Visual Pleasure in Millennium

A familiar and important text in film studies since the 1970s, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” argues that “the magic of the Hollywood style at its best” derives from the “skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure” (449). The film experience, especially as that experience is constructed in the classic Hollywood film, reproduces the hierarchical divisions of a male-dominated society. The traditional narrative film assumes a male spectator and structures the film-going experience with his pleasure in mind. As viewers, we identify with the primary male character in whom we recognize (or misrecognize) ourselves. We don’t so much look at him as we look with him. We share his gaze–and share in his pleasure in looking. Central to the “erotic pleasure” of that shared gaze is “the image of woman” (449). As narrative film constructs men as gazing subjects, women are “looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (451).

Of course, film is not the only entertainment medium that posits Woman-as-Object-of-the-Gaze, as the opening peepshow scene of Millennium makes clear. The very architecture of the peepshow constructs an experience sharply divided between viewing subject and looked-at object. The viewing booths are darkly lit, so that it is difficult to see into them, while the stage where the women perform is just the opposite, brightly lit and slightly elevated so that the whole body can be observed. The appearance of the women is obviously coded to have “strong visual and erotic impact,” emphasized by clothing (or lack thereof), stylized “dancing.” The filming of this scene, however, seems to be designed to undermine the “erotic impact” of the dancers ( a point that I will return to).

From a Lacanian perspective, the place of the peepshow, seemingly underground, dark, disgusting (all we need to see is someone in the background with a mop to know what the floor is like), claustrophobic, is not only a site of perverse (voyeuristic) sexuality but also a perfect illustration of the construction of “normal” masculine sexual identity. As Coats writes, “The male as a split subject couples with the objet a, that is he couples with a fantasized object that he projects onto an other who (or which) serves as a prop” (101). Of course, the difference between “normal” sexuality and the peepshow is that in the peepshow the male only fantasizes about coupling with the fantasized object before him. Also, the structure of the peepshow is such that there is little danger that the male subject might actually “encounter a woman in her particularity, a woman who is not his symptom,” whereas in the normal relationships between men and women there is at least the possibility (to think positively for a moment) of recognizing in one’s partner “her particularity” as another subject (okay, okay, Lacan would call me a crazy romantic, what can I say?)(106). The scenes of the women talking before going on stage, calling home to check on a child, etc., establish the women as subjects in their own right.

The peep show, like the black house that Zizek discusses, is an “empty space” where men “articulate their desires” (9). The contrast between the brightly lit space of the dancers and the dark booths, the performances of the dancers, assist in transforming the women from particularized individuals who have lives and problems (as revealed by the backstage conversations) into objets a. As Zizek writes the “objet a is precisely that surplus, that elusive make-believe. . . . In ‘reality,’ it is nothing at all, just an empty surface” (8). The women in the peepshow, in terms of their function, do not exist except as screens onto which the men project their fantasies–although perhaps “prop” is a better word than “screen,” as the women, in exchange for money, perform so as to enhance the fantasy. “Tell me what you want,” they say repeatedly. The desire they articulate is not their own but that of the male watchers.

The most interesting moment in the peepshow sequence is when we see the screen in one of the booths come down and block out the spectator’s view. As the television screen goes dark with the shutting out of its onscreen counterpart, we have, ironically, a moment of enlightenment, a little bit of truth in a situation otherwise devoted only to fantasy. This is the equivalent to the moment of rolling down the car window in the story Zizek discusses:

“It is as if, for a moment, the ‘projection’ of the outside reality had stopped working, as if, for a moment, we had been confronted with formless grey, with the emptiness of the screen, with the ‘place where nothing takes place but the place’” (15). The “projection of the outside reality” in this case is the projection of the watchers’ fantasies onto the bodies of the women, and what we see, for a moment, is the real: an empty screen, a nothingness, a lack, that will almost immediately be concealed by the renewal of the fantasy.

Since its 1975 publication, Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has been thoroughly critiqued and her ideas revised, expanded, and complicated. Mulvey’s article works well for describing the peepshow itself, but director Chris Carter complicates the depiction of that peepshow in multiple ways. It’s highly unlikely that we identify with any of the watching men in this scene, whose activity is clearly marked as pathetic (“they would clap, but it takes two hands”). Also, the camera shifts back and forth between two perspectives, and the watchers are also watched—by us and by the dancers. By sharing the dancers’ perspectives (both visually and from what they say backstage and to Frank Black), we are encouraged to know them in their “particularity.”

Note the difference in the exchange between male observer and female performer when Frank Black is in the booth. The music that accompanies the other scene is gone, the moving camera is gone, and the dancer’s opening comment (“hi, you caught me. I was thinking something nasty”) is delivered with evident lack of enthusiasm. We are closer to reality than fantasy here. Frank is not invested in the same fantasy as the watchers in the earlier scene, and that difference is revealed to us by the difference in the way the scene is filmed. Frank has a different fantasy, perhaps. Ultimately, the dancer does give him what he wants—the clue that he has been seeking.

Let me posit a few questions, which you should feel free to respond to via the comments function or in a blog post of your own:

Zizek discusses the story of a professor who falls asleep and has a dream in which he becomes involved with an attractive woman and all sorts of sex and violence ensues. Zizek suggests that dream and reality shift in this story, and that “the professor awakes to continue his dream (about being a normal person like his fellow men), that is, to escape the real (the ‘psychic reality’) of his desire.” The real of his unconscious is that he is a “murderer dreaming, in his everyday life, that he is just a decent bourgeois professor” (17).

Think about this observation in terms of the character Frank Black. In the episode we watched, what is dream and what is reality? Doesn’t Frank lead two lives (the gentle father, the detective tracking the most brutal of killers)? How are each of the two worlds that Frank lives in represented on screen?

Also, we might think about the episodes in terms of the way it depicts “sex in public,” the way it presents spaces organized around sexual activities (the peepshow, cruising in the park).  The peepshow doesn’t quite seem to fulfill the same function as the counterpublics described by Warner and Berlant, and although public spaces where men go to meet other men for sex certainly fits with their description of spaces where counterpublic discourses can begin to emerge, I’m not sure we see that happening in the episode.  The episode’s portrayal of gay men in some ways strikes me as problematic. They remain “other,” never emerging as subjects in the narrative; they function as the opposite against which Frank’s heteronormativity is underscored (between the straight men at the peepshow and the cruisers in the park, Frank, by contrast, appears “normal,” although his “difference” from both groups is questioned at various points). I’m not quite sure where I’m headed here in terms of a question other than, what did we think of the representation of these public spaces devoted to sexual activity?