安琪云1
安琪云2
剧情介绍
Introduction
Laura Mulvey raised an essential question of feminist film studies in her 1975 essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', which is ‘how to fight the unconscious structured like a language while still caught within the language of the patriarchy”[1]? Facing this challenge, Mulvey reckoned that it was necessary to first use psychoanalysis as ‘a political weapon’[2] to diagnose the male-dominated cinema with its fundamental disease of voyeurism and fetishism, only on whose theoretical basis the feminist cinematic practice can advance. Ten years after Mulvey first published her essay, the only Hollywood female friendship film of the 1980s that was produced by women[3], Desperately Seeking Susan, responded to Mulvey’s question. Although Mulvey’s essay lacks the consideration of female protagonists which is the case in the film, her analysis still serves as a counterexample which helps spectators understand what convention this film was fighting against and where it was making a difference. This essay tries to argue that, the dichotomy described by Mulvey that male is the developing narrative pursuing autonomy and female is the static spectacle outside the narrative is exactly what Desperately Seeking Susan was fighting against. I will elaborate this by first reconstructing Mulvey’s arguments in terms of the structural division of narrative/spectacle and the desire of autonomy. Then, I will examine how this film challenges this convention, also taking into account some aspects where the film and Mulvey’s essay do not overlap, to examine the value Mulvey’s essay has on the construction and representation of femininity in this film.
Understanding Mulvey
The Narrative/Spectacle Structure
According to Mulvey, in the cinema embedded in a patriarchal society, the woman serves as a signifier for the male other, and the bearer of meaning instead of the maker[4]. This means that there exists a very distinct binary opposition, where male protagonists are the narrative, while female characters are spectacles ‘to be looked at’. The narrative, as the storyline, is constantly developing, while the spectacles are just static images. There are significant shreds of evidence showing how female characters are ‘frozen’. One is how the camera focuses on their specific body parts, representing the female characters with fragments of their physical appearance, like how Lana Turner in The Post Man Always Rings Twice is first introduced with a close-up to her feet and legs and how Claudette Colbert’s character succeeds to hitchhike by revealing her legs in It Happened One Night. In Mulvey’s words, ‘it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon, rather than verisimilitude, to the screen’[5]. Also, female characters often serve as obstacles against the male protagonist’s narrative, freezing ‘the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’[6]. This structural difference is also a hierarchy, empowering male characters over female ones. Thus, the woman remains static and one-sided in the film, while the man goes on adventures, keeps on gazing, and solves the woman problem by punishing or saving the sinned woman, or fetishizing them so that they become ‘reassuring rather than dangerous’[7].
The Desire for Autonomy
The hierarchy of men being the narrative and women being the spectacle is repeatedly strengthened by the visual pleasures from the cinema. Mulvey described the two types of pleasures cinema offers to spectators: one is scopophilia, taking the screen as a peeping hole and gaining pleasure from the action of looking at others; the other is narcissism, seeing the screen as a mirror and therefore developing self-identification or misidentification from the protagonist (who, in most cases in traditional cinema, is male)[8]. Because of the narrative/spectacle split, the two different pleasures are mainly male pleasures, and they both pursue a sense of autonomy in masculinity. This is proven by psychological studies where male maturation is described as a linear progression from dependence to autonomy, while female development attempts to merge autonomy and relatedness[9]. It is not hard to understand how narcissistic identification/misidentification links to one’s autonomy, since they share the same self-reflective route. For scopophilia, however, the autonomy is built upon objectifying the other sex, establishing ‘who I am (a person with phallus)’ by constantly reminding oneself ‘who I am not (a person without phallus)’ in the process of gazing. Such is the male desire for autonomy elaborated from the pleasure of scopophilia/narcissism in Mulvey’s essay. Another kind of desire which has both autonomy and relatedness will be discussed later with examples from Desperately Seeking Susan.
Desperately Seeking Susan: the desire of becoming in the female narrative
Mulvey categorized three kinds of looking in her essay: the look from the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, the look from the spectators, and the look between the characters. She concluded that in narrative films the first two kinds of looking subordinate to the third[10]. Therefore, although scopophilia and identification are analyzed as the spectator’s pleasure, they are passed on through the look between the characters, which brings our focus to the relationship between the two main characters in this film.
The Female Narratives
We can see how this film challenged the conventional narrative/spectator structure by making the two female characters, Roberta and Susan, both narratives. It is a film lead by a suburban housewife Roberta with a desire to become a liberated modern woman like Susan, who travels across the country and communicates with her lover in the newspaper’s advertisement column. Roberta is the main narrative, whose journey of wanting to become someone, accidentally taking up another identity, and finally finding a new life, is the main plot. Compared to Roberta, although it seems that Susan is ‘positioned as the classic feminine enigma’[11] being investigated by the protagonist, she also has her equally important storyline and is not seen as a mere image. First, in the beginning of the film, when Roberta decides she wants to be ‘desperate’ for Susan, Susan is just a printed name in the newspaper column, which means it is not the fetishizing image of the sexy Madonna but the narrative of a rebellious woman and a romantic love story that intrigue Roberta, and encourage her to begin her own new narrative. Second, the title Desperately Seeking Susan can be seen as Roberta’s action, which seems like she controls the narrative; however, Susan is not just subjected to the process of being sought: when Roberta tries to be another ‘Susan’, the real Susan also joins the journey of seeking Roberta and her identity back. It is even explicitly said by Susan that ‘it’s not about her, it’s about me’ when she’s reading Roberta’s diary, claiming her hold of the narrative. There are also technical demonstrations of their equality in the narrative, which include the roughly similar time given to both characters and the parallel montage. Spectators see Susan sneaks out of a hotel room right after taking a glance at Roberta’s domestic life or watch Roberta chokes on smoke right before the camera cuts to Susan naturally borrows light from a matron. The sequences of Roberta and Susan alternate with each other, interweaving two female narratives together, which helps construct a more equal power dynamic than the conventional cinema with a moving/static tension.
Autonomy with Relatedness: Challenging Scopophilia and Narcissism
The development of both Roberta and Susan is not solely seeking autonomy but also combining it with relatedness between the two, because the main theme is Roberta’s ‘becoming’, and one has to have some interpretability and compatibility with the other person in order to ‘become’[12]. The desire of ‘becoming’ is decisive in understanding the scene where Roberta stalks Susan. The stalking scene is to some extent similar to unravelling a female myth or being a voyeur, but essentially it is not scopophilia because Roberta never otherizes Susan; instead, she tries to be like her, for instance, by buying Susan’s jacket and dressing up like her. Susan does not alienate Roberta either: when Roberta’s husband Gary comes to her help, she seems to understand Roberta’s need while Gary has no clue. Additionally, for Mulvey, voyeuristic scopophilia is sadistic, gaining pleasure from asserting control and guilt through punishment or forgiveness[13]. However, as is discussed above, Susan is not an obstacle but motivation in Roberta’s life; what Roberta gains from being desperate for her is not sadistic or morbid but positive. The two female characters seem to share compassion for each other, and the ending shot of them holding hands and appearing on the newspaper’s front together emphasizes on their unity, challenging the scopophilia view.
Apart from challenging scopophilia by emphasizing on their relatedness, this film also challenged simplistic identification by exhibiting the differences between the two women, indicating that femininity is a wide spectrum rather than a stereotype and that ‘becoming’ does not mean duplication. For instance, the parallel sequence of Roberta doing housework at home and Susan dressing up in a public restroom creates a highly contrastable juxtaposition, portraying Roberta as a domestic suburban housewife and Susan as a free and confident drifter; the two smoking scenes mentioned above also signify their different femininities[14]. It ‘tempt the woman spectator with the fictional fulfilment of becoming an ideal feminine other, while denying complete transformation by insisting upon differences between women’[15]. Additionally, the film took a satirical approach to the idea of simply mimicking the other person in order to ‘become’: when Roberta dresses up to meet Susan at the pier, she intentionally puts on Susan’s jacket and did her hair in Susan’s style; however, her domestic dressing style (pink t-shirt, violet trousers, etc.) suggests her role as an imposter; when Roberta loses her memories, takes herself as Susan, and dresses exactly like Susan, she is later arrested by the police as a prostitute. The awkwardness and the misidentification derive from simplistically equating ‘imitating someone’ to ‘becoming someone/one’s ideal self’ and suggest that to reach a balance between autonomy and relatedness one has to go beyond this superficial level. When Roberta finds her real identity back but still decides to leave her husband, ‘by merging with the liberating aspects of Susan’s personality, Roberta is able to attain a mature female identity and find personal fulfillment outside the bounds of patriarchal marriage’[16]. Thus, the identification Roberta has reached in the end suggests that simply indulging oneself in the look inside the mirror is exceedingly problematic.
To sum up, Desperately Seeking Susan adopted new approaches towards presenting the narrative structure and the content of the desire, challenging the narrative/spectacle split and the pleasure of scopophilia/identification between the characters, which in turn would have an impact on the spectator’s pleasure from the cinema.
Limitations
Although Desperately Seeking Susan seems to resonate with Mulvey’s claims, limitations still exist from both ends. As Jackie Stacey argued, there are some shots in this film that still fall inside the close-up pornographic trap, including Susan lying on Roberta’s bed reading her diary, ‘wearing only a vest and a pair of shorts over her suspenders and lacy tights[17], and the close-up shot of the manicured feet and waxed legs in the salon. It is apparent that this film, however progressive it is in challenging the narrative/spectacle split and the desire of autonomy described in Mulvey’s essay, is still not entirely outside a conventional mainstream cinema, no matter willingly or unwillingly. This again proves the difficulty of solving Mulvey’s question of fighting for a completely alternative pleasure of looking from inside the male-dominated mainstream cinema.
Mulvey’s essay helps the spectators understand where Desperately Seeking Susan succeeded in challenging against and where it might have failed to dodge the male-gaze trap. However, this essay is not perfect and should only be seen as a reference to analyze feminist films critically. Some criticized Mulvey for arguing that feminist films as counter cinema should deny pleasure[18], which seems too radical and prudent to feminist films that still wish to make an impact in the mainstream cinema. What is offered in Desperately Seeking Susan is another way of recognizing desire outside the sexualized perspective. It has to be admitted that the desire of becoming and sexual desires can be compatible, and there might be some lesbian dynamics going on in the film, although it is denied by Roberta and the ending where Roberta and Susan both go back to their heterosexual lovers (as Hollinger argues, this could be the director compromising to the male-dominated film industry where romantic love between women is not so acceptable[19]). Nonetheless, the main dynamic is still a sense of becoming another narrative based on relatedness rather than otherness, providing a new perspective of desire without having to become Mulvey’s avant-garde film which might be too progressive for the overall cinema of that time.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is cogent and visionary in exposing the problematic structure in the traditional cinema; the counterexamples it provided are also mostly helpful in analyzing how feminist films like Desperately Seeking Susan are constructing and representing femininity differently. With the help of Mulvey’s analysis, we can understand better the significance of seeing female characters as the narrative rather than the spectacle and be more aware of the presence of scopophilia/narcissism. When applying Mulvey’s analysis, we should also bear in mind that it is a historical text based on binary oppositions and should be examined critically. Nonetheless, Mulvey’s expectation for the future feminist films will remain valuable: ‘the alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.[20]’ Desperately Seeking Susan is a sparkling attempt as a feminist film of the popular cinema that responded to Mulvey’s expectations, and created a practical example for the ensuing feminist films to reflect and advance upon, whose cinematic practice will solidly bring Mulvey’s expectation closer and closer.
[1] Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures. (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 15.
[2] Mulvey, Visual, 14.
[3] Karen Hollinger, In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 84.
[4] Mulvey, Visual, 15.
[5] Mulvey, Visual, 20.
[6] Mulvey, Visual, 20.
[7] Mulvey, Visual, 22.
[8] Mulvey, Visual, 17-19.
[9] Hollinger, Company, 83.
[10] Mulvey, Visual, 26.
[11] Jackie Stacey, ‘Desperately Seeking Difference,’ in Feminism & Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 462.
[12] It should be noted that the desire of becoming is not exclusive to female characters. The reason why this differentiation exists and is represented by masculinity/femininity is that it is a historical reality of men ruling the cinematic discourse with their desire of seeking autonomy. What seems like a binary approach here is similar to Mulvey’s political use of psychoanalysis.
[13] Mulvey, Visual, 22.
[14] Stacey, ‘Desperately’, 463.
[15] Stacey, ‘Desperately,’ 464.
[16] Hollinger, In the Company, 88.
[17] Stacey, ‘Desperately,’ 461.
[18] Kaplan, ‘Gaze,’ 124.
[19] Hollinger, In the Company, 91.
[20] Mulvey, Visual, 16.
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