CLAIMING BACK THE FUN! Feminist Film Criticism and Mainstream Entertainment

Feminist theory, among many other social sciences, has played a vital role throughout the academic study of film. It has however tended to object to popular culture and mainstream movies for being controlled by a dominant male ideology in which there is no place for a true female image. In her highly influential article “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey went as far as to say:

"It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favour of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative film."[1]

In this essay I will argue that the time has come to oppose the idea of the impossibility of mainstream enjoyment of the female spectator and to recapture the entertainment sector, considering two of the major papers written on the subject in the 1970s: Claire Johnston’s “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema“and the above mentioned essay by Laura Mulvey and their used methodologies, especially the creation of the myth as defined by Roland Barthes. Do they still apply thirty years later? Looking at the 2007 film Waitress by Adrienne Shelley and the multimedia phenomenon Lara Croft, I will argue that there is a new approach of female self-confidence emerging that uses usual stereotyping in order to negate the male rather than being negated herself and demands her part in the mainstream.

What film studies and feminism have in common is their endless struggle to be taken seriously, not only by the broader public but also by the academic elite. Interestingly enough film studies have played a vital role in entering popular culture into the field of vision of arts scholarship in its hearty embrace of post modernity. Being a rather young academic discipline moving between the arts and humanities, the study of film has been very open to inspirations from established fields but has also kept an eye on new revolutionary ideas. Apart from being art and no doubt entertainment, film has always been closely connected to sociology. Any film made at a certain time reflects on the society that made it, especially if there are reoccurring themes or style devices that can be analysed. According to its versatile nature, film here can work on several levels. One is the explicit art film that undermines the mainstream with a specific agenda while the other however is the actual mainstream. The big Hollywood productions for example offer an even more interesting field since their underlying ideologies have become very subtle due to an overdeveloped familiarity of the viewer with them. Feminism especially has examined the issue of representation in the movies. On the one hand by creating new forms of production and film making, on the other by using semiotics and psychoanalysis among others to recognise the principles at work in the conventional, established entertainment sector.

The aim of feminism is to challenge mainstream ideologies that dictate the gender roles that have developed over the course of history. Meaning to identify the oppression, name it and in the end overcome it by the means of academic discussion. The evil doer is the patriarchal system ruling the Western, if not in fact all, civilisation. Both, film studies and feminism, have entered the stage of scholarship and intellectual thinking at a similar point in time. Both children of the sixties and seventies, they have formed interesting and most influential bonds. In on of the most famous essays ever written in the field Laura Mulvey presented the idea of “the gaze”[2].

"Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged."[3]

She argued that the gaze was male and in order to fully appreciate a film, women had to adopt the male gaze. The basis of her argument was Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The viewer identifies with the protagonist of a movie who is almost always male in Hollywood. The woman on the screen is his other, never his equal. She is stylised, designed to be passively looked at rather than forwarding the plot herself. By being determined through a male phantasm there can not be a true woman on the screen and the female audience is thereby deprived of a focus point other than that of the male, be it by identifying with him or succumbing to identifying with his representation of the female. The woman is fetishised, being either the whore or the virgin. Laura Mulvey here uses Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) as an example. Judy, ridden by guilt, can be used by Scottie, who turns her into his fantastical ideal woman Madeleine but since she still poses a danger to him through her exhibitionism, she has to die.[4] Only her outer appearance need’s to be formed, she has no distinct personality. While she takes the form of the vice, Midge, the other woman in Vertigo represents virtue. She is completely asexualised and therefore neither of threat nor of interest to the protagonist.

Two years prior to “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema”, namely in 1973, Claire Johnston wrote an essay entitled “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema”[5]. In it she identified the reason for cinematic stereotyping of women according to Erwin Panofsky as a necessary short hand of the early days of filmmaking and more importantly film viewing. Since its invention not only the art of filmmaking has developed but so has the audience. There has been a long and not always easy cognitive learning process involved in our reading of the projected image. Remember the early audiences famously fleeing their seats at the sight of a train coming towards them in Auguste and Louis Lumière’s L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat in1896. While early stereotyping might have been without ideological agenda it is striking how it settled in. The important point that Johnston makes however is, that Hollywood is not to blame firstly but that “The fact that there is far greater differentiation of men’s roles than of women’s roles in the history of the cinema relates to sexist ideology itself, and the basic opposition which places man inside history, and woman as ahistoric and eternal.”[6] Like Mulvey, Johnston stresses the passivity of women but not only on the screen but in everyday apperception. History is largely recorded by the deeds of great men; women on the other hand have only changed in terms of fashion. They are icons rather than developable components of any given narrative. Johnston generates the term icon from Roland Barthes’ writings on the myth and recognizes that the myth

"…as a form of speech or discourse, represents the major means in which women have been used in the cinema: myth transmits and transforms the ideology of sexism and renders it invisible – when it is made visible it evaporates – and therefore natural."[7]

Figure 1 – The formation of the sign according to Saussure In his writings on mythologies Roland Barthes has adopted the linguistic system of semiotics created by Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure has divided language into a system of signified and signifier, one determining the other by association, the premise for which is its affirmed place within a social system. Meaning is therefore not only determined by the word used but also by the cultural knowledge of the speaker.[8]

Myths, according to Roland Barthes, are signifiers of ideology, but if they are depending on context as suggested by Saussure then they do not have a fixed meaning. He adds a second step to the system explaining that the combination of signified and signifier results in a sign which in itself then turns into a signifier again, that combined with another signified then results in a myth and possibly a new meaning, whose signifier is divided between it’s own created meaning and the new meaning it helps to create.

"But the essential point in all this is that the form does not suppress the meaning, it only impoverishes it, it puts it at a distance, it holds it at one’s disposal. One believes that the meaning is going to die, but it is a death with reprieve; the meaning loses its value, but keeps its life, from which the form of the myth will draw its nourishment."[9]

The so hidden sexism in woman as myth is, according to Johnston, less dangerous in mainstream film than it is in the art film. A new female avant-garde movement is what Laura Mulvey called for in 1975, saying that the oppressed can not take pleasure in the mainstream and needs to find her own language. Claire Johnston warns that the art cinema poses a greater threat as it is “…inviting a greater invasion by the myth.”[10] It moves the myth another step further away from its original roots. Claire Johnston’s work on Dorothy Arzner, one of the few female directors in Hollywood in the 1930s analyses a subtle exploitation of the myth to infer other meaning.

The question the changing meaning behind the myth poses is, can connotations change seemingly backwards as well as forwards? In Adrienne Shelley’s film Waitress (2007), pies and pregnancy play a vital role in the female protagonist Jenna’s life. To the second-wave feminists of the 1960 these were exactly the contested attributes of female oppression as they were pictured as the 1950s housewives’ ideal goals and happily accepted destinations. In Shelley’s film, the waitress Jenna is caught in a dead-end job and a loveless marriage to a violent, infantile man. In the end pies and baby empower her to fundamentally change her life, leave her husband and open her own business. The men, husband and the adulterating gynecologist she has an affair with, are left behind when mother and
Figure 2 - Film poster for Waitress (Adrienne Shelley, 2007)daughter start a new life. The fundamental difference is that once the action is driven and dominated by the woman she then can even chose motherhood and baking as long as they are not imposed on her by someone else. Shelley willfully picks up the stereotypes, turning them against the patriarchy, forcing a new connotation upon them. The film is colourful and never shies away from comic moments. It appears to be the opposite of what Laura Mulvey thought possible. Adrienne Shelley refuses the “…total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film.”[11] On the contrary, she reclaims them. She demands a female self recognition that can be classically pretty and feminine. The film however is still very aware of Mulvey’s interpretation of the castration fear of the man as motor behind the refusal of empowerment of the woman on the screen. Jenna’s husband is afraid of the coming baby asking her to always love him more than the baby. In Waitress this Freudian complex weakens the man, exposing its implications.

Thirty years into feminist film criticism the field is still vast, but a higher awareness is recognisable. It has a fixed place in cinematic discussions, even mainstream radio critics like Mark Kermode openly attack films for being misogynistic. Worrying is the fact that it is still necessary to point towards sexism in a continuously male dominated modern cinema in which round female protagonists prove hard to find. The female movie star is largely evaluated by her looks rather than her talent; equally are her roles still often decoration. If the female star wants recognition she is stripped of her looks. Porcelain skinned screen beauty Nicole Kidman for example, was given an Oscar for her artificially nosed portrayal of Virginia Wolf in The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), while Gwyneth Paltrow and Hillary Swank even turned into men for their academy awarded films Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998) and Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999). Films like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (John West, 2001) might feature a female heroine, but in the end big-breasted, hot-pants sporting super agent Lara Croft is the incarnation of the male phantasm and seamlessly reaffirms Christian Metz’s description of the fetish. The problem that a film like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider poses is that it has a considerably large female following.

"The action genre is typically masculine so this type of characterization is often celebrated as at least offering some compensation for the ubiquity of oppressive representations of women and the preponderance of masculine hard bodies. […] The transgressive stunting body of the action heroine is replicated in the figure of Lara. Her occupation of a traditionally masculine world, her rejection of particular patriarchal values and the norms of femininity and the physical spaces that she traverses are all in direct contradiction of the typical location of femininity within the private or domestic space. […] Lara's presence within, and familiarity with, a particularly masculine space is in and of itself transgressive. By being there she disturbs the natural symbolism of masculine culture."[12]

Lara Croft, definite child of popular culture, stemming out of the new visual medium of video gaming but also protagonist of two movies, brings feminist criticism to its boundaries. Is she as Helen W. Kennedy asks “Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?”[13] a similar question could be posed on the Waitress, could she be a feminist icon or is she an oppressed kitchen - mum?

Figure 3 - Film poster Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (John West, 2001)“Feminist theory […] faces a dilemma over its reliance on particular methodologies to describe women as Other.”[14] , excluded from the masculine space and constricted by male fantasy. Feminist filmmaking has occupied a fairly secluded space often overlooked by a wider public. Feminist film criticism is in danger of looking for the woman filmmaker rather than acknowledging slight shifts in the mainstream. It is exactly there though, that the women are invading spaces on the screen as well as altering them. The space they conquer might be one that works according to a male ideology but is no longer defined through it. Lara Croft has no central love-interest; Jenna rids herself of both men once her baby is born. While Laura Mulvey’s essay proved groundbreaking at the beginning, it appears that the time has come to get off the psychoanalytical couch and reclaim the entertainment sector. In her book Feminism Without Women, Tania Modleski argues “…that the time is right for a feminist rethinking of the articulations of popular culture and political criticism.”[15] Since feminism has in recent years suffered from a stigma of almost annoyance and young women often do not identify with it because of that, it can no longer exclude itself from a general, ongoing development within popular culture, which has taken a considerably central role in film studies. The myth it seems changes its connotation again and again. Lara Croft’s big breasts then can also signify a newly determined female self-confidence by reemphasising the female form. In this context the man and his phantasm would be ignored and thereby negated. While the psychoanalysis approach has defined the problem and made visible what had become invisible in our perception, building a central argument on linguistics proves a more durable methodology. As opposed to Laura Mulvey’s essay, Claire Johnston puts the female in a less neurotic position and also acknowledged the importance of actively analysing the mainstream, which is now more significant than ever.

"Our point is that, apart from women actively involved in the second-wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, most people’s initial knowledge and understanding of feminism has been formed within the popular and through representation. […] Thus, for many women of our generation, formative understanding of, and identification with, feminist ideas have been almost exclusively within popular culture."[16]

Feminist film theory should not get lost in elitist avant-garde film discussion only. It has to equally consider the possibility of entering its age of entertainment and to actively occupy some of the perspectives it fought for only then can it truly make use of them in its own favour.[17] Keeping in mind the pitfall of the invisible ideology by holding high the analysis according to Roland Barthes, it is time for claiming back the fun.




BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Books:
Barthes,Roland. Mythologies. London: Vintage, 2000.

De Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1995.

Hollows, Joanne, and Mosley, Rachel eds. Feminism in Popular Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

Johnston, Claire. Notes on Women’s Cinema. London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973.

McCabe, Janet. Feminist Film Studies, Writing the Woman into Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2004

Mellencamp, Patricia. A Fine Romance, Five Ages of Film Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.

Metz, Christian. Language and Cinema. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.

Modleski, Tania. Feminism Without Women, Culture and Criticism in a ”Postfeminist“ Age. London: Routledge, 1991.


Articles in Edited Collections:
Johnston, Claire. “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema.“ Notes on Women’s Cinema. Ed. Claire Johnston. London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973.

Hollows, Joanne and Mosley, Rachel. “Popularity Contest: The Meanings of Popular Feminism.“ Feminism in Popular Culture. Eds. in Joanne Hollows and Rachel Mosley. Oxford: Berg, 2006.


Journals:
Kaplan, E. Ann. “Claire Johnston: 1949-1987.”Cinema Journal, Vol. 28, No.1. Autumn, 1988.

Mulvey, Laura “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema” Screen, vol. 16, No.3. Autumn 1975.

Web Journal:
Helen W. Kennedy. “Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis.” Game Studies: the International Journal of Computer Game Research. January 17th 2008. http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/kennedy/

FILMOGRAPHY:

Boys Don’t Cry (Dir. Kimberly Peirce, USA, 1999)
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (John West, UK, Germany, USA, Japan, 2001)
Shakespeare in Love (Dir. John Madden, USA, UK, 1998)
The Hours (Dir. Stephen Daldry, USA, UK, 2002)
Vertigo (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1958)
Waitress (Dir. Adrienne Shelley, USA, 2007)


[1] Laura Mulvey ”Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema“ in Screen, vol.16, No. 3 Autumn 1975), p.8
[2] Mulvey , p.8ff
[3] Mulvey, p.17
[4] Mulvey, p.16
[5] Claire Johnston „Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema“ in Claire Johnston, (ed.) Notes on Women’s Cinema (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973), p.24
[6] Johnston, p.24
[7] Johnston, p.25
[8] Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1995)
[9] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 2000), p.118
[10] Johnston, p.25
[11] Mulvey, p.8
[12] Helen W. Kennedy, “Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis” in Game Studies: the International Journal of Computer Game Research, 17th January 2008, http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/kennedy/
[13] Kennedy, http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/kennedy/
[14] Janet McCabe, Feminist Film Studies, Writing the Woman into Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), p.116
[15] Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women, Culture and Criticism in a ”Postfeminist“ Age (London: Routledge, 1991), p. ix
[16] Joanne Hollows and Rachel Mosley, „Popularity Contest: The Meanings of Popular Feminism“ in Joanne Hollows and Rachel Mosley (ed.) Feminism in Popular Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006), p. 2
[17] Interesting in this respect is the Bond film Casino Royale (Dir. Martin Campbell, USA, UK, Germany, Czech Republic, 2006). In it classical Bond characteristics are turned around. Bond himself becomes the object of the erotic gaze, when he for example walks half naked out of the sea. Bond is not only frequently physically displayed he is also almost literally castrated in a torture scene. The women on the other hand stay dressed and are never sexualised in the way Bond himself is.