be unmasked and the truth
revealed.5They rupture the veneer of their own premises
(Klinger, 1984/1986: 77). They subvert the traditional story of
investigation wherein the hero discovers a truth that others have
not seen (the detective story, the psychoanalytic case-study, the
flawed-heroic journalist). These films make a spectacle out of the
ideological belief that truth can be discovered, thereby exposing
the paucity and the limits of the voyeur's project.
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Downcast Eyes:
Vision as a Violent Way of Knowing
Recall Michael Powell's troubling, violent 1960 film Peeping
Tom. This is the story of Mark, a professional cinematographer
who moonlights as a photographer for a pornographic magazine.
Clever Mark has equipped his tripod with a hidden spike. His
camera has a mirror which reflects the faces of the women he
photographs. As his light flashes in his victims' eyes the hidden
spike penetrates their throat. The mirror reflects the fear that is in
the woman's eye as she sees herself murdered. In this way Mark's
hidden, magic, killer camera reveals one face of death, the face
of fear (see Clover, 1992: 170). We soon learn that Mark was the
childhood subject of his father's gazing camera. We are led to
believe that he is now seeking vengeance on his father by forcing
his female victims to experience the same loss, pain and fear that
were forced upon him (Silverman, 1988: 34).
Peeping Tom, of course, reproduces the classic themes of mid-
century, modernist cinema, including the masculine, scopophilic
desire for a sadistic voyeurism which makes women the object of
male violence (Clover, 1992: 177). Furthermore, the film
reminds us, as Sontag (1977: 1415, 24) argues, that photography
is a form of death, an act of power and aggression, sublimated
murder. But more is suggested, as Clover (1992: 181) observes,
for Powell's film is about the eye that is killed, not the eye that
kills. Peeping Tom turns its eye on the victim, the person who is
literally annihilated by the camera's forceful gaze.
Thus Powell's film stands as a metaphor for my study. In the race
to capture the visual field in its entirety, the cinematic society has
instantiated an apparatus that kills what it seeks to understand.
Like Mark's victims
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we have experienced the violence that comes from the
microphones and the cameras that are everywhere hidden in the
walls that enclose us. And so we look with humbled, downcast
eyes (Jay, 1993a) at the fruits of our labour.
In his stunning study of the denigration of vision in twentieth
century French thought, Martin Jay (1993a) repeats themes that
have by now become familiar. The list of French theorists who
have questioned the truth of the visual (ocularcentrism) is long,
from Bergson to Bataille, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan,
Althusser, Foucault, Debord, Barthes, Metz, Derrida, Irigaray,
Levinas, to Lyotard and Baudrillard. Each theorist expresses
disenchantment with a visual epistemology, from Bataille's
blinding sun, to Sartre's masochistic look, Merleau-Ponty's doubt
about vision's certainty, Lacan's illusive ego in the mirror stage,
Foucault's fear of the panopticon and the medical gaze, Debord's
ridicule of the society of the spectacle, Barthes's connection of
photography with death, Derrida's assertion that a specular
ideology reproduces a white mythology (light over darkness), to
Irigaray's speculum, and Baudrillard's suggestion that
postmodernism rests entirely on the simulacrum.
Americans have joined this chorus which expresses extreme
doubt about vision as the main path to truth. John Dewey
rejected a spectator theory of knowledge, and Rorty has echoed
this position. Postmodern anthropologists, like Clifford (1986:
1012; 1993), Rosaldo (1986: 92), Tyler (1986: 131) and Bruner
(1993), have elaborated the media criticisms of McLuhan and
Ong which reject visualism as the preferred way of knowing.
Sociologists Howard S. Becker (1986, Part Four), and Douglas
Harper (1994) have questioned the authority of the visual image,
and feminine film theorists from Mulvey (1989), Modleski
(1990), Doane (1991), de Lauretis (1987), Clover (1992), to
Stacey (1994) have challenged the power of the male gaze.
These are commonplace understandings for many of the
directors examined in this study, including Hitchcock, Coppola,
Antonioni and Stone. With Ong (1977: 1223) and Lonergan
(1963/1977: 121-2) they would argue that understanding is not
seeing. They too would reject the epistemological equation which
has converted human knowledge into visual perception. 13
This assault on visual truth runs deep and wide. It opens the door
for a critique of the enlightenment project which privileged
vision as the primary mode of knowing the world. The theorists
just listed all criticize the cold, analytic eye of Cartesian
perspectivalism (Jay, 1993a: 58990). At the same time these
criticisms reinforce the seduction of the visual, its pleasurable
side, suggesting that there are also other visual regimes, from the
Baconian to the Baroque and the hysterical (Jay, 1988) which
undermine the all-seeing objective, Cartesian eye. Thus this
discourse simultaneously criticizes while it repositions the
centrality of the visual in the postmodern project.
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In the End
It is time to stop using science and technology in the name of a
free, democratic society. Such a move will then destroy the,
fiction that our ethnographic and interpretive efforts are exposing
underlying truths about the postmodern social order. Here at the
end we confront ourselves and our own voyeuristic projects,
understanding finally that the stories we can tell are those which
are more than the mere record of the dangers of voyeurism. Our
projects must show how human beings endure and prevail in the
face of those technological structures which threaten to erase
forever the fragile, sacred self and the few remaining spaces it
occupies in this horrible and terrifying world we call the
postmodern. And it is with downcast eyes that we must now
look.
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Notes
1. Rosaldo makes the following connection between the
ethnographer's and Foucault's gaze: 'the fieldworker's mode of
surveillance uncomfortably resembles Michel Foucault's
Panopticon, the site from which the (disciplining) disciplines
enjoy gazing upon (and subjecting) their subjects' (1986: 92).
Atkinson (1990) elaborates this position. The ethnographer
'reports acts of surveillance from the ''door of the
anthropologist's tent"' (Atkinson, 1990: 28). Van Maanen (1978:
346) is more explicit, calling the participant observer-
ethnographer 'part spy, [and] part voyeur'. Fine and Sandstrom
(1988: 201) elaborate this deceptive identity in their concept of
'deep cover', while Punch (1986: 725) calls it into question.
2. The realist ethnographic text, according to Van Maanen (1988:
4654), adheres to four conventions: an absence of the author
from the text, a documentary style, written from the native's
point of view, while the author expresses a form of interpretive
omnipotence. This is but one form of ethnographic realism (see
below, pp. 1968), which I have elsewhere (Denzin, 1989b:
1357) called mainstream realism (the other forms being
descriptive and interpretive).
3. Recall the gay scenes in JFK.
4. Progressive or subversive is Klinger's term for Comolli and
Narboni's (1971/1976: 27) category e film, 'films which seem at
first sight to belong firmly within the ideology and under its
sway, but which turnout to be so only in an ambiguous manner'.
5. My concept of reflective film thus goes beyond the category e
films to include Comolli and Narboni's explicitly political texts
(categories b and c) which attack ideology, or go against its
grain, and category e (live cinema) which attacks the problem of
how reality is to be represented.
6. To these two impulses must be added the following, as argued
in Chapter 1: the production of a cinematic imagination which
would judge everyday life in terms of its cinematic
representations; the creation of a new, narrative, spectorial gaze,
accompanied by realistic cinema (colour and sound) and new
forms of narrative reflexivity which would emotionally draw
viewers into the stories films told.
7. Lonergan's distinctions between visual (objective) knowledge
and subjective understanding reflects a post-Kantian, post-
Merleau-Ponty (1964a, b) phenomenological epistemology
which has aroused considerable controversy (see Ong, 1977:
1213), 1434).
8. As Ong (1977: 123, 1334) observes, in elaborating
Lonergan's position, visual knowledge is surface knowledge
which implies a beneath, interior or deeper structure of
understanding; but this deeper, interior structure cannot be given
visually. Surface visual knowledge can yield explanation, but not
understanding.
9. Words would become the mirror, or window, to the inner
world of the subject while vision would give external, objective
pictures of the subject's situation. Non-visual knowledge would
be coded as non-objective knowledge.
10. Remember that Jeff (Rear Window) never hears the words
spoken by the persons he spies upon, their sounds are reduced to
visual records. We see, but do not hear, them talking. Thus visual
sightings give precision, but lacking in intimacy they can only
produce abstract, non-intersubjective understanding (see Ong,
1977: 136).
11. The mirror metaphor is revealing in the present context.
Silverman (1988: 80) distinguishes between the 'acoustic' and the
'looking-glass' mirror. In the acoustic mirror the sound of the
voice and its thoughts are heard, while in the visual mirror only
the gaze of the self, reflected back to itself can be seen. The
voice, heard in the acoustic mirror, has the property of being sent
and heard at the same time; this presence is always in effect.
12. Personal or first-person cinema (for example, Bergman's
Persona, see Kawin, 1978), explicitly attempts to capture these
interior worlds of experience; the social sciences lack a
comparable strategy or exemplary text (on Bergman's film see
Denzin, 1992c).
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13. This proposition is cruelly deconstructed in Jocelyn
Moorhouse's 1992 film Proof where a blind photographer finds
his visual images of the world manipulated by his seeing
housekeeper. Jane Chapman's The Piano (1993) further inverts
this equation where her non-speaking female protagonist
becomes the voyeurist subject of the all-speaking (and all-seeing)
males in her world.
14. McHale argues that the modernist text is marked by two key
textual strategies: mobile consciousness and parallax, or multiple
points of view. Such texts attempt to secure a fine-grained
interaction between 'consciousness and the world outside
consciousness' (McHale, 1992: 45). This internal consciousness
may be unreliable, unstable, shifting and digressive, but the
world itself is stable.
15. Ethnography has passed through five moments: the first
moment, the traditional period, lasted until World War II; the
second, the modernist phase, ended in the late 1960s. The third,
blurred genres (197086), precipitated the fourth; the crisis of
representation, which began in the mid-1980s, to be replaced by
the fifth period; the present (see Denzin and Lincoln, 1994a;
Vidich and Lyman, 1994). Each of these moments and their
genres circulate in the present.
16. A form of personal historiography which blends personal
biographical accounts with popular and scholarly texts that
purport to explain the life in question (see Ulmer, 1989, Part 3).
17. Like ethnography, British and American cultural studies have
passed through several historical moments: its pre-World War II
Frankfurt School formulations; the mid-century British tradition
of Hoggart, Williams and Thompson; Stuart Hall's
transformations of this tradition; its recent re-workings in the
United States (see Carey, 1989; Grossberg, 1992; 1988a), and
contemporary feminist expansions of the approach (Morris,
1988; Franklin et al., 1991). There are also separate Australian
(Frow and Morris, 1993), Canadian (Blundell et al., 1993), and
critical theory (Agger, 1992) histories of cultural studies.
18. This is Jameson's (1991: 68) argument. A reviewer suggests
(Jameson would agree) that such modernists as Joyce (Ulysses),
Sartre (Troubled Sleep) and Dos Passos (USA) used cinematic
techniques in their works. Perhaps it is only academics who have
been slow to come to this understanding.
19. C. Wright Mills perceived this situation in 1963, 'The
consciousness of men does not determine their existence; now
does their existence determine their consciousness. Between the
human consciousness and material existence stand
communications and designs . . . which influence decisively such
consciousness as they have. The mass arts, the public arts, and
the design are major vehicles of this consciousness' (Mills, 1963:
375).
20. This visual relationship between the theorist and ethnography
is graphically given in the front cover to Writing Culture
(Clifford and Marcus, 1986). Sitting in front of his tent,
ethnographer Stephen Tyler inscribes fieldnotes.
21. As this chapter is being written the murder trial of O.J.
Simpson is being carried by all of the major American television
networks. On the night (June 17, 1994) of his surrender 90
million Americans watched the helicopters hover over his
automobile (a white Ford Bronco) as it cruised the Los Angeles
highways, finally pulling to a stop in the driveway of his
Brentwood mansion. And media-video justice unfolds.
22. This epistemology took two forms: positivist and
hermeneutic. Positivistic realism assumed a real world that could
be objectively studied and re-represented through objective,
scientific texts. Hermeneutic realism assumed an interactive,
indeterminate, linguistic relationship between the observer and
the world observed. Both versions of realism assumed a
determinate relationship between knowledge and vision.
23. Social realism in sociology continued the narrative, realist
traditions of Romantic and Victorian fiction and in the twentieth
century quickly grafted itself into mainstream scientific-positivist
realism. However, this realism was short-lived, to be replaced by
the new governing aesthetics and philosophies of science
peculiar to modernism and postmodernism (see Jameson 1990:
156). While literary modernism (Joyce) attacked the foundations
of realism, the modernist turn in sociology (mid-century social
theory) merely perpetuated the realist agenda.
Page 221
24. Realism, as Jameson (1990: 161) suggests and Clough
(1992) elaborates, has passed through several phases and forms
(ethnographic, cinematic, simulational), reflected in
ethnography's moments: naturalistic realism (e.g. the Chicago
School case studies), the cold, objective (often statistical)
realisms of modernism and the hyperrealism of postmodernism.
25. Jeff lays the foundations for such postmodern voyeurs as
Graham of sex, lies and videotape, that is, Jeff opened the door
that permitted the camera to come directly into the living-room.
Jeff, then, is a modernist while Graham is a postmodern voyeur.
26. Raymond Schmitt disputes my use of the word morbid in the
context of sociological observation (voyeurism), suggesting that
its 'unwholesome' connotations are unsettling when considering
the work of the classic interactionists. I agree. Thomas and Park,
for example, interpreted their projects (see Baker, 1973) as
merely being ones of describing ordinary behaviour. However,
the warrant for the investigative gaze of ethnographic
positivism/realism may be unwholesomely dysfunctional for
society and its members, including the observer (see Guba and
Lincoln, 1989: 120, and discussion below, pp. 2045. For
examples of the negative effects of sociological and
anthropological investigative voyeurism see Vidich et al, 1964;
and Stoller and Olkes, 1987.)
27. See also Warren Beatty, the political reporter in The Parallax
View (1974), or Richard Boyle, the photo-journalist of Salvador
(1986), or Russell Price, the journalist of Under Fire (1983).
28. This discussion of these five ethical stances draws from
Denzin and Lincoln, 1994b.
29. Guba and Lincoln (1989: 12041) provide a valuable review
of the ethical breaches that follow from the positivist paradigm,
contrasting that paradigm with the constructionist position which
openly brings the subject into the research process and thereby
works to nullify the negative effects (invasions of privacy, etc.)
of scientific voyeurism. Breaches include the following forms of
harm when subjects discover they have been duped, loss of
personal dignity, loss of self-esteem and the denial of individual
agency. (See also Kayser-Jones and Koenig, 1994; Lee, 1993;
and Hornsby-Smith, 1993, for positions which mediate this
discourse.) These authors basically side against the conflict,
deception mode of Douglas, in favour of the compromise
solution of Punch (1994), which seeks a balance between the
researcher's obligations and the rights of subjects.
30. Mitchell calls this a version of the humanist position. Mitchell
does not endorse deception as a research practice, but points to
its inevitability in human (especially research) interactions.
31. Staples (1994) elaborates this argument. He enumerates the
small acts of cunning, from Intensive Supervision Programs
(ISPs), to electronically monitored home confinement devices,
night vision technology and confirmatory drug tests that describe
the disciplinary practices of contemporary life. See also Altheide
(1994).
32. Krug distinguishes three levels of video textuality: the films
and videos produced by native people, home videos, and
mainstream Hollywood cinema. Each video form presumes a
slightly different version of visual ethnography.
33. Media justice is thus woven through the narrative and
normative structures of those multinational corporations that
control the media, 'current cultural production is in the hands of
privately owned giant corporations, they make decisions as to
what is mass produced in the cultural area and what will not be
produced. . . . It is . . . accurate therefore to refer to corporate
decision making in the cultural area as being censorship' (Smyth,
1981: 235, also quoted in Jansen, 1988: 165).
34. A reviewer disputes my association of visual and verbal truth
with social realism, arguing that Verstehen as a foundation of
ethnography directly opposes positivism, making it incorrect to
say that realism organizes all social science discourse. This
reviewer also suggests that it is an error to equate realism's
commitment to the visual with ethnography's emphasis on the
linguistic, verbal side of experience. I disagree. To the extent that
both versions of realism (see note 20 above) are committed to an
'objective' or 'intersubjective' rendering of a world out there, they
both fall under the effects of the transcendent realist
epistemology outlined above.
Page 222
35. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between two forms of
hermeneutic enquiry, the anti-foundational hermeneutics of
Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Habermas, and the objective
hermeneutics of E. Hirsch, and the positivistic ethnographic
realism of Blumer (see Baugh, 1990: 926).
36. Ben Agger (in conversation) suggests that if the voyeur's
gaze is a culturally delimited and socially constructed
phenomenon, then in the postmodern moment analytic/visual
modes of understanding may give way to a more mythic/oral
tradition of understanding. This may occur, but such tellings will
still be contained within the voyeuristic extensions of the
cinematic apparatus.
37. I am indebted to Ben Agger (in conversation) for clarifying
my position, especially the distinction between technical
knowledge and existential understanding, which is further
distinguished from the surface understandings produced by
ethnographic realism.
38. For example, Graham (sex, lies and videotape), destroys his
tapes after his cathartic session with Ann.
39. He also sexualized the voyeur's motives (e.g., Psycho).
40. In challenging this metaphor I am not suggesting that either
the classical interactionists, or the dramaturgical theorists (Lyman
and Scott, Goffman, Perinbanayagam, Brissett and Edgley)
doubted the existence of multiple realities. However, the
historical rupture (World War II) that divides the modern from
the postmodern period, and the contemporary phase of late
postmodernism, with its stress on commodified experiences and
staged realities, makes the issue of an obdurate world beneath the
multiple layers of the real even more problematic. In such a
world the media can overdetermine the meanings brought to
cultural objects, even as interactants make choices between the
films and television shows they watch and the commodities they
buy.
41. This section draws on Denzin, 1992a: 1503.
42. The following paragraphs draw from Denzin, 1992a: 1425.
43. They wanted movies that preserved the privacy of the family.
In the language of Comolli and Narboni (1971/1976), they
favoured category a films.
44. Curiously, few interactionists followed the leads of Blumer's
(1933) landmark study of movies and conduct. Still, in their
classic text, Lindesmith and Strauss (1949: 211) would point to
the movies as sources of fantasy, and criminologists like Clinard
(1957: 17881) would discuss motion pictures and their
relationship to deviance. It would not be until the late 1980s,
however, that the movies would again become a central focus of
interactionist work (see Clough, 1988; Denzin, 1991b, and Fine,
1990: 1445).
Page 223
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Page 240
Index
A
absolutist stance, 204
aesthetics:
of looking, 46;
postmodern, 8-9
Allen, Woody, 109
Altheide, David L., 208-9
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 129, 135-6, 163
autoethnography, 199
B
Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 140, 141;
and carnival of theatre, 14;
and mimesis as fraud, 197;
and polyphony, 90.
See also Stam, Robert
Barris, Alex, 53
Barthes, Roland, 197
Baudrillard, Jean:
and hyperreality, 200;
and media and simulacra, 198, 199, 200
Behind That Curtain, 89
Benjamin, Walter, 25
The Big Sleep, 52
The Big Store, 66-7
Biga, Tracy, 76, 79
Black Widow, 2, 5, 73, 149-56;
and female gaze, 139-40;
and feminine self-image, 157-8;
as film noir, 136;
gazing structures of, 150;
and narcissistic gaze, 157-8;
and polyphony, 150;
and sexism, 141;
and violence, 157;
water symbolism in, 155
Blow Out, 10, 181
Blow-Up, 6, 51, 114-15, 128-36;
and the camera, 128-30;
and colour, 129-30, 135;
lesson of, 137;
morality in, 136-7;
and photography, 128-9;
Peeping Tom in, 114;
and reality, 128-9, 135;
and self, 129
Blue Velvet, 4, 73, 76-82, 85 n.1;
and comedy, 64, 65;
and gendered gaze, 58, 76-8, 80-2;
and modernism, 76;
multiple gazes in, 76, 78-9, 81-2;
and violence, 55
Blumer, Herbert, 11, 20, 28, 32, 38 n. 4
Bozovic, Miran, 61 n.7
Breen, Joseph, 20
Broadcast News, 4, 64, 65, 67, 68-73;
and feminine gaze, 68, 70-1
C
camera's gaze, 114;
and crime, 25;
and ethnography, 190, 196-7;
and family, 25, 40 n. 22;
ideological heritage, 31;
lens of, 26;
and morality, 137;
as Rear Window, 121;
and science, 24-5, 31;
and truth, 6, 118, 130;
and visual code, 25-6
capitalism:
crime and camera, 25;
cultural logics of, 6;
and individuals, 6;
local, 9;
and monopoly, multinational-consumerism, 9;
and private space, 5, 6;
stages of, 9, 22;
and phases of voyeuristic film, 9
Cartesian eye, 195
censorship, 208;
early, 18-19, 20;
opposition to, 19;
and the Production Code, 20
Chan is Missing, 89, 103-9;
and Asian self, 103;
and assimilation, 104;
as collage, 103-4, 107-8;
and identity, 104-5;
as multi-voiced, 107-8;
and stereotypes, 107
Charlie Chan, 23, 88-100, 111-12 n.9, n. 10, 142, 143;
blundering character of, 66;
and Chan is Missing, 103, 109;
as ethnic hero, 59;
and Mr Moro, 101, 102;
pragmatic method of, 97-9, 110;
and racism, 59, 99-100;
and Zelig, 109
Charlie Chan at the Opera, 88, 89, 94-100;
and anti-feminism, 95;
geometric structure in, 96-7
Chinatown, 48, 51, 57
cinema:
history of, 2, 10 n.7, 16-19, 39 n.11;
and individual, 29;
postmodern, 1;
primitive-realist, 8, 9;
sociological impact of, 13-14;
and sociology, 13, 212-13;
and surveillance society, 13-14, 15
cinematic:
apparatus, 193, 200;
culture, 24, 28, 32-3, 50, 200;
gazing, 29-30, 31, 33;
imagination, 33-4, 36;
self and Herbert Blumer, 28, 29, 32-3, 38 n. 4,
realism, 21-2;
voyeurism, 163, 191
Citizen Kane, 35, 41 n.35
colour, 4, 129-30, 135
comedy:
and audience, 4, 66;
ethnic, 92, 94;
and female voyeur, 72, 73, 74-5;
and neutralization of danger, 64;
and reflexivity, 66;
and voyeurism, 64-6
Page 241
community, 116, 123, 1256, 1278
Commolli, Jean-Louis, 15, 256, 40, 193
conflict deception model, 2045
conspirational film, 5, 164
conspiratorial text:
and detective story, 1656;
and history, 164;
and information technologies, 164, 1667;
as panopticon, 1667
contextualized-consequentialist model, 205
The Conversation, 5, 6, 16277;
and the acoustic mirror, 168;
gazes in, 16973;
and private space, 174;
and surveillance, 196
Cook, David A., 21
Cooley, Charles Horton, 11
Coppola, Francis Ford, 162, 163;
and conspiratorial texts, 163;
and The Conversatioin, 16777;
and everyday life, 175;
and surveillance society, 163;
and technology, 213;
and truth, 214
copy, 1978
Corner, John, 199
Creed, Barbara, 812
criminalistics, 25
Crimes and Misdemeanors, 64
cultural studies:
and cinematic society, 200;
double crisis of, 199;
and ethnography, 9;
feminist, 190;
and lived cultures, 200, 201;
new writing forms of, 199, 200;
as postmodern ethnography, 199, 211;
and video culture, 211;
and the voyeur, 190, 199, 210, 211;
as voyeurism, 9
D
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, 2, 4, 645, 824
democracy:
cultural logics of, 6;
dispersal of, 33;
failure of, 21516;
film's service to, 19;
and ideology of gaze, 312;
individuals in, 6;
and newspaper films, 23;
and private space, 56;
reconceptualized, 217;
and science, 218;
and technology, 218;
and truth, 164;
voyeur's surveillance of, 15, 31
De Palma, Brian, 8, 110, 138, 140
Derrida, Jacques, 61 n.1, 62 n.11;
and mimeses, 197;
and multiple perspectives, 141;
and speech, 198
detective story, 62 n.17;
amateur, 114;
and conspiratorial film, 165;
early, 23, 24;
history of, 166;
and the power elite, 166.
See also private inspectors; oriental sleuth
Dewey, John, 215, 216, 217
Dirty Harry, 57
Doane, Mary Anne, 956;
on the gaze, 48;
and women's films, 489
Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb, 64
dramaturgical society:
as interactional reality, 323;
and popular culture, 33
E
Edison, Thomas, 15, 16, 19
editing, 15
education, and film, 19, 20
enculturation, 94
epiphanic moments, 211
ethics:
and cinematic voyeurism, 5, 191;
of federal voyeur, 204;
feminist, 205;
and Hollywood, 203, 208;
organizing, 203;
and private space, 206;
post-pragmatic, 215;
of social science, 2045, 206;
of the state, 203-4, 208;
and surveillance, 2034
ethnicity, 8890;
and assimilation, 104, 110;
in Chan is Missing, 103, 104;
in comedy, 92;
and enculturation, 94;
gaze of, 589;
and minority male gaze, 59, 217;
as nonthreatening, 92-3;
politics, of, 1045, 108;
and stereotyping, 104;
and voyeur, 88, 89, 90.
See also Charlie Chart; racism
ethnography, 22;
and cinematic society, 200;
double crisis of, 199;
and state ethics, 208;
five moments of, 220 n.15;
gaze of, 190, 197, 200, 2012;
and the hyperreal, 200;
interpretive logics of, 196;
modernist texts of, 196;
in multi-perspective world, 196, 218;
new writing forms of, 199, 200;
and Peeping Tom, 202;
as political texts, 210;
post-Geertz, 199;
postmodern 199-218;
realist, 190, 200-1, 214;
reflexive, 35, 190, 200, 214;
traditional, 201, 213-14;
and video-cinematic texts, 201, 208, 210;
as voyeurism, 9, 12 n.20, 190, 199, 200, 201, 208, 210, 211.
See also human sciences; qualitative texts; social sciences
everyday life, 49, 51;
as art, 175;
and cinematic realism, 21, 29, 36;
as commodity, 175-6;
as in melodrama, 30;
ideological structures of, 30;
myths of, 29;
manipulated, 199;
and masculine gaze, 162;
and narrative cinema, 22;
as second-hand world, 208;
and spectral gaze, 28-9;
and voyeurism, 29, 208
F
fan clubs, 18
Fatal Attraction, 5, 139-40, 141, 143-9;
and female gaze, 140, 147, 159;
and feminine self image, 157-8;
and polyphony, 141;
and sexism, 141;
violence in, 147, 157;
and water, 147-8
female voice, 72, 170, 173
Page 242
female voyeur:
aggressive, 139, 140;
classic, 160 n.4;
and Hollywood, 139, 140;
and masculine gaze, 150, 159;
as multi-perspective, 141, 156;
and multiple subject positions, 140;
as outsider, 142, 143;
and pornography, 141;
and self image, 157;
and violence, 147.
See also feminine gaze
feminine gaze:
in Blue Velvet, 76, 78, 79, 81-2;
in Broadcast News, 68, 70-2, 73;
defined by the masculine, 139;
multiple, 139, 140, 141;
reflexive, 139;
and self understanding, 157-8, 187, 217-18;
in sex, lies and videotape, 73-5;
upon males, 139, 140;
and voyeurism, 120, 124
feminism:
cultural studies, 190;
ethic, 205;
Mulvey on, 42, 43;
theory and Hitchcock, 117;
and women's films, 42
femme fatale, 95-6, 141-3, 156;
in film noir, 156, 160 n.5;
retro, 154;
and water symbolism, 155
film, see cinema
film noir, 7, 8, 100, 103;
parody of, 83-4;
patriarchal theme in, 83-4;
recast as, 156;
versus voyeur film, 11 n.15
Flower Drum Song, 108-9
Foucault, Michel, 13, 15, 206;
and the camera, 25;
and conspiratorial texts, 166-7;
on double reflexivity, 26-7;
on gaze, 1, 2, 31, 42, 44, 46, 190;
and panopticon, 9, 118-19;
on power, 15, 46, 47;
and surveillance, 91, 176, 190, 206, 219 n.1
Frankfurt School, 13
Freud Sigmund, 38 n.9, 81-2
G
gaze:
body and, 162;
cinematic, 29-30, 31, 33;
control of, 31;
as cultural ethic, 201;
and emotions, 48;
ethnic, 58-9;
ethnographer's 190, 201, 218;
fieldworker's, 190, 197;
and gender, 48, 58, 65;
Hollywood's treatment of, 60;
ideology of 31;
and imagination, 33;
male, 42-3, 71-3, 74-5, 76, 79, 84, 162, 167, 186-7;
malevolent, 162, 167;
panauditory, 162;
panoptic, 162;
paranoiac, 162, 186;
and pleasure, 29, 162, 163;
politics of, 46;
pornographic, 57, 58;
postmodern, 202;
properties of, 48;
reflective, 28-9, 34;
of the state, 162;
scientific, 51, 193, 202;
sexual, 58, 147, 157;
and subjectivity, 45-6, 47;
and surveillance, 162, 190, 201;
technological, 169, 170;
urban, 33.
See also camera's gaze; feminine gaze; Foucault; voyeur's gaze
gender:
and Asian male stereotype, 101;
and cinematic voyeurism, 191;
and comedy, 65;
and cultural values, 53;
and female gaze, 120, 124;
and female voice, 72;
and femme fatales, 95-6;
and masculine gaze, 43, 114, 120, 141, 150, 157;
and multiple subject positions, 84;
and mythic male, 165-6;
and oppression, 14, 15, 33;
and pragmatism, 217-18;
reflexive gaze, 28;
and sane figure, 141-2, 143, 148, 154, 155, 156;
and sexual crisis, 141;
and truth, 75;
and vision, 114;
and violence, 142, 143, 147;
and voyeur's gaze, 1, 67, 78.
See also female voyeur
Goffman, Erving, 29
Gonzo Justice, 208-9
Gunning, Tom, 25
H
Hayes Commission, 19-20
Hayes, William H., 13, 19-20
hero, 57, 59, 63 n.22, 166
High Anxiety, 66, 73
history:
challenge of, 166;
as constructed, 164;
official, 166;
and power elite, 166;
and technology, 164;
and truth, 164, 186
Hitchcock, Alfred, 4, 9, 10 n.2, 114;
and audience, 120, 121;
and the camera, 163;
and cinematic society, 1;
and community, 116, 123, 125-6, 127-8;
and early postmodern period, 163;
and feminist film theory, 117;
and gender, 117, 120;
and modernism, 116, 123, 125;
and moral truth, 118, 163;
and Peeping Tom, 118;
and Point of View, 122;
and reality, 126, 127;
and scopic pleasure, 163;
and the voyeur, 115, 116-18, 121, 127-8, 163, 211-12.
See also Rear Window
Hollywood:
and Asian culture, 90;
versus Chinese filmmakers, 112 n.13;
and crime, 24;
ethics and the state, 203, 208;
and everyday life, 21;
and femme fatale, 141-2;
and film history, 10 n.7;
and journalism, 23, 24;
and marketing culture, 33;
and Orientalist discourse, 90;
and realism, 22;
and reflexive texts, 7;
and society, 13-14, 24;
and voyeurism, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 60
Holmes, Sherlock, 53, 54, 55
human eye, 24-5, 193
human sciences:
and interpretive methodologies, 193, 194;
realist epistemology, 193-4, 200, 210;
and subjects, 193;
as violence, 194;
and voyeur, 193, 210, 211.
See also ethnography; qualitative texts; social sciences
Page 243
Hunter, Holly, 68-73
hyperreality, 200
I
individual:
and cinema, 29, 33;
and fantasy, 30;
and melodrama, 20;
and private space, 5-6;
Renaissance cult of, 26
information technologies, 164, 176
informed consent, 205-6
Inspector Clouseau, 64, 65, 66
interpretive interactionism, 190
Irigaray, Luce:
and female voyeurism, 5;
feminine renunciation, 158-9;
and multiple perspectives, 141
J
Jameson, Fredric, 8, 9, 11 n.17, 18, 22;
and conspiratorial texts, 163;
critiques of status quo, 165-7;
and the individual, 165;
and media-based culture, 200;
and meta-narratives, 165-6;
and public/ private space, 136-7;
on realism, 200;
and truth, 166
Jay, Martin, 14, 33, 41 n.32, 195
JFK, 37, 177-86;
as conspiratorial text, 6, 163, 164-5;
criticisms of, 165, 184;
and history, 162-3, 165, 186;
and journalism, 183-5;
and popular culture, 182-3;
stories within, 178;
and truth, 177-8, 186
journalism:
and authority, 183-5;
and photography, 25, 31;
and scientific realism, 15;
and surveillance, 31;
and truth, 23
K
Karloff, Boris, 88, 96
Katovich, Michael, 189
the keyhole:
both sides female, 140, 150, 155, 156, 157, 159;
both sides male, 162, 186;
and feminine gaze, 140, 157;
and male gaze, 167;
and truth, 187
kinetograph, 15, 16, 32, 39 n.12
knowledge:
as perception, 27, 193, 194, 195, 197;
surface versus depth, 127, 130;
and understanding, 27, 193, 194;
as vision, 50;
and voyeur, 127, 193
Krug, Gary, 208
L
Lacan, Jacques, 44-5, 47, 61 n.6
Lathrop, George Parsons, 16
lived experience, 200
Lonergan, Bernard, 27
look, 43, 48, 162, 163. See also gaze; voyeur
Lorre, Peter, 100
M
Martin, Jay, 14, 41 n.32
Martin, Steve, 82-4
Marx, Gary T., and maximum security society, 163-4
Marx, Groucho, 66
masculine gaze, 43, 114, 150, 157;
dark side of, 141;
in everyday life, 162;
versus feminine gaze, 187;
men watching men, 162, 186;
minority gaze, 89;
and narcissistic subject, 167;
in political life, 162;
as power, 186;
prisoner of, 167;
and self-understanding, 187;
and surveillance, 186;
and truth, 187;
and voyeurism, 120, 162, 167, 186-7
maximum security society, 163-4
Mayne, Judith, 11 n.13, 29, 43, 139, 140, 156
media-culture, 200
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 42, 44, 45-6, 47
Metz, Christian, 14, 38 n.9
Mills, C. Wright, 13, 208
mimesis, 197
Mr Moto, 100-3;
as comic character, 92;
as hero, 59;
and martial arts, 102;
and racism, 59, 89-90, 93;
and stereotypes, 91;
as violent voyeur, 102
Mr Moto's Last Warning, 89, 100-2
Modeleski, Tania, 120
modernism:
and community, 125-6, 127, 128;
defined, 11 n.17;
end of 128;
and film history, 8, 22;
late, 8;
voyeur, 115
monopoly, 9, 22
Monsieur Hire, 67
morality, 118, 134;
and the camera, 137;
and technology, 136, 137;
and voyeurism, 56-7, 136-7, 163
movie stars, 18, 20, 32;
and dramaturgical society, 32;
and fan clubs, 18;
and scandal, 18, 19;
and sense of self, 32-3
multinational consumerism, 9, 22
multiple gazes, 76, 78-9, 81-2
multiple subject positions, 84, 140, 156
multiple perspectives, 141, 144, 156
multiple visual cultures, 33, 41 n.32
Mulvey, Laura, 42-3, 47
mystery film, 23, 24
'mystory', 199, 200
N
narcissistic subject, 157-8, 167
narrative:
cinema, 22, 28-9, 43;
and critiques of status quo, 165-7;
history of, 166;
North American, 165;
politics of, 165-7;
and power elites, 166
naturalistic discourse, 15
neo-pragmatists, 215-16
Network, 73
newspaper films, 2, 7, 22-3, 24
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newsreels, 21, 31, 39 n.14, 40 n.17
nickelodeon, 17
O
objective observer, rejection of, 163
ocular epistemology, 27, 197-8
Oland, Warner, 88
oriental sleuth, 88-91, 92, 217;
and comedy, 92, 94;
as non-threatening, 92-3;
as permanent other, 101-2;
and spectacle of discovery, 93;
as voyeur, 91, 92, 102
other:
creating, 46;
of surveillance society, 191;
and technology, 191.
See also Sartre, Jean-Paul
P
panopticon, 9, 44, 206;
and conspiratorial text, 166-7;
feminize to masculine, 150-1;
malevolent use of, 162;
and technology, 166-7
patriarchy:
and feminine gaze, 141, 155;
and gendered gaze, 58;
and male gaze, 14-15;
and narrative cinema, 42-3;
and racism, 192;
and sadism, 42-3;
and voyeur's gaze, 58
Pearson, Roberta, 120-1, 122, 137-8 n.4
Peeping Tom:
and ethnography, 202;
and Hitchcock's use of, 114, 118, 122, 123;
and sexual satisfaction, 28;
and surveillance society, 15;
used in film, 2, 5, 7, 67
Peeping Tom, 194-5
phenomenology of vision, 44-7
photography, 25;
beyond human eye, 26-7, 115, 126, 135;
and commercialism, 25;
and fact, 115;
and illusion, 115, 135;
and morality, 136;
and truth, 130, 134;
and visual code, 26;
and voyeur, 114-15, 126, 130, 134, 135
photo-journalism, 15, 114
Pink Panther, 64
pleasure:
of gaze, 46, 57;
and power, 162;
scopic, 163, 186
Point of View (POV) shots, 118, 121, 122, 138 n.13
political texts, in social sciences, 210
politics:
and masculine gaze, 162;
of narrative, 165-7;
of representation, 199
polyphony, 141
popular culture, 33
pornographic gaze, 57, 58
pornography of the visible, 140-1, 176, 191
postmodern:
and cinema, 1;
defined, 11 n.17;
and epistemological crisis, 6-7, 8, 9;
ethnography, 199, 212;
and film history, 8-9, 10 n.7;
and Hitchcock, 163;
interpretive framework, 190;
narrative, 165-7;
and privacy, 163;
and rampant voyeurism, 191;
and the real, 119;
and reflexive cinematic texts, 163;
self as voyeur, 202;
simulacrum, 198-9, 212;
and state surveillance, 162, 163;
and truth; 6-7, 163;
villain, 165;
voyeur, 4, 6-7, 163, 202.
See also Jameson, Fredric; private space
post-pragmatic ethics, 215, 216-17
poststructuralism, 201-2
post-surveillance society, 191,200
power:
and conspiratorial texts, 166, 167;
critiques of, 165-6;
erotics of, 162, 186;
and film, 15, 22;
history and 165-6;
and paranoia, 162, 164;
perpetuation of, 163;
and pleasure, 162;
and surveillance society, 15, 31;
and voyeur, 5, 202;
and voyeuristic ethnography, 202
pragmatic method, 6;
and voyeur, 6-7, 88, 97, 98
pragmatism, 6;
American and film, 13;
classical, 215;
media-communication based, 215;
and Rorty, 215-16;
self and, 215;
and voyeur, 88, 97, 98, 110
primitive-realist cinema, 8, 9
private inspectors, 51-3;
consequences for, 55, 56;
in detective stories, 62 n.17;
and female reporters, 53, 63 n.20;
films featuring, 2, 7;
Sherlock Holmes, 53-4;
as surveillance experts, 54;
as professional voyeurs, 54, 55, 56, 57, 63 n. 17.
See also oriental sleuth
private space, 5-6, 11 n.12;
in Blow-Up, 136;
camera's transgression of, 29;
in The Conversatioin, 174;
commodification of, 176;
end of, 137, 163;
ethics of, 206;
history of, 206;
illusion of, 214;
and informed consent, 205-6;
myth of, 207;
pornography of, 136;
and postmodern narrative, 166;
to public films, 30;
and Rear Window, 122, 124, 126;
and surveillance, 191-2, 207, 214;
turned public, 14;
and voyeur, 5-6, 15, 191-2;
zones of, 207, 208.
See also public space
psychoanalysis, 38 n.9 42, 43
public space:
and Blow-Up,136;
and civil society, 14;
history of, 206;
multiple spaces in film, 33;
pornography of, 136;
and postmodern narrative, 166;
from private space, 14, 30;
and Rear Window, 122, 125, 126;
and surveillance, 191-2;
and voyeur's trade, 191-2
Q
qualitative researchers, 196, 198. See also qualitative texts
Page 245
qualitative texts:
as genre, 196;
versus live experience, 197;
versus lived experience, 197;
as lived textuality, 197;
and mimesis, 197-8;
and ocular epistemology, 197;
and voice over writing, 198.
See also ethnography; human sciences; social sciences
R
race, 1, 88-90, 99;
in Charlie Chan films, 99-100;
and ethnic gaze, 58-9;
and minority male gaze, 89;
in Mr Moto films, 101;
and naturalism, 111 n.8;
oppression and film, 14, 15, 33;
and Oriental as hero, 59;
and segregated theatres, 17;
and stereotyping, 90-1, 101, 105, 107;
and vision, 44;
and voyeur's gaze, 1, 89, 90, 99, 217
racism:
and cinematic voyeurism, 191;
and ethnicity, 59, 89-90, 93;
and patriarchy, 192
Ray, Robert, B., 10 n.7, 31, 34
realism:
cinematic, 21;
and cinematic imagination, 34;
and colour, 129, 135;
defined, 11 n.17;
and ideology, 22;
and kinetograph, 16;
reflective, 23-4, 35-6;
scientific, 6, 15, 35;
staged, 32;
and technology, 21, 24;
and voyeur film, 8.
See also reality
realist epistemology, 193-4; 100-1
reality:
construction of, 34, 199;
control of 199;
distortion of, 36;
nature of, 129, 135;
and reflexive texts, 35;
staged, 32;
and subjectivity, 135;
and technology, 135.
See also realism
Rear Window, 2, 4, 45, 49, 114-15, 118-28;
audience, 120-1;
as camera, 121;
and community, 116, 123, 125-6, 127-8;
and female gaze, 120, 124;
lessons in, 137;
and male gaze, 120;
as ode to voyeurism, 118-19, 120, 128;
Peeping Tom in, 114, 118, 122, 123;
and point of view, 122;
and postmodern voyeur, 202, 203;
reading of, 119-20, 137;
and reality, 126, 127;
and space, 122, 124, 125, 126;
viewer-spectator, 120-1, 122-3;
and voyeur, 118-19, 120, 125, 128, 202, 203
reflexive cinematic texts, 163, 164
reflexive ethnography, 35, 190, 200, 214
reflexive evil eye, 150
reflexive texts:
development of, 7-8;
flawed, 34-5;
and Hollywood, 7;
versus realist film, 34;
and realism, 35-6;
and scientific realism, 35;
and truth, 34-5;
and the voyeur, 150;
and voyeuristic cinema, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10 n.4
relativist stance, 205
Rorty, Richard, 207, 215-16
Rosaldo, Renato, 195, 219 n.1
S
sado-masochism, 77-8
Said, Edward, 89-90, 91
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 61 n.7;
gazed upon, 45;
others gaze, 46, 47, 125, 138 n.11;
and phenomenology of gazing, 42, 44-5;
and power, 79
scandals, 19
Schmitt, Raymond, 189
scientific gaze, 51, 193;
as hegemonic vision, 202;
and surveillance society, 193
scientific realism, 6, 15;
as camera, 24-5, 31;
and photo-journalism, 15;
and reflexive texts, 35;
and truth, 6, 15
scopic pleasure, 192
A Search for Evidence, 50
self:
and art, 135;
Asian, 103-4;
cinematic, 28, 29, 32-3, 38 n.4;
commodity of, 210;
and control, 29;
creates gaze, 45-6;
feminine, 157-8;
and identity, 104-5, 108, 109;
and interior gaze, 46-7, 49;
and movie stars, 32-3;
and new ethnography, 200;
politics of, 104-5, 109;
postmodern, 1;
and pragmatics, 215;
and reflective gaze, 28;
specular, 50, 157-8;
understanding, 187;
and utopian fantasy, 14;
and visual culture, 27;
as voyeur, 50-1
sex, lies and videotape, 2, 4, 65, 67, 73-5;
and voyeurism, 37, 55
sexism, 141
sexual crisis, 141
Short, William H., and censorship, 19
Shot in the Dark, 64, 66, 85 n 5
Silverman, Kaja, 71-2;
and acoustic mirror, 168, 188 n.6;
and The Conversatioin, 173;
on Harry Caul 188 n.4;
and Lacan, 61 n 6
Simpson, O. J., 209
simulacrum:
and The Conversatioin, 174;
and history, 164;
and the 'real', 198-9;
truth of, 37, 174-5, 198, 199
social class, 1, 67, 76
social sciences:
and democracy, 217-18;
ethics of, 204-5, 206;
and ocular epistemology, 197;
pragmatic epistemology of, 196-7;
and public/ private space, 206-7, 208, 214;
and qualitative research, 196-7;
and realism, 210;
texts, 210-11;
theory from cinema, 200;
and voyeur, 210-11.
See also ethnography; human sciences; qualitative texts
Document
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spectacle of discovery, 93
Springer, Claudia, 27
Stakeout, 48, 67
Stam, Robert, 120-1, 122, 137-8 n 4;
and utopian fantasy, 14.
See also Bakhtin, Mikhail M.
state voyeurs, 115-16, 207
status quo, critiques of, 165-7
Stone, Oliver, 162, 163, 177-87;
and conspiratorial texts, 163;
as detective, 178;
and history, 164, 186;
and surveillance society, 163
stories, 22, 130, 210
The Story the Biograph Told, 2, 29, 37
subversive reading, 10 n.3
surface versus depth knowledge, 127, 130
surveillance society, 4, 5, 9;
and Communist scare, 115;
and conspiratorial text, 163;
and democratic society, 15;
early, 38 n.6;
ethics of state, 203-4;
feminine to masculine, 150-1;
and film, 13-14, 15;
Foucault on, 190, 206, 219 n.1;
gaze of, 190;
and hyperreal, 200;
and information technologies, 164, 176;
male dominance of, 186;
and other, 191;
and Peeping Tom, 15;
and power, 15;
and postmodern period, 163;
and private inspectors, 54;
and private space, 207, 214;
and science, 193;
and subjectivity, 50;
techniques of, 46-7;
and visual culture, 14, 31;
and voyeur, 15.
See also, private space; voyeur
T
talking film, 21
technology:
and conspiratorial texts, 166, 167;
and morality, 136, 137;
and new information, 164, 176;
and panopticon, 166-7;
of realism, 21, 24;
and reality, 135;
and truth, 135, 136;
of vision, 135-6
Todorov, Tzvetan: 66, 96, 97, 102, 111 n.6
truth:
and the camera, 6, 24-5, 130;
distortion of, 164;
and film, 186;
and history, 164, 186;
and Hitchcock, 118;
illusion of, 213, 215;
and journalism, 23;
lack of, 130;
and masculine gaze, 187;
moral, 118, 134, 136, 137, 163;
multiple, 130;
and perception, 27, 193;
in postmodern period, 6-7, 163;
reconstructed, 186;
and reflexive texts, 34-5;
and scientific realism, 6, 15;
scopic, 192, 195;
search for, 166;
and the simulacrum, 37, 174-5, 198, 199;
and stories, 130;
and technology, 135, 136;
unstable, 193;
and verification, 6;
visual code, 25-6, 27;
and visual culture, 195, 197;
and voyeur, 192;
and voyeur film, 7
U
Ulmer, Gregory:
and 'mystories', 199, 200;
and video culture, 211
Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, 2, 29, 37
utopia 166
utopian fantasy, 14, 90;
in Charlie Chan films, 107-8
V
video-cinematic texts, ethnography of, 201, 208, 210
video-culture, 73, 75, 211
video-justice, 208-10
villain, 165
violence:
as cinematic society, 194-5;
and vision, 194;
of sexual gaze, 147, 157
visual code, 25-6, 28;
displacing other systems, 26, 33;
and feminine sexuality, 8;
and film noir, 7;
as genre type, 8;
history of, 8;
and narrative structure, 8
visual culture, 41 n. 32;
beginnings, 13-14;
and self, 27;
and surveillance society, 14, 31;
and truth, 195, 197
voyeur:
acceptable, 91, 92-3;
active male, 79;
as amateur detective, 114;
blatant, 89;
cinematic, 7, 8, 163, 191;
and comedy, 64-6;
consequences of, 2;
construction of, 11-12 n. 19;
creation of, 14, 15;
cultural, 9;
and cultural studies, 190;
degradation, 77-8, 79, 84;
and desire, 42;
and discourse, 3;
early history of, 15;
epistemology of, 193;
erotic, 139;
ethics of, 88, 89, 90, 203;
and ethnography, 9, 12 n. 20, 190, 199, 200, 201, 208, 210,
211;
and everyday life, 29;
experience of, 14-15, 26;
federal, 203-4;
and female gaze, 120, 124, 139;
foreign, 4;
and Foucault, 1, 2;
gaze of, 29, 65-6;
gendered, 1, 78;
as hero/heroine, 57, 63 n. 22;
and Hitchcock, 163;
and Hollywood, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 60;
and human sciences, 193, 210, 211;
and illusion, 135;
and information technologies, 176;
investigative, 55, 56, 83, 101, 139, 141, 142-3;
justified, 126-7;
and knowledge, 127, 193;
and male gaze, 120, 162, 167, 186-7;
and modernism, 115;
and morality, 57, 136-7, 163;
multiple versions of, 76, 78-9, 81-2, 84, 191;
as necessary, 192, 214;
negation through comedy, 64, 66;
norm of, 192;
as personal, 115, 126, 128;
as photographer, 114-15, 126, 130, 134, 135;
as photo-journalist, 114;
and postmodernism, 4, 6-7, 163, 202;
and power, 5;
pragmatic, 88, 97, 98, 110;
and privacy, 5-6, 15, 191-2;
Page 247
professional, 54, 62 n.17;
and psychoanalysis, 38 n.9;
racial, 1, 89, 90, 99;
reciprocal, 78;
reflexive, 127-8, 150;
repressed, 89;
as self, 50-1;
sexual, 67, 76, 73-5, 76, 77-82, 147, 157;
as social, 115, 126;
and social class, 1, 67;
social type, 5;
and social science, 210-11;
from spectators, 26, 28-9;
and the state, 115-16, 207;
structures of, 191;
subject of, 124-5, 128;
surface versus depth, 127;
and surveillance society, 15;
and truth, 192;
types of, 3, 10-11 n.10;
video, 73, 75;
violent, 102.
See also Blow-Up; private space; Rear Window; surveillance
society
voyeur's gaze, 29, 65-6;
cinematic representation of, 42;
components of, 42;
creating others, 46;
epistemology of, 193-4;
and phenomenology of vision, 44;
pleasure of, 46, 57;
regulation of, 42, 48;
scopophilia, 43
W
water symbolism, 147-8, 155
Weber, Max, and cinema, 13
Mr Wong, 89-93
Y
Yellow Peril, 111 n. 7, n. 8
Y
Zapruder film, 162
Zelig, 109